The signboard says the flight shall be an hour late and I walk towards the benches to sit and wait and I see Tahira coming out in the crowd of arriving passengers.
The Athens airport is new and gleaming and malfunctioning. An hour late, an hour early, same thing, not to worry. I hardly recognize her. In the rough and ready horde emerging from the customs, the well-dressed, the shorts-and-sandal-with-a-rucksack, the serious and the smiling, it was her elegant sari that I noticed. She was pushing a baggage cart with three large suitcases she could barely move.
Five years I had not seen her. How did that beautiful young woman with the large eyes that chose to attach her spirit to mine an eternity ago in Mumbai; the pretty girl who married my business partner and was my lover whenever we met sporadically across the years come to this? It was a letdown more than sadness. A disappointment at not finding what you expect. As one gets older, one hardens. One is not easily compassionate. It was the loss of style, of poise that shocked me. Even of beauty, though Tahira was never a classic. She had an attractiveness that sprang from a lively and alert personality. A sparkling look, a rather too obvious intelligence that made you uneasy because you were never sure you could match it. A twinkle in the eye that made you suspect irony behind the sense of humor and easy laugh. She was thin and gaunt.
Her dusky skin and jet black hair had lost their luster. The large shining eyes had sunk in their sockets. A face from the concentration camp of Treblinka. For she was in a hell.
She told me so on the phone and I did not know what to do. I told her I would help.
She saw me, smiled and waved and pushed her cart towards the barrier. At least her smile remained intact. She threw herself in my arms and laid her head on my chest.
Her desperation touched me. It was so utterly out of character. Did she think I was a magician? I did not know the first thing. I followed her instructions for thirty years. She 125
told me she just needed my love and moral support for her recuperation. She had it all arranged.
Love? Could five years of sporadic telephone conversations sustain love? I was never as desperately in love with her as I was with Anna. I loved her, yes. I admired her. I yearned for her, desired her and basked in her strange fixation for me. But love?
And yet, her head on my chest, her arms tight around me gave a pang to my heart. I, too, held her tightly. My hardships never quite succeeded in stifling my sentiments. My first words hardly words of welcome.
“Oh Tahira, how did it come to this?”
“You see?”
We looked at each other assessing the damage. The graph of our lives was way past its apex. The curve was in steep decline. And we smiled for there was nothing else to do. Nothing we could say. Words of comfort stuck in my throat. They would be lies if they emerged. I took her cart and pushed it to the exit. She felt tired. Asked to sit for a moment and we moved to a sitting area. She held my hand and smiled again. Her hand, dark and bony, felt like a tentacle of death clutching at my soul.
“Welcome my dear,” I said. “I am so happy to see you again.” I was not sure I meant it. Age kills charity. It breeds selfishness and self-centeredness. I see it in old people. And yet….and yet, one cannot escape his past.
Tahira was part of it. And long ago, she did make my heart flutter.
“I am not. Not in this state. I hate coming to you like this but, Johnny, you are my only hope.”
“Oh hardly. There are clinics in Europe that can cure you and you can well afford them.”
“No. The methadone they use trades one addiction for another. One bondage for another.”
“In any case, everything is ready. Your room. The bed with straps. Just as you asked for.”
“Did you get the stuff?”
“Oh yes.”
“No problem?”
“None whatever. The country is flooded with drugs. Young people shoot it openly in the streets. The police stand by and watch. What can they do? Put them in jail? There are not enough medical facilities to take care of them.”
“You look fine Johnny. How‟s Anna?”
“As whimsical as ever. She is utterly mad.”
“How did she take my arrival?”
“With her usual indifference. All she cares about is her cats. About ten of them roaming about the house and fifty dependents in the neighborhood. She feeds them, takes them to the vet when they are sick, neuters them to pacify them and keep their numbers down. She is passionate about them. I think she is the greatest cat of all. She shares all their traits and their soul. All nine of them.”
“And you still love her!”
“Unfortunately, yes. Or perhaps I should say, fortunately. I am not sure. Isn‟t it funny? Maturity has improved her looks if not her fickleness. She has gained a little weight and she is more beautiful than ever. For her, the clock has stopped. You shall see her. She is my paranoid angel circulating in my house. The adornment and the ornament. It is enough for me to be able to look at her every day. When you have loved a woman as much as I have loved her and she has exhibited such unpredictable behavior, offering and withholding her love and her body as her whims dictate, 126
continuously keeping you on your toes, you cannot easily get over her. She is, has always been, my vice.”
“Had I not married Rami, might not I have been in her place?”
“Perhaps. For some people life is unpredictable and inexplicable. I think this is true for both of us. But we have shared something precious too, have we not?”
“When we first met.”
“And after.”
“Just stolen moments.”
“But precious and passionate.”
“Oh yes.”
“How is Rami?”
“Oh, don‟t remind me of that pig! Getting fat and rich and more revolting by the day. But I have finally escaped him. How I managed to keep my departure a secret is a miracle. I imagine he suspects I have run to you but I am at least out of his clutches. Do you know, I actually think he was hoping I would die and he would inherit me? A compensation for my betrayals? What makes a very rich man want more and more?
What makes him want to keep me tied to him when he probably hates me as much as I hate him? He has his life of which I am no part, his riches and mistresses.” There was no answer to that. No answer to the abyss of the human mind. I got up. We pushed the cart to the parking lot together and loaded them in the car with some difficulty.
“Wow,” I said, “you are planning to live it up with all this baggage.”
“I am planning to stay a while if I survive. If you will have me. I could go to a hotel. It‟s just that I want you near me for a while.”
“Tahira, we are going home. It is yours as much as it is mine. Do I have to tell you this?”
We rolled on the new highway towards our suburb by the sea from which the small villa I bought years ago was a two-minute walk away. It had a garden and a fence with shrubbery. It was as close as I could get to the sea. I could have never lived far from it. My love went a long way back. It was all in my stories. Through fact and fiction it was there. This love. At fifty-eight I was not old but I felt my life was over. I felt redundant. The only thing that kept me going was my writing, the sea and Anna.
After the highway back to narrow ancient roads, jam-packed with cars, delays and hopeful false starts. Greece modernizing piecemeal. Ruining one‟s humor. But I had Tahira next to me.
“Yesterday you called me from Colombo. How come?” I asked Tahira.
“I stayed in Sri Lanka for four days,” she said. “I heard of a clinic in Colombo that uses herbs and natural minerals to cure all sorts of diseases, mental and physical and conditions of brain damage from hemorrhages with a surprising rate of success. It is becoming quite famous and people from Europe are trooping there in droves. I inquired if they dealt with drug addiction and the answer was yes. That was what finally made me decide to leave Bombay. It seemed to be my last chance. I was using more and more heroin and I could feel my end inescapably creeping closer. It was not a difficult decision. The difficult part was the planning. But I managed pretty well. I stayed at the clinic for three days and was examined by a number of doctors and was given a regimen I must now follow. I was warned it would not be easy. Quite the contrary. It involves severe suffering but I am quite determined to go through with it. It is a matter of life and death and life is sweet. I am only forty-eight and look at me. My only misgiving is the trouble I shall cause you because it shall not be easy for you either.”
“My goodness, Tahira, we will do whatever it takes.” 127
“And Anna?”
“Anna can go to hell.”
“You don‟t mean it?”
“Not really but just as I tolerate her bloody cats she will have to put up with the inconvenience of your cure whatever this involves.”
And so, another part of my past was installed in my house ailing and broken.
Not a memory but a person. A person who revived the memory of the striking and vibrant young woman of long ago. The past keeps coming back. I am living in it. I think about it constantly. Reality is blurred. I can hardly tell what is true and what imagination. All the short stories I write and wrote confuse me even more.
Living with Anna is no help. We are both living in dreamlike isolation. We cross each other like somnambulists. She rarely goes out of the house. In summer we sometimes go to an open air movie together. I never know if she enjoys the films. She does not talk to me. Communication at the minimum. She cannot bear me to touch her.
It is her prerogative to come to me for love whenever the firing synapses of her brain and her serotonin levels demand it. Sometimes frequently, sometimes so seldom I get desperate. And when she does come, one never can predict her moods. Is that part of her lunacy? Is that what fascinates me? She is passionate, she is cool, she is kinky. It is her choice. She acts, I react. Perhaps, if she were normal I would have tired of her, her manias and eccentricities. Though I think not. She is still so beautiful, so ripe, so desirable. I look at her when she is not looking. She does not like me to stare at her.
When she first came to stay with me and I could not take my eyes off her she told me that if I kept it up she would leave me. I have learnt to look at her furtively out of the corner of my eye and pretend indifference. I get my fill when we make love.
Tahira unsettled me. She pierced my cocoon of isolation and thoughts of the past. Of what happened and what may not have happened. She brought the world back to me. The world of hunger and misery, of wars and suffering, of greed and drugs. My heart and the core of my soul had congealed. Terrorists did not revolt me. They had their reasons. Torn bodies and death left me cold. Genocides were past, present and future and they were far away. Would the folly of humanity ever cease? I had not opened the television in years.
She ignited a spark of pity, a glimmer of altruism for the young woman I knew, a woman I loved, my constant, devoted lover, now a wreck. Love and revulsion were a curious mix and my feelings a pendulum oscillating from one to the other.
We reached the house an hour later. Dusk was turning to darkness. In the garden about twenty cats were milling around. At the side of the fence near the gate were neatly stacked tin boxes of Whiskers, the best cat food money can buy. I hauled Tahira‟s baggage up the few steps to the house and opened the door. A kitty scrambled outside and Anna rushed past us to retrieve it. She was disheveled and untidy. A work of art. She caught it, smiled at us and explained that it was sick and should not be going out of the house. She then smiled at Tahira. A barely coherent conversation ensued.
“Welcome to Greece,” she said.
They had only met once or twice before but she approached and kissed her.
Well, I thought, that‟s a change of her usually surly self.
“Will you be staying long with us?” she asked.
“A couple of months perhaps, unless I become too big a burden and you throw me out.”
“Do you like cats?”
“Well, I do not dislike them.”
“Then it will be all right.”
128
She looked intently at Tahira.
“Are you not well?” she asked.
“No.”
“I saw the bed with straps come in. I thought it was for sex.” Tahira laughed.
“Perhaps later,” she said. “I shall leave it for you and John.” Inside, two or three cats were walking about and another few were sleeping comfortably on the armchairs and couch. They are ruining the furniture. Cat nails have to be sharpened and vertebrae stretched. Primordial habits of the wild surviving in sloth and luxury. A faint cattish odor permeated the house. I was forever opening windows and smoking cigars to drown it though, by now, I hardly noticed it. It was a condition for having Anna near me. When we made love I smelled her body and genitals to see if she too secreted it. No, she had her own exciting smell.
I took Tahira to her room. I tried to make it as comfortable as possible. To erase the aura that the hospital bed with the straps gave off. I brought in her suitcases and noticed, with surprise, the flowers Anna had brought in from the garden. Perhaps she is happy another person has come to break the monotony. I hate the thought. I want her to myself. When we make love I have no doubt of her shattering orgasms even when she is in her most frigid mode. Frigid or not, she always comes to me in need. Her iron body-grip of arms and legs imprisoning me in her body and her little screams leave not the slightest doubt.
I start with Tahira and end up talking of Anna.
Tahira looks around her room. It is our guest room with no guests. It is large and airy with a private bath. In a corner, two armchairs and a small table. She smiles at the flowers of welcome, comes up to me, takes my hand and kisses it.
“I had no doubt,” she said.
Does she still worship me? Making me feel a fraud.
“They are Anna‟s.”
We sit for a while and talk. Like old friends. She spares me the tenderness and cuddling of the past. The automatic approach, the enlacement, the question: Do you still love me? When we would have torn each other‟s clothes off and made wild, passionate love. Now the bed has straps, she is skeletal and we talk. Generalities. Bombay and Rami, her flight, Sri Lanka, my weird life of retirement and nostalgia, the writing that keeps me dreaming, the swimming that keeps me sane, a few pleasant, shared memories and a few laughs.
“Bless you, John,” she said. “I have not laughed in ages.” She asks for the heroin. The cramps are coming on. The searing pain is not far off. I go to the den and unlock a drawer of the bookcase. I pick up one of the many small plastic pouches with white powder and take it to her. She empties a handbag with the utensils of death. Small spoons and silver tiny measures with handles, plastic syringes and a miniature gas burner. Efficiently, she prepares the dose, ties her hand with a piece of plastic tubing and searches for a vein. Her movements are quick to overtake the pain. She finds a spot on an arm tattooed with needle points and injects the liquid. In a few moments she smiles at me.
“How long will that last?” I ask.
“Oh, a day. I feel wonderful. It is a compensation of sorts for the suffering. I could even make love with you but it would not be fair to ask you. I shall take a shower instead.”
“Then we can go and have dinner.”
“I am never hungry, you know.”
129
“Nevertheless, you must eat.”
“Help me with this bag. I need a change of clothes. Tomorrow I shall arrange my things.”
She undressed in my presence and went to the bathroom. I got up and left the room. Her nudity revolted me. It broke my heart.
We took the car to a restaurant at the shopping center of our suburb. The main street wide with wide pavements on each side and a pavement in the middle with trees and tables of the various restaurants. The harassed waiters in perpetual motion criss-crossing the street with trays, ferrying the food from the shop and attending their impatient customers whose orders were constantly readjusted with additional dishes.
It was already past ten and the crowds were thinning out but the restaurants and fast food joints were packed and noisy. Eating out is a national pastime. Food, wine and interminable chatter, a national delectation. As we entered the shop a thousand eyes appraised us. Curiosity killed the cat. It never touched a Greek. And we were an unconventional trio. Anna was with us. I did not ask her to come. I did not expect her to come even had I asked. The cats, ordinarily, had precedence and I wanted to talk to Tahira. But my unpredictable angel got dressed in a jiffy when we were ready to leave, separated the cats in different rooms by unfathomable criteria and we all left together.
She dresses like a hippy with long, colorful skirts and a throng of long necklaces, stylishly unkempt hair with perhaps a flower stuck in it. She always looks gorgeous.
Tahira, in a sari. An old, young woman.
We order food and wine and appetizers. I want Tahira to fatten up. I cannot bear her like this. Anna surprises me. She is all smiles and questions about India, Bombay, Hinduism, the Tantric temples of sex, did Tahira visit them?
“Yes, at Khajuraho, a lifetime ago with John.”
“Tell me about it. It is truly fascinating. Are Indians so very sensual?” She is as avid about sex as I am. She asks new questions before Tahira completes her answers. She is almost normal. I tell Anna to take it easy. Tahira must eat instead of talk. I press Tahira on. Tidbit after tidbit, mouthful after mouthful. She dithers like a child with every spoonful and I am the stern father. I force her to drink wine to enhance her appetite. I exhaust her and Anna comes to her rescue.
“That‟s enough for today!”
She takes Tahira‟s hand.
“What‟s wrong?”
Tahira smiles. She is surprised that Anna does not know.
“I have a drug problem. Didn‟t John tell you?”
“We don‟t talk much.”
“Why not? He loves you very much.”
“Well, so do I. How could I not? He was my first lover, you know. My juvenile sex instructor though, in truth, it was a joint venture. Each with his talents. I provided the drive and shamelessness. He, the trust and caution. We learnt to love our bodies together, to examine them minutely and taste their infinite secrets and delicacies. I think we were very lucky to have fallen in love so early and to have satisfied our animal compulsions with so much purity. Even when we were not together, in later life, there was always a feeling that we ultimately belonged to each other. Not exclusively. A kind of vague but enduring link. Though I do bear a grudge. I have borne it for twenty years and it is still lingering. I still hate him sometimes and I go and make love with him because that is when I want him most. He rejected me at a time I needed him, I longed for him so badly. Perhaps I am unconsciously punishing him for it with this silence, which is a necessity for me, not a policy.
130
“Since I moved in with him we have come to tolerate each other‟s needs and peculiarities, even if they may not be to each other‟s liking. Strange as it may seem, I believe this bond of silence with John will keep us together. There is another reason, too. After my disastrous marriage and the endless squabbling and quarrels with my husband I need this detachment, this sense of self-sufficiency, which, in the last analysis, may be false because I can no longer envisage life away from John. I am very peaceful and happy. I just do not feel the need to talk. I cannot bear interminable conversations.”
All of a sudden, she was talking my Anna. An explanation of sorts for our mute coexistence. She was the relentless obsession I once denied so stupidly and spinelessly.
Now, my pleasure and pain. All I had left in life.
“I haven‟t eaten this much in months,” said Tahira.
Anna reaches out and caresses her hair. I am surprised at her affection. I was afraid she would be put out by Tahira‟s presence in our silent household of voiceless comings and goings, occasional wild sex, stumblings over cats and annoying meows.
“You eat like a baby,” she tells her.
“I hope I don‟t throw up. I do sometimes when I overeat.”
“Overeat! My God,” says Anna.
“We‟ll have some coffee to settle the food and perk us up,” I suggest.
“Better not. I hardly sleep at night as it is.”
“A liqueur, then?”
“That would be lovely.”
I snapped my fingers at the waiter who was looking elsewhere. He came over with a vexed expression. He did not like being patronized. He had his mobile phone strapped on his belt and wore ordinary clothes on the job. He was as good as me. At least my equal. Greeks find such jobs difficult. Their temperament does not allow them to be either artificially polite or naturally servile. One must not take their scowls seriously. Excessive self-esteem is a failing of the race. I ordered the liqueurs.
“Tahira, tell us about your cure. It‟s good Anna is with us so that she will know what it entails.”
Tahira smiled.
“Let us hope it is a cure,” she says. “It is a regimen I have to follow which will hopefully free me of my addiction. I was told about this clinic in Colombo by a friend and he claims he knows two people who were cured. On the other hand, he knows a few others who drifted back to drugs. The center is like a regular hospital with qualified doctors and staff and it treats patients suffering from a variety of diseases. They practice their own special brand of homeopathy.
“Homeopathy is a relatively new science. It is scorned by conventional medicine and for this reason it is not yet systematically studied or researched. But it is gaining ground and developing and it seems the doctors at Colombo are successfully finding new methods with plants, herbs and physiotherapy that effectively treat many illnesses.
I spent three days at the center and was examined both by physicians and psychiatrists.
These are standard procedures. Doctors in homeopathy want a rounded picture of their patients to see if they can mentally handle the therapeutic process without cracking up or giving it up half way. Apparently, I can.
“They were quite an experience these three days. The center is much more loosely administered than an ordinary hospital and one is free to move around and associate with other patients and even attend their therapy or psychotherapy sessions if one wishes. You see and hear the strangest things. There were other drug addicts, people with AIDS, with cerebral hemorrhages, people who sat expressionless and 131
uncommunicative and let out piercing screams at intervals. On top of it all, monks cloaked in saffron-colored robes with shaved heads and shining faces were constantly coming and going, reciting prayers and chants for one‟s recovery and well-being, expecting a little something for their travails and I was constantly running out of small change.”
“The cure Tahira. What about the cure?” I ask.
“How do I know what the cure is? They gave me a quarter kilo of very fine gray powder and explained how I was to use it. I have no idea what it consists of. Apparently extracts of special herbs and some minerals. Mountains of herbs are processed to produce just a few grams of powder. It was more expensive than heroin. I wonder if it will work. Mind you, this is also a drug but much, much less addictive than heroin.
Heroin is deadly. It will kill you in a few years. The methadone they use as a heroin substitute is also an opioid but is relatively harmless. If this powder does not work I shall have to resort to it.
“Methadone is mainly used as a maintenance medication. Like heroin, one can rarely give it up and even if a person manages to withdraw he usually returns to hard drugs very quickly. You see, it is not a question of will power. It is your body that decides. And let me tell you, it makes its needs felt in the most merciless and brutal manner. In a sense methadone is a normalizer of a deranged physiology just like insulin is for diabetics and anti-hypertensive drugs are used to control hypertension. It brings normality to the heroin abuser who does not eat properly, sleep normally and cannot function as a useful member of society. What I am trying to avoid, however, is the continued bondage to drugs. It is a very difficult and painful process and by no means guarantees success but I am willing to try it.”
The liqueurs arrived. It was moving on to midnight and the restaurant was emptying. Tahira was obviously tired. It had been a long day. A long yesterday, too. On the move for twenty-four hours. It was the drug that kept her awake and tense.
“I think I shall probably sleep tonight,” she said. “Well, I hope so. If I do, perhaps, we can start the treatment tomorrow.”
“What do we have to do?”
“The whole idea is to substitute, very gradually, the powder for the heroin and when the heroin is totally eliminated we shall start reducing the powder dosage to zero.
Presumably this will be feasible whereas with heroin it is totally impossible and with the methadone almost impossible. Johnny, I cannot guarantee a time limit. It will depend on my body‟s tolerance of withdrawal. I feel so terrible to put you through all this.”
“Cut out the apologies, Tahira. They have no place in our friendship.”
“Another thing, I shall need daily physiotherapy. I have a sheet of paper with instructions. We shall have to find a physiotherapist.”
“I take charge of that,” said Anna.
“We shall do it together,” I tell Anna.
“Yes, we shall do it together,” Anna tells me with a smile.
She does not often smile at me. Our love, our interdependence is inarticulate and expressionless. Is it possible, Tahira‟s adversity will bring us close again?
“What are the straps on the bed for?” asks Anna.
“Just a safety measure. You see, I was told that every time we shall substitute a small amount of powder for the heroin I shall have the searing pain of withdrawal. I might get desperate and try to take some more heroin to appease the torment and that is why I must be restrained with the straps. On no account must you give in to my pleading and undo the straps. The pain will diminish gradually in the following days.
132
With the next substitution the process will be repeated. And then, again, when the heroin will be eliminated and we shall start reducing the powder.” We returned home and I accompanied Tahira to her room. Anna went to finalize the cats‟ sleeping arrangements. It was an everyday routine. She separated the quarrelsome, isolated the mewing prima donnas, sopranos and contraltos, to the far end of the house and generally made arrangements for a peaceful night. I helped Tahira retrieve a nightgown from her bag and she went in the bathroom for a warm bath to help her sleep. I left her, changed into my pajamas in my room and read for a while. Later I returned to her room and opened the door. She was lying on her side facing away from the door. A dark, bony shoulder and the skinny legs below her short nightgown were of a desiccated mummy. She did not move and seemed to be asleep. I tiptoed to her bed and put out her bedside lamp.
Back in my room I resumed my reading. I had reached an age where I slept less and less and thought more and more. Thoughts, memories, fantasies intermingling. A strange indulgence for a former man of mindless action, of middling education and mediocre intellect. A slow, puzzling, aimless march to old age and death.
Eventually I went to sleep. Dreams of India, poverty, drugs, violence. My intestines churning. Woke up at six as usual. My first thought, Tahira. Showered, shaved, dressed, t-shirt, shorts and sneakers and went to her room. She was sitting on the armchair, in a lovely, yellow and blue silk robe reading the Time magazine she had picked up on the plane. Bin Laden on the cover. A sweet, serene, kindly face. Another disciple of God with a mission. She looked almost a different person. Fresh and relaxed, her wrinkles almost gone. Her hair was combed, her large beautiful eyes accentuated with eyeliner seemed less sunken and she had purple lipstick on her lips which went well with her colors. I asked if she slept well.
“Oh, yes Johnnie,” she said with a smile, “almost miraculously we