Radhika
I was on the R train on a mission to get to Greenwood Heights to have dinner with my sister. It was the last week of August, and the heat pressed against everyone like a clammy, insistent palm. This particular subway car did not have air conditioning, but every inconvenience was, to my mind, a city experience. The smell of urine and Friday night garbage was potent, but in the right way, in the way in which city people are supposed to experience the world: at a higher, more feverish pitch than everyone else. In this way, everything around me was, if not beautiful, then at least charged with something exhilarating and unknown. The decapitated rat I stepped over on the way to the train became a romantic object: proof of my authenticity.
At the time I was working as a full-time dog-walker for the rich and busy dog-owners of Gramercy Park. I had never owned a dog as a child, and had to get over my initial squeamishness at the sheer amount of dog poop I had to scoop up and dispose of in small green baggies. After a while I got used to it, even came to respect the warped intimacy of it—holding the warm evidence of a living thing in your hand. I began to notice and appreciate the particular contours of each individual excretion. Its level of moisture, color and shape. It was as if every dog I walked was my own child, each one a fuzzy and hypermobile newborn baby, tender and utterly dependent on me.
On the train, I was listening to jazz on my phone—a bulky off-brand device my dad had bought for me off of Chinese eBay—because I had decided that I was the type of person who listened to jazz in the evening. At Canal Street, a Hare Krishna floated, specter-like, onto the train, and I removed one earbud and held it in my lap, muffled saxophone blaring from the tiny speaker. I knew she was a Hare Krishna because of the trademark robes, which glared orange in the subterranean dim. I had seen Hare Krishnas before—but only at a distance, and they had always been men. This woman, this female Hare Krishna, had a long blonde braid and a sharp nose studded with rings. She was white, so pale that I could see bluish veins under her eyes. I looked right at her, and she immediately locked eyes with me, nodding, as if she’d been expecting me.
If my purpose in recounting this experience is to assign appropriate amounts of blame, then locking eyes with the Hare Krishna was a garden-variety error and I think it’s a freebie, like the blank spot at the center of a Bingo card. I had just moved to the city and had no idea what not to do, so for this I give myself a pass. But every choice that followed is fair game.
As the train lurched out of the station, she slid into the seat next to me in one fluid, elegant motion, her bag wedged between us.
She placed a palm on my knee and the other on her chest.
“Radhika,” she said, by way of introduction.
I was unsettled for a number of reasons, but mostly by the fact that she smelled exactly like my mother: sharp and medicinal. I sniffed two times, the first time so quickly it was imperceptible and the second, less so. Was it Neem oil? Some ointment, like Vicks? Radhika looked at me, entreating, and I cleared my throat slightly. It did not occur to me that I should not engage, that I should maybe walk to the other end of the subway car.
“Pri,” I said. She tilted her head slightly, waiting, as if she knew there was more. “Priyamvada, I mean, is my full name.”
“Priyamvada,” Radhika said, and I opened my mouth to correct her before I realized she had pronounced it perfectly. Her palm was still on my knee.
“Are you?” She paused, and in that space a thousand spiky endings to her question sprouted: was I what? Startled? Her friend?
“Priyamvada, are you devoted?” she asked, finally. I was relieved. This was a question I could answer definitively and not, like with my name, in stepwise fashion. “No,” I said firmly, and Radhika just said “Hmm,” extending the “mm” into a slight drone. Something in her hum made me feel like a tiny box had snapped shut over my stomach, a metallic clutch of guilt, or at least something guilt-adjacent, like shame.
Then several things happened in quick succession. The train came to a stop, a teenage boy clutching the pole next to Radhika lost his grip, and Radhika’s bag slid off of its seat and onto the ground. The boy stepped on Radhika’s foot, trying to avoid the bag, squished against her knees, flushed, and apologized. Then all three of us were scooping up her things in confusion—a glossy miniature of Krishna, a tub of coconut oil the size of my fist, a conch shell. Did she not carry a wallet? I pictured her floating over the subway turnstiles in her willowy robes, hands gently clasped and unbothered, not scrambling, like everyone else’s, for a Metrocard. When I handed her the coconut oil she squinted at me, then did something that was less smiling than it was showing me all of her teeth.
“Goodnight,” she said, and walked swiftly, surely, out of the train. When she got onto the platform, I thought I saw her turn around and face me and the train as we wobbled away. I thought I saw her eyes narrow in anger. The boy slumped into her seat, and I heard small, tinny chords. I slipped my headphones back in. It was one stop before I registered the soft thing spiking into my back. I shifted slightly, and realized I had been sitting against a pocket-sized paperback of the Bhagavad Gita, the title stamped in a stenciled block font characteristic of the seventies. It was well-worn, a faded orange, a little greasy—perhaps coconut oil—the corners creased. The cover had a setting sun stretched across it, its tendrils wrapping around its spine and onto its back, which was blank except for a tiny hamsa symbol in the left corner. My first instinct was to look around, holding the book aloft, as if to say anyone drop this?
I thumbed through the book, and a vast spectrum of highlighters and pens and pencils blared on its brittle pages. There were delicate notes, written in steady, perfect Hindi script. The actual text of the book, buried underneath the annotations, was in Latin, which was baffling. The ink—a navy blue color—was fresh, rubbing off on my fingers. I closed Radhika’s book slowly. I felt as if I was intruding. I slid a bookmark with the name and number of a car insurance company on it back into place, noticing as I did the writing, in navy blue, on its back. There, in careful cursive, it said: Grand Central, 8.
A part of me immediately thought this had to be an invitation. Radhika had left me the book on purpose, I thought in a mad rush, and I would go to this location and I’d find another book, or simply find Radhika, waiting for me, saying my name over and over slowly and with even intonation, a prayer. Then I laughed a little at myself, and placed the book back on the seat next to me. But something nagged at me. Petit Fleur was playing and I found it incredibly loud and unnerving, the clarinet howling in a way that seemed accusatory. I grabbed the book, stuffed it into my backpack. But it didn’t feel right there, either. I clutched my backpack nervously, peering around. Now I was a thief. The worst kind of thief, a thief who steals a holy book. I pulled out the Gita and its bookmark again. Grand Central, 8 felt less like an invitation and more like a summons. My legs, independent of my brain, got off the train at Cortlandt Street and got on the uptown R.
My first flight was an international one to India via Singapore when I was two. It was seventeen hours long and I screamed the entire time. I had an ear infection, we later realized, but at the time my mom had no choice but to hold me tightly to her chest, rocking back and forth, the polyester of the seat squeaking. She tells me now that a flight attendant came up to her and joked that they would have to make an emergency landing, but when my mom laughed, the flight attendant just stared at me and then walked away. This flight attendant was the first person I ever met who wanted to kill me.
In a rare moment of clarity, I texted my sister that I would be late for dinner. We were nearing Prince Street and there was service. After sending the text, my long-suffering phone, sweating to comply with my never-ending demand for jazz, died. I took this in stride, tucking my phone back into my backpack. The subway map was half-obscured with a Sharpied penis, but I figured that all I had to do was get off at 8th Street, then walk across to Astor, and take the 6 train to Grand Central.
The book hummed in my hands. I had never been religious. My parents took me to temple now and again, but they were unconvinced by the practical and material applications of religion. But somehow I felt certain that I had to return the Gita to Radhika, and this certainty felt close to faith. In another more obvious way I was simply trying to return the book because it felt wrong to keep it or throw it away, a book so obviously loved and conversant with its reader, who wrote questions on every page as if it would one day whisper its answers out loud.
The 6 pulled in exactly when I stepped foot on the platform. I felt that maybe this kind of kismet belonged only to devotees. The car was bright and almost empty, whirring with air conditioning. Maybe it was the airflow, or that the subway car felt removed from space and time, like a small cosmic impossibility hurtling through the underground, but I fell asleep.
I slept fitfully for an unknown amount of time and dreamed about small, fanged animals. When I woke up, there was no one on the train, and my backpack, which had been resting at my feet, was gone. I was still clutching the Gita. The train was nearing a stop called Zerega Avenue. I stumbled out of the car and stared at a map, confused. The overhead lights were dim and flickering, and I was so hungry. A tiny flier screamed that the downtown 6 was out of service. I found I couldn’t read the map, which was dull and faded. I had no wallet and no phone. For some reason, I thought first of all of the dogs I was scheduled to walk tomorrow: what would they do without me? I looked around for anyone, and spotted a woman a ways down the platform.
“Hello!” I shouted, and she looked up. I hadn’t prepared for the possibility of her looking up, so I just shouted, “42nd Street?” and then shouted it again, with more force. She stared at me and I stared at her, at the bright blue of her scrubs, her tidy ponytail. Then she did the only rational thing, which was to walk away from me and out of the station.