Doctored by Sandeep Jauhar Read Free Book Online Page B

“tavern,” a tourist attraction just up the road, where he said we could get “happy together.” With Sonia relaxing by the pool at the hotel, I accepted his proposition. After hopping about two hundred yards on the scorching white sand, we arrived at the back entrance to a bamboo shack, where a group of Americans were lounging on cheap rattan furniture, taking hits from a water pipe. Tiny lamps dangling from wooden beams bathed the room in a chocolaty orange. I sat down, and almost immediately the rim of a water bong was sealed around my lips and thick white smoke was gurgling through a purple curlicue shaft. The giggling tourists egged me on. It was a scene right out of the dorms at Berkeley.
    Soon towering speakers were piping out joyful Dead tunes, and I was tripping heavily in a hallucinatory mix of speed and calm. Out on the deck, I gazed at a stunning palm-fringed tableau. It felt as if I were in a movie, a contrived visual narrative of an unsuspecting traveler stoned to oblivion in a foreign land. My mind was moving randomly through an array of interconnecting circles. Why is there space? How did it arise? Why are there jeans and tile floors and chairs of different material? So much we don’t understand!
    Clement joined me on the terrace. His bandanna gave the illusion of streaming the colors of the rainbow. “This is the strongest shit I’ve ever smoked,” I told him, feeling dizzy. He just laughed.
    The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows across the wooden deck. The sky was painted in swirls of pastel mixed with bubbly streaks of white. It reminded me of springtime in Berkeley, and thus of Lisa, my college girlfriend. What had happened to her? Where was she now? The last time we’d spoken was before I got married, when she recalled the scooter rides in the Berkeley Hills in those carefree early days. So strange that I didn’t still think about her every day: those brown curls and milky white skin; the raffish grin. At one time all paths of thought had converged on her. I used to obsess about her, her disease—lupus—and the miscarriages doctors predicted she’d have. I remembered that birthday eve when my father asked me, “Don’t you want children?” and my anguish for her gave way to my own desires. In the end, I abandoned her because I didn’t have the courage to cope with her illness. I gave her up to avoid the terrible fate of being without her.
    I suddenly became aware that Clement was talking to me. “Why you so serious?” he said.
    I shook my head and continued to gaze at the beach.
    â€œSomethin’ is botherin’ you,” he said. I glanced at him. Fervidness was radiating from his dirty yellow sclera. I mentioned the problems that Sonia and I were having.
    â€œYou are injurin’ yourself,” he intoned. “And you are hurtin’ her, too.”
    I nodded, staring at the turquoise water.
    â€œDon’t worry,” he said. “You will have a boy.”
    I turned to him. His face was vibrating. “A boy?” I said.
    He nodded confidently. “A son.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    â€œBecause I am a Rastafarian.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œIt means I believe in me, and I believe in you, too.”
    That night I told Sonia about Clement’s prediction. She seemed pleased. Though neither of us really cared whether we had a boy or a girl, Sonia, having grown up in a family of girls—two sisters, mostly female cousins—had been hoping for at least one boy. Later at the hotel, lying awake in bed, I told myself that if I ever had a child, I would be a different kind of father from my own dad, who had been too busy with his professional struggles to develop friendships with his children. He did a passable job—acceptable in that era—and we all ended up just fine. But he didn’t elevate to the highest ranks of parenting. He used coarse tools, like guilt,