Girl in Shades (32 page)

“I wasn't myself because of the death of my own mother. Death can cause a person to fall asleep. I met your mother, with her flowing auburn hair and her green eyes and skin so soft all over her body. Your mother's innocence and nervousness almost made me forget about it all. But I couldn't in the end.”

“So you left?”

“I didn't know there was a baby after. I didn't know there was you. Maybe it was better that way?”

“You hurt her very much.”

“I'm sorry. To you and your mother.”

People are shouting out from around the fire. The man that Grandfather Raj and I first met with the pipe shakes and convulses on the ground, rocks and sticks creating lines of blood on his bare back.

“Is he all right?” I ask Amar. “Is he having a seizure?” Amar points to his own hairy stomach.

“God is inside him,” he says and from inside his head he tells me again:
I'm sorry for not being there for you.

When the man, whose name turns out to be Gaur, is revived, he lies flat on the ground while others tend to him by putting a cloth on his head and feeding rice through his lips.

“He'll be all right,” Amar assures me and we lie down together on the ground beside the fire.

“But why do any of us have to be here at all?” I shiver under my fleece sweatshirt.

“You are surrounded in the purple light of your crown chakra right now,” Amar says. “And that is a good place to be.” He stands up and soon I feel a blanket fall over me. I am the warmest I have ever been, even when the rain starts, when water pounds on my back through cloth and into my skin. Even when I wake up freezing cold at 4 a.m., I have never felt more at home.

Two years pass before I think about returning to Grandfather Raj in New Delhi.

“Maya, gorgeous, your breakfast is ready.” My mother's voice wakes me from sleep, her warm hand on my arm. “Your father is already eating, so come out whenever you feel ready.”

I open my eyes into cool inside air. Logs stacked beside each other make the walls around me, a small wrought iron bed in the corner of an empty room. A blanket hangs over the doorway instead of a door, a yellow and red wool blanket, still swinging from when my mother left the room. My toes slip out from under the dense comforter and onto the wood floor. I push the door blanket aside and see them sitting at a table — smiling, touching hands, memorizing one another's eyes. My mother, Marigold McCann, and the man she has told me is my father, Amar Ghosh.

Amar eats chickpea curry and rice, his dark hair pulled back into a silky ponytail. He's laughing at a joke I must have missed. His face dances without wrinkles, his shoulders bounce themselves into stillness.

“Well, hello, sleepyhead,” he says when he sees me, his long fingers clasped in front of him like he's praying for something. “We thought you would never wake up. It's almost noon.” Their smiles join into one long grin. I rub my knuckles over my eyes and pinch the skin on my arm, squeezing only numbness.

“Look at that!” my mother yells, tripping on her fuzzy housecoat as she runs towards the window. “A hummingbird! Finally there is a hummingbird using the feeder I put out.” Her face glows and rainbow light dances around her pink skin. Locks of hair drop down her back like an auburn waterfall. She looks to be about twenty, same age as me.

Amar stands up and hugs my mom from behind, pulling her to him and stroking her hair. “I told you, Marigold, I told you they would come if we were patient.”

The sun coats the skin on their faces, making them both the colour of gold.

And then the light goes away. Something is wrong. I see it first in his hair. Amar's ponytail starts to drip black spots onto the floor, and then the rest of his body grows smaller, spreading onto the ground, fading.

He's melting.

My mother turns from the hummingbird when she no longer feels him touching her. When she sees him, now a puddle on the kitchen floor, she screams. My blood stops from the pitch of it. She falls to the floor and hugs her knees into her chest.

“Why, why, why,” she chants like a monk and I join her.

“Why, why, why,” we moan together.

And then a voice from my bedroom, familiar, distant, formal: “Maya, don't drink it.”

“Drink what?” I say over my mother's whining.

“Mari, you can't let her drink it.” It's my father's voice. My father as I knew him: Steven Devine.

“Stop it, stop it!” I yell to him. “I said I didn't want to see you!”

“But I only want to help you,” he says in a monotone and then steps out from behind the doorframe. He looks young, like I have never seen him, his hair shaved close to his scalp, body lean, his blue eyes wide like a child's. “I only wanted to tell you not to drink that.” He points to the table, to a large baby bottle filled with milk. “Mari's mother put something in it, Maya. She wants to get rid of you. Please don't drink it.”

“I wasn't planning to,” I say and he lifts one corner of his mouth into a half smile.

Mother still moans and cries on the floor. She turns her head to look at us standing over her and then closes her mouth, creating silence in the room. Then she stands and walks towards the counter. She takes a knife from the drawer and looks me in the eyes. I feel her hopelessness sink into my core.

Before I can stop her, she plunges the knife into her belly, doubling over, spilling two kinds of blood onto the floor.

My own screams are what wake me.

I don't remember where I am until I smell it. India. Dirt and rain mingle with curry in the smoky air around our open fire. Amar is beside me, leaning his bare back against a rotten log.

“What?” he says. His hair is messy and he has bags under his eyes. He's been smoking hash most of the night, and it often makes him snarly in the morning.

I choke on dirt that my nose has vacuumed in from the ground. My eyelids are crusty from choppy sleep.

“I had a nightmare, I guess,” I say. He looks away. He's not in the mood for it today. One thing I have learned about my father, Amar, is that he has good days and bad days. Sometimes he can look at you with all-encompassing joy, and sometimes he doesn't care if you're there at all.

“Was it about your mother?” he finally asks me. I nod with pinched lips. “Have these years with me not taught you anything?” he says, almost annoyed. “Your mother is still alive, only in different form. She is still around you, with you.” Then he sighs and looks back towards the crackling fire at his feet.

All the days of the last two years have melted into one. One long day of meditating, collecting money from passing strangers, sleeping in filth, smoking the channel pipe, and sitting silently with my real father, while he protects me from wandering hands and eyes and dozes in and out of drug-induced sleep.

Today, he's got a sort of greyness around his head that is hard to look at.

“Sometimes I feel like maybe she didn't exist at all.” I look at Amar and wish he would open his eyes.

“There she is now,” he says mockingly. “Hello, Marigold, nice to see you again.” He nods his head to the sky and opens one hand in from of him as if saying, “Why, come in.”

“You're crazy, I think,” I tell him but he only smiles, creating a curvature in his grey beard.

“Crazy is as we perceive it,” he says.

I pull a string of my matted hair out in front of my face. The hair is oily and sticky and puffed up in dreads. “Can you believe I was once in a shampoo commercial?” I say to Amar, hoping to change the subject.

“Shampoo. I can barely remember such a thing,” he says placing the flats of his hands over his face.

Bathing in the Ganges River made me sick for the first six months. The remnants of dead things in the muddy water made me hurl up everything I ate for hundreds of meals.

“You will get used to it,” the sadhu men told me, patting me on my head when they passed me doubled over in the dirt out behind the shelter. And they were right. My mouth tasted like spicy vomit so many times that it must have grown tired. After six months, not only could I bathe in the Ganges, I could drink the water from the tap by the road, I could eat whatever Indian food Amar found for me, and most importantly I had the strength to become more aware of my biological father.

He hardly ate. I'm not sure if this started with my arrival, or if he hadn't been eating for a while. From the look of him I would say he gave up on food years ago. He would put food down in front of me — rice, curry, vegetables — and keep back only a few handfuls for himself. A few handfuls that he would chew slowly with his mouth closed, transfixed by no exact point ahead of him. When his chewing finished, he would return to his meditation, which continued throughout much of the day. Sometimes I would join him, trying to find that centre within myself, that place where all my thoughts are silenced. Other times I would look around, at people passing, dragging cows through the streets. I would look at the people who looked at me, at my body, wrapped in bright-coloured cloth, and my light face and eyes. Sometimes I would just study him, pretend I was lounging in his grey beard sliding down his brown shoulders.

When he looked at me, he did it like he was taking me apart, piece by piece, and trying to find out what I was made of. Sometimes it seemed like he was trying to see my mother, like she was still living in my eyeballs or stretched out across my skin. He looked at me like I was a novelty from a Niagara Falls gift shop, like he was wondering if he should bother reaching into his pocket to find the four bucks that would let him keep me.

The other sadhus in the area seemed to respect Amar well enough. They gave him smoke from their pipes (and me too, occasionally), they put their dirty hands on his back, practised yoga with him, and bowed their heads when he passed. He got many handouts from random people, but he only ever took what he needed. He told me that the less he had, the more he had, period. And that's why he was here. That's why he had left my mother.

We are standing over a dead body. The man in orange robes. The man whom Amar said was originally from Rishikesh. His name was Ananta, and this morning he chose to start a new life.

“'Tis nothing but Mahasamadhi, the yogi's final conscious exit from his body,” Amar tells me as we look down on him, his eyes closed like he is resting, even through the rain that has started. I feel tears in my eyes.

To me, it all smacks of tragedy. Just yesterday, this man, now dead with his back against a tree, had given me an extra blanket during the first monsoon rain at night.

“Find warmth, girl,” Ananta had said to me, and I took his blanket, huddling with the others under the makeshift shelter.

“Don't cry for him, Maya,” Amar says now. “As a yogi, he created a soul free from resistance. He made all amends with this earthly life. And now he has kicked the frame, as they say.”

I raise my arms, almost like I'm trying to touch the calm expressions on their faces as they pass by. One by one they bow their prayer hands towards him. From their minds I hear steady Hindu chants, solemn goodbyes, and complacent humming. “But how can no one be sad?” I ask Amar.

“They are not happy. They are not sad. They are beyond these types of feelings.”

“What will happen to his body?”

“He'll be cremated in one of the burning ghats by the river. Come, let's go inside now. It's time for afternoon prayers.” I don't move, feeling stuck in calm, grounded, away from all thoughts.

“But I never thought that death could not be a sad thing,” I say.

“You learn something every day,” he says, stroking his oily beard.

That night we sleep inside an old monastery that has been offered to us. The rain pounds on the plaster roof like it's intent on getting through. We lie on thin cots laid out along the floor and I am use my backpack, filled with my only possessions, as a pillow. Our bodies are wrapped in hash smoke that went up before dusk. Amar speaks to me through the dark.

“Tomorrow, we are to go on pilgrimage to Agra. We must find a permanent place to sleep during the monsoons.”

“What if I don't want to go?” I whisper into black air.

“This temple is only temporary. The weather is too dangerous, food is scarce. We must travel and seek the assistance of strangers and tourists.”

I don't respond to him, not yet. Instead I flip my fingers through the butterfly bracelets still on my wrists, bracelets that tinkle against each other, creating breaks in the silence.

“What if I don't go with you?” I say.

“Then you don't.”

“What if I went back to New Delhi, and back to Canada?”

“Only you know that.”

“Will you be mad?” He says nothing. I wait. I want him to hug me, like a father. Like I'm daddy's little girl. I want him to plead from his core that he can't bear to see me go.

It will be different without you
, I finally hear him think.

Is that all? Different?

Not good or bad. Less bright though, I'll admit.

We fall asleep after that.