एक Barb’ra

It was the middle of August. Hot sun… hot, heavy nights. Lovely August. In the middle of the night… just before the light came… Barb’ra took a quiet journey completely by herself. She took her secrets with her at the zenith of crickets singing out their hearts… the time when the earth has burst forth… the time of the first falling leaf we have not noticed that floats onto the still-green grass. It seemed so “just like that,” but perhaps it was not. How do we even pick apart the scientific practicalities of bodies gone wrong? And what are the mysteries none of us know until it is our time?

If she must be described, Barb’ra was a geographer. She had “been,” early on, a rarely unemployed actress in New York City who refused to apply for “fat” parts… worked on those off-Broadway stages when others sat home and worried about how they would pay the rent. She had always felt bad that she had been so miserable at math. A desire to master math is what took her back to school for geography.

We were different. Geography had made her a traveler solid on the topographical surface… strange juxtapositions beneath the earth… rocks and reasons for the growth of cities. I liked to wander around… a senseless thing as if the air could tell me about the mysteries of such places. Yes, there were basic itineraries… a guidebook that I felt could turn into a poisonous snake in my hand if I used it too, too much… things secondary to the mysteries of the air. We had decided to meet in India… both now separated in far flung places since her time in China. We complemented each other as we went here and there. Neither of us particularly enjoyed the Taj Mahal experience. We took a few crappy pictures in the smog and groaned inside as a gazillion guides flashed lights through the colors of the semi-precious stones. The colors might have been beautiful if craning to see them wasn’t Taj etiquette. We ended up having a deep conversation in the park… the world renowned, white marble testament to love at a livable distance, thank God. We would both enjoy other places of brightly-colored stalls in the mysterious alleys of evening with monkeys stealthily climbing the drain pipes up to the balconies of the apartments… and we would enjoy the healthful administrations of Ayurveda as often as possible.

Barb’ra loved the unusual place. Places like Estonia and Bulgaria were at the top of her list. She and her father, who had been unwell for some time, paddled around in the Great Barrier Reef. He would die in little more than a year. Sickness and discomfort were never reasons not to travel. Her greatest wander wishes had been Antarctica and a belated honeymoon in the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia.

One year ago on Halloween Barb’ra had gotten married to Marion. They had discovered that they had been soul mates just like that and glided easily into marriage after Barb’ra’s whirlwind in China. Fairness in life is often a delusion we comfort ourselves with.

Barb’ra and I communicated almost every day. She called me two days before in her hospital bed. She didn’t have her computer and lamented that she couldn’t see my new hair cut. Sick or well… life went on as if nothing had intervened to keep her down. Barb’ra would want me to tell this story about the two of us traveling together… the kind of memory that she cherished as a prelude to the next wandering around.

Today 48 trains are running late in India.

It’s now 11 o’clock at night… and we are sitting in the train station. We’ve wandered around medieval Varanasi in the muck avoiding the broken sidewalk and shards of the cheap clay masala tea cups used once and smashed to the cobblestones in the narrow alleys. We circle cow paddies and dog shit… piles of garbage… and a Noah’s Ark of every conceivable animal. We visit the ghats and saddhus of Varanasi all day. We follow dead bodies covered in bright, shiny shrouds for their ashy sail down the Ganges… watch as the wood is weighed, bought and piled up. Some bodies are burned with expensive sandalwood and others with simple acacia logs… but they all end up in the same meandering river.

Still, no train… and, then, the train is canceled.

Another train (late) is on its laborious way. I’ve just returned from the unspeakable toilet to fish money out of my underwear to pay for our train tickets. We’ve had to figure the exchange quickly from rupees to dollars because we’ve run of out local currency. We’ve frantically thrown together the mix of currencies we have and bought tickets from a fat, oily scalper in a spotted suit who sports gold, wire-rimmed glasses and a handlebar mustache. He tries to get us to buy third class tickets. We raise our voices in protest. I am on the edge of throwing a fit. Barb’ra is not nice and uses her universal word with a lexicon of meaning in the inflection, “Lordy!” We will not travel third class in India! We will hold out for second class or find another hotel. We pay twice the going rate of a first class ticket. We are determined to move forward tired, dirty and cranky as we are.

We take our places on the cold, dirty benches. A lump of wool is next to me on the bench. It moves. It is a person. I move closer to Bar’bra. We begin to distinguish rats as big as puppies running along the tracks and boldly on the sidings. A huge rat scurries near Barb’ra’s foot and galumphs into the sewer. She moves closer to me. Cows walk down the train steps and on to the sidings. Two dogs get into a vicious fight next to me. Any closer to Barb”ra and I will be sitting in her lap. The fog that smells of burning coal grows thicker until we see the lights of the train coming as if through opaque pea soup… and, then, humanity in all its forms begins to rise up and the wool cloaks that have sprouted heads with turbans, legs and arms… saris and dhoties descend upon the slowing metal giant whose wheels and bogies screech and shudder to a halt on the bare rails. It is a monster thing that has seen its better days. Bar’bra and I make haste onto the train and down the aisles… throw ourselves onto the beds as if we have found life preservers and have been saved from drowning at sea.

The blue curtains are dirty and torn. The floor is filthy… the windows spotted and blurry. They bring us suspicious new bedding that is, at least, white. We share the coupe with an Indian couple and their child who will be kind to us the whole night. It’s only 10 hours and we will be off before we know it.

It’s now 14 hours later on this rumbling, drafty, dirty train. We get to laughing over nothing until we think we will roll on the floor… then we look at the dirty red floor and refrain and start laughing all over again. We order egg omelet sandwiches. We are so hungry that they are the best food we’ve ever had. We wash them down with masala tea and then coffee made from an electric kettle the Indian couple lend to us. I’ve taken off my boots to put my feet on the bed. We’re taking pictures. We are in high spirits until Barb’ra screams, “Paula, there’s a rat crawling on your boots.” I shriek, too, and the creature runs away. The Indian husband asks what is wrong and shrugs his shoulders, “Oh, a rat,” he tells his wife. His wife goes back to sleep. We are just beginning to settle down and the thing peaks its nose out from under Bar’bra’s bed this time… and the shrieking starts all over again.

It’s now 17 hours later. Heavy from exhaustion… with our shoes and boots back on against rat bite, we arrive at Tundla. The porter hoists our heavy bags onto his head and carries them up the three flights of steps to the train terminal.

But, before the porter arrives, we walk past the third-class car. The stench envelops us… the hard benches, the dirty people disembarking, the windows broken. Seventeen hours in a car like that! It’s a train from hell to some other hell defined by poverty.

I’m a little ashamed at last night’s entitlement and pray a silent “thank you” for my second-class ticket. I say a second prayer of thanks for Barb’ra… that I had a good friend to travel with through this long night. I shudder as I head away from the third-class train cars and wonder about karma.

We will have a lot to talk about on that bench about karma in the park at the Taj Mahal. Both of us share our strange stories rich with unexpected meetings of familiarity and the people we have wandered through in worlds not blessed with the comforts of daily living.

Barb’ra will leave me in Udaipur. That night, I’ll eat tandoori paneer with peppers so hot my head will be aflame… I’ll eat it alone in my room on the balcony overlooking the fairytale lake… drink fresh lime soda on the lawn of the bar across the road later that night. I’ll miss her as she is waiting in Delhi with a stomachache to go home for a reunion with her friend, lover and soon-to-be fiance. He has been e-mailing her about their reunion for days. I’ll anticipate a reunion all my own some weeks later. It will come. It will be wonderful. But her fate, will not be my fate, and I will continue on my own in life just as I did in India. India was a little story of what my life would soon become again.

And, now, much later, her fate is not my fate again. I am living and Barb’ra is dead.

द्वि Hermione

Hermione… I had met her in the tattered, rented house I lived in next to the deep rincon with the uninterrupted, wide view of the sea. I had small parties later that spring with food I’d never even dream of cooking these days… fried chicken… potato salad… cherry pies. I had found that curious Spanish village after the barely spaced deaths of my mother and husband. I had remembered an airport. I had remembered the road out of that airport. I had proceeded to the end of that road in a stick shift I could barely drive, turned left. That is how I found that village on top of a mountain. That is how I found Hermione.

Her dry humor clicked with my dark, subterranean Romanian one. Even through all of her falls, knee replacements, detached retinas, surgery, chemotherapy… we did just that… laugh… and sometimes we even laughed at all of what happened to her.

Hermione came to China when she was 80. We tried to figure out how to get her up on the Great Wall. Two peasant men appeared. We put her in the wheel chair. They rigged up a pulley with a rope. That’s how she got up to the ski lift. She managed the running jump into the car and out. My heart was in my mouth. So was hers. She got herself up there. She came. She saw. She conquered. She took pictures… and then, she fell down. Oh… no!!! She got up, dusted herself off and crowed a laugh. I learned a lot about growing old that day.

I had known the salient facts of Hermione’s life. Sometimes they came out in an honest irony… sardonic and tinged with bitterness. She had known sadness and how it is when things don’t work out. She put her life to rights as far as any of us can when she moved to Spain and just continued laughing. I had asked her, “Why Spain?” I asked her that many times. She discarded the layers of that answer one by one with the years. The last time I asked her she told me that they had been filming Don Quixote in a field of lavender… and she decided. It was the fragrance of that field that tipped the balance. I think of that field as the essential “ah-ha!!!”moment of why she came to Spain.

Years came and went. I’d travel through, first from the West and, then, many years from the East. The timing was always right. I got there for lunch and off we would go with my bags unpacked. Hermione was my Spanish travel agent… always finding me a place to stay and providing me with her fine, neatly folded, striped, heavy cotton sheets from London soft from years of use and Spanish sunshine. She would see me off early in the morning in her schoolgirl’s white cotton nightgown that ended at her ankles. She’d send a lunch along with me. In it would be something sweet and “naughty.” I’d laugh hours later when I’d eat it and imagine that inverted whistle of hers when she had within her sight a “naughtiness” of chocolate or a ginger cake. I always said the same thing when I left, “You be sure to be here when I get back.” I did not say that when I left this last time. I drove away through the mountains around Granada and beyond. I felt empty and helpless…

… no more Hermione. She was an institution in that curious, Spanish village… an indomitable British lady in a flowered dress and funny hat with opinions on everything. She’d laugh when I would say that to her. There will be no more practically falling out of her bedroom window to harvest the figs with a cloth basket attached to a long pole. No more giggling with Hermione over long lunches where she would wrap up a prawn or two for Lola and before that, Chuckie and Lola… no more spring drives through flowering almonds and a stop along the road to take in their fragrance…no more reminiscing about far-off places… a childhood in India… a trip to Nepal with her aunt… school in Darjeeling entirely made up of boys… a worrisome trip to Africa across the Mediterranean during the war… our getting lost on the way to see Tina Turner’s last concert… eating a hot pot of scary, odd sea creatures that set our mouths and heads ablaze in China.

I loved Hermione a lot. Memories may fade a bit… the reality of her may have left us, but the memory of that love between friends will remain… that blessing that I met her… that fact of the gumption she encouraged in me to free myself to have the life I’ve lived.

 

त्रि Bones

I am walking to this sunken, Spanish garden of dust and flowers… bones and cactus. I sit down on a bench next to two skulls of goats… their horns intact… jaws with teeth still embedded… a grimace. There is an emptiness in bones that I have not realized before. Was that only a moment ago that I was sure-footed? And, now, not so sure of anything

Emptiness. I’ve passed the dusty, blue wine bottles just around the corner on my way to the garden… bottles waiting to be filled… fulfilled… or not.

Bones are empty, too, in different ways… empty of flesh… void of eyes… wet noses with flaring nostrils that have dried up and fallen away… fur that fluffs up under the jaw that has blown onto a bush in the desert hills where no one passes by in the glare of the mid-day sun. Empty… silent… without intimacy, hunger or pain… the life before the bones that has spirited itself away.

These bleached memories lying in the desert… clues about what lived here… the dry rustle of scorched shards under my feet that lead me up a path I have not walked before. It is a warm day in these foothills. The locust scream in pity. The blue bottle flies hover around my head landing on my nose and buzz in my hair. The water splashes in the fountain… and then, the skulls… the horns… the grimace of yellow teeth beneath the prickly green cactus that reaches its arms toward the clearing, sky.

I wander around in my thoughts about the bones. How do these bones that will not be ignored inform me? Is it something about time? Is it something about loss… a separation that catches along with the dust in my throat? Are the bones a beginning or an end or just a natural cycle? Is there peace and completion in the crackly fragments? Is there life in these dried skulls and is that life a straight line or a circle?

 

चतुर् Moksha

And, now, time has passed yet again. There are no walks under a blue sky. Winter has come.  There are leaden skies. It is the time of cozy indoor lights, quilts, hot cups of oolong tea… the introspection without tears… and what can only remain… the pit of missing that comes of separation.

The fire has burned. The purification is complete.

Will two new babies cry against the bondage that is karma and be taken into their mother’s arms for comfort? Or has the final salvation been found in the heart of a force we do not understand? Is all that is left of them their ashes… and memory? Will we see them again in a distant place? Will we visit on a bench in the park near the Taj Mahal or climb on The Great Wall again and feel a strange familiarity in those places? Will we sail down the coast of Africa or find ourselves living in igloos… laughing with each other as we slide along the ice?