My Nine Lives Read online

  I knew how much he hated to be alone, so in a way I was glad that Lucia was keeping him company. In India he had always had somewhere to go, people to be with. Besides his large extended family, there was his shop, and his buyers and suppliers, and every morning a group of cronies in a coffee-house; and his errands in maybe high or low places, all of them kept secret. And there was I in my room, never knowing when he would show up but happy to see him whenever he did; and there may have been other girls—how would I know?—waiting for him somewhere else in the city around which he roamed so freely. But here in New York he was alone, a stranger with nowhere to go; and he was old now and alcoholic and so big that I had to give up my room to him, which was the only one with a double bed. At night I often had to help him into it, and out of his clothes, for he had drunk a lot by that time and each movement caused him to call on his god (“Are Ram, Ram”). When I left him, he appeared sunk in the heaviest sleep, but then the phone rang and he would snatch it up at once and I could hear his voice through the wall—low, monosyllabic, the way I used to hear him talk on the phone, but now with a new note in it, of fear.

  Lucia told me that there were phone calls during the day too, some he received from and others he made to India (this was confirmed by my phone bill). She described how he put his hand around the mouthpiece and spoke in a muffled voice—unnecessarily, since it was all in a language she didn’t understand. And after he put down the receiver, his hand shook while he poured himself another drink, and then another and another, and still his hand was shaking. It took some time before he was calm enough to resume his conversation with her. What did they talk about? Probably she did most of it, as I used to in my time with him in my hotel room when I had so much to confide, such an unspecified pressure on my heart.

  “Today I danced for him,” Lucia told me one day, still flushed from the experience. She modestly lowered her eyes, kohl-rimmed like her teacher’s, and said, “He liked me. He said I have a real talent for Bharat Natyam.”

  Bharat Natyam! I used to love to go to all-night sessions of Indian dance and music. I went with other young travelers, all of us dressed up in our Indian clothes—sort of cotton rags—some of us spiritualized on drugs, others only on the music and the dance. When I tried to tell Vijay about these experiences, he seemed to think they were mainly for foreigners. He himself liked only film music and the sort of dances that shook the stout hips of Indian film heroines. He sang those songs for me and imitated the heroine dancing—this big manly man turning himself into a simpering maiden smiling coyly from behind her veil. And as he sang and danced for me, using my pillows for breasts, he went into the same kind of swoon as we did at our concerts, overwhelmed with passion—but also in his case with laughter at his own performance, so that he fell backward on my bed and pulled me down on top of him.

  He couldn’t dance for Lucia—he could hardly stir from his armchair—but he did sometimes sing for her. These were the same lyrics he used to sing for me, for it was only old films that he knew and loved, he hadn’t kept up with the new ones. “No time,” he told Lucia—he was so taken up with all his business, and then he resumed sighing, remembering his business. “Does he mean his shop?” Lucia asked me, as perplexed as I had been to think of him as a shopkeeper. But he told us that his eldest son was now in charge of it—all his children were grown up and married, he had grandchildren and he often drew out their photographs, chuckling over them and retailing some cute things they had said or done.

  Once, during my time with him, he had spent several days locked up in my hotel room. I never knew why but realized that he was lying low—from what, from whom? My room was one of several leading out on to the roof, and when it wasn’t too hot, I went out there to look over the city that was already at that time half-smothered in the smog and smudge of its pollution. The other residents—impecunious foreigners like myself—would also come here to hang up their washing, meditate, smoke whatever it was they were smoking, and exchange travelers’ information. But when Vijay stayed there, he never came out and he made me shut the door. There was a pay phone down by the front desk where the Armenian proprietor sat, but Vijay didn’t want me to use it for the messages he gave me to pass on. These were always cryptic and in Hindi, which he coached me to pronounce correctly. This was difficult for me and my attempts made him laugh, even though the messages I had to convey on his behalf were very serious.

  During these days he communicated with no one except me, or through me; except once a skeletal and tattered man came to our door with a suitcase, which Vijay took from him. They haggled for a while and then Vijay drew out a handful of notes, and after counting them, the man went away satisfied. Vijay opened the suitcase and it was stuffed with so many bundles of notes that I gasped and he patted my cheek, pleased at my being so impressed. Next day he sent me on a very impressive errand with the suitcase—I had to go to the house of an Official who was so important that he had an armed guard standing outside. I was amazed by the easy passage I had past this guard right into the room where the Official sat alone. When I handed over the suitcase, he opened it just a crack to peer into it; and then he gave the same sign of satisfaction—a quick sway of the head—that the tattered man had given at the amount he had received. Then he put the suitcase under his chair and asked me a few perfunctory questions—the sort one is always asked by people one meets in India: what country are you from, are you married, do you like our food? Shortly afterward whatever problem had kept Vijay lying low in my room seemed to have been resolved, for he left without explanation and went about his usual business.

  But the days he spent in New York dragged on into weeks and nothing appeared to be resolved. He rarely left my apartment, and often incapacitated with drink, he became careless, forgetting to turn off the shower, or the gas. It was a busy season for me, so I was dependent on Lucia to look after him during the day. At the same time I felt uneasy at asking her to do this—of letting her get involved in a way I recognized from my own experience. Vijay himself, with all his troubles, was concerned about her, and he often asked me, “What will become of her?” It was the same question that he used to ask me, when I was young and so terribly in love with him.

  There had been a tragic incident in my New Delhi guest-house: a French girl had killed herself in her room leading off our roof terrace. Just a few days before she had come to borrow some scissors—I pretended I didn’t have any, she was always borrowing things and never returning them. I have to admit that she was not an attractive girl; she was dirty, sullen, and quarrelsome, and we all avoided her. Shocked and guilty, we stood outside the door where she was hanging from a hook in the ceiling. We didn’t know what to do: we were all young and had come to India to deal not with worldly matters but to improve our inner lives. The proprietor, terrified of scandal—it was the second suicide in his hotel—ran around helplessly, wringing his hands. At some point the police arrived, followed by a doctor, who cut the girl down and declared her dead. All was chaos, the terrace roped off, we were asked questions and gave confused answers. Then Vijay arrived and everything was sorted out. The girl’s embassy was called—the girl removed—the police persuaded to ask no more questions. But all of us were shaken out of the carefree lives we had been leading, and it was then that Vijay first asked me, “What will happen to you?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I won’t hang myself.”

  He cried out and clicked his fingers to keep evil spirits away. Then, “Diane,” he said, “it’s not right: to be alone, no family, no one, nothing.”

  “But there’s you.”

  He shook his head, sadly: sad for me, because he couldn’t do more for me. How could he? He was a family man, he had many responsibilities, at this very time he was arranging a marriage for his eldest daughter (one year younger than I). Yet he liked having me there. Although I’m sure he had many women, I was a new experience for him—a young foreigner with no husband or father or any ties at all, alone and free to be visited or not whenever
he pleased. Yes, he had enjoyed it but now his concern was for me: my welfare, my future.

  From this time on he urged me to go home, finish my education, get married; whatever I liked but it had to be something. I tried to tell him that there was nothing I wanted except to be with him, but he didn’t like to hear that—not for fear of being burdened but for my sake. He even tried to visit me less often, but that made me desperate and I kept telephoning him—in his shop, in his home; I hung around wherever I could see him, so that he too became desperate. But he never blamed me, only himself, for making me miserable and, God forbid, ruining my young life. And he was so truly unhappy about what he said he had done to me, so guilty, that now it was I who tried to comfort him. This went on for a few weeks during which slowly I began to change, and to listen to him when he talked about my future, and even to envisage one which did not include him.

  In later years, I twice revisited India, both times staying in a luxury New Delhi hotel where he visited me and where we had sex together. Once he came to New York, but he had his wife and two of his daughters with him so our meetings were limited to those times when they didn’t need him to carry their shopping. He came to my apartment, but he was no longer keen on sex; he was drinking a lot and had become huge. He also visited my office where he looked around and said, “Diane, I’m proud of you,” and he really did shine with a sort of paternal pride in me.

  My early circumstances had been the same as Lucia’s: divorced parents, a couple of sets of step-parents, two Christmas dinners every year erupting into the same kind of fights . . . India had been for me, as it now was for Lucia, a higher world, an escape from this lower world in which I had grown up. But for her it also represented those refinements of love and religion that her study of Indian dance had opened up for her: the love of the milkmaids, or gopis, for their Krishna, their emotional turmoil as he now played with them, now disappeared only to reappear with other women’s nail marks on his chest. Lucia’s dance teacher had known all about those emotions, had suffered them herself, so that when she showed Lucia the traditional gestures and facial expressions for hope, love, and despair, she had infused them with her own experience, leaving her panting like a deer or a discarded mistress.

  Vijay was a shopkeeper, and maybe also a middleman in murky politics; he wore a big shiny suit and too many rings on his hairy, handsome hands. But in retrospect I see that it had not been difficult for me to identify him with the god celebrated in Indian dance and poetry. But what about Lucia? He was now nearly sixty years old, alcoholic, fat, and frightened. Sometimes he had to be helped to the toilet where he sat astride like a pregnant woman, groaning while he relieved himself. But Lucia accepted all this: for her, as for the gopis she wished to emulate, the transcendence of sex—of the lover’s person—was the essence of love itself.

  The secret phone calls continued, and there were also letters for him containing newspaper cuttings, which he quickly destroyed. His only refuge was a constant supply of drink, but by now he was so frightened to go out—frightened of whom? of what?—that he sent Lucia to the liquor store. Once she phoned me—as intense and secret as he was when he spoke on the phone: “I don’t have any money . . . For him; for his vodka,” she said, impatient at my lack of immediate understanding. I told my staff that I had a family crisis, and on my way home, I stopped at a money machine to take out several hundred dollars. Lucia took some from me at once and hurried to the liquor store. When I reproached Vijay for not telling me that he had run out of money, he said, “I’m taking too much from you. Staying here, so long, your guest . . .” His head was bowed to his chest. I held his hand in both of mine; I wanted so much for him to share whatever it was that was troubling him. I think he was tempted to speak—he began, “What did I do? Only what everyone else does,” and then tears choked him; they rolled down his face and I kissed his wet cheek and it was at that moment that Lucia returned from the liquor store. She looked at us both, then opened the bottle and filled his glass and gave it to him, and while he drank, sighing in relief and pleasure, she looked across at me with hostility. I showed her where I put the money I had brought in a drawer: “This is for him,” I told her, and “All right,” she said, her tone expressing indifference to this mundane transaction.

  Now she had a new plan, and one morning she came to my office to propose it. My office is in a huge commercial mid-town building, and all day the elevators go up and down crowded with employees and messengers and maintenance men, and the whole place, including the inner room where I sit, is frenzied with activity of a kind that would be distasteful to anyone with unworldly or other-worldly inclinations. But Lucia had only come here—as I used to visit my father—to ask for money to go to India. She explained that she needed it to release Vijay from imprisonment in my apartment and to take him home. I began to say that Vijay was staying—in fact, hiding—in my apartment because he couldn’t go home, but she interrupted me impatiently: he himself had told her that it was all a plot, that there was nothing against him, that he had done nothing. The best plan now was for him to go back and expose the enemies who were intriguing against him and for her to go with him; all they needed was money, which I could easily give them, if I wanted to. When I was silent, she accused me of plotting to keep him here dependent on me, making him helpless, destroying him with drink. I propped my elbows on my desk and held my head; it was in sorrow for Vijay, for this description of what he had become. Lucia too began to cry, though she tried to comfort me, saying it would be all right, she would take him home and he would become himself again, what he had been. I wept with regret for the past, and she in longing for the future; and of course if money was all that was needed to dry our diverse tears, then I was more than willing to give it.

  It turned out to be unnecessary, even superfluous. Vijay’s passage home was paid for by the Government of India, who were bringing him back under an extradition order. Then Vijay did become himself again, as I remembered him—calm, resolute in the face of a crisis. It was the way he had been when the girl in my New Delhi hotel had killed herself, and he had dealt not only with all the practical arrangements but also with me, with my double anguish. I had been devastated by my sense of what her last hours must have been, and my own guilt at having refused so much as to lend her a pair of scissors. Vijay absolved me of both: by his acceptance not of her fate alone but of fate in general, which awaited us all.

  It was the way he met his own fate when it came. He refused to take legal aid against the order but submitted to it at once. At the same time he tried to calm Lucia who wanted to call everyone she could think of—Interpol, the Attorney General, the President—any president, India, America, who cares! she cried when Vijay smilingly asked her which one.

  He packed his bags and I helped him, while she hovered around us, pleading: “All you need is a good lawyer, Daddy’ll get you one, it’s just the sort of thing he knows about.”

  He was trying to zip up his bag and she was trying to stop him. “Lucia, let me go home,” he said. “I’ll get a good lawyer.”

  “Promise! Promise me!”

  “Everything will be done, God willing,” he said.

  Two Indian police officers sent from New Delhi came to fetch him. He received them like a courteous host, commiserating with them for the fatigue of their long journey and the necessity of repeating it almost at once. He offered them vodka which they had to refuse, since they were on duty, but they encouraged him to go ahead. He finished the bottle, while conversing with his captors, joking with them in Hindi; all laughed and liked one another. When it was time to go, he wouldn’t allow Lucia or me to help carry his large suitcases. His only regret was that he hadn’t been able to fill them with shopping to take home to his family, all the trinkets and gadgets they loved so much. I promised to send them on, but he said, “No, no, the customs! They’ll charge two hundred percent!” “Three hundred percent!” said his captors and they hit one another’s palms in appreciation of the joke.

  Lucia a
nd I followed their cab to the airport where they were ushered inside by the airline staff. We followed as far as we could, and he turned back to us once and waved. He was wearing one of his shiny suits from Delhi, with a broad necktie, and his rings flashed as he waved to us. He had not been handcuffed, maybe because they were all friends by now, or maybe for fear the metal would set off the alarm at the security gate.

  *

  The rest of this story belongs to Lucia. I went back to running my business, but she followed him to India. I sent her money whenever she needed it, and she faxed me newspaper reports. In these Vijay figured only marginally, as a middleman in the case against a cabinet minister and several top bureaucrats accused of taking large-scale bribes. Vijay was arrested with them, and some of the newspaper photographs showed him being taken into custody with the others, all of them shackled. There were reports of how they were let out on bail, then more reports of their re-arrest. In India it takes not weeks or months but years for a case to come to trial, and in the meantime there are constant alternations of arrests, court appearances, bail, and further arrests.

  Lucia remained there waiting for over three years, and I had very little news of her and no address other than the American Express office in New Delhi. She continued to send newspaper photographs of Vijay being taken from jail to court—each time he looked more worn, more tattered, unshaven and unkempt, until he was indistinguishable from any long-time prisoner. The last but one clipping that Lucia sent was just a few lines from some back page to say that Vijay had died from kidney failure while in custody. The last clipping announced a change of government, the reinstatement of the minister to his cabinet post, and the annulment of the case against him and his co-accused.