BACK AT HAUZ Khas, I called Sarah again; no damn answer. I left another, more urgent message. Exhausted and still weak, I lay down and took a three-hour nap.
When I awoke Chandon handed me a package that Holika sent over by messenger, which is an inexpensive method to supersede the unreliable mail delivery in Delhi. I opened it with misplaced trepidation for it contained a few articles and a slim pamphlet with a note clipped to the cover, which pictured the sculpture of a burning body of indeterminate gender.
“This might be of interest to you. If I do not call before, I will see you at your home at eight, tomorrow night. Please make sure that Vishnu and Chandon are not there. Holika, aka Quantum Woman II.”
She was right. Especially after she showed so much interest in Levi I wanted to know more of what made her into the Holika I knew existed but the depths of which I had only begun to explore. “The Invisible Burning: The Manifesto of the Free Radicals,” showed me much more of her past and of her difficulties than she than would ever tell me. It was a thirty-two page pamphlet filled with exquisite color abstract and realistic paintings and photomontages accompanied by complementary, impassioned text in English and three languages I didn’t understand. The most eerie and beautiful were a mixture of Western installation art and Indian culture shots from a gallery exhibition—found objects like scarves, saris, shoes, all thrashed and cut to show the ravages of society, were placed on walls and hangers.
The first page quoted Bhagat Singh, no relation to Siddhartha but a revolutionary executed by the British: “I have no doubt my country will be one day free. But I am afraid the brown sahibs are going to sit in the chairs the white sahibs will vacate.” The manifesto, confrontational in substance and style, condemned the accepted societal and individual practices of mental and physical brutality toward women and lower castes. It called on the emerging educated classes to duly end the caste system, to end a system where it was justified that so many still lived in poverty.
The news and magazine articles discussed the Free Radicals, who took their campaign to the villages and to the major cities, doing ritual burnings to attract attention to their cause and to educate the lower castes. They videotaped interviews with women and men in the villages. The pamphlet, published before Siddhartha’s death, said little else about him or the individual Free Radicals except that most of them hailed from the lower castes and classes. This was not a movement for self-aggrandizement but, as the text proclaimed, for the betterment of the nation and the individual.
This gift signaled that Holika, almost a decade after Siddhartha’s death remained incapable of articulating aloud her profound, unhealed wounds for someone she loved as deeply as I loved Sarah and Castor. Why she hid her love behind a denial, I was only beginning to comprehend.
The next evening when Holika came by, despite my secret yearnings, I was prepared. I maneuvered her slight body with such airy ease.
Later, we lay naked on our backs in bed sipping tea, listening to a tape of melodic Nepalese music that Chandon had given me. Because Holika had erected interior boundaries that shifted capriciously, or so it seemed, I mentioned, with a curiosity balanced by reluctance, not Siddhartha specifically, but the Free Radicals.
“Thank you for sending the package.” She only nodded. I pressed on, ready to stop if she answered again with silence. “It helped.”
“Good.” Her voice was not terse. This would be a hard conversation.
“They … it’s so courageous. Do you still agree with what they said and wanted to do?”
“Yes, of course.”
“How do you manage to balance your life with Uncle Vijay, going off with Samaka and his crowd, while hanging out with radicals and what you believe?”
“I cloak myself in repentance and say almost nothing provocative.” Holika’s firm voice came now, not from her throat, but from her rebuilt sturdy interior. “I told you when we first met not to believe everything you hear in India. And not always what you see either.”
“Are we back to life being an illusion?”
“In some ways, yes, but a real illusion. I am a spy in my own life. It has taken me years to be trusted again and I tell extremely few people my real agenda.”
“Without sounding grandiose, I am in an extremely fortunate position. Some day, my uncle will pass on, and Ratish, Alka, and I will inherit a great deal of money. I will be in a very strong position to achieve at least my modest goals. I want my country to return to the ideals that its great founders wished for it. If I do nothing more than educate women on the rights of their bodies, then I have succeeded.”
She said no more, but I understood she had far greater dreams. Suddenly, the caution and calculation of her speech and her dress, the wariness of her friendships, and her reticence in revealing her whereabouts made complete sense. But a relationship with me, except as an assertion of her independence, did not. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to question that yet.
“Your secrets are safe here.”
“Of course, or I would never have been with you and would not be here now.” She understood innately she could trust my confidence and that I existed outside her world.
“Now, I am going to the villages for two weeks as a representative of my uncle’s nongovernment organization to talk about birth control. But I will talk about much more.”
Nongovernment organizations filled the gap vacated by inept state and federal governments and became the most important social institutions in India. They fostered change and gave hope in forms of health, food, and education to the Indian village population.
She placed her teacup on the side table and turned, bent her elbow, and rested her head in her right hand. “I took you to the temple not because I believe, but to show you what those of us who will change India are up against.” In the shrine, despite her disbelief, she’d refused to utter a whisper against the religion, as if it still hinted of blasphemy. “But I do believe a pure heart is necessary to live a just life. Siddhartha possessed the purest heart of anyone I have ever met.” She closed her eyes. I understood her flight of memory to the unrecoverable past and a future denied. She did not linger long. “You cannot be pure of heart while being a sanctimonious prig and hypocrite. I think you have a pure, if bedeviled, heart.”
The phone began to ring. I eyed it as if Sarah’s figure might appear like a genie from the receiver. Holika sat up almost playfully. Her eyes did an exaggerated paranoid dart from side to side. There was no sense of jealousy or possessiveness in her. “You can talk. I can go into the living room.”
“No, no, I can’t. I need to speak with Sarah about when we should do the unveiling of Castor’s gravestone. We gotta do a special Jewish ceremony before May. I’m thinking about Christmas, but it may be too soon.”
If it were an emergency, my cell phone would start in a second. It didn’t.
I sighed. She sat up with her legs crossed lotus style, shook out her mass of hair, and began combing it with her hands. She smiled pensively and subtly began to answer the question of “Why us?” “You are estranged from someone you are still in love with but no longer trust the way a partner needs to be trusted. And it is possible that I will be engaged to someone I love, but am not passionately in love with him the way a partner wants you to be passionately in love.”
The phone rang again. I jumped in place. Spooked. This clandestine affair business—and that’s what it felt like, even if we were separated—was new to me, and I was no good at it. I talked over the ringing phone.
“If that’s true, why are you going to marry Samaka?”
“I told you not to assume that.” There was no mistaking the force of her assertion. “But I was at a women’s conference last month and a writer, you wouldn’t know her, said that many, too many men, still have the mentality of a burner or a scoundrel. I agree. Samaka is neither. He is a good man and he understands what I want to do and supports me.” I nodded my head. “And a married woman in India is much less suspicious and has more freedom.” I thought I understood her reasoning.
The phone finally stopped ringing.
“Does he have a pure heart?” I asked with impure motives.
She finished combing her hair and tied it back in a long ponytail and did her head bob thingamajig. This time I think it meant my question made her angry. “He loves me purely.” She took both of my hands in hers. “This may be hard for you to hear because of where your life is now.” My bedeviled heart syncopated faster. “But Samaka is brilliant, open-minded, kind, forward thinking. He comes from the Sudra caste.” That was the lowest caste just above the Dalits. “His father had great ambitions for him. He would bring home broken typewriters and Samaka would fix them and sell them and look where he is now. His father changed the family name to Abhitraj. In Hindi abhita means fearless and raj means to rule. Samaka means peacekeeper. Samaka has never forgotten his beginnings or his mission.” She looked at me with displeasure for being so impertinent with my question. I still did not understand our boundaries. “And he loves me. And my uncle and father approve and that is important for me now. I know that you denigrate such reasoning.”
“Not entirely.”
“I too am against arranged marriage, but I arranged this one myself, and in your country more than half of love marriages end in divorce.”
“Yeah, I know. I might be entering that exalted second half.”
Suddenly, I didn’t want to talk any more about Sarah or Samaka. I deflated of good air, and my insides filled once again with bad air of my competing desires: the guilts, hypocrisies and joys and wonder of being with Holika, and the melancholy over all that Sarah and I had lost.
“Please do not look so glum. You smiled so sweetly until now.” She massaged my belly with her hands.
“You don’t think, saying what you said two minutes ago, it is strange to be here with me?”
“No, because I choose to be here now.”
“And the question again arises: Why?”
“Stop acting like a silly boy. It does not become you.”
I must’ve looked hurt, although I knew she was right.
“OK, if I must. Quantum physics, attraction of humans is like that of particles that collide and exchange information in a way that defies classic physics, forever linking them. I feel that way sometimes about people, and I feel that way about you.”
I couldn’t dismiss that theory. No one had ever reduced attraction only to physics but no better explanation came to mind.
“I’d like to have that formula.”
“No man can ever be trusted with that information. It is too dangerous. Look what you have done with your knowledge.”
“I’d rather not.”
Her eyes closed and she smiled obliquely. “My father and uncle would severely disapprove.” Her lips smacked closed and let out an impish popping noise. “I believe that first day we met that you understood my loss and I understood yours. I see you, and … And, you love someone else.”
The implication of our impermanence, of her need to express independence wafted in the air between us as we lay there, oddly one together, oddly apart. Maybe fifty years before, we could never have happened, not like this. Holika was from a new India, a new class and breed of independent women and men. Perhaps she would become engaged to Samaka in what was not truly a love relationship and not truly an arranged marriage. In the end, I believed she would go to him. And I, I had no idea where I would end up. My guilt still plagued me, my empathy for Sarah felt crushing, but I also knew I needed to be away, to be separate. To find a place for my loss, to understand the inexplicable of what I had done to Sarah to cause her to lose faith in me, of what my son had done to deserve to die.
“Neil.” She turned on her side. “We are good now because we understand the hidden sadness in our hearts.” Holika and Matt were the only two people who I’d confided in, not only about Castor, but also about Sarah. “Do you know the famous phrase about the vagaries of the heart from the philosopher Pascal?” I shook my head. “Siddhartha told it to me and I have never forgotten it. ‘The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.’ You may never know whatever happened between you and Sarah. But you must dig inside her and you. Maybe some day you will understand, maybe you will not. I believe this, and I have done much searching inside myself, what happened with Siddhartha, as brutal as it was, has made me a better person. Harder in some ways, more generous in many others.”
“I don’t know if that can happen to me. I feel like a worse person. I’m not sure what the hell I’m doing. I obsess on it every damn day. What did I do wrong? What did I miss? And I end up thinking not of Sarah, but of Castor.”
She placed her right hand on my eyes and closed the lids and pressed her hand against my head as if to shut out my demons.
“Please, Neil, let us enjoy our time together. The future—I learned ten years ago—is at best unknown and changeable. That is why I am a quantum woman.”
I smiled with an inner bleakness.
Holika didn’t spend the night. When she left, feeling duplicitous and as if I were being watched, I tiptoed across my room, picked up the phone, and called Sarah. No answer. I tried her brother and left a message on his machine.
I got back in bed. Holika’s fresh body smell of mint and saffron penetrated, and for the first time in years, my bed, sheets, pillows, and my body smelled of someone other than Sarah.
The phone rang again in less than ten minutes. I scooted across the room.
“Hello.” I said waiting to hear Sarah’s voice.
“Neil, I’ve been calling you for hours.” Nothing like the accusatory tones of Sarah’s mother to instill optimism.
“Romey, what’s wrong?”
“Do you mean why am I calling instead of the woman who is still your wife?”
Romey’s All-American beauty queen face and figure had allowed her to skate through life. Sarah believed all of Romey’s husbands and lovers, whether rich or poor, educated or not, physically or mentally abusive, all possessed two binding qualities: “They got off on fighting with a virago and enjoyed their own and others’ misery.” I saw that Romey often seemed perplexed by, and jealous of, Sarah’s and my happiness and tried to sabotage us. More than once, she offered when Sarah and I argued, “Neil, just give her a good sock across her head.” Unwilling to engage with Romey, rarely would I answer. I would shake my head and leave the room, which ended our argument because how could I stay mad at Sarah with her mother so gleeful at our bickering?
Now Romey took unseemly pleasure in taunting me.
“She tried to call you but got no answer. She will call you in a few days. She moved to Santa Fe for awhile.”
“Why’d she go there now? Where is she staying?” I felt a sudden chill in my body, a sting in my gut. To hell with my hypocrisy, and I knew I was being a dickhead—I didn’t much like that idea, not one damn bit—because Jeremy Riegle owned a ranch in Santa Fe.
“She’ll have to tell you the little details.”
She paused letting my imagination dwell on her finely tuned phrase of “little details.”
“I asked her to stay with me but she insisted on leaving.”
“Did the gossipmongers find her?”
“Why are you asking me? If you had stayed in New York and faced up to your failure like a man instead of playing the heroic doctor and running off like a cowardly husband, you’d know where she is and why. I bet you’re not even seeing a therapist, if you can find one in that place.”
Always unsure of what Sarah told Romey, depending on that day’s anger, I didn’t know if she knew about Mr. Riegle.
“Here is my new cell phone number, and please don’t give it to anyone but Sarah.” I gave her the number. “OK, Romey, you tell her to call me anytime.”
Mentally exhausted, I got back in bed, watched the geckos scramble across the walls and ceiling, and after I finally fell asleep I awoke within hours, sweating and crying, from the netherworld of a horrific nightmare. A child, Castor in feel, but I never saw his face, only his back, darker haired, maybe even a girl, tugged at my doctor’s smock as I raced down the snow-covered streets of Delhi City, New York. Suddenly, the child, still alive, lay atop a burning pyre at the corner of Hauz Khaz and Bowery, pleading, “Daddy let’s go, we have to go. You can’t stay here or we are going to die. Help me, Daddy. Save me, Daddy,” while my mother stood in the grandstand beside the pyre screaming, “Failure, loser, I wish I’d never had a child.”