“Juliana?” I try. “Like the Dutch queen?”
“Nope.” Jules stands up from her chair and walks toward me, smiling as she folds herself into my lap. Then she kisses me.
“Juliet,” I try.
She shakes her head, smiling as she unbuttons her shirt. “Not Juliet. But you’re welcome to be my Romeo tonight.”
Twenty-nine
The next morning, Jules leaves, back to Pune and the ashram with Nash and Tasha. We make vague plans to meet up in Goa the following week. I never do find out what Jules is short for.
I feel hungover even though we didn’t drink, and lonely even though I’m used to being on my own. I call Prateek to see what he’s doing this weekend, but he’s helping his mother at home today and tomorrow he is going to a big family dinner with his uncle. I spend the day wandering Juhu Beach. I watch a bunch of men play soccer on the sand and it all makes me miss the boys in Utrecht. And then all the missing congeals, and it’s Lulu I miss, and I know it must be displaced, my loneliness a heat-seeking missile, her the heat. Only I can’t seem to find a new source of heat. I don’t miss Jules at all.
By Sunday, I’m going stir-crazy. I decide to take a train out of the city, a day trip somewhere. I’ve just opened my guidebook to figure out where to go when my phone rings. I practically leap on it.
“Willem!” Mukesh’s jovial voice echoes through the line. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to hear from him. “What are you doing today?”
“I’m just trying to suss that out. I was thinking of making a day trip to Khandala.”
“Khandala is very nice, but far for one day so you must leave early. If you like, I can arrange a driver for you another day. I have a different proposal for you. How about I take you around?”
“Really?”
“Yes. There are some very lovely temples in Mumbai, smaller temples tourists so rarely see. My wife and daughters are away, so I have the day free.”
I gratefully accept, and at noon, Mukesh picks me up in a small battered Ford and proceeds to speed me around Mumbai. We stop at three different temples, watching young men do yoga-like calisthenics, watching old Sadhus meditating in prayer. The third stop is a Jain temple, the acolytes all hold small brooms sweeping in front of them as they walk. “To brush any living creatures out of their way so not to inadvertently take a life,” Mukesh explains. “Such care for life,” he says. “Just like Mummy.”
“Right. Mummy is practically a Jain,” I say. “Or maybe she’s aiming to be the next Mother Teresa?”
Mukesh gives me a sympathetic look that makes me want to break something. “You know how I met Mummy, do you not?” he asks as we walk through a breezeway in the temple.
“I assume it had something to do with the fascinating world of air travel.” I’m being unfair to Mukesh, but such is the price for making himself her emissary.
He shakes his head. “That came later. I was with my own mummy who had the cancer.” He clucks his tongue. “She was having her treatments, tip-top doctor, but it was in the lungs, so not much to be done. We were coming from the specialist one day, waiting for a taxi, but Amma, that’s my mummy, was quite weak and dizzy and she fell on the street. Your mummy happened to be nearby and she rushed up to ask if she could help. I explained to her about Amma’s condition—it was terminal,” he lowers his voice to a whisper. “But your mummy told me about different things that could help, not to cure her, but to make the dizziness and the weakness better. And she came, every week, to my home, with her needles and her massages and it helped so much. When my amma’s time came, her journey to the next life was so much more peaceful. Thanks to your mummy.”
I see what he’s doing. Mukesh is attempting to interpret my mother to me much in the way Bram used to do when he’d explain why Yael seemed so gruff or distant. He was the one to quietly tell me stories about Saba, who, after the death of Yael’s mother, Naomi, came undone by one tragedy too many. He turned overprotective, paranoid, or more overprotective and paranoid, Bram said, not allowing Yael to do the simplest things—swim in a public pool, have a friend over—and forcing her to keep disaster preparation checklists for any kind of emergency. “She promised she would do everything differently,” he said. “So it would be different for you. So it wouldn’t be oppressive.”
As if there’s only one kind of oppressive.
After the temples, we have lunch. I’m feeling bad about how I acted toward Mukesh, so when he tells me he has something extra special he wants to show me—something very few tourists ever see—I paste on my smile and act excited. As we bump across Mumbai, the streets becomes more dense: bicycles, rickshaws, cars, donkey-pulled carts, cows, women with bundles on their heads, all converge onto choked streets that don’t seem built for such traffic. The buildings themselves suffer from the same syndrome; the mix of high-rises and shacks are all overflowing with rivers of people, sleeping on mats, hanging laundry on lines, cooking on small fires outside.
We turn down a dank narrow alley, shrouded somehow from the bright sunlight. Mukesh points to the row of young girls in tattered saris, standing. “Prostitutes,” he says.
At the end of the alley we stop. I look back at the prostitutes. Some are younger than me, and their eyes look blank, and it all makes me feel ashamed somehow. Mukesh points to a squat cement building with a name written on it in both swirly Hindi and block English. “Here we are,” he says.
I read the sign. mitali. It’s vaguely familiar.
“What is this?” I ask.
“Why, Mummy’s clinic, of course,” he says.
“Yael’s clinic?” I ask in alarm.
“Yes, I thought we might pay her a visit.”
“But, but . . .” I sputter for excuses. “It’s Sunday,” I finish, as if the day of the week is the problem.
“Sickness does not take a Sabbath.” Mukesh points to a small teashop on the corner. “I will wait for you there.” And then he’s gone.