Maya Read Online Free Page B

No one spoke but Ashok, and the topic to which he invariably returned was his abject hatred of Agra. “This city is a shithole, Mr. Stanley. A place fit only for pigs and cows.” Every otherword that left his lips was an expletive hurled at the injustice of a destiny that had condemned him to live in this filthy backwater town from which he would never, ever escape.
    I later came to see that there were, at that time, many such people in India—people whose lives had been stunted through contact with the West. For some it was enough simply to hear about the affluence of Europe or America to be forever enchanted by its lure, or perhaps to enter this fantastic realm through the occasional Hollywood film that played at the Bhagavan Talkies, a cinema in the neighborhood of Dayalbagh, not far from where I lived. As a foreigner I could not easily avoid these wounded spirits, for they were fatally attracted to Westerners and seemed to love nothing more than to pass time in our company lamenting India’s backwardness.
    While my host ranted, I sat mired in my own private hell of loneliness, marveling at the perfection of his wife’s skin, the very color of our chai. I longed to reach out and touch the soft contours of her sari where it fell over her breasts, across the gentle curve of her naked stomach, and down around her hips to the delicate silver ankle bracelets that jingled, faintly, as she nervously shifted her bare feet. What joy such a body could give and receive! Truly this man had been cursed. He could find no place of rest in the life he had been given. We talked about a lot of things: music, literature, film. But more than anything else it was this terrible defect that rent Ashok’s soul, this brokenness he carried within, that we shared.
    And then there was Penny. Miss Penelope Ainsworth. I met her through Mickey. Penny was doing research for her dissertation at Oxford, working on a project dealing with the ancient sandstone sculptures of Mathura. She had a slim, boyish figure, ivory skin, and pale green eyes. She kept her chestnut brown hair tied back in a single thick braid, in the style of Indian women. I only saw her a few times in Agra, but she was always dressed in either salwar kameez or sari—never in Western clothing. Like Mick, Penny spoke fluent Hindi and appeared to be entirely at ease in India, despite the fact that she was, very obviously, both a woman and a foreigner and therefore subject to a certain amount of routine harassment from men. Still, it was as if she were surrounded by a protective force-field that held them at bay. She was beautiful and, in her profound self-confidence, unapproachable. The three of us—Penny, Mick, and I—went out todinner once or twice at the Kwality Restaurant, not far from the Taj Mahal. That was about it. Except for the bus trip to Mathura.
    Sometime in late September Penny invited Mick and me to travel with her to the government museum in Mathura, a few hours from Agra. She had an appointment with the director, a Mr. Bhattacharya.
    After browsing the collection for a while, Mick and I left her in the director’s office and went outside for chai at a little kiosk nearby. It was a gorgeous, late summer afternoon. The sky was clear, and I was feeling uncharacteristically at ease, relaxing with my tea under a vast pipal tree. Mick had just lit up a bidi when Penny came striding purposefully out the museum door and across the yard to where we sat. Her eyes were blazing. She refused to speak other than to rouse us and demand that we all leave immediately.
    On the bus back to Agra, we got the short version of what had happened. Apparently, the whole time she was explaining her research to Mr. Bhattacharya, he had been sitting behind his big desk surreptitiously jerking off. She hadn’t noticed at first, until he sort of got carried away and started jiggling up and down in his chair. Eventually it became a joke between the three of us,