If there were water. Part 2

The bus dropped us near the train station in Udaipur before sunrise. We went back to the guest house we had stayed in last time. The manager remembered us and, somewhat unfriendly, handed us the key to our old room. There were so many hotels in Chandpole, the old part of Udaipur; they were all mostly empty and you could always get a room for next to nothing.

Francis and I had a bad fight that morning, about money, among other things. At one point Francis yelled at me, ‘Just because you feel fucked up, don’t take it out on me.’ I had no way of knowing if this was fair. ‘Why do we keep ending up in towns where there’s nothing to eat?’ I snapped. We didn’t make up, really, but eventually fell silent and then asleep. I woke up in the early afternoon. Francis was still asleep, and I went out and booked a bus to Bombay for that night. I didn’t think he’d be surprised.

But at the roundabout in Udaipole a few hours later- where the travel agents’ offices were, where the buses left from, sounding their insane horns and the conductors shouting, some to travel deeper into Rajasthan, others to the major cities in Gujarat and Maharashtra… there, I was shaken by sobs and Francis clung to me before the waiting coach. Later, he would come to Mumbai. Lying in my single sleeper, I watched Udaipur fade out, and then Rajasthan. I must have slept.

At some point in the night I became aware of the bus pulling off the highway. We parked in a dirt clearing, alongside trucks and other buses. The clearing itself was unlit, but swimming just beyond the clearing were myriad coloured lights, flickering circles of red, yellow, blue, floating as if in midair. I climbed blearily down from the bus. Figures were moving about indistinctly in the spaces between the vehicles. I could see the glowing ends of cigarettes. One bus honked its horn frantically and then pulled away. I clambered in the direction of the lights, strange and alluring in the darkness.

Upon approach, it became clear that they were electric lights, strung throughout a broad, covered veranda. It was a restaurant.  Fifty or so tables were laid out, and though the car park had given the impression of being busy, the restaurant was nearly entirely empty. One table against the far wall was occupied by a young man and woman drinking tea. They  sat close to each other, confidentially, talking. The only other people in the restaurant were the several waiters, all of them thin, barefoot men who ranged from adolescence to extreme old age. I wondered vaguely where the other passengers from my bus had gone, but I was hungry, and I  took a seat at one of the tables. A waiter went off somewhere. Another, very young, leered at me, leaning against a concrete pillar. The first waiter came back carrying a steaming clay dish in one hand, and in the other a saucer piled with thick white bread. He placed these before me.

The clay bowl held a dish of tiny fish and chillies swimming in oil. The oil was stained red by the chillies. I used my fingers to pick out a fish. It was salty and pungent and fell to pieces in my mouth. Then I pulled off a chunk of the tough bread, soaked it in oil, and ate it. The two bites of hot food kindled my appetite, and I suddenly fell to eating with avid concentration. In a few minutes I had finished off everything, including the red-hot chillies and the fine splinters of bone in the fish. I wiped the plate clean with bread. The waiter brought me more bread and a dish of eggs and mincemeat. It smelt slightly spicy, slightly sickly. I scooped the spongy meat up with my hand and shoved it in my mouth; with my other hand, I tore off pieces of bread and soaked them in the juices. When I had finished that, I ate a plate of mussels and another of sautéed cabbages. I picked the rubbery orange flesh out of the mussel shells and sucked each one slowly, relishing its intensely fishy flavour.

It was as if I had never eaten in my life- my hunger was unstoppable. Every drop of oil that passed my lips was divinely nourishing; everything tasted so good that my body shivered with pleasure. The waiter promptly put bread on my plate whenever I ran out. I was beginning, too, to recognise the dishes from somewhere… history… or literature? Didn’t they harvest mussels from the bay in New York before the water became too polluted? I ate fish heads and bean curd fried in peanut oil, then clam stew… who ate clam stew? Ishmael, for breakfast, before he set sail. Finally a huge plate of roast chicken was placed before me, so I ate that, and when I had finished I stood up- I was perfectly full, without the feeling that I had overeaten- and went to the urn that was filled with drinking water. I removed  the tin plate from the top, filled the  steel pitcher and poured a long stream into my mouth.

Looking across the restaurant, I noticed again the coloured lights. They blinked and twinkled, dancing to the unearthly music which for the first time I heard… A band was seated in the corner on a rug, playing meditatively… Strange stringed instruments, their bodies carved in weird shapes… A woman cross-legged at a harmonium, singing in a garbled language. Slowly the words took shape, like an image coming into focus.

For those who have no culture, the primordial is hard to place

In such a case

The self is heavy as an anchor and cannot be let go,

For what port would you sail to?

And in the open water, what would you do?

In what port would you be welcomed

When you belong, ungrateful, to some inland station?

For those who have no culture,

What language would we pray in?

Speak up! In what words

Should we describe the primordial?

It was the desert, the true desert, sand stretching empty to the horizon. Was it day or night?…the sun gave off a black heat, a darkness that was like the day in negative. I could still hear the singer’s voice, distantly, her words receded into incomprehensibility. Other female voices joined hers, wailing, guttural, unspeakably alien.

I turned and was frightened  to my core to see a man standing very close to me, clutching a festering gash in his belly. He was choked with confusion and horror, his mouth a frowning chasm, the mask of tragedy. His body cringed and pleaded, his eyes crazed in the attempt to communicate… All at once I understood he couldn’t speak. But I had no idea whether he was asking me for help, or simply wanted me to take note of his injury, as some kind of emblem for suffering generally. He needed perhaps my compassion. Why the vilaap of the women? …who were they mourning for?

Panic began to rise in me. I had been on my way to the city, and now I was deeper than ever into the desert hinterland, in this nowhere place, alone with this effigy of pain who could not speak but clutched his side, gasping, choking, unable to convey to me the nature of his plea. I couldn’t understand anything. Things were flat here, without their worldly reflections that ordinarily threw back coloured meanings, associations. Only the distant wailing-singing of the women had a faint echo of association… They were something archetypical, recognisable second-hand from some forgotten source, a story, or music overheard… some amalgam vision of the pre-modern world.

Perhaps if I could cry for him, for both of us…? Was that what he asked for, tears? If I could get a proper, composed sense of his sadness… But the music was too strange, beyond rapture, beyond pain. Were they mourning this man in front of me, with his terrible wound? And the ghost, the chai wallah’s son… What kind of asymmetrical fiction, to have seen him and now this man, two silent figures, one full of supplication, the other self-contained, demanding nothing, communicating nothing.

Before me was the endless distance, whence the women’s voices came; behind me… I turned around, looking for the place I had come from, and saw the inviting colours of strings of lights, red, blue, amber… I went towards them, away from the wrong, black sun. The truck-stop restaurant came back into view. The band was playing still. The woman now sang in a dialect similar to Hindi. I understood the odd word. I went back out into the lot. The other vehicles had left, leaving only my bus honking its horn in warning of departure. I got on and lay down with great relief, because my body was sore and heavy.

I woke up at first light. We were in the hills north of Mumbai, and the mist was so astonishingly thick that I could see nothing but white. I dozed a little, and when I woke again the fog had cleared and the countryside was beginning to thicken into suburbs. Clusters of general stores, mechanics, houses began to appear. There were old, roaring buses too, and auto-rickshaws with the names of outer suburbs etched on their backs; ‘Vasai – Virar – Borivali.’ A road sign read, ‘Vasai Beach, 5km,’ with an arrow pointing West, and another, ‘Vasai Rd Railway Station,’ also indicating westward. So, we were within the uppermost reaches of Mumbai’s Western metro line. The traffic gradually worsened, and by the time we reached Malad it was gridlock. It was already peak hour, and everyone was, like us, heading South. We crawled past jam-packed bus stops; thousands of women in a rainbow of salwar-kameez, men in pale shirts and slacks, school kids. Grimy palm trees here and there.

From Malad, it took an hour and a half to get to Andheri, where I decided to alight and take the metro. I stopped in at a small cafe for a breakfast of upma and chai. The upma was soft and warm and nourishing. Refreshed, I bought some cigarettes and went into the station. In the queue for a ticket, I watched the crowds of commuters taking running leaps onto still-moving southbound trains. I suddenly had a change of heart; I went outside again and got in an auto-rickshaw. ‘Juhu Beach,’ I told the driver, who nodded dutifully and set off.

Juhu Beach was close to deserted. The tide was out. I sat down on the furthermost edge of dry sand. Here was the ocean, spread out before me. Gentle waves rushed in and out. On the horizon, the air was so hazy that I couldn’t tell where the sea ended and the sky began. A jumbo jet from the nearby international airport flew very low over the beach, headed directly out to sea.

I wanted to grasp the essence, the beauty of that moment on the beach. As I thought this, I became suddenly, sickeningly overwhelmed by all the meaningful things in the world. Meaning was everywhere, in so many different forms, fractured infinitely. It was impossible to grasp anything. I realised I was exhausted. My legs ached. Getting up was unthinkable, so I just sat there, tolerating the sun as it rose higher and listening to the ocean, blessedly wordless.