Vidya had no ears for any of it. She confronted Latika, hands on her hips. “Suraj was on the beach yesterday, that’s what Gouri says. Did you see him too? Why didn’t you tell me?”
*
Even as she spoke, her son was closer than Vidya could have imagined: in a different part of the same ruins, climbing a flight of stone stairs bracketed by a pair of gryphons. Suraj selected a shadowed eave to sit in. He had a handful of tourist pamphlets with him and a notebook. He could see Nomi nearby, crouched, changing a lens on her camera. She straightened, then spotted something else and this time went on her knees, bent almost to the ground. She was wearing a dark blue kurta too large for her, one of the Indian clothes she had bought for herself in her bid to blend in. She had chopped the kurta’s sleeves off because of the heat and wore it with shapeless white pyjamas to her ankles. Her feet were in red sneakers.
This was her notion of dressing demurely in Indian clothes. A lazy grin dislodged Suraj’s cigarette and he held it between thumb and forefinger, sucking in the smoke as he observed her. The kurta hung on her as loose as a shift and kept slipping off her shoulders. It was an angular shoulder that led to slender but muscular arms. His own biceps had long since softened, but she was young, she worked on hers, he could see.
He looked at her focusing on a frieze of elephants in procession. She was at work. He was not. He needed to recover from the scare of his near-drowning that morning. His chest still hurt, and his stomach had felt as taut as a drum ever since. He would not have come had it not been for Nomi’s impersonal tone of command, as if the woman from the evening before, who was fascinated by everything he said, had never existed.
So he had come, but all he had done was to roll a joint and take a drag. He felt too old at this game to bother. Greying men shouldn’t have to rush about over monuments making notes and taking photographs, there were things they should be forever exempted from. He leaned back and shut his eyes, savouring his smoke, listening to the penetrating voice of a guide doing his rounds with a group of Western tourists. After a while he heard one of the women in the group ask accusingly, “Is that a child? There in that. .”
Nomi, straggling along behind the group, looked at the panel the woman was pointing to. It showed a buxom, narrow-waisted, naked woman in ecstatic embrace with a man, their lips pressed together, her legs curled around his hips. At their feet, caressing the man’s leg, was a figure so small it might have been a toddler.
“Not a child, Madam, no child. No children in this kind of sculpture. Not in Indian culture,” the guide said.
“Well, you’ve just about everything else, haven’t you?” The woman turned to Nomi, her grey eyes twinkling. “There’s some weird stuff out here — men with horses, women with camels, foursomes, eightsomes! Have you seen them?”
“No children, Madam,” the agitated guide said. “Look.”
He would not say the words, but what he was pointing to were the round breasts on the tiny figure. It was a woman and not a child, there was no doubt about that.
“A midget then.” A straw-hatted man in the group said. “Not a child, just a midget who’s seen a lot.” The whole group tittered and the grey-eyed woman said, “They’ve all seen a lot more than you and me!”
“Some panel show children — but only playing.” The guide was upset by their levity and pointed with a vehement, jabbing finger. “In ancient India no barrier between life and love. Erotic is creation itself, so it is celebrated in our temples. Nothing wrong. Please understand!” A voice from the group was heard muttering, “You don’t say!”
The guide’s voice grew fainter as he and his group went further away. Nomi kneeled to look at the tiny figure at the bottom of the panel. No, it wasn’t a child, the guide was right. Were there any children at all in those scenes of abandon? She went from panel to panel, inspecting one spasm of ecstasy after another. She felt composed despite the fornication on the walls surrounding her. The certainty that she would be revolted must have steeled her. Not many children in this temple, the guide was right, and certainly no little girls being fondled by old men. If there was a child at all, it was in the arms of a maternal-looking woman.
She wondered what her foster mother would have made of this temple. Unbidden, a pang of remorse stabbed her. Two mothers. One she had lost and been tormented by a lifelong need to find; the other a woman she had found but never allowed close.
Just before the trip to India, she had gone from her own studio flat to her foster mother’s house to pick up some things. She had found her sitting alone in the living room with the T.V. soundlessly on. Her foster mother did not move from her chair. She sat watching Nomi go up the stairs, listening to the sounds of cupboard doors opening and shutting, yet she asked no questions and Nomi knew that her foster mother could not speak for the dread that she was going to India because she had found some trail she would not reveal. To her biological family? The air between them was taut with unasked questions.
Nomi was overwhelmed then by an unexpected rush of compassion for the woman in the armchair, and with a terrible weariness at the burden of all that she could never speak of. She went to the drinks cabinet and poured shots of Aquavit and glasses of beer as her foster mother looked on in astonishment. They never had a drink together except dutifully, at Christmas. She kept topping up their glasses until the old woman started to smile, said they should eat something too, and warmed up meatballs that she heaped onto the white and blue plates from years ago. Afterwards Nomi made coffee and even washed up. When she left they didn’t hug, but she had reached out and squeezed her foster mother’s arm and said a gruff “see you soon” before hefting her backpack and walking out at the dark rain.
It was all so far away: that cold rain, the darkness at noon, her foster mother. Here the sun was burning her head up and there were many shrines to get through. She decided to find Suraj, time she turned professional again. There he was, still dozing. When she called, he struggled awake. There was a gap between his decision to open his eyes and the act of it.
“Hey, why are you sleeping? Get up! Make some notes. Come with me.”
Understanding the meaning of her words, that too happened with a moment’s lapse, like talking on a bad international line. He said, “Been here, seen this, binned it.” An infinite slowness came over him. He watched a bird sail over them. A very white cloud inched sideways in the blue sky.
“Up.” She held out a hand. He looked at it. “Come on.” He put his hand into hers and she yanked him up, let his hand go, strolled ahead, then bent down to squint at a sculpture at knee-level. “Can you tell what this is?”
“Some kind of animal,” Suraj yawned. “With a football for a belly and moustaches. No animal that I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s a lion, can’t you tell? I saw one like this. . not exactly, but very like it. At the sculptor’s yesterday. He was telling the truth after all!”
He was surprised by her excitement. He heard her out when she explained how the lion on the wall was evidence of some unknown man’s claim that he was descended from the same temple sculptors. She would go back to him, she declared, buy something to prove she believed him. Suraj did not think it worth pointing out that local craftsmen everywhere made copies of temple art. Was she really so gullible, to believe everything she was told?
They climbed down the stairs and crossed the courtyard to go towards the tallest tower. The people already at its top looked to his smoke-filled eyes as if they were regiments of mice scurrying over a mountainous pile of stone. His head swam. He groaned, “Oh. . forget it. I’ve seen it before. It’s not such a big deal.”