James McGirk

Don’t know why, but this artist captures something that I try to in IMFL

George Rush, “Interior with Bust” (2005-2007)

FRIENDS OF THE FRUM FOUNDATION
1.
My father John Frum never went to college. He never needed to. The draft was a non-issue; staved off with a friendly golf game, a plump envelope slid across a slippery clubhouse countertop and a single puncture in an IBM card containing his social security records. Instead of fighting, he spent his late adolescence lipping hash smoke from a flexible metal coil, dulling its interlocking links; gnawing, gumming and savoring the way every mouthful fizzed with cupric toxicity, the exotic blend of recycled scrap forged into his hookah dissolving in his saliva.

His hair was well coiffed unkempt, his funds unlimited, his father distant, his mother dead. His features were boxy, a brunette’s, though thin he had the stoutness and lurchy body language of someone much heavier. His face was broad but chiseled, a meaty hexagon, his cheekbones prominent but thick, his greenish eyes too large and watery to be penetrating or intelligent, a sheep’s head, really, flayed and ready to be roasted in some repulsive Greek restaurant.

He spent our money, fronting rock bands because he liked the sway of a tambourine player’s hips or the sublime musk of Chanel No. 5 masking a lounge act’s damp rayon underarms as she leaned over to finger the fist-sized lumps of swimming pool tile turquoise dangling around his Pierre Cardin paisley-swaddled throat. But he was never gross — he never spent too much.

John had all the possessions and earthly delights he ever wanted, yet something deeper lingered long after his psychedelic anesthesia wore away. It tugged at him as he passed head shops in Venice, sucked him through beaded curtain ways into seedy alternative bookstores or out into the desert on expensive retreats.

He soaked himself in Siddhartha, contorted his body into painful yogic poses; but California was still there, a plastic layer digesting his efforts at escape, a dollar-green smear, a palimpsest of out-stretched palms and jangled valet keys mocking his sincerity.

So John bought a fully loaded VW Bus, and hired the guy who did the Beatles covers to paint it: hyper-real tits and posies — two continents worth of border patrol men blushed as he drove by when at the age of 24, in 1972, he followed the Afghan trail back to its source then traipsed down into the Indian Subcontinent.

He lost the van in Kashmir, traded it for two crates of Belgian ornament glass and a kilogram block of opium-laced cannabis resin, of which John sampled liberally before entering this transaction. “Zero” turned up on the grounds of the impoverished Maharani of Couch’s winter palace and now lives in an automotive museum in Naples, Florida. That travesty of a car has appeared on the cover High Times magazine twice. The dope turned out to be a thin layer smeared over an inner core of axle lubricant; glossy fecal smelling plant resin giving way to satin black petroleum ooze, a hellish, inedible bonbon.

The only line out of Kashmir was a convoy pulled by two miniature steam engines that huffed and shuddered down the steep grade and narrow track of the arch gallery, cutting through the terraced tea-plantations, step-like ledges of impossible green contouring the foothills of the Himalayas; the train grinding and clattering down each layer in succession, puncturing each foggy isothermal veil to reveal a slightly different configuration of neon dabs snatching black handfuls from the glossy thickets of tea, baskets bobbing on their ruined backs.

John’s travel agency purchased him an entire first-class compartment, and he spent the last leg of his journey, from Kashmir to Bombay, alone in a riveted cage occasionally woken by a uniformed porter yanking open his capsule and presenting him with yet another tray of tin rice and curry bowls that he would later come by to collect, and a disposable ruddy clay pot of thick yogurt he would not. John tried not to look out his window. When he did he often found himself face-to-face with one of the children constantly leaping and clinging to his window and would be forced to watch a filth-blackened face smear itself open against the glass and watch the labial pink contortions of what seemed to pass for funny faces in rural India. A spitty afterimage would remain for hours, attracting flies.

Nighttimes they vanished and John roamed the cars or stood between them and smoked, watching embers sucked into the slipstream, orange meteorites streaking off into the starry blackness beyond.

Gradually the air thickened and the endless yellow mustard fields zipping by were replaced by water buffalo wallowing and tugging at reeds; the tracks rose off the ground onto an earth mound and the train appeared to skim its way across an endless puddle.

John awoke to a knock one morning and found what appeared to be a dozen cratered Milk Duds mashed up against his compartment divider. Some were mustachioed and all waved paper chits. A conductor’s arm -– khaki, jangling with brass epaulettes — thrust its way between them, rapping at the glass. John kicked off his sheet, unlatched the door and a horde of Indian businessmen piled in, a cloud of persnickety energy crackling between them, the smell of putrefying non-veg meals leaching out from the identical space-age cylinders of gleaming zinc each one carried next to his Bakelite briefcase.

Reeking of hair tonic they shoved John’s suitcases out of the way, tumbling leftover pots and lighting harsh twists of raw tobacco and clove. They crammed into the slippery vinyl seats, wedging themselves in, grabbing themselves, farting, sneering and waggling newspapers.

Each one was dressed the same: a blinding white shirt stained at the pits, the unseemly outline of an undershirt and a pair of dark nipples lurking beneath. They wore itchy-looking charcoal slacks and toothbrush mustaches, one yanked open a window, spat, turned to John: “Next stop: Victoria Terminus.” He smiled, his teeth stained red with pan.

John fixed his gaze out the window, breaking off occasionally to smile at his fellow passengers –- unabashedly staring at him — and curl his foot backwards to tap the scuffed surface of his suitcase to reassure himself of its presence. Outside, a pair of rails swooped in beside theirs, then a second, then a third, then the tracks swelled into a blur of docking trains, rail sheds and telegraph cables bisecting the glistening skyscrapers looming in the smoggy dawn beyond. An instant of black then a vast steam age industrial cavern: triangular struts, ornate clock faces dangling from the ceiling, scrawls of hand-painted Hindi flashing by.

Vendors lurked on the platform, tending cauldrons of chai, stirring from their mats as the first class cabin approached. They lurched towards him, squabbling amongst themselves, unfurling brown arms, clutching foil packets and baskets of cigarettes, waving at him, clawing at the window as the train passed by. Shoving one another out of the way as they gave chase.

The businessmen stood, grabbed their cases and jostled out into the corridor as the train jerked to a hissing, shrieking halt. John gathered his floppy leather suitcase and walked after them down the corridor. He watched the last businessman step off and become the last segment of a long white maggot wriggling its way into the brown mass swelling on the platform.

John stood teetering at the threshold of the first class cabin, the cool hollow tube-like corridor behind him the sweltering swirling masses in front. The anemic breeze of an electric fan rustling the hairs on the back of his neck felt like a tether, no one knew where he was, he didn’t know a soul in the megalopolis beyond.

His heart went from a canter to a gallop.

The station walls and ceiling were smeared black with a century of carbon deposits so thick it looked cobwebs or fur or stalactites; the air was blood warm and moist and even perched above the teeming horde he felt he was inhaling a million other exhalations. Tuberculosis, polio, smallpox, pneumonic plague, giggles of contamination horror pin-wheeled through his head. There were so many of them out there it was like wading into curry, they would tear him apart, chunks of him bobbing in the churning mass of humanity, an instant of white froth, a microdot of milk subsumed into a bubbling cauldron of broth, a twist of smoke swallowed into the smoggy haze above.

John stepped off the ladder, pushing his way into the crowd, a suitcase struck his shin, someone thudded into him, then someone else; he turned, furious he was singled out, but the expressions around him were neutral. He clutched his bags closer to his body when a hand brushed against his, paper dry with calluses when everything else was damp with subtropical humidity, his testicles shriveled in, his scalp prickled, a chill drilled into his core, but nothing happened. Not one of the hundreds, thousands of Indians elbowing past him seemed care. He relaxed his muscles and understood the ebb and flow of the crowd around him, there was a current, a direction, he let himself be swept along, no longer caring where it took him. He towered above them all, a head and shoulders jutting above a swirling sea of humanity; a godhead, a fungal stalk piercing up from an acre wide root system of rhizomes; rip tides rippled across the surface, he shrugged off inquisitive probes of his pockets, tugs at his luggage straps -— here, rubbing shoulders with millions of his brothers he no longer felt like a clotted booger of cream buoyed through society on his father’s money. This was bliss.

John was eventually disgorged from the station, nearly tripping as the crowd deposited him halfway down a flight of stairs. He caught his breath leaning up against a railing and looked back at the Victoria Terminus, this vast alien thing of wild arches and crenelated spines pulsing with throbbing chains of light bulbs, palm trees swaying beside it, and all around him, everywhere, were the teeming, jabbering masses; they were all so beautiful, even the grotesquely misshapen mistake croaking at his side. He looked down, staring into the eyes of what must have been a leper, a human roach, a creature with gnarled fingers curling in on themselves, an ashen mask for a face and he saw his own tiny reflection, doubled. He reached into his pocket and dropped a handful of damp bills into its basket. Hard currency: He was a god to these people.

My latest article, about my brief stay in a 5th Avenue Penthouse:

Readers humbled by New York City’s billionaire hedge fund managers and their trustafarian progeny may take some comfort in knowing that Andrew Carnegie’s warning about wealth slipping between the fingers of subsequent generations−“from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”−still applies. … click to read.

Final tally: 90,902 words, two sex scenes, one murder, three beatings, two continents, three countries, two cigar scenes, one pill scene.

Still debating a title, I’m not happy with “Indian Made Foreign Liquor” or “And Tonight Thank God it’s Them Instead of Us,” “Last of the Famous International Playboys” might be fun, but may be even more of a rights issue than “And Tonight…”

One last copy-edit and I’ll start flogging the thing.

(A draft of a later chunk of Friends of the Frum Foundation)

We circled Indira Gandhi International for an hour before landing. The sun wasn’t up, but an almost lavender streak emerging in the east announced its presence. We landed uncomfortably, and taxied into a world billowing with fog, banks of beetle-like green-grey seared through by pinpricks of arc-sodium, glowing amber pixels on an old-fashioned monitor, the dead zone outside the range of the cathode rays, the flat darkness of the airplanes lurking in the gloom.

The airlock opened, we shuffled through and clanked down rickety silver steps into the chilly, toxic air and stood on the tarmac feeling exposed and infinitesimal beside the massive maws of the jet engines whining, churning and tugging at the air.

No one spoke. Our luggage was lined up beside us, but a pair of armed policemen herded us away from it, lining us up until a bus emerged from the dark mist to take us to our terminal. We clambered aboard and listened to the thuds of bags hurled into a hold beneath us.

A diesel engine groaned to life, shaking the frame. Exhaust leaked into the cabin. We lurched forwards, lumbered into gear and bore into the soupy darkness. A feeble bulb pulsed above me, casting the Indian faces looming inches from mine into a sallow frog-like pallor. I held onto a metal bar for support, feeling the grip of the thousands who rode before me, the warmth bleeding out of all of us and mixing together in the cheap metallic alloy. My fingers prickled with contamination. The suspension seemed worn away. My teeth vibrated. Across the nubbly landscape of glistening black hair and greenish faces, the windows were opaque, dabs of light oozing through the condensation into synthetic, circular rainbows. We came to a rocking stop.

We shuffled forward, jostling for position among the other passengers and avoiding one another’s gaze. The bus huffed, well worn-metal clunked into place, and what little warmth we’d generated together peeled away as the door opened.

A whistle shrieked as I stepped outside.

We faced an inlet, a squat rectangle, a seep of seedy incandescent light bleeding out of a vast battleship-shaped terminal swallowing the entire horizon. We trudged out, dragged our suitcases up a slope and into a slime-colored hallway, guided by glyphs of passport officials. We passed empty gates, marched down broken escalators past ancient cigarette and perfume commercials. We were disgorged into a vast, windowless chamber, filled with silent lines of well-behaved people slowly moving past glum passport control officials. Each stamp echoed throughout the giant chamber and sent a twitch of longing cascading through the crowd behind it.

Beyond passport control, in the no-man’s land before customs, the way forward was a squat space squeezed beneath a vast grey block. A last duty-free store twinkled anemically in the monochromatic murk. I saw Aftab wander off toward it.

A red light began flashing. Under the bloodless bars of fluorescent light I bounded over scuffed marble, over the claustrophobic tangle of inset black squares, toward the conveyors. Gaggles of passengers, multiple flights, had gathered around the humming and grinding belt, grabbing for black bags plopping out of the black flaps above us. Aftab grabbed my shoulder. He offered me a stick of gum. I waved it away. We collected our bags, hoisted them onto a cart and wheeled our way out of this monochromatic world, slalomed past block-like pillars and through Customs’ green channel—nothing to declare—our bottles clinking, the sweet scent of cigarettes and cellophane leaching through our Duty Free bags.

I noticed Dr. Bhat squabbling with a customs official over a laptop computer. The official dangled it in front of the doctor, and an avalanche of paper tumbled out of it. I gave him a thumbs-up, and the milk-colored arrival gates hissed open.

I cut myself on a sliver of ice, tried to sterilize it with the bourbon, then I collapsed into bed with my finger stinging and drooling blood.

I couldn’t sleep. Bourbon does that to me, leaves me half-awake, my subconscious squirming. The day’s garbage took on a sinister pallor the more I turned it over in my head, mashing it together with this new information. Ravi had always been sinister. There was more to his razor than his being more clean-shaven than my father. I could the sting of straight razor slicing open my face.

Uncomfortable greasy heat lapped one side of my face, while the moist mist thrown up by the burbling rapids chilled the other. This was Rishikesh, on the banks of the Ganges, and I was squatting near a campfire. Aftab was on one side, my dad was on the other. Ravi was across from me, shirtless, fading into the darkness behind the flames. Our whitewater rafting gear stashed for the night and our dinner eaten, we were spooking one another with ghost stories. My dad had gone. He swilled Kingfisher beer by the fire. Aftab and I had gone. Now was Ravi’s turn.

He stood up. He was a head taller than my father.

“India is extremely old,” he said. He paced back and forth as he spoke. His voice lurched into a sadhu’s croak: “Long before the Raj, long before the East India Company, what is now known as India was ruled by another empire, a race of Mogul kings, Muslims who built vast citadels of rose stone, the Taj Mahal, the sex temples of Khajuraho, so many wondrous things…”

“Khajuraho was Hindu,” interrupted Aftab.

Ravi spat into the fire, it hissed. “But their greatest achievement of all was invisible. They brought with them a technique, a form of irrigation from their Afghan homeland to tame India’s parched cropland. They built qanats, vast networks of underground tunnels stretching from the moist mountains down to the arid plains. Down these tunnels water would trickle constantly, irrigating the crops. There are millions of these tunnels, some known, with a tunnel mouth that is still used to day, a square hole in the middle of nowhere with steps extending down into the moist darkness below. Like a mouth connected to a gullet. At the bottom there is water, now infested with crocs and cobras. But then it was the responsibility of the local monarch to maintain these channels, their prime responsibility, but when the British came, wells were built instead and gradually the qanats were neglected. Without Mogul engineers to scrape the mud from their bowels, these tunnels silted up, became dry and were forgotten. Now please bear this in mind as you as feel the cool touch of the holy Ganges river caressing the back of your necks … Aftab, Julian, now, the two of you have encountered bodies along the banks?”

We nodded.

“There is not just silt in those tunnels. Many workers died during their construction, but also, and these are personalities who after death are far, far more restless than some palace engineer, are the dacoits. The thugees, the sash-stranglers who prowled the countryside. In Hardwar down below us, there were for generations a tribe of exceptionally clever ones, the bwanas who were never caught. What they had done was find a dried-up qanat. Unbeknownst to their victims, they would creep through this primitive pipe, building their lair inside and using the network of conduits to emerge silently and secretly to springing an ambush, or to slink silently away after committing some particularly heinous deed. All that is well and good, but one year this band of brigands was lead by an particularly nasty man. He would sever the heads of anyone he encountered and carry those heads off with him. Well, this was too much for the residents of Hardwar, so one day they appealed to the British to intercede. After several years of searching, the colonial army became fed up and decided to recitify the problem with modern technology. They sealed off every access point to the qanats in the area, and then press-ganged every available man and woman to dredge silt from the main artery, the qanat that fed into cistern of tunnels that these thugees inhabited. They flooded them, and these horrid men perished. For years nothing happened, everything was safe, until the building of the Frum Foundation. To set the foundations for the house, and I was personally in charge of this, mind you, we were forced to dig very deep into the sides of the river. When we did this we happened to find some very, very old stone. We punched through and found a small channel. We lowered one of our boys down in there, and you know what we found?”

“What? We asked.

“When we opened it there was a gust off very stale air, and underneath we found a pile of skulls. The Frum Foundation was built over the drop-off points for the skulls.”

“That’s not very scary,” Aftab said.

“But I’m not finished,” said Ravi, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the firelight. “You know those skulls you boys dig up on the beaches sometimes? Not all of them are simply sick men who were too poor to afford going into the Ganges, some are cursed. About a week after we opened up the tomb, people began to tell us reports of a cloud of ghostly skulls, tens of thousands of them whooshing and squealing, flying through the air, snapping at people. The souls of the thugees victims escaped, but the dacoits were trapped inside the tomb, with no form to take other than that of the skulls of their victims. But they’ve been released now, and are free to prowl in their present form. Sometimes at night you can hear them prowling, it will sound like the wind at first, a rushing, sweeping, whistling sound. But that is not the wind, those are the dacoits, slaughtering and tormenting for eternity.”

That wasn’t all I remembered about that trip. I was following Ravi again, watching him shave in the Ganges, watching his foam drift down the river and disappear. Later we were in a concrete cavern, together, just Ravi and I, he’d found me as I’d watched him, grabbed my fist and marched me down into some secluded space. Down steps into a dark room. Pitch dark except a slash of light from an open door somewhere far above us. The edge of something metallic flared. The straightedge. Ravi held it against my throat, against my cheek and slid it across, twisting inwards towards the end, painlessly opening a small slit on my face. “Don’t ever tell anyone about this place,” Ravi says to me as blood dribbles down my chin. He licks his finger and wipes it off.

My face stings for hours.

A perfect target: a once grand hotel with unwashed windows.  Given its orange and brown exterior trim, I placed its construction date as around 1976.  The shrubbery had withered into twigs, drivers openly smoked and spat under the portico, and the red welcome carpet was piebald and frayed to nothingness in patches.     A uniformed bellhop pestered me for change.  I shrugged him off.

In the United States this was a major chain, but here this decrepit franchise had seen better days.  The marble floor was grubby and dull.  Not a trace of slipperiness.  Half the lights in the lobby were out, and I could the feel gusts of huffy air-conditioning.  Chairs were stacked on tables in the distant 24-hour café.

The bathrooms were out of order.  The currency exchange rate weeks out of date.

I tried the bazaar, expecting the gleam of halogen reflecting off electroplated antiques, but the displays were empty.  The only sign of life an anemically lit drug store.  There wasn’t much for sale inside besides hoppers of cigars.  The smell of tobacco was leathery, musky and rich.  I hadn’t smoked in years, but I couldn’t leave Tijuana without crossing some personal threshold.

I held a fistful of cigars up to my face and inhaled.

The clerk didn’t even look up.

I crinkled their cellophane packages and rolled them around in my hands.  My heart racing, I slipped one into my pocket.  I bought a packet of matches, as much Valium as I could afford and strode out the lobby as primly as possible.

The courtesy shuttle was loading up outside.  A recycled school bus.  I clambered onboard.  I was the only passenger.  The driver gave me a limp salute before he settled into his seat.  I saluted back.  He dropped me off as close to the end of the back-to-America line as he could without becoming snarled in the line himself.

The end of the line was pressed up against a line of pharmacies and stalls.  Hotdog and taco vendors walked up and down the length of the line, bellowing for our attention.  I chickened out and trashed the pills but still felt as though I was guilty of something.

I took out my cigar and rolled the thing in my hands, the crinkling soothed me.

“Is that a Cuban?” The man in front of me pointed at my cigar.  He was plump, booze-flushed, wearing a pair of ill-advised shorts.

I’d bought a small cigar, a finger-thick Cohiba that looked like an oversized cigarette.  “Supposed to be,” I said.

“Even if it isn’t, they’ll take it away.  Smoke it now while you still can,” he said.  Gesturing towards the border station.

“You don’t mind?  I don’t want to bug anyone.”

“Naah, go on, enjoy it.  Fuck them.”

I lit a match. The guy shook his head, dug what looked like a ray gun out of his pocket and offered me a lusty, jet-like flame.

“You want some?” I asked him, after I’d puffed up an acceptable coal.

“No thanks,” he said, “You might have herpes.”  He turned back and began pestering the teenaged couple in front of him.  He was lecturing them about pharmacies.

I forgot whether you were supposed to inhale a cigarillo.  The thing was vile, so dry it was flaking apart and the smoke I inhaled was acrid and foul, totally unlike the glorious aroma of the store.  I was getting dizzy.  I had to sit down.

“Hey, guy?”  I tapped my new friend on the shoulder.  He wheeled around.  Eager, thrilled to help.  Disgusting.

“You mind guarding my spot for a moment?” I asked him.

“Sure, sure, buying a hotdog?  I’ll take one, if you are.”

“No, I’ve been getting dizzy spells off and on all day.  I’m just going to sit down for a second.”  I walked over to the curb.

He followed me, “Yeah you look a little green.  You should eat,” he said.  “I’ll get you a dog.”

“No, no, it’s probably just the smoke,” I said. “It’s been awhile.”

“Hmmm, it does smell stale, let me see it for a second.”

He stepped in front of me, blocking my view of the street, shoving a stubby paw towards me.  I started getting up to hand over my wretched cigar.  What happened next was strange, happening so fast, I still can’t figure out the sequence in which it happened.

A string of what I thought were firecrackers crackled all around me.  Then my ears were screaming with tinnitus and the fat guy was wailing and wrapping his hand in his shirt.  Finally he toppled over on me and bled all over my shirt.

I thought he was dead.  I spent the next four hours answering questions to the Mexican and, later, the American authorities and babysitting the fat guy until his wife showed up.  Someone shot at us while we were in line.

The man’s wife was sweet.  “Jasper will be rave about this for years, it’ll be worth losing a fingertip for,” she told me, once he was safely conked out.  She invited me over for dinner.  I smiled and help her carry walk him to his car.

Come my friends and family, read James McGirk’s latest riveting news article right here.

Christmas in New Haven…

“She had left a rather large cut of meat in the fridge. It had rotten. I threw away everything I could find in there. She cannot argue with me about the logic of hording organic substances. They dispose of themselves, but in a most unpleasant way. Best we circumvent the decomposition.”

“It’s much nicer now.”

“Yes it is, thank god she does not have a goddamn pet. Could you imagine the whiffs? I am so embarrassed bringing people home, already it is damn difficult.”

“Do you live here?”

“Theoretically I have a space here. But I spend the vast majority of my time in Los Angeles. I am hoping to move there permanently, soon. My friends have been most accommodating and will often put me up over night.”

“Are you working?”

“Arai, in this city there are flexible boundaries to what constitutes actual work. My employ as such is not in a position to properly remunerate me for my expenses as of yet, but soon… I wanted to tell you, I will be going into the city again today, so I will not be seeing you until later, so would you please take your telephone with you this time?”

“When are you leaving?”

“Now.”

“Do you want gas money for last night?”

“Very kind of you to ask me, yes, I will take some.” I handed over a couple of ones and fives, still nicely stacked from Caroline. Aftab flattened them out on the table with his fist.

“Are you going to use them in a snack machine?” I said.

“No. I just like them to lay flat. I have, perhaps, the opposite inclination of my dear Christine. It is possible it is a contrarian reaction to her, or possible it is a corruption of some organic type in a similar spot yet manifestly different… a spectrum or a coil, take your pick. I am stuck. But Julian, I have to go. I was sorry you didn’t make it inside last night. And I am glad you made up for it. I caught a glimpse, the speckled faced hennaed one? Maybe we could have a double date with the stocky one, should you feel drinking myself in partial unconsciousness once more.”

“If you want to, Aftab.”

“Oh, also do not forget to make a date with your attorney. That is a message Catherine asked me to pass along to you. She was most insistent. At least they can distribute what was in his checking account.”

***

Something, maybe hearing the tree debris pop and crunch under Aftab’s tires, or just sitting at the table triggered a sense of déjà vu. I remembered sitting there, the same chair, the same nubbin of wood digging into the small of my back, during the day—it had to be, because everything was so bright, seering gold with light and heat flaring off the dusty haze outside—and I was gnawing at a translucent rubber ring, staring out the window at cars pulling into the driveway. A teething toddler, but I couldn’t have been so young, because I could also recall being in my room afterwards. It was an unpleasant memory, one I’d forced myself to stop fixating on a long time ago.

It was painful prying it loose again. I was in a room. Mine, I thought. One of the walls was mirrored, and I had picked a crumb of dried mucous out my nose and popped it in my mouth, then turned around and realized Aftab had been standing there the entire time, watching me.

He never mentioned it. No rumors of it ever got back to me. We must have been tiny. Or it could have been Ravi’s funeral. But it wouldn’t explain the house. Ravi was torched in Rishikesh, near the source of the Ganges. This was a favorite spot for expatriates to take their tourist friends, it was clean, you could go whitewater rafting down the gentle rapids, and, with some of the holiest cities just downstream, there was no lack of opportunities for ethno-cultural expansion, albeit with excellent, well-segregated sleeping areas cordoned off from the hoi polloi, brimming with all the mod cons, as Aftab would have put it.

The sole complication was that, being the River Ganges, there were dead bodies bobbing in the rapids, especially as you got closer to the holy temples.

Ravi was burned on the banks of the Ganges. Usually people stayed in tents upriver, and we did too until the Frum Foundation built a satellite center out there. Regional outreach—some sickening bullshit like that. They ended up naming it after him, after Ravi. They talked my dad into it; it became a rumpus room for the Land Cruiser set. We were staying there. A white house. Colonnades. A porch. A potter’s wheel for spinning cruddy pots out of river mud. Mud spatters on the wall. An art studio. A chowkidaar to keep the riff-raff away unless it was arts and crafts mother and baby day. No lights or water, except for what came out of the hand pump and a single solar panel.

I remembered Ravi, tall, dark brown, the color of a wet cigar, black hair in a ponytail, wearing faded old-fashioned high cropped swimming trunks and a Frum Foundation T-shirt, showing up clean-shaven to breakfast every morning. My own father let it ride, and by the end of the trip there was a scraggly briar patch of iron-colored bristles squirming their way across his face.

I followed Ravi one morning as he walked down to the riverbank to shave. He boiled a kettle of water and walked down the steep gulley onto our little strip of beach. He took a spot just past the fire circle, where the Frum Foundation held its beach parties. The exhausted tiki torches looked like lacquered bones spewed across the beach. Most of the riverbank was soft sand or clay, but there was a small outcropping of rock that jutted out into the water. Ravi walked barefoot out onto it, squatted, and took out a small portable mirror and straight edge razor out of his pocket. He laid them on the rock next to his toes. He lathered up with a bar of soap, dipped the razor in the kettle, held up the mirror in one hand and shaved with the other. He rinsed the razor in the river. Then he would dip it back in the kettle and shave again.

He did not rinse out the kettle afterwards.

We lit bonfires and danced every night on the banks of the Ganges, it was so strange to think that we burned had burned Ravi on those very same banks. But when? I had the timelines so fucked up—how could I possibly be old enough to follow him down if I was still teething, especially after what Christine had told me about sleeping through the ceremony—I hated that I hadn’t paid attention, that I couldn’t remember. All the fucking booze and fun-runs down to Tijuana pharmacies had finally taken their toll.

Aftab would know, I figured. We spent so much time together down there. We prowled the banks, pushing over river rocks and following panther tracks as far up into the hills as we dared. We found strange things, sunken pits we dug into, dark amber glass jars of pills, rags, scraps of clothing; we took our first swigs of spirits out of the fancy bottles we found buried on the beach. Indian-Made Foreign Liquor, their labels worn into mottled shreds. Black liquors that tasted of burnt sugar and ashes.

“Those are paupers graves,” my father said. When he found a stash of bottles I had squirreled away. “You’ve been desecrating graves, you disgusting little fuck.”

I had inhaled a piece of ash and bone. I picked it out of my nose wanting to taste human flesh. I remembered his reflection. Aftab’s face was slack with grief, slick with tear trails and embedded ash. The handful of ashes he was supposed to throw in the river had blown back in his face. Mine too.