Back at her hotel, at first she’s too revved up to sleep. She thinks of Aladdin/Naseer, of the dark and glistening Gazella. The cave-like shop, and the Tree of Life carpet. She hadn’t even asked Naseer the price, but it could be just the thing to send to Dad, while he’s still well enough to enjoy it. He’d know how she feels about it, she’s sure, and then thinks, what a silly thought, how could he.
With this thought sleep comes.
She dreams she’s at home at her mother’s kitchen table, trying to shine a tarnished brass lamp with a Silvo cloth. The cloth is black in places from previous use and smells of metal. Her hands are getting black too. No sooner has she rubbed a little bright spot on the lamp than Naseer appears before her.
‘Hello, Naseer. I was expecting the slave of the lamp. What are you doing in my bedroom?’ The lamp in her hand shines bright.
She opens her eyes and the electric light blinds her. She blinks and turns it off, but can’t shake the dream, the memory of Naseer’s presence in her room excites her. She can’t get back to sleep. Gradually the dream fades. She decides definitely to buy the tree of life carpet, send it airmail home to Dad, so he’ll see it in time.
Next morning in Naseer’s shop, she doesn’t bargain, how can she, after that meal at his place, after him appearing to her in her dream?
Naseer wraps the carpet in brown paper tied with string, then plastic—‘We must waterproof your carpet,’ he says—and again in calico that he sews with a long curved needle. He hums as he works. It takes time.
Sandra sits on the stool, sips chai, thinks about her dad, dying of AIDS. They’d had lunch at the Observatory cafe, such bland food, she’d been upset. She wanted him to have delicious food, the nectar of the earth, as he wasn’t going to enjoy it for long. They’d tried a walk down towards the lake, but hadn’t gone far, as he wasn’t really up to it. They’d sat on a bench, she patting the loose skin of his hand, staring at the gravel. She’d talked about her planned trip to London, the money she’d make, visits to the new Tate, Portobello Market.
He didn’t have any plans to share, he said, pitiful. She tried to help him.
‘We had fun Dad, when we were little, you were a great dad. Remember the beach, the sandcastles? Remember our craze for fondues, cheese fondue, fondue bourguinonne—all that meat—and then chocolate fondue. Remember you let me have all three for ten friends for my tenth birthday!’ They laughed. ‘Of course, it was different when we were teenagers, we didn’t need you that much.’
She hadn’t said, ‘Where were you when we needed you, when we had exams to pass, when we had our first boyfriends, when we got stoned every weekend, where were you Dad?’
Instead she’d said, ‘Can you hear the bellbirds, Daddy?’
At last Naseer finishes her parcel. He hands her a green texta for her to scratch her father’s address onto the calico. He dinks her on the back of his scooter to the Post Office.
The clerk says, ‘Very lucky, Madam, just in time for post,’ and as they leave she catches sight of her parcel, loaded on the back of a bicycle, on the first slow leg, then a faster bus leg, then hey presto in a plane and to Camberwell.
They pause to watch a cricket match on the dry oval, the clunk of bat on ball, the dusty pitch, the simultaneous test match on the radio, spectators reclining up on the branches of trees.
On the way back to the shop they stop at her hotel. She wants to get her guide book, so she can decide what to do with the rest of her day.
‘Coming up? I dreamt about you last night, that you were in my room. It was funny, like you were really there, so you’d better come up.’
Naseer looks at her with a question in his eyes. He follows her up the stairs.
In her room she doesn’t hesitate. It’s not as if it’s Naseer she wants, so much as the warmth of his skin, its smoothness under her hand, his hands smoothing her skin. She can tell he doesn’t do this every day, he comes as fast as she wants the tree of life carpet to arrive in Australia. Then he’s more at ease in the slow warmth of the afternoon, takes his time—she loves his moustache, that fleshy pockmarked face that she kisses.
‘Dear Aladdin,’ she says.
He’s alarmed, ‘Aladdin?’ so she tells him the story of his ‘cave’, and how she’d rubbed the lamp in her dream.
She tells him about her father’s illness. She has difficulty explaining AIDS, maybe Aladdin thinks it’s passed from father to daughter. But no, he knows what she’s talking about.
‘He’s dying, and I’m so upset with him.’
When she cries great sobs, he puts his arms around her, pats her back, and kisses her tears.
‘How could he fucking do it? My own father?’
They lie together, listening to the silence.
She feels selfish to keep him away from the shop, but needs him, presses him to stay, and relaxes when he doesn’t move.
Later, when he does dress and says goodbye, he says, ‘Life is strange’
She’s not sure if he’s referring to her confession about her father or the strange behaviour of foreign women and the afternoon in her room.
Later, eating dinner alone in the hotel restaurant, she has more thoughts of Gazella, spreading the cloth on the floor, bringing the dishes from the kitchen, making sure her guest has a cushion to sit on and another at her back, the dishes passed again and again. She feels a headache coming on, leaves her meal unfinished.
Next morning with Naseer’s help she books her bus ticket back to Chennai, not to Pondicherry which was her plan. She tries to phone the airline from her hotel, but realizes that to change her flight, go on the wait list, whatever, it can only be done from Chennai. She might beat the tree of life home yet, not that it matters. She’ll be there soon.
And she’ll hot foot it to the Austin, to his bedside.
‘I’m back, Daddy, I’m home,’ she’ll say.
Plastic
I met Louise at the end of my stay. I saw her in the front hall of the YWCA (where they accept men), reading after dinner that was all over by seven. And true, there’s not much to do in Chennai for women of her age at night, nor for me, having no cash at this stage—well some, I was hanging on like grim death to my taxi fare to the airport.
I saw her look up from her book and over at me. She took in my greasy blonde pony tail, and I’m very thin at present, I mean I’m never fat, so maybe I’m thinner, what with having not much to spend on food. I thought, she’s thinking I’m one of those Westerners who get sick through drinking the water. These are the ones who believe when they drink the water and get sick, it’s only through bad luck. So they get sick again. And again. They don’t learn. Actually I’m not like that, as Louise learnt when we got to talk. Some of these drink-the-water idiots end up at the Apollo Hospital.
Like Sherry. But she got sick in another way. I thought Sherry looked a bit stressed and quiet, but girls can be like that. Then we took off to Pondi for the weekend, and that’s when it happened. Panic attack, anxiety, depression, psychosis, I don’t know what, but she’s at the Apollo now, waiting for her insurance to repatriate her. It’s not happening fast. ‘Do you know,’ I said to Louise, ‘they’re sending a doctor from the UK to accompany her home.’ Poor Sherry, she’ll never get insurance to travel again. This is a disaster. The doctors here think it’s the antimalarials that set her off, but boy, hard to prove.
I spared Louise the gory details, but I’m troubled—God that’s an understatement. In Pondi it was impossible to get a bottom-end hotel because of the Mother’s birthday. Mother’s the Frenchwoman who married