Resilience Page 13

  “Those are not birds, memsahib,” he replied. “They are chuck-i-doors.”

  “What?” I asked, having never heard of such a bird.

  “Old men blowing whistles.”

  He explained that homeowners hired elderly men to sit on their front porches each night to guard against thieves. To keep themselves awake and to stay in contact with one another for safety, the men would blow whistles. This way the sleeping homeowners were not disturbed by the watchmen calling out to one another.

  “You must hire one,” Mukundi insisted.

  James and I didn’t think we needed a guard, but after our house was burglarized a few days later, we sent Mukundi to find one. He returned with a relative, one of the oldest-looking Indian men I’d ever seen. The only thing older than he was his rifle, which looked as if it hadn’t been fired since the 1800s, when the British first took control of India. James and I doubted our watchman was capable of protecting anything, but Mukundi assured us he could. At dusk, the old man would arrive and sit at the doorway of our house, chirping happily on his whistle until morning, when he would disappear with the morning sun.

  I began to understand the Indian caste system and how it permeated everything, especially employment. This was a system of give and take, everyone knowing his or her role. Mukundi Lal made sure every chore was covered. We were required to hire a sweeper woman and her daughter, who used bundles of sticks that didn’t look like they were making much difference, although the women dutifully swept the concrete floor each morning. We also had a laundryman who would come by twice a week to pick up clothes and bring back clean ones. My Western clothing soon began to fall apart, so I followed our man one day to investigate how the washing was done. Over a fire sat a huge cauldron of boiling water, where the clothes were stirred before being moved to another cauldron of hot rinse water. Then—and this was the part that amused me—the garments were laid on the ground to dry, the same ground where dogs and children and cows walked. I decided to buy a sari to wear instead of relying on my disintegrating clothes. I walked into the village and purchased a beautiful one, but Mukundi was horrified when he saw it.

  “Oh, no, memsahib—no, no!” he exclaimed, raising both arms in alarm. “This sari is only for sweeper women, laundrywomen. You must not be seen in it.” Leading me out the door, he took me back to the market, where he directed me to a more appropriate sari. I also had to purchase a maroon slip with a string tie and a top, both made from the same cotton material. He told me that ankle bracelets were usually worn and proudly shepherded me around the bazaar as I purchased other necessary items. When we returned to the house, he began making dinner while I showed James my loot. The sari was peacock blue with a maroon border and gold threads; the ankle bracelets were silver and had tiny silver teardrops hanging from a chain. We had to use pliers to close the latches; they were meant to stay on.

  Purchasing the proper sari had been the first step. The next day Mukundi showed me how to wear it. After I had put on my slip and top, he fussed over the folds. He was adamant about my wearing them in front, because women in the cities wore them on the side, but in the country the correct way to fold them was in the front. Once the folds were gathered, they were tucked into the cotton slip. The remainder of the fabric was pulled across my front and then dropped down my back. I felt very feminine in my sari, although it took practice to learn to walk in it. I also wished I hadn’t cut my hair very short before we left the States. Short hair while wearing a sari seemed just wrong. The sari wrapped around me, then flowed up and over my shoulder. My hair should have been part of that flow, all mingling together—my hair and the silk of the sari, like the sea.

  Every morning Mukundi would wake us by rapping on the door then entering with our morning chai—very strong tea sweetened with sugar and lightened with milk. The beverage was served in small glasses. One morning James was standing naked when Mukundi came into our bedroom. He glanced down at James’s penis, his eyes got as round as saucers, and, after putting the tea tray down, he fled. Little wiry Mukundi lost his cool for a minute! We laughed over that one for a long time.

  One more person was added to our household—a young Nepalese called Man Singh, who looked like a young, slender Charles Bronson. He was also an untouchable. Hindus could not touch an untouchable without going through a whole cleansing routine afterward. They were considered less than human because they had been born into the lowest caste. Man Singh was in the house to help Mukundi with washing windows, hauling hot water upstairs, and beating rugs. Man Singh came to us for about four hours per day. Once, when he was bringing a pail of hot water upstairs, I touched him on the arm; he snatched his arm away as if burned. I apologized. He looked so scared that my heart went out to him. I began giving him English lessons, and he caught on quickly. But despite his raw intelligence, I knew he was marked for life as an undesirable.

  Many nights, the electricity would go off; James and I would peer through the windows to see whether the whole village was in darkness. If not, we would groan and have to replace fuses in our fuse box, risking shock. If the town was dim, we would simply laugh. We discovered that seven was the perfect number of candles for reading. We would arrange them around a plate filled with water. The moths that danced in the flames would fall into the bowl and drown; otherwise it was impossible to read with their flutterings and dusty crawlings. I came to look forward to the power blackouts, when the entire village would go dark except for the moonlight reflecting off the lake and the flickering candles and the fires that dotted the mountainsides.

  For James

  You are my soul

  My ecstasy—

  We curl together

  Our lake in view

  The moon’s thumbprint boldly

  Shimmering

  In 1977, there was no Internet, no cell phones. To communicate with our families we wrote letters and, if need be, sent telegrams. We called James’s mother once from a phone in a neighbor’s house. We were cut off, and I loved it. Except when we got sick.

  Having lived in Africa, I was in the know about dysentery. But the dysentery I contracted in Naini Tal was above and beyond anything I had experienced before. With a temperature of 104, I tried valiantly to stay seated on our toilet. It wasn’t happening. I fell off onto the concrete floor and just stayed there, dribbling blood from one end, vomiting from the other. We were a long way from Delhi, so we had no choice but to stick it out. I remembered my mother’s use of the BRAT diet—bananas, rice, apples, and tea—in Africa. That helped. My only positive thought was that I was building my immunities. When I recovered, I asked Mukundi to show me how he was sterilizing our water. He put a pot of water on the coal fire, turned the timer on to twenty minutes, and waited. He was supposed to turn the timer to twenty minutes after the water began boiling. I could have strangled him! I lost two weeks being sick.

  When I felt better, I began riding on horseback most mornings. A Muslim man named Abdul would ride to our house with my favorite horse. I generally would ride on the wide dirt path to the top of the basin, called Snow View, and look out to the Himalayas. There was a tea stand there, and dogs. It was almost impossible to find a spot where there weren’t any people or tea stands—or dogs, for that matter.

  One day Abdul asked if I would like to go farther up into the mountains. We rode together on trails of packed dirt and leaves, the horses’ hooves muted, their steps sure. Ravens called, and the air was cool, with a light scent of wood smoke. We passed a woman carrying a large bundle of sticks on her back, a burden that was held in place by a wide strap on her forehead. Suddenly Abdul turned to sit sideways on his horse and began to sing. As our horses climbed higher, his voice carried in the cool air, singsong. I had never truly appreciated Indian music until that moment. When we came to a very steep, narrow trail, Abdul stopped singing and swung his leg back around his horse. The animals carried us up and up until we finally arrived at an open, flat area. I saw a huge tree, its branches spread out wide. Leaning against the tree
trunk, legs crossed, was an ancient woman smoking a pipe. Her eyes were white with blindness. A small house was near the tree. We greeted her—Namaste—and she slowly nodded her head. We rode just a bit farther, to a place where the trees stopped growing, and dismounted. A huge rock offered sweeping views of the scenery, and I stood on it. Nothing but thick jungle lay at our feet; a hawk flew below us, skimming the trees. Two seeds attached to their cottony parachutes flew toward me, and I caught them. With the seeds in my fist I made a wish that James and I would be together forever, then allowed them to fly again.

  James would ride with me some mornings, and we would talk about the books that both of us were going to write. I was keeping a daily journal about our adventure; I wanted to publish articles about our experience in India.

  In our memories, we always remember the best of times, but the journals that I was writing were filled with notations about my crying at night or exploding in rages. One moment I was happy that we were in Naini Tal, the next I was furious because I thought I should be doing something grander than living in a house in India with no purpose. My journals contain notations about Valium, over and over again—Valium to get me to sleep, Valium to calm me down. My moods would change from mania and frantic periods to melancholy spells that included picking fights with James and debilitating feelings of mental paralysis. Unknown to me at the time was that my mood shifts were common symptoms of bipolar disorder. Valium and painkillers such as codeine were easily purchased in Naini Tal, and I used them to level my moods. Abdul confided that sometimes it was too cold to sleep on the ground, so he took Valium. I took both Valium and codeine to get to sleep. And I wasn’t cold.

  James wanted to write a book about Vietnam, which initially struck me as odd because he didn’t like to talk much about what he’d done there. Early on in our relationship, he had shocked me awake one night by screaming in his sleep and then bolting upright in bed. He’d been having a nightmare and was covered with sweat. I asked him what he’d been dreaming, but he wouldn’t tell me.

  Over time, I’d learned that after James had arrived “in country” in 1966 with the 101st Airborne Division, he’d undergone special training and been assigned to a six-man long-range reconnaissance patrol, called an LRRP. They were sent into the jungle to find the enemy. I’d pieced together enough bits of information to know that his LRRP team had crossed the border into Laos when our air force was engaged in a secret bombing campaign there. During a firefight, the five soldiers with him had been wounded or killed. James carried his best friend on his back out of the jungle only to discover that he had died en route. Thinking about how he could tell his story was a way for James to confront his demons. At twenty-four, I was not yet seasoned enough to write about my childhood.

  James loved hashish, and Mukundi arranged for a sticky ball—an almost-black wad of hashish the size of a tennis ball—to be delivered to James, who began smoking hash several times every day.

  My dysentery was child’s play compared to what happened next. James decided to join me on my morning horseback ride, and when his horse began bucking he reinjured his back getting the animal under control. He’d initially hurt his back in the army. Mukundi had a medicine man come to the house to give James a massage. The result was a hot, shooting pain in James’s back no matter how he stood, sat, or laid down.

  We decided that Mukundi and I would go to Delhi, rent a room, and find a doctor. James would follow. Mukundi and I caught the bus to Kathgodam. The driver, whom we had dubbed Billy because he looked like a tiny Billy Carter, was so short that his feet couldn’t reach the pedals. He clung to the bus’s large steering wheel with one hand and touched an exposed wire to where the horn should have been with the other whenever we came to a hairpin curve. The sound warned vehicles coming up the hill. Our trip to Kathgodam was like a carnival thrill ride. At the train station there, Mukundi insisted I purchase first-class tickets, and we were soon settled in our own compartment, where everything was green—the seats, the walls, even the four fans that came on once the train pulled away from the station. I was happy that Mukundi insisted on first-class, as people crowded inside the other compartments and even clung to the exterior and sat on the roof. It seemed that all of India passed before my eyes outside the slow-moving train’s barred windows: a group of little boys flying homemade kites; a straw-roofed house covered with vultures; a woman with a tiny baby and a small girl breaking rocks in the sun; ponies carrying dirt from the riverbed; a one-furrow plow pulled by oxen and driven by a boy; little temples at every turn; banana trees, mango trees, corn, barley, rice, a tractor next to oxen, brick next to straw.

  We had to change trains that night. I slept in a ladies’ waiting room with a horrible headache and no food. Mukundi found me tea. Without him, I would have been lost.

  After much searching I found a room in Delhi with an ex-general of the Indian army and his wife. From there, I went to the American embassy and picked up a list of doctors. I chose one and sent word to James. He arrived after an excruciating bus ride. I noted in my journal that James was diagnosed as having a pinched nerve in his back on May 18, 1977. That was the beginning of five weeks of hell for us. Knowing that I needed to be there for James, I became hypervigilant. I washed my hands constantly, refused to drink anything but bottled water with no ice, didn’t put my hands on my face, and didn’t drink any soda. Meanwhile, James tried one failed treatment after another.

  I stayed at his bedside in a local hospital, sleeping on the floor next to him. One night after he was asleep, I needed a break and walked to the Oberoi hotel, where I bumped into a couple from Zaire, as it was then called. I mentioned my father and the fact that he had been the president’s doctor. Although they didn’t know me, they invited me to a party being held that same night at a Ugandan ambassador’s house in southwest Delhi. I joined them, and during the festivities I met a handsome British mercenary who had lived in Africa for the previous twenty-seven years. We began drinking, and he urged me to abandon James and return to Africa with him. For a moment, I actually considered doing it and began to flirt with him. But eventually I demurred and returned that night to the hospital a bit tipsy.

  An unhealthy pattern was beginning to emerge. I would be satisfied with my life for a brief moment and then become agitated and act impulsively, sometimes hurting people whom I loved. My actions would confuse even me. With James in pain in a hospital, why was I flirting at a party? I’d pick a fight, flirt, or flee, still confused, until I landed in a depression, filled with remorse, wondering why the hell I had acted so impulsively. The next day, I told James that I’d gone to the party but didn’t mention the flirting or the mercenary’s offer to take me to Africa. He shrugged it off. It was just how I was, he said.

  We could no longer afford to pay for two houses, and James wasn’t getting any better, so I returned to Naini Tal to pack and pay our help for a final time. I didn’t want to leave, and I found myself becoming resentful of James. I felt guilty because we had promised all our servants that we would keep them employed for at least a year, but we were forced to leave early. Telling Mukundi was the most heart-wrenching. He had tears in his eyes. I wrote him a glowing letter of recommendation and gave one to Man Singh, too. I gave the others—the chuck-i-door, the laundryman, the sweeper woman, and her daughter—all my cash and ended up going hungry during my return trip to Delhi.

  Doctors finally decided that James had a fragmented disk and needed surgery. We were nearly broke, so we contacted Roger, who was on vacation in Germany, and he sent us one thousand dollars. I noted in my journal that James went into surgery at 11:00 a.m. After what seemed hours, a surgeon appeared and told me that he had removed a large disk fragment that had been pressing on a nerve, causing intense pain. I sent Roger a thank you note that took weeks to arrive. James and I had returned to our rental flat by the time Roger called.

  “I’ll be in Delhi in two days,” he announced.

  “No, it’s okay,” I said. “James is doing much, much better. He
’s out of the hospital.”

  Roger was undeterred. When he got to Delhi and saw how much weight James had lost and how haggard I looked, he insisted that we celebrate our reunion. I took him aside and told him we were broke.

  Roger booked us a table in one of Delhi’s only five-star restaurants and said he would pay all the bills. Our meal was delicious, and midway through it Roger excused himself from our table. As James and I watched, he made his way to the band that was playing. He whispered to its conductor and handed him cash.

  “What are you up to?” I asked as soon as Roger rejoined us.

  A Cheshire-cat grin appeared on his face as the band began to play Carole King’s 1971 hit “You’ve Got a Friend.”

  I started singing softly along. Roger joined in with the next verse, and even James began singing.

  By the end of the song we were crying.

  Roger didn’t want to return to Germany without all of us having a new adventure—especially now that James was feeling better—so he rented a Mercedes, and we drove to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Before leaving, we bought a tennis ball–shaped wad of hashish and began smoking.

  By the time we reached the Taj Mahal, we were more than stoned. Roger left us alone for a few minutes, and when he returned he declared in a loud voice, “God just spoke to me!”

  “What?” James asked.

  He explained that he had given a holy man inside the Taj Mahal some money, and the oracle had looked him in the eyes and said, “Thou art my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.”

  “You’re stoned,” I said.

  “Yes, I am,” Roger replied. “But the holy man told me that God wanted him to say it.”

  The white marble of the Taj itself was cool to the touch and under our feet. Even though the temperature outside was probably near one hundred degrees, each step taken on that marble was refreshing.