Even after other villagers rouse, they take little notice of his presence. He’s an oddity, an obstacle. Women chop thorny shrubs with adzes, striking the stems until they splinter. Older boys stack the dry branches, gray and speckled like granite. Two teenage girls carry metal jugs to and from the water tank, the jugs in a column four high, a doughnut of cloth cushioning their skulls from the weight. They walk quick and steady.
How have they recovered so quickly? Is it a matter of chores? Of survival? Maybe grief is a luxury, an indulgence. Maybe it’s a flavor on the tongue, one that alters the taste of everything. Maybe this is the remedy for grief: to be forgotten, and to forget.
Just — not yet. OK, John? Not yet.
By two, he hasn’t made contact. The soldier dozes in the shade of the mosque, his rifle pointing straight into the air. Ted uses his hand as a visor, but the brightness weighs on his brow like a stone. The road sears his retinas. The desert consumes the horizon.
Ted follows a footpath between two houses to a courtyard. On the ground are trapezoidal pyramids, so white that they look new. Some are adorned with a single vermillion dot on the side, others with painted tridents. This must be a graveyard. So unlike Bhuj: no mounds of corpses, no ever-burning pyres. No stench that sinks into your clothes, waiting to stifle you.
Someone shouts — an elderly woman reclining beneath a corrugated tin roof weighted with rocks to keep the wind from blowing it away. The waves of tin are rusted, and sun angles through the jagged holes. With one hand, she fans herself with a palm frond, and with the other, she waves, as if scratching the air: Come here.
As Ted approaches, she points at her feet, then his. Oh — shoes. When he steps onto the tiles, the cool bites through his socks, a relief he hadn’t imagined possible. She sits cross-legged. Around her left ankle, she wears gold bangles as thin as string. She smooths her sari against her legs. The cloth is worn, the color of adobe. She smacks her lips to moisten her mouth. Her gray hair is tied in a bun and secured with blue thread. She is all knots.
She pats the ground next to her. Sit. Stay out of trouble.
Ted hears the motorcycles puttering before he sees them, a rumble like an oncoming headache. The men returning. He moves to rise, but the old woman puts a hand on his shoulder. Stay put. On one cycle, four men squeeze together like plywood. Flatbed carts with ragged and splintered rails are hitched to two of the motorcycles.
Once parked, the men convene around an older man in a white robe. He has a shaggy salt-and-pepper beard, and his hair has the same raspy texture as his beard. Around his neck, a cinnabar necklace, the beads as big as dried dates. The elderly woman calls out, and he comes over to them. He says something to Ted. They shake. This is their common language: their hands. He says something to the other men, and they laugh. Ted, the butt of a joke. The elder has dark, bony spurs at his ankles, as if they had once been broken. He speaks as if Ted can understand him completely.
He points to the ground, then the sky, and then, with an open palm, sweeps the air. Ted, meet world.
He tugs Ted toward a two-story structure. The door has a medallion in the shape of a rising sun. Maybe a setting sun. Atop the door is a frieze adorned with small carvings: rosettes in interlocking patterns. How many New Yorkers would pay thousands in order to turn that piece into an objet d’art? How many would praise its authenticity, its spirituality? But it belongs here, Ted thinks, where it has meaning, even if that meaning is lost on Ted — or maybe especially since that meaning is lost.
Before entering, the elder rings a bell dangling above the doorway. Inside, it’s cooclass="underline" quiet shade, a hint of incense. On the second floor is a long concrete bin topped with what looks like marble. But it’s not marble — it’s a layer of ash. From his robes, the elder retrieves a photograph, rolled and gray at the edges, with folds that cut through the image like lightning. Four figures, sun bleached into sepia. The elder points to one of the men, then himself. In the picture, he has his arm around two young boys. He puts a fingertip over the face of the boy to his right. He dips his finger in the ash, and then touches his forehead, his tongue, his neck.
The men gather beneath the shelter for tea. They invite the soldier. The glass cups from which they drink are as small as mice, and flecked with paint from decorations long chipped off. To the right, the women huddle around a shallow pit fire. The burning branches hiss and pop, and the smoke smells sweet, like acacia. A branch occasionally curls out of the pit, a Hindi character written in flame. A young girl squooshes a blob of brown dough between her fingers. Other women toss the dough until it flattens and slap it onto a metal sheet laid over the fire. The old woman fans the flames with her frond, her hand tracing a figure eight. They must have a store of food for contingencies — earthquakes, droughts, wayward white men. The women laugh among themselves, conspiring the way only women can.
The elder male slides a cup toward Ted. Ted shakes his head, but the elder says something, his head wobbling from side to side, and points to the cup, as if delivering an order. The foam on the water’s surface swirls and clashes. That’s all he needs. To get seriously ill in India. Again. The aid trucks have chlorine tablets for water purification. Who knows what might be festering in the tank?
Still. It’s only tea. It’s been boiled. Ted takes a sip. The liquid is hot. The astringency turns taut on his tongue, and a leaf gets caught between his upper lip and gums.
The old woman brings the bread on a dented tin platter. The bread is almost lavender, dotted with grain. The men take one and close their eyes, mumbling a prayer before ripping it with their fingers. The old woman doesn’t give Ted a chance to refuse and plops a piece into his hands. It’s as warm as skin. Only after all the men have been served does the elder take his portion. The old woman returns to Ted and, from the folds of her sari, produces a red onion the size of a baby’s fist. With one swift karate chop, she splits it in two, sending forth a spray of milky fluid. The papery skin crinkles away, and with a paring knife, she cuts the stem end of a shriveled lime and squeezes it onto the onion. The bright tang of the juice, the spiciness of the onion, the earthiness of the millet, slightly sweet, slightly ashen.
The men eat in silence, as if food were a blessing that should never be interrupted.
The women clear the dishes and sweep with straw brooms, the swish of bristles against the tile like a mother quieting her baby. Only after their chores do the women eat, and this bothers Ted, though he’s in no position to do anything about it. He feels he should be more grateful. These people have just fed him when they have precious little themselves.
After the sun peaks, the men resume clearing rubble. They use anything with wheels — old carts, bicycles, suitcases — to roll rocks to the bottom of the hill. Ted tries to help. Ted strains with a stone he can barely lift, looking for guidance where to put it. A man on a motorcycle waves at him to put it down, his hand flapping as if spanking a child. He points Ted back beneath the shelter, where the old woman hobbles next to him. Her face is a dried apricot, her smile the pitting incision. She has no teeth. On her feet, she has calluses as hard as leather where her skin meets the straps of her sandals.
Ted nods, and she nods back. Does she merely mimic his motion, or does the nod have a universal meaning? How many men in this village are her sons and grandsons? How many daughters and daughters-in-law have learned how to make chapati by her hands?