by Emily Barr
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. I’m alone.’
The woman patted the other side of her own table. ‘Join me? We lone wolverines should stick together.’
‘Thank you.’ Arty moved herself and her bag across to the other table. The woman made some signal to the waiter, and in no time at all two more people (they looked like a couple, and they were talking in Hindi about a wedding they were going to) were seated where Arty had just been.
‘So,’ said the woman. ‘Tell me about it. First, are you OK? How does someone so young as you find herself alone in Mumbai? And sorry – you talk kind of like the Queen of England, and you look like you could be local, maybe. Not that it’s any of my business. Are you a tourist, I guess is what I mean? Backpacker? Though I imagine you’d have ordered from a waiter before.’
‘I’m not a tourist,’ Arty said, and time stopped for a moment.
She saw in a flash that what she said now was going to be the thing that defined who she was out here. This woman had clearly not seen her on ‘social media’ like the train man had. She didn’t need to know.
She remembered Diana in the clearing saying that there were some things that you could call into being just by naming them. She froze as Diana’s voice spoke, clear and real, in her head. It was so real that she wondered why everyone in the cafe hadn’t stopped what they were doing to listen.
It was a lesson they were having, sometime before the last Kotta.
‘You might not understand this now, Arty,’ Diana’s voice said, ‘but at times the words are the thing itself. You make it happen by speaking it. The police, out there, they would say, “You’re under arrest,” and the words made it true. The same applied to weddings, for what that’s worth. You say the words to the right person. You’re married. The thing you speak can become your reality by the fact that you’ve spoken it.’
She remembered her mother saying, ‘Look at the world out there. See it for yourself … You could have an adventure and come back.’
Arty put those two things together. She reframed her life. She was going to make a new reality by speaking it.
She turned back to the woman. ‘I don’t think I’m a backpacker,’ she said. ‘I don’t really know what one is. I’ve never been anywhere apart from India. I live in a community with people from lots of different countries, but I’ve lived in the same place all my life.’ She took a deep breath and went on. ‘I’m seventeen and I’ve come to Mumbai on my own because it was time for me to see the real world. I’ve got some money, and I’m here for a year. My family are all at home waiting for me. This is my year of learning.’
It sounded good. She liked it a lot.
‘Ohhhh-kaaayyyyy,’ said the woman. ‘Kind of like a gap year?’
‘Yes.’ That was nice. ‘It’s my gap year. That’s exactly what it is.’
‘But,’ said the woman, ‘you’re coming to it from a place where you’ve been … sheltered?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your community – is it far from here?’
‘It’s in the forest. It’s very, very far away. I came on a train. I have lots of money. It’s here, in my bag. Eighteen and a half thousand rupees.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Be careful what you say to random people in cafes, darling. I’m all right. And that’s lucky. And eighteen and a half thousand rupees sounds fabulous, but please tell me it’s not supposed to last you an entire year?’
‘No. I need to get a job.’
The woman sipped her wine and looked at Arty with eyes that seemed to see everything.
‘Your community,’ the woman said. ‘Would it be a religious one?’
Arty relaxed a little. ‘No. At least, not really. We’re all gods and goddesses. My mum is called Venus. She had a different name when she was in the world, but her name’s Venus now because everyone at home has god and goddess names. Venus is the goddess. She’s in charge. We do yoga, and stretches, and breathing exercises. We say mantras. We thank the land for feeding us and we thank the water, and we thank the forest and … things.’ She stopped, overwhelmed.
The woman changed. Her eyes were interested.
‘A matriarchy? Now you’re talking my language. You live in a functioning matriarchy? So they didn’t throw you out? It sounded for a moment as if you were living in some awful religious place. I was picturing a patriarch who expelled you for refusing to know your place, or for being pregnant or something. It’s not that?’
‘It’s the opposite of that. I’m here because it was time for me to see the outside. There are eleven of us in the clearing. I was the first child born and I’m the only one who’s completely grown up there. I’ve never met anyone my own age. The adults set it up twenty years ago, so they’ve all come from out here and they know what it’s like and how different we are. But I didn’t. I have little brothers and a sister but they’re younger.’
Arty felt swamped with relief. She had spoken everyone back to life, and now they were alive inside her and inside this woman’s mind too. She had plucked Zeus away from Florence, erased her existence, and sent him back to the clearing to be happy. It felt good.
‘I’m Cherry.’ The woman extended her hand and Arty reached back, not quite sure what she was meant to do. Cherry held her hand and shook it up and down.
‘I’m Arty. Are we shaking hands?’
‘Good to meet you, Arty. Yes, we are. So you chose to do this?’
‘I did.’
‘They let you go? You didn’t run away?’
‘They let me go. I sold our herbs, and that’s how I got this money. I have to find my uncle Matthew or maybe our friend, Persephone, because she used to live with us but then she left. I think she’s in London. Matthew might be there too but I’m not sure. I’m going to spend a year here, living in the world, working, seeing how it all works, and then I can choose whether to go back, or to stay here, or to do a bit of both.’
‘Oh my God,’ Cherry said. ‘Just – wow. I’m surprised they’d send someone so vulnerable out like that. It’s harsh, but I guess if you’re going to your uncle or a friend of the family … Still. Mumbai, alone?’
Arty felt defensive. ‘I wanted to go. It’s not as if I can’t go back if I need to. I can go back any time.’
‘When did you arrive?’
‘In Mumbai? Today.’
‘And where are you going to sleep tonight, my darling?’
Arty hadn’t expected to be anyone’s darling, here.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, feeling a little bit warm. ‘I know one person in Mumbai. He’s called Joe and I met him in Lonavala. He was kind to me. He helped me a lot. He’s going to a meditation thing tomorrow, but I don’t know where he is today. I thought he might be in this cafe but he’s not.’
He had also, Arty now knew, put photos of her up on the internet. She didn’t understand how that worked, but in some weird way he had made people know about her. That was what the man on the train had said. She didn’t like that, so she didn’t tell Cherry. She would forget about it. She was making an effort not to think about it. Even if he had done that, he was still her only friend. She still wanted to see him again. She wondered why he had disappeared.
‘You got his email? His cell phone?’
Arty nodded, took the paper out of her pocket and unfolded it. She pushed it across the table to Cherry.
Cherry took out her own phone. ‘Want to call him?’
‘Yes! Yes please!’
She watched Cherry tapping her phone. Cherry put it to her ear then passed it to Arty.
This was another new thing. She was using a phone. She had a phone pressed to her ear like people did in books, and it was making a sound that was definitely not Joe’s voice. She listened to it for a bit, and then it stopped and a woman’s voice asked if she’d like to leave a message.
‘Do I want to leave a message?’ she said to Cherry.
Cherry nodded. ‘Just say whatever you want to say to him and he’ll hear it later.’
&nb
sp; ‘Hello, Joe,’ she said. ‘This is Arty. I’m trying to find you.’
‘Tell him to call back on this number,’ said Cherry.
‘Call back on this number,’ Arty said. Then she said, ‘Love from Arty,’ and hung up.
‘You are adorable,’ Cherry said. ‘Well, let’s hope he calls back soon.’ She put the phone down on the table so they could easily answer it if it rang. ‘So, let me get this straight. Your plan was that you would walk around and hope to run into him?’
‘Yes.’
Cherry grinned. ‘Mumbai has a population of around eighteen million. I looked that up before I came here. You’re not likely to find him by happy chance. Good thing we called him.’
‘Eighteen million?’
‘I know, right? Me too. And I’m from San Francisco, and there are enough of us there. Let alone growing up in a community of eleven.’
Arty knew she couldn’t imagine that many people, so she put the thought from her head. ‘So what should I do?’ she said. ‘And then how do I get to London?’
Cherry had a kind face. Arty had never spoken to anyone as old as she was before. She stared at the lines around her mouth and nose. They were nice, she thought. They showed all the ways Cherry had moved her face for her whole life.
‘I’m not sure how you get to London,’ Cherry said. ‘Like you said, I guess you’ll need to gather a bit more money. Or could you contact your uncle or your friend? Give me their numbers and I’ll call them for you. They’ll surely send you the funds you need.’
‘I don’t have their numbers,’ said Arty. ‘We don’t know what they are.’
‘OK. Emails then?’
‘No.’
‘Hmm. What are you supposed to do?’
Arty forced a smile. ‘I’ll find a way.’
‘Darling,’ said Cherry, ‘do you have an ID card of any sort?’
‘What’s that?’
‘ID. Identification. A passport or anything like that?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘In the countryside you were OK with finding accommodation? I guess it could be different out there. Here you’re going to find it difficult to find a room without ID. At the very least, a photocopy of your passport and visa – that’s what I always need. They all ask for that if you’re foreign, or for your ID card if you’re an Indian national. Which would you even be? An Indian national, I guess. We can’t have you sleeping on the street, but hotels are breaking the law if they let you stay without ID, and they won’t do it. You don’t have anything at all?’
‘Nothing. I’ve never had anything with my name on it.’ Arty tried to think about it, but she was still excited about the fact that she had brought her family back to life for Cherry. ‘I stayed with people in Lonavala. I think I’ll get a train back out to the forest and sleep there. I know how to sleep in forests. I’m just … not good when there are people around.’ She looked outside. ‘I don’t think I could sleep there. But isn’t there just a room I could stay in? One someone’s not using?’
Cherry sighed. ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? Welcome to the modern world. Out here we have outrageously rich people, and people dying of starvation. People sleep in the streets while huge luxury apartment blocks are empty.’
‘Why can’t the people in the street sleep in the luxury places?’
She shrugged. ‘Exactly. Why can’t they? Because somehow the system has stopped that happening. We, the people at large, are given television and iPhones and celebrity gossip to stop us thinking, while corporations screw us over again and again and again. The media pushes its own narrative, which is that homeless people are bad and scary and brought it on themselves, and the rich deserve to pay no taxes because they’ve worked hard, and then everyone’s happy to shove out the poor, the disabled, the women, the people with differently coloured skin … to push all of them, anyone who can be reframed as “other”, under the bus.’
‘Push them under the bus?’
‘Oh, not literally, sweetie. I’m so sorry. I’m an old Marxist and I started to rant. Your mother would be with me on this, I imagine. The bus was a metaphor.’
Arty was a bit scared. ‘So I have to find a place to sleep. I’ll go to the forest.’
‘No. You’re not getting a train to some random patch of woodland. Safety, for one thing. Hmm.’
She looked at Arty, and Arty understood for the first time the phrase ‘a twinkle in her eye’. She had never actually seen anyone with that before, but now she could see it in Cherry.
‘Your eyes are twinkling,’ she said. ‘Like someone in a book.’
Cherry laughed very loudly. ‘It’s because I’m plotting,’ she said. ‘Also like someone in a book.’
She stopped talking when the waiter tried to deliver Arty’s tea to the wrong table, before bringing it to the right place. Arty wasn’t comfortable yet with someone doing something for her, without her doing something nice for them in return, but she supposed she was paying the money as a token that would allow him to do something nice. Still, it felt awkward.
‘Thank you very much,’ she said to him, and he told her she was welcome and that the food would be along in a minute.
She turned back to her new friend. ‘What are you plotting?’
‘Well,’ said Cherry, ‘I shouldn’t. But anyway. Just for tonight I think I can give you shelter. This is my last night here so if they throw us out in the morning, who cares? I’m in an Airbnb in Bandra and, although I shouldn’t have anyone else staying on pain of all kinds of dire things, I think we’ll find a way. I have a huge room and enough cushions to make you a spot on the floor. Obviously I’m not suggesting we share a bed or anything so don’t worry about weirdness. The landlady is a sweetie, so I feel bad, but I can’t ask her because she’d have to say no.’
‘Did you say Bandra?’
‘I did. It’s across town from here.’
Arty couldn’t believe that she had said that word.
‘That’s where the Bollywood people live.’
‘It is! Two of them on my street, apparently.’
‘Can we go to AMK’s house?’
Cherry was laughing. ‘You’ve never ordered a drink from a waiter, yet you know who AMK is?’
‘Salman told me about him. The taxi driver. AMK is the greatest movie star who ever lived.’
‘Salman the taxi driver? How much did he charge?’
‘Nothing. He said it was a present from him to me.’
‘And he didn’t … ask you for anything else?’
Arty shook her head. ‘Like what?’
‘Never mind. Just wearing my cynical hat.’ She saw Arty’s face. ‘Oh, not a real hat. Though I’d love to know what a cynical hat would be like. In one of my previous lives I worked in fashion, and I would love to make you a cynical hat, my dear, to guide you on this gap year. Yes, we can go to AMK’s house. Of course we can. But first tell me more about your society, Ms Goddess.’
Arty’s food arrived, and she ate it while telling Cherry about the way life in the clearing worked. Her current life. Her happy life. She pretended with all of her might. It was hard to talk about it, but she did it. She brought it back and made it real with her words.
‘So you’ll come to stay with me tonight,’ Cherry said when she had finished. ‘That’s settled. My room’s in the basement. Kind of underground, though there’s a window of sorts. One night only, but it’s something, isn’t it?’
Arty nodded. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been underground.’
She remembered Venus saying, ‘Don’t go into the basement,’ but she thought she couldn’t have meant this one.
‘That’s OK,’ said Cherry. ‘It’s a gorgeous room. You’ll like it.’
June
It got worse, because now I was in more trouble. After I hurt her and ran up the stairs she was a lot meaner with me. She was furious. But it wasn’t as if she could do much, because she could hardly make my life any worse than she already had.
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bsp; The days went on. I sank into despair. I looked to my cartoon friends for help, but they were lethargic too, lying around in the corners of the rooms, sleeping or staring into space. For a long time we just watched television and did nothing. I lost track of the days and weeks.
I had my list of ideas. I knew that the next thing on my list was to try to attract attention from the world outside, but I had already hammered on the door at the top of the stairs and that had done me no good at all. I had tried to make a sign for the window but I couldn’t get it up high enough even with the bluebirds helping me lift it, and anyway I knew that there was a little wall between that and the pavement. I threw some things at the high window but nothing happened, so I moved down the list.
Next: convince her I was sorry. That one wouldn’t work so soon after hurting her.
I was down to my final option.
When I had the energy, when I felt the time was right, then I was going to start a fire.
11
Cherry’s room was inside the front door, then down some stairs. Arty wasn’t good at stairs, and she went down them slowly, feeling ahead with each foot, lowering herself gently. It was different from going up and down the two broad steps in the clearing or a ladder. She had had to concentrate hard on the stairs in Vikram and Gita’s house, and in the hospital they had used a lift, which had made Arty feel sick. She kept a hand on the wall and concentrated.
Ahead of her Cherry turned round. ‘Are you all right, sweetie?’ she said.
Arty couldn’t look at her. She had to look at her feet. But she nodded, knowing Cherry was watching.
‘Haven’t done this much before,’ she managed to say, frowning, and made it to the bottom of the stairs.
Cherry breathed all her breath out at once in a big huff.
‘Of course you haven’t,’ she said. ‘Wow. Yes. That makes sense. Take your time. It takes as long as it takes.’
The walls were white, with a picture of an elephant on one of them. The floor was cold, with rugs on it. The last rug Arty had seen had been in Venus and Vishnu’s bedroom. There was a bed, the same sized bed that Arty’s parents had slept in. There was a little light next to the bed. It had a black wire snaking around the floor and into the wall. There was a photo of a man beside the bed, a man with much darker skin than Cherry’s, and Arty didn’t know who he was. Next to him there was a photo of a woman, who was old, like Cherry. She had dark skin and white hair. There was a book on the table, some clothes on a chair, a suitcase in the corner.