Leila

by Prayaag Akbar

  ‘Political sector,’ I said.

  He looked at me with new curiosity. ‘This time of night?’ He inspected my plain white sari. ‘Didn’t you get on at the Towers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Eh, madwoman. No offices open now. Where do you really want to go?’ He scanned me from top to bottom. ‘You’re going to meet friends?’ he asked. ‘You have friends there? In the political sector?’ It took a second to realise his stilted hiss was laughter.

  ‘I have work.’

  ‘But no offices are open. What work?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you, do I?’

  ‘Only if you want to get dropped. Go on, press the bell. See if we stop.’ He grinned down openly. His teeth were small and white but horribly crooked in the lower jaw, like pickets of a beach fence that are cudgelled each dusk by a sturdy wind.

  ‘A tribunal. They called me at this time. I have no choice.’

  He took a sharp breath and a tiny step back, the smile gone immediately. His eyes furrowed. He seemed about to reach for my shoulder. ‘No charge,’ he whispered, and hurried on.

  On reaching the city proper, the first wall you see encloses a smaller sector, for Salsette Catholics. Every morning as I ride past I see a sprawling crystal palace, like something from a fairy tale, the early sun shimmering off the wall’s grey scales and the church steeples and the mirror plate office buildings that rise like uneven turrets. This late at night none of that is visible. Giant advertisements, each between two or three storeys high, bounce with blinding lights. The adverts are bolted to the wall, seedy proclamations and petitions for custom that charge like rutting bulls along the road and then right to your face. Afterschool Home Tutorials; Ahurmazd Gastric Bypass; Tip-top Maids (Choose religion, caste, birthplace; Be Safe Be Tip-top).

  Relief when our bus turned onto the Outroad adjoining the East Slum, away from the manic messaging, though the Slum is a noisome meld of human waste and rotting vegetables. Stagnant water fed upon by a scum of mosquitoes. The Slum pressed in from either side, only a crooked sliver of road remaining that the driver wended down. As we took a corner a man squatting across the gutter alongside the road sprang to his feet, brown eyes flashing when the bus’s double beacons washed over his frame. He fumbled with the waistband of his trousers. By the time we rumbled past he’d scrunched fabric into his fist and held his trousers above his crotch, looking away with a nonchalant air.

  We completed the turn. A dazzling sight as soon as we did. A sky the shade of a monsoon sea. The clouds light and white, without burden, floating cumulus islands. I slid the window to see better. Slum stench braised my cheeks and neck. I didn’t care. You never see a sky like this any more, not with the thick smog and hanging industrial effluent. This sky was better than any I remembered. Instantly I was driving along an open road with Riz, early spring, the school year just done. Craning to read, once again, the blotted-ink farewells the class had scrawled over my uniform. The sun turning his hair brown and gold. A sense of contentment, of completion. The clouds were different that day, a wide translucent stretch broken into tiny ripples that covered half the sky.

  This seemed to be some kind of advert. Blackness hung like a roof, and below it a layer of daylight and day cloud, an Arctic anomaly, a polar night.

  As the East Slum petered out I saw what was being sold. On a panel towards the top of the wall – high enough to be seen from the flyroads – white text stood on the sky: ‘Must Your Children Share Their Air?’ Centre of the last panel, again in white letters, the corporation’s name, Skydome.

  *

  Now I wait my turn outside the tribunal room. I’m in a building in the far end of the political sector that faces the running track and the duck pond with the low white-brick fence, a charmless structure with porthole-style windows that proved very difficult to find. The roads in the political sector arrow into roundabouts and one another, they confuse me terribly.

  How different everything is as soon as you go through the Great Gate, as if a switch has flipped. My job brings me here every day so I see it all up close. Wide, lovely avenues, empty of pedestrians, fringed either side with a stripe of thick boscage, palm squirrels and macaques skittering through the leaves. Every home is a sprawling white-walled bungalow encircled by hillocked lawns. In the morning or evening, walking between the Ministry and the bus stop, the pavements are all but empty, and for once, with everywhere so much green, I can take in great, open lungfuls of air. The deep breaths make me light-headed. I calm. I appreciate better the singing birds, the abundance, the tactile rejoinder of my feet on the pavement. Each square tile sits in deep grooves. It feels like a different world, a fathomless distance from the place I live, on a mountaintop, perhaps, locked away. The political sector is the prototype. One by one, so I’m told, all the rich sectors have begun to look like this.

  This sense of emptiness is amplified at night, and the contrast with the outside, teem and glare and revolting profusion. I scurried between the bows of dusty orange light from the street lamps, anxious for the whining zip of a car, any sign of life. Every few minutes I’d reach the inlet to a driveway, leading up to a low gate. Just beyond the gate a green wooden shed-post bearing two slumbering machine-gun-men. It wouldn’t do to ask them for directions, so I kept walking. I saw a porcupine and the glowing yellow eyes, round and lovely as planets, of a slender loris. Most of the rustles and shivers in the branches I sped past with head firmly down. The important thing is that I’ve made it here on time. It has just gone 10 p.m. Three men and a square-framed woman in a sari sit with me in the waiting area. She is rocking gently while reading from a sheet of paper, mouthing the words as she memorises them. Though it’s a cool night, though the fan finds me every few seconds, my scalp, forehead, the pits of my elbows and knees, everything is slowly leaking. If they don’t believe me, I’ll go like the others. Never to be seen again. Salt stirred into water.

  ‘Could you stop that?’ the man at my side says. A thin smile. ‘Jiggling your knees like that.’

  He accepts the apology with a curt nod. I’ve spent plenty of time in corridors like this. A caged fan mounted on the wall scans corner to corner. The panels of the prefab wall behind me judder each time someone comes up the stairs. On the wall opposite there’s a houndstooth of grimy rectangles where notices were taped up and then less carefully ripped off. The false ceiling is missing one panel altogether. I see red wires and for a second the shadow of a scuttling rat.

  He leans over, lowering his voice. ‘Actually, I’m nervous too.’ Buried in his breath is the tang of dinner, pickle and potato and paratha, a big start before his big meeting. A vermilion teeka sits like a splotch of fire on his forehead. ‘But they’re not that scary.’

  ‘Have you been to a tribunal before?’

  ‘Just tell the truth. You have nothing to fear.’

  I smile weakly. My stomach feels as if someone has scooped it up like ice cream. Still I sweat. I lift my handbag to my lap and root through it until my fingers land on glass. The jar’s rubber seal yields with a belch. Blue and white, rocket to delight. Vital for confusion, distress, panic, other forms of fear. They stink, these pills, the nauseous upthrust inevitable every night as if a trigger in my stomach is flicked by the pill’s descent.

  I stare at the spherocylinder in my palm, blue neatly slotted into white. The first time I took this pill they had to hold my jaw open like a dog at a vet’s. I mistrusted everyone, especially Dr Iyer. Now we know he was one of those who hoped to help. One morning after breakfast this blue and white pill was at my elbow in a plastic cup the size of a wind-up toy. It seemed to have suddenly materialised. Not many of us took it that first day. It was easy enough to secret away. I used the elastic band of my pyjamas. Later I emptied the capsule into the sink and washed down the powder and shrivelled plastic coat.

  The man has spotted the pill in my hand and is glaring. He drags his chair away. Its legs scrape the stone with a sound like fabric tearing. ‘Where do you live?’ he asks, the
n repeats himself.

  ‘Erm …’

  ‘She’s from the Towers,’ he announces. Three faces look up immediately. He leans in to inspect, bathing me in prandial reek. ‘I’ve never met a Tower woman before. No wonder you’re so nervous,’ he says. My ears are hot with shame. With a satisfied smile he explains to the room, ‘I knew it. Only they take those blue and white pills.’

  It’s the curiosity that irks, as if I’m a specimen, requiring study and support. For the most part we aren’t confronted with anger now. Instead we face these sudden transformations of demeanour, of regard. What meaning I once had has been taken, converted. I don’t give a damn.

  I toss one into my mouth as they gape. Then I wait. Warmth climbs in slowly, through a ground-floor window. A buzz in my calves, the first flurry. It feels for a glorious second as if my body is completely loose, like I’m draped over something, shaped into a smile. Cold bubbles fizz against the inside of my skin. The room begins to softly breathe. The overhead light has burst like a rainbow into fluid shafts of colour. I close my eyes. Maybe they stare, but I no longer care.

  A new beginning. If all goes well in the tribunal, if I get the transfer, I will never again have to see the people I’ve worked with at the Revenue Ministry for so many years. I haven’t made friends there. I go to work, carry tea and papers from office to office, clean as I’m told, come home. I don’t want anything else.

  Is it lonely people who are mad or mad people who are lonely? For some time now I’ve picked at this fear like a scab. Why is the loon always alone, taking the streets in solitude? So many years without Riz, without Leila. Maybe I no longer have the firmest grip on things. I first considered this possibility at work one day. I’d entered the kitchenette to make the morning round of tea. Pinned to the cabinet that holds the cups and saucers, so I was sure to see, was a pen sketch on lined notepaper. I’d been drawn with my nose in the air. Shalini had become Baalini, so the legend announced, with stretched locks of hair springing straight out as if I’d been shocked at a light socket. The caricaturist exaggerated the slight protrusion of my front teeth so I scowled witchlike. In between each curl (my hair isn’t that curly) arrowhead squiggles sprang from my skull, representing my temper, which I suppose was out of hand those days.

  But the point is not about the drawing, the irritation I felt, the laughter it must’ve inspired in my colleagues. At the time I had no way of knowing how angry I’d become. I might’ve shouted at one or two peons. Maybe I’d suggested to the Slummers who came to sweep and mop that I wasn’t meant for this, that I was from a good family, this work too manual, too menial. Some of them were so stupid, getting the simplest things wrong. I’d end up screaming. But until that morning I saw that drawing I had no real awareness of my behaviour. I’d imagined myself as collected, as self-possessed as anyone. The caricature helped me realise. I have become unmoored. Without Riz by my side I’m losing control. Now it’s hard to know what my own mood is like. Riz was a guide, a centre, he helped me gauge what I felt when too tightly wound. This is why I worry. The loneliness of these sixteen years is taking me out of myself. I will edge into a different state without realising.

  A peon yanks me out of my reverie with two sharp fingers into my shoulder. The same four people look at me with open contempt, like I’m a junkie. I stand and open out the middle finger of my right hand. Before anyone can notice, or at least object, I follow it with the forefinger. Both fingers on my chest, smile around the room. ‘Purity for all,’ I say.

  The tribunal room is dark wood, fusty, oblong. There are no windows. Concealed lighting leaves much of it in arcs of shadow. Four men at the far end are sunk in discussion, each in the white dhoti with the single near-invisible orange stripe that the Council’s senior functionaries like to wear. At the creak of the door they stop talking.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Should I wait outside?’

  ‘No need, no need,’ says the man who broke off mid-sentence at my entry. He looks at his colleagues. ‘Let’s get started?’ He walks towards me, squinting through the gloom at a folder in his hand. He stops and lifts a palm. ‘Wait. You are from the Towers?’

  I assent.

  A smile spreads across the man’s face. Behind him three leers. ‘She’s from the Towers,’ he says, as if he’s making an announcement. An overhead light flicks on in the far end of the room. There is a bed. A bed? A high bed, like in a doctor’s office. The light casts a neat triangle upon it, a bolster pillow at one end, covered in the same silk, black as pitch. The day Leila was taken they lined up like this. The afterglow from the pill floats away.

  ‘Why don’t you lie down? I am Mr Vijay.’ At a signal from Mr Vijay the peon emerges from the shadows. Without any instruction he arranges four chairs around the bed. They will sit, two each, at my torso, at my thighs. A flash from a documentary, a movie maybe, Japanese women stretched naked on tables with sushi arranged across their shining satin bodies, so diners can slaver over the topography of their vaginas, the ridges of their knees, the smooth scalloped breasts. I adjust my blouse. The peon walks away. The door moans and for a few seconds the light improves. Then the quick snap and slide of a deadbolt.

  Walking out before the business is complete means no transfer to Settlement. Without the transfer I won’t have the address I’ve hunted for since they took her. As I hoist myself onto the bed I let out a small sound, something like a whimper, that echoes off the wood, making it bigger than it was. Making me smaller. One officer laughs. He has a stuffy nose. The four take their seats now. Each is a foot from me. Their faces are in the dark but four sets of thighs in translucent dhotis shine in the light from the bulb. Knees and bare shins. Be brave, brave for Leila.

  The first questions are straightforward. Confirmations of name, age, Tower number. Then the man at my right knee says: ‘You must know – we don’t give transfers to Tower women?’

  ‘Yes. But I was told sometimes …’

  ‘And why should we do such a thing for you?’

  ‘There is simply no question,’ Mr Vijay interjects. Thick rings on each of the fingers on his right hand, even the thumb. The stones look like traffic lights in the murk. ‘We don’t give to Tower women. How could I send you to Settlement?’

  ‘I want to prove my commitment to the cause. I would like to show you.’

  ‘What more you want to show, madam?’ someone says. ‘Gergh gergh gergh.’ Then Mr Vijay asks, softer, ‘How old are you …’ – a rustling of papers – ‘Shalini?’

  ‘I’m forty-three.’

  ‘Oh. You look older. But still beautiful. What do you think? Isn’t she good for her age?’

  Bile at the pit of my throat. The underwire of my bra is cutting into the incline of flesh. Shifting around doesn’t help. I use a fingernail to adjust the point of contact and there is a quickening in the air, the breathing around me harder. I stare at the ceiling and will the minutes away.

  ‘So, Shalini …’ – Mr Vijay’s voice trembling like a weary muscle – ‘you were one of those women. You went against family. Against society. You could not control yourself. For carnal reasons.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I can smell it on her,’ another man says. His finger lightly traces the curve of my quivering waist. ‘It’s still in her, even at this age. Mixed with the other smells. In her sweat.’

  ‘When woman gives in to carnality,’ Mr Vijay continues, a choke in his voice once again, ‘imagine if all women gave in. You know what will come? Utter confusion. Bedlam. We are a society that needs rules. Boundaries. The ancient lines are there for a reason.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You were a good girl. You broke from your own people. From your community. What good can come from mixing like this?’ He rolls a sheet of paper into a tight cone. He places its point just above my hip. ‘Look at you,’ he says, almost whispering. ‘Your skin shines like a pearl.’ He presses the cone sharply into my waist. I bleat. ‘Even after all these years. So beautiful. No wonder they were angry.’<
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  ‘Please believe me. I know my mistake. I have learnt my lesson.’

  Mr Vijay moves his hand to my sternum, and my arm shoots out as a reflex, like a windscreen wiper, across my breasts. All four are smiling now. I sense it despite the darkness. This is what they do best, these powerful men, inject vulnerability.

  ‘How long were you in Purity Camp?’

  ‘Four months. With Dr Iyer.’

  ‘That’s a long time,’ the second voice interjects. ‘Why did they take so long with you?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I was confused about many things. I didn’t want to listen. Dr Iyer helped me understand.’

  ‘And what did you understand?’

  ‘That the walls are important. We must have them. The whole city used to be like the Outroads. Lawless. Filthy. Dirt at your doorstep. People shitting on the roads. Into the gutters. The best people could not live like that any more. We needed the walls.’

  ‘See how beautiful it is now,’ Mr Vijay says. ‘Everything so clean. Our network of flyroads known all over the world. From Singapore, America, everywhere they’re coming to see it. One community to another, above all the mess. Would it be possible if people did not respect the walls? If everyone lived like you – against their own culture, against our culture?’

  ‘I come here every day. It’s very beautiful.’

  ‘I know this.’ Mr Vijay’s face is dimly visible in the penumbra of a shadow. Eyes dart across the top of the papers sheafed in the folder. ‘In the Towers you have to live amongst it all, but that is your fault. We did not want that for you. You chose to go your own way. What were we to do?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I understand now.’

  ‘There is no hope for the people on the ground, you know. They were like this a thousand years ago. They will live like this forever.’