At the Bottom of Everything(33)

But when we talked to Thomas, he sounded—sweaty. Upset to hear she’d called us, panicky about what we knew, what we weren’t saying. Asking me if he was going to have to go to war—this was just before Iraq, fear becoming anger in the national forebrain. I started thinking drugs. Some party where he gave in, tired of protecting the prize intelligence.





Day or two later we got a call from the dean. Thomas is missing class, blowing off his adviser. Flunking three out of four courses. OK. And oh, by the way, if he doesn’t shape up we’re going to need to ask him to take a semester off and make up credits elsewhere. Lion pride. Right. So we drove up to New York, not getting anywhere on the phone. Both of us took off work, five hours up I-95, into the dorm, still half expecting the whole scene to dissolve into misunderstanding. The dorm, by the way, felt like a playroom: hallway of pajama-wearing girls lying on the floor trailing phone cords, boys bouncing lacrosse balls off concrete walls. Leaders of tomorrow.





We knocked—THOMAS PELL in bubble letters still from the RA—and he finally opened the door and the smell was … shocking, but not in any familiar collegiate way. Sinister. Rotting greens, decay. I found myself thinking, unbidden: This is the smell of a crazy person’s room.





And he was very much confused, embarrassed, overwhelmed. Skinnier than we’d ever seen him, dirty, this kind of pubic beard, still talking about being sick, about war. The room was a mess but almost sculptural, sheets wadded up on the windowsills, fans on chairs. He wanted to know—staring straight ahead—whether he had cancer, said he knew we’d been talking to doctors. He was on his bed, wrapped in sheets, the phone was next to his pillow, there was a cup of what smelled like piss. Sally was trying to pull him to his feet, crying, take the measure of him, I was kind of … feeling for the seam, like when he used to have night terrors: OK, where’s the awareness in there. Nothing doing. So I just hugged him—OK, we’ll get through this, you’re OK. Trusting that this, surprise of the dorm visit, had to be the worst moment. Except in the hug I realized two things—one, the smell, the worst of it, was his body, and two, the weight he’d lost. Imagine hugging an empty sleeping bag. For me that was the genre change, drama into horror, spring 2003—that hug with the body that was and wasn’t Thomas.





So: Sri Prabhakara. Here, from what I was able to gather during my first semiconscious couple of days, was the story. I heard some of this from the Earth Mother, Cecilia, who met me for lunch at a nightclub-feeling Mexican restaurant near her school, and some of it from people Cecilia introduced me to who’d vaguely known Thomas.

Apparently, until some point that spring, Thomas had been living on his own in Delhi. No one, or at least no one I talked to, had any idea where. Maybe he’d been homeless (there were groups of expats who lived with their wormy dogs and guitars outside the bus station at Kashmiri Gate), maybe he’d just been living in another apartment. Almost certainly he hadn’t been working for any sort of education company, the way he’d told his parents he was; by the time people in the study-apartment had started to see him he had long hair and sun-chapped skin, and he was wearing clothes that looked like they’d been pieced together from a children’s giveaway bin.

People occasionally saw him at the outdoor bazaar in Paharganj (goats wandering down the middle of the street, bearded men huddling over hookahs in doorways); the bazaar was on the way to Sri Prabhakara’s center. Thomas would be muttering and handing out fennel candies to kids, or he’d be washing himself in a runoff pipe at the end of the alley. To each other, they called him Skeletor. Maybe this was his prime looking-for-the-Batras period, maybe this was pure fugue and craziness.

Anyway, after a few weeks of not having seen Skeletor, a couple of Guruji’s students took a different way to the center one night and came across him in terrible shape: barefoot, filthy, sprawled on the steps of a temple. At first one of them mistook him for a dead body. You could have scooped him up with a shovel and tossed him like a bag of empty cans. One of them went up and tapped his shoulder, and he bolted upright. “Fine, fine,” he said, when they asked if he was all right. “Good, just a little tired, was I asleep? I think I fell asleep. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

They convinced him to come along with them to the center. They made him eat rice and drink a bottle of Thums Up, then wadded up some paper towels and helped him wash the dried blood from his ear. After Guruji’s talk they took him home to the barsati, and once he’d showered (they said he left a ring of orange around the drain, still not entirely gone), he slept the night without sheets, at his own insistence, on a corner of the roof. He answered questions about what he’d been doing as if he were talking about a dream. I was looking for someone. I had a fever. It wouldn’t stop raining. As far as they could tell he didn’t own anything except the clothes he was wearing and a kid’s backpack in which he kept a rubber-banded wad of money and a camping Thermos. They asked the next day if he wanted to stay for a while and he murmured, Yes, thank you, OK.