Vikram Chandra - Red Earth and Pouring Rain

So what else is left to tell? My parents were called in to talk to my teachers, and I spent a lot of my evenings getting counseled by their professional friends. I didn’t need the counseling but it made them feel better, and I guess I got a sort of quick lab course in The Problems and Questions of Modern Psychiatric Science. Schoolwise I struggled to catch up and Mrs. Christiansen gave me back my gnarly term paper on Ethan Brand with what I think was an overly kind B+. My grades that last semester weren’t so hot but Pomona had already accepted me and I didn’t screw up really badly enough for them to go through the hassle of canning me at that late date. Sarah and I went to the senior prom together and slow-danced defiantly to each and every song. And the last time I saw Mercy Fuller Cunningham was at the end of the summer when Ling and I were doing our ritual good-bye to the video store at the mall. We wanted to do one last huge bad movie marathon, so here we are stacking up Frantic and Conan the Barbarian and Barbarella , and I have just had the incredible good luck to stumble on Genghis Khan , with John Wayne as Genghis, when Mercy walks in with some guy. Now at this point I haven’t really seen her for a while, because I’ve been allowed to skip AP English. I guess they figured I might start attacking her or reciting sonnets at her, so they played it safe. So now Mercy freezes between DRAMA and HORROR, her mouth opens and closes a couple of times, and then I say, totally cool and nearly suave, “Looking for a movie, Mercy?”

“Yes,” she says.

So I pick up a movie at random from my side of the aisle and hand it to her, and say, “Here, try this.”

She takes it and looks even more uncomfortable, and the guy, who is handsome, I have to admit, who I haven’t ever seen before, is starting to suss out that some weird vibrations are clanging about his head, and I can see he’s trying to decide whether he should be bitterly funny or violently hostile, so I say, “Have fun. See you later.”

Ling and I stroll off through the check-out gate and when we’re outside in the mall she turns to me.

“Did you see what you gave her?” she says.

“No.”

“The old King Kong .”

We both start laughing even though it isn’t that good, but we crack up and get caught by it until we start staggering from side to side, disrupting traffic and so on, and the security guys start to loom toward us, so we sit on a circular bench and hold our stomachs. I stop before she does, and I sit and watch her unhook her glasses from behind her ears and carefully wipe her eyes with a folded white handkerchief. All around us there is the glint of glass, polished stone, anonymous hordes of teenagers, concrete, I can feel a cold draft on the back of my neck. I see very clearly the thickness of her hair, the wideness of her cheekbones and the small nose, the fold at her eyes. I ask: “Ling, how do you deal with all this shit?”

She shrugs, looking, without her glasses, more gentle than I have ever seen her. “Draw water, cut wood.”

I have fallen in love again, after that, not once but more than once. I have, but now I’ve also learned the necessity of rakish irony. I cradle breasts in my hand, and tip them to my lips, but I do it with a certain dashing expertise. I’ve learned that what we know, and what we tell each other, and what we think we must believe doesn’t make one damn bit of difference to anything. So I forgive people, or perhaps I pardon myself. When I hear, “Attempted Robbery at Kroger’s,” I forgive. I read, “Father Kills Son and then Self,” I shudder and forgive. I forgive “Mother of Three in Death Pact, Councilman on Embezzlement Charges.” When they, all of us, move in inadvertent weekend caravans across the country, wagon-training to there to get away from here, I forgive, when they roar past me in their Transam with its firebird on the hood, tires tearing the road, eyes fixed eternally on the horizon.

When I awoke, the Jaguar was squeezed between a pick-up truck and a large black motorcycle, in front of a low white building. I pulled myself out of the car and leaned against it, trying to work my muscles out of their night-long cramp. Tom was sitting on a low wall that ran round the parking lot, his knees drawn up, pulling on a cigarette.

“Oy, Majnoon,” I called.

He turned toward me, the smoking hand in front of his face. “What the fuck?”

“Majnoon,” I said, feeling embarrassed. The building hid us in deep shadow, but I could feel the heat from the sunlight a few feet away. “Majnoon. He was a Great Lover. Literally means ‘mad.’”

“What the fuck?” But behind the hand he was smiling a little now.

Amanda came toward us, shielding her eyes. “Come on,” she said.

I slammed a door on the Jaguar and we fell in behind her. In her right hand she held a wallet and in her left two keys on huge brass tags. Tom raised an eyebrow at me. The motel was laid in two half-circles, with a ragged lawn in between. We walked across the grass, and then Amanda stopped in front of a door marked “8” and tossed a key at Tom.

“See you later,” she said to Tom, taking my hand.

“Bye, Majnoon,” I said. He smiled.

Amanda and I walked down the row to nine. Inside, I went into the shower first, came out in a towel and lay on the bed, waiting for Amanda. By the time she slipped in beside me, close, her back against my chest and hair wet on my face, I had already gone in and out of a dream. She took my hand and pulled it around, laying it on her chest, over her heart, and held it there. We lay like that for a time and then we were asleep.

I awoke out of another dream, of what I do not remember, and we were already making love. I tugged off her T-shirt and she reached down and found me, then guided me into her, we moved frantically against each other, her nails in my shoulder and small exhalations at my ear. When we finished I rolled over and she moved with me, her knees still tight and hurting against my sides, we lay like that for a long time, and then like a knot coming apart we relaxed against each other. Still, there was a pulse in my chest that beat and raced painfully, and I looked about the room in the darkness, trying to remember where I was. We kissed now slowly and I rubbed her back, moving the muscles gently under my fingers, and she said, “Oh, that feels good.” Finally we slept again and I didn’t dream.

In the morning I sat outside on the steps, drinking Coke out of a red can. The sky turned colors over the buildings, and far down the street a lone woman in red, yellow hair, tottered over the sidewalks in high heels. Coming home, I thought, going home.

WE HAD A CHILDBIRTH during the story-telling last night. It is said that a woman, not even a listener, but a hugely-overdue passer-by on her way home from the hospital, paused to listen to the distant echo from the other end of the maidan, which at that distance was comprehensible only in part, and felt suddenly the twinging onset of labour. She was taken back to the hospital, where she gave birth to healthy triplets, three girls. Of course this woman’s name is not known, nor the name of the hospital she was taken to, but everybody has an uncle who knows somebody who knows the family. Now the whole town is said to be ringing with this news, and tomorrow we are expecting expecting mothers from all over the district, and soon our maidan will be filled to overflowing with fecundity.

Meanwhile I have seen translations being sold, or rather re-tellings of our stories in other languages, written by hand and copied on cheap coloured paper by indigent clerks and retired bureaucrats. This money-making scheme bothers me not at all, but Abhay seemed to be a little upset by the extrapolations and additions that these re-tellers have sprinkled throughout the text, and he muttered darkly about copyright laws.