Riot (5 page)

I was still going to stay on in India till Kim finished school, of course, but increasingly I was just going through the motions. And, I'll admit, I had found other ways to occupy my time. What the hell, it all came out in the divorce proceedings, anyway, so I may as well tell you.

I began an affair, Randy. In the most obviously predictable way possible. With my secretary.

Looking back, I'm ashamed of myself, and I suppose I was ashamed of myself even then, except that I was too blinded by own desires to see my own shame. That's probably the missionary's son talking. My marriage to Katharine had settled into a rut. Sometimes a rut can be a comfortable place to be, but ours was full of too many differences and resentments to be wholly comfortable. I had always had my own way in the marriage — about what we'd do, where we'd do it, when, how. Katharine had always argued, and always given in. In the process she'd become more resentful, I guess, except that I was too busy with my own work to notice. But in turn she was less and less appealing to me. She's a couple of years older than me, I guess you know that, but that wasn't all. Those stolid American middle-class values, her sensible clothes, her sense of responsibility, her moderation in all things — frankly, they bored me. We made love less and less, and she didn't even seem to miss it.

I did.

But I didn't miss making love with her. What I missed, frankly, was sex. The excitement of discovering a woman's body, opening her up to my touch, possessing her as no one like me had possessed her before. That's what I was seeking, and that's what I found with Nandini.

She was exotic, Randy. I mean it — exotic. She shimmered into the office in gorgeous saris, bedecked with jewelry, fragrant with attar of roses, every nail perfectly painted, every hair in place. She smiled dazzlingly at me, her slightly uneven teeth gleaming, and she answered the phone in that convent-educated English with that special lilt only Indian women can manage, and she drove me crazy. I would call her in to dictate some meaningless routine correspondence and ask her to read it back to me just so I could hear her voice lend magic to my words. And also, I'll admit it, so I could look at her.

Have you felt the allure of the exotic yourself, Randy? All right, you don't have to answer that. Just give me some more of your Scotch. Sure you don't want some yourself? Anyway, where was I? Yes, Nandini. Nandini was simply so unlike Katharine, I could have been dallying with another species. She wore little sleeveless blouses that revealed a generous amount of cleavage whenever that front fold of her sari slipped, which it did often enough, whenever she turned, or bent to pick up something, or moved in a dozen different ways. And then, of course, there was the sari itself. What a garment, Randy! There isn't another outfit in the world that balances better the twin feminine urges to conceal and reveal. It outlines the woman's shape but hides the faults a skirt can't — under a sari a heavy behind, unflattering legs are invisible. But it also reveals the midriff, a part of the anatomy most Western women hide all the time. I was mesmerized, Randy, by the mere fact of being able to see her belly button when she walked, the single fold of flesh above the knot of her sari, the curve of her waist toward her hips. That swell of flesh just above a woman's hipbone, Randy, is the sexiest part of the female anatomy to me. And I didn't even have to undress her to see it. I was completely smitten.

And she was attracted to me, too. I could see that. In her smile, in her way of talking, in her eyes when she looked at me. It was not just that she was trying to ingratiate herself with her boss. The signals she sent me were quite clear.

It still took me some time to read them. But one day, late one evening, in my office, when everyone else had gone, it just happened, as these things do.

She was on my side of the desk, standing next to me as she looked over my shoulder at a document I wanted her to retype. As I explained my revisions to her, she looked at the document and took quick notes on her steno pad. Then at one point, she dropped her pencil accidentally, right into my lap. Instinctively, she reached down to pick it up.

My hand closed on hers, keeping it in my lap.

“I like it there,” I said.

Don't worry, I'm not drunk. I can handle this stuff. I even used to live on Indian Scotch, if that isn't a contradiction in terms. “Indian-made foreign liquor,” they used to call it. Would you believe it! “Indianmade foreign liquor.” But it was better than the fake Scotch the bootleggers peddled at four times the price. There was more Johnnie Walker Black Label sold in India than was ever manufactured in Scotland, I can tell you that. Go ahead, pour away.

It's good I can hardly see your face in this light, Randy. I don't have any excuse for myself, and at the time I wasn't really looking for any. I wanted her, it was as simple as that. And at a time when I wasn't able to have much else I wanted, Nandini came as a source of pure, unqualified satisfaction.

When she moved her hand, it was not to extricate herself but to burrow her fingers deeper into my lap. “I like it there, too,” she said.

And then she was kneeling by my side and I could smell the fragrance of the attar of roses, I could sense the pressure of those uneven teeth, I felt those elegant fingers on my thigh, and I was in another world, in my office and yet completely outside it, my head swirling with pleasures tangible and imagined. . . .

That was how it began, Randy. And it continued, madly, obsessively, everywhere I could contrive — in hotel rooms booked by the company for visitors who hadn't yet arrived, on official trips where no secretary had been taken before, and of course at the office, mainly on the couch where I received visitors.

And once, thrillingly, on my desk. I came back one day from a particularly frustrating meeting with a smug functionary called the Controller of Capital Issues and Foreign Investments, having heard in tones of complacent arrogance that I was pushing what his government considered an “inessential product.” Furious and defeated, I stormed into my office. Nandini walked in behind me, concerned, and closed the door. “Bad meeting?” she asked, gently rubbing the nape of my neck, where a hard knot of tension throbbed.

In response, I turned around and kissed her full on the mouth, holding her so tightly that she almost gasped for breath as I prised her mouth open with an insistent tongue. Without a further word, I pushed her onto the desk, unzipping myself with one hand without releasing my grip on her, then lifting her sari and slip and thrusting myself into her. At that moment, her surrender was total, and for me, that was all that mattered. Her eyes were closed, her bare arms in that sleeveless blouse flung back, her legs splayed as they dangled from the desk, and I was on top, deep inside her, her conqueror. It didn't last very long, but in those few minutes in which I forgot myself, I regained my sense of who I was, and why I was here, and what I had come to do.

I'm sorry, Randy. Do I sound like a shit? Sometimes when I relive those moments I feel I'm reminding myself that I really am the complete asshole Katharine portrayed in divorce court.

In hindsight it's easy to see it inexorably coming to an end. At the time all I could think about was how to make it even better. Nandini was chafing at constantly having to watch out for noises at the office door, constantly having to hurry to vacate a hotel room, constantly having to avoid detection. She wanted, she said, to be alone with me without having to feel tense all the time. Her own place was impossible, not just because she was married, but because she lived with an aged mother who was always in the house. So it had to be mine.

I brought method to my madness. I took a greater interest in my wife's and kids' school schedules than I had ever done before, learning by heart her library hours, Kim's bagpipe lesson schedule, the servants' siesta times. Even allowing for a half-hour's margin of error on either side, the house was completely empty from one to three-thirty on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons.

On those days I dismissed the driver and took Nandini home myself, confident it was absolutely safe. She loved being there, sinking into the American king-sized bed that Katharine and I had carried around the world with us, seeing us naked together in the full-length mirror, relishing the quiet efficiency of the air-conditioning. And what did I feel, thrashing about with my secretary on the bed in which my wife of twenty years would sleep, her back to me in a flannel nightdress, a few hours later? A twinge of guilt, I'd like to think, but mainly, if I'm honest with myself, excitement, a sense of having reclaimed the conjugal bed for its rightful purpose.

By the time we began trysting at my place, matters were coming to a head anyway. Kim was almost finished at school, and I was ready to admit failure to my bosses and accept a transfer somewhere else. Nandini was beginning to ask about our future and I had not even considered whether we had one. I had embarked on our relationship without thinking beyond the next day. It was clear she had gone much further. Nandini was seeing herself in my marital bed, and convincing herself that's where she belonged. I was beginning to feel trapped.

One night Katharine noticed a suspicious scent on the sheet, and wondered if one of the servants were taking their siesta in her bed. Their injured protestations of innocence made it clear the idea was unthinkable to them. Before long Katharine began to think of another possibility she had considered unthinkable.

You find this embarrassing, Randy? Nah, you journalists have pretty thick skins. You've heard worse, I'm sure. But this is all off the record. You understand that. Fact is, when I've had a few I talk too much. Especially these days. It's all I've got left, Randy. Words.

Yeah, pour the rest. There isn't much left. Might as well finish the bottle.

So Katharine was beginning to get suspicious. But it wasn't my wife who found out. It was Priscilla. And in the worst possible way.

Of all of us, it was Priscilla who led the most Indian life. Kim had his high school friends and his exams; Lance had a small group of American friends with a shared addiction to comics, which they exchanged incessantly; Katharine had her teaching and the household; I had my work and Nandini. Priscilla was the one person with a genuine curiosity about Indians — not the handful of Americanized rich kids she met in her school, but what she called “real Indians.” Early on she decided to teach the alphabet to our servants, and was soon giving them reading lessons after dinner. One day she went with the gardener to his home and came back with a horrified account of his family's poverty. I had no choice but to double his wage. Soon everyone who did any work for us wanted her to visit them too.

It was Priscilla who was the most active member of the school social service league, Priscilla who volunteered to read to blind children, Priscilla who helped Sundays at the Catholic orphanage. She didn't know a single Indian with a college degree or a fancy job, but she really cared for the underside of this society.

So inevitably, when the dhobi's young son, who carried the bundles of laundry for his father, came to our home looking feverish and ill one Wednesday, it was Priscilla who insisted he rest instead of continuing with his father's rounds. I was already at the office; I only learned this later. When the father protested that he could not possibly take the boy back home with so many visits left to make, Priscilla declared the child could rest at our place, aspirined and blanketed, and be picked up by his father at the end of the dhobi's day. And it was typical of Priscilla, of course, that she would decide to skip her regular afterschool commitments to come home early and make sure her patient had been properly fed by the servants and was doing well.

If I had paid more attention to my daughter, I would have realized all this. And I would not have been at home, buck naked and whooping as I took Nandini doggy-style, slapping her ample behind like a cowboy taming a mare, when Priscilla, puzzled by the noise, opened the door.

She didn't scream. She didn't slam the door. She didn't run away. Instead, she just stood there, her baby blue eyes widening in bewilderment and hurt, not comprehending what was going on, not wanting to comprehend. And as I saw her, I stopped moving, frozen in shame and embarrassment.

“Ruddy, why do you stop?” Nandini clamored, kneeling on the bed on all fours, her breasts still swinging from the momentum of our coition, her eyes shut in ecstasy, oblivious of the intrusion.

That broke the spell in which Priscilla was imprisoned. A solitary tear escaped from one eye and rolled down her cheek. And then she began to sob.

“Priscilla,” I said, not knowing what to do. I pulled myself out of Nandini and tried to clamber off the bed while hiding myself, wanting to go to her but anxious to wear something, knowing that she had never seen me naked, let alone in these circumstances.

“Don't come near me!” she screamed then. “I don't want you to touch me! I hate you, Daddy!”

Everything is a blur thereafter. Nandini s little shriek, my pulling on a pair of pants, Priscilla running down the corridor crying, my setting off after her, Priscilla running blindly out of the house toward the street, my chasing her bare-chested and barefoot, trying to hold her in my arms, Priscilla struggling with me on the pavement, raining little blows on my shoulders with her fists, still sobbing. And then Katharine's car screeching to a halt beside us and my wife, also returning early to test her suspicions, leaping out. And my marriage collapsing around me like a tent.

 

 

Lakshman to Priscilla Hart

February 27, 1989

I'm an administrator, not a political scientist, but I'd say there are five major sources of division in India — language, region, caste, class, and religion.

Very simply: There are thirty-five languages in India spoken by more than a million people each, fifteen spoken by more than ten million each. The Constitution recognizes seventeen. Take a look at this rupee note: you can see “ten rupees” written out in seventeen languages, different words, different scripts. The speakers of each major language have a natural affinity for each other, and a sense of difference from those who speak the other languages. Hindi is supposed to be the national language, but half the country doesn't speak it and is extremely wary of any attempt to impose it on them. In my part of the country, Tamil Nadu, you'd do better asking for directions in English than in Hindi.