“Don’t you have to work?”
“In India, work is the master, but the guest is god,” Prateek says. “Besides, between the phone and taxi . . .” He smiles. “My uncle will not object.” He opens a newspaper. “Dil Mera Golmaal is on. So is Gangs of Wasseypur. Or Dhal Gaya Din. What do you think, Baba?”
>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.
I know that Yael came to India to study Ayurvedic medicine. It was what she and Bram had intended to do once I left for university. Travel more. For Yael to study traditional healing methods. India was to be the first stop. The tickets were booked before Bram died.
After he died, I expected Yael to fall apart. Only this time, I would be there. I would put aside my own grief and I would help her. Finally, instead of me being an interloper into her great love affair, I would be the product of it. I would be a comfort to her. What she wasn’t as a mother, I would be as a son.
For two weeks, she locked herself in the top-floor room, the one Bram had built for her, shutters closed, door locked, ignoring most of the visitors who’d stopped by. In life, Bram had been all hers, and in death, that hadn’t changed.
Then, six weeks later, she’d left for India as scheduled, as if nothing had happened. Marjolein said Yael was just licking her wounds. She’d be back soon.
Two months later, though, Yael sent word that she wasn’t coming back. Long ago, before she studied naturopathic medicine, she’d had a nursing degree, and now she was going back to that, working in a clinic in Mumbai. She said she was closing down the boat; she’d already boxed up the important things and everything else was being sold. I should take what I wanted. I packed up a few boxes and stored them in my uncle Daniel’s attic. Everything else, I left. Not long after that, I got kicked off of my program. Then I packed up my own rucksack and took off.
“You’re just like your mother,” Marjolein had said, somewhat mournfully, when I told her I was leaving.
But we both knew that wasn’t true. I am nothing like my mother.
The same emergency that kept Yael from the airport is apparently pulling her back to the clinic after all of an hour in my company. She invites me to come with her, but the invitation is halfhearted and rote, a lot like this invitation to come to India, I suspect. I politely decline, with excuses of jetlag.
“You should be out in the sunshine; it’s the best cure.” She looks at me. “Though make sure you cover this.” She touches the mirror image on her face where my scar is. “It looks fresh.”