Some Assembly Required (14 page)

What people are faced with is mind-blowing, yet everywhere you see people getting up, making their fires, the women stirring, the men shaving, getting the kids clean and combed, ready for school; just getting on with things, in a much better mood than I would be in.

The wooden tables at the yogurt stalls are stacked with clay bowls that will be used only once, and never again, because meat-eating lips may have touched them. You’re rotten and polluted if you’re not a Brahman. The business class does not want to share even a well-washed bowl with disgusting putrefied old you.

The ordinary poor people are fourth-caste. Even lower, people who sweep, deal with bodies and shit, or work with leather are the Non-Scheduleds.

I, sweet adorable me, would not be allowed to step over the threshold of a Brahman’s house.

Bill continued to tell anyone who spoke even rudimentary English that I was his ex-wife, and about our friendship
tour, and said not to offer me any alcoholic beverages, as I would end up back in the gutters. Also, not to lend me money. “I am afraid I found this out the hard way,” he grimly told the man at the coffee stall, who nodded politely. I couldn’t help laughing. Without his constant patter, I would have dissolved into a dust pile of grief.

The crush of extreme deprivation tears you apart. I said, “Nay, nay,” harshly to the mothers who tugged on my sleeves, pleading, “Mama, Mama.” And I said, “Nay, nay,” to their babies who tugged on my sleeves with Jax-sized fingers, also saying, “Mama, Mama,” in tiny Kewpie voices. Then, in a stroke of genius, I started adding “EnRaHa!” in a menacing tone. It is from the Mike Leigh movie
Happy-Go-Lucky
, in which a furiously tense driving instructor shouts “EnRaHa!” at the main character whenever she makes a mistake—he points to the side mirrors, and then the rearview, the all-seeing eye of Ra, and shouts “EnRaHa!” at her. Brake! Watch out! EnRaHa! So I waved each beggar away dismissively and shouted, “Nay, nay! EnRaHa!” all but batting people away; this was a side of me not so often seen, least of all by me. It
absolutely
threw or scared everyone off.

Life here became a lot easier after I turned on the beggars.

“Can’t we give anyone any money?” I implored Bill later, at another coffee stall.

“You could start a riot. Beggars will end up being beaten after you create disturbance and panic. We’re going to give it to people who can help,” he pronounced. So we took money
over to a friend of his who runs a foundation through which teachers go to the streets to teach girls to read.

There are scruffy, starving, mangy dogs everywhere, and you see people bring them plastic bags holding a little milk to drink.

Bill and I sat near the top stairs of the Jama Masjid, the great Red Mosque built by Shah Jahan, of Taj Mahal fame, to watch life on the streets. They spread forth like crazy roiling runners woven of people. When the unearthly call to prayer sounded from a PA system only a few feet above us, like an air-raid siren or foghorn from antiquity, I leapt skittishly to my feet, like a cartoon cat, the whitest old lady in town.

On the way back to the hotel, Bill told our driver, “The ex wants to give all the money to beggars, and bring all the dogs home. Now, there’s one special bullock I’ve allowed her to keep. She’s brought it to her room. The hotel room is packed with the sixteen children and the one bull. They are all watching the BBC and having snacks: Lay’s potato chips and full-sugar Cokes.” The driver nodded solemnly and said, “Coca-Cola,” and so, Day One.

The second day, Bill told the men at the front desk, “My former wife likes your dal very much. Don’t you, darling?
Every restaurant we go to, she orders dal. But yours? Yours she loves best.” Dal is the ubiquitous lentil stew. It is one of my favorite foods here and a staple at home.

He told the man at the counter at a Jain bookstore that our marriage was “rocky” until the truth came out, that he was a major fruit.

He told each of our drivers about our divorce, plus the children and the bull whom I’ve brought to my room for chips, Cokes, and the BBC.

He is, everywhere he goes in the world, a trove of historical information, gleaned from travels and his extensive reading. He was here when Indira Gandhi was killed by two Sikh bodyguards in 1984, and saw the city devolve into smoke and riots. Floods of memories came back to him—his driver was Sikh, and people were trying to kill him. We spent several hours at the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum, the white bungalow surrounded by trees and a magnificent garden that was her residence. Mohandas Gandhi, Mahatma, was the reason Bill first fell in love with India; he saw in Gandhi and in India the uniquely divine that he had been seeking in the West. He had seen Gandhi on TV and in magazines: the dhoti, the sandals, the spectacles, the cane, his spinning, his love, and his defeat of the British Empire with the goodness, simplicity, and faith of the Indians. Bill came here to see this for himself, and he has kept coming back.

We passed by the crystal pathway in the museum’s garden,
where Indira Gandhi was shot by her bodyguards. I sighed, and bowed my head to honor her.

India showed me reality: two concentric circles further from what life will usually show of itself, because India doesn’t have the extra energy to work on the surface or appearance or veneer. So you see how animal, how human, how divine and bodily and mystical we are, and how this is all swirled together.

I was eating some of the best food of my life, as good as the great food of France. It was tandoori and Punjabi food. Punjabi is what we are used to in the States, but I was enjoying original versions, every family’s greatest-hits versions. Food is usually served on
thali
s—plates with dividers to hold five or six kinds of food, with little condiment bowls around the edges for yogurt and bright hot sauces. You leave space in the middle for rice, and there are three kinds of bread, two kinds of dal, one sweet and one sour, plus a vegetable dish, my favorite being the crisp brown slices of cauliflower and blackened peppers. Chicken cooked in cinnamon, clove, paprika, and saffron; cardamom-flavored pudding, milk curd and semolina, which tastes somehow like delicious milky dish soap, the way cilantro tastes of deliciously soapy grass.

Babies were everywhere, part of the flowing saris, or peeking forth like baby kangaroos, eyes lined in kohl. I see Jax everywhere, his eyes framed only by those black, lush lashes. We took a rickshaw and a subway to Humayun’s monumental
tomb, the first garden tomb of the Mughals. The sheer scale left me feeling thunderstruck and stupid: the ancient and imperial gardens, the great dome, the cupolas, arches, sarcophagi. I felt as though I might begin to stagger, Snaggletooth onstage doing Shakespeare. We wandered around for a couple of hours, and then went back to the hotel for naps. Bill told the bicycle rickshaw man, “Driver-ji, you see old white foreigners like me sometime? And they need to sleep in the afternoon? That’s me: I need absolute dark and quiet for half an hour. My ex-wife has been
very
patient about this all these years.”

The driver nodded eagerly, although he did not seem to speak English.

After naps, we walked through the streets for a few hours, to look in stalls, mosques, gardens. The babies and children here are gorgeous. Half of the little ones are so physically beautiful that they could work for the airlines. And the other half look like Ragu, like ticklish containers of the divine, sneaky little beings with secrets. I saw one toddler who looked exactly like an elephant’s baby, yet managed also to be lovely. I stopped to flirt with him and his mother. You could almost feel the words that the baby wasn’t saying out loud: “I could tell you the secret, but I don’t need to, because you can see it everywhere if you simply look around and breathe.” The mother tugged on my sleeve and said, “Mama,” but Bill was glaring at me, so I just gave her half a muffin I had in my purse from breakfast.

The babies have shiny black hair, and eyes that you fall into like black pools or furry caves, like Jax’s. He could pass here, except for those babyish diapers he insists on wearing.

We saw the original Mama beggar. She and the baby made a beeline for me. “Nay, nay!” I thundered, turning away. “EnRaHa.”

“Why don’t you bring them back to your hotel room?” Bill suggested. “Share your chips with them. Help them forget about their destitution.”

He said the woman had a life, and was part of some community, and had people she returned to every night. Like the people who made a home on the street, where, in the early morning, someone would take a pot, and a match, and a piece of coal, and make a fire; the family would cook rice, and be together, and beg, and later in the afternoon, when, as Bill put it, they were off-duty, we’d see them maybe bathing at the public faucets.

I couldn’t really tell if some people were dead or just sleeping. We approached an ancient prone man in a head wrap; he was so tiny, and lying so still in the dirt. I said to Bill, “Can I at least give that one money? I can’t even tell if he’s alive.”

“Certainly not—you may not give that one money if he’s dead. Honey, you have
got
to work on your boundaries.”

We spent the morning walking around the sprawling, ancient, sinister but ethereal spice market: thousands of stalls and aromas, a riot of color and sparkle, and unbelievable squalor. Then to Jama Masjid, the biggest mosque in India—Bill has seen it many times, and so he sat outside on the steps to read William Dalrymple’s great book on Delhi,
City of Djinns
, while waiting for me. I stepped into the courtyard of red sandstone. A gregarious man who looked to be my age came up, unasked, to act as my guide through the courtyard and the mosque. He gave me a loaner
hijab
to cover my loathsome female head, and I felt like Christiane Amanpour as he led me around the domes, towers, minarets; took a picture of me standing near the low tombs; and showed me the black-and-white-mosaic workmanship of the great inside walls. The mosque leaves you flabbergasted. But when we turned to walk back to the entrance, he demanded money for the first time, two hundred rupees. I said a hundred, and he gave me a threatening look, but I bellowed, “EnRaHa!” at him and he backed off.

Most people were not wearing shoes. The pinkness of their palms and soles, when they sat resting, was quite striking and vulnerable, almost edible—the tops of their hands were as darkly rich as chocolate, and then underneath, you saw the universal pink.

I saw great, beautiful, difficult weirdness every inch of every street and alley. I was successfully still doing “EnRaHa” everywhere to chase away beggars. The begging and deformities were killing me, but Bill again maintained that it was useless to give money, because the beggars wouldn’t get it. Yet they grabbed at you and knocked on taxi windows with their stumps and babies and leprosy, and cried to you in your rickshaw. I told them each firmly, “Nay, nay,” then added, “EnRaHa,” and looked away, so Bill wouldn’t abandon me on the streets. I would hate to end up in some squalid jail even if it
had
been fashioned out of a formerly glorious Raj mansion.

I decided I would trap some monkeys later and start a Monkey Tea Party.

I would be the Chief Monkey.

Almost all the babies and little children I saw had kohl around their eyes—Bill said it was to protect them from the evil eye. I wondered if it had something in common with the eye black that football players wear around their eyes to protect them from the sun’s fierce glare. I Googled “kohl on babies’ eyes” on my tiny computer, and discovered that the lead in the powder from which kohl is made is toxic to the tiny flies that are everywhere in India; the kohl keeps the babies’ eyes safe from fly infestation. I was worried sick about the effect of lead on children’s eyes. Maybe I could form some consciousness-raising groups for the mothers.

We planned to go to bed early, as in the morning we were going to be driven to the airport for our flight to Varanasi.
That evening our taxi driver drove us through a heavy San Francisco fog. There had been, and remained, a militaristic presence of wildly heightened security, cops everywhere for the last two days, and barricades going up. The formidable, sprawling Red Fort, built in the 1600s and capital of the Mughal empire until the mid-1800s, was closed because the Republic Day parade would start there in a few days, and chaos was expected. We were in our rooms by nine. The sound of massive bombs exploding nearby sent me down to the front desk to inquire politely if we were under terrorist attack, but I was told it was only a wedding party. I put in my earplugs, and repeated
Baba nam kevalam
silently in my head until I eventually fell asleep.

We were up early for our plane ride to Varanasi—the modern name for Benares—the holiest of cities, but before we left, the most fabulous thing happened. My BlackBerry rang, and it was Ragu calling from the ashram in Los Altos—he had arranged a conference call with me, and Sam and Amy, who were at my house, and Dada, who was at his orphanage in Delhi.

I thought I was dreaming at first, but decided to go with it.

“Hi, Mom,” Sam said, and my heart swelled, but he was instantly cut off by Ragu, who shouted to Dada that “it is Anne, from Great Britain, who is so great! Remember?” Dada
said something quietly in Hindi, and Ragu shouted back at him with enthusiasm, and then shouted for Sam to talk, so he said, “Hi, Mom,” and then was interrupted again by Ragu. He wanted to explain how he had engineered this conference call, and how cheap it would be for him, and how maybe I could drop by Dada’s orphanage while I was here, and then he shouted to Dada, “That is Anne! Sam’s mother!” And then I heard Jax squawk, and I actually clutched at myself like Blanche DuBois, and Ragu then shouted for Amy to say hello, and as soon as she did, he interrupted her—he was like a crazy symphony conductor on acid. He made sure Dada was on the line. He was, but he seemed totally confused, and was speaking softly, possibly to himself, in Hindi. So Ragu talked to him loudly in English for a minute, and Dada spoke in Hindi and with obvious confusion, and an animated loud conversation ensued between the two of them. It was like a Marx Brothers comedy routine or an old radio show, like Bob and Ray, with no conversation going between me and Sam or Amy. But then I heard Jax babbling, and Amy said, “Jax, it’s Nana!” But this, too, was interrupted by enormously loud vitality and excitement from Ragu. Then Sam said, “Mommy! Mommy! We are all fine, are you okay?” and I started to cry because I was so happy, so connected in this Mad Hatter symphony piece. I said I was the happiest I had ever been in my life, and Sam asked me to tell him a story, but then we were cut off as Ragu kept shouting to Dada that this was Anne, from Great Britain, who was so great and who
wanted to come visit Dada at his orphanage, which I didn’t quite remember having said. I surrendered and simply cried out every so often that I loved Sam and Amy and Jax, Ragu and Dada, and I cried out thanks over and over to Ragu for arranging our conference call. We were on the line for a little less than ten minutes, with perhaps a minute of direct “conversation” between me and Sam and Amy, and eight minutes of this Indian Who’s on First, and Jax’s squawks for a few seconds here and there, and I felt that this phone call was why I had come to India.