Another Country

by Anjali Joseph

  ‘Why did you come back? I don’t understand,’ Chitra said. She started to laugh; she had a big laugh.

  ‘I thought Bombay was some kind of lost home. I thought I’d find that missing sense of belonging here. It sounds insane,’ Leela admitted. She heard herself say it and giggled; it was so boring. ‘I can’t remember. But how did we get here, of all places?’ All three looked at the fluorescent-lit dining hall, the formica tables, the shutter to the kitchen, which Datta, the handsome, Byronic cook, was now shutting with a great clatter. He began to wipe it energetically.

  ‘We should go,’ Shobha said. She laughed. ‘I think he wants us to.’

  ‘Come to our room,’ Chitra said.

  Leela’s heart leapt. ‘Aren’t you busy?’

  ‘With what?’

  They shared a room on the same floor as hers, larger than her room and with two single beds. ‘This is nice,’ she said, wondering if she would have been able to bear sharing. Shobha was very sweet. Yet how would Leela have managed without being able to shut the door of her room, and silently rage about the world and its failure to welcome her? ‘Did you know each other before?’ she asked.

  ‘No, we just met a few months ago,’ Chitra said. ‘I’ve only been back a few months.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You know how you get three years, then you have to move out?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But if it’s been more than three years since you left you can do another term.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I didn’t complete my last term. It was just a few months.’ Chitra looked angry now. Leela was confused. ‘I was at home for a while.’

  ‘Then you came back?’

  ‘Then I came back.’

  ‘And she became my roomie!’ Shobha, who was smaller and thinner, came to wrap her arms around Chitra and hug her. The two of them beamed at a startled Leela. Chitra said later, resigned, and when they were alone, ‘I wanted to live in a single. I begged them. And my income was the right level. But they decided to put me with a roommate. Shobha’s a sweetie, it’s not that.’ Her face darkened. ‘My father had just died when I came back, and I was engaged but it fell through. There were some weekends I didn’t get out of bed at all. I think Pawar wanted to make sure I wasn’t alone.’

  Shobha brought out some chocolate. They pressed it on Leela, who didn’t want to cut into the precious supply.

  ‘Go on,’ said Chitra. ‘You don’t have to worry about your weight.’

  ‘I’m trying to put on weight,’ said Shobha.

  Leela was amused. ‘Well, I think I have been putting on weight. I keep buying myself little bags of Gems after dinner. I don’t even know why.’

  ‘You’re lonely,’ said Chitra.

  Leela was embarrassed. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What do you do, Leela?’ Shobha asked.

  Leela told them how she’d applied for jobs, and put up her CV on a website for the non-profit sector. ‘It’s terribly paid, it’s for the Sohrab Trust.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them, of course.’

  ‘I look after the grant applications, write some stuff for the website, that sort of thing.’

  Shobha worked in a corporate law firm. ‘The hours are crazy,’ she said.

  ‘She’s out of hostel at seven sometimes,’ Chitra said. ‘Not back till after ten.’

  They carried on talking, about their lives and families, making jokes. Leela sat straight-backed on Shobha’s bed and waited for the inevitable slackening of conversation.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ Chitra said.

  ‘It might be bedtime,’ Shobha said. She smiled at Leela.

  ‘Of course. Good night!’ She hurried to the door. In the corridor, and in her room, checking the time – a quarter past ten – she was warm with embarrassment. She should have left earlier; no wonder she wasn’t making friends.

  She took to going home every other weekend. She left the hostel when it was just becoming light, and took the bus on empty roads to the station. In the ladies compartment, she’d watch the scenery for ten minutes as they rolled out of the city, slum upon well-established slum. Then she’d fall into a deep swoon, neck jolting this way and that. Near Pune, she’d reawaken, often as the train passed Shivajinagar. She’d rub her eyes and roll her neck as they pulled into the city.

  For a while those trips kept her sane amid her anxiety about conforming to a world whose rules she didn’t understand, either because there weren’t any, or because they were too multi-layered, a cascading interdependent set of priorities.

  Her parents were misfits too, she recalled. In their home, faced with her mother’s angst about the availability of broccoli, or sprouts that could be trusted (‘but think of the water they must’ve used’), or tofu, or wheat-free biscuits, and her father’s gently irrelevant conversation, and both of their lack of engagement with the world around them – her father would drift over to turn on the World Service television channel, rather than watch the news on a local channel – she could bask in their collective strangeness, their being, as a family, out of joint with the times.

  She’d arrive, blasted with tiredness, eyes rubbed with sleep, in the morning, say hello to her parents and the bai and the cook and sit in the living room talking to her father or alone with the papers till the cook finished in a flurry of cleaning the kitchen and putting saucepans away and she and the bai smiled and left together.

  There would be relative silence, and peace. They’d have lunch, and elliptically discuss their states of mind, though never in the thorough way she’d observed in other people’s families: how have you been, or how did this or that go? When she was younger, she had resented the apparent lack of interest. She would go home then and try to follow her mother around, telling her what had happened in college and the events of her and her friends’ lives. Mrs Ghosh would listen for a while but respond by asking not ‘How did you feel?’ or ‘What happened then?’ but, ‘Have you thought about an internship, darling?’ or ‘What are your plans for when you graduate?’ Her father, when Leela directed her conversation at him, would also listen for a while then, so mildly that it was hard to be openly angry about it, his hand would find itself reaching for a magazine or the book in which he was presently immersed. His face, if Leela complained, was a mix of sympathy (ostensibly for her but really, she knew, for himself) and wheedling apology. ‘You’re not listening, Baba!’ she’d point out, and he, still clutching the book or magazine, would say plaintively, ‘But Leela, I’ve been listening to you for twenty minutes now.’

  Some months after the first monsoon, when she was beginning to accept her life, and looked less than once a week at the unused portion of her return air ticket, there was a week when she lost her appetite. She felt feverish, bright with energy, and raced around at work. Every time she sat down to eat, a wave of nausea rose in her.

  ‘I feel sick,’ she confessed to Sathya when they went out for a dosa, as they now did every few weeks. ‘Some sort of bug.’

  He looked at her attentively. ‘Pull your lower eyelid down. Look up. Hmm. How’s your pee?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is it brown?’

  ‘No!’

  He shook his head. ‘Better go see a doctor first thing.’

  She went to the sardonic, expensive GP everyone in the hostel saw. ‘Get a urine test if you want,’ he said, ‘but I’m telling you it’s jaundice.’

  The next day, with the test results, she called Sathya. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said. ‘Better call Joan.’

  Leela called Joan. ‘Oh no,’ said Joan.

  ‘Four to six weeks,’ said Leela, not without satisfaction.

  Chapter 24

  Her father came into her room with a steel plate; on it, chunks of peeled sugar cane. ‘Akash got it for you.’ Akash was the driver. ‘It’s black ganna. He said to eat it first thing, even before you touch water.’ She sat up.

  Every morning she went to the pathology lab for a blood test. Once a week she took the reports to the
doctor. Her bilirubin went up, then down. She became unreasoningly hungry, and lay in bed eating toast and reading long, undemanding books.

  The office fell away. She dreamt sometimes of a detail of her life there, and would wake to think of its unreality: the database, or an email about a meeting to discuss the way the city’s parks were being taken over by private businesses. Sathya phoned once or twice, to ask where Leela had filed a particular record, then to tell her of Joan’s latest annoying habit. ‘When are you coming back to the freak show?’ he asked, almost without curiosity.

  She wrote to Amy, and other friends, but heard back only sporadically. It was as though she were between worlds; no longer part of the London life she had exited, nor her new life.

  As the weeks passed, she wandered about the house in the afternoons, watched squirrels duel in the trees outside, and later walked in the lanes around the building, looking in at the crumbling summer houses, and the bored watchmen sitting outside them. Five weeks after she had come home, she felt more energetic, more restless. She went out with her mother to buy clothes; Mrs Ghosh said Leela looked too scruffy for someone working in an office. She accompanied her father on his stroll in the evening. She read a new novel. She called Sathya, and asked him to tell Joan she’d be in the office on Monday.

  Chapter 25

  She had thought to go upstairs quietly at the hostel, but Pawar spotted her. ‘Leela Ghosh!’ she called out. She was smiling.

  ‘Hello ma’am,’ said Leela, forgetting to resist. Five o’clock, Sunday evening, everyone was in the hostel, either flitting in or on their way out. Pawar got up and put an arm around Leela. ‘Are you better? Patli toh ho gayi.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve lost weight,’ Leela said.

  ‘You’ve reduced,’ Pawar said firmly.

  Chitra appeared and let out a squeal. ‘You’re back!’

  Leela was dazzled. ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve really lost weight. How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m okay, I’m fine now.’

  A couple of other girls that she sometimes talked to at meals stopped to smile and ask after her.

  ‘You probably just want to take your stuff up, no?’ Chitra said. ‘I’ll call the lift.’

  The ‘Für Elise’ halted, they jolted up. Leela inhaled. ‘The hostel smell,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten it.’

  ‘Eau de Phenyl?’

  She was lost in an evocation of the dark, cool corridors, the doors of different rooms, and hers among them, on the left towards the end: single room with sea view which, as Pawar said, made her a very lucky girl.

  They came to the seventh floor. ‘Do you need a hand unpacking, babe?’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine,’ Leela said.

  ‘See you at dinner? Eight thirty?’ Chitra said.

  ‘Great.’

  Leela trundled her bag along the corridor, took out her key and opened the door. The room was clean, peculiarly familiar. The window and balcony door were closed; it was too warm. She turned on the fan. The desk was neat, but otherwise, with her bedspread on the bed, the pink Ganpati on top of the bookshelf, dusty but undamaged, the room looked as though she had walked out of it a day or two earlier; as though the last month had simply not happened.

  She woke early, and walked to work, enjoying the exercise and the sense of leisure. She was one of the first people in the building; the watchman didn’t recognise her at first and she had to show him her identity card. She went up to the office and began to open her mail.

  Sathya found her when he arrived. ‘Hey!’ he cried joyously. ‘You’re back.’

  She grinned. But he bustled about his desk. ‘She’s going crazy about something. Just let me sort these out. I need to make a call.’ Ten minutes later, he got up when Tipu Sultan came in, and said, ‘Come, let’s go for a cigarette?’

  They stood outside in the stone stairwell, moving out of the way for peons carrying twenty-litre bottles of mineral water, or chairs with broken seats.

  ‘So you’re okay? Feeling better now?’ Sathya asked. ‘You look thinner. You look good though.’

  Leela grinned and rolled her eyes. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I feel it’s important to say these things,’ said Sathya, grinning back. ‘When are you going to get a boyfriend?’

  Leela was mildly affronted. ‘Next week, is it on my task list?’ Joan had decided Sathya and Leela should draw up weekly task lists and prioritise their to-dos on a whiteboard.

  ‘It should be. You’re young and attractive. Don’t turn into me.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’ Leela had never arrived satisfactorily at a conclusion about whether Sathya was attracted to her. Residually perhaps – they got on very well. But with any serious intent? To her chagrin, she thought not, though when she imagined anything actually happening between them, she froze in horror.

  ‘Try not to look absolutely appalled.’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean that.’ She touched his arm in apology.

  ‘I don’t actually feel bad about it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get married, which is apparently the only relationship option in this fucking country.’

  ‘Hm, no? Maybe you haven’t found the right person?’

  ‘Every woman wants to get married. If I’m with someone, I want to see her three times a week. Maybe twice. I like my life. I’m not desperate to get married.’

  Leela regarded him dubiously. She looked at the smouldering paper stick in her hand. ‘I can’t finish this. It’s making me sick. Sorry.’ She stubbed it out in the paper-filled ashtray.

  Sathya raised an eyebrow. ‘You probably shouldn’t smoke anyway. What about your liver?’

  ‘What about my liver,’ she repeated. Just the grey curls of smoke floating in the stairwell made her queasy.

  ‘Let’s go for a drink one night this week,’ Sathya said.

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘You can eat peanuts and watch me drink. Which is pretty much all you ever do.’

  ‘I’ll drink whisky.’

  ‘You do that.’ He put out his cigarette.

  Leela thought that evening, as she lay on her bed listening to the crows and gulls outside, that it was as though she had been reborn. She walked cleanly through the city every morning, woke earlier, felt lighter. Things seemed to have fallen away.

  On Thursday she and Sathya sat in Leo’s bar. A waiter sidled towards them. ‘Another beer, sir?’

  ‘Another beer?’ Sathya asked himself. He examined the bottle on the table. ‘No, not yet,’ he said. ‘Do you want another, whatever rubbish you’re drinking?’

  ‘No,’ Leela said. After her third fresh lime soda (sweet) she’d realised matching Sathya drink for drink would make her feel burpy and sick.

  ‘Hm,’ said Sathya. ‘Well, this is exciting.’

  ‘Can you ask him for more saltines?’

  He waved at the waiter. ‘Bring her more of those things.’

  The waiter departed, nodding.

  ‘So, how long are you going to stay in this ridiculous job?’

  ‘What else should I do?’ she asked.

  A large, quite drunk black man began to dance slowly on the tiny, sticky dance area under the single disco ball. He seemed to be moving to a song different from the one playing.

  ‘Christ,’ said Sathya. ‘Look at him.’

  ‘He looks like he’s having fun.’ She accepted a fresh bowl of saltines from the waiter.

  ‘Probably. Do you think we should be doing that? Should we take some of whatever he’s had? Isn’t this the place to get hold of all of that?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course. Colaba. Firangs. Don’t you know these things, in your hostel?’

  Leela sighed. ‘The hostel’s really not like that.’

  ‘I bet. Anyway, how long are you going to carry on like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  The man stopped dancing and leaned against the edge of the DJ booth. He called over a waiter.

  ‘Pointless job, living in
hostel.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘What else should I be doing?’

  ‘How could I possibly know? You must be passionate about something.’

  Leela looked at him. His eyes were slightly red; it was smoky inside, despite the fierce air conditioning.

  ‘Books, maybe.’

  ‘Journalism? Publishing?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Marriage?’

  ‘Oh, fuck off.’

  He raised an eyebrow and grinned.

  ‘What about you?’ enquired Leela.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘How can you not be married?’

  ‘Because I’m so rich and attractive?’

  ‘I was thinking of your age, actually.’

  He guffawed. ‘I told you, I don’t want to. At least I don’t want to get married to the kind of woman I could probably still get married to.’

  ‘Matrimonials?’

  ‘Fuck that – tall fair high caste engineer?’

  ‘Homely. Divorce no bar.’

  He laughed again. ‘What about indifference no bar?’

  Leela looked at him dubiously.

  ‘I’m not gay, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I don’t mind either way,’ she pointed out.

  ‘How sweet. No, but I’m not. I’d probably get laid more if I were. Look, there was some female, okay, if you want to know. In Bangalore, of all places. Very nice, attractive, just a bit crazy.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About nine months ago.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Meenakshi.’

  ‘Ooh, I like the name. Doesn’t it mean fish-eyed?’ The meaning of names was a speciality of her father’s.

  ‘It means pain in the ass as far as I recall.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘No, no.’ Sathya put down his glass slightly too hard and spilt some beer. Leela giggled. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘the point was that she was very attractive, it was very nice, being able to have sex was great. But then she wanted to get married, and I wasn’t too sure. She wanted to live separately. I live with my parents.’