It was essential to remain close to those who had caused you harm so that the ghost of guilt might breathe through their dreams, that their guilt might slowly mature to its fullest potential.
“What do you paint?” Sonia asked before she wondered if this was a foolish question. “I paint seemingly good things as evil and seemingly evil things as good. I put together what does not go together. That is all I will say. There is nothing more horrible than an artist who begins talking nonsensical art theory when asked what he is painting. Most artists talk like this now. That is why I don’t have any artist friends. I learned from Van Gogh—you should think about your painting absolutely simply, like a traveler describing a landscape or a scene. If you do that, then you live inside your paintings—and all I want is to live inside my paintings.”
If you are lonely, you feel ashamed, and the only relief to your shame is being alone, which is what makes you lonely in the first place.
Papa had been employed for his Westernized veneer, his ability to give orders with aplomb and investigate the sort of venture that would be needed to make India more modern. Papa broke ground with notions that inevitably failed, but the ghost of failed endeavors lingered, and, inevitably, three or five or ten years later, another company came along, executed the same plan for modernity—and brilliantly succeeded: Two Minute Masala Noodles! You could argue he was unsuccessful precisely because he was over-successful, able to glimpse the future before the rest of the nation.
Oh, how could he have forgotten that love, when it arrives, arrives always twinned to its destructive force, as inevitably as God and devil, life and death, home and the leaving of it; that information collected during sweeter moments will be turned to ammunition and dispelled during war; that what is innocent in the morning will not remain so by nightfall.
Even in this country, where he’d assumed love was different from the Indian version, it was not a private endeavor, but all about being a public event. If you didn’t stamp and stamp love with legitimacy and acknowledgment, and stamp it some more, silver and gold, with further legalities and recognitions, the ghost of future lost love infiltrated and your love became irrevocably unformed, the lack folded into its substance.
Sunny and Ulla had first met by Riverside Park in the cafeteria line of a hostel for international students and American students interested in an international experience. This hostel may have had an academic purpose, and it may have looked staid from the outside, but in actuality, it was a hysterical airport of love affairs as students from around the world—menaced by perpetually expiring visas and the panic of limited time—romanced each other in fast-forward, having but two or four years to trick their native fate, leapfrog into another nation, another class, another skin, to sample all the world offered. It was a wonder anyone managed to achieve a degree.
Sunny overheard Mala begin to denounce the disheartening and repetitive occurrence of Indian boys running after white American women, always picking the most pallid, androgynous ones, the kind who withdrew to spend moody hours scribbling in diaries. This was what attracted them, said Mala, because no Indian woman was bequeathed enough privacy to thus indulge herself with a solipsistic obsession over her own psychology—encouraged to chart the fluctuations of her temperament in response to deep crises that were inevitably banal.
Babita sat down at her desk and composed a forwarding note to the marriage proposal for Sunny. As she wrote, though, her malaise worsened. How desolate it was to have to hoard one’s thoughts and jokes for future company, how tedious to translate them into a letter. How sweet it was when one could undo the lethargy of time by chatting with someone about the little things. You could always find a person to converse with over the larger matters—a government scandal, the delayed monsoon—but it was the tiny concerns, the moment’s observations, that you couldn’t save up to tell, for you didn’t even recognize their full potential to add meaning to life unless you articulated their humor, tragedy, menace, or charm. The sight of an ant, say, who appeared to be valiantly carrying his slain fellow soldier on his back; whether it was safe to take a bath despite the fact that rogue monkeys who were fed in the temple nearby had taken a dip in the water tank; whether a sari’s pink tipped too pink.
It had become something of a fad for Indian children who’d achieved an American life to treat their parents to an Alaskan cruise, to allow them to experience for a week what they’d bequeathed their children for a lifetime—the bliss of being able to pretend they were not Indians and that India didn’t exist. Where they might see enough white people and empty white landscapes to convince them this was so. What was so odd, Babita reflected, was that this striving to escape India felt patriotic: If you were a worthy Indian, you became an American.
“I don’t want to go,” Sonia said. “I want to read my Anna Karenina.” Wasn’t Tolstoy overcome by the sublime tingle even as he wrote? How could he combine that with the practical necessity of putting words on paper? What experiences he must have pursued—wouldn’t Sonia need to live a life to tell a tale? Yet to write meant stepping out of life, isolating yourself. If you tried to balance the two, wouldn’t you be living a life for the sole purpose of creating a fictional life, not one that would take its natural course, but one that you would be bending and shaping toward a secret purpose? You wouldn’t make a choice for happiness, but for an escapade you might relate.
Papa considered Sonia so precious that he did not cheat on Mama because that in turn would harm Sonia. Although this may not really be the reason her father was not a cheat. Perhaps he simply couldn’t loosen his death grip upon her mother, but that is how it made Sonia feel. Because when someone betrays their spouse, they also betray their daughter and the small life of the house: the trustful dog, the cat with the attitude of a movie star, the houseplant venturing a new leaf, the leftover vegetable soup, the worn socks, the sliver of soap stuck upon the new bar of soap. They betray all these creatures and all these objects that have no idea they’ve been made into a joke, that their lives are actually something other than what they understand them to be. In the end, the betrayer can only scorn such naïveté.
Art is how you climb out of the abyss after you’ve made yourselves into beasts. You have to hook on and rebuild yourself from outside in. This is why it is essential to live in a civilization offering theaters, opera houses, philharmonics, film festivals, cafés, and parks with magazine kiosks and benches upon which to read a newspaper. A city where you can go to a museum of a country that no longer exists, or a lecture on the vibrant culture of tenements, or the 92nd Street Y to hear a great pianist who is still miraculously alive, with a repertoire of expressions of anguished intensity, or a film about an Iranian road worker having an existential crisis. It is important to live where you can turn on public radio and listen to a quick roundup of crimes of war around the world followed by an hour-long conversation with an Irish poet about the consequence of his faith upon his meter. This reassigns you to the calm and rational side of things.
What was true was what she could not tell Marie: that as their fights had grown more primitive and fiercer, Ilan and Sonia had become more secretive, more dependent. When someone has seen you as less than human and may at any time betray this information and inform others that you are actually a ghoul, it means you have to be more solicitous of the other, more closely a pair. And after you’ve gouged one another, your missing parts belong to your fighting partner; you need to be constantly with the keeper, the consumer of your vital organs, your mind, your heart, or you no longer exist.
If you had a cook, you behaved better than if you had none. If you had a dog, you behaved better than if you had none to save it from having to crawl under the bed with its tail between its legs. Even if you had a mynah bird, it would grow prim upon hearing a rude argument, and to see your bird nervously treading on its perch, well, it shamed you into behaving better. They had no bird and no dog but a cook who noted everything because he had no other life at hand.
Sunny put a few clothes and the Hound of the Baskervilles into a small duffel bag in accordance with his childhood habit of reading Sherlock Holmes on the train to Allahabad. He thought among the best reasons to emigrate was to pack one’s own bag and carry it oneself, to have no servants, to clean one’s own house. Gandhi had managed to eject the British from India but had failed in his exhortations to get Indians to scour their own toilets and thereby fathom the basic meaning of human rights. Following the repercussions of this lack of understanding of human rights in a logical manner, Sunny thought it explained why Indians would never make good readers of novels: a reader of novels comprehends the notion of individual rights by the simple act of identifying with a person’s—any person’s—trials and joys. When you considered another person’s feelings, another person’s dignity, you actually wished to scrub your own toilet. A good novel reader was a toilet cleaner, and so Indians didn’t wish to be readers of novels as this would undo caste hierarchies and divides that made their world go around properly.
How had he managed to make the journey from the certainties of his life into the formless infinite? One of the most vital lessons a parent could give a child—how to leave life—was never imparted. Like the mystic’s path, Papa reflected, once the journey had been completed, it was rendered indescribable.
“A cook needs a strong master,” opined Mina Foi. “He doesn’t have respect for me, so he has stopped being careful in his food preparation.” When servants were held to harsh standards, it made them fearful; simultaneously, in contradiction, they felt safe, as if someone was watching over them, so Mina Foi’s thinking went. And when they didn’t feel safe, watched, and simultaneously held to fearful standards, they could not perform their duties.
That night Sonia read her Brothers Karamazov. It was a murder mystery—who was the murderer? She said, “One of the characters says something interesting: Active love is the only way to dispel fear and disbelief.” Sunny had opened his Farewell to Arms. “This is essentially what my book is about as well.” But if you love, you fear, thought Sonia. You fear and believe you will lose love. But if you don’t love, you also fear. You feel safe only when you are alone and cannot be betrayed, yet you feel unsafe being alone.
Reading Hemingway, he had become interested in Americans abroad the way a previous generation of Indians had studied the British abroad. He had embarked upon Henry James. Earnest Americans were seduced by Europe and cheated out of their innocence by an older civilization. The cynical Old World was amused and beguiled by the fresh New World. While Europeans loved cowboys, Americans were besotted by aristocrats. The romance continued, venturesome enough to save them from having to seek scary adventure in the Third World.
Sonia sat at her grandfather’s massive teak desk surrounded by the esoteric presence of his paintings of the remote Himalayas, portals to a world where human concern has no purchase. People may love the high snow mountains, but the mountains did not love people. If love were an insignificant matter to the mountains, well, so were hate and fear. To be neither loved nor hated, to learn one’s unimportance, to make oneself beside the point, was surely a relief. A man might rebalance himself against the massive indifference.
How many of her class were forced to be fraudulent to allow their children to remain innocent abroad, allow them to be vociferous and self-righteous on the subject of corruption? Financial honesty in children was a cost that had to be paid for by parents. During stressful times it was inevitable that you began to think your child was an idiot who would be able to handle nothing—until you were drawn in the other direction by pride in their naïve honorableness, a desire to share in their shadow-free lives in rich countries where it was normal to criticize Third World corruption, ignoring the massive corruption of the First World, before which we are all ants trying to get an impossible view of an elephant.
To whet his appetite, he read E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, and it occurred to him that Italy was the Englishman’s first India, their first scorching sun, swarthy skin, their first garlic and hot temper, their first people whom they viewed alternately as children and as savages, charming and suddenly cruel—ultimately baffling. Perhaps Italy had allowed them to attempt India. This would suggest Italian charm had some truth to it, or else the English would have returned to their sunless, un-garlicky island and saved the world the ruinous empire.
Sonia woke and found Sunny was not there. She worried she had made a misstep. If she had allowed him to simply get away with his bad behavior, this might have incited a feeling of grateful love—you love the person who is nice to you even when you behave badly.
It was easy to become convinced of an argument pinning you as the guilty one, to become what others accused you of, and it was even easier when you constructed this argument yourself. The certitude and conviction it took to overturn guilt when something terrible had happened within one’s purview—only the guilty had the impetus to summon. It was they who fanned an uproar of indignation enough to terrify the truth and make it slink away.
Maya recounted a speech her husband had made at an international tourism conference in Bali about how tourism was a crucial tool in cultural preservation. Faltering history that could not survive the onslaught of modernity on its own merit could be saved by “high-end” tourism. At the conference, the term “high-end” was used sincerely, and by coincidence, many other attendees presented the same argument tailored to their own respective nations. Maya and her husband were conjuring a scheme to restore heritage homes and transform them into boutique hotels to add to her husband’s hospitality empire. Could this boutique hotel venture work in tandem with Kala to offer tours to “high-end” tourists? The hotel business and the altruistic magazine might combine forces.
She remembered Ilan had given her a kitschy figurine of two dogs from the Chelsea Flea Market. I won’t let any harm come to you. If anyone dares to attack you, I will woof woof and drive them off. Kitsch means true love. That is why kitsch exists, to show you love someone so much that you are willing to be sentimental. Therefore kitsch has power. Sonia had believed what Ilan said must be true because the figurine couldn’t care less about the barriers of poor taste and embarrassment.
Again, was he right? Was he wrong? Her parents belonged to the past age of parents, unassailable as religion. They found themselves right. They admitted no shortcoming—and the confidence of their child, their servant, their cat, and their bird depended on their certainty that they were right. There wasn’t any point in telling them they’d misread the world as their parents had misjudged it before them. Sonia, now an adult, had to protect them from what they had brought about. And if Sonia informed her father and mother they were wrong, she would lose whatever stability she had, which still rested on their being right. She would only harm herself.
Ilan de Toorjen Foss had apparently told Sonia’s story. But there was a story behind that story. A story that lived behind a story that had been told was often a story that could not be told because the person who could tell it had been destroyed.
The screen of the confessional chair was woven of airy rattan so that the priest would certainly know who was giving him her confession, which he would doubtless discern anyhow from the voice that would have earlier suggested chilled cashew juice in a Bohemian goblet. But if the priest can see you, you can see the priest, too. If God can see you, you can see God, too. If you are to confess to God, God should confess to you, too. She said to Christ upon the cross, “But I am not guilty. Why can’t you help me?” But because he had died for her sins without her asking him to, she was made to feel beholden. Catholicism was about guilt and absolution. Hinduism was about retribution. It was about your karma being balanced out beyond your consciousness over millennia, so why even bother thinking about it? But that meant those who suffered tragedy either deserved it or must behoove themselves to forgive those who caused it.
Sonia thought: This is my real life. This is where my luck lies, my tragedy lies, this is where my love lies—and a certain happiness. She couldn’t imagine ever finding any love as big as this one here. You had to love someone for a long while to put up with them and feel this way.
What was her anger against? It poured from one thing to another so easily. Fear was like this, too, she remembered. And, sadly, love was like this, so if you had love, it lent its shine and tenderness to all things, and if you did not have love, the lack dulled every quarter of your existence.
Mama would not be assailed. She was made of a substance that Sonia could not comprehend. It appeared stony, but whenever Sonia had sat by her mother’s side, she was filled with freeing peace. The quiet her mother had anchored took patient work. It was her achievement. A monk would be called selfish by the family of the monk, yet if many dedicated themselves to creating such peace, the world would be quieted. If Sonia destroyed her mother’s hard-won calm, she herself would not be sustained by the rooted quiet.
He breathed in, he breathed out. Routine and simplicity, simplicity and routine. Living alone in nature, it was possible to find one’s natural habits, and they were surprisingly regular and reassuring; like the creatures around him, he had fallen into a rhythm. He got up at the same time almost to the minute, drew the curtains he had sewn himself, and stood at his door brushing his teeth and surveying the morning that traveled across the bay toward him. The opossum walked along his wall at the same hour of early night and early day. The hummingbird came by at midday, as did the flock of chachalacas. The whales were wintering in the bay just as they always did. The resident iguana sat on one of two favored branches upon the same pepper tree.
The name Ilan de Toorjen Foss, thought Sunny, was probably made up. He looked carefully at the accompanying photograph, and, as with the one Sunny had seen in the catalog in Venice and the one in Artes de México, it was compelling. Fame requires a good photograph against the right backdrop. Ilan held up a mask carved out of a tortilla and mischievously looked out of the primitive cutout eyes and mouth. About him was his collection of masks from around the world and of naguals that were creatures half human and half animal, bat men and scorpion women. Masks were a way to communicate with spirits from other times and places. You could speak a hidden truth—or else the worst falsehood. When a man wore a mask, nobody knew who he was, not even the man himself.
Maybe all you needed was to be loved once. It was too much to ask to be loved all the way through life, and you could return to the memory for sustenance. Being loved all the time might be a curtailment, a redundancy. It was wild and restful to think without attachment.
Could it be that this was what had secretly drawn Sunny to Mexico? He had thought he was hunting a life story, but a life story had been hunting him, calling upon him to play his part.
The blessing and the curse! The hallowed and the damned! Why is a child born but to create an ocean for his mother to splash in? For him to be curtailed that his mother may swim free? For her to be reflected in the mirror of his eye, in the ocean’s eye, the universal mirror? I was a hidden treasure. I wanted to be known.
Ilan had eyes on the back of his head, Sonia had told Sunny. Because a bad person is a paranoid person who expects retribution, they develop excellent intuition. You then believe that the person is the devil because they know.
It had been unexpectedly simple to have Sonia in the house. What more did one want from life, after all, but to eat dinner with someone, to watch a murder mystery that you’d be too scared to watch alone? One’s perspective normalized. When one’s perspective was askew, one behaved in a manner that was askew.
Wasn’t it a story that made a journalist, not a journalist who made a story? Wouldn’t a good journalist be able to efface himself, to have no face? What had been the point of telling his mother that he belonged neither to India nor to the United States, stuck in the in-between place where the news disconcertingly morphed from one thing into another? This was a fortunate place to work from—but while a man might travel the world and chase all of its shifting stories, when something dire happened in the landscape of his childhood, wouldn’t that man circle back to fight for what his parents had fought for, his grandparents, if it were in peril again? Sunny thought of his own father, Ratan, who had wished to bequeath his son his innocence. Not his wealth—his innocence. Sunny’s face bathed in tears.
If you don’t have love, you don’t properly exist. If you don’t properly exist, you don’t have love. One morning, after the rains had passed, Sunny woke into a memory of being half asleep just the way he was now, of waking into the bloom of affection greater than himself. It was greater because it no longer existed inside himself and Sonia—they were encased within it, the countryside was colored by it, the news was shaded by it, maybe one day even their deaths would be small matters within it.