“Goddess Underground”
Sugar Mule #43: No Place Like Home

Lunacy is contagious, especially in the close quarters of a joint family. It has swept through this crumbling Calcutta mansion like an epidemic, invaded every crack and crevice, leached into the water, and suffused the stale air of the shuttered bedrooms. Every form of oddity, eccentricity, infatuation and mania thrives here.

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Their eyes were hollow. Their work was simultaneous interpretation, listening in one language and translating into another, the language they were born to, their native tongues. Through my plastic earpiece in conference rooms, I heard snatches of their voices as I turned the dial in my console, searching for English: some sharp and distressed, rambling drunkenly; others blowing words out in nervous wisps, pausing as the speaker thundered on.

Slowly we circled the islands east of Blido, part of Stockholm's archipelago, twenty thousand skerries stippling the bluelit Baltic from Arholma to Landsort. He stood up in the canoe while I paddled, swinging his hips to an Indian tune he whistled, pursing his lips in a lovelorn look that made me laugh. He sang and splashed and played the boy but it didn't embarrass me in our privacy, our void of northern sea and air.

A Saturday afternoon with Jusujas and over mugs of beer Arvind revealed himself with the usual phrases: I'm a very frank man, I'm a very simple man, and later, I believe a person should always be happy, I don't believe in having regrets. When Sanam came into the room, in her checkered marron pantsuit, carrying the chips and cashews, Look who wears the pants in the house! he cried.

When the New Dehli heat became oppressive like this, climbed past a hundred degrees and burned relentlessly into the evening, Mrs. Shah would give up any plans of going out to shop or join a friend at the club for afternoon tea. She would let loose her hair from its bun, unwrap the silky folds of her sari, and nap in the cool of her bedroom until Mr. Shah returned home from the office. But this afternoon, after she had drawn the blinds and turned on the air conditioning, she did not go to sleep.