ONE DAY, AS I prepared to leave at around five thirty, I was told Charlie wanted to see me in the library. I crossed the football field-sized lawn to the semiprivate offices of the official staff.
A young officer left me alone in the room with the door open. I started checking out the book collection when I heard a presence hovering at the doorway. I turned and saw Holika leaning with a Lauren Bacall-like aloofness against the doorframe, smoking a filtered cigarette.
“You staring at me for a reason?” I asked.
“So friendly you are today. But yes, Charlie said you were here and asked me to say hello and I became entranced by your look of the Diasporic Jew.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Lost and wandering far away from home and searching for answers in books.”
“Lost, but not looking for answers.”
She bobbed her head skeptically and stepped into the room, dressed not in the traditional sari but in tight, claret-colored silk pants and a blue velvet top with short sleeves. She stopped about two feet away from me. “So you say.”
“And you, you’re a disbeliever then?” I tweaked her.
“In the words of men, belief is the opium of manmasters.”
“This from the sayings of Mahatmamiss Holika-ji?”
“That’s Holika to you,” she tilted her head upward and sensually inhaled and exhaled the smoke from her cigarette.
“OK, Holika to me, how do you know I’m a Jew?”
“Charlie and Chrystie.”
I felt an inner sigh of relief. “What else did the fun couple of New Delhi tell you?”
“Charlie thinks you are a great doctor. I feel he does not think you like him very much and I think that bothers him. And you have the worst tennis form and the fastest feet and hands.”
“All that nonsense and nothing else?”
She paused, “Yes, that you are very sad and lonely.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“How about what I see?”
“The hand is quicker than the eye and I have quick hands.”
She forcefully put out her cigarette in a ceramic ashtray. Her glance and broad smile seemed like a dare to play on. “And what did you ask about me?”
“Who says I asked?”
“Ask, told … always something is said.” She said with a sense of certainty and she was right.
“That you’re Vijay Pillai’s niece and you’re engaged to marry Samaka Abhitraj.”
“In India, it is best not to believe everything that you hear.”
“So, you are not engaged?”
“Not to him. Not to anyone.”
“Bang, bang goes the hammer. One nail in the knee.” I flexed my knee as if it hurt.
“Is that why you did not call me? Afraid?”
“No and yes, I didn’t know if it was sincere or your duty on the welcoming committee.”
“It was sincere then. Now …” She bobbed her head in the motion of a buoy floating on the soft waves of an ocean, a look I was becoming familiar with from many other Indians, the meaning of which I never learned to decipher.
“And now?”
“Now is forever in the past.” She flashed an enigmatic closed-lipped smile. “Think of the future.”
“Then we’ll play again?”
“That is your choice.” I didn’t have a clever answer and she seemed impatient. “Where are those quick feet now?”
“Wounded. And I’ve been out of this game for some time. Not sure I want back in.”
“You must. And there are many ways to recovery. I must go. My driver is waiting. Ta-ta for now.”
She waved and left the room. I went back to being a Diasporic Jew looking at books until Charlie showed up about ten minutes later. He called out from the hallway, “Hey buddy, be there in a second.”
He stood in profile talking to Hal Burden, former Secretary of Defense and now CEO of Environ Enterprises, one of the largest energy conglomerates in the world. On television Burden appeared like some cartoon caricature: blubbery and vastly overweight with a belly that plunged southward toward his tiny feet covered by polished cowboy boots. A history of heart problems made his breathing wispy and belabored. This muffinish body was topped off by a few curlicues of blond hair on his otherwise balding head, and thin, sneering red lips that saturated the TV screen against his ultra-pale skin. In person, even without hearing the exact words of his confident sinister whisper of a voice, his presence loomed large and fierce and didn’t seem comic at all.
They shook hands and then Burden took off. I watched Charlie’s gait ease from a stiff march into a stroll and, as he entered the library, his face muscles loosened as he shifted from the stern emissary of American power to the genial Uncle Charlie, ambassador of good will.
“I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t introduce you.” He assumed correctly that I would recognize Burden. “His plane is waiting.”
“No problem.”
“You see Holika?”
“For a few minutes.” I nodded.
“Good. Give her a call. Got this for you.” He stuck a piece of paper with Levi Furstenblum’s number and address in my shirt pocket. “He lives in Lajpat Nagar.”
Perfect. The government built the neighborhood of Lajpat Nagar specifically for Hindus who fled from Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. Furstenblum would live among outcastes in their own land.
“Thanks.” Although I so much wanted to see him—I’d been rereading his works at night when I couldn’t sleep—I doubted I had the chutzpah to call him or just drop in. Still, I was glad to have it.
As if reading my hesitancy, Charlie then said, “He also goes to the Jewish temple on Humayun Road near the Taj Hotel.”
No way, I thought, that Furstenblum, this man of lost faith would still go to temple. That I had to see.
“So, how is everything going?” A young soldier brought in a whiskey for Charlie. I didn’t want anything.
“As well as can be expected.”
“Nobody bothering you?”
Holika had bothered me, but not in the way he meant or I wanted to explore. “No, and for that I thank you.”
“I didn’t get where I am by not knowing when to shut the fuck up.” Charlie pointed to the French-style wooden terrace doors. We stepped outside. “This goes no further.”
“Scout’s honor.” I held up my hand, anticipating some inner secret of impending Indian–Pakistani upheaval for which I needed to be ready.
“What do you know about that get-it-up pill? And I mean the real one.” He couldn’t even say the word.
“Viagra, not Erecto.” Erecto was the Indian knockoff version. Often, the Indian pharmaceutical companies didn’t pay any attention to American patents and knocked off expensive drugs. Mostly it was OK but not always. “It works. I believe it’s safe.”
“Can you, um, get me some … surreptitiously?”
“Without a trace.”
“You know, the Indians would call it karma.” He stopped me before I interrupted him and explained that a man of his age should expect such things. “Yeah yeah, Neil. I’ve been no saint. I can’t afford another divorce, and hell, she’s a great lay and needs to be fucked. Often. And I want it to be by me. I know you’ve had your troubles but finding out your wife is … fuck it … I know the ‘How many doctors does it take to screw a light bulb in an ambassador’s wife?’ jokes are out there.”
“I haven’t heard any,” I lied. Even in my relative obscurity and desire not to, I’d heard them.
Charlie finished his drink in one long gulp. It was the prevailing belief that Chrystie was a brat at best, and had married him for his position and money, which made her something more or less than a brat. I never believed it was that simple. I felt lousy for Charlie.
Here he was verging on retirement and a long-planned life of serving on corporation boards, collecting fat checks, and playing golf. He’d seen his teeth go yellow, his hair turn gray and thin, his belly get larger and doughy, and now, his dick go limp. Nobody, especially his kids, gave a damn that he climbed out of the scummy streets of Buffalo, that he’d made it to the top of his profession. Nobody but Jane, his first wife who he’d dumped for a second-rate looker who could pull off the good manners and breeding schtick, and who had expectations, which included living in New York or DC, not India. I believed Charlie had seen too much to fool his inner self.
“You’ll be in touch?”
“Soon,” I reassured him.
We shook hands. Charlie left the library.