The Other Language(58)
“Isn’t your wife joining us tonight?” the prince asked.
He had completely forgotten to mention her. She had decided to stay in the room. She said she wasn’t in the mood to talk to lots of people tonight.
“Unfortunately not. She wasn’t feeling too well. She might come for dinner, otherwise she’ll order room service, if that’s not a problem for the kitchen.”
And as he said that, heads turned toward the opposite end of the terrace. A woman had appeared and was walking toward them.
The men stood up.
“Ah, here she is, at last,” the prince said and went over to embrace her.
There was a suspension, while everyone in turn greeted her.
“This is Ushma Das, our greatest dancer. She is to perform for us tomorrow night,” the playwright said.
The woman wore a short red cotton sari over green shalwar pants. The sari was neatly pleated in the front, as in the temple sculptures. She was barefoot and her anklets made a lovely sound as she moved.
“I’ve just finished a brief rehearsal with the musicians,” she was saying. “I was going to bathe and change before joining you, but then I heard your voices and …”
She turned to him, surprised to find him there.
He introduced himself, and she looked intently at him with her big, almond-shaped eyes penciled in black kohl.
“Very nice to meet you,” she said, and let him hold her cool, bony hand.
“Please have a drink with us now, dear. The light is so lovely,” said the older ex-dancer with the diamond studs in her nose. “You can freshen up later. We are having cucumber martinis.”
“You know I am not supposed to drink, Auntie,” Ushma said with a little smile. Everyone rebutted at once. Of course she could have a small drink after rehearsal. It wasn’t going to get her drunk at all. They would make it very light. She took another look at him; he was standing speechless in front of her beauty.
“I’ll have a club soda, that’s all.”
Then she sat down in the chair, erect, with royal gravity.
“And where is home, for you?” she asked, tilting her head toward him with what he took for sincere interest.
Earlier in the day, while her husband was on his inspirational promenade on the ghats, she had been staring at his laptop screen, open to Skype, while beads of sweat ran down her neck. The sun came straight through the bay window and the old-fashioned ceiling fan didn’t help against that heat. She had typed the ex-lover’s name in the space that said “enter name or e-mail address of the user you’re looking for” and had clicked on search. Only three names like his had appeared, and next to them a green icon with the + sign. One lived in Buenos Aires, but the other two were actual possibilities. One in Paris, the other in San Francisco. More likely, he would be the one in California, but she might send the same message to both. She had been staring at the green icons for a while now. What if he was happily married with kids and his wife would intercept her message? Would that be a problem? She should write something so neutral and blameless that even his wife could read it and think nothing of it. The wife could ask him, “Who is that?” And he might say, “Just someone I knew ages ago when I lived in Italy.” He might reply to her innocent message in a similar tone, something like “Hey, how’ve you been?” although he wasn’t the type that would ever write “hey.” After a lot of composing and scribbling on a scrap of paper in order to get it just right, she typed the message into the space. She stared at it. Then erased it. This was a mistake. He’d probably completely forgotten about their affair. But then she thought, What if he wasn’t married, what if he had had the same dream or he had been thinking of her too? What a wasted opportunity, right? She typed the message again. It read, “Are you the Tyler I think you are?” signed with her name. She stared at the words again, then, after what seemed an agonizing amount of time, she said out loud, What the hell, and clicked on the green icons next to both Paris and San Francisco. She jumped up from the chair as if it burned. She felt exhilarated, as though she had just sent a missile into space from Cape Canaveral.
Since that moment she had been feeling hopelessly anxious, as if time had taken on a completely different speed. After lunch by the pool she’d waited for her husband to leave the room so she could check her Skype page. She could’ve easily checked the same page on her cell phone but she just couldn’t make herself do it with him in the same room. He had decided to read his book in bed, had fallen asleep, and woken up and ordered tea, which they took on the terrace together. He asked her to take a walk with him in the village, after which he took a shower and changed for evening drinks. Finally she had gotten rid of him, if only for a few hours. The minute he was out the door she ran to check the laptop. A tiny red light was blinking next to the Skype icon. Her heart leaped.
“Yes, it’s me,” the message said. “When can we talk?”
In the meantime, he’d learned quite a lot about Ushma Das. Once the older guests had retired for the night, the two of them had lingered at the candlelit table in the courtyard and then moved onto the terrace to watch the moonlight over the river. He had had a couple of more drinks to oil his conversational skills, whereas she’d stuck to tea. He asked her about Odissi dance, wasn’t it one of the oldest forms of dance? Yes, she said, dancers are found depicted in bas-reliefs dating from the first century BC, and the Natya Shastra, the oldest surviving text on stagecraft in the world, speaks of this dance style. He told her he had seen the temple sculptures of the dancers in Puri only a week earlier, as if it had been his idea and not his wife’s. He also said he’d been moved by the gracefulness of the postures depicted on the bas-reliefs, although he only vaguely remembered them. Ushma seemed pleased by his enthusiasm. She explained how the devadasis, or temple girls, at the time of those sculptures were highly educated courtesans who lived with kings and held an elevated social status. They had to learn music and singing, study poetry and scriptures. Under the moonlight, now that she had changed into a maroon sari and had combed her hair in a tight bun, she did look like an ancient courtesan from some rhapsodic Indian tale. She moved slowly, with extreme awareness, and he was completely engulfed by her beauty and her seriousness.