I first met Rajid Kumar in the tiny Upper Michigan town of Alpena where we were both consulting for the Lafarge Corporation, which has an enormous cement plant there. He owned a Seattle-based engineering firm that specialized in process control and I worked at the time as a software developer. Lafarge had hired us to pull together different aspects of the same project. He was a self-proclaimed ‘portly Indian gentleman’ and the first thing he did after we were introduced was to suggest that we go out for lunch together.
This was my first time in Alpena, but not Rajid’s, and there were fewer than a half dozen restaurants in the place that were not of the McDonald’s variety, so it made sense that Rajid had tried them all. We went to his favorite, a stuffy little Oriental place with checkered oilcloth tabletops and coils of flypaper hanging from the ceiling. We placed our order, then he admonished the waitress that there must be no egg in his wonton soup. When she assured them that there was none, he clasped himself by the throat and collapsed onto the floor, gagging and gasping for air. While I leapt to my feet the waitress just continued to nod her head and to indicate to me to sit down. Rajid became rigid on the floor and his hands fell to his sides, then suddenly he was smiling. Because, he said, if I ingest the smallest amount of egg I will have a conniption fit. My lungs seize up, my heart bursts and I die right here under your table. You understand? Yes, Mr. Rajid, she said. We understand your dietary requirements. You’ve demonstrated them for us several times in the past. Just making sure you remember, he said good-naturedly as he rose and brushed dust and bits of fortune cookie from his jeans and shirtsleeves.
Seated again he shrugged at me. A picture is worth a thousand words and where one’s life is in the balance, I say pile on the pictures. I am violently allergic to eggs, as you may have gathered, and you know they put them in everything, so eating out is hell for me. Every meal may be my last. As with us all, I felt obliged to add, to which he smiled his toothy smile and sagely nodded his head. Nevertheless, you know what I mean, he said, and I acknowledged that his case might be a bit more precarious than my own.
Rajid was of East Indian descent but born in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, and raised in the United States. His Moslem paternal grandparents had fled India with their family just before the 1947 partition of the sub-continent, choosing to join relatives in East Africa rather than to ride the flood into a newly minted Pakistan or to stay in Bombay where they feared the worse. Rajid’s father, eighteen at the time, and just back from a school in England, was able to resume his engineering studies at the British university in his new home of Dar-es-Salaam. It was there that he met his future wife. Just a year after little Rajid was born their application to immigrate to Canada was accepted, and they moved to Edmonton, Alberta, and thence to Seattle, finding the Edmonton winters unbearable. Rajid contended that it was the common British grammar school on the resume more than the first class honors degree in Engineering from an African university that had swayed Canadian immigration officials in his father’s favor, but it was a speculation impossible to confirm. In time, the Seattle school system was found deficient by Rajid’s father, offering not a single class in the Classics, to say nothing of Latin or Greek, so, at the age of twelve Rajid was sent to England to attend the same boarding school that his father had attended in Cornwall, England. According to Rajid himself, the rather hilarious result was that, besides the rudiments of a few dead languages and some proficiency in cricket and field hockey, he still sounded curiously like every Paki straight off the boat with his sing-songy British colonial fourteen-eggs-to-the-dozen manner of speaking that was harder than the Jiminy Dickens to get rid of. In spite of this enduring handicap, Rajid had started his own consulting firm directly out of college and now had thirty employees, three of whom were with us in Alpena.
Over the months that followed Rajid came and went once or twice weekly. I discovered that he was only rarely at home, rather he spent most of his life on the road, visiting job sites where his employees labored or drumming up more work. A regular week might take him from Seattle to Alpena to Atlanta to Dallas, back to Alpena, back to Atlanta, then home to Seattle for what remained of the weekend. The employees in Alpena were all East Indian, one from India, one from Pakistan, and the other, Sathish, from Tanzania like Rajid, and they were the most competent, efficient, knowledgeable team I’d ever worked with. The several times I complemented Rajid on this he shook his head, We Indians are a very educated lot, my man, and we are willing to work ever so hard to achieve your American dream. One of his favorite expressions was, The new technology is in place. With each incremental change in the project he would summon our employers in to review the latest step. Come and see, kind sirs, he would say, ushering a few lanky mid-westerners wearing hardhats into the room, the new technology is in place, and he would demonstrate whatever it was, perhaps that material flow on some conveyor belt could be monitored and adjusted through some new software and gadgetry we’d just developed.
Some years before I had spent some time in the Middle East and had picked up a bit of Arabic. One day I greeted Rajid with Assalaam 'alaikoom, and he immediately responded with the standard response, 'alaikoom Assalaam. When I continued with Kaifa halak il-youm? he looked at me strangely. I don’t speak Arabic, he said. What are you doing? He knew a few Koranic phrases by rote, but that was the extent of his attachment to his religion. I’m a pagan, he told me. From Cornwall, remember? Stonehenge and all? I believe in the sanctity of all things, especially my portly self! He was short and bald and, were his skin-color different, with a fake beard, he would have made the perfect Santa Claus. His eyes twinkled as he rubbed his stomach, recently filled with Chicken Parmesan. After one of his ‘The new technology is in place’ performances, I pulled out the stock ‘Thanks to Allah’ phrase that I thought he’d understand Al hamdu lillah, but I bastardized it to come out Al ham diddly dum, which more or less expressed my growing boredom with his nonsense. Rajid jerked around to face me and, in front of everybody, rebuked me sharply. Don’t make fun of my religion. That is serious business, my man! Later, when we were alone, I said, Look, I’m sorry if I insulted you, but I thought you were a pagan. Pagan, smagan, he replied curtly. We are what we are.
The project lasted about eight months and ended with a round of handshakes and vague statements about the possibility of future work. Rajid didn’t need to be there for the handshaking, but he came for the PR. It was a fine day, the ice still solid on Lake Michigan and a few fishermen parked beside their shacks some distance out on the lake. I had picked Rajid up at the airport so we were sharing a car, and as we drove along the shore I pulled a bottle of single malt from the back seat and asked if he’d like a celebratory drink. As I expected, he was game, so I wheeled off the road, across the frozen beach, out onto the ice, and up to one of the unused fishing shacks. These shacks are small single rooms on skids that the fishermen haul out when the ice freezes solid, and back to shore before the spring thaw. I’d borrowed a key to this one from somebody at the plant. I went in and pulled out a couple of lawn chairs so Rajid and I could lounge outside on the ice in the sunshine then I cracked open the bottle. Cheers, I said. To a good job well done. He saluted. The new technology is in place, my man. Cheers. After a few sips I pulled a couple of Cuban cigars from the inside pocket of my jacket. Care for a cigar? He looked askance. Only idiots smoke, he said. Have you never smoked a cigar? Never, he said with some pride. Well, I envy you, I told him, your first cigar is gonna be a Cuban. How wonderful. I clipped the end and handed it to him. He took it timidly as if it might bite him, then inspected the label and sniffed it from end to end. Looking at me skeptically he said, this is a good one, huh? I shook my head. The best. While he hemmed and hawed I lit my own and took a swaggering puff. You don’t inhale it, I told him. It’s a minor vice. Those turned out to be the magic words. Ah-ha, he chortled, a minor vice, a minor vice. A man cannot have too many of those minor vices, and he stuck the thing between his teeth and I lit him up.
Rajid did pretty well for his first cigar, smoked about half of it before it went out for the second time and he flicked it across the ice. We were on our third or fourth glasses of whiskey by then. My man, he said, as they say, we only live once, and every little thing that fills our days we have it only once as well. An experience is a fleeting thing and life is a celebration of just that. A first cigar, a first kiss, a first broken promise. Each is to be savored but not clung to. Why cling to what has passed? Not that the second kiss is bad. Second kiss may be better than first kiss, who knows? But it is different. A different kiss. Did I tell you about my wife?
Now, Rajid had, over the past months, told me a lot about his wife, so I was a bit surprised by the question. I believe that she was a year or two older than he and also an Indian from Tanzania. She was the child of friends of his parents and they had largely grown up together. He had been non-committal when I’d asked if the marriage had been arranged, but I assumed that it had been. She had produced three daughters for him for whom he declared complete devotion. His complaint about his wife, and his every word of her was a complaint, was that she was more materialistic than the most driven of California teenage girls. For God’s sake, man, I drive a Datsun and she drives a Cadillac! To make matters worse, much worse, she was the president of his company. This minor deceit, and it was a deceit because she had nothing whatsoever to do with the business, had been very beneficial in a way, because it allowed him to register in all bidding wars for government contracts as a woman-owned, minority-owned company, and this gave him two considerable legs up against most of the competition due to the affirmative action regulations that were having their heyday at the time. The downside was that she felt this gave her some clout when it came to company expenditures. Also, he couldn’t simply get rid of her. She was the president, and he, technically, just an employee. A vice president to be sure, and the Chief Informational Officer and the Chief Financial Officer, but she was the Chief Executive Officer, and she wore her office day and night. Because of his wife they lived in a very fine house in West Seattle that was mortgaged to the hilt, and it was furnished with the latest, most expensive schlock, and they used it to entertain whoever it was she chose to entertain in a never-ending string of dinner parties and cocktail parties and pool parties. I am a poor man! Rajid exclaimed one night. I have thirty-two employees, most with families now, who all depend on me for their livelihood. I spend every day of the year running around finding work, writing up bids, kowtowing to every hard-hat executive in the country, trying to keep everybody gainfully employed and my head above water. I have not given myself a raise in five years!
Anyway, that day on the lake he asked me, did I tell you about my wife? Yeah, sure, I said, your wife with her Cadillac and fancy clothes. Well, my man, I want you to know that I am an honorable man. Well, of course, Rajid… An honorable Muslim man, he ignored my bluster. We all know that life is change. We all know that pleasure is fleeting, that happiness is a moment of grace that we just happen across, like a glade in a forest that we will never find again. This is a commonplace. Yet we mould our lives into a regimen in an attempt to preserve those happy moments. Is it not so? We think that because we feel such love for a woman that we should keep her close forever so we will never lose that blissful feeling. This is the crime of marriage. We think that because we enjoyed such euphoria from snorting cocaine the first time that we should snort it again and again. This is the crime of addiction. Of course, it is insanity, and we know it, but we do it, nevertheless. Is it not so, my friend? I shrugged and he nodded. Indeed, you see? As I said, it is a commonplace, but this is how we live! Our every moment is consumed in the vain struggle to hold onto what has already passed. Instead we must flow like the wind, never tarrying for even a moment upon a leaf or a blade of grass. He fluttered his hand above his head more as an apology for his highfaluting language that anything else, I think. We must embrace change as our birthright rather than a curse or a curiosity. Tempered by honor and compassion we must fulfill our desires. It sounds to me like you’re having a midlife crisis, I told him, to which he smiled. Ah, my friend, we are always in midlife crisis, from the womb to the grave. And in a crisis, the thing is to follow your instincts. So let me tell you: we Muslims are allowed to divorce, but divorce or no, we are bound to support our wives. You’re thinking about divorcing your wife? No. No I will not divorce Bibi, he said. She is the mother of my children and the president of my company. I cannot divorce her. I do not want to divorce her. I would never jeopardize the happiness of my daughters or the well being of my employees. And you know a thing is true if it is at the crossroads of honor and instinct. But I can have another wife. No! A guffaw burst out of me before I could control it. You want another wife? You’re nuts, man! Sounds to me like you already have one wife too many! No, he said. I have the wrong wife. That is all. The wrong wife. Well, forget it, I told him. In the States even you Muslims cannot have a second wife. We have bigamy laws. You think I am stupid? he said. I know that. But who said anything about these United States? I am thinking I will go back to my home country, to Tanzania, and find myself a nice young Indian woman. A woman who will give me the subtle pleasures my body still aches for, a woman not ruined by all the commercialism we have here. A woman who will just look after me, will take what I give her without demanding more, will do as I tell her, will never argue with me, never raise her voice. Back there women are still raised in the old-fashioned way, and there are ever so many of them who would love to marry a rich, portly American who would move them into a fine house of their own with a garden and servants. Do you realize what our kind of money can buy over there? And it costs nothing to live. My man, I would be a king.
So, you’d just dump everything and move back to Tanzania, just to… to what? To get laid? My God, Rajid, there are lots of women… He waved me off. Not at all. You misunderstand what I am saying. I will dump nothing, and it is not just to get laid. Laid I can get here. I will just go there for a few months now and then. Just on vacation. I will make a few business trips, you might say. Just to enjoy the good life once in a while, and with a woman who is quiet and agreeable. There is not a single such woman in North America, believe me, so spoiled they all are! And who would run your company? You work at it day and night. Time to delegate, my friend. What do you think about Sathish? He is a good man, do you not think? I had to agree that Sathish was a very competent engineer. I am thinking of making him my lieutenant, overseer of all projects. See how he does. Give him a big, fat raise. I will make the sales calls when I am here, and he will run things when I am not. And when I am here too, for that matter.
And you think that this new wife of yours will be happy to see you for two or three months a year? Why not? She will have everything she has ever dreamed of. Servants to order around, room for her family to come and visit, or to stay, who knows? And you’d have kids with her, I presume? Of course. Many, many children. We will be blessed with children. And your wife, Bibi, will never know? Never know. Why would she? No one will know. But you were speaking of honor. Yes, honor. I am an honorable man. I will support both wives, both families, keep everybody happy, yes, everybody happy, including my portly self. I snorted and chortled and shook my head but put up no more argument, and so we left it. We killed the bottle, locked the keys in the fishing shack with the chairs, drove to the airport, slapped each other on the back and headed our separate ways.
But we kept in touch, and over the next few years when our paths crossed, whether by coincidence or design, we’d get together for a meal or sometimes just a drink in an airport. We saw more of each other one year when I landed a job in Atlanta that was more than I could handle and Rajid came in with a crew of two software types and they bailed me out. None of us did very well out of the deal, but he didn’t seem to mind.
Of course, I pressed him about his extra-wifely plans but he would just shrug and tell me he was too busy to even think about it. His company had grown to over two hundred engineers by this time and he had not only Sathish as a lieutenant, but three other men as well. He told me that he was now basically the company salesman, that nobody else seemed to be able to fulfill that function, but that he’d been lucky finding and keeping sharp technicians and analysts.
Then one year, about six into our friendship, I relocated from San Francisco to Bellvue, the Seattle suburb made famous by Microsoft, and Rajid and I were suddenly as good as neighbors. A couple of times a year he’d invite me to one of his wife’s parties and I was able to confirm that most of what he’d told me was true. He was driving a Lexus now, but he assured me that it was the company that held the lease, and that he still longed for his Datsun in the way one might remember an old leather jacket that had spent its lifetime accommodating itself to the contours of one’s shoulders and softening on the underside of the cuffs, its weightiness always just right, keeping one aware of its easy presence on a windy autumn afternoon. Cut the crap, Rajid, I told him. You’re driving a Lexus now instead of an old Datsun. They don’t even make Datsuns anymore, or hadn’t you noticed? I was endowed with one of his benign smiles.
The food at these things was wonderful, of course, and my taste for Indian food grew prodigiously. Chicken curry had been my standby in sub-Continental cuisine with the occasional foray into Lamb Boti-masala, or Pokoras, but at Bibi’s table I discovered worlds of delicacies. With Rajid as my guide, over a couple of years I indulged in Somosas and papadams, fish and prawns in coconut, jalfraze, gushane, palak; allu bengan or bhartha, sag paneer, bhindi masala, chana masala, lamb dishes to dream of: curry, vindaloo, gushane, coconut, shahi korma, then chicken makhanwala, krahi chicken, chicken tikki masala, and in coconut and curry, plus biryanis, lassis, dahls, nans of a dozen varieties, and deserts too sweet to touch. The food was invariably served in large common platters or bowls, and we each helped ourselves to whatever took our fancy. Rajid, however, never partook in this free-for-all. His plate was always amply loaded, either in the kitchen or from the array of dishes on the table, by Bibi. It was she who knew the ingredients of everything and could insure that he never ingested an iota of the cursed egg. For his part, Rajid liked the pampering this entailed, and would occasionally point to one dish or another and receive an extra dollop or have it refused him.
He pulled me aside on one such occasion and raised his chin to warn me that there was a confidence coming my way. So, I finally did it, he said. What? You mean… He nodded then shook his head and glanced over his shoulder. But nobody knows. In the whole company, nobody knows. I admit that I snickered and gave him a nudge with my elbow. You old goat! I can’t believe you’re a fucking bigamist. You randy old son-of-a-bitch. Shh, he said. Keep your wits about you, my man. So what’s she like, this new babe of yours? How old is she? Is she gorgeous? Nilam is eighteen, and she is very pretty and demure. I am sure you would like her. It is unfortunate that you will never have the opportunity. And she keeps you warm at night, I’ll bet. My God, Rajid, eighteen! She could have been fourteen, my friend. I had ever so many offers, but I did not want to marry a child. So, you’ve bought a house and everything? Not yet. She is still living with her parents. I am having a house built for us. A simple affair, a few bedrooms with a walled garden and a view of the sea. She is quite pleased with herself, and we are very happy. I cannot tell you the difficulty in leaving.
I started to laugh, just couldn’t contain myself, and I collapsed into a patio chair and buried my eyes in the crook of my elbow. Between gasps I mimicked him, Just cannot Tell you the Difficulty… There was a click of heels. Rajid, my sweet… It was Bibi. Is your friend unwell? Oh no, my darling, he is just in high spirits. If he dies just now it will be of laughter. It seems I have told an amusing story. Something that would perhaps amuse the rest of us, Rajid? Oh, quite the opposite, I assure you, sweetness. A crude man-to-man joke, quite distasteful really. I cannot fathom this hilarity… They continued in this manner while I recovered my composure and shortly thereafter made my escape.
And so it went. Over the next few years Rajid made quite a number of trips to Tanzania, and upon each return he would brief me. The house was built and they had moved into it. Nilam now wanted a housemaid as well as a cook and a gardener. Nilam was pregnant. Now she needed another room added to the house for her sister who would help with the baby. The baby turned out to be a boy, which had Rajid in stitches of delight. She was pregnant again…. What Bibi thought of these absences I never knew. Nor did I care. I’d come to see it as Rajid’s and my little secret, and I savored the vicarious thrill I got out of his adventures. With every passing year we became closer friends. Closer friends, that is true, but it was more. Rajid changed. As he grew progressively fatter and balder and grayer he was somehow younger and more attractive, radiating a new serenity amid all the bustle of our lives. A magnet to me – I became addicted to his company. In a sense we ceased to be peers but master and acolyte.
We made a business call together one day to a neighboring town and as we drove we passed a dilapidated orchard and a collapsing barn surrounded by weeds. The barn roof had caved in and it was immensely overgrown with blackberry brambles. Rajid pointed it out to me, chuckling. What a wonderful sight, he said. It is the same over there, in Africa. Every second building is abandoned or falling down or never finished. Human ambition down the drain. There they are inhabited by hoards of squatters. Here we just ignore them. No sight pleases me more. I asked him what he was talking about. It is so comforting, he said, seeing everything crumble. Give me a break, I said. It’s a crime to let a barn go like that. Ten, twenty years ago it just had a few shakes missing from its roof, but the farmer was too lazy to replace them, and now the whole thing is gone. It’s such a shame, for a few shingles, a little attention, to lose such a wonderful old building. Shame? he said, there is no shame. You think it should last forever? You think the White House will never look like that? The Eiffel Tower? Well, eventually, I conceded. Exactly, he said. It puts happiness into my heart just to see it. Why is that, I asked, when it makes the rest of us angry or sad? He smiled at me. There is no sadness in things passing, my friend. These things are reminders to us that we, too, will pass, that everything we build will pass. I have spend my life building my company. For what? Is it forever? No. It is for today only. I build it for my own pleasure, for the well being of my family and friends. It is like a garden. Without tending, a garden is gone in a year or two, yet we still plant gardens knowing they will not be forever tended. We leave nothing behind. This is the secret to life. We leave nothing behind and so we are free. If we can only know it, live it, we have such freedom! It is the delusion that there is something we can do that is permanent that enslaves us. The man who built that barn… maybe he wanted to leave it to his son, so his son would have an easier life, not having to build a barn, but you see that his son did not care about the barn, or could not care for it, for whatever reason. In our ignorance we cast no blame upon the son. We must only hope that the man enjoyed the building of it, got pleasure leading his cows into it, from out of the snow. That is all there is, just that moment when he first stepped into the dim coolness he had created, fresh with green hay and whitewash, leading old Bessy in to be milked. Reason enough to build a barn if we require reason. He chuckled, shaking his head. Really, it is just so bloody lovely.
Then one day I received a telephone call from Sathish. He informed me in a solemn voice that Rajid was dead. He had died, apparently of a heart attack, in Tanzania and his body had been shipped home. There would be a memorial service at the house the next day.
I could barely bring myself to attend. Without Rajid his friends and family were nothing to me. I couldn’t formulate my feelings for him, never mind share them. Nor could I bear to have them sullied by the trite remembrances of others. There seemed a chasm between my loss and theirs, their intimacy with him so foreign to my own. So I supposed.
Bibi’s house was packed. I’d never seen so many saris or long faces. She sat enthroned in the living room on a pink-cushioned, lacy, straight-back chair amid a cluster of black and gold draped women. The men hung back in the corners and hallways, huddled against the walls is twos and threes, smoking and muttering to each other in a mixture of Urdu and English. Mine was the only pale face among them. In the dining room the table was laid out as if for a feast, but it seemed that nobody deemed it appropriate to partake. Two women hovered dolefully over the food, occasionally shuffling a plate of sweets from one side to the other, and glumly receiving and situating further contributions as they arrived.
Seated on a chair that matched Bibi’s, placed symmetrically across the room, was a solitary young Indian woman I’d not seen before. She was shrouded in black but not quite looking the part. Her kohl-lined eyes darted about the room fixing for a moment on one person then moving to the next, and she seemed to be trying to eavesdrop on the whispered exchanges between Bibi and her companions, at times leaning precariously from her perch. She gave me a long, quizzical look, almost beckoning, before moving her attention to a group of men near the archway to the dining room. I followed her gaze and caught sight of Sathish just as he disengaged from a huddle and turned towards me. I crossed the room and grasped his extended hand.
Kind of you to make it, he said. As I mumbled my condolences I felt, more than heard, a stillness fall over the room. I glanced towards Bibi to find her glaring at me. In a matter of seconds the entire room had given me a sullen or abusive glance. Pretty grim, I said to Sathish. What’s going on? He took me by the elbow and steered me through the dining room and out onto the back patio. Frankly, he said, they weren’t happy that I invited you. Bibi said she wouldn’t have you in the house. I was dumbstruck. How come? I said. I’ve been a friend here for years. What have I done? Nothing, nothing, he shook his head. It’s what you didn’t do. Bibi has decided that you knew about Rajid’s little housekeeping arrangement in Tanzania. Did you? I shrugged. Well, sure. Rajid mentioned it to me. Didn’t you know? Didn’t everybody? Well, he nodded, some of us did. I, for example, but Bibi doesn’t know that. And she mustn’t, he added emphatically. So Bibi is pissed that I didn’t rat on him to her? Something like that, he said. She’s got it in her head that you were in cahoots with him. I made some noise of disgust. How does she know about it even now? Sathish turned me around and indicated with his chin the solitary young woman in the second fancy chair. Because there she is, sweet Nilam, wife number two. She accompanied the body. Holy shit! I tried unsuccessfully to suppress a chuckle. That must have put a crimp in the grieving. Sathish abruptly turned me away again. It is no laughing matter, my friend. Kindly control yourself. Sorry, sorry, I muttered, taking a deep breath. I mean, it’s awful. It’s amazing. He was my best friend. I didn’t even know he was sick. He wasn’t sick, said Sathish. But a heart attack? It wasn’t a heart attack. He had not released my elbow, and he used it now to remove me further from the house. We walked around the swimming pool to the bar at the back of the property. We figure she killed him, he said matter-of-factly. What? Who? Nilam? Why would she do that? Because he wouldn’t bring her to America. Like practically everybody in the third world, she wanted to come here. That’s why she married him to start with, to escape Tanzania. But he wouldn’t do it, of course. How do you know this? He shook his head. I don’t. It’s pure speculation, but it makes sense. But why kill him? What would that achieve? He gave me a stunned look. Well, look! See for yourself. Here she is. Wife number two of a wealthy man, entitled to half of everything. Is she? Not in this country, she’s not. But by our law, she is. And she’ll get it. Shit! Really? I expect so. So what does it mean? How will she get half of everything? That means selling the company. Sathish was nodding. We’re trying to figure out how to buy it. Who? Us, the employees. We want to keep our jobs, keep it going. Wouldn’t Bibi have sold it anyway? I don’t think so. She says not, but I’m not sure. I would if I were her. It’s worth a lot of money and she doesn’t want to run it. Can’t run it. She’s a housewife, for God’s sake.
We had flopped down in deck chairs. But if she killed him… We don’t really know that, like I said. Was there an investigation? In Tanzania, sure. An autopsy. Some overworked quack called it a heart attack. I understand that’s what it looks like. What? What looks like a heart attack? Eggs. He was allergic to eggs. You knew that, right? I shook my head. Of course. Well, so did she, naturally, considering she cooked for him for years. Probably fed him more eggs when he was hospitalized from the first dose.
We sat there in silence for several minutes. Sathish offered me a cigarette, which I accepted, breaking a two-year abstinence that I told myself bravely I’d resume the next day. I was looking across the pool at the glass door to the dining room, wishing to see the woman in question, but the glass was opaque from that angle, a black rectangle in a white wall. So, she’ll get away with murder, I said. Crime pays? Sathish grimaced. If crime didn’t pay, do you think there would be crime? So, what’s to be done? I said through a cloud of tobacco smoke. He shrugged, then rolled his head back against the headrest of the chair and gazed up at the threatening sky. Rajid always said that life was a celebration. Did you hear him say that? You know how he could babble. I nodded and gave him a weak smile. Sathish returned the smile. Well, my friend, the celebrant is dead, but the celebration will go on. Time to emerge from the shadows and take up the song.
Todos Santos February, 2003