“The Desert Garden”
by Ian Thompson
Harvard College, Class of 2012
A story about my time with an Indian family, and why they planted a garden in one of the hottest deserts in the world.
Rahul is a mystery. He has the darkest eyes I have ever seen. You see him watching cricket for hours and hours, watching you eat, watching the dancers swimming across the screen in the millionth Bollywood movie, and have no idea what he is thinking. What is behind those eyes? How much does he know? How much does he understand? How much does he see?
Rahul is 42 years old and mentally disabled. He is a big doughy stumbling man. He walks slower than a baby crawls. His hands are always shaking. He always wears a suit and tie, even to breakfast.
Rahul is always smiling.
He lives with his mother in Delhi. Laxmi is 70 years old, a mystical smiling grandmother. She runs the family business with Rahul. They ship slate and sandstone from India to countries around the world.
We are watching our third Shah Rukh Khan movie of the day. Laxmi loves Shah Rukh, the King of Bollywood, an endearing trickster who dances his way into love in every movie. Almost all Bollywood movies are romantic comedy musicals, and Laxmi loves to explain them to me. While Shah Rukh smiles at a girl, she yells at me:
“He likes her! Shah Rukh likes her! Look! Look! He likes her very much!”
Then the beautiful girl smiles back at Shah Rukh and Laxmi points at the screen with even more ferocity. She explains the new situation to me:
“She likes him! She likes Shah Rukh! Look! Look!”
Shah Rukh begins to dance with the girl. Laxmi is almost squirming in her seat.
“Ooooooh, he loves her. He’s a very nice man, that Shah Rukh. He loves her very much, you know.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Look how he dances! Shah Rukh loves her, you know that. He would not dance so nice if he did not love her.”
There is a puja next to the television in Puspha’s house. A puja is a small shrine that she prays to every morning. It is filled with idols of more gods than god could imagine. She pours Ganges water on her favorite gods every morning.
Puspha loves to explain the Gods to me. There is Shiva, god of life and death. He is always dancing. There is Ganesh, the god of luck. He is a boy with an elephant head. Then there is Krishna, Laxmi’s favorite god. He is always dancing and playing his flute.
“What is Krishna the god of?” I ask. Laxmi loves to explain the gods. “Krishna is the god of boyfriends.”
“What?”
“I prayed to Krishna when I was a girl to send me a nice boyfriend,” She pauses. “He is a very good god.”
“This is when we married. I was so very nervous in the car,” She points to the photo. She has shown me this album three times already. Indian colors tear at the black and white polaroids.
“What color was your dress?” I ask.
“Red.” She stares at the black and white photo for a moment. “You know what we say about weddings? There are more colors in an Indian wedding than a rainbow.”
I point at a picture of her husband. He looks like the proudest man in the world that day.
“Your husband is very handsome in this photo.”
“Yes. Very handsome. He was a really very nice man.”
Then she shows me a different album. It is from when her husband took Rahul on a trip to Paris to help him show stone samples to European buyers.
Rahul is unrecognizable in the photos. He is 16, skinny, and handsome. Laxmi said he was the fastest child at school, and won all the track sprints. There is a light in his eyes I’ve never seen. His father is in almost none of the pictures. Rahul is in all of them. He is usually holding a large piece of slate and standing with the buyers, smiling broadly. His father clearly loved taking pictures of his son.
Then the pictures stop. Laxmi closes the book. “He was a nice man,” she says again. She always says this about her husband, and she speaks of him often.
He died of a sudden heart attack a year after the trip. Rahul was 17. His father was only 41, and had been building the stone business for a decade, making contact with buyers around the world. When he died, his family’s future was still not secure. And now there was no one to run the company. Indian women at this time were not part of the business world, so Laxmi had not been involved in the company.
Usually, a widow in India will stay in one place for a few months after the funeral as a way of grieving. But three days after the funeral, Laxmi looked at her husband’s schedule: he had bought a ticket to Tokyo for meetings with buyers there. She arrived in the Tokyo airport the next day wearing her bright red flowing sari, carrying stone samples for the meetings with buyers, assuring them that the business would remain strong despite the loss of her husband. Over the following decades, she would travel around the world in her sari, and grow the family stone business larger than her husband had ever imagined.
But back home Rahul, her youngest child, had more trouble landing on his feet after the loss of his father. The mentally disabled 17 year-old jumped off a 4th floor roof while his mother was in Tokyo. He closed his eyes and held his legs perfectly straight.
“His legs… crushed,” Laxmi says. That’s all she says about that.
He survived but today walks with the worst limp I’ve ever seen. He looks like he’s limping on straw stilts.
On Sunday we drive out to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Rahul has seen it at least fifty times, but he is very excited to show it to me. During the two hour drive to Agra, I begin to feel very sick. My stomach has never adjusted to Indian food, and outside it is nearly 120 degress. I have such a hard life.
The Taj costs 50 rupees to enter if you are Indian. It costs 2000 rupees if you are a foreigner. Rahul thinks this is unfair to me. I’m not sure.
Rahul always wants to hold hands. It is common to do so in India, especially for two men. Rahul often holds his mother’s hand, but the sun is too bright for her, and she stays behind in the shade, watching the Taj from a distance.
Rahul grabs my hand, and we begin the long walk towards the Taj. I usually walk very slowly to stay with Rahul but today he walks slower than usual for me. He is very worried about my stomach. He doesn’t like the idea that I am in pain. He hardly even looks at the Taj – he is more worried about me.
“You not feel well?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“No, no. You are not feeling well.”
“I’m not feeling great Rahul. But look how beautiful it is!”
“Rest now?”
We sit on a bench. Rahul asks me, “How do you feel?”
“Don’t worry, I’m fine. It’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful. Yes. Beautiful.”
Rahul laughs for no reason. He does this often. He laughs at facts like they are jokes. He often smiles for no reason.
I try to think of something to say. “How old is it?”
“Very old, very old.” He laughs again. His lips tremble as he thinks.
Rahul tells me how Shah Jahan built the Taj in memory of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. “He had many wives but she was the best one and then she died,” he says. I don’t know if I have ever heard Rahul talk so much.
We get up and follow the tourists and the cameras towards the Taj. The Taj looks like it doesn’t belong in this world. I don’t believe in god, but if I did, I’d say he made a mistake with the Taj and got heaven and earth mixed up for a moment.
“It’s hot,” I say.
“Yes. Hot,” says Rahul.
“I heard it’s even better at sunrise and sunset. They say this is the worst time of day to see the Taj.”
“That is false,” says Rahul. “There is no worst time to see the Taj.”
He looks at me with those inscrutable eyes. “It is beautiful, always.”
I get up and we walk a bit closer. Rahul says almost immediately, “Rest now?”
We sit down on another bench. Rahul likes to wait for me, since I often wait for him. He understands the need to walk slowly alongside someone who cannot walk swiftly. He understands pain, and sees even a little stomach ache as a traumatic event.
Rahul sits silently with me on the bench. The white marble of the Taj reflects in his black marble eyes. Some people can hold a great conversation. Rahul cannot. Rahul can hold a great silence, like he holds your hand. India is constant chatter – vendors, beggars, engines, tuk tuks – but Rahul is quiet.
I think of the many things I have heard said of the Taj. Someone famous called it a “teardrop on the cheek of eternity.” Raymond Chandler, my favorite noir novelist, once wrote of a femme fatale: “She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.” That’s how the Taj is. It confuses the senses and baffles the soul. It looks like a teardrop, a scent, a naked breast, and a memory, all at once.
My stomach cannot digest so much beauty. With some effort, I pull myself to my feet. I put my hand out for Rahul and help him up. We walk about 50 feet, until we reach the next bench.
Rahul looks at me and asks, “Rest now?”
I nod, and we sit, continuing our strange dance towards the Taj.
Neither of us has a camera. Around us, hundreds of tourists are photographing the Taj, but I feel we are the only ones who see it. Maybe Rahul is the only one. The black of his eyes look like the most sensitive film.
We finally enter the mausoleum. It is dark inside.
“She is here,” Rahul says.
We sit down on the steps of the back entrance.
A group of Indian tourists asks to take a picture of me. They sit down next to me on the steps and smile excitedly. I pull Rahul into the picture. Then another group of Indian tourists asks politely for a picture and crowds around us. And then another group. Rahul is delighted. Rahul loves to have people take pictures of him.
My stomach still hurts and I am unsure why they are doing this. My glasses are dusty and my hair a wild mess. Then I hear two words being whispered excitedly by the large crowd gathering around us and snapping pictures: “Harry Potter!” “Harry Potter!” They think I am Harry Potter. This is a common misconception in India.
Back in Delhi, Laxmi talks to me about Rahul after he goes to sleep. She is worried what will happen to him when she dies.
“He doesn’t want to marry. We tried to teach him girls but he didn’t like it. He gets nervous, he doesn’t like it. He likes to be alone.”
“Can he go live with your daughter in the states?”
“Yes, but he needs a visa. They have not given him a visa, we have tried for 15 years.”
“Why not?”
“It is hard with his problem. His sister, she is helping him now.”
I imagine Rahul crossing the border in Tijuana, stuffed in the back of a truck, still wearing his suit and tie, looking for a hand to hold.
The next day, we drive the two hours from Delhi to visit their garden. On the way, Laxmi explains the garden to me. A few years ago, after decades of running the business, she closed the factory her husband had built in the desert near Jaipur and opened a new factory nearby. Instead of selling her husband’s old factory, she paid a small fortune removed every pebble of stone and replace it with soil. Then she planted a garden in the middle of one of the hottest deserts on earth, where temperatures routinely reach 120 degrees.
Laxmi and Rahul don’t live there, but they visit the garden in the desert almost every weekend. She pays a garden-wala (a “garden man”) to live there full-time and care for the plants. But it is hard to keep life alive in the desert. First, there is no running water. So she built a well. Further, it is so hot and dry that the gardener can’t water during the day. The water evaporates as soon as it hits the soil. So the gardener sleeps all day and waters the plants all night by moonlight.
We drive up to the garden. In the desert, it looks like something that does not belong in this world – like god made a mistake and accidentally included a square acre of green lush land from an alternate universe where Laxmi’s husband and Rahul’s father lived forever and never died. The garden is the opposite of death. Every inch is alive. There are roses of every color. There are fruit trees. There are pear trees. There are apricot trees. There are raspberries. There are tomatoes. There are millions of mangoes.
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Rudy Maxa and Allan Comport judged the RateYourStudyAbroad.com Fall 2010 Travel Writing & Photography Contest. Rudy Maxa is the host of PBS‘s RudyMaxa’s World, a former Washington Post reporter and the former host of NPR‘s The Savvy Traveler. Allan Comport is a professor of art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
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