You brought me here to have a shower. So, I'm trying to take a shower, but you're jumping around like a rabbit. What's your problem?"
"You were naked, Lin! Naked, without any clothes also!"
"That's how I take a shower," I said, exasperated by his mysterious terror. He was darting about, peering through the tatami matting at various places. "That's how everyone takes a shower, isn't it?" "No! No! No, Lin!" he corrected, returning to face me. A desperate expression contorted his normally happy features.
"You don't take your clothes off?"
"No, Lin! This is India. Nobody can take his clothes off, not even to wash his bodies. This is India. Nobody is ever naked in India. And especially, nobody is naked without clothes."
"So... how do you take a shower?"
"We wear it the underpants, for having a bath in India."
"Well, that's fine," I said, dropping the towel to reveal my black jockey shorts. "I'm wearing underpants."
"Yaaah!" Prabaker screamed, diving for the towel and covering me again.
"Those teeny pieces, Lin? Those are not the underpants. Those are the under-underpants only. You must have it the over-underpants."
"The... over-underpants?"
"Yes. Certainly. Like these, my ones, that I am wearing."
He unbuttoned his own trousers enough to show me that he wore a pair of green shorts under his clothes.
"In India, the men are wearing this over-underpants, under their clothes, at all times, and in all the situations. Even if they are wearing under-underpants, still they are wearing over- underpants, over their unders. You see?"
"No."
"Well, just you wait here. I will get you some over-underpants for your bath. But don't remove your towel. Please! Promise! If the people see you without the towel, in such teeny pieces, they will be like a wild people. Wait here!"
He darted off, and after a few minutes returned with two pairs of red football shorts.
"Here, Lin," he puffed. "You are such a big fellow, I hope we can get a good fits. These are from Fat Satish. He is so fat, I think they might fit you. I told him a story, and then he gave it this two pairs for you. I told him that on the journey you had loose motions, and you made such a mess in your over-underpants that we had to throw them away."
"You told him," I asked, "that I shit my pants?"
"Oh, yes, Lin. I certainly couldn't tell him that you have no over-underpants!" "Well, of course not."
"I mean, what would he be thinking about you?"
"Thank you, Prabu," I muttered, through clenched teeth. If my tone had been any drier I wouldn't have needed a towel.
"That is my pleasure, Lin. I am your very good friend. So please, promise me that you will not be naked in India. Especially not without your clothes."
"I promise."
"I am so glad you make this promise, Lin. You are my very good friend, too, isn't it? Now I will take a bath also, like we are two brothers, and I will show you the Indian style."
So, we both took a shower, in the bathing area of his father's house. Watching him, and following his lead, I wet my body in a first rinse with two jugs of water from one of the large pots, and worked the soap beneath my shorts without ever taking them off. After the final rinse, and a quick dry off with the towel, he taught me how to tie a lungi around the wet shorts. The lungi was a sarong-like rectangle of cotton, worn from waist to ankle.
He gathered two long ends or corners of the lungi at the front, and then passed them around my waist, and rolled them under the top edge, in the small of my back. Within the encircling lungi, I removed and discarded my wet shorts and slipped on a dry pair of shorts underneath. With that technique, Prabaker assured me, I could take a shower in the open, and not offend his neighbours.
After the shower, and a delicious meal of dhal, rice, and homemade flatbreads, Prabaker and I watched as his parents and his two sisters opened their presents. We drank tea then, and for two hours we answered questions about me, and my home and family.
I tried to answer truthfully-without the crucial truth that in my hunted exile, I didn't think I would ever see my home or family again. At last, Prabaker announced that he was too tired to translate any more, and that I should be permitted to rest.
A bed made from the wood of coconut trees and with a stretched mattress, formed from a web of coconut-fibre rope, was set up for me in the open, outside Kishan's house. It was Kishan's own bed.
Prabaker told me that it might take two days to have a new one made to his father's satisfaction. Until then Kishan would sleep beside his son on the floor of the house, while I used his bed. I tried to resist, but my protests drowned in the sea of their gentle, relentless insistence. So I lay down on the poor farmer's bed, and my first night in that first Indian village ended, as it had begun, with surrender.
