“Three hundred rupees for no AC. Four hundred with,” Chaudhary says. “That’s the law.”
I hand Prateek five hundred rupees, about the price of a sandwich back home. He backs up to leave. “Hey, what about that korma?” I ask him.
His smile is goofy, a little like Broodje’s. “I will be in touch,” he promises.
The elevator lurches to the fifth floor. Chaudhary opens the gate onto a light-filled corridor, smelling of floor wax and incense. He leads me past a series of slatted wood doors, stopping at the farthest one, and pulls out a master key.
At first, I think the old man got the wrong room. Yael has lived here for two years, but this is an empty suite of rooms. Anonymous bulky wood furniture, generic paintings on the wall of desert forts and Bengal tigers. A small round table against a pair of French doors.
And then I smell it. Beneath the competing scents of onion and incense and ammonia and wax, is the undeniable smell of citrus and wet earth. The scent, I realize with the clarity of something you’ve always known, but never needed to recognize before, of my mother.
I take a tentative step into the hallway and another blast hits me. And just like that, I’m not in India. I’m back in Amsterdam, at home, a long summer twilight. It had finally stopped raining, so Yael and Bram were outside, celebrating the minor miracle of sunshine. Still cold from the rain, I stayed huddled inside under a scratchy wool blanket and watched them through the big picture window. Some students who lived in one of the flats across the canal were blasting music. A song came on, something old and New Wave from when Yael and Bram were younger, and he grabbed her and they danced, head to head, even though it wasn’t a slow song. I watched them through the glass, fixed on the sight of them, pretending not to be. I must’ve been eleven or twelve, an age when such displays should’ve embarrassed me, but didn’t. Yael saw me watching, and—this is what surprised me then, still surprises me now as I remember it—she came inside. She didn’t exactly drag me out or invite me to dance with them, as Bram might’ve. She just folded up the blanket and pulled me up by the elbow. I was enveloped by her smell, oranges and leaves, that ever-present loamy tang of her tinctures, and the canals and all their murky secrets. I tried to make it like I was acquiescing, allowing myself to be led, giving no trace of how happy I was. But I must not have been able to fully contain it because she smiled back at me and said, “We have to snatch the sun when we have it, don’t we?”
She could be warm like that. But it came and went with as much regularity as the Dutch sun. Except with Bram. But maybe it was reflected warmth—he was her sun, after all.
After Chaudhary leaves, I lie down on the sofa. My head rests uncomfortably against the heavy wood arm but I don’t move, because I’m in the sunlight and the heat feels necessary, like a transfusion of sorts. I should probably get in touch with Yael, I think, but drowsiness and jetlag and a certain kind of relief are pulling me under, and before I can do so much as remove my shoes, I am asleep.
I’m flying again. Back on a plane, which feels wrong because I just got off a plane. But it’s so vivid and real it takes a beat longer than usual to recognize it as the dream; and then it warps and becomes lurid and surreal, heavy and slow, the way dreams do when your mind is rebelling against a betrayed body clock. Maybe that’s why in this dream, there is no landing. No illumination of the seatbelt sign, no inaudible announcement from the captain. Just the buzz of the engines, the feeling of being aloft. Just flying.
But there is someone next to me. I turn and try to ask, Where are we? But everything is heavy, lugubrious, I can’t get my mouth to work right because what comes out is, Who are you?
“Willem,” a voice in the distance calls.
The person in the dream turns. Still faceless. Already familiar.
“Willem.” The voice again. I don’t answer it. I don’t want out of the dream quite yet, not this time. Again, I turn toward my seatmate.
“Willem!” The voice is sharp this time and it pulls me out of the honey stickiness of sleep.
I open my eyes. I sit up and for a second, we just look at each other, blinking.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
I’ve been wondering that myself for the past month, after my initial optimism about this trip faded to ambivalence and then curdled into pessimism and now has withered into regret. What am I doing here?
“You sent me a ticket.” I try to make it seem like a joke, but my head is cloudy with the dream, and Yael only frowns.
“I mean what are you doing here? We’ve been looking everywhere for you at the airport.”
We? “I didn’t see you.”
“I was needed at the clinic. I sent a driver and he was running a bit late. He said he sent you several texts.”
I take out my phone and turn it on. Nothing happens. “I don’t think it works here.”
She looks, disgusted, at my phone, and I feel a sudden and fierce loyalty to it. Then she sighs. “The important thing is you made it,” she says, which seems both obvious and optimistic.
I stand up. My neck has a crick and when I circle it, it gives off a loud pop that makes Yael frown again. I stand up, stretch, and look around the room.
“Nice place,” I say, continuing the small talk that has sustained us for the past three years. “I like what you’ve done with it.”
It’s like a reflex, trying to make her smile. It never worked for me before and it doesn’t work now. She walks away, opening the French doors leading to the balcony, overlooking the Gateway, the water beyond. “I should probably get something closer to Andheri, but I seem to have grown too accustomed to living on the water.”
“Andheri?”
“Where the clinic is,” she says, as if I should know this. But how, exactly? Talk of her work has been strictly off limits in our casual chit-chat emails. The weather. The food. The myriad Indian festivals. Postcards, without the pretty pictures.