The man doesn’t look at Lucia or me. All the force of his rage is concentrated on Mallika. ‘Okay, okay, that’s enough,’ I tell him. ‘We’ll be fine.’
We walk away from him and turn into the gate. The house seems far away, but the dogs are running towards us, barking and shattering all the unease. Lucia starts to skip down the driveway, the heavy ghagra choli catching in the weeds, the frangipani crown long demolished. She’s lifting her legs up and down, her sequinned skirt glinting in the torchlight. ‘Wait,’ I shout. ‘Wait, Lucy!’ But she refuses to hear. Up down, up down. She moves at the pace of a heartbeat. I watch the dogs circle her, running around and around in excitement. And it is girlhood, it is love, it is a word caught in my throat. Is that why they say my heart skipped a beat? Because before you can name it, you’re breathing again.
26
What happens to old lovers? What must we do with them?
They line up in military fashion, in order of height and seniority. Blake, Dawit, Vik. To have lived this long and to have such paltry representation. Was there really no one else? No lone evening of love with a stranger? Are these the only faces I must recall when I’m swimming underwater, trying to bring it all back?
I’ve been living in seclusion ever since Blake left a month ago. The last conversation I had with Vik was at the start of the year in this café with its jungle of ferns. Here I am again, this time with Rohini. We face each other under a languid fan, stirring demerara sugar into our cappuccinos. I am gathering all the distances, all the grand vistas and low-lying ditches, wondering what happens to the days in between. What are they filled with? Life seems so wasteful. I cannot account for much.
There are some memories that play repeatedly. The initial burn of desire with Vik. That first kiss. Leaning towards each other in the car, drinking of each other. I remember driving to the beach, listening to Nina Simone, laying my head down in his lap, watching the moon. I remember snatches of loving. But I don’t remember the exact words. What did we say to each other? It’s as if the rooms where these things happened still stand somewhere like an exhibition. They carry smells – salt, murk, rose petal – but the words are gone, even the actions are ghost actions. A caress. A crushing of limbs.
‘Do old boyfriends always seem diminished to you?’ Rohini asks.
‘Not really. I’m the one who feels diminished. It’s as if they’ve been released. As if I’d been the one holding them back in some way, stifling their potential. Blake is going to have a baby, you know. Finally, he’s going to have a baby.’
‘And Vik? Has he reached out?’
‘A drunken text. One measly drunken text, saying, Jaan, what have we done? That’s it.’
‘You deserve better.’
Such a strange thing the body is. Sometimes you’re living in the skin of it, you’re inseparable. Then there are times you can’t even hear one another. Everything is far. And there’s dryness, such dryness. Is it about love, then? The body needing to be in a state of desire?
Rohini tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. I have thought of her disparagingly in the past, and I’m sorry for it now because I see she is not as cunning as I make her out to be. ‘You’ll find someone else,’ she says.
‘I wonder what the point is. But tell me, how do you survive marriage? Isn’t there always the inevitability of decay?’
Rohini laughs. As always it is an unexpected sound. A gurgle. Those tiny pearl teeth flashing. That small pink tongue flickering, lizard-like. ‘It comes down to a kind of duty, doesn’t it? Everything is designed to wear us down, but we can’t just abandon things when they become difficult.’
‘But doesn’t everything begin to drag?’
‘It’s about giving up or staying the course, that’s how I look at it. You know, this morning I was thinking about this girl I knew in college. Beautiful thing with long beautiful hair. Brilliant as well, I mean she was a top-rank student. She hung herself from a ceiling fan in the college room. Everyone was so shocked. If someone like her was going to kill herself, what were we still doing alive? She always wore long skirts tucked into one corner of her waist so she looked like a flamenco dancer. I wrote a poem for her, and this morning on Facebook I saw that her boyfriend is now married and has a kid. His life has continued, and even though we’re not really in touch, his presence is constantly validated. But for a moment I’d forgotten her name. I had to look for that old poem to remember her name. It’s kind of unforgivable. Maybe living is about surviving, about being tenacious.’
‘In this city?’
‘Why not?’
‘Look at these people. I feel most of them are here because they can’t be anywhere else.’
‘Maybe it’s what you feel about your own situation.’
‘Maybe.’
That night I get stoned and spend hours waving a mosquito bat in the air trying to kill monsters. I’m wearing a dress that normally makes me feel sexy, but something doesn’t sit right. Either I’ve put on weight or the muscles in my stomach aren’t as strong as they used to be, because my back droops and it requires too great an effort to straighten myself.
It is Samir, Rohini, Praveen, the neighbour girl Tanya, and I. The last time I’d seen Tanya the resident Pomeranians had shredded her daughter’s toy pig on the floor, and she’d had to sweep the snivelling child up against her hip and storm out. She had been a heavy presence that evening. The disappearance of the father of her child had absorbed her every disappointment, and it seemed as if she couldn’t get beyond this beseeching – look what has happened to me. She has advanced since then. The magic of Praveen’s nocturnal visits, perhaps, or simply the understanding that life with that disappeared man would have been unbearable.
‘You look well,’ I tell her.
She is in an ikat jumpsuit, large silver anklets gleaming from under the cowl pants, breasts wide and settled, resembling the happy stupor of Loulou and Leela, brushed and fed, occupying two ends of the divan like bolster cushions.
‘Life is good,’ she says, stroking one elbow continuously.
Is it always so obvious when a woman decides to take a lover? Something changes, even though the body’s dimensions remain the same. The way she holds herself, stakes her place.
‘My mother is visiting so I’m getting some help with Mitali. I’ve rediscovered my sexual organs. Life is good.’
The bar room is an air-conditioned alcove with glass doors, old-fashioned rosewood furniture and tall, gleaming paper lamps. I kick my shoes off and enjoy the softness of the rug underfoot. There is an easy camaraderie to this alchemy tonight, and in the exuberance, Praveen suggests we make a master plan to take over administration of the city.
‘I’ll be in charge of public works,’ he says. ‘Grace – you take education. Samir, you’re our chief minister. Ro, you take art and crafts. Tanya, what are you going to do? Want to take health?’
We pass the joint around and I propose that henceforth all children will be educated in matters of a practical nature. ‘We’ll take them camping. They must learn how to change car tyres, how to kill and cook the things they eat, everything, you know? Stuff that’s actually useful.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Praveen says, ‘that’s it. And I propose that we microdose the water supply with LSD.’
‘Hang on,’ Tanya squawks. ‘You got to pass that through my desk, buddy. I’m not sure that’s a good thing for our citizens.’
‘Are you kidding me? It’s a known fact that LSD has curative powers. People with anxiety and depression. Dude, all those robotic people, they need a little injection.’
‘As chief I’m going to step in,’ Samir says. ‘Recent studies have proved that while LSD in the short run triggers temporary psychosis, in the long term it increases optimism and openness. It’s all about the serotonin receptors.’
‘What bull!’ Tanya shrieks.
‘Why the fuck have I been given arts and crafts?’ Rohini interjects.
It is joyful banter, one of those rare Madras nights
when I feel entirely happy for existing. I can sit among these people with the knowledge that nothing I do is harming anyone else, that the only decision I need to make is when exactly I will need to get up and pee. There is no possibility of failure, and for these few hours, it is a kind of completeness.
‘So, are the animals going to be drinking the same water?’ Tanya is saying. ‘I mean we’re going to have a Lord of the Flies situation. Little camping children running around slitting pigs’ throats and the poor piggies are going to be tripping out like crazy. It’ll be anarchy. I can’t allow it.’
‘Fine. We microdose just once a week. Limited quantity, but steady. I’m telling you. It’s what the people need. And the pigs.’
Rohini’s cook has gone to her village for a wedding, so we decide to order food instead of making something ourselves. ‘We’re so freaking global now,’ I say, scanning through food menus on my phone. ‘Imagine doing this twenty years ago in this city. Forget about ordering food online, but sushi! Too much.’
‘Why is the front of the body more shameful than the back?’ Tanya says, suddenly. ‘I know it’s a weird question, but this morning I thought I saw someone in the opposite block of flats looking through to my bathroom window with a pair of binoculars, and the first thing I did was to show him my back. Why?’
The doorbell rings and all of us turn to look at it in dumb wonder. Have we progressed so much that food will appear just by thinking about it?
Rohini gets up to open the door and it is Vik. With him is a girl.
‘We were passing by,’ Vik says. ‘You guys want to come? Golti’s party, remember?’
They’re standing at the doorway and Rohini is saying something to him that I can’t hear. I march to the door. ‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Oh, hey,’ Vik says. The girl next to him is foreign, thin. She’s in torn black jeans and a black tank top. Arms like letter openers – tapered, flat. The face is unimpressive. I’ve seen manhole covers more beautiful.
‘Franny, this is Grace.’
‘Hi,’ she says, extending a sunburnt hand; her voice – car crunching over gravel. ‘I’m Francesca.’
‘So, no worries, we’ll just head,’ Vik says. The girl turns around and walks back towards the lift. ‘Just hang on,’ he says to her, ‘I’ll be with you in a second.’
He closes the front door gently behind him; Rohini disappears into the kitchen. ‘I wanted to tell you myself. It’s nothing serious, but I didn’t want you to hear.’
‘It’s fine,’ I say. I press the sides of my dress with both hands. ‘I mean, you can do whatever you want.’
‘Okay.’ He inhales loudly and takes hold of my wrist with his hand. That leaf-like hand. ‘Listen, are you okay?’
‘I’m fine. You should probably go.’ I turn away from him, back to the bar room.
They blink at me, four cows. ‘All right, one of you can fucking say something,’ I say.
Praveen is the first to speak. ‘Miss G, it’s not even worth talking about. I mean, that kid is clueless, right? He doesn’t have the maturity you need. Like, I saw him a few weeks ago with this girl and I asked him, Where’s she from, what’s this about? and you know, he gives this sly smile and says how he met her in Hampi or whatever. So, okay, I go out with them one night, she’s doing the usual Italian hippie thing, finding herself or whatever – lady can do some drugs, I can tell you – but she’s messed up. That chick needs her chakras broken.’
‘She’s Italian, seriously?’
Tanya laughs. ‘You know, when Mitali’s dad resurfaced, every person I met started telling me about the Japanese art of broken things. I swear to God, everyone was going on about this kintsugi shit. They were like, you should think about it, Tanya, because the thing is more beautiful for having been broken or whatever. I could have strangled them all. I don’t want a beautiful, broken, patched-together fucking thing. I want it whole. So I’m not going to say anything to you, except move it along.’
When the sushi arrives we sit at the table and eat from takeaway boxes. It’s as if a season has passed. The dining room is warm and the dogs Loulou and Leela have followed us out but have chosen to lie by the threshold, where a conduit of cool air hits their fluffy faces. Later, after Praveen and Tanya have left, Rohini and I stand out on the balcony while Samir carries glasses to the kitchen.
‘Sorry, I should have said something, warned you, but I thought it was just a thing,’ she says.
‘So it’s not just a thing.’
‘It’s been a few weeks. Who knows what that boy thinks. I want to shake him.’
That night I lie on the fold-out couch and think of summers in Tranquebar, of things appearing to be what they are not. I see the house where Ma grew up – that squat, white, single-storey house on Queen Street, its low red-tiled roof and running veranda. The main room, where a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi hung alongside Jesus on the Cross, the three lime-green sofas facing the street like a firing squad, the arcades of wooden pillars, Grandpa’s office, which was really his secret drinking room where his friends and him would drink rum from steel tumblers. The kitchens, the washing stones, the servants’ quarters, the clothes lines and cowshed. All the servant girls around Grandma’s feet peeling vegetables, grinding spices, plucking chickens, drying rice, soaking lentils.
I remember Grandpa as he was in the photographs – shaped like a giant egg, pants hitched up to just underneath his impressive man boobs, walking regally down the street with his black umbrella, shooing off stray dogs, haggling with fishmongers and fruit-sellers. I see him sitting in his armchair quoting his hero, the father of the nation, ‘I will let the winds from all corners blow freely through my house, but I refuse to be blown off my feet.’
Ma telling me on one of her spring visits to Charlotte, casually, ‘He was a terrible husband. Jealous, petty. He used to beat Grandma if she smiled too sweetly at other men.’ How hearing her talk made it sound like it was a story from someone else’s life.
And how it happened when they began dying – the family breaking into small groups, the hushed courtyard. My mother’s brothers selling the house and dividing the profits between them.
A year later, a tsunami would storm across the rocks and knock down half the houses in that town. It was like a recurring dream from childhood – a house by the sea that is lifted like a tree by its roots into the sky. I mourned for that house, went to stand again and again on the spot where my mother was born and where my grandparents had made a life, and I can still hear my grandfather rocking determinedly in his chair, challenging the winds, proclaiming how no one was ever going to blow him off his feet.
27
It’s August and I feel a tiredness in my body. I want to lie down and forget about the city. I want something different. I drive slowly to the house. A cluster of brown birds scuttle off the path. The dogs run up the driveway to greet me, barking and howling. Bagheera’s puppies are due soon. There is something majestic about her, even though she has grown so heavy and slow. After this round of birthing, we’ll have to find a way to fix her.
The house looks silent, all the blue shutters closed. The dogs’ dishes are scattered on the porch, empty of water. I sound the horn. ‘Mallika!’ I shout.
The garden hose is coiled in a heap on the lawn. ‘Mallika!’ I shout again.
I leave the groceries in the car and walk around the house to see if she’s watering the trees along the stone path. I look through the French doors. Everything is hushed. The patio furniture has been pushed inside, the cushions heaped one on top of the other. ‘Lucy,’ I yell.
I walk around the house again, past the car, towards Mallika’s little house. Everything is eerily neat. No vessels outside, no hanging clothes. The sand has been raked and there’s no sign of a recent wood fire. There’s a padlock on the door.
I run now, heart erratic, body warm and light. I stare at the wall of the bathroom downstairs. The shower area is open to the sky and it’s where I always imagined an intruder could enter. All they’d need to do is jum
p the wall, and if the door to the bedroom wasn’t locked, as it frequently wasn’t, walk through. I lift my arms up against the wall and try jumping. It’s not so easy to climb a wall without a ladder or someone’s hands to push you over. I make hopeless movements and slump in the grass.
Raja, Dimple and Golly are around me, barking, excited. ‘What’s happened?’ I say. ‘Where is everyone?’
My mouth is dry and there’s a bad smell coming from it. I want to lie on the ground and stay here. I think of who I can call and, suddenly, I’m overcome with tears. I feel there should be someone I can call. Someone who’s doing this with me.
I get up and move towards the car, reach for the phone in my handbag and dial Mallika’s number. Nothing. I get in and start the engine. The dogs begin to howl in confusion. I go back up the driveway, through the gate to Valluvan’s house. I’ve never driven there before because I was always embarrassed to show them my car, but I don’t know where I must go and what has happened.
There’s no place to park so I stop the car a little ahead of the house, blocking the small tarmacked road. The door of Valluvan’s house is open, as always. I stand at the threshold, lean my body in. ‘Valluvan,’ I say. ‘Are you here?’
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