papers. No chance.' There was a huge lump in my throat. 'I think land in New York dead of a broken heart.'
Later that afternoon I presented Alehandro with the red Buddha bhong. Let the fat Buddha smile for the crowd at Alehandro's. The living room carpets had been sold, and the sacred pipe deserved better than to sit on a naked floor.
In February the Bugs took over the house. Couldn't they have waited another month? They invaded the bedroom first. I woke up one morning to find, not one, but two trails of ants marching on my body. Eeek. A troupe of large black ones had entered under the outside door. They strode across the red-and-white linoleum, mounted the carpet, hiked up the mattress via my pink satin sheet, proceeded over my naked back, came around my waist, hopped to the sheet from my stomach, then made their way over the carpet on the other side, across the linoleum, up the wall, and out the window. The smaller grey ants took approximately the same route but traversed my legs. Hey, come on, guys! There must be an easier road than this. Especially since the bedroom was on the second floor. I'd seen ants plenty of times before, but they'd usually had the courtesy to go around the bed. Many a time I'd amused myself by watching them scatter in confusion as I plopped something in their path. This new habit of theirs was a little much. I knew the root of the problem—I'd given my insecticide spray to Petra.
Downstairs I was faced with another predicament: Bach's flea collar had expired. My poor friend scratched continually. To make matters worse, the little buggers over bred themselves and had abandoned him in search of vaster horizons. Now the fleas were jumping all over the house. If I'd had the insecticide spray, I could have killed the fleas and obliged the ants to find an alternate roadway. Alas, the spray was gone, and I couldn't afford a new one.
I went to Petra's hut—only to discover she'd left Goa. There was nothing in the hut but a shred of sari hanging from the doorway and the broken top of a kerosene lamp.
To live in India, one had to dominate one's insect Population. I'd lost control. In no time the fleas propagated themselves into every corner of the ground floor. They hopped nonstop. I could not read a page of a book without a flea hopping on it. The damned things were everywhere. They didn't five on me the way they did Bach; but there were so many of them that, no matter where I went, I was in their line of hop. And they bit. Hop, hop, bite.
Only once-in-a-blue-moon customers weren't thrilled with them, either. 'Hey! What was that?' a customer remarked.
'What?'
'Yo! There goes another one. What was it? Ow! Something bit me! Hey! Now it's jumped in the tobacco!'
I couldn't ignore the fleas, though they didn't really bite that often. It was the racket they made—the sound of tiny footfalls as they hopped on the pages of the book I was reading. Very annoying. Then they'd slide down the crease between the pages and get stuck there.
The ants were what really did me in. I hated waking up to two double lanes of parading feet criss-crossing my body. Eee! Get off me. SLAP. SLAP. SLAP. Actually, it was wiser not to get too excited. At the first hint of something amiss, the ants would panic and break their neat formation, each one running in a different direction. Which meant they'd be running in different directions over ME. The wisest way to handle the situation, when I awoke to it, was to calmly brush them off.
Though I couldn't afford a new spray can of insecticide, a packet of DDT powder cost only sixty
Eventually the ants won. I retreated. I moved the carpet, the mattress, the little Kashmiri tables, the bhong. I dragged the whole lot into the movie room, which was bare now anyway.
And then—more ants! Soon I was once again awakening to find ants strutting over me.
I finally beat them. To an ant, a wrinkle in a piece of cloth could be Mount Everest. I collected clothes, bunched them together, and created an impassable mountain range around me before I went to sleep. It didn't work all the time, though. Sometimes, during the night, Bach would climb into bed next to me, and his body would flatten the wall of clothes. If he did that on both sides of me, that was all the encouragement the ants needed.
Yes, it was way past time for me to leave Goa. Three days before my departure date, I found someone who wanted my projector and agreed to pay Maria's hospital bill. He kept the projector and I took back the movies. I let him have
Everything had been sold. My souvenirs from Russia, my Japanese kimono, the topaz from Taiwan.
On March fifth Sasha came by with some people I didn't know, including one beautiful guy in a silk
'You're leaving?' he asked, seeing suitcases.
'In the morning,' I told him. 'A taxi's coming to take me to the Panjim dock. I don't know how I'll fit in it with all this luggage.'
'I'll drive you to the boat on my bike, if you want. Then you can use the whole taxi for luggage.'
We stayed awake all night. I touched the long, brown hair curling around his shoulders—it took my mind off Bach, who was freaking out over the suitcases. Bach always freaked out when he saw a suitcase. By now he knew what a suitcase meant. I tried to ignore my furry blue-and white friend as he stuck his nose into open cases and shook his head furiously. Bach would look at a suitcase, look at me, and whine. He dragged his toy elephant to me by the ear that hadn't been chewed off yet. I pulled the ear off and packed it. Dawn came.
'You don't really have to go today, do you?' asked my beautiful new friend. 'Why don't you stay?'
'I can’t.'
When the taxi came, he helped carry my bags to the dirt road. Bach ran in circles around my feet, crying. I told the driver to go ahead and that we'd meet him at the paved road. I Look Bach in my arms as I climbed on the back of the motorbike. He licked my face nervously.
The family at the Three Sisters' restaurant was still asleep when we pulled up.
They were expecting me, though, and opened quickly to my knock.
'Here he is,' I said to the sister at the door. I didn't say goodbye to Bach as I handed him to her. How would I live without him?
Epilogue
1995
HOW TO BRIEFLY DESCRIBE the past fifteen years of my life? I returned to New York and entered a drug program called Daytop and became totally drug-free from that day to this one. Daytop taught me how to five in the straight world, sleeping and eating at regular hours and doing the necessary chores of daily life, which I hated. But without some basic tools of self-discipline, I couldn't have existed in this rule-governed, legal-minded, work-ethic- based culture. With enormous difficulty, I accepted the teachings and adapted—I had no choice.
Six months after I left Goa, I started college and discovered that learning was as stimulating as any psychotropic chemical I'd taken, and with the will-power Daytop demanded of me, I was capable of postponing immediate gratification in order to aim for long-range goals. I got a Bachelor's Degree, a Master's Degree, a Ph.D., and would have kept studying except the student loans ran out. For the doctoral dissertation I returned to Thailand for three years to do research, which became the basis of my first book,
