Charmed

Leissa Shahrak

Arun plucked the fuchsia bougainvillea petals one by one from the manicured lawn and dropped them into a reed basket. He did this twice a day—now in the late afternoon when desert wind withered the older blooms and sent them tumbling down, and in the early morning, when water from sprinklers weighed down the newer blossoms until they fell, already decomposing, onto the grass. 

Arun liked this task better than his other duties at the caravanserai-turned-tourist-hotel. He did not like picking up dinner plates coated with ghee from the evening garden buffet or cleaning the hotel’s steaming kitchen. He detested carrying luggage to the guest rooms. One of his legs was longer than the other, causing him to hobble awkwardly. His cocked eye gazed upwards and to the left. If a suitcase slid off his turbaned head, Hamid, the hotel’s new manager from Delhi, would fire him. 

Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind him. Arun glanced over his shoulder with his good eye. One of the kitchen boys approached with a load of naan from the village bakery. Relieved that Hamid was nowhere in the vicinity, Arun resumed his task. Hamid had it in for him, he knew. Arun wondered what advice Auntie would have given him.

Arun’s aunt had taken over her grand-nephew’s care after his mother died during his infancy. A wise woman, Auntie predicted that Arun would struggle in life. His awkward gait and unlucky eye were not the only reasons. He was darker-skinned than most residents of Shekhawati. His mother had haled from Kerbala where coffee-colored skin was the norm. When Arun was a child, even Auntie thought he was undisputedly ugly. The village children proclaimed her silent verdict out loud. They taunted and bullied and ostracized Arun. He would hide in the folds of his auntie’s sari, the gauzy cloth between his teeth, eliciting mocking laughter from his peers. 

Hamid had taken up where the children left off. He tormented Arun with frequent tongue-lashings, particularly when Arun practiced his English with the tourists. Arun had left his native village seven kilometers away and come to work at the hotel a few months ago. Here, he hoped to have the opportunity to speak English. This was the new India, and, despite his forty years and lack of education, Arun wanted to advance. He sometimes considered leaving his native region of Shekhawati, a bleak desert area in the northeastern part of Rajasthan Province on the way from Delhi to the provincial capital of Jaipur. In the past, caravans carried goods through Shekhawati from East to West and back again. For the camel drivers, Shekhawati was only a crossroads between here and there. Today, few visitors straggled off the major tourist track to traverse the region. Still a mirage in the hostile landscape, India’s new-found prosperity had not found Shekhawati. Shekhawati remained neither here nor there.

 

In the outer courtyard bells clanged. The pungent odor of camel dung invaded Arun’s nostrils. The hotel’s Danish guests had returned from a guided caravan into the surrounding desert. Arun struggled to his bare feet and brushed a speck of pollen off his white tunic. He could not tolerate soiled clothing. For years, his auntie had told him that Nehru had always been immaculate in his white suit. She had never seen Nehru. She said the same about Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who wore a widow’s white sari. Arun’s aunt had never seen Mrs. Gandhi either. Yet Arun’s resultant obsession with cleanliness had served him well. For many years, he ran a laundry in the Shekhawati village where he grew up. The villagers knew that Arun never failed to transform their wrinkled, dirty clothes into smooth, spotless garments. 

A car’s motor drowned out the voices of the Danes who now sipped drinks on the outer verandah. Arun emptied the basket of petals and limped under the archway to the outer courtyard. There, Hamid stood at attention beside a dusty, white Ambassador. The handle of Hamid’s saber curved above his cummerbund. Arun did not like the way Hamid’s betel-stained teeth smiled out from between his oiled, drooping mustache. 

The driver opened the Ambassador’s doors, and a middle-aged American couple descended. The bronzed man took off his sunglasses and shook Hamid’s hand. His blond wife inclined her head over folded hands and said, “Namaste.” She must not know that Hamid is Moslem, Arun thought, as he strained to hoist an oversized suitcase to his head. He could tell that Hamid relished the blond woman’s tribute. Hamid had let it be known early on that his name meant “one who deserves praise.” Arun was happier with his own name. It meant “dawn.” 

Arun followed the chattering blond woman up the stairs with the suitcase balanced precariously on his head. When Arun was first married, his wife had babbled on like that. Shakti, his cousin from a neighboring village, was only fourteen when Arun’s aunt arranged the marriage. Shakti’s family, poverty-stricken with younger daughters to consider, convinced themselves that the marriage was predestined. The soothsayer Arun’s aunt had engaged influenced them in this estimation. Still, the marriage negotiations were long and hard, and Shakti’s parents agreed only when Arun’s family reduced the dowry to two gold coins, a laying hen, and a pair of slippers for the groom. Shakti did not see Arun until the wedding day.

Terrified at the prospect of a wife, Arun could not imagine having the courage to talk to her. Auntie rescued him, giving him endless lessons in how to approach a woman. When the wedding night came, Arun repeated all the scripts he had so dutifully rehearsed accompanied by the gestures Auntie had so meticulously described. These overtures, enhanced by Arun’s natural gentleness and nature’s primordial laws, succeeded: the newlyweds became a couple. Every morning, Shakti scrubbed and swept and aired the room in which she lived with Arun in Auntie’s house. Every night, she combed her fingers through Arun’s hair, removing any lice she found. 

Two years later, the desert summer contaminated the water in the village well. Shakti contracted cholera. As Arun held her feverish body in his arms, the beating of her heart faltered and ceased, and the unborn child in her womb no longer thrashed about. Arun rent his clothes in despair and wished that he were a woman. Then he could engage in suttee, the ritual burning of traditional Indian women after their husbands died. 

The blond woman’s chatter still ringing in his ears, Arun settled the luggage onto the stand in the guest room. He paid close attention when he heard her refer to Hamid as the one with the big mustache. “He’s just so-oh chahming,” she said to her husband. On his way downstairs, Arun repeated the word “chahming” to himself. It was not a word he knew. 

 

In the hotel garden Arun placed torches in iron holders and lit them. He started setting up the buffet tables. Behind him, he heard Hamid’s saber swishing against his pant legs. “The third torch on the right is fizzling out,” Hamid said, jerking his chin in the torch’s direction. “Get out of your daydreams and into your job for a change.” Arun placed his hand over his heart and, nodding, lowered his eyes. 

Arun plunged the faulty torch in water, gasping as the ensuing smoke stung his eyes. He stripped the cremated gauze from the charred wood and wound a clean, white cloth in its place. The white head of the torch reminded him of the turbans worn by Jains, practitioners of the sect whose principles of non-violence and religious tolerance had influenced Mahatma Gandhi. Arun had seen white-clad Jain monastics picking their way through the countryside barefoot, without a permanent home or any possessions. He liked the Jain practice of watching every step to keep from killing even the tiniest living creature. He liked the white masks they wore over their mouths and noses to avoid breathing in flying insects. Arun had considered joining the Jain sect after Shakti’s death. Auntie, though, dissuaded him from a hasty decision, and his laundry business with its smell of moist cotton saved him from a starker destiny. 

Still keeping a lookout for Hamid, Arun dowsed the torch in kerosene, fastened it in its holder, and set fire to it. A wave of noxious fumes arose, and he hurried back to spread the buffet table with cotton cloths. When he discovered a yellow spot on one of the cloths, Arun leaned over and sniffed at the discoloration. Wrinkling his nose, he sent the kitchen boy scurrying for a clean tablecloth. Arun considered the faint smell of curry on the cloth even more offensive than the spot itself. Years ago, he had begun to collect dried marigold and jasmine petals from shrines in the village temple. The villagers soon noticed the scent of flowers on their clothes along with a yellowish hue or a faint shade of pink. When Arun ironed, perfumed vapor ascended, and he imagined that it reached Shakti somewhere in a far-off world. 

 

That night in the caravanserai garden, the eunuch dancer twirled to the furious beat of the tabla with twelve clay pots balanced on his head. The blond American woman smiled at the performance with all her straight, white teeth. Her bronzed husband lifted his hands above his head and clapped. Hamid had disappeared. The kitchen crew busied themselves carrying hot tins of vegetable dosas and kid goat kebabs to the buffet table. It was still too early for Arun to make the rounds with a pot of masala chai. He stood in the shadows, muttering in English.

Three years ago, Arun had heard school boys outside the laundry talking about new jobs in India answering phones in English for companies in America. Arun asked the biggest boy if he knew English. “Yes, yes,” the boy said, using one of a handful of English words Arun recognized. In Hindi, the boy told Arun of his family’s plans to save enough money to send him to a computer training course in Mumbai. Within the week, the boy promised to talk to his father about Arun’s proposal:  Arun would do the family laundry in exchange for English lessons.

Now, Arun repeated English phrases from the tapes his boy tutor had ordered from a language school in Delhi. His confidence bolstered, Arun approached the American man. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “Where are you from?” 

The blond lady leaned across her husband and said, “We’re from the Deep South, honey. Natchez, Mississippi. Y’all probably don’t hear much about Mississippi here, do you? Except maybe the river.” 

She took some photos out of her bag. Arun had never seen such pictures of America. There were no skyscrapers or crowded highways, no American presidents’ faces carved in rock or cowboys on bucking bulls. Instead, there were huge white houses with tall pillars and girls sitting in rocking chairs on verandahs. These girls did not have on short skirts or tight T-shirts or bikinis. They were decked out in full-length, billowy dresses. Their waists were tiny and their necklines low-cut. The woman pointed to a blond girl in yellow. “This is our youngest daughter,” she said.

The girls were beautiful, so beautiful that Arun forgot to concentrate on what the woman was saying. Although she talked slower than the man on his English tape, Arun did not grasp the meaning of words like “hoop-skirts” and “Civil War pageant” and “antebellum.” Some pictures showed a wide river with an iron bridge crossing it. It was the Mississippi River, the man said, the longest river in America. Other photos were of shiny bushes with waxen flowers and vine-filled trees with gray whiskers hanging from the branches. The Americans said that rain was plentiful where they lived, that floods often caused damage because sometimes the river ran high and the land was low.

“In Shekhawati—only desert,” Arun said, making a sweeping gesture. “You need gardeners there?” 

The man smiled. “All the plantation houses do employ gardeners.”

“Here, you can have this picture—the one you liked,” said the woman. She handed Arun a photo of the prettiest garden. “These red bushes are azaleas,” she said. “And that white tree is a dogwood.”

“Arun. Tea.” Hamid’s voice was stern. When he smiled at the Americans in the torchlight, his teeth did not appear so stained. 

Concealing the photo under his arm, Arun turned to go. Behind him, he heard the Americans protesting to Hamid. They didn’t mind at all talking to Arun, they said. “His English is just chahming,” said the woman. 

 

By the time Arun returned to his room after cleaning up the kitchen, panic squeezed his insides and throbbed in his head. He could not fathom how to show his gratitude for the Americans’ gift. His prized possessions, the tape recorder and the English tapes, would be of no use to them. Arun cast his good eye over his belongings–a straw sleeping mat, a tin plate, a battered teapot, a clay water jug, a broom, the sandals he rarely wore, a tiny statue of Ganesh for prosperity, a few sticks of incense for puja, a red paper flower he bought in the village once, his father’s pair of spectacles without any glass in them, a bangle that had belonged to Auntie. The blond woman’s kindness had impressed him, and he rejected the idea of giving her husband a Bollywood star’s glamour photo torn from a tourist’s magazine. 

Then Arun remembered the puppet he had stuck in the corner behind the water jug. Auntie had returned from a wedding in Jaipur with it. The wooden puppet was a snake charmer who wore a cloak of embroidered cloth sprinkled with tiny mirrors. The snake charmer held a miniature shawm, a reed instrument like an oboe, above a straw basket. When Auntie manipulated the strings, the snake charmer would sway, the basket’s lid would pop off, and a cloth cobra’s glittering eyes would appear. It took Arun little time to master the movements of the snake charmer and even less time to learn how to make the snake uncoil and raise its head and body as its tongue slithered in and out of its mouth. 

The puppet would help Arun conquer his shyness and forget his woes, Auntie said. She was right. Arun practiced with the puppet until he could enthrall the village children with it. Before long, they accepted his lop-sidedness and cocked eye and dusky skin. Arun and his puppet performed for every special occasion—weddings, births, India’s Independence Day, even a Moslem feast day once in another village. Shakti had loved the puppet, and he used to amuse her with it on evenings when she was homesick. When Shakti became pregnant, Arun dreamed of some day helping his son learn how, with each slight motion of his small hands, he, too, could make the puppet come to life. 

Three years after Shakti’s death, Auntie died, leaving Arun alone. He sprinkled turmeric around Auntie’s body to protect her soul until the cremation when he would release it by breaking her skull. That day, Arun wrapped the puppet in Auntie’s best sari and put it away. Now, he hoped the puppet would weave its magic. Nothing held him any longer in this Shekhawati desert. He could already see himself picking red azalea petals off the grass in a lush Mississippi garden. He pronounced “Mississippi” out loud several times. He imagined it slithering off his tongue to swim among the ashes of the deceased in the holy River Ganges on its way to open seas. 

 

The stars winked at Arun in the deep indigo of the desert night as he made his way through the garden. It was a good omen, he thought. Avoiding Hamid, Arun limped up the staircase to the second floor. When he knocked on the door to the Americans’ room, the man opened it, surprise spreading across his face. Arun hid the puppet behind his back and explained that he had a gift for the couple to take with them to Mississippi. “Mississippi,” he repeated two more times, smiling. 

“Oh, please do come in,” the wife said, peeking around her husband’s side. She wore a long, blue robe and blue slippers with little balls of white fur on top. 

Inside the room, Arun pulled the puppet from behind his back. He bowed and handed it to the blond woman. 

“Whatever is it?” the woman said. “My goodness. A puppet. A man with a basket. Isn’t this something special?” She manipulated the puppet’s strings but succeeded only in tangling them. “Oh, dear, I’ll never figure out how to entertain the grandbabies with this,” she said. 

The man took the puppet from his wife and tried himself. He managed to bob the snake charmer’s head up and down a few times before he got one of the wooden handles twisted in the strings. “How ever do you get the basket’s lid to open?” he said, laughing. 

“I show you,” Arun said. The man and his wife sat on the edge of the bed while Arun’s fingers raced to unravel the mess.

From the heap of strings and glittering red cloth, the snake charmer’s head emerged above his seated body. His arms extended the shawm over the basket. Arun made sure that the cobra’s head and body were folded just so inside the basket, ready to emerge at just the right moment. The snake charmer began to sway from side to side and from side to side again and back and forth and back and forth again. Arun swayed with the rhythm and remembered Auntie’s words. “Don’t worry about your audience,” his aunt had said. “Just think of the things you love most.” 

Arun swayed back and forth and from side to side and did as his old auntie had told him. He forgot the caravanserai and Hamid and the heavy luggage. He forgot the American couple from Mississippi sitting on the bed. He remembered his long-deceased father wearing those glassless specs he had found smashed on the side of the road; he remembered his mother’s cousin slapping his hands for wasting a grain of rice and Auntie wiping his tear-stained cheeks with the end of her sari. He thought of Ganesh holding his trunk high and Shiva dancing with many arms and legs. The more he swayed the more he remembered. He saw the old men sitting under the village banyan tree and the village children throwing rocks at pigs with long black hair on their backs. He felt the heat of the wind coming off the desert. He saw Nehru and Indira Gandhi dressed in white. He smelled cumin and jasmine and sandalwood. He heard mosquitoes buzzing and peacocks screaming and Moslem muezzins calling to prayer and Hindu widows weeping. He remembered India. And Arun pursed his lips and imitated the sounds of a shawm as he had for the village children long ago. And he sang again those wailing notes that called and beseeched and begged and prayed in the dry air. And the miracle occurred: the cobra’s dark head rose above the basket’s rim, one row of scales at a time, swaying back and forth and from side to side in a trance. The shawm’s voice whined and screeched. Quarter-tones ascended to the heights of Arun’s register. He wailed louder with each movement of the cobra’s head. And the cobra rose higher and swayed in a wider arc and the snake and the shawm and the puppet and Arun swayed as one charmed by the pulse of a distant world.

Arun did not hear the door open or Hamid’s voice behind him, did not see the alarm in the blond woman’s eyes or notice her husband gesturing to Hamid to back away. When Arun did feel a hand on his shoulder, his head jerked, and his bad eye veered so far up to the left that he misjudged the position of his hands. The snake’s head flew up, out of control, striking the American woman in the face. Her scream pierced the agony of the shawm’s dying wail.

Hamid, amid apologies, pushed Arun out of the door and threw the collapsed snake charmer in a jumbled heap after him. Later, Arun looked up at a midnight sky no longer indigo, but black as a poisoned man’s lips.

 

At dawn Arun came out of his room, his clothing as pristine white as Nehru’s. Under one arm, he carried his sleeping mat. Rolled up inside it were his mangled puppet, his small statue of Ganesh, Auntie’s bracelet, and his father’s glassless specs. In his other hand, he held his red paper flower. The tape recorder and English tapes he left behind along with the photo of the Mississippi garden. 

Arun squatted on his haunches next to the bougainvillea, his bare feet unevenly planted in the wet grass of the inner courtyard. There, he unrolled the sleeping mat and put the fallen petals of bougainvillea on it. The last fuchsia petal he picked up had floated on the early morning breeze to the dry path bordering the garden wall. Arun lifted it to his nostrils. Paper-thin, the bright petal fluttered in Arun’s breath for a few seconds. He bent and laid it back on the path where he had found it.

Neither Hamid nor the American couple was up when Arun hobbled to the outer courtyard and through the hotel gate. The barren Shekhawati landscape stretched without end before him as he limped down the long, dusty road home, his head turned just enough to the right to allow his wayward eye to gaze straight ahead.