Page 15

“Have no fear, Lieutenant,” I murmured. “For you may count yourself assured that, even if no else does, I will take care to always award you a place in my memory.”

Grammar blinked, his eyes already red-lined and darkening, as the cilia slowly haemorrhaged. His mouth worked, but words failed him. I brought mine closer, in case a final sentence might yet be forthcoming.

Then he gave a gushing whoop, and laughed out loud, spattering our mutual visage with liquid viscera.

Whereupon—with no regrets to speak of—I bit the mad bastard in half.

And so at last we come to you, o my beloved—little raggamuffin, would-be tourist district date rapist. You, with your fresh-cut fade and precious Apache Indian concert tickets, with barely enough real Hindi under your belt to tell the demure Calcutta girl you once thought I was—when first we met, you all swagger and chatter, spinning yourself a man-sized noose of lies as you steered me towards this oh-so-deserted alley—a dirty joke. Here in this bright, drunken, filthy place, so full of neon and flies, this overhanging crush of shacks where one open window lets slip a lick of the latest Bollywood duet, another the drone of Johnny Cash falling down, down, down. The ring of fire, the endless Wheel, spinning.

You thought me merely a bumpkin to be robbed of her virginity, and yourself the true synthesis of Anglo-Indian culture, post-British Occupation. But I believe you now know better.

The Mutiny of 1857 marked one whole turn of the Wheel for India and Britain alike, replacing up most firmly with down; it gave the British (via the East India Company) a perfect excuse to stay in India, to seize control, to cut down the guilty and the “loyal” as well in their lust for gain. They imposed their own system of values on everything they met: Breaking apart clans, ransacking treasuries, erasing whole villages, disinheriting heirs because they were adopted rather than biological, and deeding the lands involved to a plump little Queen, more concerned with the state of her marriage than with exactly whose bleeding hands all these exotic gifts had been ripped from.

Soon enough, Army replaced Company—but nothing really changed. The British swept in like a tide of cockroaches, mating and killing as they willed, forcing themselves in at the top of our caste system in order to escape their own. They stayed until they had outworn their welcome a thousand times over, until those brought up in India—but still calling an England they had never even seen “Home”—were immune to even its most enticing charms. They maintained their stiff spines upright against heat and dust, forgetfulness, sensual excess and nonviolent protest, clinging to their Indian holdings even as the rest of their duskless Empire crumbled—slowly but surely—from within, until their provisional government here was nothing but a skeleton at the feast, last guest left at a singularly unpopular party, still busily stuffing food down its denuded jaws and protesting all the while (whining like a spoiled child, even as the bouncers edge it towards the door) that it is not sleepy, that it has hours yet to revel, wishes yet to make, and room for much, much more.

At last, however, the British did leave—freeing us to return to the long-postponed business of slaughtering each other over differences of race, creed, history. The Wheel had turned again, as it always will.

Yes, it burns, burns, burns, this ring of fire. It keeps on spinning. And I hope you find it hot enough for your liking, o my beloved, just as the Lieutenant and I do—and have, ever since that night in 1857, when his mad appetites mingled so very surely with my own immortal ones, along with his stringy white meat. That night, when I bit through him at one swallow—rind to pulp, red juice spurting, like an overripe piece of fruit—only to have the taste of him linger not only in my mouth but in every other part of me as well: Infected, infectious, infecting.

Before that night, I had no “true shape” to speak of. It was my curse, and my strength—this restless formlessness; this unstinting, innate empathy pulling me forward through the centuries, making every new thing I touched my potential refuge. This much, at least, has never altered. I can still be anything I choose, if I choose.

But now, whenever I relax my hold, I flow back—relentlessly—into him.

Namesake to namesake: The mask and the mirror. Desbarrats Grammar usurped my title, so I made him my prey; I consumed his flesh, and it engulfed me. What was an accidental mislabeling has become a complex truth. Here in the ring of fire, Lieutenant Grammar and I twine tight as mating heartworms, joined at the supernatural equivalent of DNA—the Mutiny that walks like whatever it chooses to. We catch and claw. And at last, almost two hundred years later—as the Wheel, in our case, fails to turn—between the two of us, each only half-there to begin with, something has finally evolved resembling a coordinated whole. Sub lal hogea hai, with a vengeance; so much so that neither of us—former occupier or former occupied—can truthfully tell where we once began, or where we now end.

For were we ever so very different, really?

Liars both. Madmen, cannibals. And monsters.

Ah, but I see you yet stir in my embrace—so slowly, so feebly. Your lips move. Do you wish to refute my words? To confirm them, perhaps?

Lean closer, then, o my beloved. Do not be shy, but do choose your side wisely. Lean closer, closer. And speak up, I pray thee—for I am still quite deaf in this one ear.

The Guided Tour

Hell eats its tourists.

—Andrew Vachss

SIX CARS HAD ALREADY passed me by without a second glance when Lester P. Budgell’s green Oldsmobile finally lurched, hesitated and ground to a halt. Its passenger-side door opened to reveal a balding, paunchy man with a black string tie and a red and yellow checkered shirt. He had Elvis-length sideburns and tarnished silver caps on the wings of his collar. But I was tired. I had been walking along the highway since dawn. And I am also not as young as I used to be.

“Thank you,” I said, taking his sweaty palm in my cold one.

“No problem, ma’am.”

And then we were off, our tires spraying the blanched dust with dried tar.

As the scenery blurred and the sun sank below the rim of the windshield, torn by advancing clumps of cacti, he became talkative. I might have reminded him of his mother—it has happened before. He told me about his wife, his children and his job running a neighbourhood Piggly-Wiggly store in Arkansas, much of which flowed straight over me. I closed my eyes, took care to nod in the right places, and let my mind wander—something I find increasingly easy to do.

I went inside my head.

Inside my head is a beach that stretches farther than the eye can see in all directions but one. Beside the beach runs the sea. It is always night there, in my house made of driftwood by the cold sea’s side. And sometimes, if I am not careful, the sea begins to rise. It rushes in through all the doors and windows of my house, filling its rooms with little silver fish and the bones of drowned men. Green, and slow, and dark, and deep. I sleep there, under the water, and I am at peace.

“Ma’am?”

I pulled myself back with a jerk. “I am sorry,” I said.

“No problem,” he repeated. “Just wondered what you were doing way out here all by yourself in the first place. Car break down?”