respectfully to him. He must have owned the place. Upstairs, Dandruff and I were introduced to six Westerners, all male, all droop looking, and all sleazy.
A porter showed me to a room. I was impressed: it had its own bedroom.
'Here you are, darling. Is this not cosy?'
During the day, we sat around a central area waiting to be called. The hotel manager would summon us.
'Your turn.' The Indian signalled Dandruff.
'What, again? I already went twice today.'
'Cleo, you're next.'
'But Tin in the middle of a Tandoori chicken,' I moaned.
Sometimes we were all out at once. Rarely were more than three of us there at one time. In Delhi I relaxed. With the hotel outside the city centre, I no longer feared running into a victim after the feet I still hated the job, but I was surviving the monsoon. And there was a wonderful Bengali restaurant down the block Food! Soon soon I would be back in Goa.
One evening Dandruff didn't return. We notified Rachid. Late that night a knock woke me. Half asleep, I didn't think twice about opening the door until two police officers strode into the room.
Oh, shit.
'You are tourist?' asked a little inspector, looking into corners. 'Uh . . . yes.'
'Please, you show me your passport.'
When I did, he sat on the bed to examine it. The other policeman searched the room at first poking into empty drawers and then rummaging through the suitcase where all my clothes tangled into one big knot. 'But you are staying in India what eleven months?' the inspector said, trying to figure out my entry dates. 'No, you are making one trip to Bangkok and return. What is your occupation?'
'Oh, um . . . uh . . .'
'Is this correct? It is saying that you are born in 1950. You are twenty-one?' He looked closer at me. 'No, you are being no more than eighteen.' People always mistook me for younger than my age. He compared me to the passport picture.
Just then the other officer came across a set of traveller’s checks hidden in a bikini bottom He brought them to the inspector, and the two of them smiled Humpty Dumpty-style.
'So! These are your checks? This is your name?'
They weren't and it wasn't.
The police took me away.
A canvas-covered jeep waited in front of the hotel, and in the back wrapped to his ears in a blanket sat Dandruff.
'What happened?' I asked, climbing in and sitting beside him.
He waited till the engine blocked his voice from the driver, then answered, 'A tourist recognized me from last year. She called the cops. They beat me. Look, they pulled my earring out.' He motioned to his bloody lobe. 'The pigs ruined my ear.'
Was that supposed to justify his informing on me? Obviously he'd led the police to my door. He must not have mentioned anyone else from the hotel just me.
Thank you very much. Dandruff. I'm going to get you for this, I thought, while I smiled at him. 'Are you all right?' I asked. At that moment I needed a fellow sufferer more than I needed an enemy.
It was still the middle of the night when the jeep brought us to the police station, and our arrival woke the servants who'd been, sleeping on the concrete floor of the courtyard. After depositing Dandruff in an empty cell that said 'Lathes,' the police escorted me to a narrow room overwhelmed by yellow folders and smelling of an earlier curried meal. 'We are having no facilities for you,' the inspector told me. 'You must be spending the night in this office.' He spoke Hindi to a servant who'd scurried in behind us. After producing blankets of the same type I'd seen wrapped around Dandruff, the servant was dismissed for the night 'Here, you sleep here,' the inspector said as he spread blankets on the floor; one, half under the desk and another, a few feet away. Then came a clanging of chains. 'Come, you are lying down now.' I sat on the floor and tried to make a pillow of my handbag, bunching it into a ball. He approached me. 'I am sorry, I must manacle you. Please, you are lying down.' He kneeled near me with a gigantically thick chain that should not have been used for anything smaller than an elephant. 'Here. You are putting your foot here.' I moved as directed until the bottom half of me lay under the desk. He chained my ankle to its initial leg. Theo he went to the other blanket and turned out the light.
The ceiling fan revolved slowly. I could barely feel the stirred air passing through the top wisps of my hair. Outside in the station courtyard the sounds of activity grew quieter as the servants settled hack down for the night A door slammed at the end of the corridor, and I heard a foreign shout in the distance. An answering shout came in more words I couldn't understand. My shoulder blades dog into the floor, but I couldn't turn to the side with my foot chained to the desk.
I cried.
Chained under a desk, deep inside a police station somewhere in New Delhi, in India, in the middle of the night—I didn't want to think. I wanted desperately to sleep—sleep and let all this go away for a while.
I suspected, though, I wouldn't be able to do that just yet.
And there he was. As the last thump and shuffle moved off in the distance, there was the inspector at my side, right up against me. He stroked my hair and, with a sexual smirk in his voice, said, 'You are not having to cry. I can make everything okay for you. I can take away this manacle even, if you are wishing.'
The scratchy surface of the handbag itched my neck. How had I gotten myself into this mess? Somewhere along the way I'd lost control of my life. Something somewhere had escaped me. But it had all been so wonderful—hadn't it? I'd created the perfect home for myself in Goa. Goa was my dream community, my fantasy paradise. It represented everything I'd ever wanted.
But I wasn't in Goa at the moment. Goa seemed worlds away. What had gone wrong?
As the inspector fondled my hair, I remembered my mother's night time touch when I was a little girl. She'd sit on my bed and caress me until I fell asleep. Sometimes she'd sing a Song about dolls or a Swiss man who made cheese. This only happened on Thursdays, though, because that was the government's day off.
The only child of a wealthy family, I grew up in a large New York City apartment overlooking Central Park. We had a cook and a cleaning lady. I had a French nanny and went to a French school, driven there in a chauffeured limousine. Nobody in the family was French; but French was chic and the family was very chic. We spent the nasty months of the year in a Florida hotel, the Eden Roc, in which my father had a partnership. I was raised in the good life, destined for JAPHood—the coddled existence of a Jewish American Princess.
As I approached my teen years my father developed Parkinson's disease. Stories of his falling in the subway and being helped home by strangers made my heart ache. During New York's famous blackout, his blank gaze as he sat in his candlelit wheelchair made me realize he was no longer cognizant.
As I watched his mind and body deteriorate, I was unaware that our finances were doing the same. By the time I was old enough to appreciate grandeur, we no longer lived in it. It took my father years to the, years spend as a vegetable. In the meantime, my mother thought it better to let me run wild than to keep me home while he wasted away. And run wild I did.
'What's going on here?' she asked once, entering my room.
A group of us lay on the floor, speechless, enraptured by a swirly design that circled round and round. Marijuana smoke fogged the air, but my mother couldn't identify the smell. I was fifteen.
'Hey, Momsy. Look at this! Psychedelic!'
The guys had long, straggly hair. My mother stared at one wearing a toga and makeup. Over the sound of the Rolling Stones she yelled, 'Cook said dinner will be ready at seven.'
'We're going for pizza,' I answered, my eyes pleading her not to object. She glanced again at the toga. 'Momsy, I can't eat here. Please?' She hesitated but, as always, she let me go. She knew how it hurt me to watch my father's spastic body be fed by the nurse, food dribbling from his chin. 'And, Momsy, would you dose the door, please?'
Out every night from the age of fifteen, I became a regular on the disco scene. No club charged me
