The Stochastic Man

23

Sundara vanished at the end of June, leaving no message, and was gone for five days. I didn’t notify the police. When she returned, saying nothing by way of explanation, I didn’t ask where she had been. Bombay again, Tierra del Fuego, Capetown, Bangkok, they were all the same to me. I was becoming a good Transit husband. Perhaps she had spent all five days spread-eagled on the altar at some local Transit house, if they have altars, or perhaps she’d been putting in time at a Bronx bordello. Didn’t know, didn’t want to care. We were badly out of touch with each other now, skating side by side over thin ice and never once glancing toward each other, never once exchanging a word, just gliding on silently toward an unknown and perilous destination. Transit processes occupied her energies night and day, day and night. What do you get out of it? I wanted to ask her. What does it mean to you? But I didn’t. One sticky July evening she came home late from doing God knows what in the city, wearing a sheer turquoise sari that clung to her moist skin with a lasciviousness that would get her a ten-year sentence for public lewdity in puritan New Delhi, and came up to me and rested her arms on my shoulders and sighed and leaned close to me, so that I felt the warmth of her body and it made me tremble, and her eyes met mine, and there was in her dark shining eyes a look of pain and loss and regret, a terrible look of aching grief. And as though I were able to read her thoughts, I could clearly hear her telling me, “Say the word, Lew, only say the word, and I’ll quit them, and everything will be as it used to be for us.” I know that was what her eyes were telling me. But I didn’t say the word. Why did I remain silent? Because I suspected Sundara was merely playing out another meaningless Transit exercise on me, playing a game of Did-you-think-I-meant-it? Or because somewhere within me I really didn’t want her to swerve from the course she had chosen?