After four days, Yael finally has a day off. Instead of waking up from my fold-up bed to find her rushing out the door, I see her in her pajamas. “I’ve ordered up breakfast,” she says in that crisp voice of hers, the gutturalness of her Israeli accent ironed out from all the years of speaking English.
There’s a knock at the door. Chaudhary, who seems to always work and to do every single job here, shuffles in, pushing a trolley. “Breakfast, Memsahib,” he announces.
“Thank you, Chaudhary,” Yael says.
He studies the two of us. Then shakes his head. “He is nothing like you, Memsahib,” he says.
“He looks like his baba,” Yael replies.
I know it’s true, but it’s strange to hear her say it. Though not as strange, I’d imagine, as seeing the face of her dead husband staring back at her. Sometimes when I’m feeling charitable, I’ll justify this as the reason she’s put such distance between us these last three years. Then the less charitable side of me will ask, What about the eighteen years before that?
With a dramatic flourish, Chaudhary sets out toast, coffee, tea, and juice. Then he backs out of the door.
“Does he ever leave?” I ask.
“No, not really. His children are all overseas and his wife passed. So he works.”
“Sounds miserable.”
She gives me one of her inscrutable looks. “At least he has a purpose.”
She flips open the newspaper. Even that is colorful, a salmony shade of pink. “What have you been doing the last few days?” she asks me as she eyes the headlines.
I went back to Chowpatty Beach, the markets around Colaba, the Gateway. I went to another movie with Prateek. I’ve wandered mostly. Without purpose. “This and that,” I say.
“So today we do that and this,” she replies.
Downstairs, we are besieged by the usual congregation of beggars. “Ten rupees,” a woman carrying a sleeping baby says. “For formula for my baby. You come with me to buy it.”
I start to pull out money, but Yael snaps at me to stop and then snaps at the woman in Hindi.
I don’t say a word. But my expression must give me away, because Yael gives an exasperated explanation. “It’s a scam, Willem. The babies are props. The women are part of begging rings, run by organized crime syndicates.”
I look at the woman, now standing across from the Taj Hotel, and shrug. “So? She still needs the money.”
Yael nods and frowns. “Yes, she does. And the baby needs food, no doubt, but neither of them will get what they need. If you bought milk for that woman, you’d pay an inflated price, and you’d get an inflated sense of goodwill. You helped a mother feed her baby. What could be better?”
I don’t say anything, because I’ve been giving them money every day and now I feel foolish for it.
“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.”