Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Again my heart began to pound. This time I refused to hide, yet when Mrs. Shaw herself pointed in my direction I was struck dumb. She wanted to know if Indrani was my mother. Her mother is away, said my keeper. I am her cousin. I watch her. She is a worthless girl, but I keep her out of goodness. She shook her pigeon-gray head and sighed.

  Mrs. Shaw and her escort looked at each other. Then they both looked at me, a firm look as if they were trying to tell me something with their eyes, but while I might speak with my sisters in this secret way, I could not understand these two.

  Indrani pushed me inside. I heard the strangers asking more questions, and a skittering at the back of the house—Bharati’s babu had stayed the night and was probably fleeing out the alley. Now the others were called, and each in turn said she worked for herself, the old lady just rented them rooms. No, no one forced them. Nothing illegal. They came and went as they pleased. The answers were well rehearsed. The laws did not prohibit women from selling their flesh of their own free will, as long as they were of age, which, of course, we all said we were. At last, with much shaking of heads and fumbling of hands, the young man and Mrs. Shaw left.

  That night, when the police came, I wondered if Mrs. Shaw had summoned them. True, they often came. Indrani had known Inspector Golba since her days as a nautch girl. Sometimes, still, he let her dance for him, drink with him. In return, she let them pick, any girl they liked. I knew their smells, of hair grease and sweaty palms, of curry and onion and whiskey. Sometimes they gave me a sweet or stuck out their tongue. But never before had they picked me out. Never before spoken my name. This night Inspector Golba pointed his finger just as Mrs. Shaw had done. Then his men took me away.

  Indrani said nothing, did nothing to stop them. Mira cried out and Bharati cursed them. I struggled, but the two men holding my arms lifted me so that my chappals fell right off my feet, and my wails became whispers beneath the Hindi movie music squawking from loudspeakers at the back of their jeep. As we jerked forward I looked back at the many clusters of women watching along the lane. I remember so clearly, as if I’d never noticed and never would again, the glitter of the tinseled brothel lights, the brilliant colors those women wore, the casual relief with which they resumed their suggestive, welcoming poses. But most of all I remember the hot black silence of their knowing eyes.

  The men took me straight to the police station and pushed me in through a back entrance. They marked me down as sixteen years old, though I was not yet near puberty. One of them joked they would call me China Blue—for my eyes.

  I said nothing. Their talk was full of a swagger and heat that I knew full well from the brothel, but also from some more distant place buried deep within me. There were three of them. They placed me in a cell by myself. They bound my hands. Then they left me.

  I was too frightened to call out. The men’s hard taunts echoed in my ears. Not by way of the flash house now. No. Through a nightmare perhaps. Or a time long ago. The sliver of recall gnawed at me, filled me with dread.

  I forced myself to push the voices away, to listen to the lizards tsk, tsking across the ceiling. A scorpion dropped on my arm, but it did not sting me, and I was grateful, told myself this was a sign that I would be forgotten. I slept, but soon woke to the rattle of the door, the stamp of boots, grunting, and a new smell over me, of police sweat and breath like rotten fish.

  They yanked at the drawstring of my kameez trousers.

  The bars of the cell’s single high window divided the night into four flat blue-gray strips of sky encased in black. A crescent moon clung to one of these strips. By its light I could just make out the shadow shapes of three men leaning, heard the slap as they loosened their belts. One by one they pried my legs open and, wordless, shoved themselves inside me.

  No recall now. No sweet dread. Only this. I felt my flesh tearing, burning, weeping as they pounded deeper. I did not mean to scream, for I knew it would do no good, but somehow the horror, not at the pain or even the raw physical invasion, but that sensation of their hot, sticky spill pouring over and out of me unleashed such revulsion that I did not hear myself. China Blue sings, they howled back, mocking before they gagged me.

  When at last they left me alone, I thought, this is what it means to be rescued by Mrs. Shaw.

  2

  As she woke to the second week of Aidan’s absence, Joanna realized she was beginning to enjoy the slower pace of these mornings. Her husband had a habit of lurching out of bed the instant he opened his eyes, and if that didn’t rouse her, the arthritic squeal of the plumbing as he showered and brushed his teeth surely would. Before her own eyes opened she could all but hear the roar of ideas, problems, assignments cramming Aidan’s overactive skull, and by the time he emerged in one of his immaculate seersucker or white linen suits, she might have managed to sit up, might even have her robe on, but he would already have set his day’s game plan. This inner momentum and discipline, the sheer volume of purpose in his life were among the many qualities that Joanna admired in her husband, yet try as she might to keep up, she found his early rising a particularly hard act to follow in India’s grueling heat.

  She crossed the room and raised the grass blinds—khas-khas tati she corrected herself, silently crisping the syllables in her mouth, or tats, as the British and Indians both called them for short—and stepped out onto the balcony. Their house was at the end of Ratendone Road, on the city’s fringe. In the two years since India’s Independence, Delhi had been expanding rapidly and this part of town would doubtless soon be swallowed by development, but for the moment, it enjoyed a curious double identity. At night, the quiet of the nearby wild lands lent an aura of isolation, yet by seven in the morning the street already was seething with tonga wagons, bullocks, rickshaw and bicycle traffic. A sadhu covered in ash squatted with his begging bowl on one side of the road. A belled elephant, draped in mirrored embroidery, lumbered along the other, while overhead a kite stretched its wings, riding the morning heat currents. Even after living here five months Joanna still marveled at the adventure of it all.

  But she pushed aside the recurring question of where they would go—what Aidan would do if he did not come back with the story he needed to mollify his accusers. Right now she needed to get Simon off to school and herself to work by nine. And Aidan had assured her his lead in Kashmir was all but guaranteed.

  Quickly she showered and dressed, then went in search of her son. For Simon, having absorbed both his mother’s enthusiasm for India and his father’s penchant for early rising, had already been up for ages. He’d been breakfasted and entertained and allowed to disrupt the chores of the entire household, from the gardener and cook to the bearer, Nagu. Joanna tracked him out to the garage turned servants’ quarters where he was chasing lizards with Nagu’s two sons.

  Dilip and Bhanu were eleven and nine but, generous as their father, embraced eight-year-old Simon as a peer. He reveled in their company and, predictably, didn’t want to leave this morning. Even after Joanna got him into the car and was maneuvering the secondhand Austin out of the driveway and into the flow of bicycle traffic, he couldn’t stop talking about the krait that Dilip had killed behind the servants’ quarters. The krait is a deadly poisonous snake, but the force behind Simon’s story was not fear or awe but an almost clinical fascination with the undigested toad that tumbled out when Dilip slit the krait’s belly.

  Joanna kept her hands on the wheel and warned herself not to react. This was the same slight, tousle-haired child who spent his last weeks in Maryland huddled with his kittens under the dining room table, who had told her definitively that if they didn’t have cowboys in India, then he wasn’t going. The table eventually was collected by the packers, the kittens were distributed among the neighbors, and Simon’s red Roy Rogers hat blew into the Atlantic four days into their voyage. He’d worn that hat—and slept in it—every day since he was three, but in the end Joanna mourned its loss more than he did. The cats, the hat, the good-hearted Bermans and Andersons next door
, the house of cedar and fieldstone that Simon as a toddler had “helped” to build, all were out of mind the instant they were out of his sight. And now he was playing with killer snakes. Let it go, she told herself. Danger is inescapable, but fear is a worse trap.

  They reached Simon’s school, and he grabbed his book bag, was about to scramble out when Joanna caught him around the shoulders. As she kissed him she tasted the salt of his skin, the morning dust in his hair. Then, before he could do it himself, she put out a thumb and wiped off her lipstick. By the time she reached the gate he was trotting yards ahead of her, making rushed namaste to his teachers, who were a mixed assortment of pinch-lipped Yankees and young upper-caste Indian women dressed in emerald and mustard and coral saris, with frangipani in their hair. The other children were already seating themselves on dhurries spread across the lawn under canopies dyed like circus tents.

  Joanna paused to exchange small talk with two of the State Department wives who had founded this school as an alternative to sending their children to Indian-run institutions. The women addressed her with the same presumptive solidarity that she had come to recognize as an expat trademark, but as she walked away she couldn’t help wonder how their attitudes would change if and when the FBI’s accusations against Aidan became public. Would they shun her as the wife of a “Communist”? Or actively challenge her own political loyalties? Would they pressure her to pull Simon from school and forbid their children to play with him? Though she’d like to believe that some of these women might choose to defend Aidan, it would not help that she herself had sidestepped their clubs and bridge games, electing instead to take a job for the Indian government rescuing wayward natives.

  Back in the car she squinted into the glare and, as she drove on to work, turned her thoughts defiantly to Aidan and their last night together. “Lying in wait,” he’d joked when she tugged back the sheet and found him naked and preposterously ready. He’d gotten up onto his knees and slid her nightgown off over her head, then trailed his fingertips the length of her body, teasing her with affection and focusing all his restless energy into their mutual desire. Afterward, they lay cupped together drawing spirals on their sweat-slick skin and talking softly about the madness that seemed poised to engulf them.

  Over the past few years J. Edgar Hoover and his friends with the China Lobby had repeatedly targeted Aidan, in part because he was half Chinese, but mostly for his articles criticizing Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese government. After learning there were wiretaps on Aidan’s phone and surveillance teams following him to and from the Washington office, the Herald finally assigned him to India to get him out of sight. But Aidan did not stop writing his stories, and just last month he sent off a particularly inflammatory piece, which his Australian friend Lawrence Malcolm archly dubbed “The Generalissimo’s Rag Team.” The highlight of the article was a description of fourteen-year-old Nationalist conscripts wearing rags for shoes as they stood in the snow guarding a restaurant where Madame Chiang Kai-shek was accepting personal “gifts” of diamond jewelry and sipping French champagne with three notorious Shanghainese mobsters and their concubines. Joanna agreed with Aidan that this was one of the best pieces he’d ever written and she believed every word of it. But scathing honesty about the Chiangs was still out of fashion in Washington, so two weeks ago Aidan was demoted from Delhi bureau chief to special correspondent. With the demotion came a directive. As Aidan put it, “Prove my Stars and Stripes and set the crusaders at ease.” His objective in Kashmir was to write something damning against the Communists in the U.N. peace commission.

  “Or else…?” Joanna finally dared to ask.

  “I suppose they’ll order me home. Fire me. Send me up before the Un-American Activities Committee for one of their show trials, followed by the blacklist or jail. Or, they could just deport me. America, the beautiful.”

  A shiver raced up Joanna’s spine now as she recalled the bitterness in his voice. Up ahead a public bus had tipped over on its side and passengers were blithely scrambling out the windows as peddlers plied them with mangoes.

  Farther on, a makeshift fair blared scratchy Indian film songs as two men hand-cranked a rickety wooden Ferris wheel stuffed full of schoolgirls in navy and pink, and all around the edges families camped under black tarpaulins or shreds of filthy matting. Lepers crouched caressing their wounds. Snake charmers held up cobras. And there, that old, old man in a soiled lungi curled down at the feet of a fat young dandy wearing movie star sunglasses. Joanna felt a surge of despair. Who exactly was in charge of doling out power in this world, and why did it always seem to wind up in the hands of those who deserved it least?

  She braked to avoid a sauntering cow and squeezed the car between two battered cycle rickshaws in front of Safe Haven. In frustration she banged the heel of her hand, inadvertently tooting the horn. A child standing too close to the car jumped back as if struck, then immediately started forward again.

  Joanna braced for the expected thrust of a palm through the open window, the stroking, pleading flurry of fingers demanding money or sweets—or perhaps delivering a trumped-up accusation that she had been struck. But though the girl was scrawny, bedraggled, and filthy as a beggar, her hair matted and her pajamalike salwar kameez stiff with embedded dust, she stood with dignity, watching and waiting as if expected.

  In fact, on closer examination, Joanna did recognize her. Two weeks earlier she’d received an alert from the Vigilance Society about a “blue-eyed hill child,” ten, maybe eleven years old, believed to be a kidnap victim living in a brothel in the red-light district. The rescue agencies kept an eye out for girls around this age because there was still a chance of taking them into custody before they were initiated into prostitution. Joanna and her assistant, Vijay Lai, had investigated and promptly located the child. There was no mistaking her identity; the eyes marked her, even from a distance. They were aquamarine in color, almost Chinese in shape, and they burned so brightly they might have been lit from within. Her skin was golden, and though she’d worn the same clothing and seemed familiar with the other girls of G. B. Road, she had looked distinctly out of place, solitary even in the crowded lane. The expression on her face—neither forlorn nor self-pitying, but strangely reserved—alerted Joanna that this was an exceptional child.

  Unfortunately, she had not had the forethought that day to secure a search warrant. If the child had come forward and asked for asylum, all would have been well. But she ducked from their approach, and they were forced to leave without her. When they returned a few days later with the necessary warrant, the girl was nowhere to be found.

  Now those same eyes trained on Joanna, waiting for her to get out of the car. Which she did slowly, closing the door with her hip. Without speaking, she extended her right hand.

  The child stared at her naked fingers. No gloves. Perhaps this seemed too intimate, a brute violation of caste code, but just as Joanna was about to pull back, the girl snatched at her fingers, all but crushing them in her own small, powerful hands.

  “I am called Kamla,” she said loudly in English. “You are Mrs. Shaw.”

  3

  Everything had changed after I was returned from the police station. Indrani beat me with a leather thong—as a warning, she said. I saw her as an old woman, but her greed and anger gave her strength, and the strap ate the flesh off my bones, so when she had finished I could barely move. She locked me in the storage hut behind the house and refused to let Mira tend me, though I could hear through the wall Mira’s arguments on my behalf. Why the child? my sister demanded. What can the child do? She cannot refuse. She would not dare to run away, and in any case, where could she go? She has no one, knows no one, is a stranger outside this house. But Indrani told Mira this was none of her concern.

  Bharati had warned me, and now I knew. I was broken and worthless, yet only now was I worth the trouble of beating and locking. Now Indrani would take money for me. Now I had bled. But the bleeding had been forced on me. I was still a child
. Still the girl they called Kamla. I told myself I had not changed, though I knew this was not true.

  Days passed. The hut was mud-walled, tin-roofed, the floor packed dirt like an oven. During the day I could not move for the heat. My companions were old crates and packing boxes, scraps of cotton, a typewriter missing most of its keys, broken lamps, beer bottles, dented trays, a chair without a seat, a child’s sandal with torn straps, rolled-up wall calendars six years old. In front, by the door stood sacks of dal, wheat, and rice, which attracted rats. I cleared a path through the rubbish into the farthest corner and made a nest of newspapers and cloth, but there was no way to stay clean. I tore rags from an old white mourning sari to sop the blood between my legs. Each time Indrani came for a cup of grain from her stores she would squint at me there in my corner before leaving a bowl of water and scraps. She would wrinkle her nose at my stink and make a noise of derision, but even when I called out to her, she did not speak. I chewed on bits of the raw grain, letting it soften in my mouth for many minutes before chewing and swallowing, and for the most part I kept it down. As my flesh healed, however, I grew weaker.

  At night, when the darkness threatened to smother me, I first took comfort in the sounds coming through the walls. Calling, commanding, crying—they were alive. But soon I realized that these noises belonged mostly to men. They would shout out the full range of emotion as if megaphones were implanted in their hearts. Meanwhile the answering silence of my sisters seemed a dirge.

  I thought of Mira and the way she would sometimes spy me passing and smile while a customer was on top of her. We conversed with our eyes, Mira and I. Hers were heavy and brown, brimming with her kindness. She had not been brought to the brothel, but walked in alone, and Indrani had accepted her with tenderness as she had me in my time. Eventually I learned that Mira, like me, had no mother or father, and the uncle who raised her had spoiled her for marriage, so she chose the only path left. Her debt was lighter than my own, but often I felt Mira’s load to be weightier. When I asked her to tell me the colors of her dreams, she could not answer. When I asked her to sing me a song, she told me that she knew none. Yet I knew her secret smile. I knew that even when a man as hairy as a pi dog or as cruel as the demon Ravana rode her, he could not touch her smile. But I could.