by Liam Pieper
Under the distant auspices of Pasteur, the classes are staffed by any Seeker who volunteers their time, and the syllabus is whatever is important to them on the day: math, art, woodwork – long, rambling treatises on ancient aliens and aural cleansing and assorted hippy nonsense. Week after week, Sasha comes to check in on the kids, and Velli in particular. She watches from the back of the classroom with horror as a great ropey leatherwood of a Seeker shuffles in, bangles clacking, and pulls out the materials to make a dreamcatcher. Sasha does the best she can, picking up classes in basic math whenever she can find time, but she craves more structure for the kids. Connor could be a huge help; he could make their lives better.
He doesn’t think so. ‘I was never flash at school.’
‘Connor! Come on. If you want to stay here, you’ll have to work. You might as well do this. You can talk to the kids in Hindi.’
‘Who wants to learn Hindi? I barely speak Hindi. Down here nobody speaks Hindi except good guys in movies and bad guys in government.’
‘Just come have a look, watch me take a couple of classes. You might like it. The kids will like it. They don’t have anyone to rely on. I know what it’s like to be that little and feel alone in the world. It’s a terrible thing.’
‘Yeah, nah,’ Connor says, and then, ‘Yeah. True. That’s true.’
A compromise: Connor starts taking the kids for an hour of sport every morning, until he is exhausted and his lungs scream out for oxygen and a cigarette. Soccer, if it’s dry enough in a dusty clearing behind the schoolhouse, or cricket, if it’s not raining but the sky hangs low and steely before the afternoon downpour.
The children, who follow sport through radio signals bounced halfway across the world, freak out when they place his accent. They pester him for stories and facts about cricketers from the Australian pantheon whose names he barely remembers, but he lies, reflexively, so he doesn’t disappoint them. Soon they defer to him on all things sports-related, and he is baffled that Australians might be considered authorities on anything.
By the end of a morning’s play he is buggered and begs off, lights a cigarette, retires to the back of the classroom while Sasha takes over to teach, the children worn out almost to the point of obedience. He passes the time flipping through the novels stacked in waterproof crates in the schoolhouse, taking the books to read on one of the dormitory beds where the orphans sleep – and where he will inevitably doze off. The children seem nonplussed to find a strange man napping in their room – they apologise and dart away – so he learns to ignore them, pulls his cap down over his eyes against the sun.
Sasha, for her part, is tireless. After his nap, he returns to the classroom and catches Sasha bent over a desk, patiently guiding a child through some mathematical labyrinth. She sketches out lesson plans, scatters them with little facts she snatches out of her subconscious that delighted and amazed her as a child. She fortifies their health with not just vaccines and vitamins, but also foundational habits. This is how to brush your teeth. This is how you improvise complex proteins out of beans and rice. This is how you grow up and out into a better world.
Sasha dotes on one child, Velli, a tiny little thing who never smiles, never talks, keeps to herself at the back of the classroom, near Connor. She is painfully shy and withdrawn, but that’s hardly unique with the orphaned children. Their English and French are poorer than that of the children born to the ashram, and in the ragged, improvised curriculum of the classroom they tend to be left out of discussions – at least at first. Connor is amazed at how fast the kids pick things up, absorb information. It makes him ashamed of his own limited facility with language, his rusting hometown Australian dialect, his ugly, hacked-up Hindi.
He approaches the girl in class one day when he sees her ignoring Sasha’s instruction, scrawling in pencil on paper while Sasha is explaining a math problem. ‘Velli? Do you want to show me what you’re drawing?’ When she doesn’t respond, he tries again in Hindi. She ignores him, sinks deeper into her drawing, tucks her chin further into her chest, resolutely moving her pencil across the page. The rest of the children turn to stare and titter, Sasha sends him a glare, and Connor feels like a 24-carat prick.
That day, after class, Velli stays behind. Sasha spends an extra hour with her, bringing her sweets she’s pilfered from the canteen, foisting a toy doll on her, singing little tunes in nonsense English, until the girl is relaxed enough for Sasha to pull up the sleeve of her shirt, revealing an expanse of gnarled scar tissue across the soft brown skin of her forearm. Connor averts his eyes as Sasha rubs lotion into the scar, murmurs soft, encouraging noises, and then does the same to another set of scars hidden beneath the girl’s collar.
Sasha is in the middle of teaching one afternoon when Connor hears a motorcycle approaching fast, too fast for the dusty tracks that lead through the jungle to the schoolhouse. He can hear from the pitch and whine of the engine that the rider is in a hurry, taking the corners at full pelt.
The driver pulls up outside, kills the engine, rushes inside. There’s an emergency, one of the Seekers has collapsed on her yoga mat, they need Sasha to come right away.
Sasha thumps on the door of the dorm, yells through the window that she needs Connor to look after the class until she gets back, jumps on the bike. She is gone before he can argue. Connor slips out of the dorm, spooked. He scans the clearing for a way out, considers a mad dash through the jungle. Resigned to his fate, he goes inside.
It’s cool inside the classroom, a giant, overzealous ceiling fan looming over orderly rows of fold-out tables – papers and textbooks flutter wildly, held down by an assortment of rocks and Thums Up cola bottles, improvised into paperweights.
It takes a minute for his eyes to adjust to the gloom and the neat rows of children. He can feel their eyes boring into him as he moves to the front of the room, his panic spiking when he reaches the blackboard. He picks up a piece of chalk, puts it back down. He felt more comfortable diving with sharks and in police custody than he does right now.
Finally, he turns around and makes eye contact with the closest child. ‘So,’ he says. ‘What do you guys want to talk about?’
A hand shoots up in the front row. ‘Why do Australians talk so funny?’
‘That’s how we all talk. Why do you talk so funny?’ Connor shoots back. The kids are delighted.
They pelt him with questions about Australia, his accent, his life, his past, and Connor begins reflexively, luxuriously, to lie. Does he know about crocodiles? Does he know about boomerangs?
Yes, he knows how to throw a boomerang, yes, he wrestles crocodiles, and yes, he misses having none to wrestle in India. Australia is full of dangerous creatures, but he isn’t scared of them, not at all, except for the savage drop-bear. Of course he rides a kangaroo to get around, otherwise he would have to walk there on his hands, because everything is backwards down under.
When Sasha returns she finds the classroom deserted, the children running amok in dirtied clothes, playing catch, British bulldog, soccer, while Connor leans against the shaded awning of the classroom, smoking a cigarette, kicking the ball back into play when it comes his way. He meets Sasha’s incredulous stare and shrugs.
On days when the weather co-operates, he commandeers one of the utes that the ashram uses to move its workers around, piles the children into the tray, and takes them to the beach. Only a few of the children know how to swim, but as the weeks pass Connor is able to teach most of them the basics. Before long the children are accomplished enough swimmers that Connor feels comfortable leaving them to swim on their own, keeping an eye from shore.
One evening, as the sun sets, Pasteur joins him on the dunes, trudging up from the jungle path. Connor offers a cigarette, but Pasteur declines. He is fussing with a camera, an ancient cannon of a thing, absurdly large in the little man’s hands. Pasteur’s eyes are intent on the beach, the waves crashing and the children tearing through the surf. Every once in a while he raises the camera and clicks.
&nb
sp; ‘That’s a serious piece of kit,’ Connor says. ‘You a professional?’
‘No. Not really.’ Pasteur is shy. The shiny pate of his head, already orange in the fading light, reddens. ‘I am fond of nature. That is all.’
A long moment passes, a not entirely comfortable pause; the sound of children at play and the click, click, click of the camera.
Pasteur breaks the silence. ‘We were wrong about you, I think. When you first arrived, we . . . had some questions? But perhaps we were wrong. This may be the place for you.’
‘Right,’ says Connor. ‘Thanks.’
‘Except for the guru,’ continues Pasteur. ‘She hates you. Very much.’ He chuckles a little, raises his camera again.
The kids from the fishing villages are already comfortable in the water, dart around the less experienced ones and yell encouragement. The boys strip to their shorts and singlets and bolt out into the surf, while the girls link hands and inch into the shallows, moving warily. Each time a wave hits them one or two of the smaller ones goes down, knocked flat in the water, and the other girls in the human chain haul her to her feet, laughing, heaving against the weight of the water.
All except Velli. The girl sits sullen and silent, shaded by a palm, knees and chin tucked into her chest, waiting for the time when she can go back to the small orphanage at the ashram.
‘So,’ Connor says to Sasha when they are alone. ‘What happened to her? The kid is messed up.’
Sasha gives him the bones of the story – the day she was attacked by the wild dog, that she has not spoken since the attack, shows little interest in other people. Sasha found her a place in the ashram’s orphanage, and has been looking out for the girl ever since. ‘It’s my fault that she got hurt. What happened to her, it’s on me.’
More and more, Velli is on Connor’s mind. There’s something about the way she carries herself – lonely, lost, stoic – that slips between his ribs. She has no friends and no means of making them. Something that hardened inside him long ago starts to loosen. While the other children play, he sits with her, talks to her in English, helps her shade in her colouring.
There’s a memory he has, more than a memory really, some atavistic thing somewhere in his makeup, that is the feeling of swimming for the first time. After being thrown into the pool by Dad time and again, and just when he’d despaired that he would never be allowed out, he found a rhythm in his legs, his arms. He realised he was treading water. That will never leave him – there is always a way to survive.
He is convinced that if he can get Velli into the ocean, if she can master a once terrifying element, she will start to come out of her shell.
An inch at a time, over a period of weeks, Connor coaxes her waist-deep into the water. When she feels the undertow pull at her back she panics, makes distressing, wordless cries, and Connor soothes her.
When he finally has her trust, Connor takes her hand and leads her out until the waves lap her collarbones, then laces his hands around her waist and tilts her so she is horizontal to the water, tells her how to move her arms, her legs, and then, after several days of this, when he lets go she is floating, all on her own. Velli can swim.
Connor scrambles back up the dune to where Sasha is watching. She catches his eye and busts him smiling. She takes his hand and squeezes, and it tingles in a way he hasn’t felt for decades.
That night a hard rain falls and Connor puts his lips close to Sasha’s ear to make himself heard over the drumming on the roof. ‘It’s weird. You go your whole life thinking it’s your fault, right? And then one day, you realise that it wasn’t. That you were a kid, really, and someone should have been looking out for you. But they weren’t, even if maybe they thought they were. And shit, maybe they were right, who knows?’
The rain is at its heaviest, the crescendo before the end of the storm. The night is so dark the only light is the tip of Connor’s cigarette, which he draws on between thoughts.
‘The girl should see someone,’ he says. ‘A specialist.’
Sasha agrees. Yes, of course she should. But how, and where, and how would they afford it? It would cost more than Sasha can possibly produce. Her resources are finite, burning away with the days.
‘I don’t have that kind of money,’ she says.
Connor’s cigarette flares, his eyes take up the spark, shine it back into the night. He asks, ‘What kind of money?’
Connor leaves the next day, tells her he needs to head to Chennai to renew his visa – asks to borrow her bike – and she agrees, eventually, when he assures her he’ll be back in a day, two max.
He waits until Sasha is in the bathroom, the brass wash bucket ringing loudly as it fills, then quietly levers the mattress up to retrieve his pills. He shoves the full packet into his bag, then pauses, reconsiders, splits it into two bags and puts one back in the mattress.
He rides to Puducherry, leaves the bike out on the main road. Sangeeta opens the door in her house dress, nods in greeting, and moves aside to let him in. Sangeeta goes out right away and when she comes back, hours later, she has a lump of oily black tar for him.
Each time he visits, she’s sold a handful of his pills, has a little money for him, which, inevitably, she takes back from him to sell him some opium. The problem with drug-dealing – it’s often a zero-sum game unless you’re sober, and sobriety is not an option for Connor.
This is the only time he finds peace, these days. The bitter black tea, the melting softness it lends his body and his mind. As it kicks in, he curls up into a little ball, hugs his knees to his chest, rests his head in Sangeeta’s lap, where she makes a little hammock for him out of the hem of her sari, strokes his hair. He talks for a while, about not much, nonsense, things he doesn’t like to remember, parts of his mind he never goes into, like dark streets in a bad town.
His stories start in Hindi, slide into thick Australian English. Does she understand? Perhaps. It doesn’t matter. After a while he stops talking altogether, concentrates on the pleasure twanging down his spine as her nails rake his scalp. He loves this – cannot imagine anything better. Even the guard dogs back at the ashram – stupid half-wild things – know the value of a good scritch.
His thoughts drift from the ashram dogs to Velli, and he feels a pang for her. What a shitty thing to happen, her throat half ripped out – what a life to be born into. He wishes he could have given her his childhood, the happy parts of it. For the first time it occurs to him that he was wildly lucky.
He is aware Sangeeta is ripping him off on their exchanges, taking a huge tax, but what can he do? He has no idea where to find the stuff on his own. When he asks her where he might do so, she frets, waves a scolding finger in front of his nose, tells him there are places where white people aren’t welcome.
‘And you? Why is it safe for you?’
‘I am always welcome,’ admonishes Sangeeta, and he knows it is true, more or less. It’s truer to say there is nowhere she is welcome, but nowhere is forbidden to her either.
In places like this, where the desperate congregate, Sangeeta has learned to wield the prejudice against her as a weapon. Amongst the pimps, the roughnecks in the street, the police, Sangeeta has superstition on her side. In their eyes, she has power over luck, can curse them, can turn their fortunes on a whim; none of them will bother her as she goes about her day.
He broods on this situation, turns it over in his head, and an idea comes to him fully formed, pearlescent and pure in the muddy depths of his mind.
At the bottom of his bag he finds the phone Baba gave him and boots it up, searches for trance parties nearby, finds two contenders.
Those parties were his favourite thing about India once upon a time, they were the reason he settled in Goa. Then he realised that he didn’t actually like trance music at all – he just liked drugs. Everyone at these parties did.
As a young man he went to these parties at every opportunity, luxuriating in the euphoria of the music. Even with his bad ear, he missed out on nothing, the b
ass of it through the ground, in his spine, his whole body, his soul; the feeling of utopian oneness with the crowd, the freedom from the suffocating loneliness that had wrapped itself around him and followed him through every country and village he stopped in.
And then, the dreaded sunrise. He shivers at the memory of coming down, the plunging realisation that the drugs didn’t work anymore. Grimly grinding his jaw and shuffling his feet amongst other munters in a vain effort to retrieve the bliss they’d shared earlier in the night, shrugging off the beggars who came drifting down from the sand dunes to try their luck with the chemically induced generosity of the party people. A memory of a leper reaching out for alms and him embracing her, warmly hugging her, shouting in her ear to ask her if she wanted a line.
The first party is at a secluded beach cove about two hours west of Puducherry. Before he and Sangeeta set out, they visit a tailor together to get her fitted for something to wear. She flatly refuses any of the western clothes he tries to convince her of, settling instead on a bright orange sari. It’s not subtle, but he has to admit it suits her. He hadn’t realised how pretty she is, or how young.
There’s time to kill before the party. They wander through Puducherry, looking for something to do, stop in front of a cinema. It’s showing one of Sangeeta’s favourites, Salaam Namaste, and she is outraged that he hasn’t seen it, doubly so since he is Australian. She explains it was shot in Australia, declares it the best film in history, and waving aside his protests, marches him inside.
In the dark of the theatre her eyes are bright, taking everything in. She sings along quietly with every song, knows every lyric, every note, from the first big thumping dance on the beach to the item number. At the end she throws a handful of cash at the screen. They emerge blinking into the late afternoon sun and Connor has to admit that, yes, it is the best movie ever made.