ADA IS MUCKING OUT THE COWSHED when an older woman with white-blond curls, one of the founders of the orchard, asks Ada to walk with her to the small Ganesha temple at the edge of the cashew field.
I’m Els, the woman says as they make their way through trellises of brinjal and rows of string beans, ladyfingers, and arugula.
Ada, she says.
I’m going to Europe for several months, Els says, pointing to a rusty hand pump. Ada washes her hands, then sticks her head under for a long, cool drink as Els pushes and pulls the handle up and down.
Someone needs to perform puja at the temple in the morning while I’m gone, Els says once they continue walking.
And you are asking me? Ada says, her voice rising. I’m not the right person. No. I’m not religious and probably not spiritual. You had better ask one of the others.
Els shakes her head, the curls bouncing at her shoulders. You have…Her voice trails off as she looks at Ada. …the right aura, she hastily concludes. The right aura for the space.
Does she? Ada wonders as they continue walking, now through the cashew field.
Think of a temple as an enclosure of space made special by an altar, a statue, Els says. In addition, there are some agreed-upon rules, like taking off one’s shoes before entering, covering one’s head, sitting still, and, if chanting mantras, doing so quietly.
Ada has never bothered to examine the temple before. It is a flat-roofed, stand-alone building the size of a shed with a black metal security door. Inside is a teak altar table with a Ganesha statue and a brass incense holder. Two blue meditation cushions sit in front of the altar.
Hardly anyone visits, Els says. It’s mostly here as a possibility. That’s the important thing. For people to know there’s a space set aside in which they can pray or sit in silence or peace or whatever. The job, then, is the upkeep of this possibility, to sweep it each morning, dust the altar, light an incense stick, and make small offerings of flowers or fruit to Ganesha. I take the cushion coverings home every few weeks to wash them and clean the walls when needed.
Ada nods. Hmm, she says noncommittally. Then Els asks about her living situation. Ada recently walked out of her old life and is sleeping at a friend’s on a lumpy floor mattress.
I live nearby, Els says. You can stay there while I’m gone. I have a dog though. Do you like dogs?
Ada nods.
I’ll give you directions.
When Ada arrives at Els’s, an old sheepdog rouses himself from the earthen-tile porch and gives a few half-hearted barks. Shush, Manu, Els reprimands him, coming outside. Hello, she calls to Ada in a singsong voice. Welcome.
Her house is made from a shipping container. Surrounding it is a cement moat filled with turbid water. An ant channel, she says. Doesn’t keep them out. Sit. She points to a rattan chair on the porch. I’ve made chai. She brings out a silver tray with a plate of ragi biscuits and two cups of chai flavored with lemongrass and sweetened with jaggery.
They eat and drink, and Manu licks what crumbs he can from Els’s hand before curling up at her feet. Els gestures to the various trees and plants—a neem, papaya, red banana, sweet lime, chikoo, ghost chilies, and pepper plants. None of this was here when my ex-husband and I first came, she says. We planted it all. She scans the garden as if taking the accomplishment in for the first time.
You were married? Ada asks, not knowing what else to say.
To an Argentinian, Els says. A regenerative organic farmer. He was the one who started the orchard. She tucks her hair behind her ear and smiles faintly. He taught me everything I know about farming. Though it’s never what I remember about him.
No?
No, she says, not really. Sure, it’s there in the background, but what’s stayed with me is an incident from over twenty years ago now. He was planting those pineapple plants over there, she says, pointing to the ones near the plumeria. It was late morning, already boiling hot. I went over to him with a pair of scissors, intending to ask him to trim my hair, but when I handed him the scissors, he spun me around, and before I could say anything, he chopped off my long ponytail.
Really? Just like that? Ada says in a gasp.
Els nods. I felt it thud down my back. No, not thud. More like, a light thump. She sucks her teeth. I felt sick to my stomach. The weight felt similar to that of a small bird. That is actually what I thought. That a small bird had fallen from the sky and thumped my back, and when I looked at the ground I expected to see the bloody entrails of a tailorbird, but no, it was my hair, limply coiled on the dirt, already coming undone in the breeze. To keep from, I’m not sure—she winces—slapping him or scratching his face with my fingernails, I fled into the forest. Through there. She points to an opening in the thicket in front of them. The trees were only shoulder-high then. I was barefoot and sobbing and stopped only to pull thorns from my feet. In the scheme of things I know it’s silly, but at the time I felt a tremendous sense of loss. He must have cut off twenty centimeters.
But after several hours, I changed my mind. Rather abruptly, I might add. I don’t know why. I guess some part of me decided he’d been correct to chop off my ponytail. It’d been long and heavy, the ends ratty. In this heat, it was like carrying a cat around on my head. Perhaps I’d known all along that he’d chop off all my hair if given the chance, and that’s why I went out to him with the scissors in the first place. She shrugs and sticks out her bottom lip as if to say, who knows one’s own mind. I mean, I knew he didn’t like my hair. He refused to touch it, not during sex and not in those moments when I needed comfort. He would stroke my cheek instead. We never spoke about it, and I continued to hand him the scissors every few months, and he chopped off what had grown until he left me for a German woman. She didn’t have great hair either, but she had great breasts and bright green eyes.
The sheepdog bolts from the porch and frantically rolls around in the red sand. Mosquitoes, she says. He’s a funny one. Hardwired to herd. If you have people over, you’ll see. He presses his snout into people’s shins and the backs of their legs, wanting to corral them into the same space. Only after everyone is grouped together eating and drinking does he allow himself to curl up and nap.
Shall I show you the house? Els asks, gathering the cups back onto the tray. The ceiling inside is barrel-vaulted—for ventilation, she says—but otherwise the
rectangular space is unremarkable. A desk, some shelves, a sage futon below a portrait of Sri Aurobindo, and in back a kitchenette. It is simple but quiet, peaceful.
It’s perfect, Ada says. Els shows her some of the quirks. You have to jiggle the fan plug to get it to work, and you should never turn on the coffee pot and toaster at the same time. But if you forget, she laughs, they’ll remind you.
Behind the shipping container, beside a fragrant orange jasmine, is a hut with a squat toilet, pink bathing buckets, and a small sink. She introduces me to the frog in the sink’s washbasin. See, she says. He lives inside the overflow hole. Sometimes, when I bend over the sink to wash my face, he hops out and bounces off my cheek or chin, as if to say hello. She gestures toward the toilet. Less pleasant, she says, is the frog who lives in the toilet. One night, when I sat down, he leapt up and bounced off here. Els waves her hand at her labia. It was shocking, she says with a shiver, to have something slick and unknown strike there. I didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. Too amped up. I recommend inspecting the toilet bowl with a torch beforehand.
There are frogs everywhere. Els says that several years ago a frog family lived on top of the frame of the Sri Aurobindo portrait above the futon. In the evenings, she called out to them, asking if she should read from the Savitri, or would they prefer to watch a series?
Recently they have taken to settling inside the flowerpots after the rain, and a rat snake comes by, checking each pot and gobbling up who he can.
The following week, Els leaves for Rotterdam to renew her visa, after which she is planning to travel to Copenhagen to care for a friend. Throat cancer, she tells Ada, no family.
Ada wakes early and prepares the breakfast Els has left for Manu, a mixture of rice, dal, and chicken parts—what looks to be part of a liver and a talon—before sitting down at Els’s desk with toast to answer emails. However, she is soon disturbed by reddish brown ants. Quite suddenly they are everywhere, climbing up her shins and along her arms, biting her as she blows and flicks and brushes them away. By the time she finishes cycling to the temple, red welts, painful to the touch, have appeared around the bites.
Later that afternoon she discovers ant chalk in one of the desk drawers, and now each time before sitting down to work, she draws white lines around the desk, reverently going over the places where the chalk easily thins. This proves to be an excellent barrier, until one afternoon a week or so later, from between the 1 and 2 keys—just as her left ring finger is stretching for the Q key—an ant appears and stings the distal joint. Her finger swells immediately and is soon at odds with the other fingers, throwing them out of sync like a rower dragging a blade in the water. She gives up typing, makes a few audio notes, then rouses Manu for a walk.
Manu is resistant. Usually they go later in the day when it is cooler. He pants heavily, lagging behind Ada until they reach the shade of the palmyra forest. Then he joyfully races ahead, but not too far, always checking that she is behind him and whining if she is too far behind.
It is tamarind season. Fallen pods crunch underneath Ada’s bare feet, and she keeps having to stop and scrape off the sticky pulp and brown husks that cling to her skin. This is what she is doing, bent over, running a stick across the soles of her feet, when a bell chimes behind her. She steps aside and is immediately caught up in what Els called the wait-a-moment bushes when she showed Ada the path a few weeks earlier. The thorns catch you, she said, and it takes a moment for you to disentangle yourself.
A nearby bamboo thicket is creaking in its ominous way. The first time Ada heard it, she hustled Manu to safety, believing the thick shoots were going to topple over and crush them, but she has come to hear that the sound—the sort an audio engineer might use in a horror film to ratchet up the eeriness of a creaky gate or door—doesn’t portend any danger. The shoots are just shifting in the wind.
The source of the chime, Ada discovers, is a bell attached to the handlebar of a bicycle ridden by a broad-shouldered man. After passing Ada and Manu, he stops. He is tall with cropped hair, wide-set brown eyes, a snub nose, full lips.
Are you okay? he asks.
Ada thinks he means her entanglement in the bushes. Yeah, yeah, she says. I’m fine. Dethorning myself.
No, he says. Your leg.
She makes a show of dragging the stick across the sole of her foot. Tamarind pulp, she says.
No, he says. You limp.
No-no-no-no, Ada replies, not wanting this man to think her injured and therefore unattractive. I’m fine. She stands straighter, quelling a groan. The physical labor at the orchard is taking a toll on her body. He looks at her in the manner of one who is used to professionally assessing bodies. Though he does pause and slightly cock his head while looking at her breasts, which are small, made more so by a tight-fitting sports bra. A uniboob, Ada thinks.
She first heard this term years ago at university. She had been washing her hands in the ladies’ room of a bistro when a woman burst in, speaking rapidly on her phone. Somehow the woman had ended up on a date in workout clothes. No, she said impatiently, listen to me, I can’t change. I met him at the gym. They’re cute but still. She was looking at herself in the mirror, fluffing her hair so it framed her face. I have that unflattering uniboob, you know. No, she said, nope, there’s no way. She exhaled. But seriously should I, like, put on some red lipstick? That would be too much, right? Ada dried her hands and left before learning what, if anything, the woman did to improve her appearance.
A look of disgust or annoyance appears on the cyclist’s flat, angular face. He shakes his head as if knocking out something—some image or idea—the size of her breasts or his break from professionalism or something else. Probably something else, Ada thinks.
Els’s dog? he asks, leaning over the cycle. Manu nuzzles his snout against the man’s hands. Cyrillic letters are tattooed across his knuckles.
Yeah, Ada says. Manu.
Anton, he says.
Russian?
Belarusian, he says. And your name?
Over the next few weeks, Anton and Ada often see each other on the paths in the forest, and they always stop and chat. Once they chat so long that it becomes dusk, and the mosquitoes are out. Manu whines, wanting to go home, but Ada ignores him, continuing to talk, slapping at the mosquitoes on her arms and legs, running the arches of her feet along the insides of her shins and wrapping the tops of her feet around her calves, and when this doesn’t deter them, she hops from foot to the other. Anton is smacking his deltoids and cheeks. By then they are hardly speaking, just hitting and swatting at themselves and then each other. He smashes one that lands on the inside of her bicep. She gently squashes one on his forehead.
Eventually she learns Anton is a massage therapist. His parents were engineers who met during a poetry reading at a power plant. He is learning to play the flugelhorn and has a son who is learning Norwegian in hopes of studying mathematics there.
In Norway? Ada asks.
Yes, he says. A good socialist country.
Once, after she gets back to Els’s, she smiles in the teeny mirror Els hung from a nail in the bathroom hut, to assess what she had looked like speaking with Anton. She sees to her displeasure that the skins of the peanuts she ate earlier are wallpapering portions of her front teeth.
Several days later, Manu and Ada pass a bamboo thicket as the wind is rippling through it. Instead of its usual creaking, the sound is gentle and burbling, like a waterfall. She has paused to listen when she feels mud splatter across her calves. Anton has zipped around the bend and sped through a mud puddle.
Pardon me, he says.
No worries.
Hey, meet over there? he asks, meaning the blue gate with the cattle guard where Manu is waiting. Manu isn’t able to navigate the horizontal bars and is waiting for Ada to pick him up and ferry him across in her arms.
Tomorrow? he asks. I’m visiting a puppy.
Okay.
Around this time?
Sure.
That evening, as she washes Manu’s food bowl in the kitchen sink, she is sliding the arches of her feet along the insides of her calves, recalling that evening with the mosquitoes, when she feels the flecks of dried mud. She rubs at her skin, smiling, thinking about tomorrow’s meeting, and while she is putting Manu’s bowl on the drying rack, she glances out the window and catches sight of the moon perfectly encircled by the plumeria’s twisty branches, momentarily looking like the opal center in a bracelet of braided metals.
The next day she waits at the blue gate for Anton, listening to the whistling of a row of casuarinas serving as a windbreak for what looks to be a tapioca field. Aton arrives on a juddering Royal Enfield Bullet. She gets on. The rumble of the engine drowns out what he is saying. Something about the puppy. She leans in closer and opens her mouth to shout for him to repeat himself, but her hair flies into her mouth. Dirt from the path blows into her eyes.
After speeding past several mango fields and a cashew plantation, they arrive at an old bungalow with crumbling Mangalore tiles. The puppy is on the porch with his mother. He is a fat, floppy, seal-colored singleton, not yet able to walk. His legs look like little flippers. He uses them to blindly scoot across the smooth concrete porch in search of his mother’s teats. Anton sticks out his pinkie. The puppy latches on and greedily sucks. Ada tries to decipher the blurry Cyrillic letters tattooed across his knuckles. He withdraws his hand, telling her not what the letters mean but that he tattooed them himself when he was a teenager, using pencil lead and a sewing needle.
To rebel against the regime, he adds after some silence.
Ada doesn’t know what to say, so she asks him when he is taking the puppy home. Not for a few months, he tells her. The puppy needs to be with his mother. Plus, Anton is busy soundproofing a room. He has been using a trumpet mute on the flugelhorn to soften its sound. However, due to the trumpet’s smaller conical bore, the mute constantly gets sucked in, and so as not to disturb his neighbors, Anton can only practice the fingerings and lightly blow on the mouthpiece.
And this is no good, he says. I want loud sound. Though he is practicing for an orchestral part in an opera his friend has written for children, he played in a heavy-metal band in his youth.
The feel is the same, he tells Ada, stroking the puppy’s head. Vibrations are transmitted through the body from the instrument. That’s the important thing.
Shall we go? he asks after a few minutes, gently shifting the sleeping puppy from his lap to a blanket on the porch. On the way back, they don’t fight to be heard over the engine.
The mango fields whizz by, then the cashew plantation. She keeps distance between their bodies, but less than before, so when the Enfield hits a bump or rut, she jolts forward and one or the other or sometimes both of her breasts—swollen and jiggly in a way they normally aren’t due to an upcoming menstruation—grazes his back, and she shivers in delight.
Thump whack whack whack. Anton is gunning the Enfield through the palmyra forest. Her breasts are beating hard against his back now. Her heart rate is spiking. He is turning his head. She thinks he is going to tell her something, but no, he is looking through a clearing that has appeared in the forest thicket.
The next morning she wakes early. Palm squirrels are noisily scampering across Els’s metal roof and rolling what sounds like nuts off the side. Ada gets up, feeds Manu, encircles Els’s desk in ant chalk, and sits down, but soon she hears a prolonged metal scraping. A palm squirrel has gotten inside Manu’s food bowl and is scooting it across the porch, trying to get at the congealed rice he has left stuck to the sides.
Normally one of the crows gets there first, grips the edge of the bowl with its beak, and loudly bangs the bottom against the tiles, while the other crows look on, devising ways of stealing what is being loosened. Most of her mornings then are scored with cawing squabbles. But this morning she sees that the neighbors have laid out yellow dal—strangely unattended, she thinks—on a blue tarp, and the crows are devouring the legumes.
Ada cycles to the temple as usual. Overnight a snail has wound its way across the black metal security door, leaving intricate, spiraling paths that glimmer in the morning light. She dusts and sweeps the inside of the temple, lights sandal incense, and offers Ganesha violet bougainvillea, a misshapen gourd, and a small, pink guava. She sits on a blue cushion and tries her best to shepherd silence and contemplation into the space.
Eventually she hears the shouts of the other volunteers in the fields and goes out to join them, though she soon tires of talking and sneaks off to clean out the chicken coop near the property line. The coop is beautifully marked, she thinks, by slim granite pillars on which painted storks perch. After she finishes cleaning, she sits in the grass while the chickens mill around and the storks remain graceful and unperturbed.
Ada admits to herself that she is in a sort of mental haze. Although she has been trying to focus on her duties at the orchard, almost all her thoughts are in anticipation of seeing Anton on the forest path, and later that afternoon while walking with Manu, she listens eagerly at every curve, bamboo thicket, and cattle guard for the whoosh of his cycle’s tires and the ding–ding of the bell. She is disappointed when she doesn’t see him but feels certain she will the next day. And when she doesn’t see him the next day, she feels certain she will see him the day after that.
One week goes by. Then two. Then three. Only then does she stop consoling herself. She won’t see him the next day or the day after or the one after that. Although she still feels unfit for the duty—more now than when she started, if that is even possible—she continues cycling to the temple and preparing the space for anyone who is so inclined to sit undisturbed for some moments in silence.
Mary Marbourg divides her time between the United States and India. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Hotel Amerika, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
Photo by Ramakrishnan Nataraj on Unsplash
