Throughout the night he feels the distant roar of traffic entering his soul, the great trucks and their horns, the plaintive bleating of exile. He follows their sounds and imagines this vast terrible land from which he was born. The idea to leave, to find home, seems pathetic to him. It is impossible. There is no home, he keeps having to remind himself, he has to let it go. He drifts to sleep with that idea in mind. And in the morning, as the temple bells sound and the bhajans begin their hypnotic rise and fall, Ajay stands ready to leave.
* * *
—
They arrive in Goa three days later and pitch up in a shack in Arambol called RoknRoll. It is here that Ajay sees the ocean, stands in front of it on the beach, lets the waves wrap around his ankles, suck on his bare feet. His days are full and empty at once, and work is the most pleasurable it’s ever been. It’s a good life, in Goa. They like him in the shack too, a hard worker who doesn’t smoke or drink. A boy who can already speak basic English and Nepali. They like him because he knows how to behave, knows how not to look at the foreign women too long, not to ask too many questions. The foreigners like him too; he’s diligent, he runs back to the kitchen with an order, hurries back with the food and a smile. The girls like him because he is shy and handsome and his teeth are perfectly white and his body holds no fat and he doesn’t stare, doesn’t try to charm them with cheap words and posturing. He is beloved. He only serves. Everything is forgotten. A season goes by like this. Mostly sun-blind. Sometimes reflected by violent shards. Keeping their toothbrushes together in the humid bathroom at the back. Sharing the leftover Axe deodorant, the leftover T-shirts and jeans. Ajay half adrift. Sunburnt and petrified. He learns to swim, first the doggy paddle, then as the season progresses, some foreigners show him the breaststroke and later on the front crawl. He learns to guide a motorboat too, goes crab fishing on the rocks at low tide in the moonlight and sleeps on the beach under the stars. He plays volleyball and cricket and football in the siesta of the afternoon, when business is at a lull. He eats fish and beef and chicken carbonara and french fries, mango, coconut water, pineapple; he becomes tanned all over.
He feels blessed, content. But he tells himself in the dark: You know how precarious life can be.
It’s true.
Some of the Nepalis have been dealing their charas down here. They bring it from the mountains every season, one hundred tolas in total. Perfect mountain charas. Sticky and green, wrapped in cellophane. They sell it from the shack itself, take the order with the food order, it’s the system: the customer orders the “special mountain sizzler,” a dish not on the menu. They pay for it with their food bill, it’s there on the receipt with the other dishes. The charas is passed to the customer in one of the little wooden receipt boxes along with their change. It’s a good system. The landlord takes his cut, as do the police. But some of the boys are greedy, they deal on the beach alone too, without protection, and some deal in other bars and on the back roads at night. One day one of the boys is found dead in the jungle, tied to a tree, a rag in his mouth, his hands cut off.
He is cremated. It’s forgotten.
It’s never forgotten.
The boys, fraying at the edges, live quietly like there’s no tomorrow. Some of them have foreign girlfriends, girls they meet in the café, get friendly with, give drugs to, take out to spots in the jungle or on motorbikes to waterfalls far inland, show them hidden places, looking for that long-shot promise—“I’ll sponsor your visa, come live with me.” The boys encourage Ajay to find a girl. What is he waiting for? He has enough admirers. The girls often ask about him. But he’s too shy; he recoils. He cannot conceive of it, his own body terrifies him, his own needs. He likes to set himself within limits; those limits keep him strong. He sleeps curled up on the beach, spooning the beach dogs that are drawn to his gentleness and the scent of mutual need.
He builds a fantasy: He will return home to take his mother and sister away. He’ll arrive in a car of his own, a driver in front, he sitting behind, and they’ll all weep when he touches his mother’s feet. And the whole village will rejoice.
7.
It might have gone on like this forever, a life deferred, if it weren’t for the sudden appearance of Sunny Wadia. He arrives when Ajay has gone back to the mountains, returned from Goa to Purple Haze for the summer season of 2001.
Sunny is the leader of a small band of revelers, Indians who live like the foreigners, still something of a rarity in those days. Who live like the foreigners but who are not like the foreigners at all, four men and one woman, something dangerously new and bold; young, rich, and glamorous Indians, not afraid to show it, not afraid to slum it, welcome everywhere, welcomed by themselves. Travelers for whom authenticity is not a question, content to sit in the cafés with the foreigners and smoke chillum and eat their backpacker food, who arrived in big, shiny cars without scratches instead of buses and bikes and wore good clothing and stayed in the best new hotels in the village, ones with bright pine balconies and expensive bars.