Just One Year

Prateek loves. “Cricket game on later. If you want to listen,” he informs me.

I take a sip of the tea. “Cricket? Really? The only thing duller than watching cricket is listening to it.”

“You only say that because you don’t understand the particulars of the game.”

Nawal enjoys schooling me about all the things that I don’t understand. I don’t understand cricket, or soccer for that matter, and I don’t understand the politics between India and Pakistan, and I don’t understand the truth about global warming, and I certainly don’t understand why love marriages are inferior to arranged marriages. Yesterday, I made the mistake of asking what was so wrong with love marriages, and I got quite a lecture.

“The divorce rate in India is the lowest in the world. In the West, it’s fifty percent. And that’s if they even get married,” Nawal had said, disgusted. “Here, I tell you a story: All my grandparents, my aunties, my uncles, my parents, my brothers, all had arranged marriages. Happy. Long lives. My cousin, he chose a love marriage, and after two years, no children, the wife leaves him in disgrace.”

“What happened?” I’d asked.

“What happened is they were not compatible,” he’d said. “They were driving without a map. You cannot do that. You must have it arranged properly. Tomorrow I will show you.”

So today, Nawal has brought a copy of the astrological chart that was drawn up to decide if he and his fiance, Geeta, are compatible. Nawal insists it shows his and Geeta’s happy future, ordained by the gods. “With matters such as these, you have to rely on forces larger than the human heart,” he says.

The chart looks not unlike one of W’s mathematical equations, with the paper divided into sections and different symbols in each one. I know W believes that all of life’s questions can be solved through mathematical principle, but I think even he would find this a stretch.

“You don’t believe in it?” Nawal challenges. “Name me one good love marriage that lasts.”

Lulu had asked me a similar question. Sitting at that cafe, arguing about love, she’d demanded to know one couple who’d stayed in love, who’d stayed stained. And so I’d said Yael and Bram. Their names had just popped out. And it was so strange because in two years on the road, I had never told anyone about them, not even people I’d traveled with for a long time. As soon as I said that, I’d wanted to tell her everything about them, the story of how they met, how they seemed like interlocking puzzle pieces and how sometimes I didn’t seem to fit into the equation. But it had been so long since I’d spoken of them, I hadn’t known know how to do it. Though in some strange way, it seemed like another unsaid thing she already knew. Still, I wish I’d told her everything. Add it to my list of regrets.

I’m about to tell Nawal about them. My parents, who had a pretty spectacular love marriage, but then again, maybe it was there, in the charts all along, how it would end. I have wondered: If you could know going in that twenty-five years of love would break you in the end, would you risk it? Because isn’t it inevitable? When you make such a large withdrawal of happiness, somewhere you’ll have to make an equally large deposit. It all goes back to the universal law of equilibrium.

“I think this whole falling in love business is a mistake,” Nawal continues. “I mean look at you.” He says it like an indictment.

“What about me?”

“You are twenty-one and you are all alone.”

“I’m not all alone. I’m here with you.”

Nawal eyes me pitifully, reminding me that, pleasant as these days have been, he is here to sell something and I am here to buy something.

“You have no wife. And I’ll wager you have been in love. I’ll wager you have been in love many times like they always seem to be in Western films.”

“Actually, I have never been in love.” Nawal looks surprised at that, and I’m about to explain that while I haven’t been in love, I’ve fallen in love many times. That they’re separate entities entirely.

But then I stop. Because once again, I’m transported from the deserts of Rajasthan to that Paris cafe. I can almost hear the skepticism in Lulu’s voice when I’d told her: There’s a world of difference between falling in love and being in love. Then I’d dabbed the Nutella on her wrist, supposedly to demonstrate my point, but really because it had given me an excuse to see what she tasted like.

She’d laughed at me. She’d said the distinction between falling in love and being in love was false. It sounds like you just like to screw around. At least own that about yourself.

I smile at the memory of it, although Lulu, who had been right about me so much that day, was wrong about this. Yael had trained as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces, and she once described how it felt to jump out of a plane: hurtling through the air, the wind everywhere, the exhilaration, the speed, your stomach in your throat, the hard landing. It always seemed the exact right way to describe how things felt with girls—that wind and the exhilaration, the hurtling, the wanting, the freefall. The abrupt end.

Oddly enough, though, that day with Lulu it didn’t feel anything like falling. It felt like arriving.

• • •

Nawal and I drink our tea and listen to music, talk about upcoming elections in India and upcoming soccer tournaments. The sun blazes through the canopy roof and we go quiet in the heat. No customers come this time of day.

The ringing of my phone disturbs the idyll. It’ll be Mukesh. He is the only one who calls me here. Prateek texts. Yael does neither.

“Willem, is everything tip-top?” he asks

“A-okay,” I say. In Mukesh’s hierarchy, A-okay is one step above tip-top.

“Excellent. Not to worry you but I call with a change in plans. Camel tour is canceled.”

“Canceled? Why?”

“Camels got sick.”

“Sick?”

“Yes, yes, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible, terrible.”

“Can’t we book another one?” The three-night desert camel tour was the one part of his planned itinerary I was actually looking forward to. When I extended my trip a week, I’d asked Mukesh to reschedule the camel trip for me.

“I tried. But unfortunately, next tour I could get you on was not for another week, and if you take that, you miss your flight to Dubai next Monday.”

“Is there a problem?” Nawal asks.

“My camel tour was canceled. The camels are sick.”

“My cousin runs a tour.” Nawal is already picking up his mobile. “I can arrange it for you.”

“Mukesh, I think my friend here can book me on a different tour.”

“Oh, no! Willem. That will be most unacceptable.” His ever-friendly tone goes brusque. Then, in a milder voice he continues: “I already booked your train back to Jaipur tonight, and a flight back to Mumbai tomorrow.”

“Tonight? What’s the rush? I don’t leave for a week.” When I asked Mukesh to extend my Rajasthan trip by a week, I also asked him to book my return flight to Amsterdam for a few days after I am due to get back to Mumbai. I had it all timed out perfectly so I’d only have to see Yael for a couple of days at the tail end. “Maybe I could stay here another few days?”

Mukesh clucks his tongue, which, in his particular argot, is the exact opposite of A-okay. He starts rattling on about flight schedules and change fees and warnings of me being stuck in India unless I come back to Mumbai now, and finally there is nothing to do but give in. “Good, good. I’ll email you the itinerary,” he says.

“My email’s not working right. I got locked out of it and had to reset the password and then a whole bunch of recent messages disappeared,” I say. “Apparently there’s a virus going around.

“Yes, that would be the Jagdish virus.” He tsks again. “You must set up a new account. In the meantime, I will text you your train and flight itinerary.”

I get off the phone with Mukesh and reach into my backpack for my wallet. I count out three thousand rupees, the last price Nawal had dropped to. His face falls.

“I have to leave,” I explain. “This evening.”

Nawal reaches behind the counter for a thick square wrapped up in brown paper. “I set it aside on day one so no one else would get it.” He peels back the paper, showing me the tapestry. “I put a little something extra in it