Small Days and Nights

by Tishani Doshi

  Lenin, the boy, appears. He is taller and there is a new mannishness to his limbs. ‘Hi akka,’ he says. ‘Did you bring me chocolate?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Is your father here, or mother?’

  His face closes. ‘Amma,’ he shouts, and runs out of the front door.

  I hover there, not sure if I should go inside and wait, or keep watch here. Lenin is stroking the flanks of the car doors admiringly. He opens out the side mirror and smooths down his hair, juts his chin out and makes faces at his reflection.

  ‘Nila,’ I shout. ‘Nila, are you here?’

  Nila sees me at the door. Her hands are full of clothes. ‘Where have you been?’ she says, accusingly.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I say. ‘I don’t understand what’s happened.’

  She drops the bundle of clothes on the floor and starts beating her forehead softly. Tears stream out as she begins to convulse. A noise starts coming from within her – a harsh, painful sound. No words that I can understand except for ‘they are coming for us’.

  ‘Who?’ I say. ‘What’s happened? Where’s Mallika? Where’s Lucy?’

  ‘How can you ask this?’ she keeps saying.

  I pick up the clothes and heap them on the two jute stools by the almirah.

  ‘You,’ she says, her body shaking slowly now, as if she were dizzy. ‘You can leave whenever you want to, but what about me, what about my children?’

  ‘Nila,’ I say, shaking her. ‘Tell me what it is. I don’t understand anything.’

  At seven I walk down the stone path to the beach with a torch. The dark comes so quickly here, turning the edge of day into something altered and treacherous.

  ‘Golly, Golly!’ I shout. I try whistling, but the noise coming from me is feeble, like the sound of wind slipping through the small crack of a window. She had disappeared after I left for Valluvan’s house. Raja and Dimple follow alongside me, sometimes tearing ahead at an imaginary shape in the distance. I cry, a steady weep, and somehow this is comforting as I shine the torchlight across sand. The beach is deserted. I scan left and right. A bright orange moon is beginning to emerge from the sea.

  Kavitha had taken three hours to drive from the city. ‘Slow down,’ she’d said, when I phoned her, frantic after speaking with Nila. ‘You’re like a horse going off the rails.’

  Nila had given me the house key. ‘Two days,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting two days for you to come and get the key. What you do is not right.’ If she had been silent about her denunciations in the past, she was making the force of them clear now by repetition.

  When Kavitha arrived we walked into the house together. Lucy’s room had been emptied out. All her clothes and shoes, her retinue of friends – hankies, socks, and the newly added oven mitt – the tar shampoo for her dandruff, the silver anklets we had bought from the Kashmiri shop in Kodai, all had been taken away. How little the sum of her possessions, I thought. Only the soft toys remained in their usual corner, and I was ashamed, looking at the sad state of them.

  I went to lie on my bed while Kavitha set about making a stew for dinner. I kept thinking of what Nila had said – What you do is not right. I had wanted to explain that I had tried to do something right.

  ‘You came here and suddenly he starts thinking he’s a great man. That he can make changes in our village with someone like you to support him. But you didn’t support him, did you? So much money you’re sitting on, holding on to it like some queen’s cunt, but you’re just a common whore, stingy bitch.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I said, shocked, breathless.

  Nila had laughed, imitating my disbelief. ‘Oh, sorry, you didn’t learn these Tamil words? You don’t understand? No one taught you? Everyone is so nice to you all the time. Bowing and scratching at your fucking feet. As if you’re some kind of saint because of your sister.’

  ‘You think that’s easy?’ I shouted. ‘You don’t think what I do is hard?’

  She laughed meanly. ‘What do you know about hard? My husband lies in a hospital now. He might die. Then what will happen to me? How will I live?’ She was adamant, shrieking, ‘Everyone talks about accepting this, accepting that. Everything must be accepted. It’s God’s will. It’s someone’s will. As if we are nothing – mud – shit – I do not accept. You listen to me: I do not accept.’

  ‘Where are the girls?’ I asked.

  Lenin had stalked back into the room. He looked worried. ‘Amma,’ he kept saying, but she turned to him wildly. ‘Shut up! How many times I told you, now is not the time to talk. My daughters! Yes, what will happen to those girls now? They are at my mother’s. They’re not safe here.’

  ‘I must find Lucy. You call me if you need anything.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she sneered. ‘You are always so available.’

  When I go downstairs, Praveen is standing with Kavitha by the kitchen island fixing martinis, plopping olives into long-stemmed glasses. ‘Come here, darling,’ he says, wrapping his arms around me, squeezing my ribs.

  I feel like how I used to when Papi and Ma fought. It was always a kind of battering. After long arguments, after everything had been said and nothing could be taken back, one or the other would make a small touch, an advance. Usually Ma. And it always surprised me how that managed to restore things. But isn’t everything broken? I wanted to ask. Haven’t you shattered everything that you’ve taken so long to build? All the days of calm. Aren’t you exhausted by each other?

  The sun appears cauldron-like, and by nine in the morning the whole sky is milk-white with heat. The sea murmurs beneath and I can hear the sounds of a few catamarans puttering across the water. I look at the tops of the casuarina trees from bed. They are motionless, not a hint of breeze. There is clattering in the kitchen below. Kavitha, always an early riser, would have returned from a walk. She would have known to take the dogs with her. I wonder if Golly is back. I know I should shower, descend, begin, but my legs feel like axes – leaden, directionless.

  I thought I heard Lucia shuffling down the corridor last night. She had been so excited about Bagheera’s new babies. It had become a ritual – talking about the new pups, how many they’d be, what colour, what names. It was almost a way of getting back together.

  I reach for my iPod, push the earphones into my ears. Jacqueline du Pré. Elgar’s cello concerto. I know there will be emails from my lawyer Mr Sriram waiting. Praveen will want an extensive breakfast discussion about how to proceed. But I feel like a person dying or dead. I want to be alone.

  A hand at my shoulder. ‘Grace, wake up.’

  Dried spit on my chin. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Eleven. You should get up.’

  Kavitha is pulling on the ropes of the blinds, allowing lashes of light to hit the floors.

  ‘Sorry, I must have gone back to sleep. It was a rough night. Is Golly back?’

  ‘Yes. She was on the patio this morning. I fed the dogs some rice and curd.’

  ‘I feel wrecked.’

  ‘I think you’ll have to go and visit Valluvan at some point. Praveen will go with you. I’ll talk to Sriram about what our options are legally.’

  ‘Have you been able to speak to Teacher?’

  ‘She’s not taking my calls.’

  ‘And Mallika. What’s her story?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  There are two guards at the gates of the Sneha Centre. Men who wear uniforms, who are hired out by security companies on a part-time basis to lend a sense of propriety to establishments.

  ‘Entry not allowed,’ one of them says, in English.

  Praveen is cajoling at first. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘we just want to make sure that her sister is okay, that she’s here. We just need to go in and speak to Mrs Gayatri.’

  ‘Madam is out of station,’ the guard says. ‘Nobody is allowed inside. If you try, we will call the police.’

  Kavitha pushes Praveen aside and leans over the gates. ‘Gayatri!’ she shouts. ‘Stop this nonsense, this is serious. At least, le
t us know she’s here.’

  The guards try to wrest her off the gates and Praveen is on them, punching wildly. People emerge from houses along the street. Some run into the fray, shouting with authority even though they cannot know what the matter is. Others stand and watch, shielding their eyes from the sun. Kavitha is on the phone talking to someone who knows the Inspector General. I start screaming, Lucy Lucy Lucy.

  The teachers at the Sneha Centre file out, creating a barricade behind the guards. There are five of them – women who have committed their lives to looking after these children. Nothing like this can have happened here before, because their eyes gleam with drama. Two of them have been with Mrs Gayatri since the beginning. They have known Kavitha since before they were married, and now they have children who are almost ready to be married themselves, but still, they look at her as though she were a stranger and tell her they don’t know where Lucy is.

  ‘You mean you’ve lost her?’ one of them says.

  ‘If you have nothing to hide, then let us in,’ Kavitha says. ‘What is this behaviour? I don’t understand.’

  Finally Teacher barrels through the line. ‘That’s enough. What is your business here?’

  ‘I want to know if you have Lucy,’ I say. ‘I just need to know she’s okay.’

  ‘So you can beat her, is it? So you can abandon her for days? You know that lady you keep to look after her disappears as soon as you’re gone? She feeds her once and then goes and sees some fellow she has in the village. Poor child. Bathroom, everything, she has to do by herself, and she cannot manage. You know that. You think that lady feeds your precious dogs? You think she does anything the minute you go? You should have seen the state I found her in.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I say. ‘Mallika always speaks well of you. Why are you talking like this?’

  ‘These children – can they say anything? Can they say that someone is abusing them, or taking advantage of them? How can you leave your house open there with your sister? And what? To go off and have fun in the city?’

  ‘What proof do you have?’ Kavitha says. ‘This is just talk, come on.’

  ‘Do you deny it?’ Teacher says, looking at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you deny that you hit your sister? Did you not beat her, poor thing, when your dogs were poisoned and she was grieving? Did you?’

  I tear up with all the shouting. Everyone looks at me, including Kavitha and Praveen. But I cannot speak. I cannot be in this place any more.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Teacher says, turning away from us. ‘Don’t let them in.’

  Days pass. All is subdued and hushed. The house feels different, larger somehow. I cannot remember how it used to feel when I lived here alone, before Lucia came to stay, but it did not feel like this.

  Praveen and I drive to the government hospital in Cheyyur where Valluvan was taken after he was attacked. It had not been about land, as I had initially suspected. The perpetrators were from a neighbouring village. Valluvan had been speaking to their people, trying to get votes for the elections. We don’t know whether there had been a failed dialogue where they asked him to back off and he disagreed, or whether they thought it would just be easier to maim the man, but we knew that there had been three of them and they had used fish hooks.

  There are rows of chairs cemented into the floor of the hospital waiting area and all of them are full. One woman is talking dramatically, slapping her chest, knots in her hair, sari in disarray. It’s some kind of plea for help. People sit around reading newspapers, playing games on their mobile phones, calmly ignoring her. The receptionist is wearing a burgundy sari and looks bored until Praveen goes up to her. He’s a man used to getting things done.

  We sit in a side corridor under a row of tube lights, examining the ceramic-tile floors with lines of dirt separating them. Two nurses are gossiping beside a man on a stretcher. A young boy with a mop and bucket walks past us barefoot.

  Praveen is restless. He jogs his left leg up and down. I put a hand on his knee to settle him.

  After an hour the receptionist comes over to us. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Now you can go.’

  Valluvan is in a room with another patient who is corpulent, turned over on one side, the great back of him shrouded in a green hospital blanket. Beside him Valluvan looks like a tiny relic. There’s a stool beside his bed with a mobile phone and a photograph of Amma, the hugging saint.

  He’s covered in bandages – legs, arms, head. One eye is covered with a patch. There are stains of yellow through the bandages and whatever little we can see of his face is blue and bloated. The receptionist hovers behind us. ‘I told you he’s unconscious, but you wanted to see, so here. But you must go soon. Actually, this is not allowed.’

  I walk up to Valluvan and peer into his face. I want to say something about how worried I am for him, for us, but I just pat the air around his arm lightly, too scared of touching him.

  ‘Bloody thugs,’ Praveen says, as we leave the hospital. ‘This state is run by thugs and we are surrounded by thugs.’

  ‘I just want to get out of here.’

  ‘Three of them. I mean, they fucking sliced this guy and he’s still alive.’

  ‘It was just one extra day that I stayed,’ I say. ‘Just one extra day.’

  We drive towards the city. The traffic moves with purpose. Outside, the flash of paddy fields through the window in quick succession. We pass under a canopy of wide-limbed trees, and the effect of the dappled light on the road is so beautiful, so incongruous, it feels like we’ve momentarily been transported somewhere else, to a country where gangs of men cannot set upon a man without fear of retribution. I feel a sense of confidence returning. Valluvan will live. Things will be put back to what they were. I do not need the freedom I imagine I need.

  28

  I occupy Papi’s flat like a bird. I make multiple nests in different rooms. I need a space to sleep, a place to read, a nook by the window. I hear the heavy labour of his breathing wherever I am – guttural sounds. ‘Grazia,’ he’ll call, but only when he needs me. He’s lived with such staunch ideas about the limitations of responsibility. Now that his body is showing signs of diminishment, he wants to be sure to uphold those ideas.

  ‘Get out of here,’ he says in the mornings, after I’ve taken him breakfast and antibiotics. ‘Get some air. You look like an animal in a cage.’

  The streets of Venice are intolerable. I walk past glass-fronted shops, all in the business of selling mirages. Trinkets and masks. Rows and rows of pointless coloured glasses. There are a few treasures. A printer, close to Papi’s apartment. His name is Gianni. He looks like he has travelled here from a different century. He spends his days with gargantuan, laborious, hand-printing machines. He was the last to learn the art from the Armenian Mekhitarists on the island of San Lazzaro. He still speaks of Venice as if it were the centre of the world. I glide through his shop touching the array of visiting cards and thank-you notes – the paper, creamy and thick, far too luxurious for the disposable times we live in. ‘Guarda,’ he says, showing me the ex libris he made for Joseph Brodsky. It is an image of a cat reading a book. Gianni caresses the cat’s coat.

  There is a woman who makes shoes. Soft, kidskin boots in bright colours. I think of childhood stories – ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ – all those beauties could have come from this shop. They glow in windows – ankle boots, eighteenth-century-style slip-ons with short, sturdy heels, glamorous lace-ups trimmed with fur that sits at the widest part of the shank. I’d had no use for shoes in Paramankeni – just rubber slippers for the beach to protect against thorns, and a few pretty things for the city. The shoemaker sits in a chair, bent over her work, thread in her hands. I would like to go in and watch her, learn something of how she works. It feels ridiculous to have lived so long and learned nothing of a craft.

  Venice is a kind of banishment. I take vaporettos to the islands. In Burano I point my phone at coloured buildings. They
seem unreal – reds, blues, greens, yellows. A book I read mentions that the palazzos in Venice were once painted like this too. So much colour.

  In Peggy Guggenheim’s museum I wonder what I would have done if I’d been incredibly rich and eccentric. Would I have surrounded myself with staggering beauty? Would I have had sex unrepentantly with other women’s husbands? And the dogs. I certainly would have had all those dogs.

  The accident of birth. Papi and I have been talking. ‘I don’t think much of my parents now they are gone,’ he says. ‘But you feel it very much, cara, and you must move forward in your life.’

  He doesn’t understand my conundrum, doesn’t see why I insist upon being stuck in my life. Even the fact that I am here taking care of him does not strike him as being ironic. He will recover, but it is his first setback, and he’s at an age where this signals a decline.

  More and more he will need to rely on other people. ‘It need not be you,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I have money. I’ll get a nurse. And if I outlive my money, then I’m the problem of the state. Not you.’

  ‘But what will have been the point? Why breed? Why have the structure of family? Why live together for years and years, bearing each other’s inconsistencies, only to abandon them?’

  Papi’s fingers itch from inactivity. He’s been forced to give up smoking but he still asks for his papers. He makes stacks of beautifully rolled cigarettes. ‘Take them and distribute them on the streets,’ he says, laughing.

  I gather up the rollies and put them into Nonno Danilo’s silver cigarette case. This too is an act of connection. The smooth age of it in my palm.

  There’s an afternoon when I eat lunch in Campo San Polo. It’s one of the widest, sunniest campos in Venice, so it’s always filled with children and dogs in the afternoons, and in winter they put in an ice-skating rink and around it there are stands selling sweets and glossy pink zucchero filato.

  A family at the restaurant – American I think, drinking tall beers, smiling at their pizzas. Three boys, golden-haired, one of them with Down’s. He is shorter than his brothers, squatter, and his mother has cut the crusts off his pizza. They are smiling, looking at the pigeons, enjoying the postcard of their family vacation. The parents are suntanned, the father perhaps a little too pink. He leans towards the boy, squeezes his hand. It undoes something in me. I have been keeping the story of Lucia to myself. Papi will not hear too much of it, so I must ration out bits and pieces until he signals that it is enough.