I’ve found the Batras, I’m getting ready, when it’s time I will do what needs to be done, what’s needed to be done, I’m sorry.
Right then I decided, or maybe I should say I realized that it had been decided; it didn’t seem to originate with me. I didn’t write back. Instead I spent a couple of hot gray afternoons shuttling along Massachusetts Avenue between the Indian embassy and my doctor’s office, getting my tourist visa and my typhoid shot. Then on July 26, with my old camp backpack stuffed in the overhead bin, I ate dinner in an upright and locked position two miles above Maine. I slept for a few hours and woke up in white sunlight to a breakfast of microwaved rolls and freezing fruit. My left leg was completely asleep. My malaria medicine, or something, was making me feel dry mouthed and edgy. The cartoon airplane ticking across the ocean on the monitor in front of me showed us 2,063 miles from New Delhi.
· Two ·
As the taxi, which was really a kind of windowless van, carried me and my bag through the much-darker-than-America night, I kept having to fight down the impulse to tell my driver to turn around. It was just after nine, apparently, but my sense of time had gotten multiply exposed; I couldn’t count the meals I’d eaten or sunsets I’d seen or Ambiens I’d taken since leaving home. Every couple of minutes I was having the same embarrassingly stupid thought, which was: Everyone here is Indian. The soldiers standing by the doorways with machine guns; the eight-year-old boys clamoring to shine my shoes; the women arranging candies and wind-up toys on bedsheets.
The right side of the highway was being constructed at that very minute by men standing on hills of steaming asphalt, which meant that the left side was clotted with trucks and bikes and rickshaws and little golf-cart-ish things like green-painted Flintstones cars, each with a horn blaring at a slightly different pitch. A few times my driver, a sweating, frowning bald man, had to swerve around dogs standing in stupors in the middle of the road like zombies in a video game. Also like a video game: we kept passing the same two billboards—a full-lipped woman in red laughing while she held a cell phone to her ear, and a wavy-haired soccer player kicking a ball straight out of a TV. WELCOME TO “THE BEST” HI-DEF!
We were going to Thomas’s apartment, or anyway to an apartment where he’d lived at some point recently. The neighborhood was called Paharganj. Everything else I knew about where Thomas might have been could have fit on an index card (in fact it fit on the first few lines in the black-and-white notebook in my carry-on). I’d expected Thomas’s parents to be brimming with leads and notions, but they’d proved surprisingly hopeless. Or maybe just fatalistic, after years of trying and failing to understand what their son was doing. A couple of weeks earlier, just after I’d agreed to go, I’d spent an awkward evening perched on the edge of their couch, feeling like I was being bid farewell before shipping off to war. At one point Sally had handed me a semirecent photograph of Thomas; he had long hair pulled back and a wispy beard, and he was smiling in a way that suggested drunkenness or maybe just the effects of whatever pills he was on. I held it with two hands, not sure how long I needed to stare before I could tuck it into my bag. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it,” Richard said, seeming to sense that we’d slipped into a moment out of Saving Private Ryan.
For the past couple of weeks, Richard and Sally had been writing me emails; first just practical—addresses and phone numbers—then more and more a kind of journal of what they’d been through these past few years—things they couldn’t say to Thomas, maybe, or things they’d tell anyone who’d listen. I hadn’t felt so wrapped up in the Pells, so close to the daily workings of their lives, since I was fourteen.
Anyway, with each turn the road narrowed by a couple of lanes, until we were in a grim, dusty neighborhood where dogs slept on top of cars and the buildings seemed to be made of cinder block. The Pells had said that Thomas might have fallen in with some spiritual-burnout types, and this looked like the right place for it.
Decoding the building’s buzzers, a plate-sized grid of silver nubbins, was just at the edge of my mental capacity. A barefoot, elfin man named Rory met me at the top of three flights of stairs; he wore loose cotton pants and stood looking recently asleep, with a slight smile and eyes just barely open. We’d talked once when I was still in D.C., and he’d seemed bizarrely unfazed that I was hoping to come stay in his apartment while I looked for a lost friend. “No worries, no worries.” He’d never actually met Thomas (he’d only been in Delhi since May), but he knew people who knew him, and he said they had a spare bed. He was, I saw now, a man with the metabolism of an iguana; he wouldn’t be fazed by the explosion of the sun. He took my bag and shuffled ahead of me into an apartment that felt like it had once been a locker room. It was dim the way fluorescent-lit rooms are dim, with a color-flecked cement floor and a half-dozen wooden partitions. There were collapsed, filthy couches, lamps set on top of plastic crates, a strip of speckled flypaper hanging in the corner. There was a cloying, oily smell in the air coming from a candle burning on a trunk.