China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

  She knows she will go, if only to deflect the anger he might unleash if she were to stay away. He might tell her husband about them. Tell Mai. He’d be fine, his part in it all downplayed, even conveniently justified. Men have their needs. But for her life would be over. She can see herself now: head shaved, breasts exposed, the iron pig-ring around her neck and the coarse rope parading her through the village. She can hear the crowds calling her a dirty whore and feel the rocks cutting her flesh as she lurches to the well and jumps to her drowning end. Yes, for those reasons she will go. But, lying on her bed, her back to Harbans’ back, she recognises another note, a lighter, brighter music behind the crashing death-cymbals. She listens to it, and hears it for what it is: desire, her own, amplifying. She closes her eyes and whispers, out loud but so only she can hear it – ‘I want you, too’ – and then she reopens them, and for a long time she stares at the muddy apples spilled across the stone ledge of the window.

  * * *

  The paint Radhika had brought me was a very light shade of pink, almost white, the colour of a ballet slipper. It matched what had been there before, judging by the few flakes still clinging to the pillars. One afternoon I was working outside the gate, priming the exterior wall, when a man arrived on a silver Bajaj scooter. He wore one of those black half-face sixties helmets, with a large flip-up visor, and it took him an age to unclip it from under his chin and head towards me. I’d not met him before and I didn’t stop my work to meet him now.

  ‘You’re sensible to leave this wall until it’s in shade.’

  There was grey in his wavy combed-back hair, as much grey as black, and the same was true of his goatee, though that seemed more of a vanity, a trimmed and lustrous Vandyke. He looked like he might have once played in a band, like he still jammed with his friends at the weekends now that they all sported pot bellies, now that helmets didn’t quite clasp under their chins as easily as they once had. The kind of guy who’d been certain he’d belong to the future. In reality, I soon learned, he was a teacher of Commerce and Society at Hindu Kanya High School, the local – secular, despite the name – secondary for girls. He was unmarried and lived alone in the neighbouring village, Sunra, up the dirt track and in a house with a gunny sack for a door.

  ‘Tanbir,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘You’re making good progress.’

  ‘Let’s hope the progress is making me.’

  He gave a small gruff laugh. I went back to coating the wall in watery primer. It seemed of poor quality and I doubted if it would make any difference to the finish.

  ‘Jai’s done well,’ he said. ‘A house-sitter and a fixer-upper in one.’

  I said nothing. I felt discomfited by his easy confidence, by how at home he seemed to be, and wanted him to turn around and go, taking the helmet he’d left dangling off the scooter’s handlebar.

  ‘The last time I saw your uncle he was replacing the heater in the bank. Always rushing round doing something, that man. Gosh, that must have been – two years ago? Winter-time. How is he keeping? Well?’

  ‘Think so.’

  Jai hadn’t once been here since dropping me off on that first day, nearly three weeks earlier, and Tanbir must have sensed something of my confusion because he said, ‘Like I say, he’s a busy guy. But I hope your aunt’s looking after you?’

  At this I stood and looked at him face on. Visitors never asked about my aunt and I wondered what lay behind his question. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘How are you coping without electricity?’

  ‘It’s not a problem.’

  ‘Dr Chaturvedi’s keeping an eye on things?’

  Again he surprised me. I think my lips moved, but nothing came out. Who was this man? Radhika had been here again the previous day to drop off more paint, a new roller. We’d shared some whisky from her flask. I didn’t know what to say to him and my hands went to my waist, in confrontation.

  ‘Look.’ His tone changed, became conciliatory, even confiding. ‘People are beginning to whisper. That she’s here a lot, an out-of-stater on this lonely farm with a young boy half her age. I thought you should know.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be telling this to her, not me?’

  ‘I did.’

  I waited.

  ‘She – she hooted, really, and said I had a tiny, tiny mind.’ He smiled, rueful. ‘She thinks she’s Isabel fucking Archer. But she doesn’t know what it’s like round here. She thinks she does. But she doesn’t, not really. If they take against someone, they’ll eat her alive, slowly, from the inside.’ He looked down, then across to his scooter. ‘I should make a move. Would you mind if I called again someday?’

  ‘It’s a free country,’ I said, and he laughed, wagging a finger as if to show he knew I was making some awful joke.

  * * *

  *

  Radhika stopped by often, to check how I was getting on, to help with the painting, or sometimes simply to talk. The more she came, the more I wanted her to stay, and the more I started to feel for her. The morning after Tanbir’s visit, I was looking out from the roof, hoping to see her, and suddenly there she was, turning towards the farm, waving. She joined me on the roof, standing right beside me, and we watched the work on the Krishna statue up ahead. The legs, a pair of thick blue columns, pressed together, were complete. A blue torso, too. A web of ropes tethered the thing to the ground. Constructors milled. Trucks came and went. In one, its rear panel swinging open, lay a gigantic blue arm, palm cupped towards the sky as though it were pointing out the two bright green parakeets flying overhead.

  ‘Who’s Isabel Archer?’ I said.

  Radhika crossed her arms loosely and exhaled, and I felt her shoulder touch mine. ‘A clever girl in a novel. Ends up— Why?’

  I didn’t know how to explain. ‘No reason.’

  She looked at me closely. ‘It’s an idea, you know. You should read. It’ll help you pass the time.’

  I’d picked up a book at the airport, one I hadn’t started yet but was eager to; as if I hoped reading about life might be a way to overcome it. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  ‘I can bring you some. What’re you into?’

  I didn’t know that yet. ‘Anything. I don’t mind.’

  We embarked on my task for the day, which was painting the porch, staying out of the midday heat. Radhika took one end, I the other. Suddenly she waved her paint roller at me. ‘That washed-up teacher. Has he been talking to you?’

  I stopped painting. ‘Who?’

  ‘He likes his books and whatnot. Probably wanks over James. Has he? Been here?’

  ‘Who’s James?’

  ‘Long hair. Beard. Middling height. Fat cheeks.’

  ‘James?’

  ‘I believe his name’s Tanbir Singh.’

  I shrugged, admitting defeat. ‘He came to say people were talking about you.’

  ‘Ha! I knew it! I knew he would! He takes his job way too far. He thinks he walks some moral high ground looking down on us all, throwing out advice.’

  Still, I couldn’t help noticing that she was far from outraged. Humming to herself, she moved the roller through the tray of paint, once, twice.

  ‘I assumed you were from the city?’ I said, keen to continue the conversation.

  ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know. You live there, don’t you?’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘And before?’

  ‘Before?’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I said, already exasperated.

  ‘I’m from Ranchi, which is the capital city of the state of Jharkhand. A very long way away.’

  ‘So how did you end up here?’

  She reached quietly for her cigarettes then thought better of it. Worried I’d hurt her, I tried to think of something light-hearted to win her back.

  ‘Should you really be smoking around me? Offering me whis
ky? It’s a pretty slippery slope I’m on.’

  As if I’d not even spoken, she stepped towards me, looking serious, and I thought we might kiss, something I wanted very much and, now it seemed possible, felt completely unprepared for. ‘I had all this anger,’ she said, ‘all this resentment and energy that had no good outlet. And then I found my outlet and things improved.’

  ‘Your outlet? Like a pipe?’

  ‘My work, doofus. Medicine. Look alive.’

  I smiled. ‘Sorry. And you come here to help me find my outlet? Like you did?’

  ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ she said. ‘That’s all on you,’ she added, and I nodded, because it was true. ‘But I do find this place a haven.’

  ‘I think my mum loved it growing up.’

  ‘It’s a respite from . . .’ She gestured beyond the farm. ‘Plus it’s a nice change to spend time with a young man who doesn’t judge me too much.’

  ‘You know I was joking about smoking around me and . . .’ But she was smiling. ‘I’m glad you come here,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Please don’t. There’s no need.’

  She kissed my cheek and brushed past my arm, and I watched her walk back to her side of the porch. I felt a sharp longing for her, and beside that longing, faith that life need not remain a wail of anger, that it can also be full of beautiful moments that just seem to arrive with the birds.

  * * *

  *

  Prince, who liked to talk, had told me some of the village stories about Radhika: she was in hiding from a drug lord she’d double-crossed; she’d been struck off in Bihar for killing a politician’s daughter during an appendectomy; she was a divorcee who’d abandoned her child to run off with a man twice her age, a man who’d later dumped her in a snow-capped chalet in Shimla. On that day we painted the porch, she told me everything herself. She was born in Patna, the daughter of a clever, frustrated Bengali mother and a charming Bihari drunk. When Radhika was six, her mother left her violent husband and crossed into West Bengal, where the two of them lived, on sufferance, in a single side room in the house of some extended family. Three years later, Radhika’s mother boarded a train for Ranchi with a man who was exactly twice her age, with plans to set up a new school. Radhika was to remain with the extended family, until her mother and her partner were ready for her to start upper primary in her new home. And wouldn’t that be much better, Radhu? She did join her mother in Ranchi, but not until she was twelve and a much older cousin had, the night before her departure, tiptoed into her room and slid under the floral sheet. The new school hadn’t worked out and her mother waited tables at night and sold face creams by day. She’d left her partner, who’d turned out to be just another abusive drunk, but when Radhika’s mother began shitting blood and was diagnosed with cancer of the bowel, they arrived at the old man’s doorstep and he, beaming with awful benevolence, allowed them in. It was a slow death. She lasted six years, with only the most rudimentary treatment. Less than two months after Radhika cast her mother’s ashes into the Subarnarekha, the old man, now seventy, put his hand on her breast. She’d been studying at the time, and he came up behind her, one hand on her shoulder and began stroking her nipple through her shirt. She smiled up at him and led him to the bedroom, where she tied his wrists to the bedstead. He looked terribly excited. His arm was whorled in thick white fur and before Radhika had even finished spraying the deodorant and got out her lighter, he was screaming, blowing on his arm and calling her a nothing little slut. She grabbed her textbook, her bag, and left, first to Goa and then to take up her sponsored medical studies in Hyderabad.

  I nodded, unsure what to say. It was sundown and she looked off to the sky.

  When she turned thirty, she continued, she decided to get out of the cities and do some fieldwork. It took a while for the right opportunity to arrive, one that didn’t require her to fellate anyone on the appointing committee, but then a role in some godforsaken backwater of Punjab appeared on the staff noticeboard. It was a one-year trial to investigate whether having a large presence of female doctors made any difference to rates of female infanticide, a metric on which Punjab leads the way. She got the nod and had a heaving goodbye party where she laughed and got drunk and smoked dope and sobbed with her friends. And then she got here, one boiling afternoon, and quickly realised Dr Duggal resented her mere existence and wasn’t going to let her establish anything more than a roving monthly clinic where she could hand out soft yellow leaflets on the various types of birth control. She only came to my uncle’s house that time because Duggal had been complaining about having to go and see what some foreign prat had gone and done to himself, and she was so bored she’d insisted on tagging along.

  ‘I’m glad I did,’ she said, standing up.

  I wanted to touch her so much, for us to be together and close all night, but we walked to the gate in silence.

  * * *

  *

  On his second visit, Tanbir brought a bag of peas, freshly picked.

  ‘Hungry?’ he called, holding aloft the thin blue bag. ‘I thought you might be sick of greasy dhaba food.’

  When I said nothing he came through the gate, his smiling face emerging abruptly from the explosion of sunlight on metal. He looked at the house, across its newly painted façade. ‘Good job. Nearly finished?’

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘Inside still needs doing.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  His face changed, now weary, as if he had to put up with enough of these ironic inflections in the classroom.

  ‘I don’t have anything to cook the peas with,’ I offered, conceding a little.

  * * *

  *

  We sat on the charpoy shelling the peas with our thumbnails and eating them straight from the pod. He told me about Sunra, a place of steep cobbled lanes and a couple of hundred stone houses. He’d been born there, he said, which surprised me for some reason. I’d had him down as a big-city do-gooder come to help the poor folk. But, no, he’d never lived anywhere else and now, since his father’s stroke, that didn’t look like it could change.

  ‘Where is your father?’

  ‘In a care facility. Towards the city. I go to see him every other day,’ he added defensively.

  ‘So you mean you’ve never really left?’

  ‘Only to get my teaching diploma. And then I came back.’

  ‘I hope you love your work.’

  He said he did, very much.

  ‘And being alone?’

  ‘It has its charms, for sure.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get married?’ I asked, as if, at forty, that option was long gone.

  ‘I choose not to discuss that.’

  I smiled a little and nodded, acknowledging the moment without extending it. There was a small silence.

  Then: ‘I saw your aunt yesterday,’ he said, with the air of someone trying to drag the conversation on to more familiar terrain.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She was in the bazaar. With her little boy. She seemed happy?’

  I said nothing. I felt enough loyalty to my uncle not to gossip about the state of his marriage.

  ‘I don’t mean to pry,’ he said.

  We heard the rattle before the bell ting-a-linged and Radhika rode into the yard. I was elated that she’d turned up, though I tried not to let that show on my face.

  ‘You finished the mouldings!’ she said.

  ‘I found a ladder in that back field.’

  She left aside the bike and perched, rod-straight, on the end of our charpoy, her knees crossed under her long skirt. She took a fat pod from the tray and traced her nail around the bumps. ‘Have you come to keep an eye on us?’ she said to Tanbir.

  He showed his palms in apology. ‘I’m sorry I misspoke.’

  ‘You come in peas,’ she said, and we chuckled, though most of my delight was in he
r use of ‘us’, as if we were a unit apart from everyone else.

  She roped Tanbir into helping us clean out the inner rooms and soon we all had brooms in hand and were sweeping the thick dust across the porch and on to the courtyard. We broke up the cot and busted charpoys and set the wood aside to use as kindling, but the rest of the rubbish – the tins of Ovaltine, the piles of old calendars, the smashed earthenware pots and willow-pattern shards, the boxes of rusted bent nails – we dumped outside the gate. There were still holes in the walls, but I’d discovered some enamel bricks in a corner of the barn and thought they could be used to fill the gaps. Radhika offered to bring a hammer and some cement the next day, and Tanbir said he knew someone who’d collect the scrap from the gate. We washed at the pump, watering our faces and arms, and then, exhausted more by the sullen heat than by actual labour, we returned to the charpoy. It was evening and our shadows lengthened over the yard, black on gold, stretching as the sun dipped behind the plane trees. Radhika lit up. I declined, but when Tanbir accepted I reached for one too, and she smiled a little, and I wished I’d not given so much away.

  Silence pervaded, the long day’s ordinary quiet. For once, I hadn’t rolled my sleeves down from my shoulders, and I watched the sweat beading my arms. I thought how I wasn’t stammering any more. That my sleep had improved. And I realised that this was what I liked, not being on my own, far from it, I wanted people around me, I just didn’t want to talk. I wanted undemanding friendships, transcendent connections, all and forever on my own terms. I ground out my cigarette and, without asking, took a second from the carton.

  There was another evening tugging at the back of my mind; quietly I let it come. I was upstairs in my room, trying to get on with my GCSE homework, my curtains shut against the older schoolkids who gathered outside the shop. They were always there, the older kids, with their grey threatening noise, and there was constant fear in my heart that things might flare up, as they often did. I heard my dad labouring up the stairs and I reached round in my seat and opened the door.