• • •
I wake up. My skin is cool. The sky is purple. I’m not sure if it’s twilight or dawn, how long I’ve been out. I’m coherent enough to know that I’m supposed to be back in Cancun soon to meet Broodje and fly back to Holland, and I need to get word to him somehow, that he might have to leave without me. I swing my legs over the side of the bed. The room teeters before my eyes, but it doesn’t totter over. I plant my feet. I pull to a stand. Like a toddler or a very old man, I take the steps, one at a time, to the lobby.
In the corner is an Internet cafe where you can make long-distance phone calls. I feel like I’ve been in the dark for months, the lights from all those monitors hurt my eyes so. I hand over some money and ask for a phone and am guided to a bank of computers with a telephone handset. I open my address book. Kate’s card, ruckus theater company splashed across the top in red lettering, falls out.
I start to dial. The digits swim on the page and I’m not sure if I have the country code right or if I dialed correctly.
But there’s a tinny ring. And then a voice: faraway, tunnel-like, but unmistakably hers. As soon as I hear it, my throat closes.
“Hello. Hello? Who is this?”
“Ma?” I manage to croak out.
Silence. And when she says my name I want to cry.
“Ma,” I say again.
“Willem, where are you?” Her voice is crisp, officious, businesslike as always.
“I’m lost.”
“You’re
I’ve been lost before, in new cities with no familiar landmarks to set me straight, waking up in strange beds, unsure of where I was or who was next to me. But I realize now,
There’s a long silence on the line and I’m afraid the call has dropped. But then Yael says: “Come to me. I’ll send you a ticket. Come to me.”
It’s not what I really want to hear. What I want—what I ache—to hear is
But she can’t tell me to come to a place that no longer exists, any more than I can go to that place. For now, this is the best either of us can do.
FEBRUARY
This email, containing my itinerary, comprises the bulk of the communication between Yael and me since I returned from Mexico last month. When I got back from Cancun, a friendly travel agent named Mukesh called to request a copy of my passport. A week later, I got the itinerary from Yael. I’ve heard little else since.
I try not to read too much into it. This is Yael. And this is me. The most charitable explanation is that she’s hoarding the small talk so we will have something to say to each other for the next . . . two weeks, month, six weeks? I’m not sure. We haven’t discussed it. Mukesh told me that the ticket was valid for three months and that if I wanted help booking flights within India, or out of India, I should contact him. I try not to read too much into that, either.
In the immigration line, I’m jangly with nerves. The bar of duty-free Toblerone (meant for Yael) that I wound up eating as the plane descended into Mumbai probably didn’t help matters. As the line lurches forward, an impatient Indian woman pushes into me with her prodigious sari-wrapped belly, as if that will make us go faster. I almost switch places with her. To stop the pushing. And to make us go slower.
When I exit into the airport arrivals hall, the scene is both space age and biblical. The airport is modern and new, but the hall is thronged with people who seem to be carrying their entire lives on metal trolleys. The minute I get out of customs, I know that Yael is not here. It’s not that I don’t see her, though I don’t. It’s that I realize, belatedly, she never specifically said she’d meet me. I just assumed. And with my mother, you never assume.
But it’s been almost three years. And she invited me here. I go back and forth through the hall. All around me, people swarm and push and shove, as if racing for some invisible finish line. But there’s no Yael.
Ever optimistic, I go outside to see if she’s waiting there. The bright morning light hurts my eyes. I wait ten minutes. Fifteen. There’s no sign of my mother.
There’s a gladiator match of taxi drivers and porters vying for passengers.
“Are you being met?”
In front of me is a man. Or a boy. Somewhere in between. He seems about my age, except for his eyes, which are ancient.
I give the area one more sweep. “It appears I’m not.”
“Do you need a driver?”
“It appears I do.”
“Where are you going?”
I recall the address from the immigration forms I just filled out in triplicate. “The Bombay Royale. In Colaba. Do you know it?”
He gives his head a half nod, half shake that isn’t exactly reassuring. “I take you there.”
“Are you a driver?”
He wags his head again. “Where is your suitcase?”
I point to the small rucksack on my back.
He laughs. “Like Kurma.”
“The food?”
“No. That is korma. Kurma is one of Vishnu’s incarnations, a tortoise, carries his home on his back. But if you like korma, I can show you a good place.”
The boy introduces himself as Prateek and then confidently threads us through the crowd past the airport garage and to a dusty lot. On one side are the runways, the other, high-rise buildings and even higher cranes, swinging in the wind. Prateek locates the car—something that back home might be called vintage, but when I compliment it, he makes a face and tells me it belongs to his uncle and one day, he will buy his own car, a good
