Karom sped while Gita sat with her face directly in front of the air-conditioning vent. “I like the smell of it,” she said when he looked at her quizzically. “It’s the smell of cold.”
They were on the way to Archer’s Rock, the famous boulder that jutted out over the sea where families picnicked and sunbathed. “‘This rocky edifice may be the last bastion of the unsullied natural vantage point,’” Gita read from the National Geographic app on her iPhone. “‘Everything else has been filed down, shaved away, taking with it the history and fossilized evolutionary proof of our lives.’ Oh, Kar, we have to go there.”
By the time their car pulled up to visitors’ parking, ambulances and police tape had cordoned off the graveled lot. Scuba tanks were stacked together in a pile near one of the medical vans, and medics scurried about, stricken, possessed, mumbling into walkie-talkies.
“Park’s closed, sir,” a ranger said, directing their car. “Please turn around and go back the way you came.” Karom couldn’t believe that the ranger wore a hat just like on Yogi Bear. He spoke to the absurdly flat brim.
“What happened?”
“Wave.”
Karom hesitantly put his hand up and looked around before he realized that the ranger wasn’t instructing him to gesture to anyone. He put the car in reverse. While Karom fiddled with the AM radio to find a local channel, Gita plugged in the address of their hotel into the GPS that would lead them out of the park and back toward the highway.
“Tragedy struck at Acadia National Park today as a giant wave crashed over Archer’s Rock, claiming the lives of dozens of hikers and picnickers. Body count is still unknown as medics and scuba divers continue to comb the rocky coast to recover up to 50 park visitors who are expected to have been on the rock. Accounts confirm that a rogue wave such as this one hasn’t struck the area in nearly 40 years, the last similar tragedy occurring in 1971.”
The trees rushed by them, faster and faster, a blur of green in ascending brightness past their windows. They flew by the distinct odor of skunk and a tiny manicured graveyard, past which Gita held her breath. The two-way road was narrow and Gita was glad that Karom was driving. She felt nervous driving in situations where the car might graze against the side of another. She panicked easily in tunnels.
Karom pressed the button to clean the windshield, the blades scraping dully against the already clean glass. Gita pressed the window down and a small spray of window cleaner struck her cheekbone. Karom pulled the car to the side of the road, though there was no shoulder there. He leaned down to the steering wheel and rested his forehead in the center of the wheel, little bleeps emitting sporadically from the horn like a suffering goat.
“Karom,” Gita said, rubbing his ear. “It’s not the same thing. Look at me, baby.” He didn’t move.
“Baby, look at me. It’s a completely different situation, okay? I’m not going to let anything happen to you. You’re fine. You’re safe. I’m here.” She grabbed his head, the hair in the back where it had grown long and scraggly, and pushed it into her shoulder. She could feel him slowly disintegrate against her body, his long sobs penetrating through her thin windbreaker, his breath forcing muffled gasps and soggy exhalations. They sat there like that, allowing cars to whiz by their window, first a few at a time and then the ambulance they had seen in the parking lot, an underwater detection van and then another slew of cars. It became dark in the trees before Gita finally tapped his leg and Karom moved away, averting his face in the embarrassing dance of drying his tearstained face.
They traded places; Gita slid into the driver’s seat, put the car into drive and navigated the rest of the way to their budget hotel while Karom leaned back in his seat, one arm swung over his eyes to shield them from the glow of the dashboard.
* * *
In the rickshaw, Gita forced herself to remember that while their trip to Agra had been uneventful, without epiphany or excitement, that was what had made it a success. She forced her hand back into his and snuggled against him, turning her back to the beggars and hawkers in the road.
* * *
“Hang on,” Gita says now, as they sidestep two dogs sleeping in the middle of the lane. “When Ammama prays, is it in Hindi? English?”
“Definitely not English,” Karom says. “But she says my name. Repeatedly.”
“May-be,” Gita singsongs, pressing her body against him, “she’s praying for you to propose to me.”
“Ha.” Karom steps slightly away from her as they pass through the gates of Ammama’s compound.
“Oh, get over it,” she exclaims, grabbing his hand.
Karom stiffens. “Not here, Gita.”
“Of course here,” Gita insists. “It’s the birthplace of the Kama Sutra. Romance was practically invented here.”
But there is a sense of decorum in India, regardless of the historical ramifications of one dusty volume of intimate positions that sex shops like to pass off as exotic and sensual. Karom understands that the things that they take for granted back home in New York can never be accepted in this land so easily. The idea of boyfriends and girlfriends and dating, of sleeping in the same bed, even of traveling together, are all acts that had he grown up here, he himself might have frowned upon.
On their first night in Ammama’s flat, Karom had reverently touched her feet as he knew she would appreciate and asked, “Where will I be sleeping?” and then “Where will Gita be sleeping?” before placing their backpacks in the appropriate rooms: Gita sharing her grandmother’s double bed, Karom on the wooden pallet in the sitting room. He wondered if Gita asked her grandmother if she could sleep in the bed away from the door or away from the window, whichever it was that she was most worried about. Most women had a side of the bed, the right or left, but for Gita it was the side that she felt least vulnerable in. If they stayed in a hotel room, it was the side farthest away from the door; if they were on the ground floor in a room with garden access, it was where Gita felt intruders would be least likely to enter.
“It’s because if someone were to break in, I wouldn’t be the first thing they’d see,” she’d explained to Karom.
“But I would,” he’d snorted. “And I’d be the one they mauled or kidnapped or beat up. That’s okay with you?”
“No...you would protect me,” Gita had said. “My big strong man.”
He’d shaken his head. It was a stupid argument, but still he couldn’t help feeling slighted by her selfishness. He wondered if Gita was okay with her grandmother falling victim to hypothetical marauders in her second-floor flat in the suburban residential colony in East Delhi.
* * *
When they return to the flat later, after a long afternoon of shopping, Karom steps hesitantly through the door. But Ammama isn’t focused on him; she tells Gita that she has something to show her. While Gita slips behind the curtain that serves as the door to Ammama’s room, Karom busies himself with taking his purchases out of the bags and laying them out on the sofa: Calvin Klein shirts, a Kenneth Cole suit, all gathered at severely discounted prices. He holds up a shirt and breathes it in. It is so reassuring how much the fabric smells like India, like the mustiness of cardamom and mustard and mothballs all in one. He hears jingles and snaps and coos and sighs before Ammama slides the curtain open and beckons shyly at him. Karom follows her into the bedroom.
The bedroom is dimly lit: Ammama has drawn the curtains against prying eyes and sunlight is poking in at the corners of the windows. Gita is sitting on the bed