Reeti was the daughter of the Chief Engineer of the Public Works Department in Patna. I remembered having seen her father’s name in the papers, but couldn’t recall any specific details because one scandal soon gets swallowed up by another. I met Reeti at Stony Brook where we were both new international students, and, when I found out she was from Patna, I had asked her whose daughter she was. With the naïve and often assertive morality that had been a part of my upbringing, I would look at her face, so full of allure, and her beautiful, naked arms, and was surprised that she appeared so entirely untouched by her father’s corruption.

This was more true at the beginning of our friendship. For her part, she was often unconcerned and not the least self-conscious about anything. Each week, I would find scattered about in the apartment or on the dining table pages from a letter written by her father. The words of the letter were arranged in neat blue lines on sheets that, on the back, had words and figures printed on them. Here is an example:

TENDER Information
TR 1977273 Drainage and Embankment Related works in Connection with Proposed Phulwarisharif-Pataliputra Line Bihar 3,50,71,376
TR 1977063 14/12/1998 Hiring of Road Vehicle (TATA SUMO or similar) Bihar Value 6,97,837
TR 1968823 Development of TT Parking Area at Patna LPG Bottling Plant, Gidhha, Bihar. Refer document 8/12/1998.

In Stony Brook, we had been friends for maybe three or four months before becoming lovers. Other Indian students, like Chawla or Rashmi, would talk to Reeti in English, but I didn’t. Kyaa madam, kyaa haal hai? Bahut sundar lag rahin hain aap. She would smile and say, Tum bhi na, ek dum… Once, Perry Anderson came to our university and spoke about the language and politics in South Asia. I got up and asked him if he had thought of Hindi speakers, and speakers of other Indian languages, or whether his understanding was limited to English. Some of my classmates said things like “I liked your intervention” but I was more struck by what Reeti said. “You sound just like my father when he speaks in public.” I felt slightly weird but I knew that this couldn’t be all bad.

Then, it was Holi. To celebrate the festival, the Indian Student Association screened Raincoat. An hour into the movie, I began to weep. It was becoming embarrassing, and I turned to Reeti and said, as if I needed to explain something, “This is like being home again. We never watched movies without crying.” This was true. My father has been a stern, patrician figure, but when we got a TV, he watched the Bombay films and his cheeks were forever wet and glistening. I would look at him and find myself moved, at least when I was younger. And I think my tears and my cheerful confession affected Reeti that night, and she cried too, and in the dark of the theater leaned her head on my shoulder. I did not want the film to end, and in a way it didn’t, because without ever putting it into words, Reeti and I found that we had become lovers.

***

Reeti was a serious student. She never missed any classes and spent long hours at the library reading everything that her professors recommended. When I looked at her, I saw a very bright future ahead for her. I was studying history but I wanted to be a filmmaker. My plan was a simple one: I’d sell the land we had near Barauni, I had no need to be a farmer, and I’d use that money to make a film like Teesri Kasam. Of course, I had no training, and didn’t know how I’d do it, but that was my dream. Unlike Reeti, I didn’t have a straight path joining my present and my future. But I wasn’t too worried. At the Dark Grape, the bar on Eisenhower Road, I had many times put quarters in the jukebox to play Jimmy Cliff singing You Can Get It If You Really Want.

You can get it if you really want
You can get it if you really want
You can get it if you really want
But you must try, try and try
Try and try, you’ll succeed at last

I didn’t go to classes as regularly as Reeti did; I certainly didn’t spend as much time in the library reading till my eyes began to bleed tears. But, nevertheless, I tried to stay true to the idea I had developed about myself—I wrote a little, I watched films (becoming a fan of Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses, which I saw seventeen times), and I began living with Reeti.

Reeti told her parents that she had found the person she would marry. It was a natural, uncomplicated feeling, which she accepted without ambivalence or doubt. I can honestly say that the discovery of this love, a love that stretched around me like the open sky, made me feel sometimes that I hadn’t left home. And yet, I was not wholly satisfied.

Perhaps I wanted to be like Antoine in Stolen Kisses: when he is discharged and comes back to Paris, Antoine’s girlfriend Christine no longer loves him, at least not for a long time. Although this happened in a movie, I felt that is how it was supposed to be in real life. In real life, love was a mess. And by that count, I wasn’t living the real life. Reeti’s love for me was so steadfast, so unlike what movies and books told me life was all about, that I almost resented it.

When I met Janet, who was a documentary film-maker from Los Angeles, it struck me that instead of a feature film I might want to make a documentary in Bihar. I decided I wanted to shoot the elephants that were sold at the Sonepur fair. Who bought those elephants? Who sold them?

The old zamindars were gone, their sprawling homes on their estates now decayed or turned into crumbling government offices. The landlords had maintained elephants as a symbol of sorts. They were used during weddings for the bridegroom’s baraat, and during floods although there was danger in that. Or when a car got caught in mud or slipped into a canal, but now there were tractors that did the job. What place did those pachyderms have in our modern society?

When I mentioned this idea one summer day to Janet—describing in detail how, when I was a boy, I had seen my grandfather bringing back bullocks from Sonepur, their hides and horns painted in bright colors—she announced that she would come with me. “You’ll need some help with the equipment, my friend,” she said with a smile. My eyes dropped to her feet, and I pretended to be looking at the tattoo on her right ankle. She said, “Do you think Reeti will be all right with it?”

“Why not?” I said, but already afraid that I had hit a wall. In the end, unwilling to make anything big out of it, I didn’t say anything to Reeti till the last week. I saw from the look on her face that she was puzzled. She said, “Is anyone else going with you two?”

On the way to Sonepur, we spent a night in Patna. My parents had no reason to doubt or question my statement that Janet was a film-maker and was here to help me on a project. She slept in her own room, of course. I would now and then put my arm on her shoulder, as when we were crossing a road, but there was no physical contact otherwise. Still, I felt guilty that I had come without Reeti. I made it a point to go without her to Reeti’s house. She had sent an electric toaster, a shirt, and two bottles of perfume. Her mother said, “Why didn’t you bring her with you?” Her father put his hand on the shirt, shiny in its Brooks Brothers box, and asked, “She didn’t send a letter?”

***

Sonepur was only an hour away from Patna, but I didn’t want to come back. I found a two-story hotel not too far from the fair, and checked into two rooms next to each other. The hotel was a modest affair but it was new and freshly painted. It didn’t serve any food on the premises and the carpets and walls didn’t smell stale. The fair was on the banks of the Ganga and a rickshaw took us there. The man at the hotel had said we’d find the elephants near the bank, often being washed, and it turned out to be true. They lay on their sides, lazily plopping their trunks in and out of the grey water. The sun had peeled away all the mist that had greeted us in the morning; all around us, there was the smell of dust and marijuana. A man was shouting or chanting on the loudspeaker, asking whether we wanted to kill all the seven generations of bedbugs in our homes. He had the medicine if we hurried.

Janet asked me whether I’d mind if she started shooting some footage of the elephants. She rolled up her trousers to her knees and stepped into the water. More people gathered to look at her than those who had stood around watching the elephants. The exercise filled her with energy. When she came out of the water, she said she wanted to explore. She let the camera stay on as she panned over the young women buying ribbons and bangles that glinted brightly in the sun. We saw sadhus with matted hair, quacks, sickly looking Pomeranians, lizards in small cages, women who were getting their ears cleaned. Late in the afternoon, Janet found a stall that billed itself as a drama company, but it was actually nothing more than a makeshift brothel. A Bollywood number was playing on a tape player and five Nepali girls, all teenagers, were rocking to the music. Men sat on chairs and drank toddy and country liquor. She said, “You might have found your subject.” I looked at the girls, and then the men. None of them would speak to us, I was sure of that. Then, Janet moved away, drawn by the sight of two peacocks, with long, lustrous tails. The birds had thin metal chains around their feet and were tied to a peepal tree. An old man sitting beneath the tree was waiting for a customer. Janet took the camera to the birds. She had found in the camera the passport to enter India.

The elephants, we found out, were there to be sold primarily to the officials from the Forest Department. The driver of our jeep pointed to a dwarf and said that the man was actually very rich, he owned a circus, and he would buy an elephant or two for his business. Janet thought if we followed the dwarf it would make an interesting documentary but it would be grotesque in a Diane Arbus kind of way. She was clear that she wouldn’t let me do it.

But she didn’t think there was anything grotesque in filming the Nepali girls from the drama company. On the second day, she proposed that we also film two young girls, maybe teenagers, who had come to the fair from a nearby village to buy something they wouldn’t have got anywhere else. But I nixed the idea. Partly because I felt it would be much better to keep the focus on the Nepali dancers, and, if it became necessary, to splice contrasting footage from the dance sequences in Teesri Kasam. Also, I thought I couldn’t let Janet determine everything that was going to happen in my film. This was not the reason why she had come to India.

In any event, the result of my irritation was that a quality of callousness came into my dealings with Janet. The old feeling that someone owed me something returned to me, and I surrendered to it. I became determined that I would like to see Janet naked. She had a thin body and small breasts. She wore her hair high in a pony tail, and on that second day in Sonepur I knotted a red ribbon in her hair. I had picked it up from a seller’s cart, a gaudy piece with golden brocade stitched to it. When she began to laugh, I also took a bindi and pressed it on her forehead. Tilting her chin up, I brushed my lips against her face and said, “You look nice.”

After that, I went back to the hotel and slept. For a while I lay facedown in bed and imagined Janet under me. She was still at the fair; I had felt unsure about leaving her alone there, but she had said she’d be okay. I gave the driver of our Jeep a fifty-rupee note and said he should drink tea if he felt sleepy. He was to keep an eye on Janet and not let anyone molest her.

That night, I was very happy when we returned to the hotel. This was because while I had been taking my long nap, Janet had spoken to the driver of our Jeep and he had asked the dancing girls about their manager. Janet found him and arranged for us to have a conversation with the girls on camera. The manager claimed he was the uncle of one of the girls; he was dirty and unshaven, but he spoke English, and this impressed Janet. It became apparent to her that all the girls referred to that guy as Uncle. She didn’t understand why they didn’t call him their pimp. She wanted me to ask the girls such questions, and I asked her what she had told the man. She said, “Oh, I was careful. I told him we were interested in the dancing.” We would record their dancing, she had told him, and then suggested that there was money in it.

The girls had been waiting when we reached their tent. A few customers had already gathered to watch them, but the girls seemed unconcerned about this. I asked them questions and they ignored the camera being handled by Janet. Our talk didn’t reveal much but we had established a rapport. In the coming days, we would be able to do much more. The girls giggled a lot, and they stroked Janet’s arms and feet. They told her they loved the ribbon in her hair. It made her look like a Bollywood star.

I had let our driver take the evening off because he was interested in watching a film. We took a rickshaw back to the hotel, and on the ride back, I thanked Janet for having arranged the interview. This time, when she turned to smile at me, I kissed her on the mouth.

When we were back at the hotel, a surprise awaited me. Janet had put the afternoon in the market to use. She had bought tomatoes and given it to the wife of the guy who manned the register downstairs: after sautéing onions and garlic, the woman had added the tomatoes and allowed them to simmer in water. The soup was in an aluminum pot, to be heated on an electric coil heater. We ate it with warm rotis. Janet said she had had this fantasy about this simple meal the moment her eyes had fallen on the fresh tomatoes.

Then, once we had begun to kiss in earnest, she asked me to wait and took out from this little paper-bag fashioned out of a Hindi newspaper, a packet of condoms. The brand she had bought was Nirodh whose red-and-yellow ads had been a part of my childhood. (Ah, the nostalgia for one’s past! Even when cheating on a part of that past that is one’s lover!) While it was true that I had earlier harbored thoughts about being brutal with Janet, at that moment I felt only tenderness. It was not so much carnality I felt as much as warm caring, and it made the experience of fucking Janet so much sweeter and, surprisingly, without guilt.

I had planned to stay in Sonepur for a week. Work was going well. Each day and even during the night, we shot footage: we had gone with one of the Nepali girls to a doctor; two of them had decided to buy a puppy and we went around with them, looking at all that was on offer at the fair till they selected a four-month-old black terrier; one night there was a fire in another section of the grounds when an electric spark set aflame sheets of plastic and then a section of bamboo fencing. Once, we were shooting one the youngest girls making a phone call at the STD booth to her elder sister, and I asked the owner if he also had an international line. Could I call Reeti in America? He said yes but then I decided not to.

On our fifth night, a Friday, when we had eaten and made love, I was awakened by the sound of knocking on a door. It was the door across from us on the other side of the corridor: I had earlier seen a short, dark man wearing a white baniyan and lungi coming out with a bottle of water. Then I heard my name. Light seeped in from under the door. The man called out my name again. It was Girish, the man who sat downstairs at the counter, but there was someone else talking to him. I began to put on some clothes.

Standing outside with Girish was Reeti’s father and another man I had not met before. I brought my hands together in greeting. Had they first been knocking on the door of the other room, the one in which Janet was supposed to be staying? They must have noticed the lock on the door. Had they got a message for her? That was the first thought that came to me. I thought, perhaps too hopefully, that someone had needed to get in touch with Janet urgently. They had contacted Reeti, who had then called her father. I said, “Is everything okay? So late…?”

Reeti’s father parted the curtain and nodded to the man with him who tried to step inside. But I stopped him. I said, “One minute…”

Reeti’s father only said, “Why?”

I said, “There are other people here. Let’s go into the other room.” The key to the other room was on the small desk inside, but I didn’t want to leave my post at the door. Janet had been lying naked in bed. All the conversation had so far been in Hindi, and she wouldn’t have understood what was going on. Had she had the sense to slip on a t-shirt?

I saw that even Girish looked curious.

Then, a few seconds later, there was Janet beside me. She had come out to see what the matter was. She was wearing a simple gray sweater and pajamas. Her hair was in a ponytail. Once she had appeared at the door, Reeti’s father said, “Excuse me,” and pushed past her into the room. His sidekick quickly followed him inside. But there was nothing to see. A bed with woolen blankets where, till recently, two people were sleeping. Two open suitcases. A video camera and a still camera. Some small yellow bananas. Janet’s blue jeans and a red ribbon draped on a chair.

Janet said, “What do they want?”

Reeti’s father said to her, in English, “What’s your name?”

She said, “Who are you?” and then, turning again to me, “What do they want?”

The previous night we had shot footage of sadhus beside a campfire smoking dope from fat chillums. At one point, one of them, an old sadhu with grey hair still thick on his head and his eyes twinkling, had given his fragrant bong to Janet. And she, smiling, full of assurance, had sucked on it. Instead of returning it to its owner, she had passed on the chillum to me. I had half-tried to give it back to the sadhu but he said it was God’s gift and I shouldn’t refuse it. When I pulled on it, I thought of Reeti. For some reason, I thought I should call her. Rather, I felt that I should have called her during all these days I had been in Sonepur. It was as if she had ceased to exist for me. I froze. I found that my thinking had become blocked, and then wondered if it was the dope that had done something to me. I looked at Janet. She seemed unaffected. With a smile on her face, she had put the camera to her eye and kept it rolling, chasing the smoke as it spiraled into the mango leaves above.

Reeti’s father said, “So this is the research you are doing?”

I tried to look offended. I said, “I have been shooting every day.”

He said, “I came because Reeti called this evening. It must have been early morning there.

“She was very worried because she had received no word from you. I don’t think she had slept.

She asked, has he fallen sick, does he have diarrhea?”

I didn’t look at Janet. She must have heard the English word “diarrhea”.

Reeti’s father said, “She had this thought that you were lying sick somewhere in a room, stinking in your own shit, but it is clear that you are smelling roses here.”

For a moment, I asked myself if he was going to ask his men to bundle me into his car. What would they do with Janet? But he turned and walked away. They were gone. I even saw Girish turn the light off in the stairwell. Back in the room, I let out my anger and it took me a minute to notice that Janet was not responding at all. I realized she didn’t yet know who the visitors were. I told her, and then apologized to her. I said, “Let’s go back to bed.”

But she didn’t move.

***

Three years have passed. I learned from a woman who was also in school with us that Reeti is married. She took her lover home to Patna and they were joined in a traditional Hindu ceremony under a mandap. The man she married was someone I knew slightly, a big, light-haired grad student named Doug Tauscher. The person who was telling me this, Nandini, who had been in sociology with Reeti, said that Doug was doted upon by everyone in Patna. He fell sick during the trip; he got diarrhea, and Reeti’s parents treated him like a son. Nandini said, “Reeti’s mother washed Doug’s underwear.” Who had told her all this? Reeti? I asked these questions to myself, but I was also happy for Reeti.

When I came back from India that time, when I had gone there with Janet, I had only had one question in mind: Would Reeti’s father have said anything to Reeti about what he had seen in the hotel room? Not only because there was something shameful about having to tell one’s daughter about her boyfriend’s infidelity but also because he was a man who flouted laws, made illicit deals, and was perhaps quite comfortable with human failings. But when I got back, Reeti had already moved out of the apartment. She was polite with me when we met, but there was no going back. And I didn’t feel the urge too strongly either; I could see in her eyes that it was all over. I didn’t seek out Janet either, though we met over several beers and talked about the work we had done in Sonepur. When I raised some grant money and hired an editor, I didn’t call Janet to discuss the footage. We never mentioned having slept with each other while we were together in India.

All of this came back tonight because I was rubbing a muscle relaxant on my back. I don’t know how I strained it, but it’s been hurting like hell. When I rubbed the ointment on my skin, the smell transported me to those small, overheated rooms of my childhood. I was visiting an old relative in the winter. The door opened and I entered a room where the windows were shut and the walls were dark. A figure was on bed, wearing a maroon sweater, with one or two blankets covering the bed. On the floor there was a single-coil heater and the room had an air of overcrowding. Even in the middle of a sentence, I could feel something huge tilting down and about to crash on me. But the defining feature was the sharp smell of the muscle relaxant in the room. Nothing from the outside world was going to come inside, nor was anything ever likely to leave. I’m not making excuses for what happened with Reeti. However, it has become clear to me in these three years that whatever I have done has been a way of escaping that room.