by Amita Trasi
He looked behind. His eyes smiled for him.
“I am a social worker, and I work for these people. I can see you haven’t been to this part of the city before.” He held out his hand for me as I jumped across a gutter.
“No, I haven’t. I’ve never seen so many people living in one room.”
“Not even when you lived here?”
“No,” I shrugged, “I guess Papa wanted me to see the good side of life.”
“Hmm . . . I find it very fulfilling to help people who are less fortunate than me.”
“Papa used to say that . . . it was such a long time ago.”
He smiled at me affectionately. “You must miss him.”
“Of course, I do.”
Within ten minutes we had reached a dilapidated chawl. The bricks were showing through the wall; the cracks so deep I worried it might collapse on us. Outside, women were queued up with buckets and pots at a tap to collect water. I could smell the stink of the toilet we passed. Raza said it was the only toilet in this chawl that housed so many families. I climbed up the stairs after Raza. We finally stopped on the second floor, outside an open door.
“Here we are,” Raza said, “Salim’s place.”
The door was open, like many other rooms in this chawl. Fear and anger waited to explode inside me as I waited outside his door. Around us, women chatted on the verandah and boys chased each other; washed clothes sunned themselves on the railing.
“Salaam, Aleykum Raza bhai.” I could hear Salim’s voice, his face hidden in the darkness of that room.
“Aleykum Salaam,” Raza said and they hugged like brothers. Salim didn’t acknowledge me, just invited Raza in. I walked behind Raza, trying to wave away memories of that evening. When my eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the room, I could see Salim’s face clearly, different from the boyish face I remembered. Blackness had spread around his eyes now; a scar ran like a jagged line on his forehead and there were wrinkles on his face that deepened when he smiled.
“Tea or coffee?” he asked, looking at Raza and then me, inviting us to sit on the divan in the room.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Tara Memsahib, in my home you have to have something. We don’t send guests away without having something to eat. It isn’t a custom we follow.”
“Chai will be fine for both of us. Thank you,” Raza said.
Salim waved to someone in the kitchen and nodded.
“Tara Memsahib all of us lost something in the 1993 blasts. Many of us Muslims were rounded up and beaten. So forgive me if I don’t feel bad that you lost your mother.”
I glared at him, the flashbacks forming a lump in my throat.
“Salim, we have come here for only one thing,” Raza said.
“Arre Raza bhai, yes, yes,” he said nonchalantly. He then turned around and shouted out a name, “Najma, Najma . . . ”
A thin woman in a burkha appeared with a tray of biscuits and tea. I could only see her eyes through a narrow slit in the burkha.
“My wife,” Salim said while she carefully placed the tray of biscuits before us and poured the tea.
“We are looking for the girl who lived at Tara’s place,” Raza reminded him.
“Arre, but I don’t remember very well,” Salim said, calmly sipping his tea, looking in the distance, pretending to think. “I hear you are a great man these days Raza bhai, helping people of all religions. But what makes you think I know anything about her? You think I kidnapped her, don’t you?”
I felt like a scared cat, hiding behind Raza, waiting for him to say something.
“Salim bhai,” Raza said softly this time, “she just wants to know if you know anything.”
“Trust me,” Salim paused and took a deep breath, “if I had done it, I would be the first to tell you, Raza bhai. I swear on Allah that I haven’t kidnapped the girl. That night when she was kidnapped I was arrested by the police. Don’t you remember?”
The look on his face, the way he convincingly told a lie, made my words erupt into the silence that followed. “You are lying. You were the one who took her. I saw you,” I said, my voice trembling.
He looked at me and repeated very slowly, gritting his teeth, “I . . . haven’t . . . done . . . anything.” The look in his eyes was fierce. It brought back memories that left me gasping for breath. I was once again that little girl sobbing to get away from him. I got up and walked out the door, trying to catch the air around me, breathing in deep and fast.
Raza followed me and made me sit down, “Breathe, breathe,” he said.
“Arre, I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Salim said, leaning against the door, his hands folded against his chest.
Raza turned around. “Shut up, Salim.”
As we walked back silently through the narrow alley again, I wondered what I had expected from this meeting anyway. Did I really expect Salim to fall at my feet and apologize? I was a fool to have thought he would tell me where Mukta was, and yet, there had been a hope that I would be one step closer to finding her.
“He is lying, you know. It was him that night, he was the kidnapper.” My voice sounded weary as I grasped at straws.
Raza nodded but didn’t say anything. Perhaps even he knew this search was futile to begin with.
“I remember something now. After Salim mentioned he was arrested. It’s not Salim who kidnapped Mukta, because that night in question . . . when Mukta was kidnapped, the police had arrested us. I remember now because I got the beating of my life. I remember it very well.”
“Are you saying the kidnapper is someone else?”
Raza shrugged. “You didn’t see the kidnapper’s face, did you? And from what you tell me, the kidnapper had the keys to your apartment. How could Salim have the keys?”
“He could have stolen them.”
“Salim was with me that night!”
I was about to tell him I didn’t believe him, that he was lying, when Raza’s phone rang. In the silence of that dark alley, against the background of distant traffic noise, I could hear Salim through Raza’s phone, “Arre Raza bhai, don’t be naraaz. I really didn’t kidnap that girl.” He gave out a laugh. “But I wanted to tell you that the last I saw that girl—and this was many years ago—it was at a brothel in Kamathipura.”
Hope is like a bird. It wants to keep soaring, no matter how much you want to tie it down.
–MUKTA
Twenty-two
2003
That morning, a journalist came up to me, posing as a customer, trying to avoid the gaze of the goondas that guard this place. He said his name was Andrew and he wanted to write my story in the newspapers, maybe even write a book about it. He told me he wanted to write about the kind of life we led here. I laughed and said the article would be read by thousands, maybe millions, over tea one morning. For a moment they will feel sad and cringe that a life like this exists. Then they will finish their cup of tea, greet their neighbors, and go off to work like any other morning as if nothing had ever happened. This has been happening for so many years, I told him, that small things like articles and books wouldn’t make a difference to our lives.
He looked at me eagerly. He was young, strands of blond hair falling on his forehead. The yellow fluorescent lights gave his face a curious glow. He was a journalist from another country—curious about our lives. I’d met many like him. The last one said he was “passionate about spinning exotic stories for the entire world to see.”
“I can help you . . . all these women here,” Andrew told me now.
I sighed, knowing he was another one of those who thought they could help. But maybe he could help me find Tara. I brought out a beedi from my blouse, lit it, and inhaled the fumes, blowing smoke on his face mischievously.
“All right,” I said, “but I need your help in finding two people. And whatever I tell you will not be for free.”
He nodded. “Of course not! I will pay. And I will help you find . . . whoever you are looking for.”
“Ho
w?” I asked suddenly suspicious.
“How?” he repeated, his eyebrows raised.
“Yes. How will you help me find them?”
“I know people.” He shrugged.
He might be lying, but the longing in me rose again. This thing called hope, which I have been trying to lose for ages, has risen and fallen like waves in my heart for so many years.
I waved to him to follow me. I led him up the spiral stairs to my room. The stairs creaked under our weight. He looked around my bare room, his eyes running over the cracks on the brick wall behind me, finally settling on the barred window close to the ceiling. He took a deep breath and exhaled as if the place made him very tired.
“This room is six feet by six feet,” I said with a show of my hands. “One of my customers measured it for me one night. He was drunk.” I laughed. Above us, the whirring ceiling fan creaked. In the room next door, a girl moaned, a man’s jagged breath in unison with hers.
“For a few years now I have been given a room with a window, so I am very happy. I can feel the warmth of sunshine in the morning. See for yourself,” I said, sliding a stool to the corner, standing on it to peer outside. “It has been years since I have tried to escape, and Madam is now sure I am part of the family.” I chuckled.
Outside, Bollywood music poured out from the paan beedi shops, instilling the promise of love and passion; prostitutes and hijras stood on the garbage-littered street below, trying to entice customers; drunks loitered in corners while the sky above us spread out onto another world—a distant, different world. The journalist was silent; his eyebrows knitted together. He watched me carefully.
“I am luckier than the other girls here. I found a friend who taught me many things, who gave me strength. Of course I lost her like I lost everybody else who really mattered in my life, but in spirit she is still with me,” I said, jumping down from the stool.
“What was her name?”
“Tara. I will tell you all about her, how I met her, how she gave me the courage to survive, but first you have to know what happened to me to understand how she helped me.”
“Okay.”
He sat on the cot in my room, and I squatted on the floor opposite him. He dipped his hand into his bag, bringing out a writing pad and a pen. I wished I could capture it like that—my life on pieces of paper, no more than a story.
“So what is your name?” he asked.
“They call me Sweety.”
“You can call me Andrew.”
I nodded and told him my story.
Andrew came to the brothel once every week, paid the brothel the money, but listened to my life story instead. By now, he knew everything about me—my childhood in the village, the ceremony, Amma dying, Sahib bringing me to Tara, and how Tara helped me recover from those days of despair. It was surprising to me that a man could sit before me and not touch me, that the story of a foolish, useless girl like me could be so important to him that he would pay the brothel to spend an evening listening to me. But of all those things, what was most surprising was when he arrived one evening with information about Tara and her Papa. They had left for Amreeka, another country, he said, ten years ago.
“I’ll find out more. I’ll write to a few people in the US and see if they can find something for you.”
I imagined Tara’s life happier than mine—married to the man she loved, two beautiful children in her arms, and living in a country so far away that the pain of her mother’s loss wouldn’t venture close to her heart. I was very happy to hear that news, and indebted to Andrew for taking the time to look for her.
One evening, I was excited when he brought me a bouquet of red and yellow flowers. I smiled. “Sylvie once brought me flowers like these when I was in the hospital,” I said, stroking the petals as they reminded me of another time.
“When did that happen? Was it the time they beat you up?” His eyes widened.
I smiled again. “No, no, when they beat us we learn to live with it; we recover on our own. I was in the hospital . . . ” I paused as I poured water into a vessel and immersed the flowers in the water.
“I was in the hospital during one of my abortions,” I said simply. The words rolled off my tongue like pebbles sliding off a hilltop, trying to lighten its load in vain. He remained motionless, scanning my face as if searching for a hint of sadness.
“Abortions and diseases are common here,” I told him. “We all go through them. But you see, after having repeated abortions, this particular time, I narrowly escaped with my life. Usually they call a mid-wife to perform it; we get a day’s rest and then get back to work. But if you repeatedly make a notch in a tree, it won’t take long for the wound to penetrate deep inside and soon the tree will fall. After losing so many tiny lives, my body was probably giving up; the mid-wife panicked, and they had to rush me to the hospital.”
I won’t lie—the idea of death had often crossed my mind. When they were stowing me away in a cab, loading me on a stretcher, rushing me through that pale hospital lobby, the nurses’ faces hovering above me, I was afraid this was it—the end. I would never see Tara or her Papa again. Earlier, I had convinced myself finding them would never be possible, but it was at this point of no return that I realized finding them had always been my deepest desire, and I wanted to cling to life just for that.
A day later, when the darkness melted around me, Sylvie was standing there with red and yellow roses in her hands, staring at me as I lay in that hospital bed. Not many girls from the brothel wanted to be friends with me anymore to avoid getting beaten badly if I tried to escape again. Sylvie was the only one brave enough to be there; she understood how painful it was to be all alone.
“It rained heavily outside when you were gone,” she said, putting the flowers by my bed.
I watched the mist that had settled on the window after the rains, the dampness it brought into the room. And I watched Sylvie’s face, how expertly she hid the pain she felt for me. When I held Sylvie’s hands she burst into tears and knocked my hand away.
“You scared us,” she said, sitting by my bed.
I tried to laugh. “I didn’t think anyone would miss me.”
She let out a laugh and wept some more. I wish I could have told her then that the comfort of her presence was what I would remember the most.
Upon my return, Madam stood at the bottom of the staircase while Sylvie helped me up the stairs, Madam’s voice rising and railing about the hospital trip then fading in the darkness of the winding stairway. “You better not give me anymore trouble. I have spent enough on your hospital stay. You better earn it back for me.”
Over the next few months I tried to be careful. Sylvie helped me get the pill so I wouldn’t get pregnant again. We giggled like children at the thrill of sneaking behind Madam’s back to get money from our customers so we could buy some necessities. Sylvie even managed to buy imported chocolates, and our dull afternoons exploded with the sweetness of it. Those were the small pleasures, along with the drugs they gave us, which kept me afloat for those few months. Those and Arun Sahib.
He was the main reason they didn’t move Sylvie and me from brothel to brothel like many other girls. It was the custom in the brothels to keep moving the girls so if a kidnapped girl was sighted, she could never be found in that brothel again. He wanted to keep me in this brothel so he could regularly visit me, and I made sure he kept Sylvie here along with me. I met Arun Sahib three or four days after my trip to the hospital. He came into my life like a thunderbolt crashing down from the skies. His disheveled dark hair fell over his forehead, his bloodshot, brown eyes a molten mixture of anguish and anger, looking at me as if I could set him free. I gave him a faint smile, but he didn’t return it.
“Hmm,” he said as he came closer. His breath smelled of imported whisky. Given what he has done for me, I want to lie and say he was a gentle lover that night but the truth is, he poured all his troubles into my body and didn’t seem to care about my pain. He didn’t say a word to me, didn’
t look at me, then grunted as he left.
He visited me every Thursday and never spoke much except to say, “It’s true what they say. You are beautiful.” Then he would hold my jaw tightly in his hand and continue, “Your eyes—they are the prettiest eyes I have ever seen.” It seemed he had forgotten that was exactly what he had said to me the week before.
When I told Sylvie how he complimented me repeatedly and, strangely, said nothing else, she scoffed at me, asking, “Do you know who he is?”
I shrugged. I did not know. “He must be important and paying Madam twice as much as she could get for me in that hour.”
“Twice?” Sylvie let her head fall behind as she laughed. “He wouldn’t pay a thing and yet Madam wouldn’t make a sound. Don’t you know who he is? What world do you live in?”
I shook my head as my eyes widened curiously. Sylvie knew so much more about the world outside because she insisted on knowing more from her customers. Sometimes this got her in trouble, but most of the time she was the only woman who, despite staying in the closed quarters of a brothel, knew what was going on in the outside world.
“He is the dada here, the head of the gang who runs this whole place. He is involved in drug trafficking besides having this brothel business on the side. His chamchas come to collect hafta every weekend from every shop in this neighborhood, trying to extort money from shopkeepers for no rhyme or reason. He owns this place.”
“Haan?” I asked in disbelief. Sylvie laughed loudly and for so long I thought she would never stop.
“You are such a fool. He is enamored by your beauty. The only thing that can tame a wild man is the charm of a woman. Haven’t you learned anything in your time here?”
It was true. If I had the bold ways of Sylvie, I would have thrived instead of trying to survive. I envied Sylvie—women like her—who could comfort themselves with expensive things. I wanted to learn from them how to cover the gaping hole in my heart with silk sarees and jewelry.
The next time Arun Sahib and I were together, I asked him if he could give me something special to remember him by. He laughed and the next Thursday brought me a shining gold necklace. He put the necklace around my neck and fastened the clasp. I stared at my reflection in the mirror and questioned whether I felt any different about myself.