Mr. Gupta of San Sebastian, Utah
Mr. Gupta of San Sebastian, Utah
Short Story
“My sister married a Canadian and they have lots of Indians up there only they call them Pakistanis. Do you want my driver’s license number or my car license number here?” Evelyn poised the leaky ball-point above the registration form and looked through her thick glasses at the dark, young man.
“Your car plates, madam,” said Mr. Gupta. “That’s right. Is it Utah plates?”
“No, California. I live in California.” She pushed her grey hair behind her ears.
“India and Pakistan are not the same, madam,” said Mr. Gupta softly. Evelyn dropped the pen on the counter and just looked at his black eyes. She held out her hand for the room key.
“I’ve been driving all night,” she said.
“Yes, madam, you are in number 122. Straight down here and around to the back of the motel. Drive around this way. Those men are working on the other side. You can’t get through that way.”
Evelyn walked out into the dry fire of the desert wind, and the heavy tar fumes sickened her stomach. The workmen looked at her and she looked away. She couldn’t believe a human being could pour asphalt in this desert heat. It must be like Hell. Just like being punished in Hell. But everybody had to earn a living, she thought, that’s true.
And some people earn death, she thought. That’s true, too. Retribution, she knew, was real.
The motel room was dingy and run-down and smelled dusty. She felt the mattress. Thank God, it was firm. The next thing she noticed was a Book of Mormon on the bedside table. She picked it up and carried it into the bathroom. She dropped it into the wastepaper basket. Utah was like a foreign country to her. That’s what she had always liked about travelling through it with her husband before he divorced her. These Mormons were so strange. They looked just like Americans, but they had added all kinds of stories to the Bible. Well, they’d be punished for that, she knew. Imagine Jesus coming to America a thousand years before Columbus and preaching to the Indians. This made her think of Mr. Gupta at the front desk. Why did he call himself an Indian? Everybody knew that was confusing in the United States, what with so many different kinds of American Indians still running around out here. She preferred to call him a Pakistani, it made it easier to understand that he wasn’t a Navaho or a Geronimo or something like that. She’d call him a Pakistani, just like her sister would, like her Canadian brother-in-law would.
At least the air-conditioner in the room was strong, and within minutes the room was actually chilly. Evelyn looked at the gold watch on her wrist. It looked so tiny there. It had been her mother’s. Evelyn held the watch up to her glasses. Only nine in the morning. It was already a hundred degrees outside, at least. She pulled the black-out drapes, turned out the bedside lamp and crawled under the blanket. Evelyn was taking her brother-in-law’s advice. She’d sleep through the day heat of Utah, sleep in St. Sebastian, then drive on to Colorado during the night. It had been five years since she’d been to Denver. She wondered if they’d feel like strangers when she got there.
Even after driving all night, Evelyn couldn’t get to sleep. The sheets felt old and worn thin and slick with use, and that made her skin crawl. She started thinking about the Book of Mormon lying in the wastebasket. She hauled herself out of bed and trundled her overly-tired body slowly through the darkened room towards the bathroom. She’d fetch the Mormon book and take a look at the color plates and maybe read some of the wickedness there. Thank the Lord she’d been raised in a real Christian home. Cursed be anyone that adds to or takes away from the Word of God, she quoted to herself. That’s what it said in The Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine.
“Revelation,” she said out loud.
Who was this St. Sebastian, she wondered. Sounded like a Catholic saint. How did his name get brought to Mormon Utah anyway? She’d ask the Pakistani later. Maybe he’d know. He was probably a Christian. It was usually the missionized ones who came over. Usually the heathens didn’t migrate but stayed put at home with all their gods and such.
Evelyn put out her hand in the darkness and groped her way along the wall toward the bathroom.
She thought of all their gods she’d seen in pictures. Elephant-headed nonsense. Just like in the Bible days. Golden calves and all. Nothing had changed since the days of the Children of Israel. Golden calves and Sodom and Gomorrah and the flood. “Retribution,” she said sadly.
My God. Maybe the Pakistani was a Mormon. Otherwise, why on earth would he end up here in the desert of south Utah? A Hindu Mormon. Evelyn was astonished at the thought. She’d ask him when she checked out.
Evelyn banged her knee against the sharp corner of the television table, hard, and felt a trickle of blood run down her shin. She threw The Book of Mormon across the room. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Oh, Lord,” she said. “That stupid Pakistani! Why did he put such a cheap old sharp table half in the doorway here anyway.”
She fumbled for the light and knocked a glass off the counter. It shattered on the linoleum floor. Evelyn was barefooted. Her knee was already wounded, she wasn’t wearing her spectacles, and now the floor was covered with broken glass. This was an evil place.
****
Later, in the middle of the day, with the heavy dirty curtains still pulled firmly shut against the heat and light of the Utah sun, Evelyn gave up trying to get any sleep at all. She could feel bits of broken glass in her heel. But she wouldn’t go to a doctor in this odd state. She’d wait ’til Colorado if she could. Maybe in Grand Junction. But she had already begun to think that maybe Colorado, too, was an evil place. Denver, anyway.
She tossed in the bed and thought she could feel her cuts festering.
****
“My name is Gupta, madam,” the motel owner replied to her question.
“Are you a Christian, Mr. Gupta? Or a Mormon?”
Evelyn hadn’t slept a wink all day, and her round plump face was pale and slightly puffy around the eyes and cheeks. The light in the motel room had been a dim thirty watt bulb, and she had put on too much make-up. Her lips were too red and her eye-liner and mascara too thick and black. Her whole face was slightly off-center.
“I’m a Christian, Mr. Gupta. What are you?” She shifted her large weak figure to her other foot. Mr. Gupta didn’t reply to her question. Evelyn patted her hair behind her ears and straightened her glasses.
“Why I want to know is, do you know a Christian doctor in St. Sebastian? I’ve got glass in my foot and can’t drive all the way to Missouri like this. My mother is dying and I’ve got to get to Missouri as soon as I can.” She looked at the watch on her wrist. She thought of Denver and was frightened because now she knew surely that it, too, was an evil place, just like this St. Sebastian. “You should put plastic glasses in the motel room. Or carpet on the floor. It’s dangerous. Are you a Christian or a Mormon?”
“I’m an Indian,” said Mr. Gupta.
He rocked his head slightly from side to side. It made Evelyn dizzy to look at.
“I thought I told you, Madam,” he said softly.
Evelyn wept. “Well, I’ve got to have a doctor. My foot will be infected. And I can’t stay here. I’ve got to get home before my old mother dies. I haven’t been home to Missouri in five years.” She rejected a handkerchief that Mr. Gupta offered her and dug through her purse for one of her own. She rubbed the corners of her eyes carefully and inspected the hanky for signs of mascara.
“It will be hard to find a doctor at this time of the night. Ten p.m. We’re a small town. But let me try for you. I’ll send him to 122.” Her tears made him uncomfortable. “I’m very sorry about your mother.” He rocked his head very gently.
Evelyn waved the handkerchief at him, as though at a pesky mosquito or gnat, and she looked away, fixed her eyes on a point outside the window. Then she looked at her little watch. She couldn’t look Mr. Gupta in the face.
“I can’t stay in that room,” she said. “I’ll sit right here in the lobby and wait. Please find someone. I’ve got to drive at night while it’s cool. This heat is too punishing out here. I told you my mother is dying and I’ve got to get to Missouri— Why did you ever come to such a place as this? What a God-forsaken desert.”
Evelyn sat down across from the front-desk in a large, plastic-leather easy chair. “But I guess it’s better than where you come from, what with all the starving beggars.” Evelyn wondered why she was born an American. It didn’t seem fair to the others, but she sure was glad. The throbbing in her foot made her remember her mishap, and she was afraid again. What an evil place this Utah was.
She looked out the front plate glass window, looked across the parking lot and into the darkness where the desert began. It was savage. An evil place. It wasn’t southwest Utah, she thought. It was no place. She looked at Mr. Gupta as he consulted the yellow pages of the telephone directory. She felt so lonely out here, so alone with no one, and dependent on a Pakistani. At least he was polite, and trying to be helpful.
****
Mr. Gupta pushed a rickety, chipped coffee table in front of Evelyn’s chair. She was surprised when he picked up her foot and gently placed it on the low table. His brown hands were delicate, long-fingered. His fingernails had little, white half moons at their base, and were better manicured than Evelyn’s. She rubbed her thumbs over the rough cuticles of her index fingers.
Mr. Gupta went behind the desk, and when he had his back turned, Evelyn tucked her dress around and under her legs. He came back with a little first aid kit with a red cross on it. Mr. Gupta washed Evelyn’s foot with a peppermint antiseptic, she could smell the peppermint when he blew on her foot to soothe the sting. When he touched her foot with his brown hands, this reminded Evelyn of something familiar from the dim past, but she pushed it out of her mind forcefully. Mr. Gupta took out a roll of gauze, as white and dazzling as a bride, and began to work it gently round and round Evelyn’s foot.
“This will help until the doctor gets here. We want to keep it clean, madam.”
“You should’a been a doctor, Mr. Gupta, not a motel-keeper. Look how well you wrapped up my foot there.” Evelyn was amazed.
“Let me give you a different room,” said Mr. Gupta. “You need to rest. The doctor promised he’d be here as soon as the baby is delivered, but that could be a long time. You never know.”
He bobbed his head from side to side and Evelyn imitated him. “Why do you do that?”she said. Mr. Gupta offered a small smile in response and set about doing some paperwork behind the tall, front desk.
Evelyn picked up a magazine, and from time to time she made some comment to Mr. Gupta about the articles she read there. Now she stared idly out the window. A fat full moon had come up over the faraway red cliffs and sat there now on the rim. Like Humpty-Dumpty, she thought. She recited to herself:
Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall
Evelyn smiled ruefully. “Do you have any children, Mr. Gupta?”
“Children?” He looked up from his account books. “No. No children.”
“Are you married, Mr. Gupta? A smart young man like you.”
“I was. I was married.” Mr. Gupta removed his glasses and sat up straight. There was silence in the lobby. Only the refrigeration-unit of the Cola machine made a slight whirring noise.
“It’s ok,” said Evelyn. “I was, too. I don’t believe in divorce, but my husband—”
“My wife died,” said Mr. Gupta simply.
Evelyn looked as though Mr. Gupta had slapped her. He was so young to have a dead wife.
Mr. Gupta still sat straight and tall. Evelyn could barely hear his voice. “She was twenty-four. Young and healthy. One day a blood vessel erupted in her brain and she died. Right here in this lobby. We were working together and laughing about a silly television program.” Mr. Gupta indicated the silent, staring TV set in the corner. “I knew her since we were children. We grew up together. Our families arranged the marriage. I always loved her.”
Evelyn didn’t say anything.
“Life is so fragile,” said Mr. Gupta. He got up and went to the bathroom at the end of the lobby. He went in and closed the door behind him.
Evelyn’s foot pained her when she stood up on it, but she walked out the door, got in her car, and started the engine. The moon on her right had not fallen off the cliff, but had steadily risen in the sky and poured its yellow light across the raw, red rock face far down from St. Sebastian, and across the unending desert.
Evelyn drove off down the highway, faster than she should have. She pushed the buttons and rolled down all the windows. The warm night air howled through her car. Her foot throbbed and she could feel the bandage growing warm and sticky. She left the town of St. Sebastian far behind.
“My old mother died a long time ago, Mr. Gupta. I ain’t going to Missouri,” she yelled into the empty desert night. “I’m going to Denver.”
Evelyn’s thoughts whirled round and round then, like the wind blowing through the open windows. “My son, my son is dying. A professor at the University in Denver. My son. He was a smart boy. My son my son.”
Evelyn hit a rabbit or something small. It made a thud against the underside of the car.
“I haven’t seen him in five years, Mr. Gupta,” she yelled into the howling air. “We’re strangers. He’s dying. He has AIDS, Mr. Gupta. You know what all that means. Don’t tell me about your young wife like that. I don’t hardly know you. Pakistanis don’t know the meaning of privacy.”
She drove faster. “A Hindu Mormon. Heathens.” Evelyn mouthed the words into the roaring desert air.
Evelyn was angry. She hated Mr. Gupta.
My memoir:
The Land Near Oz: Two Gay Yankees Move to New Zealand
Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published on Substack.
Before too long!
In a Desert or a City
BOOK I
‘PRINCE CARTIER’ or HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE BEING GAY WITH MY SAUDI PRINCE AND TO START WORRYING
BOOK II
MONSIEUR LE PRINCE, PARIS
BOOK III
THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS
BOOK IV
TYROMANCY AND LUCIFER
BOOK V
WHY WAIT FOR THE LIGHT?