Kamal
said: “Oh, Baby, you know you can’t do that.”
Chi,
tilting her head, dropped her shoulders and smiled. Every time Kamal said: “Oh,
Baby, you know you can’t do that,” Chi titled her head, dropped her shoulders
and smiled.
“I’d like
to start an animal rehabilitation centre here,” Chi said.
“Oh,
baby,” Kamal said, “you know you can’t do that.”
So Chi
tilted her head, dropped her shoulders and smiled.
“Imagine
how an animal rehabilitation centre here could change people’s attitudes towards
animals,” Chi said.
“Oh,
baby,” Kamal replied, “you know that won’t happen.”
So Chi
tilted her head, dropped her shoulders and smiled.
A tent
sat on the footpath outside. A family’s silhouettes moved inside the illuminated
tent at night. Two chanting, blind men in rags passed the family, holding hands,
led by a sighted third.
The blind
men’s eyes, facing the sun, possessed a surprising liveliness that showed up the
deadness in Chi’s eyes.
Her back
faced the family. Her hair, thin frame, and porcelain skin created a doll look
of innocent sweetness. The contrast between her black hair and her white skin,
with her ivory corneas, sharpened the blackness in her irises.
“The
carpets I bought yesterday,” she said, “are so beautiful.”
The blind
men’s chanting disappeared.
“How much
did they cost?” Tim asked.
“Three
thousand dollars,” she replied.
The
footpath mother stirred the contents of a pot that sat over a coal-fired burner.
The mother’s clothes hadn’t changed from the day before when Tim and I had
arrived. The same frazzled-edge shawl covered her shoulders. The beaming eyes of
a half-naked, three-year-old boy beside her, observing the pot, contrasted with
the lifelessness in Chi’s irises.
“How do
you know,” I asked, “that the carpets will get to The States?”
Chi’s
slither-of-a-film smile plummeted from her face. Shocked calculation appeared.
Her black irises hardened with ruthless consideration.
Oblivious, I thought, that she’s as innocent as she tries to look.
“Kamal’s
family can follow it up,” she said.
Her voice
aged from infantile sweetness to adulthood. She had spoken as if thinking aloud.
“What if
the carpet shop has disappeared?” I proposed.
“Kamal
can go there tomorrow and pick them up.”
“Oh,
Baby,” Kamal whined, from an adjoining room.
“Kamal!”
she screamed.
Vehement
disbelief ignited in her eyes.
“But---”
“Kamal!”
“Okay,
Baby, I will.”
Kamal had
come home from New York to set up a software company, time short.
Chi’s
voice returned to sweetness.
“The Taj
Mahal is going to be so beautiful,” she said, her smile like light on ice.
Chi, Tim
and I were going there the following day.
The tent
mother waved away a canine, fur-covered ribcage that moved on emaciated stick
legs.
***
Stars
abounded above our hotel’s courtyard in Agra. The heavenly past exuded a
reassuring promise of a gorgeous future. Silence sat like a veil of peace. The
light on a wall above the table darkened the shadows. Chi faced away from the
shadows. Artificial light illuminated her face.
She had
exhibited adulthood until I said: “I like reading obituaries.”
“You read
about dead people?!” she gasped.
“Dead–physically,” I replied.
“That’s
sad, reading about people who’ve just died.”
“It’d be
sadder if we didn’t remember their achievements.”
“Still,
how can you do it, knowing that their family and friends are suffering, it’s--”
“It’s
important to understand the past.”
“The past
has had no effect on my life.”
“Your
mother worked in the US embassy in Saigon during the war, didn’t she?” I asked.
“When you were a kid?”
“Yes;
and?”
“Nothing.”
“Why did
you ask?”
“Curiosity. The Vietnam War was my first ever media event.”
“I don’t
remember much about it. We immigrated to The States before it finished. I was
only seven years old.”
“I
thought that there might have been hope for her,” Tim said, later, “but the
obituaries, pun intended, killed that off.”
“Imagine
the syrupy head-patting she must have got,” I said, “in the US embassy.”
“The past
has had no effect on my life,” Tim replied.
***
Sapphire
radiance touched beige earth’s horizon haze. A two-headed creature appeared
ahead. Tim and I leant forward. Our heads almost touched.
“It’s a
bear!” Tim gasped.
Obscenity
slammed into the padding protecting our moral cores.
Chi’s
eyes reflected nothing.
“Arghhh,”
I groaned.
A
stick-carrying man was controlling a chained bear. The black-and-white beads in
Chi’s face remained inscrutable.
Green
saliva hung from the bear’s mouth. A chain ringed its neck.
“Geeeawd,” Tim hissed.
Fracas
hope smeared the bear-man’s face as he stared at our bus’s windows, hoping to
get paid for bear entertainment. When the inexpressive slithers of Chi’s eyes
met the hopeful beads glinting in the man’s face, she turned and faced the road.
***
Pushing,
shoving, screaming men battled outside the bus for our attention. Chi’s eyes
revealed neither feeling, thought, nor curiosity. Those men couldn’t glamorise
her self-perception.
We parked
before a crimson wall. Trinkets, cheap jewellery, cooked corn, and clothes
covered portable tables that the screaming sellers shoved beside us as we headed
towards a palace’s entry. If pointless screaming fails, try it again; so they
did; we walked even faster towards the entry.
Going
inside resembled receiving an unexpected gift, the refreshing silence like a
charming novelty. The puppies we saw rolling around on the ground inside the
entry had round, brown eyes and round, black snouts. Their finger tails flailed.
Crimson-coloured buildings, with towers and slanting roofs, bordered the
courtyard where the puppies were playing. Women in flashing saris made
impressionistic brushstrokes against crimson.
The
puppies sniffed and leapt about. Their mother’s snout, on the other side of the
courtyard, sat upon her front legs. Her contentment contrasted with the
desperation that had flooded from the sellers’ craving corneas.
Head-tilted Chi, facing the puppies, gasped: “Ahhh…”
“I’m
going to stay here,” she said, “with the puppies.”
The lines
protruding from the corners of her small mouth resembled cat’s whiskers.
Maybe
this reflected my perception of her predatory sweetness?
The
columns of a walkway Tim and I walked towards fanned out to support a roof that
sat above a vast clay slab. A candle-flame-shaped window revealed a misty
blending of earth and sky. The tranquillity reflected time's immense, languid
pulse.
“You can
fit fifty on it,” Tim said, observing the slab.
“All
experts,” I replied, “in the Karma Sutra.”
I felt
envy and sadness for the loss of a calming tolerance that had once enlightened
the world. That enlightenment must have seemed that it would last forever.
Coloured
marble decorated the columns. A woman’s blue and yellow sari highlighted her
smooth stomach. Voices heightened the palace’s serenity by emphasising the
vastness of the background quietude.
Chi
remained with the puppies. Her distant figure failed to illicit in me
admiration. She made me realise how much I admired people generally, and how
little I acknowledged this. The palace enhanced my perception of time; she
contracted it.
“Puppies,” I said, “usurp history in the Chiian School of Personal Glory.”
She
stayed with them all day. On the bus afterwards, Tim joked: “We thought you were
going to bring one with you.”
Dreaminess lacquered her face. She lifted up her T-shirt. A puppy was curled up
on her stomach. For Tim’s benefit, I said: “Oh, how sweet!”
She was
sitting in front of us. Tim’s eyes shone with malicious joy. We adored
madness–provided it didn’t affect us directly.
Chi
struggled to control the puppy’s attempts to escape. It couldn’t see its
master’s “good intentions.” It rolled around on Chi’s stomach, sometimes
yelping. She grabbed its snout to stop the yelping. Her loveless sweetness
included cruelty towards animals.
In the
hotel courtyard, under a blue celestial iris, the puppy writhed on Chi’s lap.
“The
mother was too skinny to produce milk,” she claimed.
“Why was
the mother in such good condition then?” I asked.
“Tourists
have been feeding it,” she replied.
“Oh.”
The
puppy’s mother, fed by palace workers, may have been a reincarnation of the
original Maharaja, Chi oblivious of local philosophies.
She tried
feeding the healthy puppy hot milk, claiming it was “starving.”
She
shoved the puppy’s snout into boiling liquid, causing it to yelp. Its shrilling,
high-pitched yelps came from nature’s candid heart.
Tim’s
azure gems glowed with condescending amazement. Chi hadn’t been expecting canine
resistance. Her imagination had made the puppy a pliable cog that enhanced her
self-ennobling sweetness, she only aware of one thing–herself–and only naively
so.
“What do
you intend to do with it?” Tim asked.
Great
question, I thought.
“Kamal’s
family will look after it,” she replied. “They’ll adore it.”
Silence
reigned under pitiless blue.
Tim and I
went to the Taj Mahal. Chi stayed behind to rearrange her ticket back to Delhi,
and “to nurse the puppy.”
In a
rickshaw, Tim said: “It’ll represent nothing more to Kamal’s family than an
extra mouth to feed; they’ll get rid of it the moment her back’s turned and
right about now,” he grinned, “it’s probably pissing on her.”
“It’s
inevitable,” I said, “that something will.”
The
appreciation underpinning Tim’s laughter turned his chortling into thunderous
hilarity.
Men
carrying heavy loads around us revealed a grim resignation towards their dire
lots that contrasted with our privileged amusement. The brown in their serious
eyes was compacted by strain.
"Did you
see her reaction to the bear?" I asked.
"No," Tim
replied. "What was it?"
"She
didn't give a damn," I said.
"Ha!" Tim
guffawed. “So much for animal farms.”
We
charged down streets lined with rotting garbage. Animals and beggars fought for
scraps that fell from consumers’ clay bowls at food stalls, the humid atmosphere
redolent with frying fat.
A man in
a soiled rag rolled down the road in religious appeasement; at traffic lights, a
legless man on a skateboard held his hands up to disinterested drivers who
looked straight ahead. Black fumes rose over moving vehicles; suddenly an
elephant was beside us. We passed corrugated-iron hovels. A woman in a red sari
emerged from a hole in a grey slag heap, stench sudden, putrid, foul; cows
sprawled on a traffic island; straining men carrying heavy loads. Men in white
fabrics prostrate on dead grass; a cow entering a temple. Scooters, bikes,
pedalled rickshaws passing; men carrying rolls of fabric on their shoulders. A
two-seater rickshaw appeared beside us. A man with a wreath of flowers around
his neck on a concrete slab was sitting beside Hindu statues. A crouching boy
shat onto the roadside. A camel-drawn cart. Scooters and shops streaming by. Man
after man on motorbikes.
The
rickshaw finally stopped before high, clay walls.
An
emaciated dog, with wary, submissive eyes, another ribcage on legs, tried
beating a cow to rice that had fallen from a consumer’s bowl. Fumes swirled in
the steamy air. The cow outmuscled the dog. Horns snorted and honked. Motorbikes
flashed by. The horn language between machines produced a cacophony of chatter.
Mechanical animals prattled in a squalid pen.
Women in
saris were queued before a window in the wall to buy entry tickets into the Taj
Mahal. Line-up men stood beside the line-up saris. A crowd was facing a stall
where rice was frying on hot plates. A woman with a baby perched on her hip
raised her open right palm towards two tourists, her eyes fraught with yearning
demand; an orange shawl covered her chest and shoulders, its edges frazzled, the
baby’s plump face surrounded by orange, woollen headwear, bangles on its wrists.
The
police pushed the baby-carrier back onto the road. The bangles clattered. The
baby-carrier screamed with sudden-white eyes. One of the tourists had taken her
photograph. She was still demanding money despite the police pushing her away
from the tourists who had turned their backs on her.
The
beggar screamed like someone being separated from loved ones by an evil force.
We queued
to buy tickets. Frying-fat stench churned my stomach. Smoke rose from road-side
kitchens. Horns puncturing traffic’s roaring resembled bleating geese. A man
dropped a clay bowl. A beggar and a cow went for it. The beggar won.
Chi’s
puppy had avoided this–by chance.
Inside,
bamboo and ferns sat beside a wall. The grass beside the path was gorgeous
green. Silence and shadow, like the therapeutic impact of good news, had
replaced the smelly disorder unfolding, like a Stravinsky symphony, on the other
side of the walls.
Through
another door and suddenly the space widened.
Marble
steps reached the white silhouette of the Taj Mahal. Saris, flashing against the
building’s creamy marble, resembled tropical butterflies. Colourful gardens
complimented the saris that glided between breast-topped cylindrical towers that
sat at the four corners of the marble floor upon which the building’s curves and
lines rose in a balance so refined and unexpected that surprise, a sensuous
shock, erupted inside my head. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
We scaled
the marble stairs. The gravity of attraction alluring us towards the building’s
dome breasts was strong but gentle.
A
curved-top door opened into the mausoleum’s domed interior. Our guide shut the
door and blew a whistle. An echoing note slowly smoothed out with euphonious
perfection.
Our dome
heads beautify ideas.
In the
darkness, we could only perceive exquisite acoustics.
The guide
shone a torch upon the precious-stone representations of India’s flowers that
the builders had inserted into the walls. Red and green sparkled iridescently,
like jewels. I felt like a child before something magical that had previously
been unimaginable, something absolute and unquestionable from the heart of pure
aesthetics. Beauty makes things so arresting that they seem absolutely apart,
completely unique, infinitely observable.
Something
in early childhood gives us uplifting triumph and whatever this thing might be
its intrinsic value–its capacity to fulfil–its social acceptability–is just a
question of luck.
When the
guide opened the doors, blade light, like a revelation, entered the chamber,
revealing people wandering free outside.
A girl in
red velvet, eating chocolate, resembled a floating ruby or a precious-stone
flower that had flown from the building’s interior to wander free around this
construct of perfect symmetry. Her curious eyes stared at us as she heard Tim
saying: “Imagine Kamal saying: ‘Oh, how sweet,’ then throwing it out the window
and saying: ‘I’ve just wasted a day tracking down your carpets. And guess what?
Yes–my clients were more interested in finding out if I’d developed a program
that could help them identify where they get their clients from. Isn’t that
amazing?’”
Chi
didn’t know why we were laughing when she suddenly appeared before us. Neither
did the floating ruby; but Chi was pleased; she had her ticket to Delhi. Her
smile lacked amiability, her pretences to kindness exposed by that syrupy-facade
grin.
“Where’s
the puppy?” Tim asked.
Another
great question. Curiosity emerges from all emotions.
“They
wouldn’t let me bring it in,” she replied, “so I left it in the garden outside
the inner walls. It’ll be better off here because there are more tourists;
someone’ll look after it.”
We
nodded.
“Well,”
she said, “I’m off to look around. See you back in Delhi. I’m going back
tonight.”
She
walked away. Tim’s azure opals shone with blissful scorn.
“I
suspect,” he said, “she believes that stuff about tourists feeding it.”
“She
believes anything,” I said, “that increases her celebrity, which means that she
believes anything.”
Exotic
sounds, resonating behind her black pupils, reverberated unconsciously back to
Saigon.
***
Taj
marble became apricot incandescence under a circular slice of mango sun. The
building’s perfection came from its creator giving testimony to mutual love. His
wife’s sarcophagus lay within. His inspiration had redrawn the blueprint for
beauty.
A woman
in gold and emerald floated before that redrawing, her follicles reflecting
mango light. She floated like a spectre of sensuous evanescence, the marble
classicism behind her reflecting her grace, as if an embodiment of she who had
inspired the building’s creation had come alive before our eyes, my memory’s
tentacles capturing her permanently, a woman, symbolising desirability, who had
pleasantly agitated an idea that had gripped male consciousness aeons before.
We
re-entered the garden inside the outer walls. Vegetation covered the barrier
that kept the beggars and the brash entrepreneurs out. A creature with a hanging
pink tongue was wriggling in a security guard’s hands.
“It’s the
puppy!” Tim said. “She must have walked straight past it when she left!”
I hadn’t
even thought of that!
The guard
left it on the street. Horns and engines accompanied chaotic desperation.
Fat
stench floated in clouds. The dog’s eyes blazed with terror, its tail down. The
door slammed shut behind it. It dashed out onto the road. A rickshaw’s racket
smothered the fizzing of frying fat. The vehicle hit the puppy side on. The dog
spun. Its head hit the ground, its eyes ending up facing away from its
splayed-out legs.
I looked
away from seeing open dead dog eyes facing away from puppy paws. Nothing
stopped. The rushing continued. Tim hissed: “Jeeesuzzz Kerrreist! Tourists will
look after it.”
“Self-absorbed America,” I replied, “leaving again, oblivious of damage reeked.”
***
Silent
darkness engulfed our hotel room. Silhouettes of previously familiar objects sat
in background black. Our heads had once been empty chambers waiting for sight
and sound.
“She’s
going to lead,” I said, “animals into Kamal’s living room, saying: ‘Welcome,
God’s creatures, to Kamal’s Ark.’ And Kamal’s going to say: ‘Oh, Baby, you know
you can’t do this.’ Then she’s going to drop her shoulders, tilt her head and
smile. And everything is going to be so sweet.”
Tim’s
laughter made me smile. His curiosity had given him the means to separate desire
from evidence. Because his laughter cracked like Big-Bang titillation in the
darkness, I asked: “Did an omniscient creature plan her existence?”
“Maybe a
God,” he replied, “who loves eccentric randomness did it.”
“It makes
sense to me: planned, eccentric randomness. How else can you explain her
existence? Even given the psychological pressure to look innocent and sweet, you
know you don’t pick up dogs and expect the people whose house you’re staying in
to accept them. Nobody is intrinsically that stupid. A flippant, omniscient wag
planned it. Randomness by itself just doesn’t have that level of creativity. It
must be the work of a witty wag. It has to be! Tell me, for God’s sake, that
people can’t be this stupid. Perleeeseee! Before I go mad! Mad! Mad! Mad! Give
me some faith, for Christ’s sake!”
The
delight in Tim’s laughter was so pure, it seemed purified by the dome we had
stood under earlier in the day. Tim had been lucky with the sounds that had
entered his dome. Luckier than most.