This is a story about how appearing bald on the cover of a book led to my getting punched repeatedly by middle-aged women in India. No, actually, that’s not exactly true. Some of these women were ancient.
One, in fact, was at least 85, so old her eyes were a rheumy blue. Mrs. Ranawat was a large bear of a woman, the stepmother of a royal family I lived with. I’d moved in to the family’s haveli, its mansion, toward the end of a year I was spent in India, at a point when I was getting the hang of the culture and could speak Hindi. Mrs. Ranawat would show up for a visit and I’d bend down to brush the air above her toes, showing respect to my elders in the way my Hindi teacher had taught me. Mrs. Ranawat would be so incredulous to find a foreigner behaving normally for a change, she’d pound exuberantly on my head. Up until she was about 30, the snooty British Raj had been in charge; she wasn’t used to Westerners being respectful. She’d grab my face gleefully and shake it so hard, my “Namaste” would come out Na-a-a-a-maste. Then we’d take seats and I’d ask, in Hindi, about her life.
“At the time of her highness’ birthday, a messenger would call. All the ladies would go to the palace,” she’d begin, adjusting her violet head covering. “Or we would go to the royal hunting lodge. They were having wildlife then. Too much wildlife. The ranis used to hunt.” The word ranis meant “queens.” There were two, she explained: senior and junior wives. “I used to fire with the ranis,” she said.
“You used to hunt with the queens?” I was careful to use the verb form that displayed the most respect. By then, I understood the demands of Indian hierarchy. By venerability rights, for example, Mrs. Ranawat was allowed to yank me out of the bathroom if she wanted to use it. You best believe I went.
“YES!” she exclaimed, socking my arm for emphasis. “Wild pigs. Cheetahs. Lions.” Bam, bam, bam. We were having a love-fest, or so I hoped.
The reason I’d come to India was to study Hindi and write a book about the process—about what it was like to learn another language, to force yourself to piece together a world word by word while trying to keep your head above water. Sometimes the water went up your nose, that’s what I was finding. And sometimes you crested the waves, exhilarated.
This book would be my second. My first had been about the experience of living with stage four breast cancer, which I’d had for years at the time I went to India, and which I still have. Stage four cancer is cancer that’s spread from the original organ — illness that’s advanced, in the great majority of cases, beyond a cure. “There is no stage five,” as Margaret Edison writes in the play Wit, and there’s also no going back to stage one, two or three. Once you’re stage four, you’re in it for the rest of your life — about two and a half years, if you go by the average. Some women will die sooner than that; some will continue to live for years, long enough they’ll wish they’d put more in their IRA.
But on average, the time a woman will have left is two and a half years—a cruelly brief period if you’re a woman hearing that estimate, and especially if you also have young children, as more and more breast cancer patients do. I mention all this here because I’ll put in a plea for increased cancer funding anywhere I can. Increased funding has already lead to a wider arsenal of treatments, and these, in turn, have allowed a number of stage four breast cancer patients to extend their lives out beyond what was formerly reasonable to expect. Take me, for instance; I’m now into year sixteen. That’s 6,000 days, give or take, each spent with a sharp awareness of two things: the magnitude of luck I stumbled into and how finite all our lives are.
Sometimes, this keen perception will make me act rashly: Life’s too short! Don’t let the receptionist talk to you that way, it’ll whisper, and so I’ll let the guy have it and the guy will hang up on me. But I can’t blame the awareness for a rash decision I made around the time of my first book: to let the editor run a photograph of me bald on the front. This was one of the photographs a friend, a photographer, had taken of me eight months into chemo. Eight long months. I was sinking, and my friend wanted to shore me up, to make me feel beautiful. So he set up a shoot in his studio, as if I were a professional model. It was an act of deep kindness.
“Come on! Let’s use one,” the editor, who’d become a friend, urged when I showed them to her. This was in 1998, right before the long arm of Google had begun to extend into everyone’s lives, just before every citizen came to understand that if you agreed to do something like appear bald on the cover of a book, you were asking for 400 shots of yourself like that on your permanent record. “All right. Sure,” I said. “Why not?” It was several years before I discovered there were a few solid answers to that question, most involving dating.
The short one is that many, many men find it disconcerting to be surreptitiously looking up info on their date only to have her pop out at them, leering, without her hair. There was, for example, one man with whom I’d been making dinner plans who said, “Okay, I’m going to Google you!” right before we hung up. Googling wasn’t yet par for the course in romance preliminaries; I figured this was a nervous joke. Two hours later, at dinner, I couldn’t understand out why he kept staring, with apparent alarm, at my chest. Afterward, I didn’t immediately hear from him, but he must have been giving the evening some thought because three months later, out of the blue, he called and asked in a shaky voice, “How are you feeling?” I was tempted to wheeze and gasp, “Not so good tonight.”
In one or two instances, a man reacted to the cyber discovery with the lip-curling indignation of a person who believes himself to have been snookered. I’m thinking here, in particular, of someone I’ll call Seth—because that was his name and because his response prompted a musician friend to compose a song whose lyrics began, “Free caviar for all! Ride on the Seth train.”
Seth had a physique that was robust from riding his bike, and if he seemed somewhat grim in his orientation toward life, he’d been, overall, a pleasant enough companion the three previous times we’d had dinner. But then on the fourth, when he called to confirm plans, Seth, to my surprise, began making statements that might have been construed as persnickety. We had, for instance, planned to attend a party, but when I mentioned a reality TV crew would be on hand to film the host, an actor, he recoiled from that sordid avenue to fun. “Uh-uh. That’s just too weird a twist,” he said in a tone that succinctly conveyed: I don’t go in for any monkey business.
We went to a cheap loud Thai restaurant instead, where he gave one-word answers to my questions and stared at people’s backs until the waiter arrived with the Pad Thai. Then he stared at me levelly and let me know the jig was up. “Found your book online. Not going to read it,” he said, sounding indignant but resigned to the ways of the world. The way David Caruso does when he’s putting on his sunglasses in CSI: So that makes this a seizure kit, and Mr. Whitley, a liar. “Not going to read it,” he repeated flatly. “That would be like going through your closet.” He said this last sentence several times, sometimes with the variation, “That would be like going through your underwear drawer.” He was putting it right out there that he knew I’d aired skeletons in lingerie, in case I thought he wasn’t going to find out. He graciously provided me with reasons for what I’d done. “When you’re going through something like that,” he explained, meaning cancer, “that’s all you can think about. You can’t see anything else.” In fact, a woman in his office had gone away for a time, she’d had this same thing, and now all she could talk about was Lance Armstrong. And Seth was really tired of Lance Armstrong.
This woman and Lance and me seemed to have left him drained. We ate the Pad Thai in silence for awhile, and when we’d exhausted that option, I asked more questions. He supplied answers. No, he didn’t like his apartment so much. No, he didn’t like New York. He thought he was going to like it more here, but everyone was always trying to pull a fast one on you. He mentioned a date he’d taken for vodka at a Russian place who’d just wildly ordered caviar. Without being invited. “She was riding the Seth train,” he said ruefully. I found a way to mention the bitter flame-haired woman in my building who was always complaining about everything, meaning he reminded me of her but hoping he wouldn’t figure that out. He didn’t. The waiter brought the bill. I laid down $12 for my chicken, two dollars short — one foot on the Seth train, one foot aiming for the R.
I grew squirrelly about having the book out there. If someone didn’t phone back, I was sure the book was the reason. When asked what it was about, I wouldn’t say. I was vague and elusive, furtive even, about its contents, which sent everyone hurrying to fire up Amazon as soon as they got home. A couple of men said later they figured I’d been a stripper. I won’t go so far as to say the presence of the book drove me to India, but it was an enormous relief, once I got over there, to realize I had no discernible history. Half the homes in the town where I settling didn’t even have phones. The chance of anyone Googling anybody was nil. In one plane ride, I’d wiped my record clean.
In India, I ate lotus-seed pudding. I rode camels through the desert, taught art in a deaf school, judged a male beauty contest with four Michael Jackson impersonators. I spoke so much Hindi that half the time, I couldn’t remember afterward if my conversations had been in Hindi or English. This was once I figured out how to find people who’d speak it with me. Half the men and many people under 35 were up to speed in English and weren’t interested in conversing with someone who needed five minutes to think of the word for “door.” But I soon found myself a group of willing conversational participants: menopausal women. All women of a certain age in this town had been whisked off into marriage so young that they hadn’t had time for English lessons. If we were going to converse, it had to be in Hindi! They had no choice!
Most of these women were astonished to find a Westerner cruising them for friendship. This was a town full of royals; if you were a foreigner living here, you could easily get taken up by those circles. But I wanted my arm punched. I wanted a real connection, and I got it, most strongly, in the person of Mrs. Lalit Jain.
There were any number of aspects to Mrs. Lalit Jain I liked tremendously, one being the fact that I got a sense of how Jackie Kennedy must have felt when she blew through town in 1963. Mrs. Lalit Jain regarded me unreservedly as a dignitary, for reasons that weren’t quite clear to me but that I didn’t really care about. All I knew was that as soon as I arrived, she’d position me on the sofa and force everyone in her apartment building to troop through and witness that I was there.
Mrs. Lalit Jain had the same habit my father did of shouting around foreigners in the belief that this would help them understand better, so what she’d do next, as soon as all the neighbors cleared out, would be to pick up the phone and dial relatives all over India, then bellow at them in Hindi, “THERE IS A WESTERNER HERE. IN MY LIVING ROOM! SHE IS FROM NEW JERSEY OR FROM FRANCE. TALK TO HER!” She’d then thrust the receiver at my head, but before I could get out the full word, “Namas—,” she’d grab it back. “SEE?” she’d say. “SHE IS SITTING HERE!”
This woman was no slouch in the walloping department, and neither were her friends, who were all small-time entrepreneurs. They’d tell me about the things they peddled: handbags, massages, chapatis, wham, wham, wham. I began coming around regularly. I liked the questions the neighbors asked, a regular Hindi bonanza: Did I have a car? Did I know how to drive it? Had I gotten it for free? I liked how once, as soon as I sat down, Mrs. Lalit Jain shouted “KAB ANA?” When was I coming back? “She wants to give you some fabric to have an outfit made in the market, so you will remember her,” her husband explained. I liked the trays and trays of food she laid out with the tea, pancakes and sweet noodles and salted flour sticks, and above all, I liked the sweetness of the afternoons—of the friendship given so freely, without question. Every punch in the arm was an injection of that sweetness. The explosion of contact melted me.
I knew I was changing in India, but I didn’t know how much until I got back. Then the changes became obvious. There were signs: my apartment looked like it had been decorated by someone else, the reflexive irony used by New Yorkers was suddenly too harsh, my vowels in English were faintly different — tighter, more polite-sounding. Of course, in time these changes began to fade, but every so often, they’d crop up. Like, for instance, the night I was out with a man and he asked, “So what was that book about?” I answered, without thinking, “About a time in my life when I was working in magazines and got cancer,” and he said, casually, “I’d like to read it.” Then the rest of the conversation caught and began to form around us. It pooled and then carried us. We moved on.
***
Original art by Ilyse Iris Magy.
