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.
I stand in front of the clinic for a minute. One of the prostitutes—she looks no older than thirteen—starts to walk toward me and I can’t stand the thought that she thinks I’m a client, so I shove open the door to the clinic. The door swings open, right onto an old woman crouched just inside. There are people everywhere, with homemade bandages, and listless babies, napping on pallets on the floor. They’re camped all up the cement stairs and all around the waiting room, giving new meaning to the term.
“Are you Willem?” From behind the glass partition a no-nonsense Indian woman in a lab coat is looking at me. Two seconds later, she opens the door to the waiting room. I feel all the eyes turn to me. The woman says something in Hindi or Marathi and there is much silent nodding, giving new meaning to the term patient, too.
“I’m Doctor Gupta,” she says, her voice brisk, efficient but warm. “I work with your mother. Let me go find her. Would you like some tea?”
“No thank you.” I have the sickening feeling that everyone else is in on a joke but me.
“Good, good. Wait here.”
She leads me to a small windowless room with a ripped gurney, and a rush of memory overtakes me. The last time I was in a hospital: Paris. The time before that: Amsterdam. Yael had called me at my dorm, very early that morning, telling me to come. Bram was sick.
I couldn’t understand the urgency. I’d seen him not a week before. He’d been a little off his game, a sore throat, but Yael was tending to him with her usual teas and tinctures. I had an exam that day. I asked if I could come after.
“Come now,” she said.
At the hospital, Yael had stood in the corner while three doctors—the traditional kind, with stethoscopes and guarded expressions—surrounded me in a grim little circle and explained to me that Bram had contracted a rare strain of strep that had sent his body into septic shock. His kidneys had already failed and now his liver was going, too. They were doing everything they could, putting him on dialysis and pumping him full of the most powerful antibiotics, but so far, nothing had been effective. I should brace myself for the worst.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Neither did they, really. All they could say was, “It’s one of those one-in-a-million cases.” Such comforting odds, except when you were the one.
It was like finding out the world was made of gossamer and could be so easily ripped apart. To be so solely at the mercy of fate. Even with all Bram’s talk of accidents, it seemed inconceivable.
I looked to Yael, mighty Yael, to intervene, to swoop in, to take care of Bram like she always had. But she just shrank into that corner, not saying a word.
“Do something, goddammit!” I screamed at her. “You have to do something.”
But she didn’t. Couldn’t. And two days later, Bram was gone.
“Willem.”
I turn around and there’s Yael. I always think she’s so frightening, but she’s actually tiny, barely reaching my shoulder.
“You’re crying,” she says.
I reach out and touch my face and I find it wet with tears. I’m mortified to be doing this. In front of her. I turn away. I want to run. Out of this clinic. Out of India. Forget the shoot. Forget the flight delay. Buy a new ticket. It doesn’t have to be back to Amsterdam. Anywhere that’s not here.
I feel her hands on me, turning me back around. “Willem?” she asks. “Tell me why you’re lost.”
It’s shocking to hear her words, my words. That she remembered.
But how can I answer her? How can I answer when I’ve been nothing but lost these last three years? So much more than I ever anticipated. I keep thinking of another one of the stories Bram used to tell, a horror story really, about when Yael was a girl. She was ten and Saba had taken her camping in the desert. Just the two of them. As the sun started to set, Saba said he’d be right back, and then left her alone with one of those disaster preparation checklists that he was always having her make. Yael, terrified, but capable because of those very disaster preparation checklists, made a fire, made dinner, made camp, fended. When Saba showed up the next day, she screamed at him, How could you leave me alone? And Saba had said, I wasn’t leaving you alone. I was watching the whole time. I was preparing you.
Why didn’t she prepare me? Why didn’t she teach me about the universal law of equilibrium before I had to find it out for myself? Maybe then I wouldn’t miss everything so much.
“I miss . . .” I start to say, but I can’t get the words out.
“You miss Bram,” she says.
And yes, of course I do. I miss my father. I miss my grandfather. I miss my home. And I miss my mother. But the thing is, for almost three years, I managed not to miss any of them. And then I spent that one day with that one girl. One day. One day of watching the rise and fall of her sleep under the rolling clouds in that park and feeling so peaceful that I fell asleep myself. One day of being under her protection—I can still feel the grasp of her hand as we flew through the streets after she threw the book at the skinheads, her grip so strong that it felt like we were one person, not two. One day of being the beneficiary of her strange generosity—the barge ride, the watch, that honesty, her willingness to show fear, her willingness to show courage. It was like she gave me her whole self, and somehow as a result, I gave her more of myself than I even realized there was to give. But then she was gone. And only after I’d been filled up by her, by that day, did I understand how empty I really was.
Yael watches me a moment longer. “Who else do you miss?” she asks, like she already knows the answer.
“I don’t know,” I say, and for a minute she looks frustrated, like I’m keeping it from her, but that’s not it, and I don’t want to keep things from her anymore. So I clarify. “I don’t know her name.”
Yael looks up, surprised, and not. “Whose name?”
“Lulu.”
“Isn’t that her name?”
So I tell my mother. About finding this girl, this strange and nameless girl, whom I showed nothing but who saw everything. I tell her how since losing her, I have felt bereft. And the relief at telling my mother this is almost as profound as the relief of finding Lulu was.
When I finish telling Yael the story about that day in Paris, I look at her. And I’m shocked all over again because she’s doing something I’ve only seen her do in the kitchen while cutting onions.
My mother is crying.
“Why are you crying?” I ask her, now crying again myself.
“Because it sounds just like how I met Bram,” she says, laughing on a sob.
Of course it does. I’ve thought about that every single day since I met Lulu. Wondered if that’s not why I’m stuck on her. Because the story is so much like Yael and Bram’s.
“Except for one thing,” I say.
“What’s that?” she asks, swiping at her eyes.
The most important detail. And you’d think I would’ve known better, having heard Bram’s story so many times.
“You give the girl your address.”
Thirty
APRIL
Mumbai
As Mukesh expected, the shoot goes over schedule by double, so for six days I have the pleasure of becoming Lars Von Gelder. And it is. A pleasure. A surprising one. On set, in costume, with Amisha and the other actors across from me, Lars Von Gelder’s cheesy Hindi lines cease to feel cheesy. They don’t even feel like another language. They roll off my tongue and I feel like I am him, the calculating operator who says one thing and wants another.
In between takes, I hang out in Amisha’s trailer, playing games of hearts with her and Billy. “We’re all impressed with your abilities,” Amisha tells me. “Even Faruk, though he’ll never say so.”
He doesn’t. Not exactly. But at the end of each day, he pats me on the back and says, “Not bad, Mr. Not Really.” And I feel proud.
But then it’s the last day and I know it’s over, because instead of saying “not bad,” Faruk says “good work,” and thanks me.
And that’s it. Next week, Amisha and the principles are packing for Abu Dhabi where they will shoot the final scenes of the film. And me? Yesterday I got a text from Tasha. She and Nash and Jules are in Goa. I’m invited to go with them. But I won’t.
I have a couple more weeks here. And I’m spending them with my mother.
My first night back at the Bombay Royale, I get in late. Chaudhary is snoring behind the desk, so I take the stairs up to the fifth floor rather than wake him. Yael has left the door propped open, but she’s also asleep when I get in. I’m both relieved and disappointed. We haven’t really spoken since that day at the clinic. I don’t quite know what to expect between us. Have things changed? Do we speak a common language now?