Louisa Ermelino
It’s the Nature of Opium to Conjure
I killed his baby. I did. I suppose there are other ways to look at it, but why mince words. I can’t say I’m sorry, looking at him now, his glazed eyes, the lids heavy. He does have the most beautiful blue eyes, those gifts from a god who every now and then reminds you what he can do when he feels like it.”
Anna said this without any trace of emotion. It was somewhere between “Pass the sugar” and “Can you believe this view?” She had had options, she told me. The options girls used to dream of, pray for. The Marry Me option, the I Want To Take Care Of You And Our Baby option. Then there was the Intrepid Young Mother option. The idea of taking an infant into the Laotian jungle or trekking into the Himalayas, Junior tied in a sling over a beating heart, didn’t cause a moment of hesitation.
She told me all this in the vale of Kashmir, at a tea shop overlooking the Jhelum River. I had just bought a magnificent wool robe, embroidered at the cuffs and hem and all the way down the front, the remnant of some English memsahib’s raj wardrobe. Anna had helped me button it up, introducing herself as she ran her hands from the closure at my neck to the fitted waist. She stood so close I could feel her breath on my cheek. I liked her immediately. She suggested we go for tea.
“He was all blubbery when he found out about the baby,” Anna said. “Maybe he was feeling gallant. Maybe he was imagining a bonny blue-eyed boy like he must have been, a postwar baby, a symbol of renewal and hope.
He was a sweet man,” she said, stirring an unconscionable amount of sugar into her tea, ignoring the black bits that swirled in the cup. She had picked him, plucked him like a blackberry at the apex of summer because she needed someone, a male, to get her from Point A to Point B, from Calcutta to anywhere else because it was time to go and he was molica, her grandmother’s word, the soft inside of the bread. A good quality in a man, according to her grandmother, who had married a brute. Anna looked up at me. “Myself, I like them on the rough side. You?” She didn’t wait for an answer. I wondered if her grandmother had wanted out, too. If her grandmother had had options.
“We’ve been together a long time, Jim and I,” she said, blowing on the sweet milky tea, even the cup too hot to hold. “I was surprised, but to be honest, nothing better presented itself. And he had plans—dangerous ones, drugs hidden in suitcases, in hollowed-out images of Shiva. But he didn’t involve me, so I was happy to go along.
Then, of course, that baby, that tadpole, that twinkle in a father’s eye. Not that I ever saw it—no such thing back in the day. But I knew. I just knew. The sight of a raw egg cracked in a bowl turned my stomach. It was as simple as that.”
She got up to go. She left me with the check. She just left, in the middle of the story, just like that. I went back to my houseboat. It was a small one, lovely, and looking over the lake, I saw that her houseboat was near mine. I saw her sitting on her deck, smoking deliberately, and breaking up a pomegranate. I could see the seeds, she was that close. I can’t imagine she didn’t see me, but she never looked over, only into the horizon.
And then I saw a man, tall, so thin I could see the points of his shoulders, floppy hair but not long the way the hippies wore it. I watched him bend to kiss her and stumble, losing his footing as though the boat had been rocked by a wave even though the lake was still as glass. He went inside and Anna stayed, still as a stone, smoking. I stayed too, watching her until the sun went down. A Kashmiri sunset is like watching the world end; there’s nothing left to see, nothing left to want.
Later, I put on my robe. I felt foolish. My raj dressing gown deserved a more elegant houseboat than mine. It was very late when I finally fell asleep. Sound carries across water and secretly I hoped I would hear Anna and her man talking, fighting, making love, but there was only silence.
I looked for her the next day and the days after. I’m ashamed to admit that I did this instead of trekking as I had planned. I walked around Srinagar, poking into shops and tea rooms with no luck until finally I spotted her in the tea shop where we had first talked. She was spooning pudding distractedly into her mouth, reading a paperback, and when she looked up and saw me, she motioned me in.
“Hello, hello,” she said, as though she had been expecting me. “Sit down, have some phirni. It’s wonderful here, they make it with rose petals.” She ordered me one and asked for more tea. I was unexplainably happy to see her. I wanted to hear more of the story. I wanted to ask about her man, to tell her that our houseboats were near each other. Instead I was quiet, waiting for her to start,
which she did, as soon as the tea and phirni arrived.
“We ended up in Australia, in Sydney, working crappy jobs, trying to earn enough to get out. I had holes in my shoes. I didn’t know leather could wear out like that. It was an education in deprivation. By the end of the week, I didn’t even have the money for a pack of cigarettes. Even then, before the baby, I wanted out but I was stuck. Then a windfall arrived and I bought a one-way ticket to Denpasar.”
She paused but didn’t explain the windfall and I didn’t ask. “The usual route was to Port Townsend in the north and then over to Indonesia, but I had that ticket straight to Bali. I told Jim I was leaving, and he said he would join me when he could. I let him think I’d be waiting. Like I said, he was molica. But then the nausea, the uncooked egg, and I realized I was in the soup. Suddenly I had this problem. I didn’t think of a baby. I thought of a problem keeping me from getting from Point A to Point B. I had a week to figure it out.
In the end, I took a taxi to a house somewhere in the Sydney suburbs. A man in street clothes brought me to a room set up like a doctor’s office. He said he was a doctor. I counted out the cash, four hundred and fifty Australian dollars. He couldn’t use anesthesia, too risky. I went out a side door and walked to a bus stop. The baby, the tadpole, the twinkle, was gone. The next day I was in pain and bleeding. The doctor’s phone was disconnected. And I had that ticket for Bali.”
She stopped talking. Standing at the table was her man, the one I had seen on the deck of the houseboat. “Hey,” he said.
She looked up, still as stone and quickly looked across at me. “This is Jim,” she said.
He had the most amazing blue eyes, even if they were half closed.
She didn’t introduce me to him, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t see me. There was only Anna. He moved behind her chair and put his hands on her, one on each shoulder. His hands were as beautiful as his eyes. He must have once been a beautiful man.
“Have a tea,” Anna said to him, not moving, looking at me.
He sat down and Anna called the waiter over and ordered a black tea. When it arrived, Jim reached for the milk and poured it into his cup until it overflowed into the saucer, kept pouring until the tablecloth was wet. Anna reached for his hand. “You have to go,” she said.
He nodded, stood up and turned away.
Anna rested her face in her hands. “He’ll go to the pharmacy and buy morphine,” she said. “He’s an addict. Disappointing.” She took a sip of tea. “Vile is more like it.
I waited a week before I went to the hospital. The doctor in the emergency room was just about my age. He kept asking me what I had done, had I done something illegal, and I kept saying nothing. He told me I had a massive infection. I told him I was leaving for Bali in the morning. He said I couldn’t. He said I would die. I said I was leaving for Bali in the morning. I asked him to come with me.
Instead he shot me up with syringe after syringe of penicillin. He made me promise that when I got to Bali I would go to the hospital. I said OK. I promised.”
Anna stopped to smoke. More tea arrived. I spooned sugar into her glass and stirred. By now I knew how much she liked. She looked at me and smiled. “I left the next morning,” she said. “I rented a room in a family compound where the women were sweeping the courtyard bare-breasted in batik sarongs, and I knew I would be happy there.”
“Did you go to the hospital?”
“I did,” she said, blowing a line of impressive smoke rings. “It was a concrete building broken up into rooms with no doors. I saw a woman lying on a stone slab, moaning, her clothes covered in blood. I watched the doctor rinse his hands in a finger bowl of water with rose petals floating in it. I kept walking.”
She stopped the story, stood up and said, “I have to go.”
“Will I see you again?”
“Why not?”
“Tomorrow? Where?”
She didn’t answer but walked out the door and into the mist that was rising off the river. She left me with the check.
Again that evening I saw her on the deck of her houseboat. Jim was there. I watched him take the red silk scarf from his neck and tie it around his bicep. He put a needle in the crook of his arm. The syringe was large, medieval, metal and glass. He sat down beside Anna and I watched her get up and go inside. He called after her but she didn’t respond.
The next day I had fever and chills, and my babu at the houseboat brought me a small lump of opium from the market. He kneaded it into pellets and made me swallow them with cold tea. He set up a hammock on the deck and I drifted in and out of sleep.
One night, from my hammock, I saw Anna and Jim on the deck of their
houseboat. She sitting, he standing. I saw him stumble. I saw him fall over into the water. I heard the sound of the surface breaking, a sound like a fish jumping. Then it was quiet. Anna sat smoking until the mist came in and the darkness, and I didn’t see or hear anything more. What had I seen? It’s the nature of opium to conjure.
When I was better, I went to their houseboat. I hadn’t seen them after that night. The houseboat was being cleaned for the next guests. I asked after Anna.
“She is gone,” the babu told me.
“And her friend? The tall man with the blue eyes?”
The babu moved his head from side to side. He held up his palms.
I scoured the tea shops. I asked after Anna in the one where we had met. I stood in front of the police station but I didn’t go in. I asked my babu for unusual happenings among the ferengi without being specific. He moved his head from side to side and held up his palms.
I learned nothing and I did nothing. I never saw Anna again. But I always asked after her on the road. We weren’t many then, we ferengi, and we crossed paths often. Sometimes someone would tell me they might have seen her. An Australian I met in Kalimpong was sure of it.
“She was on her way to Dharamsala for the Dalai Lama’s birthday,” he said.
“And was there a man? Tall with very beautiful blue eyes?”
“No, there was no man. There was never any man.”