The Other Language(53)
Why these days did he always wake up to unpleasant thoughts such as this one? They’d come just like that, surprisingly clear and specific. His wife’s hair issue wasn’t a particularly bad one compared to others. Most days the first thought he’d have would concern his own death. It was like a message flashing an alarm just as he was floating back to the surface of consciousness. A little voice would warn him, getting louder and louder till he had to open his eyes: “Good morning, you are going to die! It will occur soon, every day it’ll be a day sooner!”
He’d started having these deathly reminders since he’d turned thirty-five. It was the age when he’d became physically aware that half of his life had gone past him. Once he’d heard a well-known writer at a dinner party, much older than him, say that since he’d turned fifty he’d had the distinct sensation that he had more past than future, as on a scale that tilts the other way. The concept had terrified him. These unpleasant thoughts, such as his wife’s hair eventually flattening with age (which he put in the same death department as this idea, too, had to do with the passing of time and the loss of youth), would greet him as soon as he opened his eyes with a frightening punctuality, like that damned crow cawing so loudly outside the window, that horrible sound that always woke him with a fright. There was nothing to do. Crows, he had told his wife since the day they arrived, were the sound track of India. And so was death. According to the clichés.
He stumbled out of bed and went into the shower. There were signs of his wife having just left: a damp towel abandoned on the floor, the bottle of shower gel uncapped, covered in droplets. His wife was an early riser and her morning routine was always a fast one. It was one of the first things he’d observed about her when they’d first started sleeping together. She could be ready in fifteen minutes and look perfect. He thought that it was an attractive trait in a woman; he hated having to wait around and didn’t like women who put on too much makeup. The shower was pleasantly hot, the bath gel’s fragrance was sweet. As usual, sinister thoughts were washed out under the forceful jet. They were not to come back again, at least until the next morning.
He had been to India before, loved it, and had enjoyed playing the India expert for decades. This time however, he wasn’t sure he loved it as much. Maybe he was just in a bad mood, and India could be difficult if taken the wrong way. Things that had never bothered him were now beginning to take a toll. The pollution, the ugly malls sprouting everywhere in the big cities. Even the food was tiresome. When they had gone up north in Rajasthan two weeks earlier, nothing had felt authentic, it had all seemed a circus, a fa?ade for the wealthy tourists. When he had traveled through the same regions back in his twenties, he had felt as though he had continuously stumbled upon fairy tales happening before his eyes. The magnificent haveli in Jaisalmer that cost only two hundred rupees a night where no other guests were staying, seemingly open just for him and his friend; their room with exquisite wall paintings and a balcony carved in sandstone overlooking the desert. The lovely country residence of a local Thakur outside Bikaner who had taken him horseback riding through the plains and led him inside a thatched hut, its mud floor swept clean, walls painted in bright turquoise lime, where they’d been offered opium tea by the Bishnoi, a vanishing tribe over which the Thakur family had ruled for centuries. Now the haveli looking out on the desert had been badly restored and was on Trip Advisor and the Thakur had handed his family home over to a hotel chain, so that now travel agents offered guided tours in the huts of the Bishnoi with “opium tea included in the price.” It all had to do with time, of course. That was then, when he was young and India was poor, this was now, when he could afford a seven-star hotel and India’s economy had grown at a stellar rate.
His wife had never been to India before and she loved everything she saw unconditionally. Before they left she had devoured guidebooks, Indian novels, essays on Hinduism and Jainism, and was determined to get the most out of this trip. She was an enthusiast, a firm believer in the glass-half-full theory. He had married her partly for that reason: he knew that as long as he held on to her, she would save him from the gloom that haunted him at every corner.
During the trip she noticed things he no longer saw or that didn’t interest him enough to notice.
“I love the way everything happens on the floor. How good people here are at doing things we can do only on tables.”
“Like what?”
“Eating. Ironing. Lots of stuff. Have you seen how the tailors squat and hold the material down with their big toe when they cut it?”
Images like that stuck. Now, whenever they happened to see a tailor at work on his haunches, he couldn’t help checking his feet, how deftly he was using them to clasp the fabric.
“Do you realize these women drape six meters of fabric around their bodies with only one pin, if any? They tuck the pleated fabric of the sari into the petticoat. No buttons, no stitches, nothing. And the way they put those flower garlands in their hair? It takes one second for them to do, and yet they stay on for the whole day.”
She had wanted a garland in her hair too, and women in the temple during a pooja had pinned one in her short ponytail. It didn’t look as good as theirs. For some reason it kept dangling wildly in a way that it never did on Indian braids or buns. After twenty minutes, she lost it.
“See? That would never happen to them,” she said, defeated. And immediately added, “I must study the way they clip this thing on.”