Leila

by Prayaag Akbar

  ‘Did it spread from the landfill?’

  ‘No. The gutter between us is too wide. The fire can’t jump it. This was something else.’

  ‘Do you know what caused it?’

  ‘This is what, you people build your fancy things, you don’t care what happens to us.’

  She’s accusing me of things I have nothing to do with. There’s nothing for me here, I can walk right out. I take a deep breath. ‘What fancy things, Sapna?’

  ‘These things that are coming up all over the city. What do you call it?’ She struggles with the English name. ‘Sffffllllt. Sk … y. Daum. When you build a roof you keep something outside. You put huge air conditioners, pumping cold air into each of the domes. Don’t you know what happens behind an air conditioner, what comes out of its ass? That’s where the hot air is. Hotter than the sun. They put one of their massive air-conditioning units right next to Mahaan Nagar. Pumping out hot air, all day, all night. One hut caught fire, then another. Soon the whole road was burning. That’s how they lost their homes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sapna. Can’t you do something? Complain?’

  ‘What complain? You think anyone listens? No one cared about the landfill fires for years. Years they’ve been burning and we’ve been breathing the air. Our children, our old ones. They only listen when you people complain. From inside the walls.’

  ‘I’m not one of them, Sapna. Why don’t you understand? I’m not like them.’

  ‘Yes, you are, lady. Whatever they have done to you. That is what you don’t understand.’

  THINGS THAT PULL US TOGETHER

  Sapna’s letter came a week ago. Since that afternoon an energy is bubbling under my skin that might burst out any moment. I feel faster, more capable. At work they ask why I’m smiling so much. I helped my neighbour clean out the long metal planter she grows her money plants in. I went to the cinema with two women from the fourth floor. Men pawed at us in the crush as we left the hall. I even did my eyebrows, at a small place that I see on the way back from work. The next day I awoke at dawn, just as a dream of Leila ebbed away. In the evening I went to a children’s store and bought a colouring book and pencils. At home I coloured in the dwarves, the Dalmatians, the mouse and the duck. When I realised how ridiculous this was I started laughing. My laughter made the apartment sound empty, like a vessel.

  In truth, I wasn’t sure I would hear back. The second address I found that day in the Records room – it made no sense. Only members of the Council live in the political sector. Somehow Sapna has gone from the Slum to Officer’s Circle, the best address in the city, where the Council’s most important men have their bungalows. It doesn’t seem possible. But Sapna’s reply came from there. That’s where she’s asked me to meet her. This must be where they live.

  Once I got over my surprise, I thought about what this must’ve meant for Leila. Sapna didn’t even mention her in the letter. Still I could picture it. Leila has grown up in a big house. With a garden, and trees, clean air, wide roads to cycle on, playmates from good families, an excellent school. Far enough from the margin I occupy that it might be another planet. I should be grateful that Sapna managed to give her all this. Instead I feel deep shame. Fragments of memory suppurate, overcome me. What did I do? I brought sadness to Leila’s life. Sapna has been her protector.

  The other day, towards evening, it turned cloudy, and for some reason I thought it must be drizzling where they live. I imagined Leila running up the stairs to her mother’s room, dragging Sapna from her bed, out into their wet green garden where the trees are like a roof, arms raised to the first rain of the year. The knowledge that I failed my daughter is part of me, I carry it everywhere. Over the years I’ve covered it over with something hard. But now that I can picture the life Leila has with Sapna, it feels different, like the burning pink skin underneath a blister you’ve ripped off too early.

  They were here all along. Officer’s Circle is only minutes from the Ministries. As Leila has grown up, there have been two, maybe three walls between us. When I think about how close we’ve been to each other all these years, my chest begins to hurt. I have to remind myself that it could easily have been very different. How did Sapna manage to escape the Slum? I have to wonder. All these years I’ve lived outside the system, outside the sectors, while she has been inside.

  Sapna will have kept herself supple and smooth. When I tell Leila our story, won’t she study my appearance for signs that I’m her mother? How worn out I will look. I know what the smoke and grime have done to my skin and hair and eyes. And what if Sapna believes, as Dipanita did, that the outside dirt has settled into me, under my skin? That impurity is part of who I am. What if Leila is with her as I walk in, what will her first impression be? It would be a mistake to enter their home on foot. I will take a taxi.

  This morning I called a service. The cab that pulled into the badminton court area had a bent, swollen bumper and long silver scratches along the sides almost like racing stripes. Despite this he wanted thousands. Few taxis work the Outroads, fewer still agree to a pick-up in the Towers. I pleaded. He just shrugged, flubbing his lips like a motor revving to indicate it wasn’t his problem. Then he was furious I’d made him come out here for nothing, abusing me, my family. This made me feel better. They think it’s okay to take advantage because we have so little. When he reached the wall bending towards the main gate, he stopped his car and shouted, ‘You sluts deserve to be out here.’ Mouth thick with saliva. I just laughed.

  On the bus came a terrific surprise. As I bought my ticket, I looked up, and Riz was beaming in the last seat, in his favourite shirt, black with thin navy checks. He glowed like he’d been caught in a shard of sunlight. I went to him almost running.

  ‘You came!’ I said.

  ‘Of course. I’d let you do this on your own?’

  ‘I’m so glad that cabbie was an asshole.’ I sat down next to him.

  ‘I’d have found you,’ he said. I wanted to rest my head on his shoulder. But I knew how it would seem to the others on the bus. Riz looked me up and down. ‘New outfit?’

  ‘No, not new. I wanted to look good. I’ve been trying not to rub my eyes. I don’t want Leila to see these circles.’

  ‘Don’t worry so much. You look younger. You look happy.’

  ‘I feel happy, Riz. I’m so excited. I even had my eyebrows done. I haven’t felt like this for so long. But it was terrible, this last month. You don’t know how worried I’ve been. And it was my fault. Just like when I tried to phone Dipanita. I’d call and hang up, call and hang up.’

  ‘Why?’ Riz asked. We were riding down a broad avenue. The weak morning light made the dust glow pink.

  ‘I was afraid that she’d hear my voice and know instantly what I wanted. Slam down the phone. In a second it would all be over,’ I said. ‘Leila would never see me, never know about these years I’ve been trying.’

  I suddenly remembered the tribunal, the slobbering, jerking face hanging over my body. I dropped my gaze so I didn’t have to look Riz in the eye. He has forgiven you. That’s why he’s here.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I wrote a letter. That was the mistake. It took her a month to get back to me. Maybe that’s why I’ve been feeling so kicked since she wrote back. Because last month was so horrible. I was hiding at work. I hid in my apartment. I didn’t even go downstairs to watch the badminton. Every knock on the door, the sound of the lift, a loud crash, I was sure it was the Repeaters again, come to take me away.’

  ‘But why would Sapna rat you out?’ Riz said. ‘We were always good to her.’

  Sapna’s letter is unemotional. I’d written to her in Hindi. The reply came in English. Yes, we could meet. She set a time and date, without recourse to change. This gives me hope. She knows how important this is to me, what I’ve been through to get her address. She knows why I’m coming. Still she agreed. This means she’s been waiting for me too.

  I keep rereading the letter for any sign of what will transpire
today.

  ‘They must know she’s a Slummer,’ Riz said. ‘Why would they go against their own rules for someone like her?’

  ‘Not just any part. She’s in Officer’s Circle. The Council’s senior men live there. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  We’d been riding in the shadow of a sector wall. Riz was staring down at the thick, roiling sea of trash on the pavement. The garbage heaved as rodents scurried underneath its surface. Sometimes they burst out into the open, hairy, black-brown things, fat as sin. As we rolled by the neat bricks of the sector wall, I recalled a night from a long time ago.

  ‘Do you remember, Riz, that time one of your girlfriends came to visit from America?’

  Riz’s eyes went big. He smiled and put his arm around me. ‘She wasn’t my girlfriend, you nincompoop. We dated for a month in college. She came with her husband! To see our mystical city.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ I took his hand. ‘I’m not angry now. Do you remember the fight we had, though? Was Leila born then? I can’t remember.’

  ‘I think she was. Maybe.’

  ‘I refused to come. You came back late, pretending you weren’t drunk. The next morning I blew up, when I found out it was just the two of you, that her husband had fallen sick from something he ate. All night I’d festered at home, wondering what was keeping you there so late. I was sure I knew. I got so angry. I could picture you at the table, leaning into each other, laughing, remembering, stroking hands.’

  ‘Why bring this up now, Shalini? It must be twenty years. Why go over this today?’

  I squeezed his hand. ‘I don’t care about that night. But I remember the fight we had. We screamed at each other so much. I locked myself in the bedroom. I lay in the dark I don’t know how long. Only then did I start feeling calmer. Only then could I hear what you’d been saying. That you hadn’t intended for it to happen – you were as surprised as anyone when she came down alone – that you were allowed to have a few drinks with another woman without it becoming a storming fight. I could hear you moving about in the hall, in the living room. I wanted to come out and speak to you. Just to say sorry, that it wasn’t a big deal. That I loved you. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was like my anger had put a wall between us. I felt it looming. The bedroom wall seemed insignificant. But this wall in my mind I couldn’t climb over.’

  Riz held me closer. He kissed my forehead. ‘It doesn’t matter, my love. It doesn’t matter now. Today we’re going to get our daughter. We can finally forget the past.’

  ‘Don’t you understand? That’s what we are like. I feel it all the time. Everyone tucked behind walls of their own making, stewing in a private shame, like I was that day. They can’t come out into the open. Anyone who can afford it hides behind walls. They think they’re doing it for security, for purity, but somewhere inside it’s shame, shame at their own greed. How they’ve made the rest of us live. That’s why they’re always secluding themselves, going higher and higher. They don’t want to see what’s on the ground. They don’t want to see who lives here.’

  In the distance, grey, implacable, stood Purity One. From the top of the wall began the Skydome, like a marble roosted on a groove. The dome was opaque in the sun, almost greenish-silver. It glistened like a raindrop.

  ‘I’ll feel better when I’m inside,’ I said to Riz. ‘The dome calms me. They keep the air at such a lovely temperature, like it has just finished raining and the wind is blowing. Purifiers working day and night.’ I flashed my identification card as the bus entered a lower gate. Once we were safely inside, I began to take deep lungfuls. ‘You won’t be able to tell,’ I told Riz, giddy, happy, ‘the dome makes the air sweet. Empty. Like it used to be before the walls.’

  ‘Think what these filters do to the air outside,’ Riz said.

  But it’s hard to think about that once you’re under the dome. The bus lurched through leafy streets, a rainbow sun streaming through in stippled pockets. My stop arrived. I rose to walk down the aisle and Riz was no longer with me. An instant of primal panic. I got off and sat on the bus stop bench and for minutes didn’t move. Slowly I aligned my breathing, my every sense, with this hermetic setting. This morning, excitement had knotted my stomach tight as a bowline. I couldn’t eat. I packed my sandwich, in case hunger came later. I unwrapped it now. A mynah appeared almost immediately, perching on the backrest at the other end of the bench. The first bite tasted like paper. Still no appetite. I kept looking at my watch. My feet and calves and genitals rang like a temple with a thousand bells, pushing me to get going, burst ahead, race through. I got to my feet. The yellow kohl around the mynah’s eye seemed to glow with accusation. I fed it a vertex of hard crust and put the rest of the sandwich back in my bag.

  Was Riz right – did we always treat Sapna well? I remember kindnesses. Giving her old clothes. Three months’ advance, fifteen thousand rupees, when her father killed himself and it fell to her to make the arrangements.

  On that bench under the plastic sky I remembered also a sweltering noon in our home in the East End, the very peak of summer. We were in the driveway, the doors of my car flung open to release the morning heat. The child seat hadn’t been attached properly. I was so angry. Clenched, bottled fury, at how careless Sapna was being with my daughter’s safety. The sun pounded down, making blinding lines on the kota driveway. My back and thighs were clammy with sweat. ‘You can’t get a simple thing right?’ I shouted. ‘How many times!’

  Sapna’s shoulders had shrunk as she bent her head to the ground. On her lips a soft, blubbed protest. The guard stared at us from the gate. I glared back. When I turned back Sapna was smiling nervously at him. I saw insolence in that smile, pride, a hollow assertion of status. ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ I shouted. ‘What’s so funny? You’re laughing? This is my daughter you’re talking about. My daughter’s safety. What do you think, I’m an asshole? A moron? You’ll get away with such carelessness?’ As those words came out – my odd, uncustomary Hindi invective – Sapna cracked that smile once again, exchanged another furtive look with the guard. It sent me spiralling to combustion. I took a step towards her with my arm slightly raised. She fell back onto the boot of the car. ‘I’ll throw you out of here,’ I screamed. ‘Make sure you don’t find another job. You can go back to the gutter you came from.’

  A few days later, when things between us had returned to normal, Sapna came to me. ‘Didi, I know you get angry. But not in front of the guard, please. Not like that. He thought you were going to hit me. He was telling the servants from the other apartments that if you threatened me like that in the driveway, what must you be doing behind closed doors?’

  I wonder if Sapna still remembers that afternoon.

  *

  The gate is a few minutes’ walk from the bus stop. Behind it a narrow lane with a wall on one side with a stubble of dark-green moss. Shade from a long rim of trees gives the lane a mysterious aspect, as if it belongs in a children’s story.

  I hand Sapna’s letter to one of the Repeaters sat on plastic chairs by the gate. He reads with a slow frown.

  ‘This doesn’t explain anything,’ he says. He’s a young, pale man with a moustache turning velvet from mehndi. ‘Who you are. Why you’re here.’

  ‘I live in the Towers,’ I say. ‘I came to meet Sapna.’

  ‘Sapna Madam?’ He laughs and gestures at his partner, nodding towards me with a mocking grin. ‘Look at this one. Sap – nah – what a memsahib. What style.’ His voice turns gruff. ‘Show some respect!’

  ‘Sorry. Sapna Madam. I’m here to meet her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I used to know her a long time ago. She told me to come. Call. Ask her.’ I’ve been holding my breath. When I inhale it’s so loud that both Repeaters stare. Sweet-smelling drifts from the mulberry and sonjna trees waft through the crystal air.

  The first one looks me up and down slowly. ‘That we do for everyone. Not just the trash,’ he says, and starts to lau
gh. On the other side of the gate a rabbit comes out of the undergrowth and puts a pink nose between the bars. Its ears tremble and then it hops away, frightened by the Repeater’s boots. The Repeater has marched to the gate. He waits there, phone at his ear, then beckons, ushering me through. I’m about to head on when he calls out. ‘Over there,’ he points.

  Opposing the mossed wall, well spaced from one another, are forbidding metal gates, enormous black, rust, maroon panels dead in the sun. Only the first is wide open, revealing, behind a lick of grass, a small office. Pegged in the grass are three unwashed olive-green tents. This is where the Repeater has directed me. I’m walking through the grass to the office building when a dark face pops out of one of the tents. ‘In here,’ she says. ‘Hurry up.’

  The tent flap is horribly damp to the touch. The inside smells of mildew and body powder and sweat. There are a number of cots towards the back, though their bedding looks undisturbed. Three uniformed women sit around a low wooden table, eating fistfuls of shelled peanuts and drinking tea. The fourth, the one who stuck her head out, calls me over. She’s round with little arms and an expression of abject disinterest.

  ‘Quick. Don’t waste everybody’s time,’ she says. Her belt, high on the waist, fails to disguise the obscene bulge of fat just under the buckle. The zip of her trousers only makes it three-fourths of the way up.

  I’m clueless. ‘Hurry up with what?’ I say.

  ‘Take it off, take it off,’ she answers, tugging the lapel of her shirt. ‘Fast. We don’t have all day.’

  So I’m to strip here, like the servants who enter the high sectors each morning. No problem. I pull the kameez over my head and hand it to the woman. She tosses it to a vacant chair. Another guard stands up now and walks to the front. As I’m unlacing my salwar, this woman upturns my handbag, scattering the contents onto a long folding table. She calls out each object’s name and a description, typed by a third uniform into a loud, labouring computer. The guard unwraps my sandwich, examines it, throws it in the trash.