2.

“Isn’t it strange?” Yasmina asks her companions. The flash of her eyes above her ugly suit and the movement of her slender wrists suggest someone whom shock and oxygen deprivation have removed to a different world. “Isn’t it strange what we think we fear absolutely, only to find at the last that it gives us wings? And isn’t it strange what we think we could never understand? My father used to say, ‘Yasmina, anyone who wears a watch does not understand time.’”

“‘Daddy,’ I used to say, ‘you are so old-fashioned, you should live inside the temple compound all night instead of only by day.’” She laughs and her laughter is light and silvery and full of tranquil resignation, like the strands of small bells around a temple elephant’s neck. “‘Even in Bombay, Daddy, modern times have come,’ I used to tell him. ‘Gucci watches have come. Even in Bombay, time moves on, time flies, but you have been left behind with oxcarts and rickshaw wallahs.’

“‘Time is air, Yasmina,’ he would tell me. ‘Time is ocean. Does the air we breathe move on? Does the ocean have beginning or end? All of time and all of matter is a blink in Shiva’s red eye.’

“I thought it was old-fashioned Hindu gobbledygook, not modern at all. Isn’t it strange, now that I have no time left, that I understand what my father meant?” She is facing the eye of the camera, gesturing to her companions, inviting them to ponder this curious fact. “Suddenly I know it is so. Now. Here.” She looks around the cramped twilit space. “And where is here? We are underground, yes? In a cave? In a cellar? What country are we in? We do not know. What use are maps or watches to us now? We are nowhere. We are outside time.”

She looks her watcher in his dark bloodshot eye. She raises her cupped hands as though releasing a dove toward the light. “Agit, my son, my dear little boy, I am sending the cloud messenger.”

Her breathing turns ragged. She begins to cough. “My eyes, my eyes,” she murmurs. “There is salt in my eyes.

“Agit!” she calls urgently. She gasps. Her padded chest heaves, she doubles over, but she raises her cupped hands above her head. She offers the chalice of her curved fingers to her son. “Agit!” she calls. “Here is time. Here is my father on the steps of the temple tank where he died; and here is the moment of your birth, Agit; and here is the beggar girl who lives at our gates, and here are the tinsel dreams I dreamed in Bollywood, and here we are, all of us in this strange place, bound together for a reason we do not yet know, with no time and all time in our hands.

“And now I have no fear and no grief, because, do you see?”—and she is speaking in a singsong lilt, in ancestral patterns of Sanskrit chant as sages speak from stone steps by temple pools—“our story will go through time as Klidsa’s poetry passes through time, as his Cloud Messenger passes through fifteen hundred years and still settles in the minds of all exiles and of those who will die far from home.”

She gives way to a spasm of coughing. “I am burning,” she murmurs. “I am drowning in my suit.” She sways. She closes her eyes.

“Here is time, Agit. Here is Bombay.

“When I was a child in Bombay, poverty frightened me. Once I struck a beggar child with my riding whip because he touched me.

“Here is my father at sixty. He wants to give away his wealth and live like Gandhi. He wants to sit by the temple pool all day, he wants only to meditate on the thousand names of the Lord. But as for me, I want to put many, many layers of wealth between me and the children who die in the street. Inside the high wall around our house are lawns and fountains and peacocks and those who serve us. Outside is contamination. I leave our garden as rarely as possible, only seated in the back of our car.

“Our driver gets out and opens the gates, and drives through, and gets out and closes them again. And there is the beggar girl who sits outside our gates, and always, day after day, she taps at my window and stares in and I open the window a crack and toss her a coin. I cannot bear to touch her or put the coin in her hand. She is covered with sores.”

Yasmina begins to scratch the backs of her hands. She begins to cough again. She talks faster.

“Year after year, day after day, I toss her a coin, and one day she is not there.

“‘Where is the beggar girl?’ I ask.

“‘She died,’ says our driver. ‘The porter found her body this morning.’

“‘What did she die of?’

“‘Of hunger,’ he says.

“At night, in my bedroom, her eyes float in the dark like bloodshot moons, and I have fled from her, but like her I am hungry. I am famished. For years and years, I am hungry for wealth, for fame, for more wealth and more fame, for more houses in Paris and Majorca and New York. But now”—she turns to the red eye high above her in the room—“see how she has found me with her bloodshot eye? See how she has waited for me to recognize myself?”

Yasmina is coughing badly. She presses her hands to her face, and the skin of her cheeks blisters and breaks. She rubs her padded arms and blinks rapidly with her bloodshot eyes. She talks faster and faster.

“Now I die her death, covered in sores, but I must tell you this story, Agit, before I leave you. I must pass on Klidsa’s great and beloved Sanskrit poem which has been told before and will be told again, over and over, and you in your turn must retell it and pass it on.

“A year ago, Bollywood made a movie of Klidsa’s Meghaduta, and this is the story of The Cloud Messenger: a yaksha is sent into exile from the Himalayan paradise and banished to the end of the world. He is sent to the farthest point of the idea of South, where the monsoon coast of Kerala slides up against the edge of the earth. The yaksha is dying of lovesickness for his mountains of snow and for his lady. He summons a cloud. Go, sweet cloud, he says, and tell my love … He gives the cloud directions for the long journey north.

“In the film—do you see me, Agit?—I am in the marketplace buying strands of jasmine for my hair—” she lets her hair fall forward over her face and braids it with imaginary flowers—“and the first wet cloud of the monsoon floats by, and in that fog I stumble and fall across a beggar child, and I draw back with horror, because it is she, it is the girl again, the girl who sat at the gates of my childhood, but the cloud …”—she makes motions of bathing herself in the toxic air that surrounds her—“the cloud envelops me with the smells of my homeland, curries cooking, cinnamon, incense, the smell of my father and my mother, the sweet smell of my son, my Agit, and the beggar girl says to me, ‘Everything returns. Nothing can ever be lost.’”

Yasmina coughs. She bats her hands at the toxic mist. “Go, sweet cloud …”

And then she begins to struggle for air, and to writhe. “Tell my son,” she gasps, “tell Agit—”

Her voice is stretched out, racked, in a long rising siren of agony, unbearable—

The scene is cut.

Blank screen on which appears only the lettering of a name, a place of birth, a date.

Yasmina Shankara
Born Bombay, 1952

There is the sound of a flute.