I get off the phone with Mukesh and reach into my backpack for my wallet. I count out three thousand rupees, the last price Nawal had dropped to. His face falls.
“I have to leave,” I explain. “This evening.”
Nawal reaches behind the counter for a thick square wrapped up in brown paper. “I set it aside on day one so no one else would get it.” He peels back the paper, showing me the tapestry. “I put a little something extra in it for you.”
We say good-bye. I wish him luck with his marriage. “I don’t need luck; it’s in the stars. You, I think, are the one who needs luck.”
It makes me think of something Kate said when she dropped me off in Mérida. “I’d wish you luck, Willem, but I think you need to stop relying on that.”
>I skirt past a group of women, their eyes kohl-dipped, downturned, shy it seems, though they manage to flirt in other ways, with the swoosh of their electric-colored saris, the tinkle of their ankle bracelets.
At the bottom of the hill, I pass several stalls hawking local textiles. I stop at one of them, peering at a purple-mirrored wall-hanging.
“You like what you see?” the young man behind the counter asks casually, no sign that he knows me except for the twinkle in his eye.
“Perhaps,” I say noncommittally.
“Is there something particular you like?”
“I have my eye on something.”
Nawal nods solemnly, no hint of a smile, no hint that we have had almost this exact same conversation for the past four days. It’s like a game. Or a play we started acting in when I first found the tapestry I want. Or rather, Prateek wants.
Two days into my tour of Rajasthan, when I was still full of bitterness and bile and of half a mind to just fly back to Amsterdam early, Prateek sent me a text about his “grand proposal!!!!!!!!!!!” Turned out to be not so grand. He wanted me to shop for Rajasthani handicrafts that he’d sell back in Mumbai for a markup. He’d reimburse me for what I spent and we’d split the profit. At first I told him no, especially after he texted the shopping list. But then one day in Jaipur I wound up in the Bapu Bazaar with nothing much to do, so I started looking for the kind of leather sandals he wanted. And from there, I kept going. Combing the markets for spices and bangles and a very particular kind of slipper has given the trip a sort of shape, allowing me to forget that it’s actually an exile. And because of that, I’ve extended the exile, having Mukesh lengthen it by a week. I’ve now been gone three weeks, and I’ll get back to Mumbai with only a handful days before my return flight to Amsterdam.
In Jaisalmer, Prateek has instructed me to buy a particular kind of tapestry that the area is known for. It must be silk, and I will know it is silk because I must burn a thread, and it will give off the odor of burnt hair. It should be embroidered, sewn, not glued, and I will know it’s sewn because I must turn it over and yank the thread, which also must be silk and must be tested with a match. And it’s to cost no more than two thousand rupees, and I must bargain, hard. Prateek had grave doubts about my bargaining ability, because he claims I overpaid him for the taxi, but I assured him that I’d seen my grandfather barter down a wheel of cheese by half in the Albert Cuyp market, so it was in me.
“Some tea, perhaps, while you look?” Nawal asks. I look under the counter and see that, like yesterday, the tea is already prepared.
“Why not?”
At which point, the script ends and conversation takes over. Hours of it. I sit down in the canvas chair next to Nawal’s, and as we have done for the past four days, we talk. When it gets too hot, or when Nawal gets a serious customer, I leave. Before I do, he will drop the price of the tapestry by five hundred rupees, insuring that I’ll come back and do the whole thing again the next day.
Nawal pours the spicy tea from the ornate metal pot. His radio is playing the same crazy Hindi pop that Prateek loves. “Cricket game on later. If you want to listen,” he informs me.
I take a sip of the tea. “Cricket? Really? The only thing duller than watching cricket is listening to it.”
“You only say that because you don’t understand the particulars of the game.”
Nawal enjoys schooling me about all the things that I don’t understand. I don’t understand cricket, or soccer for that matter, and I don’t understand the politics between India and Pakistan, and I don’t understand the truth about global warming, and I certainly don’t understand why love marriages are inferior to arranged marriages. Yesterday, I made the mistake of asking what was so wrong with love marriages, and I got quite a lecture.
“The divorce rate in India is the lowest in the world. In the West, it’s fifty percent. And that’s if they even get married,” Nawal had said, disgusted. “Here, I tell you a story: All my grandparents, my aunties, my uncles, my parents, my brothers, all had arranged marriages. Happy. Long lives. My cousin, he chose a love marriage, and after two years, no children, the wife leaves him in disgrace.”
“What happened?” I’d asked.
“What happened is they were not compatible,” he’d said. “They were driving without a map. You cannot do that. You must have it arranged properly. Tomorrow I will show you.”
So today, Nawal has brought a copy of the astrological chart that was drawn up to decide if he and his fiancé, Geeta, are compatible. Nawal insists it shows his and Geeta’s happy future, ordained by the gods. “With matters such as these, you have to rely on forces larger than the human heart,” he says.
The chart looks not unlike one of W’s mathematical equations, with the paper divided into sections and different symbols in each one. I know W believes that all of life’s questions can be solved through mathematical principle, but I think even he would find this a stretch.
“You don’t believe in it?” Nawal challenges. “Name me one good love marriage that lasts.”
Lulu had asked me a similar question. Sitting at that café, arguing about love, she’d demanded to know one couple who’d stayed in love, who’d stayed stained. And so I’d said Yael and Bram. Their names had just popped out. And it was so strange because in two years on the road, I had never told anyone about them, not even people I’d traveled with for a long time. As soon as I said that, I’d wanted to tell her everything about them, the story of how they met, how they seemed like interlocking puzzle pieces and how sometimes I didn’t seem to fit into the equation. But it had been so long since I’d spoken of them, I hadn’t known know how to do it. Though in some strange way, it seemed like another unsaid thing she already knew. Still, I wish I’d told her everything. Add it to my list of regrets.
I’m about to tell Nawal about them. My parents, who had a pretty spectacular love marriage, but then again, maybe it was there, in the charts all along, how it would end. I have wondered: If you could know going in that twenty-five years of love would break you in the end, would you risk it? Because isn’t it inevitable? When you make such a large withdrawal of happiness, somewhere you’ll have to make an equally large deposit. It all goes back to the universal law of equilibrium.
“I think this whole falling in love business is a mistake,” Nawal continues. “I mean look at you.” He says it like an indictment.