The Marriage Plot (46 page)

Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Herb got up from the table.

Mike waited for him to get out of earshot. Then he said, “Poona. Sounds like poontang. Having orgies is part of their whole deal. The Bhagwan makes guys wear rubbers. You know what they say to each other? They say, ‘I glove you.’”

“Maybe you should join,” Mitchell said.

“‘I glove you,’” Mike scoffed. “Man. And the chicks buy it. Suck my cock for inner peace. What a racket.”

He snorted again and got up from the table. “I gotta go take a shit,” he said. “One thing I can’t get used to over here? These Asian toilets. Just holes in the floor, all splattery. It’s fucking gross.”

“Different technology,” Mitchell said.

“It’s uncivilized,” Mike opined, and with a wave he exited the dining room.

Left alone, Mitchell drank more tea and looked around the room, at its faded elegance, the tiled veranda full of potted plants, the white columns marred with electrical wires powering the wicker-bladed fans on the ceiling. Two Indian waiters in dirty white jackets scurried among the tables, serving travelers lounging in silk scarves and cotton drawstring pants. The long-haired, ginger-bearded guy directly across from Mitchell was dressed all in white, like John Lennon on the cover of
Abbey Road
.

Mitchell had always thought he’d been born too late to be a hippie. But he was wrong. Here it was 1983, and India was full of them. As far as Mitchell was concerned, the sixties were an Anglo-American phenomenon. It didn’t seem right that continental Europeans, who had produced no decent rock music of their own, should be allowed to fall under its sway, to frug, to form communes, to sing Pink Floyd lyrics in heavily accented voices. That the Swedes and Germans he met in India were still wearing love beads in the eighties only confirmed Mitchell’s prejudice that their participation in the sixties had been imitative at best. They liked the nudism, the ecology, the sunshine-and-health bits. As far as Mitchell was concerned, Europeans’ relationship to the sixties, as to more and more things nowadays, was essentially spectatorial. They’d looked on from the sidelines and, after a while, tried to join in.

The hippies weren’t the only long-haired figures in the dining room, however. Gazing out from the rear wall was none other than Jesus Christ himself. The mural, which for all Mitchell knew existed in every Salvation Army headquarters around the globe, depicted the Son of Man illuminated by a heavenly beam of light, his piercing blue eyes staring straight out at the diners.

A caption proclaimed:

Christ is the Head of the House.

The Unseen Guest at Every Meal.

The Silent Listener to Every Conversation.

At a long table directly beneath the mural, a large group was gathered. The men in this group kept their hair short. The women favored long skirts, bib-collared blouses, and sandals with socks. They were sitting up straight, their napkins in their laps, conversing in low, serious tones.

These were the other volunteers for Mother Teresa.

What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn’t like? Mitchell had eaten breakfast at the volunteers’ table before. The Belgians, Austrians, Swiss, and others had welcomed him warmly. They’d been quick to pass the marmalade. They had asked Mitchell polite questions about himself and had politely supplied information about themselves in return. But they told no jokes and seemed slightly pained by those he made. Mitchell had seen these people in action at Kalighat. He’d watched them perform difficult, messy tasks. He considered them impressive human beings, especially in comparison with someone like Herb. But he didn’t feel as if he fit in with them.

This wasn’t for lack of trying. On his third day in Calcutta, Mitchell had indulged in the luxury of a barbershop shave. In the tumbledown shop, the barber applied hot towels to Mitchell’s face, lathered his cheeks and shaved them, and finished by running a battery-powered hand-massaging unit over Mitchell’s shoulders and neck. Finally, the barber wheeled Mitchell around to face the mirror. Mitchell looked at himself closely. He saw his pale face, his large eyes, his nose, lips, and chin, and something the matter with it all. The defect wasn’t even physical, not a vote of nature so much as people, or not people so much as girls, or not girls so much as Madeleine Hanna. Why didn’t she like him enough? Mitchell studied his reflection, searching for a clue. A few seconds later, responding to an urge that was almost violent, he told the barber that he wanted a haircut.

The barber held up a pair of scissors. Mitchell shook his head. The barber held up the electric shaver, and Mitchell nodded.

They had to negotiate the setting, agreeing, after a couple of swipes, on one-sixth of an inch. In five minutes it was done. Mitchell was sheared of his brown curls, which fell in heaps to the floor. A boy in ragged shorts swept them outside into the gutter.

After leaving the barbershop, Mitchell kept checking out his dramatic reflection in the windows along the avenue. He looked like a ghost of himself.

One window Mitchell stopped to look at himself in was that of a jewelry store. He went in and found the case of religious medallions. There were crosses, Islamic crescents, Stars of David, yin-and-yang symbols, and other emblems he didn’t recognize. After deliberating among crosses of various styles and sizes, Mitchell chose one. The jeweler weighed the items and elaborately wrapped them, putting them into a satin pouch, placing the pouch into a carved wooden box, and wrapping it with ornate paper before sealing the entire package with wax. As soon as Mitchell was back on the street, he ripped the exquisite package open and took the cross out. It was silver, with a blue inlay. It was not small. At first, he wore the cross inside his T-shirt, but a week later, after he’d become an official volunteer, he began wearing it outside, where everyone, including the sick and dying, could see it.

Mitchell had worried that he might run screaming from the place after ten minutes. But things had gone better than expected. On his first day, he’d been taken around by a friendly, broad-shouldered guy who ran a honeybee farm in New Mexico.

“You’ll see there’s not much organization around here,” the beekeeper said, leading Mitchell down the aisle between the tiers of beds. “People come and go all the time, so you just have to jump in where you can.” The enterprise was a lot smaller than
Something Beautiful for God
had led Mitchell to imagine. The men’s ward contained fewer than a hundred beds, maybe closer to seventy-five. The women’s side was even smaller. The beekeeper showed Mitchell the supply room, where the medications and bandages were kept. He led him past the soot-blackened kitchen and the equally primitive laundry. A nun stood before a vat of boiling water, poking the laundry with a long stick, while another carried wet sheets up to the roof to hang out to dry.

“How long have you been here?” Mitchell asked the beekeeper.

“Couple of weeks. Brought the whole family. This is our Christmas vacation. And New Year’s. My wife and kids are working in one of the orphanages. I figured this place might be a little tough on the kids. But taking care of cute little babies? Yeah, sure.” With his suntanned skin and blond curls, the beekeeper looked like a surfing legend or an aging quarterback. His gaze was level and serene. “Two things brought me here,” he said, before leaving Mitchell on his own. “Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer. Couple years ago I went on a real Schweitzer kick. Read everything he wrote. Next thing I know I’m taking premed classes. At
night
. Biology. Organic chemistry. I was twenty years older than anybody else in the class. But I kept going. Finished my premed requirements last year, applied to sixteen medical schools, and got into one. I start next fall.”

“What are you going to do with your bees?”

“I’m selling the farm. Turning over a new leaf. Starting a new chapter. Pick your cliché.”

Mitchell took it easy that day, settling in. He helped serve lunch, ladling daal into bowls. He brought the patients glasses of water. On the whole, the men were cleaner and healthier than he’d anticipated. A dozen or so were superannuated, with skeletal faces, lying immobile in their beds, but quite a few were middle-aged, and a few even young. It was often hard to tell what they were suffering from. No charts hung from their beds. What was plain was that the men had nowhere else to go.

The nun in charge, Sister Louise, was a martinet with black horn-rimmed eyeglasses. All day long, she stood at the front of the Home, barking orders. She treated volunteers like a nuisance. The rest of the nuns were uniformly gentle and kind. Mitchell wondered how they had the strength, small and delicate-boned as they were, to lift the destitute off the streets into the old ambulance, and how they carried out the bodies when people died.

The other volunteers were a miscellaneous bunch. There was a group of Irish women who believed in papal infallibility. There was an Anglican minister who spoke of the resurrection as “a nice idea.” There was a sixty-year-old (gay) New Orleanian who, before coming to Calcutta, had walked the pilgrimage route in Spain, stopping off to run with the bulls in Pamplona. Sven and Ellen, the Lutheran couple from Minnesota, wore matching safari vests, the pockets full of candy bars that the nuns forbade them to give out. The two surly French medical students listened to their Walkmans while they worked and didn’t speak to anyone. There were married couples who came to volunteer for a week and college students who stayed a half year or a year. No matter who they were or where they came from, they all tried their best to follow the guiding philosophy.

Whenever Mitchell had seen Mother Teresa on television, meeting presidents or accepting humanitarian awards, looking, every time, like a crone in a fairy tale barging into a grand ball, whenever she stepped up to the microphone that was inevitably too high for her, so that she had to hieratically lift her face to speak into it—a face both girlish and grandmotherly and as indefinable as the oddly accented Eastern European voice that issued from the lipless mouth—whenever Mother Teresa spoke, it was to quote Matthew 25:40: “Whatsoever you do for the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me.” This was the scripture she founded her work on, at once an expression of mystical belief and a practical guide for performing charity work. The bodies at the Home for Dying Destitutes, broken, diseased, were the bodies of Christ, divinity immanent in each one. What you were supposed to do here was to take this scripture literally. To believe it strongly and earnestly enough that, by some alchemy of the soul, it happened: you looked into a dying person’s eyes and saw Christ looking back.

This hadn’t happened to Mitchell. He didn’t expect it to, but by the end of his second week he had become uncomfortably aware that he was performing only the simplest, least demanding tasks at the Home. He hadn’t given anyone a bath, for instance. Bathing the patients was the main service that the foreign volunteers provided. Every morning, Sven and Ellen, who had a landscaping business back in Minnesota, worked their way down the line of beds, assisting men to the lavatory on the other side of the building. If the men were too weak or sick to walk, Sven got the beekeeper or the Anglican minister to help carry the stretcher. While Mitchell sat administering head massages, he watched people who looked in no way extraordinary perform the extraordinary task of cleaning and wiping the sick and dying men who populated the Home, bringing them back to their beds with their hair wet, their spindly bodies wrapped in fresh bedclothes. Day after day, Mitchell managed not to help with this. He was afraid to bathe the men. He was scared of what their naked bodies might look like, of the diseases or wounds that might lie under their robes, and he was afraid of their bodily effluvia, of his hands touching their urine and excrement.

As for Mother Teresa, Mitchell had seen her only once. She didn’t work at the home on a daily basis anymore. She had hospices and orphanages all over India, as well as in other countries, and spent most of her time overseeing the entire organization. Mitchell had heard that the best way to see Mother Teresa was to attend mass at the Mother House, and so one morning before sunrise, he left the Salvation Army and walked through the dark silent streets to the convent on A.J.C. Bose Road. Entering the candlelit chapel, Mitchell tried not to show how excited he was—he felt like a fan with a backstage pass. He joined a small group of foreigners who had already assembled. On the floor in front of them, other nuns were already praying, not only kneeling but prostrating themselves before the altar.

A flurry of head turnings on the part of the volunteers made him aware that Mother Teresa had entered the chapel. She looked impossibly tiny, no bigger than a twelve-year-old. Proceeding to the center of the chapel, she knelt and touched her forehead to the ground. All Mitchell could see were the soles of Mother Teresa’s bare feet. They were cracked and yellow—an old woman’s feet—but they seemed invested with the utmost significance.

One Friday morning, his third week in the city, Mitchell rose from bed, brushed his teeth with iodine-treated water, swallowed a chloroquine tablet (against malaria), and, after splashing tap water on his face and nearly hairless head, went off to eat breakfast. Mike joined him, but ate nothing (his stomach was bothering him). Rüdiger came to the table with a book. Finishing quickly, Mitchell went back downstairs to the courtyard and stepped onto Sudder Street.

It was early January, and colder than Mitchell had expected India would be. As he passed the rickshaws outside the front gate, the drivers called to him, but Mitchell waved them off, horrified at the thought of employing a human being as a beast of burden. Reaching Jawaharlal Nehru Road, he waded into traffic. By the time his bus came, ten minutes later, listing perilously from the passengers hanging out the doors, the winter sun had burned off the haze, and the day was heating up.