Monthly Story (February'23): Babuji

fiction

(This is one of my older stories, originally published in Prairie Schooner.)

It began, he thought, auspiciously enough. In the plane as they flew over the Indian subcontinent from Bangkok, Richard sat in a window seat watching a pale thunder cloud rise level with and a mile off from the airplane. Far below through the mists of the cloud were the starry lights of a city, and as the plane wheeled toward the thunderhead, branches of lightening flashed and filled it from top to bottom like arteries and veins shot through with blue illuminate. The cloud twisted on its axis, larger still, flexed its billows, heaved its hoary chest, wagged an old man's beard at Richard, then its body filled again with the jagged lines of blue light, jolted up straighter, more powerful even than before.        

He watched for the ten minutes or so it took to approach and then pass the cloud. "What a sight!" he told the Arab man sitting next to him. "Sensational," he said over and over again. The man leaned across Richard to stare out the window and rested his thick paw on Richard's thigh for balance, an alarming, embarrassing feeling that Richard wanted over with. "What a way to start," he said matter of factly and turned away from the window, hoping the man would get off him. "What a sight that was."  In half an hour they were on the ground in Munbai. It was three in the morning and pitch black. 

The ride from the airport in the dark looked almost like any ride in a taxi from any airport, except that many of the trucks and cabs drove with their lights off, some even on the wrong side of the road, and except that indistinct shapes like giraffes or camels seemed always about to race out in front of the taxi from the shadows. Time to sleep when the creature images start, he thought. It was nothing more than the whimsy of fatigue. He let himself sink back into the vinyl of the passenger's seat and half closed his eyes. They came wide open again and he cringed and sat up straight as his driver, a fat, bald man in his fifties, Richard's own age, started to pass a darkened truck but then seemed happy to simply run parallel to it. 

"From which country do you come?" the cheerful driver asked.

Richard glanced from the back of the driver's head to the truck they had not completed passing. He felt am empty, cold space in his gut. A pair of headlights approached in the windshield but the driver seemed unconcerned. Richard would have complained at home in Minneapolis or even in New York. Here, though, he would never quite be sure what to do. "I'm from the United States," he said. He noticed that written in English on the side of the truck with no headlights were the words "Caution! Highly Inflammable Gases!" 

"That's a rolling Molotov cocktail," he told the driver.

"A very good country, the USA," said the man. "I have many friends USA.  Change money?"

But at that instant the oncoming headlights reached them, the talkative driver couldn't decide which way to turn, and the three vehicles tangled themselves into a rolling, spinning collision of screeching tires, breaking glass, shredded blades of slashing aluminum, and fire. Richard was not burnt. His body shot over the driver's seat and through the windshield, landing like a heap of dirty laundry in the dust and rocks at the side of the road. His neck and back were broken, and a long laceration starting at his hairline and staggering across his face and neck, ending in his lower torso, made him look as if someone had turned him halfway inside out. His mouth filled with commingling dust and blood, and for an instant, only for that instant, he felt the sharp air move across the open wound of his face. He smiled as a herd of giraffes, racing monkeys under foot, galloped away across the black wasteland. 

After that he stood above his own body wondering what was meant to happen next. "There are no giraffes in India," he said aloud. The burning wreck blocked half the road, and vehicles coming to and leaving the airport picked their ways through this island of fire. Richard watched impassively as the sleepy, morbidly curious passengers stared through smokey windows and continued on. He poked the body at his feet, his own body, with the toe of his tasseled loafers. "No response," he said aloud. "I'm here."

Who would know what to do in that circumstance? His suitcase and shoulder bag sat neatly next to the road, as if waiting for him like a pair of shoes set next to the bed in the morning. He picked them up, found his way past the burning wreck, and began walking into his darkness. No cabs would stop while within sight of the fire, so he had to walk three miles before he caught a ride to his hotel.

Strangely, though, nothing happened immediately after that. He imagined while riding in the second taxi that, since he was conscious and apparently dead, he would be delivered to some vaguely angelic keeper of souls, escorted through a heavenly customs gate. Instead he arrived at the very hotel he had previously made reservations in. The hotel was a famous one facing the waterfront, all plush and brass and glass and the Sikh doorman sported an elaborate white uniform and a huge red turban. Many of Richard's "clients" at home—ne’er do wells and welfare mothers, people for whom he no longer felt real compassion--lived in a trailer park that would have fit neatly into that lobby.

The young man at the desk wore a sharp blue suit and efficiently checked Richard in and saw to it that Richard's bags were carried to his room. He had a full mustache and a curl of his wavy black hair fell onto his forehead.

"So things just go on," Richard whispered. "Nothing happens. How stupid."             

"I beg your pardon, Sir?" the clerk asked. When Richard only stared at him, he said, "We don't tip here, Sir. There will be a ten percent service charge added to your bill when you leave." 

Richard tipped the bell hop when he got to the room anyway. "There will be more when I leave if you take good care of me," he said. The man understood, and Richard felt clever and cocky. Because he kept his budget tight, he could afford only two nights in this place, but he would have good service from the little man while he stayed. How much would he have to tip after just two nights in a place that allowed no tipping? he wondered. It couldn't be much, and anyhow how much was too much in his new state, such as it was?  

But something seemed odd, different in how he handled the money. Was it in his elbows? His fingertips? He'd found it difficult to judge where his pockets were when reaching to find the tip for the man. His arms were numb.            

Watching his movements carefully, judging with his eye now instead of by feel, he threw the curtains open wide and looked out over not the harbor but a poor side street below. The sun, just coming up, caught the angles and pastels of a building that was either being torn down brick by brick or going up the same way. He couldn't tell, but he thought of a cubist painting as he stood watching the sharp blades of light stab across the surface of yellow bricks. 

"Tangy," he said aloud and, struck by the oddness of the sensation, tasted the sight on his tongue. "Good grief." A woman in an orange sari squatted next to a cooking fire inside the painting's walls. Did she live there? What difference did it make? He wanted to deny the odd sensations creeping over him.

Apparently you live and you die and nothing changes, he told himself. He had always figured he had done his part for the world, "more than the world probably deserves," he had liked to tell the drab young woman in the desk next to his at the office. "After the final words are written and signed, we are all only really responsible for who and what we are, not for the who and what of other lives. We are, after all, alone." He liked saying that and he said it rather cynically because it shocked and offended her. She was passionate about the social welfare work they did. "The poor will always be with us," he liked adding for good measure. "So no unemployment for us."

After retreating into sleep for a few hours, he rose and shaved. His face was numb.  He might have nicked himself and felt nothing. He took a long hot shower. He turned the shower on full blast and stuck his face close up to the nozzle but felt no pain, only a dull pressure, on his face. Then, after drying off, he stopped to examine himself in the mirror for changes. He was a slight man, neither tall nor short, with kinky gray hair increasingly thin in a patch on the back of his head. His features were good, not especially strong, but rather aquiline and, under the weathered grayness of age, his skin still radiated the pink associated with Sunday school and sunlight. He could be positively boyish with a drink in his hand at office social gatherings, and women often wanted to take him home and care for him. His drab young colleague had done just that a time or two, but he felt she'd become dependent and so cut her off. He saw no change in his reflection, no sign of the previous night's trauma except maybe a sourness at the back of the throat that might have still been fatigue. "I see a sourness?"

Still wondering about the jumble of vision and taste, he ventured out onto the street, searching for the tangy building he could see from his room. The same woman in the orange sari squatted next to the same fire stirring the coals. A man, presumably her husband, reclined on a nearby stack of bricks smoking a foul smelling Indian cigarette that looked like a marijuana joint. A second woman sifted dirt through a box with a screen bottom. For one brief moment the air stank of urine and tobacco, sight and smell united. 

Apparently there would be no sign today, good or bad, that might explain his condition. He had expected for the world to change the moment he looked again at reality, but that didn't seem to be happening. True, there were these other, odd, sensations, the numbness, the sight/taste confusion, but nothing like that was unexpected when you were jet lagged and people had told him India would assault his senses in unexpected ways. He took each step mindful of the sensation the pavement caused his heel, his shin, his knee as he walked through the heat and the crowds of tourists and vendors. He noted the time and date on his wristwatch.  Things were almost the same as always. People spoke to him. He was not invisible.  His elbows and fingertips had not returned to normal. In fact, his arms from shoulder to fingertips hung loose and unfeeling from his torso, but he could still use them. As if to prove this to himself, he bought a handful of peanuts from a grizzled old timer stooping under a palm tree on the curb, and he held the peanuts in his hand. They did not fall through his skin; he did not drop them. He had not turned into Casper the Ghost, walking through walls. What could he do but continue with his plans, even when he had no real plans? The peanuts tasted—Rectangular?

He had slept most of the day away, spent one of his 2500 rupee nights dreaming of giraffe herds cantering aimlessly over an endless savanna. He would go back to his room in a few hours, force himself to sleep again, then rise and find a new, much cheaper place to stay. In the meantime, he strolled down to the boat launches and paid the hundred rupees to ride out to Elephanta Island to walk around the cave temples and feed the monkeys. But he did all this feeling enervated and uncomfortable, still looking for something outside himself that would explain what was happening to him. 

If the faith of his parents had, against all reason, turned out to be correct, he could expect to be visited by some heavenly body alighted perhaps in the branches of a tree, carried off to harp and halo land. "We are all put on Earth for a purpose," his mother had told him repeatedly as a child. "God has a plan." 

Really now? He wondered what that plan might have been. 

"God will only call you home after you have fulfilled his plan," she had said. 

He reviewed his days quickly and thought it unlikely there had ever been any such plan meant for him.

But he did watch the lower tree limbs as he wandered along the paved walkways of Elephanta with the crowds of Indian tourists. It was hotter still than before and everywhere he turned he found himself staring into the pink faces of ragged monkeys. They crouched on the branches and sidewalks, chewing, hundreds of eyes dogging his steps. As much to escape the heat and the strangely inert monkeys as to rekindle any smoldering curiosity he had had when he bought his ticket, Richard entered the first of the cave temples and found himself gravitating through the crowd of tourists toward a circular inner room you had to step up into. There was inside this room a low, blunt stone obelisk, and Richard stepped quickly up the two stairs. 

"Please!" someone yelled hysterically. All conversation stopped as everyone's attention focused on Richard. "Take your shoes off," demanded a tall gentleman in a light sports jacket. "You must be taking your shoes off first inside the temple." 

Yes, of course, he thought. This inner room was the temple proper. Take your shoes off first, then go in. He'd forgotten. He jumped back down but felt nothing in his feet and legs as he hit the stone floor. No sensation told him when to bend his knees to absorb the impact. He steadied himself to know how to walk. The tall man continued staring at him as the others went back to what they had been doing. The man had an attractively made up woman in a sari on each arm. The small elderly one wore a white sari; the younger, a fiftyish woman probably his wife, yellow. Both wore heavy makeup and western hair styles. "You may go back in," said the man, "but first you must kindly remove your shoes please." He said this in the most helpful tones. Dazed and ashamed, Richard ignored him and left for the return boat without bothering to look at the other temples. A knot of three large monkeys followed him the last hundred yards as he hobbled to the launch. Each time he looked away from them, they came in a little closer.

Back in the city, he bought a newspaper in the hotel shopping arcade and searched for a report of his sensational death. Nothing, though the paper was full of the gory details of other accidents, and of political and communal bombings and murders.  One woman had been doused with kerosene and set ablaze by her husband or someone in her husband's family. He chuckled. It reminded him of a case he'd been involved in ten years ago that had ended in suicide. The wife in this case had sat waiting on her husband's Lazyboy recliner for him to return from work, and as he walked in the door she drenched herself in gasoline from a ten gallon can and lit a match. Take that, sucker!  He had known both of them well professionally and anesthetized himself by wondering if the loss of the wife or the recliner had been greater for the man. Richard never would have imagined that this bovine-eyed woman could have found such cruelty in her heart.          

The next morning, without calling ahead for reservations, hoping in a slow motion panic that all would be explained today, he took a cab to the YMCA near the Mumbai Central train station, only to find it full. The three places he called from the phone at the desk were full also. "Why don't you take a taxi to the Regal Cinema and see what you can find in Colaba?" the polite young clerk advised. He seemed familiar. A curl of his wavy black hair dangled onto his forehead, and his upper lips, cleanly shaven, seemed too wide to Richard. A cricket match played loudly on a television in the office behind the reception desk and two other young men lounged around the set, chatting and drinking tea. The desk clerk kept looking behind himself to catch important details of the match. The sharp crack of a bat sounded from the television. 

"Colaba's the best place," he said hurriedly. 

Richard thanked him and didn't mention that his first hotel, in fact, was in Colaba.  Still learning to walk on his new, stiff legs, he carried his luggage outside and hired one of the six black taxis lined up at the curb, their drivers smoking cigarettes as they leaned casually against the hoods and doors of their cars. A pockmarked driver in a wrinkled khaki uniform swung open the trunk of his cab, and Richard gladly tossed in his cloth suitcase, holding onto the smaller blue shoulder bag with his maps, guidebooks, bottled water, and camera. They rode through crowds and traffic along graceful, tree-lined boulevards, circling past and around dry stone fountains and high jagged indifferent Victorian architecture to the Regal.

"I will take you to the very best places," the driver called over his shoulder. "You will see. Please tell me. From which country do you come?"

Richard told him the United States.

"Ah," said the driver. "Very excellent, the USA. I have many friends the USA. Change money?"

"Just the hotel, please." But the first hotel the driver pulled up to was the one he had left that morning. "Not this one," he said.

"Please, sir." The driver had turned in his seat. "You go in and look. It is a very excellent hotel. Large large."

"Not this one. Too expensive." But somehow each place they stopped was either full or uninhabitable after that. There seemed no in between. "It will be like home, Babu," the driver nearly shouted over his shoulder as the windshield filled with newsreel footage of Mumbai streets. He shut his eyes to stop the rush of tastes.  "This one you will like. I guarantee!" But it would turn out that this next wonderful place was either full or offered windowless rooms with broken light fixtures. The driver followed up the sagging stairs to look at the room with Richard, adding his voice to the clerk's. "Right around the corner to excellent restaurants!" Or he'd thump the bed in the dark room. "Feel that mattress!" Richard noted the walls of chipped paint and wondered about rats.

In disgust, he paid his fare and headed out on his own to find something. He couldn't understand why being dead should be so difficult. It was too much like being alive: you could get so busy attending to the details you could forget which state of being you were in. To have died on a cruise ship, his usual vacation choice, would have been far preferable to these wanderings. There would at least be no competition for rooms once you started out to sea!

As he lugged his suitcase and shoulder bag down one more side street, a dark young man with a sharp chin and a hooked nose fell into step with him. They smiled courteously to each other and Richard thought sweet and sour. "Chinese food."

"Excuse me," the fellow asked, "but when was the last time we met?"

Richard tittered. "Never, pal. Never. It's not possible."

"Really? But I thought we had. So sorry." He broke stride and started to peel off, but maintained eye contact.

"People make that kind of mistake with me all the time," Richard told him. "No big deal. I must have one of those faces."

"Then you are an American?" the man inquired, plunging back into step. He spoke with the slight British clip and the pleasing lilt of an educated Indian. "I thought at first you might be an Australian. I've always been curious about your country." He seemed in his carriage and in the set of his lips to be about to ask some specific question about America, then didn't.

"Listen, I've got to take a rest for a few minutes," Richard said. Making his dead arms and legs do what he needed had turned to real work. If he felt anything in them and in his face it was a rubberiness that threatened to melt in the heat. "Let's just lean against this wall for a while." They were along the sea wall, very near to where he had spent the previous two nights, and could admire the ships in the harbor as they talked.

"You speak English like a native." Richard had, perhaps in fatigue, momentarily forgotten himself and his own thoughts. "Did your family speak it at home or were you educated in England?"

The man straightened himself with a comfortable smile on the thin lips under his beaklike nose. "Oh, no. I'm afraid I've never had the pleasure of touring to England, but, yes, you are correct, my family spoke English at home. Can you guess why?" He stared down at Richard like a bird watching from the branch of a tree. "My name is James. We are an Anglo-Indian family. Can you guess my last name?"

Richard couldn't imagine why he should be able to guess the fellow's last name. "No, I can't. What is it?"

"McDonald," he shot back with a thrust of his face. "Like the quick-food. That's why my English is so perfect. May I ask what your good name is, Sir?"

Richard told him.

"Well, Mr. Richard Kline, is that K-L-I-N-E or K-L-E-I-N?" he asked but didn't wait for an answer. "And may I ask what it is you do professionally in your United States?"

Richard thought this fellow was at least amusing. "I'm a social worker," he said.

"Ah!" James's index finger shot into the air and his free hand fluttered off independently like a feather on unsteady wind. "So you have now come to India to solve our many pressing troubles."

"Not exactly. I've come on a vacation, though I may stay longer than I thought."

"Yes, I see. Then you are enjoying my country. But it is true that a person of your mastery would find much to occupy himself with in a country such as this, if—that is—he were so inclined. We have, as you've already seen, many social problems. The caste system, for example. The problems faced by minority communities. Why, even my own, the Anglo-Indian community, has many, many problems. The rest of India, you see, does not want us. We are a reminder of India's colonial past, don't you see?"

"Yes, I understand that," said Richard. "And what is it you do professionally."

At this James shifted from one foot to the next and then back again. "I'm ashamed to say that presently I am disabled. I am a welder by trade, but a road accident last year has left me unable to work." He pulled the sleeve of his right arm up to expose a jagged, bitter line of, Richard guessed, thirty ugly suture scars and, Richard thought, a strange, twisted angle in the shape of his forearm. Before Richard could comment, James rolled the sleeve back down. "I have other medical problems, as well," he said, "but I won't bore you with them."

Richard shouldered his luggage again and started off. "Just walk along," he said.  "I've got to find a place to stay. Well, tell me how you get along then?"

James spread his palms out as he fell back into step. "Last September 14th I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. The Lord takes care of me and of my family. We trust in Him."

Richard still wondered how the fellow put bread on the table. He had been dead for over forty-eight hours, and no lord had so much as winked at him. "Well, right now," he commented sardonically, "I'm wondering how to find myself a room for the night."

James ascended and wheeled in a flutter. "Oh, my dear brother, why didn't you say so from the first moment? Would you like me to help? Please, just follow this way."

Suddenly he was very much employed, leading Richard ahead in a charge. 

"There is a place one five or ten minute's walk from here." James flew ahead talking the whole time.

"You seem in excellent physical condition to me," said Richard, readjusting the shoulder straps of his suitcase and day bag.

"Oh, no. Not at all." James slowed down, looked abashed, and placed his hand on his stomach. "Actually, I shouldn't allow myself to become so excited. I have a duodenal ulcer." And at that instant he presented a crumpled prescription from his breast pocket. "These are the medicines, and their costs, that I have to take every single day for the remainder of my life.  I worry how I will get along, but the Lord sends me friends." His small eyes smiled from over his nose. "Ah, we are almost there."

They entered a dim lobby full of babble and cigarette smoke, and James shepherded Richard through a sort of underworld of piles of luggage and of lines of Indian men and women waiting for service. He felt sure that the taxi driver had earlier brought him to this very lobby but he couldn't be sure. If I see the room, he thought, I'll know. But just as he was about to demand to go upstairs, James took him by the elbow and pulled him to the beginning of one of the lines. "My friend works here," said James. "Please, if I might suggest? Crowd up, Babuji."

Richard strongly believed in waiting his turn; it was rude to butt in like this, but James guided him so smoothly that it would have been wrong to resist. He looked at the line and obeyed. "Hadn't we better stand in line?" he said anyway, unable to muster a stronger protest.

"Give me twenty rupees," James demanded and put his hand out. When he saw the expression of alarmed bewilderment on Richard's face, he added, "It's not for me, for goodness sake. It's for my friend."

Richard produced the money and James slid it under the plexiglass window. In quick order Richard stood at the window himself paying for his room, ignoring the sour faces of the melancholy people waiting behind him who didn't have twenty rupees to spare.

He understood without being told that he now owed James, and he remembered with the suddenness of one who's just realized he has been taken in that he hadn't even looked at the room before paying. "Is there a restaurant here?" he asked.

James nodded. 

"Well, let's have a cup of tea to celebrate." He wanted to complete their business and be done with this fellow. 

Recognizing the double elevator doors next to the restaurant entrance, he realized that he had indeed come here with the taxi driver and rejected the room.

Richard asked at the table, "What do you know about giraffes?"

"Oh, dear friend, we have no giraffes in India." James shook his head quickly and licked his lips, smiling inwardly under the motion. "Except in zoos."

"I thought not," said Richard.

"Oh, no, dear friend, we have no giraffes in India except in zoos," James repeated. He smiled broadly, genuinely, and studied Richard. "I think you are a very whimsical man underneath that stern visage, Mr. Keith Richards.  Giraffes indeed!"

Richard let it go. "Are you married?" he asked.

"Oh, I had to get married." James nearly flew from his seat, his neck twisting and head wobbling, eyes closed, in a uniquely Indian gesture. "Doctor's orders for my ulcer. And also because I am a diabetic."

Why a doctor would prescribe marriage and not insulin for diabetes Richard could not figure out, but James's point was not lost on him. Being a married, unemployed diabetic with an ulcer had to be expensive, and India is a poor country.

"Life in India is very hard," James was saying as if he had read Richard's mind. "My back is really against the wall, Babuji."

Richard wondered what had happened to trust in the Lord, but said instead, "I feel I really ought to pay you a little something for your services."

James shrugged as if to say it hadn't occurred to him but that, in his present circumstances, he couldn't see how he could reject the offer.

“How much do you suppose one should pay in a case like this?"

"As you like, my friend." James hunched his shoulders as a cold bird shrouds itself in the greatcoat of its wings. "I hope you don't take me for a beggar."

"Oh, heavens no. You performed a service. Please take this." Richard handed him a one hundred rupee note. "I think that should do it."

James turned the note over on the tabletop and stared at it blankly. "Have I shown you the picture of my daughter?" he asked and furnished the picture on the next beat. Richard sat looking at the picture of a six-year-old with jet black bangs and a yellow barrette in her hair. She looked like any American school girl. "In India we have to pay even for our children's school books, and education is essential for even the tiniest advancement."

Richard worked his numb fingers to strip a second one hundred rupee note from the collection in his passport pouch and added a fifty. "There," he declared. "That ought to do it." 

The cagey expression of an accomplished liar returned to James's face. It was an expression Richard knew well from his endless years of casework. James pocketed the money. "Only if you give with a happy heart, Babuji," he said.

Richard imagined he probably knew what that meant. "Oh, yes." He waved his hand as if to say this was elementary. He pressed his spine against the back of the chair.  His back had gone numb, too. "Oh, yes, James. A happy heart." 

Later, after having arranged his few belongings in the windowless room, Richard hired a cab to go look at the Hanging Gardens and the Towers of Silence, but the cigarette smoke everywhere annoyed him, the crowds sent him reaching to hold onto his passport pouch, and the constant noise drove him toward the end of the day to seek the relative peace of his darkened hotel room, listening to the arguments of his neighbors through the thin walls and to the hum of the air conditioner, which rested inside a crude cut in the wall and drew its air from the hallway.

He wondered how long this trial or purgatory or bardo or whatever it was would go on. Would he simply vanish into the humidity when the rest of his parts had finished numbing? It was slowly dawning on him that he might have had something special to do after all. He had been raised in the Methodist church, on covered dish suppers and youth groups and Boy Scouts. In college he read the Social Gospel theologians and studied sociology. He couldn't put his finger on exactly when he'd stopped believing, but he had. Still, by all objective measures, he had lived a decent life, had done the good work the system allowed. True, he had long since lost faith he'd change or affect his world and so had walled himself off from its disappointments, but he had delivered services to those in need. He didn't think he had to like it. One needed only procedural guidelines to do social work, not a happy heart.  

When he came down into the lobby for breakfast the next morning, James McDonald stood waiting at the foot of the stairs. Richard had forced himself to take the stairs so he could practice walking on his numb legs. He grasped the wooden banister with both hands for balance when he saw James.

"Mr. Keith Josephs! I felt sure I'd find you this early. It seems I'm in rather good luck." Though he stood at the bottom of the stairs, only two steps away from the elevator doors, James made it all sound coincidental. "I thought we might talk."

Richard reached for his money.

"Oh, don't do that." James gently brushed Richard's wrist."Is there some place we could talk?" His head darted left then right suspiciously. "The police are all around in this country, and Indian people are so nosey. Their minds will come to all sorts of nasty conclusions if they see us twice in the same restaurant."

It was eight in the morning and Richard still hadn't had a cup of coffee. "I was on my way to have breakfast," he told James. "Why don't you come on in."

"Here?"

"Is there another place close by? I'm hungry, James."

James began ushering him out the door. "A two minute walk," he said. "We can talk on the way." The guard's eyes followed them as they passed. When Richard greeted him, he saluted but smirked at James in a sort of warning, as if to say "I know his kind."

"I'm so glad I ran into you," James was saying, as if he hadn't been waiting in ambush. Richard pondered how long he had been there like that. "You'll never believe all that has happened to me since we last met." He drew a creased piece of paper from his pocket and began nervously unfolding it. It might well have been the same foul paper he had produced the day before. Richard thought of the thin gruel spooned up in refugee camps as he looked at it. "The doctor says I have to have these medicines and that I need to see a specialist in Delhi. My back is really against the wall. You know how hard life is in India; that's why I honestly don't believe it was any coincidence we met." He grinned over at Richard without a trace of irony and winked. "The Lord works in mysterious ways, don't you believe?"

Richard remembered this as another comfortable lie.  He felt novocaine taking hold in the top of his head and in his stomach.

"How much do you need?"

That instant James spun around in front of him, waving the dirty scrap of paper, skipping backwards on the sidewalk, sweet. "Oh, thank you, thank you, my beloved brother. You don't know what this means to me."

"I didn't say I would. I only asked how much."

James chuckled uncomfortably, regrouping. "Yes, of course," he said and tucked his shirt back into his pants. "Altogether, 900 rupees. It would mean the world to me."

Richard had to think. Already James had pulled the picture of his daughter out of his wallet. "I don't want to see that again," Richard snapped. Then, only to keep peace, "She's a pretty child. How close are we to this restaurant, anyhow?" So much of him had gone numb he could hardly stand. He stopped and leaned against a tree to steady himself.

They'd been walking for five or ten minutes, and Richard thought he detected the beginnings of a serious caffeine deprivation headache starting directly behind his right eye.

James placed his left hand on Richard's chest, where he could still feel, though that seemed now to be going, too. "You will be well again, Babuji," he said. "I guarantee it. I'll work for the money. Before, I helped you find a place."

"For which I am grateful," Richard answered.

"Now I'll take you all over Mumbai," said James. "I'll take you to places you couldn't possibly find on your own. Please, dear friend. I'm a sick man. I have a family. My back is against the wall or I wouldn't ask. I would be deeply ashamed if you thought for even one minute that I was a beggar."

Richard suspected he would help. "If I give you the 900 rupees and then pay for a cab to take us around, plus feed us," he was breathing heavily, "I'll be out 2000 rupees by the end of the day."

"No! No!" James ran out in Richard's face again, waving his arms and dancing backwards. "We'll take the bus. One single little rupee. And I have friends who will feed us. It will cost very little."

"So when do I get my breakfast?" Richard demanded. He knew the day would be more expensive than what James described, but, as usual, he had no firm plans.

But Richard hadn't gotten a withdrawal headache, after all. Instead he'd had a decent breakfast, they'd ridden a city bus, and here they were in the crowded bazaar near Mumbadevi Temple. "Watch for pickpockets," James had cautioned when they boarded the bus. "If I don't watch out for you, who on earth will?"

An old woman appeared with a white cow, selling bundles of grass to feed the animal as a comforting blessing. Richard approached her.

"These Hindus consider it auspicious to feed a cow," James was saying with some distaste. "But use your right hand for politeness's sake. They do make a fuss."

Richard shifted the length of grass he'd bought from the woman to his right and offered it to the white cow. He felt a gentle tug in his chest as the cow chomped into the grass. 

"Give the woman whatever you think it was worth when you finish."

Richard thought it was worth quite a lot indeed. "It's a charming custom," he told James. He could barely move his tingling jaw to speak, but the anesthetic was wearing off. "I grew up around cows." James looked at his watch and glanced down the narrow, crowded bazaar. He had insisted that Richard not give him his money until after they had explored all the spots he promised. "I am not a beggar," he repeated. "First, I will perform a service. I belong to a good family."

Now watching the slow eyes of the white cow Richard felt glad to have given in to coming along. 

A group of people chanted in the temple nearby, a low monotonous, oddly comforting chant. The smoke of burning trash crossed his face. This was not the Mumbai of wide, tree-lined boulevards and curved beaches he had seen before. He stroked the silky hair over the cow's nose and felt a passing sensation of nostalgia, a blueness for something lost long before death.

Cars honked in the background. The chanting continued unabated. A young man a few yards away slept in a pile of straw, amid the legs and feet of the bazaar. Only James, who kept looking at his watch and furrowing his brow, seemed ill at ease. Richard wanted to stay with this cow of his boyhood forever. It was late afternoon.

"How much did you give her?" James demanded as they walked away through the crowd. "You didn't give her too much, did you? Does your watch tell the date also?"

How much was too much for a dead man? "Yes, it tells the date," he said. What does a dead man do when he's run out of money? He had no standard. He did know, however, that 900 rupees was too much for what James had given him that day, good as it might be. Richard imagined a man of James's profession had plenty of experience of getting more than his share.

They approached a shop selling herbs and lizards hung upside down from a clothesline. A man in dirty white pajamas and bare feet squatted next to a caldron set over a low flame burning in dark stones. A wary, bemused expression on his lips, he looked from James to Richard and back. James stopped short as if a thought had alighted directly in his path. 

"I say, Richard. Would you like to try a bhang? It's a drink the sadhus drink. Very auspicious, like feeding the cow. Made with almonds and other herbs and nuts in a milk. Would you like to try one?"

Richard didn't know bhang from any other drink and had no way of knowing its main ingredient was marijuana. It tasted round and went down smoothly. When he fished in his passport pouch to pay for the third one, already feeling the effects of the first, he dropped his roll of one hundred and five hundred rupee notes in the straw at his feet.

"Here, old fellow, no problem," was James' exclamation as he quickly stooped to retrieve the money. 

Richard might have seen James quickly counting the notes if he hadn't been having so much trouble working his rubbery fingers to take it. It seemed that people were watching him but he took his time anyhow, holding back a growing sense of panic and paranoia as he tried to cope with the tingling in his toes and knees.

"Come on," said James. "I've got something else to show you." Then he told the shop owner something in Hindi and they both laughed. The shop owner looked at Richard and said something else in Hindi and Richard smiled, pretending to understand.

They made their way through the crowd and then into a narrow alleyway. A beggar with huge bloodshot eyes and red betel juice on her teeth materialized in front of Richard and wouldn't let him pass. James grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her away as Richard tried to find loose change in his pocket. Then James led them down a still tinier alley, this one smelling of human feces, which Richard did his best not to step in.

Each time James came to a turn in their way, he stopped and waited for Richard to catch up, seldom saying much or even looking at him. For Richard's part, he kept doing things that even he found, under the circumstances, a little odd. When they reached the end of the feces strewn alley, for example, or when James had reached the end and stopped to wait for him to catch up, Richard stopped, looked intently at James's silhouette in the gathering darkness, took his glasses off and started polishing them on his shirt tail. He didn't care. "I'm stoned," he said casually. "What the bloody hell is in that stuff?"

"Just marijuana. You said earlier nothing ever happened to you. But don't worry. It's a nice high."

"Well, it's not exactly what I'd choose to have happen to me," said Richard. His ears were clogged and his voice seemed to come from far, far away.

James's face puckered. "We seldom choose what happens to us," he said, turned on his heels and led the way off again, this time past a huge white mosque decorated in what Richard described to himself as Islamic gingerbread. It did not taste.

They walked far, and by the time they had reached the grassy, shady spot near the beach the sun had begun to slide into the Arabian Sea. "I have no idea where we are," said Richard. And then staring intently into the palm of his right hand he said, "Where are we anyhow?"

"We're in Mumbai," James answered and it took Richard a minute to realize he'd been mocked. But he didn't care. Long, long ago he had gone through a time of occasional dope smoking. It had been for him a carefree time right after college, a good time in his life. He told himself now that he truly did not care about what had happened after that. It was over, forgotten. Experience had turned him away from those good years. 

"Isn't there anything left of you?" James asked into the air. "Isn't anything coming back?"

Not ten yards away slept a man and a woman and their small child, each like some heap of dirty rags tossed onto the grass. All had limbs thin as telephone cable. The child, a girl, had blistered sores on her lips that the flies ferried back and forth from somewhere. 

At home this family's case would probably cross Richard's desk, though he was far enough up in the bureaucracy that he'd never have had to actually look at them, never need to suffer the indignity of meeting them face to face. He considered the absurdity of trying to help people without looking into their faces, but then remembered that, in truth, he had stopped trying to help long ago. Now, looking at these people, he told himself he didn't care. They mattered less than the paper cases he reviewed at home. All he had to do was walk a few paces and he'd find another family just like them, maybe worse. What could one person do? He felt James study him.

"You don't have to change the whole world," said James. "These people were here before you arrived."

But what was expected? Richard felt like going to sleep.       

"Does that ballpoint you carry work?" asked James as he reached out for it. Richard took it from his breast pocket and slowly handed it over. James tested it on the palm of his left hand and then placed it in his own breast pocket.

The grass and the earth were warm though the air in the shade was cool. Richard felt he could doze off and drift for a short time. After that he'd feel more like talking and walking again, figuring all this business out.  The sun had gone off to Africa and baby giraffes frolicked in the darkness of the beach, splashing in the shallows of the Arabian Sea. James wouldn't mind if he took a small nap. He seemed impatient anyway. He'd get the 900 rupees later. 

When Richard woke, James and all his money and his passport were gone, but he didn't care much. Absurdly, he thought about what a terrible hassle it would be to go to the consulate to get the replacement papers for his passport and to trundle down to the American Express office at Flora Fountain to replace his checks. He didn't bother thinking of the already exchanged cash he could never replace. It would of course be no good at all to file a report with the police. He knew all of this as he sat in the dark rubbing his eyes and stretching. He also knew that he should not sit alone in a park at night, whether he had any money left or not. It just wasn't wise.

Who he was now seemed somehow more detachable from the image of his body than before, as if it could maybe drift away like an aroma. He tossed this around in his mind for a few minutes and concluded nothing. He had picked a career in tune with his upbringing, but had never seriously wondered if he were a kind man. The question itself, if it ever had been even so much as half-formed, had slipped away into a numbing self-interest. He felt the image of his body with his hands, not really caring but strangely curious. It was there in all its parts. The empty passport pouch lay by his side. A new group of people sitting where the small family had been before now watched him without real interest. Their eyes were blank and they too seemed like just so many piles of dirty laundry heaped upon the ground. Richard thought he might smile, but decided the effort would be unnecessary. 

He imagined now that when you are dead you long to leave your bodily attachments behind, and so he tried to allow that aroma of self to drift off, but nothing further would separate. He stood to leave and found his legs still weak and wobbly.  Where were his shoes? And his socks? His glasses and the ball point pen he kept in his breast pocket were also gone. He felt his face and neck and thought he must be sunburned. His pockets were turned inside out. He ambled out of the park, feeling hunger suddenly in his gut, stepping over more heaps of laundry as he left, and came out on the street. It couldn't have been late. Traffic was still heavy. It must have been only a couple of hours that he'd slept.

His first impulse was to hail a cab, but he realized he had no ready cash. The prospect of walking all the way back to his hotel gave him mild displeasure but no real concern. Another hassle. That's all. Like seeing to the traveler's checks and the passport. Doable, though he had no idea how far a walk it would be. He had no idea which direction to take.

Except for the piles of rags and shadows of faces who lived permanently on the sidewalk, no one else was about. Cars and buses whizzed past as he wandered through smoke and cooking fires on the sidewalk. He walked towards some lights at the end of the block, but they turned out to be the security lights of closed shops. In the display window of a clock shop, Richard read the time.  8 P. M.  Then the date on a watch like the one he foolishly imagined himself replacing. The twenty third. He'd slept for over twenty-four hours. It didn't matter. He went on, not knowing if the street were taking him closer or further from his hotel.

At the next corner he turned and walked into the darkness one last time. Music played somewhere at the end of this street and Richard walked toward it. A man sang in Hindi and others played tabla and harmonium. He hurried along on his bare feet. It came from behind a house beyond the middle of the block. Richard found his way to the gate and peeked around the corner to get a look. 

The whole back yard was lit up with long tubes of fluorescent lights around a shrine where clusters of long incense sticks burned, and a group of men sat on carpets underneath a large striped tent, like a small circus tent open on his side. The musicians sat in front of the shrine and played into a pair of silver microphones. Their audience of men, dressed in white cotton pajamas so fresh the folding creases were still visible, reclined on bolsters, drinking tea and occasionally chatting quietly. Richard watched as long as he thought it polite and then started to leave. But at the instant he turned to go, a hand touched his shoulder and he heard a woman's voice say, "Come. Come in and have tea."

She led him up the drive and handed him over to a small boy. "Give him a place," she said. Smiling sweetly and motioning with an open palm, she said, "Yes, please. You come now."

He approached the tent, watching the faces of the two or three men who had turned to notice him. They did not smile or frown. Their faces gave nothing away, but he did not feel unwelcome. One immediately gave up his bolster and motioned for Richard to come and sit. Another called for a servant to bring tea and sweets. The singer's eyes met Richard's and he held Richard's gaze and sang directly to him, winking.

Richard accepted this with indifferent politeness. It felt like his due, but also he felt a closeness to these people because he did not feel separated from them in any significant way. He was as indifferent to their differences as he was to the tea they served him. He didn't care one way or the other about having tea, but if they wanted to bring it he would drink out of a new generosity. He felt only a happiness to be among the living. The music roamed aimlessly, like a wandering mind, now dark, now light, full of wishes and despair, finding occasional joy in a phrase or in some discovered tone, then as indifferent as a cow staring into a soul.

"Would you like for me to interpret?" asked the man whose bolster Richard had taken. "This is the last night of a worship we are having for two elderly relatives who recently died. You see their photographs above the shrine? The singer is asking Lord Krishna to come down and visit this house. You see Krishna's picture there on the shrine? He is the blue figure next to the white cow."

Richard stared at the figure and at the cow, which had a strand of grass hanging from its mouth. The man did not look at Richard as he spoke. He stared instead at the picture of Krishna, his face dreamy as it responded to the music.

"The music says 'Come down to us, Krishna/Bless our home with your presence/We will serve you tea and sweets/Come to us and bless our house/We know you are hungry and will eat.'"

Some of the other men had turned to watch Richard's face as he listened to the translation.

"'Even if you come as a stranger,'" the man continued, "'Even if you come dressed in another's clothing/Speaking in another's voice/We will feed you with tea and sweets/We will make you comfortable/Bless our home.'" The man chuckled nervously. "And here," he said, "the singer repeats the lines. But allow the boy to bring you more tea." He hissed sharply twice and the boy scurried over. "Bring our visitor more tea," he said. Turning to face Richard with his kind gaze, he asked, “And what is your good name, sir? You must be a long way from your home. You do look tired."

Richard thought of home and of the life he now left behind forever. He didn't know what time it was there anymore. I am Krishna, a blue orgasm of light within an ancient thunderhead, he told himself. It all mattered, from beginning to end, and the only mission the gods gave was the gift of a generosity of heart he had wasted.  He saw his image carried on a bier to the sea for cremation, the sweetness of temper gone from his body like the aroma from washed herbs.

"You look tired, Babuji," said the man. "Let us open our house to you. You need a place to rest.”