Free The PuppetMaster by Andrew L. MacNair Page A

who coaxed me in her incredibly hardheaded manner into talking about Lilia. She got me to smile again.
    And Devamukti, who understood that I needed full baptism in the language we both loved.
    There were good and erudite people along that path, a physician who saw me through fever and dysentery and recognized my deeper illness. Perceptive vendors, cabbies, and philosophers I met in the city. Tutors and healers who encouraged me to speak, when I was willing. It took time, two years worth. Most sensed that my former existence wasn’t something I could discuss, so they kept it to the present.
    In the final analysis, I came to see that it wasn’t a process that would have worked in the West. It required a lonely cleansing and the harsh elixir of a city like Varanasi.
    The fool, the ones who pressed thoughtless questions upon me--where I came from, why had I left the life of money and surf and glitter--those I turned my backside to.
    In some odd way, I believe I even owed Soma’s dead husband gratitude. Had the young groom not tumbled from the roof of the train and bled to death, she would not have become the banished widow she was, and I wouldn’t have come to understand that others also could feel the same depth of pain. But as I began my daily lessons with Devi, I saw her sweeping the kitchen with unchecked tears, and from Mirabai I learned her story.
    The irony was that we never spoke directly of our losses, Soma and I. We embarked on timid conversations about the tidbits of life, drifted like castaways on a sea of mundane. I asked her about village life, she asked me about radios. She assumed incorrectly that Master Bhim knew everything, asked how the voices sang from the front. Telling her what little I knew, I saw a curiosity and aptitude that would sprout like flax given correct nutrients. She asked about the river, the snows from which it sprang and the ocean to which it flowed. She had only seen the one, but all three she imagined beautifully. I saved my newspapers, taught her letters, and she began to read. Step by step we came to a place where we could talk in roundabout ways of ill-fortune.
    In addition to everything else, Lilia’s death had left me agonizingly shy with members of the opposite sex, certainly any close to my own age.
    Now I stood outside Master’s back gate, in a gully that smelled of cow dung, urine and cooking oil, holding a note from the most beautiful woman in Varanasi. The paper trembled in my fingers. Somewhere down the alley, a woman’s voice rose, an eerie, pitching soprano, and melded into a melody of flute and tablas. I looked at the folded paper and hesitated. The heart needs so much time to heal. With a sigh, I unfolded the scrap. In neat cursive it demanded, “HAROON’S 8:PM SHARP!!
    I swore. Sukshmi had evidently picked up one annoying practice from her father. I swore again. I really didn’t like Haroon’s, especially at eight in the evening.

     
     
    Thirteen
    My ears caught the low thumping of the bass woofers three hundred meters away. Reason number one for disliking the loudest—possibly the only--night club in Varanasi, I was usually left hearing impaired for an hour after I quit the place. Decent conversation, scholarly or otherwise, during music hours was unachievable. And, under no circumstances, did I enjoy techno music. Dancing to it was the furthest thing from my mind.
    Haroon’s was trendy. That was another reason I avoided it. Fashionable young Indians swarmed in at dusk, drank far too much coffee or gin, smoked too much tobacco, and discussed politics ad nauseum. It was the gathering place for itinerant foreigners, and middle-class Varanasi wannabees--the aspiring young semi-wealthy who craved anything Western. You could make a fat stack of rupees selling Abercrombie blue jeans in Haroon’s. There was even steak on the menu—try getting that in rural India—with the preposterous description of ‘charbroiled, round-up cowboy style.’ In my opinion, the