All around us, people are laying garlands around the shrine or singing or praying.
“Do you have to make an offering?” I ask. “To get your obstacles removed?”
“You can,” she replies. “Or just chant a mantra.”
“What mantra?”
“There are several.” Yael doesn’t say anything else for a while. And then, in a low and clear voice, she chants: “
“What does it mean?”
She cocks her head. “Roughly I’ve heard it translated as: ‘Wake up.’”
“Wake up?”
She looks at me for a second, and though we have the same eyes, I really have no idea what she sees through hers.
“It’s not the translation that matters with a mantra. It’s the intention,” she says. “And this is what you say when you want a new beginning.”
• • •
After the temple, we hail a rickshaw. “Where to now?” I ask.
“We are meeting Mukesh for lunch.”
Mukesh? The travel agent who booked my flights?
We spend the next half hour in silence as we weave through more traffic and dodge more cows, finally arriving at a sort of dusty shopping center. As we’re paying the driver, a tall, broad, smiling man in a voluminous white shirt comes barreling out of a place called Outbound Travels.
“Willem!” he says, greeting me warmly, grasping both my hands. “Welcome.”
“Thank you,” I say, looking back and forth between him and Yael, who’s decidedly not looking at him, and I wonder what exactly is going on. Are they together? It would be just her way, introduce the idea of a boyfriend by not introducing him as her boyfriend and leaving me to figure it out.
Mukesh tells our driver to wait and then goes back into the travel agency to pick up a plastic bag, and then we climb back in and drive through fifteen more minutes of traffic to the restaurant.
“It’s middle eastern,” Mukesh says proudly. “Like Mummy.”
Mukesh pushes the menu aside and calls over the waiter, ordering platters of hummus and grape leaves, baba ghanoush and tabouli.
When the first platter of hummus arrives, Mukesh asks me how I’m liking Indian food so far.
I explain about the dosas and the pakoras I’ve been eating off the stands. “I still haven’t had a proper curry.”
“We will have to arrange that for you,” he says. “Which is why I’m here.” He reaches into the plastic bag and pulls out a number of glossy brochures. “You don’t have so much time here, so I suggest you pick one region—Rajasthan, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh—and explore that. I have taken the liberty of coming up with a few sample itineraries.” He slides me over a computer printout. One is for Rajasthan. It has everything. Return flights to Jaipur, transfers to Jodhpur, Udaipur and Jaisalmer. There’s even a camel trip. There’s a similar packed itinerary for Kerala, flights, transfers, river cruises.
I’m confused. “Are we taking a trip?” I ask Yael.
“Oh, no, no,” Mukesh answers for her. “Mummy has to work. This is a special trip for you, to make sure your time in India is tip-top.”
And then I understand the guilty look. Mukesh isn’t the boyfriend. He’s the travel agent. The one enlisted to bring me here. The one enlisted to send me away.
At least I know why I’m here. Not for new beginnings. A hasty invitation that was foolish to issue, foolish to accept—and most foolish of all to solicit.
“Which trip do you prefer?” Mukesh asks. He seems unaware of the thorny dynamic he’s stumbled into.
My anger feels hot and bilious but I keep it bottled until it doubles back and I’m mad at myself. What’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
“This one,” I say, flicking the brochure on top of the pile. I don’t even look where it goes to. It hardly seems the point.
MARCH
I skirt past a group of women, their eyes kohl-dipped, downturned, shy it seems, though they manage to flirt in other ways, with the swoosh of their electric-colored saris, the tinkle of their ankle bracelets.
At the bottom of the hill, I pass several stalls hawking local textiles. I stop at one of them, peering at a purple-mirrored wall-hanging.
“You like what you see?” the young man behind the counter asks casually, no sign that he knows me except for the twinkle in his eye.
“Perhaps,” I say noncommittally.
“Is there something particular you like?”
“I have my eye on something.”
Nawal nods solemnly, no hint of a smile, no hint that we have had almost this exact same conversation for the past four days. It’s like a game. Or a play we started acting in when I first found the tapestry I want. Or rather, Prateek wants.
Two days into my tour of Rajasthan, when I was still full of bitterness and bile and of half a mind to just fly back to Amsterdam early, Prateek sent me a text about his “grand proposal!!!!!!!!!!!” Turned out to be not so grand. He wanted me to shop for Rajasthani handicrafts that he’d sell back in Mumbai for a markup. He’d reimburse me for what I spent and we’d split the profit. At first I told him no, especially after he texted the shopping list. But then one day in Jaipur I wound up in the Bapu Bazaar with nothing much to do, so I started looking for the kind of leather sandals he wanted. And from there, I kept going. Combing the markets for spices and bangles and a very particular kind of slipper has given the trip a sort of shape, allowing me to forget that it’s actually an exile. And because of that, I’ve extended the exile, having Mukesh lengthen it by a week. I’ve now been gone three weeks, and I’ll get back to Mumbai with only a handful days before my return flight to Amsterdam.
In Jaisalmer, Prateek has instructed me to buy a particular kind of tapestry that the area is known for. It must be silk, and I will know it is silk because I must burn a thread, and it will give off the odor of burnt hair. It should be embroidered, sewn, not glued, and I will know it’s sewn because I must turn it over and yank the thread, which also must be silk and must be tested with a match. And it’s to cost no more than two thousand rupees, and I must bargain, hard. Prateek had grave doubts about my bargaining ability, because he claims I overpaid him for the taxi, but I assured him that I’d seen my grandfather barter down a wheel of cheese by half in the Albert Cuyp market, so it was in me.
“Some tea, perhaps, while you look?” Nawal asks. I look under the counter and see that, like yesterday, the tea is already prepared.
“Why not?”
At which point, the script ends and conversation takes over. Hours of it. I sit down in the canvas chair next to Nawal’s, and as we have done for the past four days, we talk. When it gets too hot, or when Nawal gets a serious customer, I leave. Before I do, he will drop the price of the tapestry by five hundred rupees, insuring that I’ll come back and do the whole thing again the next day.
Nawal pours the spicy tea from the ornate metal pot. His radio is playing the same crazy Hindi pop that
