There were temples at both ends of the main dirt road in town. One was an enormous stone complex with eight massive towers. It stood at the far end and through its gates people streamed in their colourful saris, their combed moustaches, carrying bags of marigolds and coconuts, coming out with their dark foreheads dotted red or yellow or streaked white. Some continued down the road in their bare feet along the hot cracked sidewalk. At the opposite end, perhaps a kilometer or so towards the hills, the road disappeared into gravel and grass on its way to a massive dark-stoned pavilion that housed a sixteen-foot statue of Nandi the Bull. Behind the pavilion, stone steps wound up the dry hill and disappeared behind sandy boulders. Above this all, the clouds sat quietly in the blue sky as if proof some lid had been arched and sealed over the whole thing. The tall grass stood still against the columns of the ruins and the soft hooves of cows thumped gently as they inched their noses forward to new grass.

I walked from the centre of town towards the bull statue wondering if Cassie had stopped crying yet and if she had figured out a way to make sense of everything despite it not getting any better. All last evening she had been on the brink of tears saying it was too much for her and for Christ’s sakes none of it was fair.

I said, “No. Nothing’s fair,” but we couldn’t do anything about it this day or the next or anytime soon if we expected to fix the whole goddamned thing.

“Goddamned is right,” she said. “Goddamned is right.”

This morning she stayed in bed as I went to eat breakfast. She lay beneath the mosquito netting looking like some malarial Sub-Saharan though it was her mind not her body that had given up.

She said from the bed, “I could hear everything you did in the bathroom.”

I said, “It can’t be helped, don’t hold it against me. I’m going to eat breakfast and then walking to the river. You sure you don’t want to come?”

Cassie said, “No. I can’t face it again. Actually, I want to leave.”

“We’re not leaving. I’m going to eat breakfast and then walking to the river. You should get out of bed at least. Look around the shops or something.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to see any of it.”

Out towards the statue, children played cricket on the dry ground where the road disappeared. Further on, the cows stood and watched. The children batted then ran in bare feet. I wanted to take my shoes off and run with them but their soles were worn thick as elephants’ and could stand the scalding earth. Beneath the stone pavilion, the worn face of Nandi stared down the street to the towers of the far temple. Along the edges of the road, chickens darted from the shade and colourful racks of clothing and jewelry shimmered behind the heat and there was no breeze except when a child would swing the cricket bat.

Before the pavilion, the road forked left through the forest down towards the river. It was cooler in the shade. At the junction there were a few people sitting by the trees on old logs behind their tilted carts selling water or juice or biscuits. No one looked up as I passed except a young boy who stood next to his cart. I was glad to be out of Bangalore and into the countryside. There had been too many dishonest people and the men on the street had laughed at Cassie when she had worn her sari incorrectly. Bangalore was an older city that seemed to have been recently suctioned. Anything loose had disappeared.

Ahead of me on the forest road were three young men who slowed and turned to watch me coming. They whispered to each other as I got closer and I wondered what it was about.

I thought, “What’s the worst that could happen? Knives, poison?” and kept walking without slowing down. As I passed them, one stuck out his hand to shake and told me I was from America.

I said, “No. I’m not from America,” and the other two men shook my hand.
We walked along the road beneath the trees and then down to the river.

The tallest one said, “You come here alone?”

I said, “No. My wife is back at the hotel. She doesn’t feel like moving.”

“Tired wife. So young to be married,” he said.

I said, “Yes,” and then, “but Indians are married even younger.”

The three men smiled. The tall one said, “We are not married. We’re only students.”

And I thought, “Ah, India rising.”

As we came through the trees, the path opened out to a broad, stone riverbank. Dozens of Indian families spread out along the flat rocks, the babies standing naked, mothers adjusting their saris that had shifted too far, the men looking stern and capable. They were sitting in groups eating biscuits and drinking from thermoses. At the shore, several young men stood waist deep in the muddy water with their lungis still tied. They dipped their bodies up to the shoulders, stood, then washed their faces vigorously with both hands. Around them, others were splashing or diving out into the current then swimming back with quick strokes. The young women sat shyly with their parents and pretended not to look. Groups chatted noisily and I couldn’t help but feel I had interrupted. It was so hot standing on the rocks and the river looked cool.

The three men waved for me to follow as they walked to a small group gathered by the shore. They sat and pulled my arms down to sit with them and as I did, I took out some cigarettes and passed them around.

The tall one pointed to a smiling man and said, “This is my brother.”

The man took a cigarette, still smiling and I smiled back.

Then he pointed to a man sitting off by himself. He had a scarf tied around his neck and his face was brown and bumpy.

“He’s a thief,” the tall one said, smiling.

The man looked up at me as though it were true, like he wasn’t ashamed of it but was simply out of work thanks to all the police guarding the ruins. He picked up a stick and scratched it on the rock he was sitting on.

I thought, “So that’s a thief.”

Cassie had said on the train from Bangalore, “You know, that place is crawling with thieves. They lure you behind the boulders and throw chili in your eyes. Even people in groups aren’t safe. They always roam in packs.”

I said, “It will be fine.”

And she said, “It’s just not fair. None of this is fair!”

I said, “We’ll leave everything valuable in the hotel. That way, they can’t take anything.”

“What if that’s their plan?” she said. “What if they know we’ll be leaving our things behind and when we come back, they won’t be there?”

“Nothing like that will happen. Please stop saying things aren’t fair.”

“Well, they’re not.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it now,” I said.

After an hour or two, I said goodbye to the Indians and shook their hands since they had shared their food with me despite what I had been thinking. I had told them of my plans to study medicine and they were pleased to see I had a wife and had all nodded when I said I wanted children. The thief had walked away long ago and there were more questions about what it was like to study in the West and if I had a car and how many children did I want. The afternoon sun had tilted down above the mountains and across the muddy river it was shining orange against the boulders and everything seemed familiar.

I shook their hands again and walked back down the road, giving a few coins to a saddhu sitting beneath a rock. He didn’t nod or acknowledge and I kept walking. At the junction to the main dirt road, the young boy beside the cart had disappeared and there were families stopped to buy water or juice or biscuits. They had come for the day from the next town, had dressed nicely and were now driving home before the sun set. The children were still playing cricket on the sparse grass; the cows had moved further up the hill and were sitting with their bodies off to one side like dogs; Nandi hadn’t moved for twelve hundred years and the sun was going down for the millionth time in its presence.

When I reached the hotel, I suddenly imagined walking into the room to find Cassie gone. I thought, “I hope she went out to get some food or bought a necklace at least.” Inside, beneath the mosquito net, Cassie was curled up on the sheet reading a book.

She said, “Did you have fun? Where did you go?”

I said, “Down to the river. I met some Indians and sat with them. There was a thief too.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Did you go out?”

“No. I didn’t move.”

“Christ.”

“I want to leave.”

“We’re not leaving.”

“Did you talk to the thief?”

“No. He sat by himself. There was nothing to be afraid of.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Will you at least try this?” I said and pulled a small bag from my pocket.

Her eyes shifted from her book to the bag then brightened and I felt happy when I saw that.

This morning at breakfast, I had asked the woman at the restaurant if she knew where I could buy some hash.

She said, “You want hashbrown?”

“No,” I said. “Hash.” I mimed smoking with my fingers at the front of my mouth.

“You want ashtray?”

“Hash…Hash…you know, dope?”

“Ganja?” she said.

“Yes. Like ganja.”

Her face was fat and young. The brown skin around her waist doubled over her sari and I couldn’t help but look. She turned and walked to the balcony without saying anything then yelled something to someone below.

She walked back to the table. “I get my mother. You follow her.”

An old woman in a green sari came up to the restaurant. Her grey hair flew out from an old braid that stretched down her back.

“You follow my mother,” the woman said.

Cassie said, “Where did you get it?”

“This morning. I followed an old woman to someone’s house. He spoke English. Said he could have sold me anything I wanted. Will you at least try some of it?”

“Yes,” Cassie said. “I don’t mind that. But isn’t it rather dangerous to buy that here? I’ve heard stories of arrests for even small amounts. This is a holy town because of the ruins. They don’t tolerate it here.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “There’s nothing that could happen.”

I crawled under the mosquito net and pulled a pipe from my pocket. Cassie stared at it and I noticed she’d been crying. She lit the pipe and I could see her body relax. Outside, I noticed, the sun had painted the sky completely orange with edges of purple that drifted behind the roofs of the buildings beside us. We smoked until it was dark, sitting beneath the net in the warm, dusty air and Cassie told me how she had never seen a thief before.

I said, “I hadn’t either. Until today.”

“It must have been exciting,” she said. “People who are thieves never admit it, which means they’re rare.”

“He didn’t admit it,” I said. “His friends did.”

“How close were you to him?”

“A couple of feet.”

“I wish I had gone out with you today. I didn’t enjoy myself very much.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“Yes, I’ll go out with you tomorrow. I want to climb up into those ruins. They look so pretty from down here. If we pack enough water…”

“We can go to the ruins.”

A few minutes later, the electricity switched off and the room became as dark as the outside. On the street a dog was barking and both Cassie and I stayed silent. I could see the red embers glowing in the bowl of the pipe. We both watched them smolder.

Then Cassie said, “I have to use the toilet.” She lifted up the netting and crawled down from the bed and shut the thin wooden door to the bathroom. The lights were still out but my eyes were getting used to it and I could see from the window the light of the moon on the rooftops.

Down the street a man started to yell. A door slammed and a woman began to yell. The dog barked again and the man and the woman yelled and then the woman screamed. The rest of the town was quiet. I don’t know why, perhaps because the noise came from the direction of the restaurant, but I couldn’t help but picture something awful happening.

“There was no one in the restaurant,” I thought. “Nobody else could have known.” The hash smoke had thickened the air and my face felt hot and coated. I untucked the netting and lay flat out on the bare mattress. The air outside the net felt cool.

Down the street, the dog barked again as the shouting voices moved closer. The woman was shouting the most and I could hear them getting closer. The man would be silent for a while and then shout something back.

I thought, “What’s the worse that could happen? The police? Execution?”

Cassie was taking so long in the bathroom, though I couldn’t hear anything from behind the thin door.

Then it became clear there were two men and they both started speaking quietly while the woman interjected with loud protests. The voices sounded no further than ten feet away from the window. My heart had started pounding and I could hear Cassie scooping water in the bathroom behind the door. The two men whispered but I could no longer hear the woman or the dog. Cassie came out of the bathroom and adjusted her shirt. The men abruptly stopped whispering and in the distance, I could hear the rush of the river behind the trees.

“Don’t you think we should go out tonight?” she said. “Let’s take a walk around the town and see what’s going on. There’s no point in staying in, the lights will be back on soon. Don’t you think it would be exciting to walk around the dark town?”

“No,” I said. “I want to stay in tonight.”

“You should come out,” she said.

“Cassie!” I whispered. “This place is crawling with thieves!”

She paused then said, “Don’t be ridiculous. You said you had met one today and everything was fine. What’s the worst that could happen?”

The river rumbled in the distance, a constant rush of water dragging along the banks and reeds, smoothing the rocks and filling the water with silt.

“I’m not going anywhere tonight.” I said. “There’s no reason to go anywhere tonight.”