Jenny at the Taj

 

On that bright summer day in Los Angeles, Jenny separated herself  from the flock of American students waiting for the class to start and  walked over to me to strike up a casual conversation. My being a lonely student from India was something special in her eyes. She was wearing a white top that day, and a gold chain necklace which set off the carnal sponginess of her skin. Her chiseled white Anglo-Saxon features glowed. The light in Los Angeles seemed to change for me. Did this divine apparition really want to talk to me? Be a friend? Could she, heaven perish the thought, be mine one day?

What does a lonely student from India have to offer  those strange luminous beings who tucked their trim behinds in blue spandex and went jogging, walkman in hand and a strange smile on their faces ?   Their uninhibited movements, their insistent sexuality, their solemn promiscuity - all this from books, of course - didn’t all  this put them completely out of reach? What was one’s forte, one’s stock-in-trade in courting these animals of light? Why should they be interested? Why would they even look ?

But Jenny  had these vague left-wing, third-world sympathies. She had recently participated in a demonstration against the American involvement in the gulf war, and had been roundly cursed by passing motorists. I myself had been criticized back home as someone who keeps up with the socialist
revolution much as he keeps up with the avant garde theater. I had let such comments pass. I knew my India, was obsessed with its problems of poverty and overpopulation.

This made everything easy. We started discussing  India in earnest, whenever we had the chance. And after a few such meetings she apparently decided that I was good enough for an evening of more intense conversation, away from lab corridors. We  went on a date-which-was-not-quite-a-date, ostensibly to
discuss politics.

She had this vast, sixties’ car, a Dodge which guzzled gas. Jenny always filled only a small amount of gas, to preserve her limited student dollars better.  And she had this trick of dumping her large backpack between herself and me on the front seat,  in case I got fresh during a drive.

We talked over an expensive Chardonnay that night, and  again I strove hard to cram in as much insight on India as possible.

The dinner went well. Jenny seemed to hang on to each word of mine.  At the end, as the coup de grace,  I brought out the latest I had read in a history book, “ Indian culture will save the world one day. It is a gentle culture. The feminine principle rules there, keeps life  vibrant. Western culture  seems
obsessed with  domination, wanting to separate everything into dead particles to understand and control it. To me, this feels wrong. You need to love all things living. That and only that will save you from your Reagans and Brezhnevs one day.”

Jenny looked impressed.  She was pressing her breasts against the edge of the table, and trying to look deep in my eyes. I felt like a French savant.

Outside Los Angeles cast its  brilliant  night-glow. The wine helped. I was a hit. We became close friends that night.
                                                         ********
Things went on in this vein for a long time. We explored the  sub-cultures of Los Angeles. We heard Nobel laureates recite poetry. We went to the Hollywood Bowl for a night of Mozart. It is possible that we became an item in local school gossip. Many Indians looked at me with great admiration.

I could not quite fathom Jenny’s feelings towards me, whether she reciprocated, even in a small measure , the intensely romantic feelings I had for her. Time never felt ripe to bring up that question.

But every time I proposed a dinner or a movie, she always said yes without hesitation. And hung on to my words, like on our first dinner together.

She had this knack of asking questions which brought out the pop social scientist in me.

“But why does the population continue to grow there, Ashok?. What forces a man who can barely feed himself to produce seven children?”, she would demand, earnestly.

“This is a difficult one, Jen, but you are a biologist yourself. You know that DNA must somehow reproduce itself, ensure its own survival. In certain castes, if a woman is childless, she is known to get her sister as a second wife to her own husband, just to ensure family perpetuity.”

“Whatever the conditions of life?”

“Yes, apparently whatever the conditions of life. Because each eon is only a passing phase, and who knows what glories God has in store for those who believe and persevere? ”

Jenny would take this in with great deliberation, chewing thoughtfully on the biryani meat. And then her eyes would light up at the insight and I would get that reverent look on  which I thrived.

An year passed like this, our relationship locked in this savant-student status quo, and I needed to visit my family in India. When I mentioned this plan to visit India to Jenny, she hesitated only a second before saying, ”May I come with you, Ashok? We have talked about it so much,  I am dying to come and see it for myself.”

My heart leapt with joy.

“Sure”,  I said, “You must. It’s unlike anything you will ever have seen before.”

                                                               *****
We flew to India, Jenny chirpy during the flight, full of anticipation, me ready with more of my donnish insights. Her eyes were glowing, drinking in every detail as we took a cab out of the Delhi airport, and checked into that plush hotel which only dollars could afford.

In a Raj ambiance, surrounded by gleaming brass and footmen in red dresses, we had our first glass of wine for the evening.

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free..
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we....

Jenny jumped up at my recital of that Kipling poem. “This is super, Ashok. How does it go? Now Chil the Kite...Brings home the night...” she intoned, and broke into a tap dance to the tune, her eyes golden with the wine.

“God this place is hot....Let’s get out of this place, Ashok, let’s see some India”. She demanded.

At the imperial  district  we stood before the Tolkienesqe red marble palace of the President. Easily rivalling any building in Rome, the domes and the columns there  had a sense of palace intrigue about it, of masked men carrying daggers to dissolute princes.

I saw Jenny go into a trance.

“Breath-taking, isn’t it?” I asked.

Jenny was not-quite-there. When I asked again, she came-to with a start.

“Hum, yeah, quite grand, I suppose.” She said.

I then took her to the  Chandni Chowk- an  ancient district of Delhi - on a tip about a good kabob place there. In that vast slum, bearded men sat over fires, hawking their ancient fare. Veiled women moved in the background, guarding their tattered footpath dwellings teeming with children. A street urchin tugged at Jenny’s purse to beg for money.

Jenny pulled her bag away, half annoyed, half scared.

She had become completely silent by now. A slow look of what could have been despair seemed to be growing in her eyes.

My attempts to draw Jenny out failed throughout  the excellent kabob dinner, eaten standing on the sidewalk.

“Why would you guys have so many children when you can’t even feed them?”, she finally asked in a  hurt, bewildered tone.

I kept quiet. I didn’t want to get into a fight. Not when I was about to propose to her. When I  finally had her under those brilliant exotic Indian skies. When the Taj Mahal - that magnificent monument to eternal love - was so close by.

Our hotel was close, and we decided to walk back. On our way, we saw this throng of people gathered by the roadside. The circle was lit by burning torches casting a strange glow. Curious, I took Jenny to watch.

In the center a bearded dervish danced in a trance,  his long flowing  dress having taken on a life of its own. The rag-tag crowd watched on, half in sympathy, half in awe. As he saw Jenny at the back of the circle, the dervish suddenly seemed to become  furious. With wide-spread eyes looking far away in the sky, he intoned :

Fly away
They will fly away, all the infidels
Hah,
Their necks will be wrung like pigeons
Hah,
Their blood will warm our earth,
Hah,
Our Man in  the black hood is nigh,
Hah

The crowd sniggered, half glancing over their shoulders at Jenny. The dervish abruptly jumped over the heads of the  crowd and  was  face to face with us, his sunken eyes bloodshot, his famished chest heaving with  the action.  Concerned, I stepped between him and Jenny.

The dervish extended his hand slowly.

As my first flush of fear abated, I realized he was only begging for money. I handed him fifty rupees, a very tidy sum in Chandni chowk.

Elated, he jumped back to the circle.

Jenny looked  flushed,  and very  annoyed.  I hurried her out of that area, back to the hotel. Her thoughtfulness, her depression seemed to have gone up quite a few notches.

I took her to the Taj Mahal the next day, hoping that that awesome monument will restore my waning fortunes.

                                                ********
The Taj sat on the ground, seemingly not-quite touching it, ethereal, like a soap bubble, its gleaming white spires  leading me to the luminous sky , and to  the grand vision of Islam:  All this flows from one God, full of mercy and grace....

I stood paralyzed by its beauty,  ignoring Jenny, who seemed to be in her own world anyway.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, I turned to Jenny and said, “There is nothing like it in the whole world. The emperor cut off the architect’s hands, to be sure.”

Jenny shivered.

We walked back to the hotel in silence.

That night, as the Taj glowed in the moonlight in the distance, I lost my control or inhibition or patience-  say what you will - and proposed to Jenny.

“I am mad, desperately mad for you, Jenny.” I said. “ Marry me. Marry me and I will serve you the rest of my life”.

Jenny’s eyes went stony, blank.

The sense I had, of her being not-quite-there, seemed to deepen.

“Let us see, Ashok”, she said. “Let us see. I need time. And do me a favor, let’s not do the south. I need to leave.”

This was rather abrupt. But sensing that something was seriously amiss,  I decided not to push the matter at that time, worried that she will slip away even further.

Three days later, she hugged me tightly at the airport, carefully tilting her mouth away from my lips, and flew back to the US.

I was to follow about a month later, a month devoted  to my family.

                                             ********
As I looked out of my plane window at the vast cityscape of Los Angeles again, my heart seemed to skip a beat. I knew that my relationship with Jenny was entering a critical phase. I was impatient now, determined to make her mine, it was now or never.

Jenny, on the other hand, seemed determined to avoid any situation in which I could be alone with her.

Avoiding me totally was, of course, impossible. We took the same courses, worked in nearby labs , bumped into each other in the cafeteria all the time. I kept asking for a dinner meeting and she kept making excuses.

She had also started going about with one John Meier, a burly, brilliant American, a fellow graduate student, and a good friend of us both. As gossip had it, they were seen in all kinds places together, Sunset Street
restaurants, Venice beach sands  and all.  Indians had started giving me a pitying glance now.

Jenny’s foray into India with me, an escapade  as gossip had it, was by now famous.

The question which made the rounds in beer parties was, “What happened in India?”

I finally cornered Jenny in a party thrown by a common friend. John Meier was there of course, standing in corner in a group , beer in hand, laughing with gusto. He waved at me cheerfully.

I hunted in every room and finally ran Jenny to ground  in a bedroom, in deep conversation with another girl friend of hers. When she saw me at the door, the girl looked at me knowingly, and left us with a cheery
see-ya-around.

“Jenny, what happened?” I asked, “ I thought we had a connection.”

Jenny sighed, motioned me to sit next to her on the bed, put her hand on my shoulder.

Her eyes were sad as she began to speak.

“Ashok, you have been a dear, and I know this is going to be hard on you. But I think you will understand, because you understand India so well.

We had this trip to India. That whole thing was a nightmare for me. I remember your President’s palace . Even now I wake up at nights in sweat...have these nightmares of dark men attacking me. What kind of a past do you guys have, Ashok?

Those spires of Taj Mahal twisted my insides. I am not used to such rushes. Yes, I know they are magnificent. They took you close to heaven that day. I remember the look on your face. I did not exist for you at that moment, Ashok. Nothing else did.

And in Chandni Chowk I was scared ,  Ashok. Those wretched people could have attacked us any time. They had every reason to. I had to get away as fast as I could.”

And now Jenny spoke with resignation, her eyes focused on a spot on the carpet, finding words with precision, a precision seemingly born of having brooded long and hard over the matter.

“I am a failure as a leftist, Ashok. I couldn’t  love those people. I keep thinking of what will break out of those slums one day. And then I start shivering....

I am a simple animal, Ashok. I can love your complexities only from a distance.  I like my reality tame -   shallow and superficial, if you will.

You seem to carry all that atavism deep within you. All those symbols  seem to mean so much to you.”

Her face now came up with an air of finality.

“I know you will make a very good husband, Ashok  Any girl would be lucky to have you.

But I can’t sleep next to a dark Indian body, Ashok. Not after what I saw. I will never know what’s going on in there.

I am sorry, Ashok.”

I sensed she had finished. She had finally brushed off that last dark body clutching at her.

There was nothing left for me to say. One does not argue with such compelling irrationality. Why have her shiver every time I touched her?

John had just appeared in the doorway.

“Are you guys done? May I come in? ,” John asked in his most endearing tone.

“Sure, John, I was about to go out for a beer, anyway,” I said, starting to leave.

John came in, walked up to Jenny. Jenny looked up at him gratefully. They kissed each other full on the lips, in deep embrace.

(Cupertino, CA 95014)