At the Bottom of Everything(43)
“Yes, hello, good morning, Hindu Temple?”
“Hi, I’m calling with a question about a cousin of mine who used to belong to your temple?”
“Yes, hello, good morning, Hindu Temple?”
“Hi, I’m calling with a question about one of your former members?”
“Oh, hello, yes. Membership question?”
For the next fifteen minutes (minutes that cost me more than every bite of food I’d eaten so far in India), I lied that I was named Sanjay Batra, repeated again and again the story of how I’d left my address book in a cab, waited on hold while the woman talked to her coworkers, and kept my brain, or anyway my eyes, busy by staring at the acne-pitted moon rising behind an electricity tower.
“Oh yes,” the woman said, after an especially long hold, “Manish Batra and Amita Batra, they move back to India, two thousand two. Move away. No more in Washington.”
“Yes, and do you have an address for them?”
“Address for them, sorry?”
More holding, more swelling string music, more moon-staring.
“OK, yes, sir, I have forwarding address, Manish Batra, Amita Batra. You have a pencil ready?”
I had a British Airways pen and the back of a newsletter and a trembling knee. I looked like someone taking down the number of a pizza place and I felt like someone learning the date of his death. Manish and Amita Batra, D-5, Sector 8, Noida, India.
So Noida wasn’t a Sanskrit word for purification. It was a place—a suburb an hour and a half outside of Delhi, it turned out—with its own map on page 839 of my guidebook. Good God.
The bus didn’t leave until the next morning, so I had a full night to think about what I was doing. I didn’t even lie down; instead I took a shower, which entailed switching on the electric heater and ignoring the smell of burning plastic, and then I sat, wearing my last clean clothes, in the kitchen under the fluorescent tube light, failing to read a Philip Dick novel I’d bought at a bookstall, drinking beer after beer in the hopes of settling my brain and killing whatever parasites were thriving in my stomach. I stood up every half hour to rediscover that there was nothing to eat in the fridge except hot sauce and a head of cauliflower. It’s hard to reconstruct my mind’s state now, but I don’t think, if I’d really been forced to bet, that I would have said it was likely that I’d actually find Thomas or the Batras in Noida. I don’t think I really thought I’d find anything. But it was like not being able to remember whether you locked your apartment door; it was like my entire trip: I needed, with a helplessness that felt like tumbling down a cliffside, to know for sure.
The bus depot in central Delhi, particularly on no sleep, particularly with a hangover, is as despair inducing a place as you’re ever likely to encounter. Drivers stand in front of their buses, shouting the names of their routes and waving indecipherable timetables; Dantean beggars of every age and variety of misfortune root through garbage drifts; wooden-seated toilets overflow behind broken doors. It was eighty-nine degrees at nine thirty in the morning.
I somehow managed, after much gesticulating and stumbling and rushing from one side of the station to the other, to get on my bus. My seat was in the back, one of those shelf seats that folds down from the wall, and there was a better-than-even chance, I thought as we pulled out, that we were headed somewhere other than Noida, but by that point I couldn’t have moved even if I’d wanted to. A dozen men with woven plastic suitcases stood crammed next to me in the aisle, and every few minutes we pulled over to pick up another group of men with woven plastic suitcases, until it felt like the bus’s underside was scraping the road. I eventually fell asleep against my backpack in my lap, breathing through my mouth, the sun roasting the right half of my face a deep maroon. I could probably have made better time by walking.
I’d pictured Noida, based on the chirpy paragraph in my guidebook, as something like Tysons Corner: clean and fake and functional, golf courses and parking lots and new developments next to four-lane highways. But clean and functional turn out to be relative terms. We pulled into the station just past noon, and there were in fact office buildings, all swooping glass, that could have been built for insurance companies in Fairfax; but there were also traffic circles in which scarily muscled cows stood knee-deep in garbage and, off on a hillside, clusters of what looked like tepees made from plastic tarps. I’d been vaguely planning on either taking the last bus back to Delhi or else staying the night at the Noida Radisson, which was the only hotel listed in my guidebook, but what if I couldn’t get a room? What if I missed my bus and ended up stuck and wandering these cloverleaf intersections? Maybe it wasn’t wise to go to a city you’d never heard of without telling anyone your plans. Certain kinds of fear, along with certain states of hangover, make me hungry: within half an hour I was standing on a sidewalk in front of Domino’s, eating a whole deluxe veggie pizza that it took me three slices to realize tasted like paprika.