‘It sounds like you’ve done a lot of thinking,’ Mike said.
She felt ashamed; she had begun to tell the story in a deliberate way, but lost awareness. It had pulled her along, and she had begun to shed details, accumulate speed like a cartoon snowball.
She shrugged. ‘I dunno.’
‘We must keep in touch,’ he said. ‘I don’t want this to be one of those things where you meet someone really great on holiday and have a chat and that’s it.’
‘Okay.’
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘Let me give you my number. Give me a call when you get back.’
She took out her black-backed notebook and her pen, and he took both from her. She disliked other people writing in her notebook, but watched as he wrote down his name, Mike Gibbons, and his telephone number.
‘Give me your address as well,’ she said. ‘I could write to you.’
‘I’m not very good at letters.’ He wrote it down anyway. ‘Call me when you’re back,’ he said. ‘The house number’s the best. Leave a message if I’m not there, and I’ll call you back for sure.’
He wanted to pay for dinner, but she refused; when they said goodnight, he gave her a hug. After the elephant trip the next day, he and his parents were leaving for a bird sanctuary in the hills. Leela said she would move on in a day or two; she didn’t know.
The hug had made her more lonely. The next day, eating her dosa, reading, going to the beach, she was alone in a new way. She sat on the sand, drawing in her sketchbook, and an old woman who was passing stopped to look, then tried to teach her the Malayalam word for ‘cow’, indicating the cow Leela was sketching to make her point.
Chapter 21
‘Ah, you went travelling? Where all?’
‘Round the coast, Varkala, Kanyakumari, Madurai. I had the best coffee there, on the street. You know the way they pour it.’ She mimed the gesture of two vessels, a yard apart.
The other girl, Chitra, smiled. She was tall and fair, with a soft face. They continued to sit in the dining room, at a corner table under the fluorescent tube lights.
Leela was divided between the pressure to be entertaining and the pleasure of a moment in which someone was listening; this was her first prolonged conversation in the hostel. ‘Lots of temple towns,’ she went on.
‘I’ve been to Kanchipuram and Chidambaram,’ Chitra said.
No one else was left in the room. Leela moved congealed daal around her plate. Half a leathery chapati also remained.
‘I didn’t go to either,’ she said. ‘But I did go to Rameswaram.’
‘Ooh! Was it beautiful?’
‘Really beautiful. The sea was incredibly blue, and calm. It made me nervous. I went on a boat trip, with this family from Indore. The boat guy said the sea is always like that at that time of year. He said in June it’s flat, like glass.’
‘Wow,’ Chitra said. She smiled, and gathered her pots of ghee and pickle, condiments every hostel girl seemed to own.
‘I went to Dhanushkodi as well. They say you can see Lanka on a clear day – but I didn’t.’ Her mind became blank and wondering as that day, stepping out of a rickshaw to go down to the beach. The ocean had boomed, dark blue. There had been huge breakers, and what looked like a steep shelf. She had sat on the beach for a while in her swimming costume, and a t-shirt; fishermen had pulled in their boats and thrown out ropes so that their wives could draw in the nets. The men had looked at her and the women had narrowed their eyes, telegraphing that when she began to drown, they wouldn’t save her.
After some thought she had put on her trousers again. ‘I didn’t swim,’ she told the baffled rickshaw driver.
At the end of the land was a salty promontory, fish bones and quartz, a few boats and coir huts. You looked out into space, wind, and ocean.
Chitra got up and went to the fridge to put away her stuff. Each of her bottles was labelled with her name, as per regulations. Leela followed her, already depressed by the moment when they would part for the evening. There were firm unspoken rules about new girls, who were ignored for exactly as long as making friends mattered to them. There was one girl who’d smiled at Leela and introduced herself when she moved into the corridor. But they had never spoken at length, merely exchanged ‘How’s it going?’ and smiles en route to the communal bathroom, each clutching her plastic bucket.
She and Chitra headed into the foyer.
‘Late finishing today,’ remarked Mrs Pawar, one of the hostel wardens. She sat at the desk, self-consciously upright in her bright pink sari and matching, daringly low-backed blouse. Sometimes she even wore sleeveless blouses. She had recently bobbed her hair. It was an improbable crow-black.
Chitra dimpled at her. ‘You know what it’s like, ma’am. We were talking.’ She drifted over to the pigeonholes to check her mail. Leela headed to the lift. The requirement to address the wardens as ‘ma’am’ so horrified her that she avoided talking to them.
‘Leela Ghosh!’ Pawar liked to apostrophise using the full name.
Leela turned.
‘Come here.’
Leela approached. She showed her teeth. Pawar took on a reproachful look. She was a kind woman, though she would nag.
‘Lee-la,’ said Pawar, at length and querulously.
‘Yes?’
‘“Yes ma’am”,’ explained Pawar.
Leela remained silent.
‘Your room is very untidy.’
‘Where?’ said Leela. She had almost no things with her – she had moved in with a suitcase. Her possessions were in the steel cupboard, or on the small shelf. Moreover, she made her bed every day.
‘Your room was inspected by the committee today. Your table is very untidy.’
‘Two books and a piece of paper?’
‘Neat your table. And please,’ said Pawar with finality and some distaste, ‘try to be sincere.’
Leela gawped and moved towards the lift, which had just arrived. Chitra held open the doors, then closed the outer, then inner door. The lift stopped playing a piercing rendition of the ‘Für Elise’, and jerked upwards.
‘“Be sincere?”’ said Leela.
Chitra giggled. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s one of her things. “Be sincere.”’
‘She said my room is untidy because there are a couple of books on the desk. What the fuck?’
Chitra nodded. ‘They get anal about things. It’s a power trip.’
‘And why was the committee in my room?’
The other girl shrugged. They had arrived at their floor. ‘Don’t take it all so seriously.’
‘See you,’ said Leela, sad that Chitra hadn’t invited her to her room to chat. She moved down the corridor, and let herself into room 703. Her cell was clean and peaceful. She turned on the light and fan, shut the door, listened to the sounds of the corridor – other girls talking – and stretched out on the bed. The small fan turned crankily. The window was open onto the balcony, and the sea breeze came in clear. You could stand there in the daytime, or sit on the slightly dirty tiles, and watch a few inches of ocean shimmer not far away; the view belonged to the millionaires of Cuffe Parade, but the hostel girls had somehow appropriated it.
In the morning she lay blank after waking. The breeze came in, wilful, then went. It was too hot. A patch of sun lay across the floor: the curtains she’d bought a week earlier were slightly too short.
How did I get here? Small matters arose more urgently. The fan, turning fast in the early morning voltage, made her shiver. She pulled the sheet around her. The corridor was quiet. This would be a good time to bathe, before the bathroom became busy.
Crows quarrelled on the balcony, harsh and repetitive. She laughed, got up, went outside. The sun was already hot, almost wet in its intensity. ‘Shut up!’
Two large crows, one a little younger than the other, looked round. They made clockwork noises of reproof and moved further away.
She sat cross-legged and looked down. To her left, the gardens with their large trees, then t
he sea, then Cuffe Parade’s high-rises sparkling in the sun. On the right, the road spread out like a diagram. Buses from the depot swung out of the gate, illustrating how to manoeuvre a parallelogram around a corner.
She closed her eyes. Through the lids, orange.
For a moment there was contentment. Then she thought of a similar moment, in Roger’s flat. He had without remark left a cup of coffee on the bedside table next to her, then gone to take a shower. She had half sat in bed, drinking the coffee, her mind nearly empty. From the bathroom she had heard water, Roger’s beard trimmer, a snatch of song. She had been liberated in that instant from the world: she might have been said to be taking part in it, yet there was enough room for her to stand back. She hadn’t considered whether she was happy, and she had been.
Revisiting the moment didn’t bring the same peace. She twitched, thought of Roger – perhaps she should write to him? – and cringed, for he was bound up with her ego and meant pain and humiliation. When she dreamed of him, he appeared with a cruel face.
Inside she convulsed away from the thought. No, I’m strong and capable of … whatever. The tiles were rough under her. Would she miss breakfast, and her cup of weak coffee? That would be annoying – but there was time – but she must get to the bathroom before it became busy. She moved. Her ankle hurt against the floor. And Roger and the … but she would meet someone; something would happen. She was without faith but debilitated by hope.
She would focus on her breathing. In, the lungs were tight, then a pause; then out, slowly, the relief of having breath giving way to the urge to be rid of it. A moment’s quiet, then thought started again. She sighed and opened her eyes. Below, another bus pulled into the lane. She scrambled up for her bucket, soap, and towel.
When she went to work, sitting on the top deck of the number 124 towards Worli Aagar, it would strike her, surprising her, that she was somewhere she knew – Colaba, where her aunt and uncle had lived, and the familiar road, on which many of the shops still looked the same. When she saw them, she felt she had known them even during the time she’d forgotten their existence, and the earlier life that had taken place in this small world. She remembered the thwack of thin branches on the bus’s upper windows as it trundled down the Causeway past the market and the docks.
As she looked out of the window, her mind, which was always chattering underneath whatever happened, said something about the mornings, and the trip to work, and was shocked. It expected west London, rushing to the tube, privet hedges, red-brick walls, the Metropolitan line, the quiet misery of sodden concrete. She looked out instead on sunshine, banyan trees, and the Causeway, and wondered.
Chapter 22
‘Ah, you’re here? No,’ Sathya raised his eyebrows, ‘that crazy bitch was asking. Between you and me, she’s a bit of a stickler for timekeeping.’ He threw his head back and laughed. His voice was deep and musical, but also slightly hysterical. ‘Silly cow,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about her. I told her you were in the bathroom. Cigarette? I’m going to the gulag for one.’
Leela grinned. ‘Maybe a bit early for me. Give me half an hour.’
‘Not a problem. If that cretin comes with the coffee, could you grab me one? Assuming he’s bothered to put any coffee in it today.’
Leela nodded. She hung her bag on her chair and turned on her computer. The processor began to whirr and gurgle; the screen thrummed into life.
Tipu Sultan, the tea boy, came in. He was shortly followed by Joan, the third person who sat in the office, which was a room in the solid mock-Gothic building.
‘Ah! Leela!’ said Joan. ‘I was looking for you. Sathya said you’d –’ The pause was dramatic and indicated doubt.
‘Yes,’ said Leela. She picked up papers from her desk, and moved them in front of her. They included the ten grant applications remaining from yesterday, which had to be logged in the new database, and some post addressed to her predecessor, who’d gone to England to work in an auction house. Every time Leela saw her name, Radha Gupta, on an envelope, she felt a frisson of connection, and nostalgic envy.
‘Right, well, there are a lot of things piling up. I think perhaps you and I should have a meeting,’ Joan said.
She had already done this three times in the fortnight Leela had been there. Each time she made Leela sit on a rickety, uncomfortable stool near her desk. Joan had the air conditioner near her turned up high. Leela sympathised in principle, but the cold made her soporific. ‘Hot flushes. Think about it, explains why she’s so fucking crazy,’ Sathya had said over a shared Gold Flake in the gulag a couple of days earlier.
‘Could I clear my pending workload first?’ Leela asked. ‘I don’t want to let things pile up. The database records the difference between the date we receive an application and when we log it in the system.’
Joan’s face darkened. She went to her desk and began to type. She hated and feared the database; Leela had been hired partly in order to keep its malevolence under control.
‘Chai, kaapi?’ said Tipu Sultan patiently. His name was not Tipu Sultan but Chhotu. It can’t have been Chhotu either, but that is what everyone other than Sathya called him. Sathya, in his friendly, offensive way, had decided the boy, an ageing perpetual adolescent, looked like Tipu Sultan because of his twirly moustache. He could be jocularly rude to the tea boy but also, Leela found out much later, paid his fees to go to an evening class and get a diploma in basic computer studies, one of the many kindnesses he concealed from general view.
‘Coffee, do, strong,’ Leela said. He held out the wire tray; she chose two darker looking glasses. When Sathya returned he would take out the tin of Nescafé from his desk, and offer Leela a supplementary spoon, murmuring, ‘Bilge … look at us, like addicts.’
The ancient standing fan turned her way. A strong breath hit her shoulders and neck, and blew her hair aside. She sighed, enjoying it, hung onto her papers. When it had passed she looked down again.
Application for grant. Name of body making application: Nritya Dance Trust. Date of application: 2nd February 2004.
She heard Sathya exhale. In the background, Joan was quarrelling on the telephone.
Leela opened a new record in the database. She hated its interface, ugly and grey, and the clunky buttons on screen. She continually had to pay attention to it, which she disliked, yet there was no way of shining at her work.
A bird sang outside; a crow cawed. At twelve, she would be starving. Tipu Sultan would come around again, with tea. She’d drink it, and turn her stomach.
At one thirty, Joan went to the canteen to meet a friend. Leela had tried but failed to imagine her having actual conversation with anyone. Perhaps instead she and her friend simply complained at each other.
Sathya would sigh, and get out his paper and the tiffin his mother sent for him. He was in his forties, grizzled and plump, and lived with his parents. They periodically tried, he said, to marry him off. ‘Who the hell would want to marry me?’ he enquired of Leela, who said, ‘Er, there must be people …’
‘I’m happy,’ said Sathya. ‘I have companionship, I have my interests.’ Leela envied him.
She picked up her bag when Joan had left for lunch. ‘Go,’ Sathya said with a wink. He said he told Joan, whenever she returned, that Leela had just left. But Leela was often back within half an hour, for she had little purpose. She began by hurrying down the stairs, with their red-earth spittle stains and stencilled notices (Do Not Spit), and emerged below into the short lane where yellow school buses were parked.
Bougainvillea, hot pink and orange, hung over the school walls. Expensive cars and their drivers waited; some drivers held tiffins. The lane was dusty and hot. She hurried through the waiting people.
Sometimes, she wandered into the Khadi Bhavan. It remained a temple to the Gandhian nation that seemed never quite to have come into being. Its dark wood counters still held rolls of khadi, some fine and soft as voile; there were displays of ahimsak chappals made from the hide of cows that had died a natural
death. Upstairs, the gifts: puppets from Rajasthan, bags from Gujarat, rosewood and ivory elephants, things made of sandalwood. She knew, thanks to her father, that kantha saris were beautiful, and could tell in which ones the work was good; she could admire bedspreads of kalamkari or blockprint. She moved through the sections with a borrowed expression of knowledge tinged with cynicism.
Today she stopped at a counter of wooden toys and picked up a painted cup with a handle, attached by string to a wooden ball. She and her sister had once been given a pair of these, the sort of handcrafted toys one’s parents’ friends thought were charming. Leela had carried hers around for a while, pretending to play with it; Neeti had broken hers at once and looked happy.
‘Where are these from?’ she asked the salesman.
He eyed her. ‘Madhya Pradesh.’
‘Can I see that?’ She pointed at a pink Ganpati.
He brought it down. Gingerly, she turned two of its rounded arms, one ending in a hand bearing a laddoo, the other upraised, palm flat in benediction. They moved cheerfully.
‘Here.’ The salesman took the idol from her and turned the arms more vigorously. There was another pair behind them, one carrying a mace, one a snare.
‘These ones don’t move?’
‘No,’ he said. He gave her back the statue. The god sat on a dark pink base, where a tiny mouse was painted.
‘How much is it?’
He turned it over. ‘Hundred fifteen.’
At the hostel she removed the stapled paper bag. The pink Ganpati came out. She dusted him, put him on top of the small bookshelf, and after her bath said her prayer in front of him; he afterwards looked quite as pleased as before.
Chapter 23
Chitra and her roommate finished listening to Leela complain after dinner. She was sick of men bumping into her on purpose, or punching her in the breast when she walked home. She couldn’t understand why everyone was so unfriendly. Everything was complicated. Going to the bank took ages.
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