Just One Year (Just One Day #2)

But there is someone next to me. I turn and try to ask, Where are we? But everything is heavy, lugubrious, I can’t get my mouth to work right because what comes out is, Who are you?

“Willem,” a voice in the distance calls.

The person in the dream turns. Still faceless. Already familiar.

“Willem.” The voice again. I don’t answer it. I don’t want out of the dream quite yet, not this time. Again, I turn toward my seatmate.

“Willem!” The voice is sharp this time and it pulls me out of the honey stickiness of sleep.

I open my eyes. I sit up and for a second, we just look at each other, blinking.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

I’ve been wondering that myself for the past month, after my initial optimism about this trip faded to ambivalence and then curdled into pessimism and now has withered into regret. What am I doing here?

“You sent me a ticket.” I try to make it seem like a joke, but my head is cloudy with the dream, and Yael only frowns.

“I mean what are you doing here? We’ve been looking everywhere for you at the airport.”

We? “I didn’t see you.”

“I was needed at the clinic. I sent a driver and he was running a bit late. He said he sent you several texts.”

I take out my phone and turn it on. Nothing happens. “I don’t think it works here.”

She looks, disgusted, at my phone, and I feel a sudden and fierce loyalty to it. Then she sighs. “The important thing is you made it,” she says, which seems both obvious and optimistic.

I stand up. My neck has a crick and when I circle it, it gives off a loud pop that makes Yael frown again. I stand up, stretch, and look around the room.

“Nice place,” I say, continuing the small talk that has sustained us for the past three years. “I like what you’ve done with it.”

It’s like a reflex, trying to make her smile. It never worked for me before and it doesn’t work now. She walks away, opening the French doors leading to the balcony, overlooking the Gateway, the water beyond. “I should probably get something closer to Andheri, but I seem to have grown too accustomed to living on the water.”

“Andheri?”

“Where the clinic is,” she says, as if I should know this. But how, exactly? Talk of her work has been strictly off limits in our casual chit-chat emails. The weather. The food. The myriad Indian festivals. Postcards, without the pretty pictures.

I know that Yael came to India to study Ayurvedic medicine. It was what she and Bram had intended to do once I left for university. Travel more. For Yael to study traditional healing methods. India was to be the first stop. The tickets were booked before Bram died.

After he died, I expected Yael to fall apart. Only this time, I would be there. I would put aside my own grief and I would help her. Finally, instead of me being an interloper into her great love affair, I would be the product of it. I would be a comfort to her. What she wasn’t as a mother, I would be as a son.

For two weeks, she locked herself in the top-floor room, the one Bram had built for her, shutters closed, door locked, ignoring most of the visitors who’d stopped by. In life, Bram had been all hers, and in death, that hadn’t changed.

Then, six weeks later, she’d left for India as scheduled, as if nothing had happened. Marjolein said Yael was just licking her wounds. She’d be back soon.

Two months later, though, Yael sent word that she wasn’t coming back. Long ago, before she studied naturopathic medicine, she’d had a nursing degree, and now she was going back to that, working in a clinic in Mumbai. She said she was closing down the boat; she’d already boxed up the important things and everything else was being sold. I should take what I wanted. I packed up a few boxes and stored them in my uncle Daniel’s attic. Everything else, I left. Not long after that, I got kicked off of my program. Then I packed up my own rucksack and took off.

“You’re just like your mother,” Marjolein had said, somewhat mournfully, when I told her I was leaving.

But we both knew that wasn’t true. I am nothing like my mother.

The same emergency that kept Yael from the airport is apparently pulling her back to the clinic after all of an hour in my company. She invites me to come with her, but the invitation is halfhearted and rote, a lot like this invitation to come to India, I suspect. I politely decline, with excuses of jetlag.

“You should be out in the sunshine; it’s the best cure.” She looks at me. “Though make sure you cover this.” She touches the mirror image on her face where my scar is. “It looks fresh.”

I touch the scar. It’s six months old now. And, for a minute, I imagine telling Yael about it. It would infuriate her if she knew what I said to the skinheads to take their attention off the girls and onto me. A one four six oh three—the identification number the Nazis tattooed on Saba’s wrist—but at least I would get a reaction.

But I don’t tell Yael. This goes way beyond small talk. It goes to painful things we never mention: Saba. The war. Yael’s mother. Yael’s entire childhood. I touch the scar. It feels hot, as if merely thinking about that day has inflamed it. “It’s not that fresh,” I tell her. “It’s just not healing right.”

“I can mix you up something for that.” Yael brushes the scar. Her fingers are rough and callused. Workers’ hands, Bram used to say, though he was the one who should’ve had the rougher hands. I realize then we haven’t embraced or kissed or done any of the things one might expect for a reunion.

Still, when she takes her hand away, I wish she hadn’t. And when she starts packing up with promises of things we will do when she has a day off, I’m wishing I had told her about the skinheads, about Paris, about Lulu. Except even if I’d tried, I wouldn’t have known how. My mother and I, we both speak Dutch and English. But we never could speak the same language.

Twenty-two

I am awoken by the ringing of a phone. I reach for my mobile, remember it doesn’t work here. The phone keeps ringing. It’s the house line. It doesn’t stop. Finally, I pick it up.

“Willem saab. Chaudhary here.” He clears his throat. “On the line for you, Prateek Sanu,” he continues formally. “Would you like me to ask the nature of his business?”

“No, that’s okay. You can put him through.”

“One moment.” There is a series of clicks. Then Prateek’s voice echoing hellos, interrupted by Chaudhary, declaring. “Prateek Sanu calling for Willem Shiloh.”

It’s funny to be called by Yael and Saba’s surname. I don’t correct him. After a moment of silence, Chaudhary clicks off.

“Willem!” Prateek booms, as if it’s been months, not hours, since we last spoke. “How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“And what do you think of the Maximum City?”

“I haven’t seen much of it,” I admit. “I’ve been asleep.”

“You are awake now. What are your plans?”

“Haven’t worked that out yet.”

“Let me make a proposal: Pay a visit to me at Crawford Market.”

“Sounds good.”

Prateek gives me instructions. After a cold shower, I head outside, Chaudhary trailing behind me with dire warnings of “pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and roving gangs.” He ticks off the threats on his thick fingers. “They will accost you.”

I assure him I can take it, and in any case the only people to accost me are begging mothers, who congregate in the grassy medians in the center of the shady streets, asking for money to buy formula for the sleeping babies in their arms.

This part of Mumbai reminds me a bit of London with its decaying colonial buildings, except it’s supersaturated with color: the women’s saris, the marigold-festooned temples, the crazily painted buses. It’s like everything absorbs and reflects the bright sun.

From the outside, Crawford Market seems like another building plucked out of old England, but inside it is all India: bustling commerce and yet more surreally bright colors. I walk around the fruit stalls, the clothing stalls, making my way toward the electronics stalls where Prateek told me to find him. I feel a tap on my shoulder.

“Lost?” Prateek asks, a grin splitting his face.

“Not in a bad way.”

He frowns at that, confounded. “I was worried,” he says. “I wanted to call you but I don’t have your mobile.”

“My mobile doesn’t work here.”

The smile returns. “As it happens, we have many mobile phones at my uncle’s electronics stall.”

“So that’s why you lured me here?” I tease.

Prateek looks insulted. “Of course not. How did I know you lacked a phone?” He gestures to the stalls around us. “You can buy from another stall.”

“I’m joking, Prateek.”

“Oh.” He takes me to his uncle’s stall, crammed to the ceiling with cellphones, radios, computers, knockoff iPads, televisions, and more. He introduces me to his uncle and buys us all cups of tea from the chai-wallah, the traveling tea salesman. Then he takes me to the back of the stall and we sit down on a couple of rickety stools.

“You work here?”

“On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays.”

“What do you do the other days?”

He does the head nod/wag thing. “I’m studying accounting. I also work for my mother some days. And I help my cousin sometimes to find goreh for movies.”

“Goreh.”

“White people, like you. It’s why I was at the airport today. I had to drive my cousin.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?” I joke.

“Oh, I am not a casting director, or even an assistant to an assistant. I just drove Rahul to the airport to look for backpackers needing money. Do you need money, Willem?”

“No.”

“I did not think so. You are staying at the Bombay Royale. Very high class. And visiting your mother. Where is your father?” he asks.

It’s been a while since anyone asked me that. “He’s dead.”

“Oh, mine, too,” Prateek says almost cheerfully. “But I have many uncles. And cousins. You?”

I almost say yes. I have an uncle. But how do you explain Daniel? Not so much a black sheep as an invisible one, eclipsed by Bram. And Yael. Daniel, the footnote to Yael and Bram’s story, the small print that nobody bothers to read. Daniel, the younger, scragglier, messier, less directed—and not to forget, shorter—brother. Daniel, the one relegated to the backseat of the Fiat, and consequently, it seemed, the backseat of life.

“Not much family,” is all I say in the end, bookending my vagueness with a shrug, my own version of the head wag.

Prateek presents me a choice of phones. I choose one and buy a SIM card. He immediately programs his number and, for good measure, his uncle’s into it. We finish our tea and then he announces, “Now I think you must go to the movies.”

“I just got here.”

“Exactly. What is more Indian than that? Fourteen million people—”

“A day go to the movies here,” I interrupt. “Yes, I’ve been told.”

He pulls a heap of magazines out of his bag, the same ones I’d seen in the car. Magna. Stardust. He opens one and shows me pages of attractive people, all with extremely white teeth. He rattles off a bunch of names, dismayed that I know none of them.

“We will go now,” he declares.

“Don’t you have to work?”

“In India, work is the master, but the guest is god,” Prateek says. “Besides, between the phone and taxi . . .” He smiles. “My uncle will not object.” He opens a newspaper. “Dil Mera Golmaal is on. So is Gangs of Wasseypur. Or Dhal Gaya Din. What do you think, Baba?”