Monsoon

Mueller and his wife sit in a taxi wending its way south from the Bombay airport down grimy streets under a grey, monsoon sky. Slum after slum looks out over the Back Bay. A solid surf beats against the breakwater, swashing spray on the sidewalk vendors and strolling passersby. Grim trains slide past tenements painted a fading sickly green and blue.

"It looks like photographs I've seen of Birmingham," Mueller's wife, Sharon remarks. "Or Leeds. Some ugly industrial English town."

Mueller nods agreement, though he has, in fact, been thinking that Bombay looks relatively prosperous. There are more apartment buildings and office towers than in other large Indian cities. The bumbling autorickshaws seem to be banned from downtown, and all the cows have been rounded up and taken somewhere else.

After checking into the Hotel President, the Muellers hire a driver to show them the city's sights. They make lightning assaults on the Gateway to India, swarming with black market moneychangers, then the Prince of Wales Museum where, as she bends close to the exquisite Mogul miniatures, sweat drips down Sharon's sharply angled face and off her long nose. In the Jehangir Art Gallery, which is air-conditioned and hosting an exhibit of contemporary Calcutta painters, Mueller fidgets, barely looking at the pictures--people sleeping on the roofs of busses, fat politicians with angels' wings, Mother Teresa with the head of a parrot. Sharon whispers, "You don't like Third World Art, do you, Mueller? It's the Old Masters, for you, isn't it? The European tradition all the way."

"This just isn't my cup of tea."

"Your `cup of tea,'" she scoffs.

Mueller sits down on a bench, his arms folded across his slight potbelly, as Sharon conscientiously stares at each painting. "Don't bring your wife on a trip like this," everyone told him. "A couple of romantic kids could handle it, but you're both in your forties. It's a recipe for disaster." Mueller, however, figured that he had nothing to lose. Their marriage of four years was crumbling. The five-week trip to India would either save the relationship or put it out of its misery.

Mueller glances mindlessly at his watch. The meeting isn't until tomorrow, but he is used to staying on schedule. Mueller is the associate dean at a small Lutheran college in South Dakota, though actually he spends more time as one of three professors in the Education department. He teaches prospective elementary school teachers how to teach: Behavioral objectives are always modified by metacognitive and decoding activities. Etcetera. Mueller is in India because the college's new president, a Californian, is pushing to make his institution "a multicultural haven." All Mueller's expenses are covered on this barnstorming mission of publicity, recruiting and general goodwill. His wife, a radiologist, is paying her own way.

At the Gandhi Museum, the Muellers linger on the balcony where Gandhi spoke down to great crowds, Nehru at his side, the infant Indira in her nurse's arms. The museum is empty except for the two Americans and a bus-load of Italian tourists.

"What are you thinking, Mueller?"

"You won't approve."

"Tell me anyway."

"It just saddens me that one of the few people from the twentieth-century for whom it's possible to have nearly unqualified respect should be so ignored in his own country."

"What?"
"Where are all the Indians?"

"Maybe they can't afford the museum."

"The entrance fee was half a rupee."

"Well, maybe they're out scraping together enough half-rupees to feed themselves and their families. They have to live in the real world."

"But there are plenty of middle-class Indians. The place should be overflowing with them. No. Gandhi's influence is gone. He's just some genial saint people turn to when they're down on their luck."

"Mueller, you are something else. You really are."

The driver takes them to the Hanging Gardens where they walk among the crowds of Indian holiday-makers in a cold gray drizzle. The weather is so miserable that even Sharon has difficulty admiring the view of Chowpatty Beach. The Muellers don't even leave the cab at the wooded entrance to the heavily guarded Tower of Silence. "Adherents of Zorastrism," Sharon reads from the guidebook, "Parsis refuse to defile earth and fire with human corpses, and so leave their dead on the rim of this brick structure for vultures to devour, pushing the bones inside the tower when the corpse is picked clean."

"Charming," says Mueller. The black, ungainly birds are everywhere, as numerous as pigeons in a city park. The vast flat emptiness of South Dakota had never appealed to Mueller, but now he thinks of it, and his bland Lutheran colleagues, with something like nostalgia.

On the way back to the hotel, a young girl sitting sidesaddle on the back of her boyfriend's Bajaj scooter waves her heart-shaped helium balloon, calling out to everyone, "I'm in love!" Mueller reaches for Sharon's hand, but she pulls it away.

The Muellers second day in Bombay is as gray as the first. Their enthusiasm for each other and their trip slightly revived by a sound night's sleep, they take a morning stroll past the fishing boats-cum-tenements along Cuthbert Parade, then through the downtown streets, stopping under awnings when the drizzle becomes a shower. Whey they reach Marine Drive, the rain has abated and they sit down on the breakwater to watch the people pass. Immediately, though, they are assailed by four beggar children--two boys, ages three and six, and a nine-year-old girl holding her infant sister. The baby has an eye infection and her skin is covered with white blotches. The eldest immediately goes into her spiel, pointing to her sister's mouth: "Hello, Babu, baksheesh, hello, please, sir, baksheesh, hello?"

Mueller has been in India exactly twenty-four days, but his heart is an antediluvian rock. "No," he says in his firmest tone, "Go away!"

But having no place else to go, the children are there for the duration, and they continue to paw at the Muellers' arms, shoving themselves in the couple's line of vision whenever they turn their heads. Finally, the Muellers walk off. When it becomes clear to the children that the Americans aren't parting with any of their rupees, the nine year old slaps the back of Mueller's hand. It is a hard slap, full of anger and resentment, and when he looks back there isn't a trace of good humor in her eyes.

"Aren't you glad we never had children?" Mueller asks.

"On that point, anyway," says his wife, "we can agree."

Mueller spends the afternoon with members of an Indian version of the Rotarians. There are a legion of them, a scattering of businessmen and prospective students, but mostly teachers and principals, professors and university officials. Mueller delivers his half-hour talk for the sixth time. He knows it so well that he can gaze around the conference room as he speaks. With its high ceiling, ugly chandelier, fading wallpaper and noisy air conditioning, it reminds him of a trip he took twenty years earlier to the Soviet Union. The only thing missing is a portrait of Comrade Lenin.

Mueller has to pee badly, so his concentration is low. He catches only a smattering of disconnected remarks: "The teacher's role is inevitable and supreme." "Once you get a grip on the minds of the children, you can manage many of them, even one hundred in a single class." "I am wanting to come to America because women in India don't understand that they are human beings."

Mueller leaves as soon as he can. Outside is the smell of raw sewage and fresh dog shit, the sound of crows cawing, a thousand honking horns, ancient busses and trucks grinding gears.

Later that evening, in the hotel pub, Sharon says, "Look, this just isn't working out."

Mueller takes a long swallow of his Kingfisher beer. "How so?"

"Come off it, Mueller. I'm thinking of going back to Delhi. Flying home early."

"Sweetheart."

"This is not a `sweetheart' situation."

"All right. But let's give it one last chance. Please." He leans towards her, hands palm up on the table. "Is there one spot in India that you really wanted to see? Someplace we weren't scheduled to visit?"

"Well..."

"Where?"

"There are some caves a few hundred miles east of here. Ellora and Ajanta. I'd like to go there."

"All right, then," says Mueller. "I'll cancel the Jaipur meeting and get the tickets tonight. It's settled. This is what we've been needing: something spontaneous, like the day we got married."

They leave the Hotel President the next morning at four for a seven o'clock flight to Aurangabad. The Bombay Airport is relatively modern inside, but out on the tarmac pi-dogs chase each other, a crow perches on their airplane's tail. Two peasant men wash themselves and their clothes in a ditch between runways. The Muellers stand waiting at the foot of the stairway to board the plane while the pilot tests his engines in their ears.

Aurangabad seems positively bucolic compared to Bombay. Traffic is light and sane; burros graze by the side of the road. Though they've slept only a few hours, the Muellers decide to see the Bibi-ka-Maqbara, what their taxi driver calls "The Mini Taj." Sharon's guidebook tells them that the tomb is a poor imitation of the Taj Mahal, ill-proportioned and awkward. It has Mueller's sympathy from the start.

The sky is cerulean and the air is cool as they pay the penny-and-a-half entrance fee and walk through the gates. It's true that the Bibi-ka-Maqbara is thin and unkempt. Plaster is peeling from the minarets. Lovers have carved their names in the walls. Nevertheless, there are no hawkers and only a couple of polite "guides." The only other tourists are three American backpackers with long hair, baggy pants and sandals, and a group of Spanish tourists. The Muellers find a shady spot and lean against the cool white marble. The melody of lilting Spanish, the encircling green hills, the small farms in the distance and the occasional trees--Mueller is reminded of central Mexico in winter.

"This is nice," Mueller says. "The way it should be."

Sharon puts her hand tentatively on her husband's forearm.

Yellow butterflies flit from golden lantana bushes to the pink and white oleander blooms. A squirrel scrambles up the thick, twisted trunk of a mango tree. Crickets chirp and twittering swallows skitter across the sky. Sharon drowses, her head just touching Mueller's shoulder.

In the afternoon they hire a car to drive them to the Ellora Caves. The road cuts through green, rolling hills. Cactus grows alongside ruined mosques and the crumbling, moss-covered walls of cities that no longer exist. The land is mostly uncultivated and, the driver tells them, when the monsoon passes, the area is a desert.

By the time they reach Ellora it is nearly two, and sleeplessness has left Mueller in a state of wonder and bewilderment. The caves, carved into the side of a hill by Buddhists, Jains and Hindus, date from 600 AD. Mueller had expected to be interested, but in fact he is overwhelmed. If there were only a couple of these dark enigmatic cavities, it would be incredible. But there are thirty-two and he wants to see them all, lingering behind in the lap of each great stone Buddha after Sharon has gone on.

In the Carpenter's Cave, where monks would chant in prayer, Mueller convinces Sharon to sing "Row Row Row Your Boat" with him from the balcony. The bats hanging from the roof rustle nervously as echoes transform the silly lyrics of their round into a deep, impressive "Om."

At the Kailasa Temple, a complex of buildings under open sky, Mueller sits quietly on the lip of a cavern. Though the smell of bat shit, which is reminiscent of nothing so much as stale urine, is staggering, the cool wind helps. A flight of green parrots slices overhead. All around him, carved in stone, are tales that he doesn't recognize: lovers entwined, gods doing battle, man-lions balancing atop thundering elephants. The entire world is created and destroyed.

Sharon is ready to leave, but Mueller scrambles up the hillside above Kailasa, his thighs already sore from the unaccustomed activity. Below him, Sharon is waiting with hands on hips by the car. She waves at him to come down. Mueller pretends to understand it as a wave of greeting. "Hello!" he shouts down. "Hello! Hello!" As Sharon's waving grows more vigorous and more obvious in its intent, it begins to rain, the drops fat and stinging. Possessed now, Mueller runs at full-speed down the hill, leaping from rock to rock, nearly sliding the hundred feet down to the stone floor of the temple.

"Are you crazy?" Sharon asks when he finally climbs, soaking, into the car.

Mueller only smiles. "This place is great, really great."

He falls asleep at five that evening and slumbers soundly until morning.

Thousands of wild morning glories, some five feet tall, sprout along the highway north to the Ajanta Caves. Men in white clothes and caps hold hands by the side of the road. Occasional patches of sugar cane give way in the green hills to scrub and then to bluffs. Mueller continues to be amazed at the innocent happiness with which little children wave at tourists. Don't they know, he wonders, who we are?

The Ajanta Caves are a disappointment after Ellora. Though their setting is more spectacular--they open from a cliff face which wraps around a bend of the Waghore River--the cave paintings illustrating impossibly complex narratives are ill-lit and peeling. For Mueller, it is like trying to invent an epic poem out of old wallpaper.

At the far end of the caves where few tourists bother to venture, Sharon says, "Sit down, Mueller. Let's get this over with."

Mueller leans against a great reclining stone Buddha about to enter nirvana. "I'm not ready. I'm just not."

"I understand that. But it's a done deal. Okay?" She takes a notebook out of her purse and refers to it as she talks. "I can be out of the house in a week. I'll stay with my sister in St. Paul. You can send my big stuff there. It's much easier this way, Mueller. By the time you get home, it'll be like we were never married." She goes on to outline her plans for separation and divorce; she discusses, in detail, the division of assets and potential settlement modifications. Obviously she has been formulating her plans for some time.

Mueller traces the Buddha's cold face with his hand.

"So, does that sound good?" she finishes. Mueller stares. "Let's shake on it, buddy." He extends a limp hand which Sharon grasps firmly. "I'll be waiting in the car. Come back when you're ready. Take your time." He thinks that he has never seen her look so relieved.

Mueller sits in the semi-darkness for almost an hour, trying to steady his breathing, before he makes his aimless way back. Halfway there, he rests in a tiny temple just outside the second-story overhang of a large cave. A myna hops from rock to rock. The sky is low and dark; rain is imminent.

After a while the woman who has assigned herself as guide to this cave ignores Mueller completely. She wears a sky blue sari and has a dozen bangles on each wrist. "Hello. Look-see. Inside is nice looking," she calls down to the tourists, who disregard her. When there is no one to call to she sings to herself in a high, wavering voice. It is probably just some Hindi film song, Mueller realizes, but here, with the wind whispering harshly through the foreign trees, it sounds mysterious and beautiful.

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