One day, he showed up at the pool while I was doing my club sandwich thing. (I always order triple-deckers at hotel pools, it’s a Queenie tradition.) I was on a chaise longue fooling around with a rich kid whose parents had taken the train to Goa without him. Out of nowhere Kura grabbed my arm. The boy hightailed it — so blind was Kura’s anger I don’t even think he noticed. He began to shout about how he’d made a mistake bringing me there, how I was an albatross around his neck, that at long last he found what he’d been searching for and was hereby firing himself from the job of nanny… I kept a stiff upper lip, not easy under the circumstances. I said I was happy for him and didn’t need a nanny, thank you very much. I must have been talking through my tears but it wouldn’t have mattered. He wasn’t listening. He said he wasn’t going to waste his time on a spoiled little cunt doomed to perpetual adolescence and that I was “spitting at God,” flushing my only chance at self-liberation like so much shite down the toilet. In mid-tirade, he grabbed my hand by the wrist and raised it up as if to present its amputated fingers to the jury as Exhibit A. I recall a jolly waiter striding triumphantly toward us with my club, fries and sundae held high on a tray. When he saw what was going down, he neatly swiveled and departed. I was still seated and Kura was standing; he held my wrist so high that my shoulder flirted with dislocation. As hurtful as it was, and as poorly handled, I understood where Kura was coming from. His life had been dislocated too, in the most gorgeous way, and he’d generously wanted me to have the same experience. I had my doubts about his new relationship. At the time, I felt he was determined to meet a guru, any guru, it just turned out that the American was the handiest, with the best provenance. I never thought it would last — and believe me, when he crawled back to me I wasn’t planning on being there to pick up the karma. So I pretty much handled his rage-out, until he said something that wounded me to my core.
“Why didn’t I just let you die?”
O, Bruce! I think I did die — right then — died again—as I searched the eyes of my killer — my killer by default, or do I mean omission? — the killer I loved before knowing what love is — searched his eyes for a sign of mercy…
I held his gaze but none was forthcoming.
He came to my room while I was packing. I thought he was going to hit me. That’s how far from love we had come. He gave me $25,000 worth of francs and enough damp, stinky rupees to buy myself a soda at the airport. I went back to Paris and stayed at the George V for a month. I was not in good shape. Had a wicked parasite too, not to mention a few stowaway demons of lower caste.
That was the last I saw or heard of him until that day he called my apartment in New York, seven years ago. There are so many “sevens,” do you notice? Sevens and elevens… they really do seem to come up more than other numbers. O! Now I remember his last words to me in Bombay:
He said, “I shan’t be saving you again.”
I was dreaming of New York, in quiet conversation with a gargoyle, when the voice of a stewardess whispered, “We’re beginning our descent.”
I nudged the drape aside to look out the window.
The great orange dust cloud of Delhi lay before me.
We resumed the following day.
What happened next is a blur.
I debarked into those rioting molecules of shit, perfume, death and rebirth that belong not just to Delhi but every Indian necropolis. Two golf carts raced toward us on the tarmac, holding porters and customs officials — and Kura with two bodyguards! He hugged me and I almost fainted dead away. How my old lover looked! And my tear-streaked self watching him watch me, seeing how I looked! We took each other in, sizing up like tailors for our three-piece eternity suits — that magnificent ache that embraced all coming-togethers and coming-aparts, and touched the exquisite sorrow that is the shadow of existence itself.
His smile was big as a catcher’s mitt.
He looked strikingly presidential in his Muga silk threads. Arms intertwined, our whole beings clutched, fussed and melded as we rode to the hotel in the small motorcade. We hardly said a word. Kura had a flair for the grandiose; the other cars were carrying “muscle.” (And the elusive doctor.) I was tongue-tied except for the powerful, almost jokey urge to ask how the hell he made a living these days. But I didn’t, discretion being the better part of valor. However the saying goes.
We had dinner in one of those dark, gaudy, empty restaurants that tend to live on the ground floor of 5-star Indian hotels. Wait a while though… did we go to a private club? Why am I thinking of this particular club? Maybe that was Bangalore… or Bangkok. Or Chicago! Memory’s failing me… a club? I actually don’t think so — no, probably not. Though he kept the details mysterious, Kura implied we had quite a journey ahead and I doubt he’d have wanted to trek off-campus on the eve of our departure, because we were slated to leave the next day. Though it is possible, more than possible that we took our meal in his room. Or should I say rooms, in that they occupied the entire penthouse. The Presidential Suite, indeed.
I told you this part was blurry. Starting the next morning, everything sharpens.
We had breakfast at a corner table in the coffee shop off the lobby. We’d slept well and allowed ourselves the exquisite luxury of enjoying each other’s company in the moment, unencumbered by the odd circumstances of our reunion. We were brighter than the day that was about to enfold us, we threw off sparks and made spunky prayers of thanks to the gods of Whatever for arranging things thus. Kura had gained a bit of weight but not too much — some whiteness and thinning of hair — a slight tremor when he lifted his glass. Yes, he still had the hôtel particulier in the Marais on the Rue Vieille-du-Temple. (Glory be!) Yes, he was single. (Hmm.) His father was dead coming up on twenty years but his mother had just celebrated her 100th. When British citizens reach their centennial, the Queen mails them a congratulatory card; an anti-royalist all her life, Mum secretly ate it up. As for his current line of work, he knew I’d be curious and threw me a bone—“I am in the recycling business.” I almost laughed, because it sounded so mafia.
We spoke in shallow generalities, packaging the broader strokes of our lives and exchanging them as gifts. At the end of the preliminaries, something shifted in him. He looked positively ancient — more battered pharaoh than beleaguered king.
“I remember everything about the day you left Bombay… a horrible, terrible day. A day that hurt me — as they say — more than it hurt you. I flogged myself for treating you so shabbily. Please accept my belated amends. ‘It’s been a long time coming, it’s going to be a long time gone.’ Do you remember how we used to sing that song?