Letty

Letty: a short story by Paul William Roberts robertspaulwilliam@gmail.com

     'I hate doing this, maan...'

'You say that every year,' she said, as she also said every year.

The Monsoon was approaching, with a charcoal sky sagging in vast dark tendrils down over the slate-grey ocean, turning even yolky yellow sands on the long beach to an anemic ochre-pink, like the skin of westerners. Jean-Claude and his girlfriend, Marianne, were packing all their electronics – the stereo, radio, amplifiers, guitars and some of the cameras – along with anything made of leather, into large trunks stacked with big bags of anhydrous silica. When the rains came, extreme damp would destroy your circuit boards and coat your shoes or sandals with a greenish rime of mold. Whatever was being left in the villa while they spent this coming season up in one of the hill stations, and perhaps in Delhi or Bombay as well, had to be safely stored and locked away. Joseph, the house-boy, would keep an eye on everything and make sure the curved terracotta roof tiles did not leak too badly. The European and American population of Anjuna – mostly hippies, drifters and the odd rock band – was also packing itself away, traipsing over to the east coast, or up into Nepal, some even taking a slow cheap bus across into Burma, maybe Thailand too. Jean-Claude had just clicked shut a padlock the size of his hand on the fourth and last trunk, when his dogs began to bark. Someone was rattling the clapper of an old brass bell that hung above a tall faded turquoise gate leading out from their walled garden. Past a footpath to the village it led to the north, and onto the wide deserted beach to the west. Jean-Claude snapped his fingers at Joseph, who was not so much a "boy" as a man in his fifties with the frame of a twelve-year-old. His bare feet slapping on the corroded umber paving stones covering most of this so-called garden, Joseph ran to the clanging gate, but so slowly that a minute seemed to have passed before he reached it.

'Hey, Joe,' said Letizia Manin, standing there in her orange silk salwar kameez, framed by rutted sands, ruffled silvery-iron waves and drifting palm fronds.

'Letty!' cried Marianne, hastening down to greet her. 'What on earth are you doing here?'

Seated on an outsized red velvet cushion, her silver toe-rings tinkling against cool tiles, strands of wavy blonde hair troubled by a ceiling fan's lethargic progress through sultry air so heavy you could hold it, Letizia told both of them together. As she did, piecing together the disjointed narrative like a quilt, Jean-Claude, wielding a blue Dupont lighter, heated one corner of a slab of black hashish the size of a 19th century novel. It was streaked with white veins of opium, and he now crumbled granules into a pile of tobacco broken from three Dunhill cigarettes, stuffing this mixture into a conical chillum, which was lit and, with a paisley handkerchief over the end to act as a filter, passed around while Letty talked.

'In short,' she said, deciding the quilt was just a bedsheet, 'I lost my faith. The ashram is a madhouse of backbiting and gossip, everyone thinking that Baba is sending them secret messages, when in truth he doesn't even seem to have a message at all – just chanting fucking bhajans all day long. We sat there in the sand from morning to night just waiting for him to come out in his fancy saffron robes and waft about giving blessings. All anyone really wanted was an interview, private time alone with him. And some had really urgent reasons to get his help – they were dying or going through some kind of crisis – but if he called anyone in it was invariably the richer westerners, the fat-cats from Delhi, or the maharanis. I got sick of it. And I'd had this letter from home: my dad was dying – now he's dead...'

'Rough, maan,' Jean-Claude interrupted in his soupy Belgian accent, inhaling deeply, while handing the chillum to her.

'Let her finish,' said Marianne snappily.