Girl in Shades (30 page)

“Ah, Christ, why'd you have to do that?” he says, reaching for some paper towel. “I'm only halfway finished.”

“I just need to get a drink of water and splash my face.”

“Feel free.” He points to the sink at the back of the room. I slide off the table and walk until my mouth hangs open over the running tap. Rusty water slides down my throat. I look up at myself in the mirror. I'm in my bra, my eyes are puffy slits, my hair has matted around my face, and my lips are dry and cracked.

This is not me.

On the left side of my chest, two black letters have formed in the middle of red blotches. “M” and “A.” MA. Two black letters that weren't there when I woke up this morning, or when I went to my final English class, when Mr. Henry wished us “all the best for the future and a million bright tomorrows,” or when Alicia Silver wrote “Wish I had gotten to know you better” in my yearbook. No, these letters, this drunk girl in the mirror, this is not me. I splash my face with water but I don't go away.

“You ready, girl?” the tattoo man asks me, and at that moment I know that I am. Something is different. I walk back to the table.

“I changed my mind. I want the last two letters to be Y and A, not R and I.”

“So you want me to finish it with ‘YA'?”

“Yeah, finish it with ‘YA.'”

“All right, lie back on the table.”

Buffy and Aunt Leah are still awake when I put my key in the lock of the apartment door. It's 2 a.m. They are sitting in the living room, across from each other.

“Maya, you're back!” Aunt Leah says when I push open the door. “Look, I'm sorry, kid. I should have been way more sensitive to you.” I sit on the floor between them.

“Maya, have you been drinking?” Buffy says first. “You smell like booze.”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I have been drinking.”

“Oh gosh,” Aunt Leah says, her voice high and screechy. “I drove you to drink! This is all my fault.”

“I got my name tattooed on my chest.” I pull my collar down and peel the gauze to show her.

“So you did . . .” Aunt Leah says, for lack of anything else.

“Did it hurt?” Buffy asks.

“Not really, I was drunk.” We sit in a triangle, in silence. Until I decide to speak again. “I want to go to India.” Aunt Leah picks up the ticket and hands it to me.

“We want you to go to India,” she says.

“But I spent my spending money on this tattoo. I'm sorry.”

“We'll get you some more, Maya,” Buffy says. “I'll get you some more.”

That night Buffy's voice comes back. Her nighttime voice. Her voice that speaks from her mind and doesn't even need an open mouth. Before I hear the words, the blackness above my head starts to fill with colour: pinks and oranges, greens and blues, zipping around when I close my eyes and when I open them too. And in the middle, Buffy's thoughts.
Find your family
, she says.

My plane slips between the clouds, down, down, and onto the parched beige land below. Ten minutes on the tarmac makes my eyeballs ache and the inside of my mouth start to sweat. Entire families scurry up and down the aisles, pushing small children towards the washroom, while old women in leather sandals limp behind. Beside me, a fat man in a business suit snores with his hands crossed on his large belly, the smell of onion blowing out from between his parted lips. The air inside the cabin grows thicker with every minute, curry lingers in the air from the in-flight meal, the plastic door from the bathroom continues to slam shut after use.

If they don't let us out soon, I may not make it out at all.

As I slip my arm out of my zip-up sweatshirt (useful when the air conditioning was on), I hear the door slide back at the front of the plane. The people in the aisles move towards the front, all of them murmuring frantically in words I can't understand. A man puts his fingers flat on another man's back and pushes him forward. This causes the man to throw his body backwards, pushing the first man to the ground. They argue. The man's wife helps him up, then adjusts her pink sari and looks towards the floor. Where have I sent myself? I rub my fingertips over the flat stones in my hand and imagine my mother holding my other hand.

I'm sure she would have quoted something from the
Gita
at this point, and tried to change the subject when I asked her what it meant.

“It just means you can get through anything,” she may have said if I persisted.

Buffy would say the same thing.

I make it into the Delhi airport, which is like a large warehouse packed solid with people: people yelling, people hurrying, people throwing bags and boxes around with no apparent system. I clutch the backpack Aunt Leah helped me pick out at Mountain Equipment Co-op. She made me sew a Canadian flag to the outside as well, as if that hasn't been done before.

“People respect Canadians,” she had told me. “You'll get treated better.”

But this isn't a sightseeing trip. I do not care how others perceive me, or if I get a discounted fare somewhere. I am here for one reason only: to meet my real father.

I find the place where I think my bag will be spit out and wait. Men stare at me — tall men, short men, dirty men, men with beards, men with long noses and greasy hands. Their eyes run up and down my body as I try to create a protective ball of light around myself. Their thoughts are loud, in other languages, and not coated with respect of any kind.

Where have I sent myself?

I think back to Buffy's directions spoken at a coffee shop in Pearson Airport. “Get to New Delhi. Take a taxi to the address on the paper. Find your grandfather, Raj Ghosh — he will take you to where your father is.”

I look at the paper in my hand. A scrap pulled from the junk mail pile, there's an advertisement for steam cleaning on the other side. An address: 13 Brahma Road.

After picking up my duffle bag, I push myself through the crowd and out towards the curb outside the airport. A huge crowd waits for taxis on the street. Families, children, the staring men. Babies cry out in frustration and are hushed by stern voices. I feel hands slide down my shoulder, on my back, and across my breasts as I walk. Though their thoughts are in a different language, I still get a clear sense of what they're thinking — dirty things about my breasts and ass. I slap them away like I'm swatting hungry mosquitoes.

A young English couple takes pity on me and invites me to share their airport limo into town. I only smile while they chat about their impending yoga retreat and the peace it will bring them. I don't talk, because I don't think I am able to at this point. They stop and drop me on a busy street in New Delhi. I thank them with a nod and emerge into the outside air.

The smell hits me first. Armpits, burning garbage, incense floating in dust, one combined smell like nothing that has entered my nose before. It chokes itself down and churns up my stomach. I cover my face with my hand, trying to avoid the smoky air and breathe in only that which is on my palm. I feel small and insignificant against the many faded signs above me for travel companies and sandwich meat, the dark boys pedalling rickshaws, the thin men without helmets on motorcycles and the tiny half-yellow, half-green vehicles with no doors screeching by in furious streaks.

Men touch their hands to the heads of emaciated cows as they pass, kiss their fingers and then touch their own heads. Women squat in the dirt while their urine creates yellow rivers that intersect on the ground. I look down at my sandals to see my toes already covered with grime from the street.

There's a monkey looking at me now. Sitting on a curb, silky grey, with a black face and sagging nipples. I smile at the way he crosses his feet in front of him like a person.

“Hello, little monkey.” These are the first real words I have managed to say since I got off the plane. They stumble out of the dryness in my throat. I take a step towards the beast, which is watching me. He holds out his palm for a handout. I reach out to grab his hand when I hear a voice: “Don't touch him!” It's a cab driver, and he's laughing. “Those monkeys will bite you if you don't watch it.”

“Oh, sorry,” I say to him. His face is hidden inside the dark cab.

“Don't be sorry to me. You want a ride?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, please.” I walk towards the car, which is dirty, old, no bumper, paint chipping. I sit in the back seat; the cracks in the upholstery cut at my legs. I can see the man's face in the rearview window: shiny skin, dark eyebrows, white teeth under brown lips. A strong face. A calm face. “I'm going to this address.” I hand the piece of paper over the seat and the man looks at it and nods. Then he revs the engine and we jerk to a start. He plows the car through the crowd of people, who scatter like ants on a sidewalk.

“Where you from?” the driver asks without turning his head. His words are thick and even.

“Canada,” I say.

“Ahh, Canada. I have a brother living in Brampton. Canada took him and I haven't seen him for over ten years.”

“Too bad,” I say, my hand still covering my nose. The man nods again and turns up the radio. A hectic melody of sitars and flutes scratches out of the speaker. That's all I hear until we arrive.

“It's that one there,” he says pointing and I hand him the money. “Welcome to the mystical land of India.” He laughs again and is still laughing when I shut the door and step out onto the street.

The house spreads out flat in front of me, beige and red brick, all one level and surrounded by a black gate that I push in and walk through. A path leads me to the front door. For once, I can't even hear my own thoughts. I have been dropped into India, into a moment with no end and no beginning. I knock on the door. It seems to open instantly.

What I notice first is the colour around his body, clean and bright, yellows and purples. Then, it's his white beard, long and fluffed up into a smile over his neck. He's mostly bald on top and his wrinkled forehead creates arrows that point down to his wide nose. He wears rectangular-framed glasses and his eyes are dark like deep Ontario lakes. His body, draped in white, hunches over a cane that he clutches with bony knuckles.

“Maya, I presume.” His voice wraps round me like a blanket and before I can say anything I start to cry, then sob, then moan, my hands rubbing my eyes, tears streaming down my cheeks. He stands in front of me on the doorstep, watching me and smiling, and reaches one hand up and places it on my shoulder. “Come in, my dear.” He points into the house and I follow him.

Though the rooms inside are quite large, there is not much furniture. Only a table when it might be needed and a chair for resting by a window. I think, what a large house for one old man, if indeed he does live alone. There is no kitchen like I'm used to, just an open area in the centre of the house with no roof and a small area for cooking. By the time he has seated me in a wooden armchair in a sitting room, I have not seen evidence of anyone else in the house.

“It is only the stress of your long journey that is making this reaction in you.” He coughs into his hand. “Once you sleep through the night you will feel much better.” He hands me a green cup filled with water, which I take and sip down.

“It was a long time flying.” He nods and smiles, lowering himself to a pillow on the floor. “Do you live here all alone?”

“Yes, all alone, just me.”

“No wife?”

“No, no, my wife and I were divorced many, many years ago.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot. And she died from a brain aneurism.”

“That's right.” The old man coughs again and rubs his thin fingers on his chest. “I guess she had nothing to live for once we were not together.” I look at him. He smiles, with teeth this time, and laughs so that the phlegm dances around in his lungs, creating crackles. “I'm kidding with you,” he says, and I'm glad for it.

“And is it true that you are my grandfather?”

“You tell me that. Are you my granddaughter?”

“I think so.”

“Then yes, let's make it so. You are my long-lost granddaughter, Maya Devine, and I am your grandfather, Raj.” He pulls an orange from a hidden pocket and digs his thumb into its skin, pulling pieces and piling them beside him on the floor. When the orange is naked he holds it up to offer it to me.

“No, thank you. I am not hungry yet.”

“Suit yourself.” He breaks the orange apart and feeds the slices between his lips, swallowing them down with only a few chomps of his wrinkled jaw.

“I do need to use the washroom though.” My grandfather's face lights up.

“Ahh, you will be happy to know that when I retired from the university ten years ago, I did myself the privilege of installing a flush toilet in my home. This will make it much more comfortable for you.” He grasps my arm and walks me down a hall. I stop to look into a small room decorated with shiny paintings of Hindu gods; they sit on lotus flowers and have trunks for noses and many arms reaching out to the side. Around the room are unlit candles and plants clinging to the walls.

“C'mon, Maya,” Grandfather says from further down the hall. “I'm an old man. I don't have all day.” He chuckles in his throat and I follow him to the toilet.

After the sun sets we eat dinner together at a wooden table. I help him cook rice and curried chickpeas on the stove, even though he told me to relax and recuperate from the jet lag.

“So you lived in Canada then?” I ask him when we are eating.

“Yes, in Toronto, for twenty years. I taught courses in Indian History and Sanskrit at the University of Toronto.”

“Have you ever read the
Bhagavad Gita
?” His eyes widen at my question and his cheeks puff up in glee.

“My dear, I do not mean to be immodest, but I studied the
Gita
when I went to university in Calcutta and taught on the subject later on at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I think you will find me to be one of Delhi's premier experts on the study of the
Bhagavad Gita
and the
Mahabharata
in general. In my younger days, before being invited to Canada, I even wrote a book on the subject. A collection of essays on the
Gita
.”

“What about?”

“Oh, fascinating topics like whether Mahatma Gandhi was correct in his view that the
Gita
was an allegorical demonstration of the conflict between knowledge and ignorance.” I stick out my lip and nod my head like I know what he's talking about. “And the idea that an individual life is part of a grander reality which lies beyond human perception.”

“So you've read it then.”

“Many times.”

“My mother used to read it too.”

He puts his fork down on his empty plate, weaves his fingers like he is praying and settles his dark eyes on mine. “From what your aunt told me on the phone, your mother had much strength, strength to live with secrets, to deal with a serious illness.”

“I guess. Will you tell me about my father?” I correct myself: “About the man that I have heard is my father?”

“Ah, yes — my son, Amar, a sweet gift from his mother. He has a soul unattached to the mundane expectations of earthly life.”

“What is he like?”

“The day my son was born, everything else stopped in my world. It was only about him from then on. I was extremely lucky, you know, because even though his mother had graduated from the University of Toronto with an English degree, she still agreed to stay home and raise my son. Even though this was a big deal, for a woman in the thirties to graduate with a degree, she gave it all up to be a mother to Amar, and I am thankful for that.”

“Did you have other children?” I say. Grandfather Raj takes off his glasses and places them on the table.

“No other children, no. We tried though. Ivy wanted them desperately, but Amar was our one and only miracle. She never really accepted that, however. I think she resented me for it, to her death even.”