Small Days and Nights

by Tishani Doshi

  By now this road should be familiar to me, but I keep forgetting which village comes after which. There are always new scars of apartment buildings clawing into the sky. The sun is at my face, restrained, but as we move through the widened highway, past Mahabalipuram and continuing on towards Pondicherry, it ascends with great vigour, the sea beneath it a pitiful blue rag.

  ‘Roll down the windows,’ I say once we get to the turnoff, relishing the warm air rushing in. The canal gleams to our right, dunes and jagged palmyra, and beyond, stretching to the water, paddy fields, a shimmy of white egrets. A woman with her goats is crossing, stick raised in the air, voice shrill and menacing. ‘Slow, slow,’ I say, as we watch them pass. They move in a mass, one or two of them breaking free in a trot, the sound of their panicked goaty noises reverberating through the flock.

  Is it fear? Something like it. It shoots up my body from my toes, and my eyes fill with tears, the way Lucia’s used to. They fill and stop. This homecoming, all this uncertainty. The small houses in the village with their open doors, the kolam patterns in the mud outside them, bushes of jasmine, boys playing cricket, piles of brick and hay.

  The boys stop their game and gather in a huddle as we pass. They are bare-chested, in shorts. They wave and holler. Further down the road, water is gushing uselessly out of a pipe, and there are new trenches on either side, freshly dug, but it’s as if they’ve been abandoned, people having forgotten what they needed them for in the first place.

  ‘Happy to come home?’ Kadar asks. And I say, ‘Yes, of course.’

  There are new speed bumps in the road, tiny clumps of tar in groups of three. Kadar flies over the first set, and again I say, ‘Slow, slow.’ There are always things crossing a village road. Dogs, chickens, children. How to explain to Kadar that I want to take all these creatures home with me. Even the mean-spirited, superstitious adults. I want to belong to them, instead of this estrangement.

  We stop at the gate and I open the car door. ‘I’ll get it,’ I say. I’m wearing the wrong clothes, aeroplane clothes. Jeans and sports shoes and a hoodie. The air so sweet and warm. I heave the gate to one side, the blue paint peeling in places. The long grasses down the centre of the driveway are unruly and parched. Kadar honks the horn twice. A signal to the dogs. As I climb back in and move towards the house, they start running towards us. Raja, Bagheera, Golly, Dimple and, flagging behind them, the new pups – racing madly, howling, tongues like pink sails trailing out of their heads. And so there is this, I am filled with it, a sweetness.

  ‘It’s not about thanking,’ Kavitha says, but I insist it is. ‘What would they have done without you? Papi or Ma. They were like children, completely clueless, and what would I have done without you?’

  We are sitting on the veranda, watching the moon rise. The hush of sea. It’s the most peaceful sound in the world. Womb noise. I’m still in a place of two places. Venice, Madras. In a day or two, all that will be forgotten and it will just be this – the heat, the dogs. But for now it’s still in my body, that strange afternoon with Roberto in his professor’s quarters, the midnight walk with Papi and Marcella.

  ‘Papi is happy, you know? I haven’t seen him happier. He says coming back to Italy was the best thing for him. He found a kind of peace again. He told me it was about finding a level of hypocrisy you could deal with.’

  ‘And Lucia? What did he say about her?’

  ‘He is unmoveable. He listens but offers no advice. He has not changed his mind about anything, and in a way, I suppose, it’s a kind of relief. Imagine, if you were going to begin to feel guilt.’

  The dogs are lying on the patio around us, bellies full, bodies stretched out like mats. ‘The dogmatics,’ I say, laughing. ‘Look at them. The good life.’

  Kavitha’s face is lean and tanned. The lines around her eyes look more pronounced, but there is something fresher about her. ‘The sea air has done you good,’ I say. ‘You look rejuvenated.’

  ‘I feel close to her here,’ she says.

  ‘To Ma?’

  ‘She was the most stubborn person I knew. We met at a yoga centre in Madras. Did you know that? She decided I would be her friend. She had that command with people. I don’t know how she lost that. It’s as though she got thwarted a few times and she just gave up. But being here in this place, I understand that she never truly gave up. She was just tired. It was your mother’s idea to move to Kodai. Your father was so unhappy. He was talking of taking a job in Africa, of going back to Egypt where he had worked before. Your mother was terrified it would mean cutting all ties with Lucy. We stayed up one night talking about it and she kept saying, “It will be like being in exile. I can’t allow him to do that to us.”’

  ‘She got her way.’

  ‘She frequently did.’

  After dinner we go upstairs and lie on the bed together. A small bat flies around in a frenzy until it finds its way out through the terrace doors. Kavitha lies on her side, facing me. She wears a robe tied loosely at the waist. A pedestal fan in the corner of the room moves its head slowly from side to side. I bring the sheets up to my chin. ‘It’s easy to grow tired,’ I say. ‘It’s easy to give up.’

  I wake intermittently, drink sips of water, tread over to the bathroom in the dark.

  ‘You’re flopping around like a sole fillet,’ Kavitha complains. ‘What time is it anyway?’

  ‘Sorry. It must be the jet lag. I’m completely awake. I’ll go read in the other room.’

  I leave her and walk down the corridor to Lucia’s bedroom. There is a smell of her. I can’t say what it is – something powdery and musty. The room has been closed for a while. I open the side window. The stuffed toys arranged in a pyramid glare at me in the dark. I should burn those things.

  I put the bedside lamp on, looking for something to read. There are a few children’s books that I used to read to Lucia, but she soon tired of those. I lift the pillow so I can lean against the bed comfortably. Underneath the pillow there’s a crumpled napkin, military green, made of rayon or something synthetic. Lucia must have stolen it from a restaurant. I think of her howling for it at the Sneha Centre, and Teacher looking at her without being able to help. ‘Which one, kanna? Aren’t they all here?’ A night, a day, and maybe then she would have stopped with her noise. I squash the napkin in a ball and crush it in my palm. When Kavitha brings me tea in the morning, she finds me splayed out on my stomach with the lamp on, the napkin in my fist.

  A few days later we drive to a village fifteen minutes away. There’s a new roadside restaurant at the top of our street called Saravana Villas. A man in a ramshackle Mickey Mouse costume waves to cars speeding down the highway, trying to flag them down and direct them to the restaurant.

  ‘Poor little shit,’ Kavitha says. ‘What a job.’ She slows down as we pass by, and thrusts ten bucks into his paw. A group of men dressed in white are leaning against a white jeep drinking coffee from plastic cups. Even their sandals are white. Local politicians of some sort. They all have healthy moustaches and paunches. ‘Do you think the reason they’re so committed to white is because it’s so obvious they’re corrupt assholes?’ Kavitha says.

  ‘Stop staring at us,’ I want to shout. ‘Turn away and mind your own business.’ I don’t know what it is about seeing groups of men together, but it unsettles me. The way they hold their bodies, the ownership of space. Nothing they offer by way of their togetherness engenders a sense of safety. It is all gnarl and hair and ball sac and matted heel. The world needs softness. Not this.

  There is dereliction all around. A gated community called Luxor lies in semi-finished abandon. Incongruous, trying to recall some kind of pharaonic glory here in Tamil Nadu. The builders must have run out of funds or neglected to pay off the right people. Already neem bushes are growing horizontally and wildly into the half-built foundations. The Sphinx-like statue in yellow stone, positioned as the centrepiece of the property, is covered in bird shit and has nothing of the grandeur of its Egyptian ancestor.

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sp; It’s only nine in the morning but my shirt is already damp. We pass the Marakkanam Lake to our right, which is flat and white in the heat. ‘There,’ I say. ‘That’s the road we need to take.’

  It is always a surprise, leaving the main road for the interior. How rapidly the scale alters. An Indian village will cling to the side of any highway. In most cases the village was there first, but when the highway arrives, dissecting it, the village remains in this amputated fashion, growing any which way, adjusting itself within the new parameters. There is no discernible centre except for a large banyan tree, under which meetings with village elders supposedly happen. Kavitha parks near a temple because the road has become too narrow and muddy. We step out and walk behind a group of children – boys and girls who are fixing to play some kind of game.

  ‘Where’s the dog doctor?’ Kavitha asks. ‘Do you know?’

  The smell is something awful. Burnt hair, burnt flesh. As we approach the crowd, the noise escalates. A man in a golf shirt, jeans and trainers stands in the middle of the crowd. He has white hair and glasses, and he is speaking in a patient, measured tone to the men around him. The majority are village men, barefoot, in shirts and lungis. They are thumping their chests extravagantly. Kavitha unsheathes her massive SLR camera and starts photographing the scene.

  Burnt corpses of dogs lie in heaps. There are hundreds of them. The earth has been turned over in ridges, and volunteers continue to dig with shovels. When they find another one, the digging stops. Someone goes into the crater and pulls out a charred rigid thing. ‘Okay,’ or ‘Got it,’ they shout, and the digging begins again.

  The man from the Blue Cross, Kavitha’s friend, with whom I’ve spoken a few times on the telephone, gives us masks and gloves to wear. ‘It’s cyclical,’ he says. ‘The dogs multiply because of all the rubbish, there are packs of them, and so of course there are accidents. People are scared to walk around, some children get bitten, people complain and so the panchayat just decides to do a mass culling.’

  Was it easy for these men to corner the dogs one by one and inject them with cyanide? Did they wait to set them alight or did they burn them immediately? I have to walk to a corner and vomit to feel steady again. One of the village women is crying. ‘They killed my Tikku. He was like my son. What right did they have to kill him?’

  She’s dragged away by family members and there is more shouting. I can’t understand everything that’s going on, but there is a sense of fear. Everyone knows the police are on the way so there’s a scattering, but a few tenacious ones remain. The man from the Blue Cross is on his mobile giving directions to a journalist.

  Kavitha lights a cigarette. ‘Can you believe this shit? It’s inhumane, not to mention stupid. Don’t they think that after injecting cyanide into four hundred animals, burning some of them and burying them right by the lake that it won’t affect their water supply, their soil?’

  ‘Please,’ the Blue Cross man says, walking up to us quickly. ‘Do you mind not smoking here? Things are tense as it is.’

  Kavitha squashes the cigarette under her sandal. ‘Just to be clear, I don’t give a shit about their sensibilities.’

  She strides back to a group of volunteers who are bagging corpses. They are college students from the city. Many of them have never been in a place like this. Even they look at her with confusion and admiration. She’s wearing a man’s shirt as usual, with jeans and sandals. Every few weeks she gets her head shaved so the salt-and-pepper bristle is maintained. Her face is achingly symmetrical, nose sharp, lips full, but there is a hardness about it that you can tell has accumulated over the years.

  ‘I’m sick of this,’ I say. ‘There’s no need for us to be here.’

  A few hours later we make our way back to the car. The door handles are impossible to touch. I fold the cuff of my shirt under the bottom of my palm and lift up the handle. Three of the volunteers climb into the back seat. We drive with the windows down and the air conditioner blowing hard. We let them off at the Koovathur bus stop. They are all chummy, shouting, ‘Bye auntie, thanks auntie,’ at us. On the way home I cover Kavitha’s hand with mine on the gearstick. I hold it as if it were my sixth finger and I were reclaiming it.

  ‘Papi was right,’ I say. ‘We’re living with savages.’

  30

  The house is secretive at this hour. Kavitha is still asleep, and the dogs are lying in cool patches of mud in the garden. We’ve had rains, so everything looks powerful and unstoppable. I put the kettle on and stand beside the counter with one leg tucked into the other, tree pose, waiting for the water to boil. Everything seems so closely bound in the mornings. I sit on the veranda with my cup of tea and biscuits. The lawn gleams, choked with weeds. A bird in a tree is making a sound I’ve never heard before.

  I could not give any of this up. There is a kind of silence in these early mornings broken only by faraway truck horns and flies slamming themselves against window glass, guiding you into the day.

  Teacher had told me to come alone.

  I’m wearing one of Ma’s saris – the white Bangladeshi cotton with the red border. I hardly ever used to wear them, but Kavitha has been teaching me how to drape them so that my limbs aren’t inhibited. Strange how a piece of cloth can transform you, fool you into thinking you’re stronger than you are.

  The compound wall is in such a damaged state, but it would cost a fortune to fix it up again. In a place like this, where decay is inevitable, it feels simpler to submit. I have wanted to belong to this world. I think this as I drive out. It’s sentimental, but how else are we to look at things? To move through life at a distance, without having participated, it seems wasteful somehow.

  I drive past groves of trees. The flame trees we planted to cover the ugly orange house. Champaca, hibiscus, laburnum – all sprouting from the mud of our dead dogs. I feel peaceful driving into the city, even though I haven’t seen Lucia in five months. We had spoken on the phone a few times. Teacher held the phone to Lucy’s ear and I shouted, ‘Hello, Lucy, how are you? I miss you.’ And Lucy, after saying the first hello in her way, the h caught in the throat like a well, the long extended ooooo, would fall silent. ‘Huloooo.’

  ‘Golly misses you.’

  ‘That’s Lucy’s dog,’ she’d say.

  Eventually, Teacher would get on the phone. ‘Okay, bye for now.’

  ‘Will you bring her back?’ Valluvan had asked when I went to see him.

  He was an old man now but his face held no malice. He would not talk about what happened except to say that he had survived because of the grace of God. A rare man. Strident in his house and village, humble before the universe.

  Nila did not meet my eye. She had revealed too much already. She was a loyal wife, a strict mother, no one could say a word against her. When Valluvan was in the hospital she had been in charge. She looked at her husband as if he were a saint. She brought him a shawl, she brought tea. When he said, ‘Leave us,’ she left. We both knew she was standing by the kitchen wall, listening. She would have to get used to standing on the sidelines again.

  ‘What shall I do?’ I asked.

  He explained there were only two ways of living. The life we desire and the life we are born to. Sometimes these lives can be the same. Sometimes we must make them the same.

  ‘Are you scared?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m always scared.’

  I went home in the late afternoon knowing that the real days were ahead of us. Our dogs were strong. They did not leave us at nights and they no longer knew hunger, so they were less exposed to danger. There were tomatoes in the garden and chillis. All around the trees grew close and high, protecting us. Lucia would know all this again.

  Teacher brings me a pair of scissors. Her eyes are limitless pools of authority. ‘Pastor will be joining you,’ she says. There must be a hundred people gathered. I recognise most of the girls, but there are a few new faces. They are dressed in long sequinned skirts and velvet blouses. I know not to expect to see Lucia there, but I look
anyway. Someone has switched the fans off for the lamp-lighting ceremony, so there are armpits soft and wet all around. People from the neighbourhood have come. Shopkeepers, housewives, a judge who has been given a plastic chair to sit in. Everyone else stands. The staff are passing out plastic packets of water. Pastor and I are given tumblers of Fanta.

  ‘God bless you, child,’ Pastor says. We cut the ribbon together and are asked to move closer to smile for the camera. ‘Please,’ I say, ‘after you.’ We leave our footwear outside the building. It smells of fresh paint inside. I’m sad again. There is something hopeless about the window grilles.

  After everyone gathers inside and sits down on jute mats, the girls are pushed into the centre of the room to sing ‘Vande Mataram’. I can hear the scraping of spoons against vessels from outside the building, where caterers are making large vessels of biryani. Teacher makes a speech where she thanks me for my generous contribution for completing the new wing. She speaks for a long time because she has prevailed. If others will not praise her, she will praise herself. Everyone praises her, though, even her husband, who had once seemed ferocious but now walks respectfully two paces behind her.

  Later, in her office in the old building, after everyone has left, she cries. She tells me one of the girls had been having breathing problems. Valli. Did I remember her? Not really. She kept putting her fingers down her throat and nobody could understand what was wrong with her. She couldn’t say what was bothering her. They took her to a government hospital and kept her there overnight. Teacher called the parents to inform them. They were separated, she told me. Brahmin couple, she added. The husband lived downstairs and the wife lived upstairs. They couldn’t afford two separate houses. ‘They said they couldn’t pay for the hospital so we brought her back here, but she was still uncomfortable. She kept putting her fingers down her throat. I feel so bad that we can’t know what they’re thinking. After two days she expired.’