“I’m sorry,” he tells her, “that I can’t do more.”
He can barely hear her reply, her voice a murmur deep within her throat. The unfamiliar syllables and phonemes fail to process in his weak, limited brain. Her words are acrobats, bending and twisting. But he listens anyway. She tells him about the quality of the dust from one season to the next: how she can taste the monsoon air, the oncoming whirlwinds. She tells him about the joy of serving water to thirsty strangers. She says that she has lived her life, and that it has been a good one, and that she has no regrets about how she has lived it. She tells him that the world that he has pulled away from now pulls him back, and he should neither resist nor meekly accept it. His life is still his, after all, and he should do with it what he pleases. She laughs, the only sound he understands clearly, and she pats his knee as if he were her son, her laziest son, her most self-indulgent son, but her son nonetheless, and she rises, her joints creaking, to bring him another cup of tea.
It’s nearly five when he finally makes contact with Piotr. Ted is glad to hear his voice.
“Is this where you’ve been hiding?” Piotr asks.
“My car broke down,” Ted replies. “Long story.”
There’s a pause. Then Piotr says, “Lorraine has a present for you.”
When Piotr and the aid truck arrives, the sun hangs low in the sky, the land awash in light as if it were cast in bronze. Piotr hops out of the cab, and Ted asks, “So, where’s this present?” and Piotr gestures behind him. A Jeep full of teenagers drives up. They’re dressed in shorts and T-shirts with Scripture quotes.
“They’re all yours,” Piotr says.
Ted gives the orders—“I want three people each unloading the housing kits. Carry it by the ropes. You don’t want to rip holes in someone’s roof. Offer one per family.”
The villagers look at the housing kits, canvas-wrapped cubes. Everyone recognizes the bags of rice, but these things — what could they be? Two female volunteers pass out boxes of canned goods. There better be can openers in there too.
Ted offers two village girls wobbly plastic bladders of water. “So you don’t have to carry so much every day,” he says. They wear shawls in colors that defy the desert — the green of new shoots, the blue of the deepest part of the ocean. The shawls have tiny mirrors embroidered into them, flashes of brightness. Gold earrings the shape of peacock feathers rest on their shoulders.
The girls each peel off a bag of water. The vinyl sounds as if it’s ripping. They turn to leave.
“No, wait,” he says. “These are for you. Take them.” He pushes the packets toward them.
The girls hold up what they have. The water sloshes like it’s alive.
They don’t understand. “It’s all for you,” he says, but the girls nod and walk away, and Ted can’t believe how beautiful they are, and how stupid he is, and how this has probably always been the case.
Ted rides back with the volunteers. He thought he’d be grateful to hear English again, but… The volunteers, from Patrick Henry College, had been doing a winter study abroad in Delhi, and when they heard about the earthquake, they just had to come and help. They’re so chirpy that Ted wants to plug his ears.
“It was a calling,” says one girl, her hair in a long, blond ponytail. Others jabber in agreement.
“We didn’t even have to talk our faculty sponsor into it,” says a young man, who should have been tanning himself on a beach. “But he was thinking the same thing.”
“We were totally of one mind about this.”
Everyone nods so vigorously that Ted imagines their heads snapping off in unison.
They ask him about doing this for a living, about what he’s seen, and when he answers that he’s new to the job himself, they don’t seem disappointed. In fact, they press him harder: Why this line of work? What about it? Did he have a calling? A stroke of divine inspiration? Ted wants to answer yes but can’t bring himself to believe that God has killed thousands — maimed thousands more — just to make him a better person.
Night settles in, and soldiers, hands on rifle butts, remind everyone of curfew. He asks Lorraine if she sicced the evangelical group on him. “It wasn’t me,” she replies. She looks heavenward. “It was God’s plan.” At the volunteers’ behest, he meets their faculty sponsor, Mr. Meyer, a jovial bag of pastry dough.
“I’m glad you were able to give my kids some direction,” he says. “I wouldn’t let them out on their own, but I know they were in good hands.” There are fifteen students total. They compare little gifts that they were given: A twig sculpture. A string bracelet. A marble. Others have cameras with irrefutable proof of their good deeds. “Will you be able to work with them tomorrow?” Mr. Meyer asks, but Ted shakes his head no. I go where I’m needed most.
The last bits of sunlight lie low on the horizon, seeping into the earth. Cooking fires have started again. Farther on, the ever-present glow from the medical tents.
The medical tents at night seem somehow more dire. As people sleep, they appear dead. The pain, localized in their bodies during the day, becomes unmoored, diffuses in the air. He can smell it.
It’s difficult to tell one person from another. All their faces are carved out of darkness. Many are not asleep at all, but have fallen into an open-eyed stupor. Morphine is in short supply. One man, hunched into an egg, stares at something directly across from him, clasping his hands to his lower lip. Missing limbs, extra limbs: a man with an amputation below the knee, an old woman with splints made from tree branches. Limbs that jut out as if suddenly vestigial. Limbs materialize out of nowhere to beg for help. Ted feels as if his own limbs could abandon him at any second and reattach themselves to new bodies. Here, take my hand. Here, have a foot. He almost wishes it would happen.
Ted isn’t sure who recognizes whom first. It’s a shared moment, instantaneous, like a lightbulb burning through its filament. Had Ted seen him first, he might have sneaked away, shielding his face behind his hand. But their eyes meet, and Ted seizes. It is him — Ted would recognize him anywhere. He wears sky-blue surgical scrubs and a face mask around his throat, and he’s a few pounds heavier, but it’s him nonetheless. His voice still has a baritone singsong: “You are the last person I expected to encounter here.”
Ted feels something rise inside him, and he knows exactly what it is: his past life, the one he thought he’d left behind, incomplete, in India two years ago. There it is, crowding out his current life, bringing with it a long ledger of errors and grievances to rectify. His past life jumps in his mouth, leaving him dumbstruck. His past life stands before him, with that wry smile, concentrated on the right side of the face, and his current life manages to croak out, finally, “It’s nice to see you again, Dev.”
RELIEF
PILGRIMS TO AN UNFAMILIAR GOD, 1999
I. Love during the Plague Years
Ted’s taxi had waited at the light for no longer than ten seconds when the little girl approached. Ann was dozing. The plane ride had been rough on her. They had expected a car to pick them up, but the line of chauffeurs outside the gate held up everyone’s names but theirs. So while Ann watched the luggage, Ted searched for a cab. The drivers auctioned themselves off; they’d show him four sites, no, five sites, six sites and a place to watch the beautiful sunset. And even after he’d secured a ride for what he considered a good price, other cabbies accosted him, trying to undercut the winning driver. They grabbed his bags, then Ann’s bags, and the driver shooed them away with a harsh word. Ted felt as though he were being led by a ring through his nose.