At the back of the hotel was a garden. Along its edge ran an earthen pathway pillared by palms. It ended in a low iron gate. They had not noticed the gate before, but now they saw it opened directly onto the beach. Stepping through the gate, they were confronted by the white and blue of ocean and beach in limpid morning light. Bare-chested fishermen were pushing wooden boats into the surf, chanting prayers together for luck. Women in fluorescent knee-high saris walked past in pairs and threes, with fish-baskets on their heads.
Vidya and Latika took their slippers in their hands and walked barefoot, scanning the beach for a round form in a sari. They passed a scent of cloves and ginger. Latika remembered the tea stall and turned around to find it, but as she turned she glimpsed someone who looked very like Suraj from the back. She grabbed Vidya’s hand to propel her the other way, babbling, “Look, they’re selling lobsters there. And crabs too. By those boats.” Upturned boats rose out of the sand like the carcasses of prehistoric animals. Latika pointed Vidya in their direction.
They hurried away, Vidya protesting. “If we walk this quickly, we’ll never find her. Slow down!” The tea-man’s morning song came to them in snatches, “The rain came again that night. And again and again and again.”
A familiar voice interrupted the song. “Awake at last. And I’ve been up and about since dawn! You should have seen the sunrise. Today I decided I would say my prayers out here by the sea.”
She was parked on the hull of an abandoned boat. Despite her prayer beads and white hair and bulk, Gouri looked more sinister than grandmotherly. She wore round sunglasses that they had never seen on her before, and a necklace of rose-pink pearls acquired minutes earlier from a vendor who was offering them identical strings now. She bared her teeth in laughter at their furious faces and the stark white of her dentures gleamed in the sunlight. “Oh come, come,” she said gaily. “I am not under house arrest here too, am I? And anyway, I have a stuffy old room, yours are much nicer.”
They did not know what to say, feeling their pent-up emotions drift clear of their bodies.
“I can’t bear to stay in my room, it suffocates me,” Gouri stated as she rose from her throne.
“Why didn’t you at least carry the cards I made for you?” Vidya’s voice rained hailstones when she was this furious. The voice that was said to detonate bombs under the chairs of sleepy clerks when she was Director General, Social Welfare.
It did not intimidate Gouri. She whipped out one of Vidya’s handwritten cards from somewhere inside the layers of her sari and waved it in her face. “I didn’t carry my handbag, that’s all. It’s so heavy.” She sounded even more smug now.
For a long time neither of them could speak to Gouri. It was only after breakfast, when they reached the bazaar, where they had to pool voices to discourage beggars, that they forgot their anger. They shopped, then found a restaurant to eat lunch in. Steaming mounds of white rice and daal and vegetables, too much for any of them to finish, were served by a waiter who seemed in a hurry to be somewhere else. Bells began ringing all over the town, bhajans battled each other on competing loudspeakers. From above, the first floor of the building, they heard voices chanting hymns, intoning the Sanskrit in exotic accents. A band of pilgrims passed them, singing kirtans, tinkling their cymbals. There were young women, men, even a child or two, all in saris and dhotis, their foreheads marked with the tilak of Vishnu. They smiled at the women through the glass front of the restaurant.
“Let’s eat quickly,” Vidya commanded. “We have other things to do.”
As they began their meal the singing stopped and half a dozen men and women came down the stairs. They were foreigners in saffron and yellow robes. Sprigs of hair sprouted from the backs of their shaven heads like stalks from berries.
Gouri noticed that the foreigners were being served only bowls of grapes. Why was that, she asked their waiter in a whisper, “Don’t they like the food?” He gave her a withering look. “They are fasting,” he said. Then more emphatically, “For Shivaratri. Some of them won’t touch water either all day. You’ve forgotten?”
The disdain in his voice, its air of authority, reminded her of home. It was how her son spoke when he said, “Your widow’s pension was to be picked up, didn’t you remember? The children were to reach their tennis lesson at two, didn’t you remember?”
She remembered her terracotta tea and told herself she must have that third cup before returning home. And she would go back to the temple. By herself.
*
On the morning of Shivaratri the great temple was more crowded than usual. Badal was escorting a man in his eighties who hobbled along, trying to keep his footing in the cavernous inner sanctum. As always it was half dark, lit largely with flickering lamps.
“Please hold on to my arm, you might fall.” Something about the man reminded Badal of his father. Perhaps the over-large ears. The sign of a good man, Badal’s father used to say, pulling at his own elongated lobes. Look at the ears on statues of the Buddha.
The man said, “I may look feeble, son, but let me tell you, in my time I’ve climbed the Himalaya and swum half way across the English Channel. I just didn’t reach the other side because. .”
Inside the sanctum sanctorum, the image of Vishnu glowed red and gold and black. In his infancy, Badal had felt a sense of dread in the temple, even though his father held his hand. The oil lamps cast black shadows everywhere, the air thrummed with chanting, and there were people in such raptures of devotion that they appeared insensible to the world. They frightened him then, with their swaying bodies, their dazed eyes, their delirious singing. He used to be frightened too by the temple’s priests in their white dhotis, bare bodies melting into the gloom, the image of the Lord looming above them all with the impassive might of a mountain.
But what mountains had he seen? He had never left the shores of the sea he had been born by. A few nights ago, he had dreamt of them: snow peaks and ranges of blue hills. He was following people who were trudging up the rocks and ice. They had a dog with them. It was cold, the sounds were muffled. Everything was happening very slowly, every step took an aeon. All at once he was transported to a long, red-carpeted corridor and someone was shouting at him: “The doors are shut. They won’t let you in.” The shouting voice had woken him.
Awake, he had felt with superstitious certainty that he had dreamt of his own death, and the people he had been following were the Pandavas on their long trek to heaven. In the Mahabharata, the Pandavas too had been stopped at the gates of heaven. Indra had appeared and ordered them, “Abandon your dog, dog-owners have no place in Heaven.” And Yudhishtira, defiant, had declared to the king of the gods that he would abandon heaven before he gave up a friend.
Badal would never abandon Raghu, whatever happened. He would forget what he had seen: the monk, the beer bottle, the tight black jeans. He had not been able to find Raghu since. He had to have him back, he would not ask any questions. All he needed was to hold Raghu so close that he would not be able to tell their heartbeats apart.