“As soon as you walk away, the milk’s returned to the shop. And your money? The shopkeeper gets a cut; the crime bosses get a cut. The women, the women are indentured, and they get nothing. As for what happens to babies . . .” She trails off ominously.
“What happens to the babies?” The question pops out before I realize I might not want to know the answer.
“They die. Sometimes of malnutrition. Or sometimes of pneumonia. When life is so tenuous, something small might do it.”
“I know,” I say. Sometimes even when life isn’t that tenuous, I think and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing.
“In fact, the day you arrived, I was late because of an emergency with one of those very children.” She doesn’t elaborate, leaving it for me to put the pieces together.
Yael’s non-admission manages to make me feel retroactively guilty for faulting her—there was something more important—and bitter—there always is something more important. But mostly it makes me tired. Couldn’t she have just told me and saved me the trouble of my guilt and bitterness?
Then again, sometimes I think that guilt and bitterness may be Yael’s and my true common language.
Our first stop is the Shree Siddhivinayak Temple, an ornate wedding cake of a temple that is being attacked by a tourist horde of ants. Yael and I take our place among the masses and push into a stuffy gold hall, wending our way to a flower-covered statue of the elephant god. He’s beet-red, as if embarrassed, or maybe he’s just hot, too.
“Ganesha,” Yael tells me.
“The remover of obstacles.”
She nods.
All around us, people are laying garlands around the shrine or singing or praying.
“Do you have to make an offering?” I ask. “To get your obstacles removed?”
“You can,” she replies. “Or just chant a mantra.”
“What mantra?”
“There are several.” Yael doesn’t say anything else for a while. And then, in a low and clear voice, she chants: “Om gam ganapatayae namaha.” She gives me a look, like that’s enough of that.
“What does it mean?”
She cocks her head. “Roughly I’ve heard it translated as: ‘Wake up.’”
“Wake up?”
She looks at me for a second, and though we have the same eyes, I really have no idea what she sees through hers.
“It’s not the translation that matters with a mantra. It’s the intention,” she says. “And this is what you say when you want a new beginning.”
After the temple, we hail a rickshaw. “Where to now?” I ask.
“We are meeting Mukesh for lunch.”
Mukesh? The travel agent who booked my flights?
We spend the next half hour in silence as we weave through more traffic and dodge more cows, finally arriving at a sort of dusty shopping center. As we’re paying the driver, a tall, broad, smiling man in a voluminous white shirt comes barreling out of a place called Outbound Travels.
“Willem!” he says, greeting me warmly, grasping both my hands. “Welcome.”
“Thank you,” I say, looking back and forth between him and Yael, who’s decidedly not looking at him, and I wonder what exactly is going on. Are they together? It would be just her way, introduce the idea of a boyfriend by not introducing him as her boyfriend and leaving me to figure it out.
Mukesh tells our driver to wait and then goes back into the travel agency to pick up a plastic bag, and then we climb back in and drive through fifteen more minutes of traffic to the restaurant.
“It’s middle eastern,” Mukesh says proudly. “Like Mummy.”
Mukesh pushes the menu aside and calls over the waiter, ordering platters of hummus and grape leaves, baba ghanoush and tabouli.