The Overnight Palace Read online

  The Overnight Palace

  Janet Marie Sola

  Spotted Owl Press

  Ashland, Oregon

  Copyright © 2014 by Janet Marie Sola

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Spotted Owl Press

  47 California Street

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.spottedowlpress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout © 2014 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Cover Design by BookCreatives.com

  Library of Congress Control Number

  2014912703

  The Overnight Palace/ Janet Marie Sola. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-0-578-14509-9

  For my mother, who taught me

  so much about courage.

  All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

  ―Martin Buber

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: A Lake in Rajasthan

  SARASWATI

  A Mysterious Painting

  The Night Market

  Cathy’s Story

  A Visit to the Temples

  A Dinner and Movie Date

  The Monsoon Palace

  Email

  Exile

  PARVATI

  The Rooftop Restaurant

  The Dinner Party

  A Hindi Lesson

  A Visit to Baba

  The Shadow

  A Swollen Nose

  Reunion

  The Festival

  Escaping Udaipur

  DURGA

  The Bottomless Lake

  Cathy’s Email

  A Village of Clay

  A Wild Ride

  Another Dinner Party

  Trapped

  The Final Fight

  The Overnight Palace

  Prologue:

  A Lake in Rajasthan

  I move across our room and open the French doors that lead to the tiny balcony. A gust of wind from the lake blows in and the long white curtains billow in response. They look like the ghosts of veiled women. I step through the doors. Two stories below me, the dark water laps against the stone walls. The moon floats on the surface of the lake. The night is a mirror.

  Then, in the silence, a thud. Then another. Sahil must be reviving. I turn to look, but he’s hasn’t moved. There’s the sound again. Muffled. Insistent. Thud. Thud. The sound is coming from the other side of the double doors that lead to the hallway. Thud. Thud. Thud. Then another sound. Sharper this time, a cracking sound, a hard object butting against wood. The sound of a rifle butt. No, the sound of two rifle butts. It’s the most sickening sound I have ever heard. I can’t move. I stare at the door where the sounds are coming from.

  The curtains billow again. My mind stops in mid-thought, freezes, then slides through a narrow bright opening to another dimension, a dimension where everything rational, everything civilized has been left behind, like so many silly customs, and what is left is very clear. The hunter and the hunted.

  I press my palms together to stop shaking. The henna patterns I thought were so beautiful look strange now, nonsensical swirls and whorls. I try to connect something of what I am doing at this moment to the woman who came here a few short months ago, maybe a little naïve, maybe a little overly romantic, but a nice woman, surely, a nice educated woman with a life and friends and a career—surely that’s a description of me. Will I ever get back to her? Will I ever get out of this room? Will I ever get out of India?

  PART ONE

  SARASWATI

  Saraswati, goddess of the arts, is often pictured playing her lute by a river, her black hair streaming down onto her white sari, her swan vehicle nearby. One calls on her to release the flow of creativity necessary to achieve freedom.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Mysterious Painting

  Even with the dry wind blowing through the open window on the overnight train headed north, I can’t shake off the memory of the ashram I’ve just fled. I can still feel the sweat running down my back and pooling at the base of my spine under the white polyester tunic and pants I had to wear there. I can still hear the chanting of hundreds of voices, two notes over and over again, all day and all night. I can still see myself, knees extended, fidgeting on the hard marble floor, sure that I alone among all the devotees was not flowing in the stream of divine love. I wanted to flow, I really did. I wanted to heal. I wanted to cry. I even just wanted to breathe deeply. But I was stuck. Every gesture, every breath, was a struggle.

  A calm sanctuary, a place where your wounds will heal and your heart will open. That was the picture my friend Jason had painted when he proposed we make the journey from California all the way to India. It would help me, he thought, recover from the shock of my failed relationship. Jason needed solace too. His lover had died of AIDS a year earlier and he was still in mourning.

  And so we traveled to the other side of the world, to an over-decorated pink temple in the jungle. But after weeks of sitting, sweating and chanting, with no enlightenment or serenity on the horizon, I felt trapped. And yet, just like my bad relationship, I was afraid to leave. Even though I longed for adventure, I was afraid of being alone. I was afraid, period.

  I would probably still be at the ashram except that an unexpected thing happened. A woman there, her blue eyes rimmed in kohl, presented me with a gift. It was a ticket she couldn’t use, she told me, to a city called Udaipur, situated on a lovely lake in the desert state of Rajasthan in the northwest of India. Jason thought it was a sign that I should go out on my own. He would catch up with me later. Maybe.

  And now here I am, the train rumbling along beneath me, headed to this mysterious place. A storybook India, the guidebook on my lap tells me. A land of elephants and palaces and gypsies. The home of the fierce and noble Rajput race, propagated by the sun and the moon. A desert state bejeweled by lakes.

  I love these words, propagated, bejeweled. I have always loved words, maybe too much. There is a life waiting for me that is more urgent, more beguiling, than what I can find in books. I believe that. With my finger, I draw a question mark in the dust film of the window. I see now that its shape suggests the om mark. Perhaps the universe began with a question: What will I be? And the answer is another question, and another and another in an unfolding forever. The wind is turning cooler and the night blacker. I shiver. I am forty years old and I have never traveled alone before. I’m exhilarated. I’m terrified. I’m heading north, into the desert, into the unknown.

  The family sitting across from me is asleep, a softly snoring white-bearded patriarch, a woman in a dark sari and an old cardigan, a child with a scarlet dot on her forehead, wrapped in her mother’s arms. The little girl opens her huge eyes and gazes at me. I smile at her. She continues staring as if I’m an alien being. I smooth my almost-new linen travel skirt and try to sleep.

  We arrive in Udaipur the next morning. During the brief journey in an open three-wheeled taxi from the train station to the guesthouse, there is a moment when I first see the Rajasthani people, swaying through ancient streets, wrapped in the flaming colors of the sunset, looking back at me with their eyes of fire.

  I am here to find the courage to step out of my middle-class, middle-aged skin and into a culture that traces its ancestry to the sun. There are secrets here, and I want to discover them. I write this in my journal as I w
ait for breakfast in the courtyard of the guesthouse on the edge of the lake. Am I being overly romantic? Maybe. That’s what my ex would have said. The ex of the “failed relationship.” The ex who dumped me, and unceremoniously at that.

  To be honest, at the moment I feel like a prisoner again, with all the promise of the exotic culture outside these thick walls still eluding me. I’ve been stuck here for two days now. “The ladies cannot be leaving the premises,” the manager tells me again, a smug smile on his pockmarked face. “Much mischief in the street today. Much danger. This is better you stay in safety, madam.”

  Why do you call me madam? I want to say to him. Maybe I am forty, but can’t you see I’m an adventurer and a poet, and in no way the kind of fussy, proper woman associated with that title? But I don’t say it. Not out loud. I simply sigh and resign myself to another day in the hot, fly-plagued courtyard. The other guests shrug and settle down to wait for breakfast under the scattering of shade from the courtyard’s lone tree.

  The official excuse for all this constraint is the festival of holi, usually a benign rite of spring where, I’ve been told, people dash about merrily and throw dust in all the colors of the rainbow at each other. But there have been reports of violence between Muslims and Hindus in faraway towns like Mumbai. And even here, in this seemingly tranquil city, a rumor has gone around that some young Indian women were grabbed and molested.

  The manager assures us he is erring on the side of safety, but I wonder if he is being overly dramatic. He lifts his chin to the waiter who is serving breakfast, and soon I and the other guests are brought omelets and black coffee and toastbutterjam, as they pronounce it. The flies swarm around my plate. The waiter tries to chase them away, to no avail. I look at my fellow guests. Each of us has our own little fly cloud. There’s the silent German couple—he lean as a stick, she stout as a globe and wrapped in a sari of some metallic material she wears as if it’s armor. They pretend they don’t even notice the flies as they eat, a sign perhaps that they’ve been here for a while. Then there are the two young English fellows, swearing and swatting as they recount tales of how some taxi driver tried to cheat them out of a few rupees, the equivalent of a few cents.

  Finally, face lifted to the sun, is the woman who looks as if she might have been a model. Long blond hair, huge sunglasses. She brushes her own fly cloud away with casual disdain and returns to her copy of some scandal sheet with a tearful Indian actress on the cover. Without looking up, she turns to the Brits and says in bellowing American English, “No mistake about it, dudes. They’re all out to cheat you.”

  I smile at them, but inside I’m seething. Their cynicism and arrogance are getting on my nerves. Can’t they see the beauty and magic of this culture around them? Did they come here just to complain and act as if they are great white gods dispensing their precious rupees to the native ingrates? I want to say, you traveling Philistines, don’t you know that the people here are descended from the sun and the moon? Don’t you know they are fierce and beautiful? Don’t you know that their painting, their culture, their palaces, their souls—especially their souls—are far more complex than yours?

  I know I’m being snooty, but I can’t help it. By the time I’ve finished my breakfast, I realize that hanging out in this place with my fellow travelers for another day instead of in the streets and bazaars filled with the exotic beings who live on the other side of the wall—well, it’s more than I can stand. I take my coffee, my books on the history and culture and poetry of Rajasthan, and climb two flights of stone stairs to what has become my retreat since my arrival, the rooftop.

  It’s lovely, with a pergola that offers protection from the sun and overlooks the lake. All around me the city creates itself in the brilliant sunlight. A wash of white and honey-colored buildings flows over the hills that circle the lake. Graceful minarets reflect themselves in the glassy stillness of the water. In the lake’s center, a shimmering white palace seems to float on the surface like a lotus blossom. I feel myself drifting back and forth between my books and the vision unfolding in front of me. The lake was born, legend has it, because once upon a time a gypsy built a dyke on a stream for his cattle to cross over. Three or four hundred years ago, Rajput princes and princesses, when they weren’t fighting each other in to-the-death feudal wars, created the fairy-tale palaces and artificial lakes and arched bridges that surround me. It’s all exquisitely sensual and incredibly romantic. It’s everything, to be honest, that was missing from my own life back in California. I surrender to the heat and close my eyes.

  Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Slowly, I become aware of a rhythm, a constant soft percussion coming from somewhere beneath me. I shake off my lassitude and look over the edge of the roof. And there, on the lake’s shore, women, hip high in water, are slapping their ropes of laundry on the stone steps that lead into the lake. They’re beautiful, their gauzy veils shielding their faces from the sun, their midriffs bare and glistening above wet sari skirts, their arms lifting and slapping, lifting and slapping. There’s the thwack—and the echo of the thwack. Thwack. Echo. Thwack. Echo. Thwack. Echo. The sound, deep and seductive, translates in my head as Come. Out. Come. Out. Come. Out. But then another inner voice, much higher-pitched, chimes in. Watch. Out. Watch. Out. Watch. Out. I try to shut it out. That’s the voice, I remind myself, that I came here to silence—squeaky, cautionary, always full of the-worst-thing-that-can-happen scenarios.

  The women call to me once more Come. Out. Come. Out. I make up my mind. I will go out, the so-called danger be damned.

  I retrieve my camera from my room, pick up my shoulder bag, and turn to catch a startling glimpse of myself in a tarnished mirror. I see a pale, worried-looking woman in a stiff beige linen skirt and a large straw hat—definitely someone who should be addressed as “madam.” Someone who reminds me of the woman I thought I’d left back home. Reliable, loyal, cautious. A bit bookish. A woman who had stuck with a job she didn’t like for years and with a man who didn’t like her for even more years. It’s a woman I would like to take a vacation from, I think, rather than with.

  I take off my hat, pull off the band that ties my hair in back—my plain brown hair that I wouldn’t mind being a little blonder—and change into something bright blue and silky that I picked up in a market in the town near the ashram. I look again. I attempt a tentative smile, then a bigger one. Much better. The face of an adventurer and poet. Someone who isn’t afraid to feel the sun on her face even if there are a few tiny lines just beginning to show. Someone who is ready to plunge into the waiting world on the other side of the wall. I slip back through the courtyard, and, when no one is looking, I push open the heavy wooden door that leads to the street and steal out. In the distance, on the next hill, the golden dome of the city palace glows in the afternoon sky.

  The cobblestone streets twist through warrens of lovely old buildings adorned with latticed wooden windows and arched doorways. Women float by dressed in saris the colors of dreams—saffron, lime, orange, melon, hibiscus. The men wear the same dazzling colors on their heads in the form of huge turbans. They look like flowers and mushrooms in an enchanted garden. The smells are different at every turn. I try to separate out the flavors—curry, charcoal, musk, patchouli oil. People behind the walls making food or love.

  Around a corner, children play near a water pump, hanging from the handle. They don’t quite have the strength to pull it down, so I help them. When the cool water starts to spurt, they squeal with delight and splash each other, then me. “Help,” I say and put up my arms in mock defense, which makes them laugh and splash harder. I shake the water droplets off my head. They imitate me, shaking their heads too. I’m feeling something I haven’t felt for a long time—pure joy.

  I wave goodbye and follow the street as it winds up the hill, away from the lake, then dips into a tunnel under a phalanx of medieval buildings, a cool stretch out of the sun. The tunnel opens on to a busier part of town, and soon I’m in a square, lined by long rows of open stalls selling
clothes, trinkets, newspapers, snacks. The square is thronged with revelers. Young men run around throwing colored powders into the air with great flourish, like Tinkerbells of the east. The dire warnings of danger seem greatly exaggerated.

  Two young boys, their skin and clothes pink and blue and purple from the powder, are perched on a stoop in front of a dress stall. They shout at me to take their photo, putting their arms around each other and grinning at the camera. I oblige them. Then I take a photo of the tailor behind them, yellow turbaned and fat, sitting on the floor of his stall. He looks like a big caterpillar. His legs are contorted in front of his body in a way that allows him to use one foot to push the treadle of an antiquated sewing machine. A little further on, a vendor is selling bracelets encrusted with a handpainted design and tiny mirrored cutouts. I buy two of them and put them on my wrist.

  A pair of teenage girls, their long braids woven with flowers, approach me. One of them giggles with one hand over her mouth and with the other tosses rainbow-hued powder in my direction, sprinkling my face and arms. A thrill goes through me. I’m no longer an invisible outsider, the cautious American tourist. I’m part of the mysterious world of Rajasthan. People are pouring into the streets now, a river of color and sound and movement. I’m feeling the rhythm of the crowd, gliding through it like a dancer, neatly side-stepping motorcycles and bicycles, waltzing around clusters of multi-hued girls and boys.

  As I turn a corner, I slow down to step around a reclining humped-necked cow, munching on a plastic bag, so thin its white hide looks like a sheet draped over its jutting shoulder blades. So I’m not in a dream. This is real, part of the vast pulsating scene where exuberance and misery exist side by side. I want to do something to help, but what? As I’m standing there pondering this unanswerable problem, my gaze travels up to a tarnished sign on a wall that says, in English, “Miniature Paintings of Old India.” I remember finding them fascinating in some long ago art history class.