Leila

by Prayaag Akbar

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  I take a deep breath. ‘I don’t even have a photo of her. Not one photograph of my baby. They just dragged me away that night. They didn’t leave me anything to remember her by. What if one day I can’t remember her face? It frightens me so much. It makes me panic. I start freaking out. What if I can’t remember? What if the details are already fading? Her neck, her cheeks, those small hairs before the hairline – do I remember them exactly like they were? All it takes is a little bit. Little here, little there. What if some day I’m remembering the wrong face? I need you to do this, Dips. They’ll have something, maybe in an old album. Maybe they took the photos that were up on the walls of our apartment. Ask Gazala. I only need one. Just one photograph.’

  Dipanita’s eyes are screwed up, shining from tears. ‘I’ll see what I can do, Shalini. I might have one myself. That day we drove out to the hills for that picnic. Atul took a lot of photos that day. But I’m not sure which ones we still have. I’m going to try my best. If we don’t have one, I will ask Gazala. God,’ she said, bending to dab her eyes with the napkin on the side plate, ‘I promised Atul I wouldn’t see you any more. This was it. He made me swear. But let me try. Let me try.’

  I know immediately that I’ll never get the photograph. Already she struggles with the weight of what I’ve asked. It is too much to expect.

  ‘There is one thing,’ she says suddenly. ‘That day … that night they came. A few days after that we found this little plastic shovel among Pari’s toys. You know those bucket sets they sell for kids to take to the beach? It wasn’t Pari’s, I was sure of that. My maid thought we brought it back by mistake that night in all the confusion, that it got put into our bag. I could never throw it away because I thought it might be, you know … Did Leila have a beach set? Is it hers? I can send it to you.’

  I cannot speak. Riz is carrying Leila into the ocean, her first time. I’m a few steps behind with a camera. She looks at me over his shoulder, confused, frightened, about to wail. Later she is plopped where the waves turn to rolling foam, doughy thighs sunk in the silver sand. I am crying again.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I say. ‘Please send it.’

  The waiter is appraising us as he walks over with the bill. He quietly places the leather folder in front of Dipanita. ‘And Atul. How is he? You haven’t told me anything about him. About your own life.’

  ‘Atul is fine, I guess. His business is doing well.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that, Dips. I’m glad you’re happy.’

  ‘Happy?’ She laughs unconvincingly. ‘I wouldn’t say that. Atul … thinks he’s smart. But he’s stupid. He’s having an affair.’

  For the first time there is something like defeat in Dipanita’s eyes. Resignation. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, D,’ I say. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. His secretary.’ Her eyes are suddenly wet again. ‘She’s such a bitch to me. Acts superior. Won’t pass on messages. Won’t return my calls. Doesn’t do any of the work I give her. And when I tell Atul he starts shouting, asks if he is supposed to fire her, as if I’m the one who is taking advantage. She comes from some shitty place. Had a tough life, by all accounts.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I think that’s the fun now. All these fucking boss men. Forbidden fruit and all. As if their pussies taste different. No question of getting married, so it’s perfect. All the fun and none of the hassle.’

  A paddleboat shaped like a white swan ventures down the canal in long zigs and zags. Two young men pedal, puffing from the exertion. One of their companions is draped over the boat’s gunwale, trailing a lithe white arm in the water. Dipanita slips a few notes in the bill folder and suddenly stands up. ‘That’s why I did it, you know,’ she says. ‘This skin whitening thing. I thought it would get him interested again. Long procedure. And bloody painful.’ She laughs again, that same pained burst. ‘Silly me. I really thought it would help.’

  I remain seated. ‘Will I see you again?’

  She looks so worried, wringing her hands. ‘It’s difficult, Shal. Very hard. I’m going to try to talk to Gazala, of course. But I don’t like lying to my husband. It’s the kids, you know. He’d throw me out if he knew I was staying in touch. I can’t endanger them like this.’

  I stand up and walk around the table, put my arms out for a hug. When we embrace I feel her tears again. ‘It was good seeing you again, Dipanita,’ I whisper. ‘It really was. Go home to your kids.’

  SETTLEMENT

  The girl ignores me. Never smiles as she goes past at the end of the day, as some of them do. I briefly considered the possibility she was Pari, Dips’s daughter grown up. But they would never send her here.

  Her name is Advika Chauhan. I read it off a postage label. She’s Agnikula Rajput. I knew by the thread on her wrist that she came from one of the better communities, but it is clear Advika’s family isn’t wealthy. Her father will be a building darvaan, a security man in a factory, something similar, clinging to the edges of the sector from a time-worn sense of pride, but too poor, in truth, to pay the Council taxes, the rocketing property rates. This is why they send her all this way for the few thousand rupees she earns every month.

  The hemp thread wrapped around half an inch of her wrist is bright red interwoven with yellow. Left wrist, meaning she is unmarried. In the political sector we have people from all around the city. The threads let people know where you are from. There are different colours for each grade. I look down at my own wrist, so thin now the bones might be ganglions, bony and bare. If you live outside the walls, like the Slummers or us Tower women, you aren’t accorded a thread.

  Advika adjusts the angle of her computer monitor. Through the window behind her a patch of road is visible. Pedestrians, the ridged grey bonnet of a parked sedan behind an interlay of leaves, along the pavement a strip of smooth, grey tarmac upon which every few minutes some ministerial convoy travels, a channel of bulbous white cars, the middle with a wailing red beacon on its forehead. Perched on my stool I have time to stare. This morning there was a paunchy, dark man with gold chains, talking into a cell phone, one hand flung out like a ghazal singer. Two ladies bundling forward in heavy silk saris. A powder blue suit who bent to adjust his shoe. Each person who walks into this snippet of shining white sun is untouched, blithe, unburdened by what transpires around them. They follow the thread of their day, think through worries, chase desires. They are allowed to grow, create. They needn’t consider what goes on beneath their roads and outside their walls, they can section it from their minds.

  Somehow Leila has stumbled into this square of spring sunshine. The Council did not find her. She has never known its choking grip. For this I would give anything.

  Today I will have the address. This afternoon, while everyone is at the Sealing. My journey is coming to its end.

  *

  A fire rages in the East Slum. Seven weeks the landfill has burned. The Harnagar landfill is one of four mountains of garbage along the cardinal edges of the city, each growing higher every day. Harnagar is the biggest. It stretches a kilometre each way, rises further than any sector wall, any Ministry building, something like two hundred feet. On my way to work the bus takes me right past the blaze. The odour is unmistakable. It settles on your skin. Rub your thumb against the tips of your fingers and even with eyes closed you’ll see black grains of the things that heavy this air.

  Mummy would slap my hand if I held my nose as we drove past a stinky area, a sewer, a Slum, some other accretion of horrifying smells. A disappointed light would enter her eyes. ‘Think of the people who live here,’ she’d say. ‘But they can’t see us,’ I would protest. ‘What if they did it to you? Would you like that?’ Neither of us could imagine I would some day have an answer.

  If it goes well today, I will have a chance to teach Leila this little marker of respect myself. A message down from mother to daughter, without interruption, like hair carefully plaited. If it goes well today. Give me this, just this. Please.


  The landfill ignites every summer. The firemen say the trash throws high concentrations of methane in the air. Usually the fires are small enough to be controlled. This time was different. The unseasonable sun sparked off the methane. In seconds blue-orange flames forked down from the brow of the hill in four distinct channels. Finding fresh fuel at a giant crag of hospital waste – needles, oxygen cylinders, blades, glass pipettes – over the ledges formed by the rusted bed frames, round and down the scarps that descended from a long, narrow plateau of non-processable plastic. On the first day of the fire the clouds were so thick the crows and kites and gulls deserted the skies. Cows, buffalo and cattle egrets once roamed the crest of the mountain, burrowing long faces in the loam with glee. Now they are gone. Of the scavengers only the rats and humans remain, hardy, hard to dislodge.

  *

  It’s just past noon when the phones go off. Thirty-two short trills, from every part of the room, at precisely the same moment. My own phone is silent. I don’t receive the same broadcast message. Every protocol, every computer system is calibrated to these sensitivities. Our message comes a minute or two later, in tow, bent low. Trucks leave for the Sealing at 3 p.m. sharp. Lateness will not be tolerated.

  At fifteen minutes to the hour I pile into the bed of a truck along with the peons. I’m so excited I hardly notice the rush of people climbing in after me until we’re about to get moving and I’m pushed up against restraints approximating a side wall, thick wooden planks set like a stile into the metal frame of the truck bed. The stile reminds me of childhood drives on rain-torn highways, stuck behind a cattle truck, two broad, black, muscled rears trembling down at me, their faeces-streaked tails swishing road bugs away. The truck gargles to life. I grab hold of a plank and hang my head over a strip of lumber so I don’t have to smell everyone else. The inside carries a whiff of grain, or coir, fibrous and dusty. I’m very nervous. Under my breath I mouth a mantra. No Repeaters, no Repeaters, no Repeaters. Alongside the anxiety something else, when I think how it will be to finally have my daughter’s address in hand, a cold, coiled thrill like the beginning of love.

  A wiry boy, maybe from the hills, his eyes are like coin slots, pushes through the crowd selling amulets and charms. The black threads are looped around his right arm so the pieces dangle and when the truck sways the grainy blue and green and red stones catch the sunshine anew like glinting snake eyes.

  Dr Iyer once told me that the right charm, a periapt of his choosing, would align my future. We were walking that afternoon on a path that ran alongside the boundary of Camp. He called these sessions 1-2-1s.

  ‘The stone will be shaped like an egg. Bigger than a hen’s egg. Like a swan’s.’ It was extremely hot and there was no shade. Iyer pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his temples carefully. ‘A pearl from the head of an elephant.’

  ‘Which elephant makes pearls?’ I asked.

  ‘One in a million. That’s what makes this stone very, very rare. I have read your charts. This is the solution. Find this stone and you will once again find happiness.’

  I stopped dead, turned to him. ‘How can I?’ I shouted, anger clouding my brain, spilling out. ‘All of this, what’s happened to me. You want me to be like you? All this is because people believed in ancient stories.’

  That is what I wanted to say. Instead I kept quiet, didn’t break stride. We walked in silence, each breath going down like a hot draught, sandals crunching in the brittle topsoil. When I was calm, I said, ‘Look what they did to me, Doctor. How can I believe such things?’

  ‘It wasn’t believers who did this to you, Shalini,’ he said. He nodded slowly, voice soft. ‘Someone with true belief is gentle. Pious. Those men were not believers. They were simply a consequence of that moment. Once in a while even the gentlest hand must ball into a fist. This is what they were. They were the fist.’

  ‘We just happened to be caught in the swing?’

  He shook his head as if disagreeing. Suddenly he shrugged. ‘Things were worse before the walls,’ he said. ‘People fought each other, burned each other. Not just about women. Over who will get government money. Who will get jobs. Fought over everything. We were like animals. With the walls we have order. We will finally have peace.’

  For how long?

  *

  Our truck is in a convoy moving towards Purity Pyramid. In ten minutes we are at the onyx monstrosity, winking and wavy like a mirage in the afternoon glare. It has a white tip. A balcony runs all the way around this tip, a viewing gallery from where the Council looks over the city. Purity Pyramid has been built at the precise centre of the political sector. It rises one hundred feet. Around its base a square of trim zoysia, every blade polished by the bright afternoon. We Tower women are not to come too close to the pyramid, but I know that the tiles, outsized mirrored half-hexagons that interlock, with grooves the depth of a man’s arm, reflect an array of blinding blacks. This is why it seems to wink.

  A stage has been erected on the grass upon which senior members of the Council stand in diamond-white outfits. We’re taken up a series of tunnels. There are so many of us, all footsteps and murmurs. When we emerge once again into the open the audience below looks like ants. Repeaters herd us onto a broad, curving parapet built against the external wall of a parking lot. Below, Ministry workers dismount from air-conditioned buses and mill about confused. Bumping antennae, sniffing out the other’s identity, their role in the colony. When they identify their area they hurry towards it, the relief in each stride palpable all the way up. This is what it is. When order and hierarchy break for even a few seconds, insectile panic.

  Behind the stage a series of giant screens, together showing a baby-blue sky with broad swathes of carpaccio cloud. The signage is familiar. As we stare the clouds turn into letters, a word resolves: Skydome.

  At ground level a chant has begun. ‘Whyyyy share-the-air?’ the audience intones. The heat makes their song gruff, blunt. They keep at it. ‘Whyyyy share-the-air? Whyyyy share-the-air?’ Over this, gradually, a distant clangour, clunks and clashes that sound industrial, suggesting size, coming from above and around us and growing louder by the second, like we’re driving towards the roar of the ocean.

  The Sealing is about to commence. Dholak boys pound skin before the audience. Each sector has a pair of these drummers, sweltering in embroidered sherwanis. Their insistent rhythm wheedles into the shoulders and necks and arms and finally feet of the long column of people behind them. The corporation’s chant, over the muscular drums, reaches us in fragments now. A young girl with kohl-stroked eyes begins a slow, rhythmic dance on a wooden platform on one side, across from her another in the same black and gold sari dances like a reflection. In the great circular fire pit the first embers, big as boulders, warm to a tangerine glow. Priests are at carefully spaced locations around its circumference, like numbers on a dial. Behind each cowl a long line of people. When the believers reach the priest they hand over polythene packets. Coconuts, clarified butter, flowers, fruit tumble into the craggy licking flames. In one zone, men in flowing kurtas and beards and knitted skullcaps wheel their black-curtained women in a square perambulation. Others stand, sit, bend double to the ground with an uncertain cadence. In another section, a procession of men and women is kneeing its way across the gritty road, up and down a channel, following a lady wielding a cross high above her head. The reverences leave a sour taste, the hypocrisy of their piety – it is hollow supplication, they rule as gods themselves.

  I need to get moving. I pick my way through the crowd. Already it’s a squeeze up along the parapet. Four Repeaters are tasked with watching us. Two in the distance, eyes on stage; the other pair is more worrying. My progress elicits complaints, elbows, flickering fingers. I stop when I’m close to the entrance leading down to the tunnels. The Repeaters are walking in a broad circuit, eyes sharp on the long strip of menials for any sign of unrest, any low cussing. The din thunderous as the two translucent halves of the dome come together. They
are maybe a hundred feet apart. There’s a chill in the air, ice-cold currents taper down from above. The air conditioning has kicked in. Shrieks and shouts, joyful, entranced. Around me Slummers and the Tower folk delight in the sight, though they will return to their shelterless life every day, no prospect of sleeping under this cleansing second sky. The audience below breaks into a holy hum. The Repeaters stare straight up like the rest. Fast as I can, I slip through the entrance.

  I negotiate the tunnels without incident. On the road I begin to jog. The priests take their time if they feel the gathered are not sufficiently pious, if they haven’t collected enough money – but to rely on this would be foolish. A huge roar chases me down the tunnels as the citizenry celebrate the completion of the Sealing. They have once again made a pretty package. This dome has majesty. Near see-through, a latticework of plastic venules across the sky. The grey pall that hangs day and night over the city is transformed. Where the sun catches the curvature right the light comes in rainbow drifts.

  The streets are empty with everyone at the Sealing. As my feet pound the pavement, running free, wisps of dirge-like proclamations float over from the ceremony, announcements and claims.

  Why share the air?

  PureSeal.

  … outside impurities.

  100% ClimaControl.

  Breathe easy.

  Cool breeze. Dust-free.

  Imported tech.

  Tell your Council rep today!

  I slow to a walk just before the turn into the Ministry of Settlement, mop the down of droplets on my upper lip. The air conditioning is glorious, a triumph. It makes me feel special, as if I’ve blunted this heat myself. I am restored. Ready for the Repeaters. Steady breath and open heart.