Leila

by Prayaag Akbar

  Even their attention is held above. A young, twitchy man examines my papers. While he pats me down he’s goggling at the roof. Holstering his security wand, he straightens; there’s childish excitement in his voice, as if he might suddenly start clapping, when he asks why I’m not at the Sealing.

  ‘I was just there,’ I say. ‘I was sent back.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Minister-sir. He has asked me to bring him his new camera. He wants to remember this day.’

  He makes way without another word. Is the world suddenly different? Everything refreshed, colours rich, snatches of birdsong. The Repeater is smiling, he doesn’t gripe at some needless thing. Already breathing is much easier, without the gritty chestburn that accompanies deep inhalation. The air has chilled beautifully, evenly. Behind the Repeater two colleagues are unbothered by my presence, one with his legs on a facing chair, tunic open, head all the way back. Everyone enjoying this splendid advance.

  *

  The things Leila and I will do together.

  1. Oil and comb her hair. She will have long, difficult frizzes, like me. I want to rub oil into her scalp. Bunch strands in my palm. Stroke unguent deep into each one.

  2. Factory Dhaba, in the East Slum. Formica tables and tube lights. Women can have a beer here without much trouble, the waiters keep an eye on the men. I hardly drink now but I must hear everything. What music she likes. Colours, whom she’s loved, how she spent these years. She will be facing a stranger. I must be ready for that.

  3. Buy her a dress. This is tricky. The good stores are inside the best sectors.

  4. Travel to the East End. It’s a sector now for Mohyal Brahmins, small but prestigious. They won’t let us enter, of course. But she must see where she was born. If we can spot it, the home her father bought, how we once were.

  5.

  *

  The Records hall is a long room with rows of blue-grey metal shelves that reach the ceiling. They block the windows, even at this hour the room gets only a gauze of natural light. A low ceiling, damp walls, air that clots your breath.

  One end of the room a bank of ancient computers by a wall, each screen grubby with prints. I’ve been sent up to Records before on small tasks. This is the first time the room has been empty. The computers and air conditioning are off, leaving vacancies where there should be familiar sounds. Each rattle or creak is like the moan of the door: someone will walk in, yank me off this chair, throw me in lock-up. Sunder me, at this last step, from my purpose.

  I power on one of the computers and pull up a swivel chair. A buzz of blue light, and a wheezing, strained drone that breaks the quiet like a dying electric saw. The programme that stores the land records is clunky. These machines needed replacing years ago.

  The biggest problem is I can’t remember her surname. We never learnt surnames. I remember so many things about the people who worked in our homes – quirks, scars, facial details, tics. But what came after Sapna? It is my understanding – perhaps this is wrong – that those born in the Slum never truly have a family name. They’ve lived outside society for millennia, nothing to pass on, why have a name other than the diminutive given by parents? I have a notion I saw the surname Kumar on whatever scrap of identification Sapna showed when she came to work in my house. It means prince, chaste. Sometimes they adopted Raja, or Rani, king, or queen. The irony is rich.

  The computer has a file on its desktop named Harnagar. I open it while waiting for the records to load up. It’s a report from a delegation sent by the Council to the landfill. They want to see what can be done about the fire. Smoke from the conflagration is travelling across the city in thick white clouds that extend unbroken till the horizon. Residents of the sectors neighbouring the landfill complain of chronic pulmonary conditions, eye trouble. The blaze spreads like a bush fire. Firefighters quell it in one place, only to find it has been sucked under the surface, flamed out elsewhere. A new layer has been added to the shroud of particulates over the city.

  There are fourteen Sapna Kumars. I’m working down the list, crossing out names as I’m certain. I must get back to the Sealing before they miss me. I must figure out which Slum she has settled in, which sector it serves. If she lives in the wide arc of Slums adjoining the industrial sectors, that will complicate matters further. I check current professions, income levels. Then the penny drops. Only two Sapnas are listed with daughters at the right age. This is what I should’ve been searching for all along.

  One address seems right. Sapna is in Harnagar. Hut 86, Mahaan Nagar, East Slum. This has to be it. Her girl is nineteen, exactly the right age. But why would she be at the landfill? The Sapna I knew wasn’t from the scavenger caste. We wouldn’t have let her tend to our daughter. Things must’ve been very hard for her after. Maybe no one would give her a job. Why else would she have descended to this, to scavenger level?

  The other Sapna’s daughter is eighteen. Strange. She lives right here, in the political sector: 23 Officer’s Circle. The houses there are for the Council’s highest echelons, top of the ancient ladder, the cream of society. I note down the phone number and address just to be safe.

  So I must travel to the landfill then.

  SAPNA

  I’m hiding in a tiny sweet shop in the East Slum. I came in to ask for directions when a commotion began behind us. Quick as a monkey, the owner ducked behind the counter. I elbowed a customer out of the little shop and put my back against the wall. The stink of milk is making me gag, but I can’t go out onto the road. The Repeaters are here. They’re taking people, looks like it doesn’t matter whom. Men, women, they’re grabbing them off the road and tossing them into a blue van. The morning is very bright. All over there are puddles, grey, simmering lakes. A goat roped to a mailbox is watching me and chewing.

  Someone tipped the Repeaters off. I saw it on the news last night. The scavenger community that lives here has been starting the landfill fires, no one is sure why. Day by day the sulphur clouds rising from the dumping ground have thickened. Now they maraud through the skies like battleships, and in the high sectors people complain of afflictions, rhinal, renal, rheumatoid.

  One man’s trousers are bunched at his knees. A Repeater winds back and swings. The lathi whips through the air again and again. The sound reminds me of Riz’s squash racquet, like the rails he’d practise for hours. The Slummer is hopping, clutching his naked arse, yelping miserably. Over the years the East Slum has spread, squat and wet, through the eastern quadrant, a river of blue and black tarpaulin roofs fed by a monsoon of migrants. The landfill scavengers occupy one festering lane of the East Slum, in the shadow of the midden. They’ve crowded the road with shaky, single-room dwellings.

  Sapna lives here. Leila lives here. I was nervous even before the Repeaters arrived, all morning my stomach did somersaults. I was trembling as I looked for their hut. Now I feel the blood pounding in my ears, rushing through me, charging every limb.

  Slow. Wait for the Repeaters to complete their business. Shift your mind. An old man helps a child squat in an open-air cubicle that dumps directly into the gutter, into a smoking pile the colour of wet coffee grinds. The hand pump, focus on that. Creak-gwoosh-creak-gwoosh, little girls, mothers, hunched biddies crouching around the square concrete basin. Most of the women at the pump are washing utensils and clothes. An old woman occupies a plastic chair. Everyone pretends not to watch the Repeaters. The crowd is arguing, pleading the innocence of friends, children, spouses. A slap rings out, then another. The Repeaters climb into their van, swinging their sticks, slinging abuse. It kicks into life and then down the road, into a self-made swirl of dust.

  That moment the wind picks up, bringing tattered ribbons of smoke from the endless fire. Instantly I’m bent double, leaning on my knees, retching and drooling on the road. Acrid fumes scratch at my eyes and throat. When I look up some of the younger children are watching and giggling.

  It breaks my heart that Leila has grown up like this. Her delicate, tiny lungs have slowly calci
fied, these years living in the dirt have lined her face. Now she will be hardly different from these urchins. Sapna, my low surrogate, how could you bring her here, to this forsaken place? Did you really have no choice? Did you teach her, as a child, to go barefoot and barehanded through this diseased dump, scour it for things to sell, for sustenance? I stare down at the streaks of silver saliva I’ve left on the road, shivering like I have a fever.

  A young woman is tapping my spine, the crest of my back. ‘Are you okay?’ The glare of the sky behind her darkens the face, yet around her there’s a shine, a halo. Leila. Grown-up Leila has come to me. Finally we are found. Is it inside that instant, in its hollow denouement, that I understand it isn’t her? My thrill is like a speed bump. I wipe my mouth and eyes, nod. The girl offers a sympathetic smile. She starts to walk away. I clutch at her crepe-like sari and cough out a question.

  Yes, she knows Sapna Kumar’s house. The hut she points to has a washing line spanned across the front, onto which is clipped a single pair of Batman boxers. It’s growing again, that tingle in my calves, the sense of an impending moment, of fruition. ‘Go,’ she says. ‘She’ll be heading to the landfill soon.’

  *

  Our home in the East End one evening, Dips visiting. We sat around the dining table, Leila’s dolls and blocks scattered across the polished dark wood. Dipanita was zipping up her handbag, preparing to leave, when Sapna skittered up to us, all of twenty, brown eyes shining.

  ‘Get your toys together!’ she scolded, mocking. ‘What’ll Auntie think?’

  Faint disapproval on Dipanita’s face, a tight smile. ‘This girl is too familiar,’ she said in English. Sapna was oblivious, helping Leila gather the playthings into a large, sturdy container made from see-through plastic.

  ‘She’s fine,’ I said. ‘They get along very well. She obviously loves her.’

  Leila looked up to see if we were talking about her. Sapna tucked the container into the crook of her arm. They collapsed on the carpet in the living room, spilling the toys around them.

  Dipanita scraped her chair out and stood. ‘You know how to raise your daughter,’ she said with a smile. But when we were at the door – I had my back to the room – she clutched my arm. ‘Look, look,’ she said. ‘She’s kissing her. Look at that. Nose, cheeks, forehead. How can you allow that?’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked. ‘She washes her bum too.’

  ‘That’s different. Not this. There has to be some distance. Propriety. Who knows what’s been in her mouth.’ She squeezed my forearm tighter, eyes big as a hunting cat. ‘They have so many diseases. Stop all this. Promise me.’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ I said. And I did. What bothered me, I came to realise, was the thought of her saliva on my daughter. I imagined faint, near-invisible lines of spit, slowly soaking into my daughter’s skin, becoming part of her. That night I told Sapna she wasn’t allowed to kiss my daughter any more.

  *

  There is no door, it is an oblong hole in the corrugated tin wall, a knotted bed sheet hiding the inside. A flaking blue water drum, half-full, stands sentry. I’m careful not to peek when I knock on the wall. Do not cause offence, be patient. There will be genuine affection between them, love of a kind. But the squalor gives me hope. I can pay, even if I have to promise more than I can manage. My savings from sixteen years at the Ministries, everything I have, all of it can go. Need be I’ll go to a moneylender. How much could she ask for, living like this.

  A woman responds from inside the hut. Sapna? Or was that … was that my daughter? Her smoky, grown-up voice?

  At first the change in light is too much, I can’t see anything. Slowly a figure emerges from the darkness. The woman seated on the pavement floor peeling ginger root between her legs is dark and muscled. She has closeset eyes, a toothy, slightly manic smile. But this isn’t the Sapna who worked for me. The air rushes from my lungs. The dark little room starts to spin. There’s no furniture in here to hold on to, I realise, as I crash to the ground.

  I haven’t fainted, I’ve landed heavily on my knees. There is no pain. Sapna, this one, she’s staring at me, confusion on her gremlin face. ‘My daughter has gone to fetch water,’ she says. ‘You want fridgewater, right?’

  ‘Anything is fine,’ I say. The girl enters the hut and with a hint of a curtsy hands over a tumbler, condensation dripping. She’s prettier than her mother. She isn’t Leila. The water is cold, metallic.

  Their home is the size of a bathroom. Spotless – the flatware, the floor, the crisp man’s shirt in one corner, everything gleams. In the corner two columns of water pots rise to the ceiling, which is barely higher than my standing height. Three mattresses, tightly coiled, on a shelf near the roof, next to an aluminium chest with a sturdy lock. ‘You were asking for me,’ the woman declares. She hasn’t moved. Her knife shaves the gnarled root with ease. The daughter leans against their metal almirah and slides down to the floor, hugging her knees once she sits.

  ‘My mistake,’ I say. ‘I was confused. I thought you were someone else.’

  A commotion has started up outside again. Through the door I can see people hurrying back in the direction I came from. Sapna swivels her neck. Her daughter jumps up and unfurls the bedsheet at the door, cutting off the light. The mother leans back until she’s reclining, resting her head against the far wall. It seems at first she’s hiding, but no, she’s watching the outside through the long, vertical crack where the tin-sheet walls are supposed to join. In the hut the darkness is gathering weight. What light there is comes from under the curtain, from the walls. Sapna sits up straight. ‘The bastards are back,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Why are they here?’ I ask. Though there is shouting and crying outside we speak in lowered tones.

  ‘They think we’re responsible for the fires. We’ve been trying to explain … Ass fuckers, the lot of them.’

  Her daughter smiles, showing a stripe of white teeth. Sapna speaks. ‘We’ve been telling Municipal about the fires for so long. Every summer it happens. This year the fire isn’t going out, it’s out of control. Some parts of the mountain none of us will go near.’

  ‘Why do they think it’s you?’

  ‘God knows. They stick their dicks in each other’s ears so often it’s fucked their brains. Because we work here, I suppose. Because they need someone to blame.’ She sucks the moisture from her teeth between sentences. Sffffllllt. ‘They’ve done this before. Once things have died down they’ll demand money. Fifteen, twenty thousand, for each person’s release. Where will we get that money? I make a hundred a day. Hundred and fifty if I find metal, some unspoilt plastic. Are we crazy? Sffffllllt. The mountain is our livelihood, our only earning. Why would we burn it down?’

  ‘It’s been going on for weeks.’

  ‘And what about the stuff coming in from the factories? Drums filled with thick red acid, something like what comes out of a battery. But you can’t touch it.’ She raises her hand. Skin has bubbled up at the heel of her palm, creating a rubbery pink trench. I feel sick again. ‘Sffffllllt. All winter trucks were bringing in those drums. They toss it and disappear. The drums leak all over the place.’

  The girl is messaging on her mother’s phone, a blue-white light playing across her face. Now she looks up. ‘But what are you doing here, didi? Are you from the Slum? Why did you come to see my mother?’

  ‘I’m from the Towers, my dear. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Your mother seems to.’ I try to put on an easy smile. ‘It’s where the Council keeps people who don’t fit in. Who broke their rules.’

  ‘What rule did you break?’

  ‘I fell in love.’

  Sapna laughs at this, a bitter twist of her lips. ‘Remember that,’ she tells her daughter. ‘Remember this woman. The Towers is where they put high-borns. Sffffllllt. The people that broke their rules. Sffffllllt. Still they get big, big buildings. Toilet, fans, electricity, flush. Even when they break the rules they’r
e too good to be put out here with us. But us? Our crime is being born. We don’t get anything. We don’t deserve it.’

  Tell her. Tell her I will gladly, instantly swap. Her daughter is in her home, she can reach out at any time, touch her, stroke her hair, teach her how to face this world. I have sixteen years of emptiness. I didn’t get to once bandage Leila’s knee, help her get over a boy. Leila never kept a secret from me. She never – guilty, laughing – betrayed a friend’s confidence to give me a juicy bit of gossip. Stormed out of the room, convinced I’m the biggest bitch in the world. We have been denied the natural arc, the swings between tenderness and dismay, the love between mother and daughter.

  But no one must know what I’m trying to do. This is what’s important. I must think ahead, to the next meeting, to the Sapna who lives in Officer’s Circle.

  This Sapna is staring down at the piles of peeled ginger. With the curtain down the air in the hut is thick, close. She looks at me from the tops of her eyes, that sly, gremlin smile returning. ‘Lady, you still haven’t told us why you’re here. Are you hiding from them?’ she asks, jerking a thumb at the door.

  ‘No, no,’ I quickly say. ‘It’s just … I thought you were another Sapna, one I used to know a long time ago. But you’re right, I don’t want to be caught up in all that. It’s safer in here, if you both don’t mind.’

  For some time there is silence between us. The abuse and shouting has been replaced by an infant’s wail. Sapna nods at her daughter and she ties the curtain to one side again, letting in an angry rhombus of light.

  ‘Do you know there was a fire here also?’ Sapna asks. ‘Sffffllllt. Did you hear about that?’ I shake my head. ‘The other end of Mahaan Nagar was gutted. Burnt to nothing, all the homes there. Six children died. Hundred families homeless.’