At lunch the two of them sat in the shade at the table by the pool. He was relieved to be alone with his wife, so they wouldn’t have to sustain a polite conversation with strangers. Thank God the prince never joined them at lunch, only at breakfast and dinner. Evidently two meals with his guests were more than enough for him as well.
The waiter brought a plate of golden fried zucchini flowers. A starter, he announced.
“You and the prince made these?” he asked his wife.
She nodded.
“Very tasty. The batter is nice. What is it?”
She was looking beyond the pool, beyond the trees, somewhere out of focus.
“Chickpea flour, I think.”
He waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. They ate in silence. The waiter took away the plates and presented the main course, shrimp sautéed with chilis served with mango slices over arugula. The food here was tasteful, understated and the staff didn’t wear funny turbans or garish Bollywood-style outfits. They had a simple uniform like that of the staff in a house where one didn’t have to show off or pose in front of a camera all day long.
“Did you have fun?” he asked.
She turned to him, surprised, as if shaken from a thought.
“What?”
“In the kitchen. With the prince.”
“Yes, we did. It was a lot of fun.”
“Are you all right? You look tired.”
“Maybe. I didn’t sleep very well last night. I might take a nap after lunch.”
“Good. Then I’ll do some work. I think I’ve just had an idea I want to get down.”
She didn’t ask him what the idea was. She just smiled with a blank expression, not having listened to what he’d just said.
When he came down from the room around seven, the guests from Delhi were sitting on the terrace around the low table set for the evening drinks. He had a hard time getting their names right when the prince made the introductions, the names being always so complicated in India. One of the guests was an older playwright—our living legend, the prince had said—a thin, elongated man who resembled a stork, with fine birdlike features and an impressive mane of flowing white hair. The playwright stood up and shook his hand, emanating a subtle aroma of sandalwood. He wore a finely tailored silk kurta that reached his shins and had a very fine, soft shawl wrapped around his shoulders. His wife, an ex-dancer, was a beautiful woman in her early sixties, draped in a blue and gold sari. Her ears and nose were studded with diamonds. There was a middle-aged choreographer, a tall, bald, bulky man in loose white pajamas and tunic who had lived in New York in the seventies (and had danced with Martha Graham and then performed with Peter Brook, it was explained). His friend, or perhaps his companion, was a younger man, a translator, who was the only one wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and had longish, uncombed hair. Unfortunately the translator spoke with a very thick Indian accent that was hard to understand, so he made sure to sit at the opposite end of the table, in order to avoid having to decipher him.
The bald choreographer had just come back from London and had brought a rare bottle of gin infused with cucumber and rose petals. Everyone was having cucumber gin martinis, so he agreed to have one and found it deliciously refreshing. In order to include him in the conversation the group was eager to know what kind of books he wrote and whether they could read them, had any of them been translated into English? Yes, a few had, so everyone made a mental note of the titles so they could look for them in Delhi. They mentioned names of the few Italian writers they’d read (Eco, Calvino), then mentioned Fellini and Antonioni’s films so that the conversation could seamlessly shift from them to him and he could take the lead. He felt at ease, well liked, especially after the second cucumber gin martini. This was what it must be like to live here, he thought, to have a normal conversation with people who do not address me just as a foreigner but as an intellectual: these people could easily be my friends as well. Then he asked them about Indian literature, a subject to which he—unlike his wife—hadn’t given much thought until that very moment, but the company inspired him and he wanted to return the courtesy. They discussed the problem of translation, how Indian literature was written in so many different languages and so much of it couldn’t be read by the rest of the country. There was an immense amount of excellent literature bound to remain unknown. It was so unfair. The young translator with the impossible accent was indicated as one of the best, if not the best, translators of Tamil literature into Hindi. He had translated epic novels, contemporary essays and poetry that would have been lost otherwise to all the Indians who didn’t read Tamil. There were twenty-two major languages, and most of the regions that spoke them had their own flourishing literature. What to do? He mentioned the few Indian novels translated into Italian he had read and praised them, to show them that not all Indian literature had been lost to foreigners. They pointed out that those novels were of a different kind, though, as they were originally written in English by writers who no longer lived in India or were born abroad and either wrote about their parents’ origins or wrote about the discovery of their roots as adults.
“We have a word for them, you know …,” the playwright said with a hint of a smile. The choreographer joined in and finished his sentence.
“We call them Indonostalgics,” he said, and everyone laughed.
Indonostalgics, he repeated, savoring the word, and making a mental note. That was exactly the kind of inside knowledge he enjoyed.
“Isn’t your wife joining us tonight?” the prince asked.
He had completely forgotten to mention her. She had decided to stay in the room. She said she wasn’t in the mood to talk to lots of people tonight.
“Unfortunately not. She wasn’t feeling too well. She might come for dinner, otherwise she’ll order room service, if that’s not a problem for the kitchen.”
And as he said that, heads turned toward the opposite end of the terrace. A woman had appeared and was walking toward them.
The men stood up.
“Ah, here she is, at last,” the prince said and went over to embrace her.
There was a suspension, while everyone in turn greeted her.
“This is Ushma Das, our greatest dancer. She is to perform for us tomorrow night,” the playwright said.
The woman wore a short red cotton sari over green shalwar pants. The sari was neatly pleated in the front, as in the temple sculptures. She was barefoot and her anklets made a lovely sound as she moved.
“I’ve just finished a brief rehearsal with the musicians,” she was saying. “I was going to bathe and change before joining you, but then I heard your voices and …”
She turned to him, surprised to find him there.
He introduced himself, and she looked intently at him with her big, almond-shaped eyes penciled in black kohl.
“Very nice to meet you,” she said, and let him hold her cool, bony hand.
“Please have a drink with us now, dear. The light is so lovely,” said the older ex-dancer with the diamond studs in her nose. “You can freshen up later. We are having cucumber martinis.”
“You know I am not supposed to drink, Auntie,” Ushma said with a little smile. Everyone rebutted at once. Of course she could have a small drink after rehearsal. It wasn’t going to get her drunk at all. They would make it very light. She took another look at him; he was standing speechless in front of her beauty.
“I’ll have a club soda, that’s all.”
Then she sat down in the chair, erect, with royal gravity.
“And where is home, for you?” she asked, tilting her head toward him with what he took for sincere interest.
Earlier in the day, while her husband was on his inspirational promenade on the ghats, she had been staring at his laptop screen, open to Skype, while beads of sweat ran down her neck. The sun came straight through the bay window and the old-fashioned ceiling fan didn’t help against that heat. She had typed the ex-lover’s name in the space that said “enter name or e-mail address of the user you’re looking for” and had clicked on search. Only three names like his had appeared, and next to them a green icon with the + sign. One lived in Buenos Aires, but the other two were actual possibilities. One in Paris, the other in San Francisco. More likely, he would be the one in California, but she might send the same message to both. She had been staring at the green icons for a while now. What if he was happily married with kids and his wife would intercept her message? Would that be a problem? She should write something so neutral and blameless that even his wife could read it and think nothing of it. The wife could ask him, “Who is that?” And he might say, “Just someone I knew ages ago when I lived in Italy.” He might reply to her innocent message in a similar tone, something like “Hey, how’ve you been?” although he wasn’t the type that would ever write “hey.” After a lot of composing and scribbling on a scrap of paper in order to get it just right, she typed the message into the space. She stared at it. Then erased it. This was a mistake. He’d probably completely forgotten about their affair. But then she thought, What if he wasn’t married, what if he had had the same dream or he had been thinking of her too? What a wasted opportunity, right? She typed the message again. It read, “Are you the Tyler I think you are?” signed with her name. She stared at the words again, then, after what seemed an agonizing amount of time, she said out loud, What the hell, and clicked on the green icons next to both Paris and San Francisco. She jumped up from the chair as if it burned. She felt exhilarated, as though she had just sent a missile into space from Cape Canaveral.
Since that moment she had been feeling hopelessly anxious, as if time had taken on a completely different speed. After lunch by the pool she’d waited for her husband to leave the room so she could check her Skype page. She could’ve easily checked the same page on her cell phone but she just couldn’t make herself do it with him in the same room. He had decided to read his book in bed, had fallen asleep, and woken up and ordered tea, which they took on the terrace together. He asked her to take a walk with him in the village, after which he took a shower and changed for evening drinks. Finally she had gotten rid of him, if only for a few hours. The minute he was out the door she ran to check the laptop. A tiny red light was blinking next to the Skype icon. Her heart leaped.
“Yes, it’s me,” the message said. “When can we talk?”
In the meantime, he’d learned quite a lot about Ushma Das. Once the older guests had retired for the night, the two of them had lingered at the candlelit table in the courtyard and then moved onto the terrace to watch the moonlight over the river. He had had a couple of more drinks to oil his conversational skills, whereas she’d stuck to tea. He asked her about Odissi dance, wasn’t it one of the oldest forms of dance? Yes, she said, dancers are found depicted in bas-reliefs dating from the first century BC, and the Natya Shastra, the oldest surviving text on stagecraft in the world, speaks of this dance style. He told her he had seen the temple sculptures of the dancers in Puri only a week earlier, as if it had been his idea and not his wife’s. He also said he’d been moved by the gracefulness of the postures depicted on the bas-reliefs, although he only vaguely remembered them. Ushma seemed pleased by his enthusiasm. She explained how the devadasis, or temple girls, at the time of those sculptures were highly educated courtesans who lived with kings and held an elevated social status. They had to learn music and singing, study poetry and scriptures. Under the moonlight, now that she had changed into a maroon sari and had combed her hair in a tight bun, she did look like an ancient courtesan from some rhapsodic Indian tale. She moved slowly, with extreme awareness, and he was completely engulfed by her beauty and her seriousness.
“Where do you live?” he asked her.
“In the countryside outside Bhubaneswar. I have a school there where I teach and live with my students. Dance is all we do. We wake up at dawn and dance all day. It’s what I’ve done every day of my life for the last twenty years.”
He showed surprise. Twenty years of monastic life? That seemed like a waste to him, for a woman this beautiful.
“You are not married?”
She gave a little laugh and turned her face away from him, as though the question had embarrassed her.
“No, how could I? I’ve been married to my guru and my students are now married to me. Ours is a never-ending chain, we have no time to devote to anything else. This has always been the way knowledge and artistic expression has been taught by our gurus for centuries.”
“It sounds extremely demanding.”
“It has been my choice. Of course it is hard. But we are rewarded when we dance.”
She relaxed her face into a softer expression and smiled, as if letting him in on a secret.
“There is nothing like it.”
“I am sure. It must be”—he searched for an appropriate word and then said—“pure ecstasy?”
Her face remained neutral, almost grave. “Not exactly. It’s more like a feeling of oneness.”
Oneness. What a beautiful thing to feel, he thought.
There was a moment of suspension, as if she were going to add something, but then she looked away.
“I am afraid I have to leave you now,” she said. “Tomorrow we have a long rehearsal and I must go and get my sleep.”