A cup of coffee and the battle for your life
Every time we return home Sadhna’s family insists on turning on the air conditioning in the room, which is usually off. Two chairs await us on the wall opposite the television, in a place of honor. They offer us water, chai and food, even if we’ve just eaten outside. We have to accept at least one piece of fruit, which Sadhna’s father prepares for us. Sadhna assures us that her father loves to peel and cut fruit, and he does it with so much care that it’s hard to doubt.
From day one Sadhna’s sister coveted Sara’s hands, and today she finally had the courage to say that she liked to tattoo them. “Do you know what is mehndi? Henna? The lines will stand out on your fair skin.”
With a religious care, Sadhna’s sister spreads a red carpet on the living room floor, where she and Sara sit. Sara opens her hands in her lap, and Sadhna’s sister squeezes a kind of pastry bag that spits a brown paste. The whole family watches the process. The father always keeps us company, in the relaxed attire he wears at home, barefoot, with a tank top undershirt and a white cloth wrapped around the waist. Sadhna’s sister rarely sits down, fluttering between the living room and the kitchen, and the mother never, she just comes to bring or say something. Sara always asks her to stay with us and today she agreed, the lady sits silently between Sadhna and her husband. I stand up to see the process better. Sara looks at me in disbelief. I restrain the urge to laugh, it would be a hard blow to the artist. She squeezes the tube tighter and draws fat, clumsy lines, filling both palms and the backs of the hands with coarse patterns, arches and flowers, with many dots filling the empty spaces. She is prepared to go on and continue up to the wrist, but Sadhna interrupts her.
“I think that’s enough.”
The sister halts contemplating her work. “Now don’t move, don’t touch anything.” She leaves Sara with her hands open and comes back with two plastic bags and a string. “You have to sleep with the bags, the design will last longer.”
Locked in the room, we hold our laughter so that they don’t hear us outside. Sara looks at me, looks at the bags strapped to her wrists. “It’s awful, isn’t it? And what’s the idea with the bags? I’ve had henna before and only had to wait for half an hour.”
We are faced with an unexpected challenge. With her hands disabled, Sara cannot undress herself. I try to pull the top by her arms without tearing the bags off. Then she lies down on the bed with open arms, like a scarecrow. “I don’t know how I’m going to sleep with this…” I pull the pants from her ankles. Then she suddenly remembers: “You have to take my lenses off too!”
“No way! You can sleep with them for one night.”
“It’s simple, come on.” She comes closer to me with eyes wide open. “You’ve seen me do it so many times!”
With my left hand I hold her eyelids, while the fingers of the right one, like tweezers, reach to the jelly of her eye. As soon as I touch the soft, wet pupil I recoil. “I’m afraid to hurt you.”
“Go on, don’t hesitate.”
In the morning Sara gets rid of the bags and rubs her hands together to shake off the brown crust. She holds out her hands to me, laughing: “It’s a disaster.”
After breakfast we leave with Sadhna to visit the coffee shop, two minutes away from home. Like so many others, the sign announces the name of the shop in English in bold letters; above is the name in Hindi, below the address and the telephone number, and on the sides generic photographs of the business, in this case, roasted coffee beans. The store is no more than two meters by three, the counter, a blue cupboard with glass doors, bags on the floor with ground coffee and beans, and on the wall, again Sai Baba with the afro hair. Sadhna’s father, in an immaculately starched white shirt, stands behind a wooden and glass counter with a two-pan scale with a triangular dial.
A door opens into a longer room, with more sacks of coffee piled up on the floor and the mezzanine. There is ground coffee everywhere, ropes and buckets hanging, the electrical wiring that powers the machines is exposed on the wall with huge transformers and yellow warning signs. In addition to the bags, heavy machinery takes most of the space, with an old-fashioned charm that harks back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The largest one has a boiler, a chimney and a tray where the coffee beans rotate while roasting. Another one, a large funnel through which the grains descend to be ground, before sliding as powder into plastic containers. The last machine reminds me of a cement mixer. A young employee runs the machinery while Sadhna’s father explains to us how it works and the coffee cycle, from the plantation to the consumer. He offers us a bag of ground coffee for the trip.
Upon arrival, Rahul bends down to touch Sadhna’s father’s feet.
“Let’s go?” asks Sadhna.
“Challo” I reply.
“Very good!
“It’s one of the few words I remember in Hindi.”
“Are you sure you want to come?” asks Sara. “We can go alone.”
“Don’t worry” answers Sadhna.
“Are we going by train?” asks Rahul. “You’ll travel like real Mumbaikar. Prepare to fight for your places!”
“I know, the train in Mumbai was the most terrifying experience I had in India!” I say.
It was perhaps the episode from my first trip to India that I recounted the most. With no one to guide us, as we now have, we boarded the train unwary and immediately found a seat, with our swollen backpacks beside us. It was only towards the end of the line that most people started to enter, now we were all well packed and with no place for the backpacks but our laps. People jostled nervously. We were surprised, but since we were not in a hurry, we let ourselves be. At the last station, the train still hadn’t stopped and already an avalanche of people was assaulting the doors while another tried to leave the train, clashing with the brutal violence of two rival armies. If the windows hadn’t all been barred, they would have flown through them too. There was a lot of screaming and shoving, two men started fighting. Holding tight to our backpacks (it was now impossible to put them on our backs), we tried to break through the wall of people that was getting tighter, to let the furious current in. Upon realizing our panic, a man started screaming and pushing to give us room, and that was the only way we managed to get out.
“I was leaving Mumbai at the time everyone wanted to enter” I explain. “And the same train I took was doing the return journey to the city center, those that didn’t enter had to wait for the next one.”
“Were you alone the first time you traveled to India?” asks Rahul.
“No, I was with a friend,” I reply, and maybe I blushed. It’s convenient not to have to specify the gender in English, I don’t feel like explaining that I was with a female friend, let alone clarify our relationship, which was not clear at all, something indeterminate, tumultuous and intermittent, which in those weeks of travel ended up having an unlikely stability (we lived in a singularity, where the general laws did not apply), before permanently dissolving once we returned. Naturally, this friend, Julia, is linked to my impressions of the places I visited with her, and when I return to them, a slumbering cloud arises to color everything with a shadow.
The train is full and more people await on the platform. Sadhna flees with Sara to the women reserved coach, I dig in behind Rahul to get into the general. We crush against each other, there’s always space for someone else to enter, until we reach the grate that separates the coaches. It’s a chicken coop, all in fading blue-gray metal, the bars on the windows, the walls, the back of the benches, the beams in the ceiling with the hand supports hanging, the fans that blow without relieving the heat. Sara and Sadhna have more space, they even manage to sit. We see them through the grate, among women in colorful saris, black burkas, or ‘Western’ clothes.
With Rahul entertaining me, the trip wasn’t as bad as I remembered. We take a long walk through the city to Chowpatty Beach. We sit down on the sand, stop to eat kulfi and chaats, and reenter the streets until we reach the vertiginous bazaars where everything is sold at the side of the road. On the market, Sara finds many architectural details that delight her. To me they were just deteriorated buildings, but aided by her gaze I can glimpse the beauty. Sadhna continues to instruct us with precious curiosities, while Rahul amuses us with his stories, which we never know how much to believe. They are his caricature of India. Sadhna corrects him, or shakes her head with a condescending smile: “Rahul…”. She would never make light of her country or the customs, but she doesn’t hold his nonsense against him. Rahul is the blathering jester while she is the counterweight of thoughtfulness and wisdom.
We end up in front of the station again, our friends have to leave us. Sadhna makes us recommendations, before the monumental building swallows them. With its dark, thorny roofs, gargoyles, stained glass windows, the relentless clock with Roman numerals, the station looks like an old English matron trying to uphold its solemnity amidst the tropical heat. A warm wave rises from the inside of my body to meet the outside heat: we are alone!
Perpetual Motion is a serial novel. Go to the Table of Contents to read previous posts.
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Next: Alone in the big city
