It must have been difficult for her to have even put these few words together in her weakened state. She asked Max’s forgiveness for wrecking his life and regretted leaving without a word. What explanation would she have given? No way of knowing. Pascale was as reserved in her final letter as she was in life. A photo fell out of the envelope as he placed the letter back inside. He picked it up and saw Pascale in what must have been her last months, looking old and tired. Her smile was bitter and resigned. She was dressed in a sari with a bindi on her forehead, an Indian costume that was far from comic to Max.
Standing in the doorway with hands folded, Sister Irène seemed as much at a loss as they were. She came over to Max and held him in her arms. He didn’t know nuns were allowed to go that far. Of course, this was India, “pagan territory,” and Sister Irène was a model, forever setting the standard. Sympathy and compassion were always her guiding principles, and she said so freely.
Hours later, she accompanied them along the Ganges to the ghat in Manikarnika, where the cremation would take place. Max didn’t know Westerners had this right. By way of response, Sister Irène smiled in Indian fashion and shook her head. She knew very little of the road Pascale had taken. Pascale had simply shown up about ten years ago and joined a Buddhist community, as young foreigners do at the outset. Then, after a few months, most go back home, where they can take a shower, eat with utensils, and move on with their own lives, not one belonging to a group, religion, and culture of which they can never really be a part. Their intense and inevitable spirituality takes on the more comfortable form of a photo album.
Against all probability, though, unlike those other foreigners, Pascale had taken root in India, wavering between open, welcoming Buddhism and closed, hierarchical Hinduism.
“You know you can’t convert to it. It’s sealed off from everything else.”
“There are enough of them already,” Max shot back. “They don’t have to worry about recruiting.”
Sister Irène smiled. Their rickshaw, like Antoine’s, was stuck in a monstrous traffic-jam: rickshaws as far as the eye could see, utterly paralyzed, as well. It was like Friday evening at the entrance to New York’s Lincoln Tunnel.
Max had no idea whether Pascale’s body had been carried across the city on a bamboo stretcher, as was the custom, but now she rested on a pile of logs placed one by one to keep track of the price of this ceremony. The priest was about to set fire to the pyre when he suddenly turned to Sister Irène and pointed to something on the body. They conferred in Hindi for a moment, then Sister Irène asked Max and Antoine, “Do you wish to keep her ring?”
The officiant hadn’t waited, however, and was already taking it off to hand to Irène, who gave it to Max. He recognized the “jewel.” He’d made it himself in the prison workshop at Temagami, using recycled metal from tin cans, then given it to her when she visited the following weekend. She had cried and cried, so much that the guards, who were used to bursts of tears, came over to see if she was in hysterics. So this was all that remained, this ring of twisted scrap metal. Max was on the verge of tears now, too, and slipped it into his pocket as they lit the fire.
The smoke danced over Pascale’s remains, then flames lapped out from the centre. Max heard the crackling of wood and saw sparks tracing a path in the sky. Hypnotized, he watched without understanding, still in shock from the chintzy ring, the poor photo, and the letter saying nothing. Antoine stared rapt at the fire, walled in silence as always.
Pascale was burning well. Licked by flames, her body was now black. An odour of burning skin and hair invaded the ghat and blew toward them. Smoke was coming from every direction as Max closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he saw the fire had dwindled after the men stopped piling on wood. Max turned to Sister Irène as she apologized: “The orphanage has little enough money for the living, let alone the dead, and wood is expensive.”
“What will they do with the … what isn’t burnt?”
“It will go in the Ganges. The river’s full of human remains …”
Animals too. Climbing out of the rickshaw, he had seen a cow drifting with the current. He spoke to the man in charge and pulled a pile of rupees from his pocket. The man understood. He weighed out some more logs and threw them on. The flames grew again, stronger and higher. Antoine turned away, and Max saw he was sobbing off to one side, alone. His eyes met Sister Irène’s, and he felt like crying, too. He did.
Once Pascale’s body was completely consumed, Max and Antoine went down to the level that bordered the Ganges, their hands clutching ashes: some of wood, some of Pascale, who knows? Still, a ritual is a ritual, and Max felt both solemn and ridiculous at the same time. Antoine released them first, and the ashes vanished in the wind over the water. Then Max did the same, turning to Antoine, perhaps to hug him. What do you do at a time like this? Anyway, Antoine was gone. Max spotted his friend climbing up the ghats at full speed, as though chasing after someone. Max followed. What was this about? He caught up with Antoine, out of breath on the last level.
“He was here. I saw him,” he said looking around nervously. “He was watching us.”
“What are you talking about, who?”
“Some Westerner,” Antoine said. He’d already noticed him in the station at Varanasi, but thought he was dreaming … and now today, here.
“What, a tourist?”
Antoine turned to Max: “The guy at her place that night …”
Max recoiled. Her “kidnapper” — her lover — had come here to see her off, too.
10
The voices of sunbathers in the pool snapped him awake. Max O’Brien opened his eyes and snatched his watch off the dresser: 4:00 p.m. He’d slept almost twelve hours — his first rest free of nightmares in a week. He opened the curtains. The pool was swarming with the usual tourists, beached on deck chairs. Young Indians in livery went among them handing out drinks. The heat seemed crushing and the war just a bad dream.
Max spotted his friend Jayesh in his Speedo trunks with an American newspaper on his knee, a Kingfisher beer nearby.
When Max strode up a few minutes later, Jayesh exclaimed, “Why don’t they pay José Théodore a decent salary? He should just take off for Colorado like Patrick Roy. Sometimes you’d think they don’t want to win the Stanley Cup at all.”
Max sighed. If there was one thing that absolutely did not interest him, it was hockey. Jayesh Srinivasan, though, born on Birnam Street in Montreal, was the greatest (the only?) Indian fan of the Montreal Canadiens and goalie José Théodore. Today, around the pool at least, it was no contest. Jayesh had the air of a geek on vacation, a computer whiz weaned off his technology. Slicked-back hair, dark shades, discreet tattoo on the shoulder — a change of style, he called it — Jayesh had the look of a playboy. At the age of twenty-nine, he had decided to try his luck in India, after a stretch of work with Max: three years of cons in the big U.S. cities, playing a Saudi investor in search of greedy pigeons longing for a quick score. Tired of such easy pickings, Max imagined him at the High Commission of India in Ottawa explaining to some bureaucrat why he wanted to “go home” to Tamil Nadu where his family had lived. Then followed four years in Mumbai, a choice he stuck to wholeheartedly … except for the lack of hockey. Even so, he followed all the gossip in USA Today, and from his parents in Montreal, as well. They’d never understood the decision of their only son. Siddhartha Srinivasan, now a retired star salesman from Cummings Chevrolet Oldsmobile on Décarie, felt cheated by his “ungrateful son,” who had rejected America, the costly and much-sought-after gift
