The Petal’s Incarnations

I lied when he asked was I alone. Even though throughout the flow of faces there
was none with which to identify me, and though I had seen him watching me over a
shoulder, or as he leant against a railing, his head turning slowly, or had found him
falling behind, beckoning my own gaze over my own shoulder, ever since I had left
the gallery an hour before, I lied because I was alone. Fragile from a sleepless night, I
wanted to be alone.
But as my irritated eyes sought him that last time he was there beside me, asking
my name, and would I like an ice cream. His accent surprised me; it was different to
those newly weds, those mothers and those clumps of youth who had all day been
asking for (or simply snapping) photos. And as we circled the canopy east of India
Gate, speaking and licking in counterpoint, I flattered myself; it was brave for him, Dr
Omar Khalid, to have approach me. And when he complimented my camera, it was
not with irony (its black leather and chrome trim finish had been attracting looks from
those tech-savvy Indian youth), but because the Pentax was a suitable choice for
someone travelling. It was “strong as bone,” he said, tapping his forearm. Strange
man, he made me laugh. Though his expression didn’t change.
But it never did. It was then that I took his photo, and that same humourless gaze
stares out at me. How difficult to remember a face with only one expression! So I find
myself now pulling it out quite often, much more so than the few others of New Delhi;
the one of my husband all sunglasses and polo shirt, another of the entrance to the
courts, and one deep red sunset from the hotel balcony. It is a good photo. Three
horizontal bars: dark greenery at the bottom, then the milky white horizon, and pale
blue above. Omar stands to across them to the left, above him to the right is the red
sandstone of the canopy. He is still holding his cone. His shadow is long and the
crowd was thinning. I was tired, but we agreed to breakfast the next day, and as he
answered his phone in thick Arabic I waved and went directly to bed.

Passing beneath the white stone arches of Connaught Place before the dawny
violet light had settled into its baked haze, I had hoped to reach the café first, and not
wanting to make a disturbance back at my room had neither showered nor brushed my
hair. A little compact and a brush rattled fruitlessly in my bag; I saw him as soon as I
walked in, facing the entrance across a small square table with wooden chairs. He
closed a manila folder and placed it on the red tablecloth as I sat down, beside a
beaker holding some carnations. His eyes darted over my top, along my hair,
narrowing for a moment into my own. Then, gripping the table on either side he
arched himself over the table to inspect my shoes. I pulled them in under my chair and
crossed my arms, noticing a man in an unlit corner eating from a takeaway container
and near the kitchen a thin thread of incense smoke flowing from a plastic shrine. It
was cold, and the street sounds were soft, and it was not until my coffee came that I
felt warm and awake enough to return Omar’s gaze. Breathing in and holding, I
fixed my eyes on his for several seconds before relapsing, laughing as I expired. But
there was warmth in his severity, though whether communicated by his eyes or his
voice I can’t recall. But it was there.
It was then that I learnt he was a doctor, that he was employed by the state of Iraq
for his trilingual fluency in hospitals across India, that his current commission was
mainly bureaucratic, but that he hoped to soon be practising privately in Istanbul. He
came from a lineage of doctors; his father was a fellow at the University of Babylon
where he had completed his undergraduate. English was the language of medicine, the
common language amongst the hospitals of India, and I noticed with what relative
fluidity his English could articulate the particulars could conjure up the realities of the
procedures as he told me of his internship in a Baghdad surgical emergency clinic. His
tone was hypnotic; unwavering and unaffected by its subject, but a weight began to
press down on my abdomen as he spoke, and at a certain point my winces must have
become apparent, as Omar was silent when my eyes at last refocused and drifted back
upwards.
Ostensibly, I must have been staring at the carnations while Omar spoke of
amputations, of splinters of bone in muscle tissue and the near blackness of
dehydrated blood, though really I was seeing nothing. Or, if I was seeing, it was not
what was in front of me, but the tessellated carpet of the hallway the night before last,
or the face of the night porter as he questioned my husband, or of the couple in
dressing gowns leaning in their doorway. They were shameless; I hated them so much,
but that hatred had calmed me, finally.
Some coffee had seeped darkly through the tablecloth, and I drank a little cold
from the saucer, laughing nervously. Omar sighed, and taking up his folder from the
table withdrew half a dozen documents in English, each with a black and white
portrait in the top left corner. He was due at the courts, and would be thankful for
company.

The rickshaw took us along two sides of the honeycomb circuit that encloses the
India Gate monument and the canopy where yesterday, a little later than now, we had
met. Within a sudden break of the foliage both structures came into view along a clear
avenue, the smaller arch of the canopy aligning perfectly within the larger for one
moment. I looked over at Omar to see if he saw, but he was facing the other way;
outwards, into the city. Until the driver braked suddenly, the blast of the horn more
reflexive than the brake itself, there was silence; until then, I had to myself perhaps a
minute to gaze uninterrupted at the figure beside me. But the driver and Omar spoke
from then till our arrival.
Alighting at a leafy street we walked to the pale yellow buildings of the high court.
A sign on the cobblestones read ‘notary public, and elsewhere stacks of olive green
plastic chairs choked the thoroughfare, as if some event was soon to be set up. I was
asked for my camera upon entering by an armed man with a uniform that matched the
painted yellow of the walls, and we were led to a shaded courtyard and seated on an
iron bench. Omar went through his folder, reading briefly over each document and
replacing it beneath the others, and I could see the guard seated behind his desk in the
first room, turning over the camera and peering through the viewfinder. Satisfied with
his preparations, Omar stood up and looked me over again, placing a strand of hair
behind my ear. I winced at his touch and jerked away. Then we entered.
At the end of unlit corridors, past signs that signified doors that opened onto other
signs, through open yards of unnerving silence and dimness, were the offices of the
notaries. In each I sat next to Omar with little to do but study the passage and
idiosyncrasies of desktop fans, the gold leafed spines of law tomes, and the twitching
deaths of overhead lights, until the third or fourth clerk we encountered greeted me in
English. It was lucky I was to disorientated to respond, as Omar, stuttering for a
moment with eyes wide, had time to introduce me as a visiting cardiothoracic
specialist from the United Kingdom. The clerk nodded his head slowly, humming
deep in his throat, before suggesting that perhaps, for everyone’s benefit, we continue
the conversation in English.
I smiled. I was proud of my new position, and it was comforting to see Omar
unhinged, if only for a moment: when it became apparent the clerk had nothing more
to say to me, Omar repossessed his calm. The form of the dialogue resembled those
previous, but now I could comprehend the substance: Omar, extracting one of the
documents, would indicate the photograph and recount the patient’s history and the
misfortunes of their expatriation. . Each case was the centre of a tragedy, and each
tragedy culminated in an affliction prolonged only by bureaucratic absurdities.
The flourish was his description of the surgical procedure, and as he withdrew his
third document, female, thirty four years old, a metastatic tumour threatening
intracerebral haemorrhage, demonstrating the motions of the procedure with twisting
fists and scooping palms, I once again felt a pressing upon my stomach. My shoulders
tensed and my hands squeezed in between my thighs, and again I could feel the
weight of the wet sheets, could hear those short stabbing screams in the dark so
clearly, though I did not for so long believe they had been mine, as if they had
travelled some great distance between my throat and my ears. His palm over my
mouth just made the noise more intense, and it was not until the lights were on and
spare linen tumbling down from above the cupboard that it began to ebb, then muffled
voices and a knocking at the door and me having to stand with the sheets all bunched
up under my nightie, crying humiliated in the shower till the warmth stopped flowing.
Then silence. The stamp peeled from the paper with a soft sucking sound and the
clerk blew lightly on the moist red ink. I stood up and left without a word, scrambling
back through the labyrinth. I needed air.
Omar old me outside that four of the documents had been attested; they had failed
to come to an agreement on the other two, and, walking through the first courtyard to
the entrance, he explained that he would return tomorrow, perhaps even the next, till
he secured the correct price. That was the way of things, it was just a matter of
patience. I collected my camera from the front desk and we walked back up toward
the main road, where Omar thanked me, both for my company and my silence. I had
helped, he was certain.
The rickshaw dropped me back near the café. The street was too loud for
goodbyes, so Omar departed with a wave. I didn’t yet feel up to the hotel, so I walked
to the central park and brushed my hair on the grass. We hadn’t organised to see each
other again, but that was probably for the best. It was nice being a doctor for an hour,
a stranger for a day; to hide behind my strangeness. Or maybe hide from my
strangeness. Hiding from something. I turned my phone on and waited, and a few
seconds later they came: a cascade of pings, like tiny coins falling on glass.

The linen was taut and warm against my cheek when finally I returned to my
room. The stains were still visible though, splashed across the carpet like the little silk
petals from that first night. I suppose they must have been vacuumed. A note on the
hotel paper explained that a separate room had been booked, that I would be staying
alone tonight, and that my mother in law had booked flights for the next day And if I
refused to answer my phone maybe I could at least message to say that I had
understood the note. Fingering the indented Shangri-Las letterhead I reread the slanted
scribble for something to possibly misunderstand, something beyond statement. But
there was nothing.
I faced the wall and pretended to sleep when my husband came in the morning. He
packed for me, quietly, and then called my name to rouse me. There was no talking on
the flight home; I cried twice then slept until we landed, and felt nothing for the
second, shorter domestic flight or the taxi ride. My eyes were open but I’m not sure I
was really conscious. When we reached my apartment I went straight to my room as
he brought my luggage in, and heard the sounds of the floorboards, then the heavy
thud of the front door, and then nothing.
For two days I lay in bed, silencing calls and reading only the words of messages
that were visible without opening my phone, words like ‘covenant’, ‘cessation’, and
‘constructive abandonment’. My last proper meal had been my first night in India; I
had to order some takeaway, but turning again to my phone I saw a new name on the
screen: ‘Omar sent a photo’. I opened the image and gazed down through an operating
theatre at viscera blooming from surgical drapes, and I felt once more the weight
above my stomach, though this time so strong it pressed out what was in me, like bare
feet crushing an egg.
But it was then that my fever broke, and I remember as I ate leftovers from the
fridge (incredibly, less than a week old) feeling a strength returning from so far away
that it had been forgotten. Five more images came, one on the bus to the lawyer’s
office, another in the tea room at my old supermarket job. One came late at night as I
sat in bed reading, one more midway through a phone call with an old friend from art
school, and the last reached me as I was walking my mother’s dog in the park across
from her house. I thought about each of those people opening up a part of themselves
to a bright light and letting people inside, to have something removed, or something
fixed, and each of those people then returning to the world, returning home, there
flesh having become one. And I thought of all the lovelessness I had escaped.