Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  Fatya and Shahnaz spent no smiles on me. They abided by themselves, sometimes even taking customers together. But though they had each other they were a joyless pair. Fatya’s husband had sold her to the flash house before he left for Pakistan during Partition. Shahnaz had been tricked by a girlfriend’s mother who said she would take her to the cinema and instead brought her to the brothel. Both were from Bengal and did not speak Hindi, but they chattered continuously between themselves and seemed to need no one else. When I crossed behind their screen I could see how they, like Mira, turned their faces as their customers heaved on top of them and the beads that jeweled their skin would slide away like tears.

  I never saw any of my sisters actually cry, however, and now it was through their very silence that I felt myself disappearing. I realized that this was what Indrani intended. That she would take no chances until the last of my spirit was gone, and she could trade the body as she wished.

  Then on the fifth morning I heard Mira calling softly outside the locked door. “Kamla,” she whispered. “Indrani says she will release you tomorrow. She has bought a new charpoy, raised a new curtain. You will stay beside me.”

  This from Mira, my sister of smiles. Did she mean to warn, or reassure me? To this day I cannot say. But I knew from that instant, I must not allow Indrani to own my tomorrow.

  I lay down to think, to make my plan. Instead, in the heat of the afternoon, I fell asleep. For the first time since my captivity, my dreams filled with color and song. I awoke clutching my own leg, but in my thoughts I was clinging to a hand that would lead me to safety. I had blamed Mrs. Shaw. Even now I understood that my freedom would have stretched another month, perhaps another year but for her intrusion. I knew in my heart that Indrani, not Mrs. Shaw, had called for Golba. Indrani had witnessed Mrs. Shaw’s gesture, had seen her reaching for me. That pointed finger was not an accusation but an offer of safety. Surely Mrs. Shaw had not meant to harm me! No, it was Indrani who wanted to teach me a lesson, and the police were only too happy to oblige. I must be taught to keep quiet. And so my situation was caused by Mrs. Shaw and not Mrs. Shaw. And perhaps she would never come again. But if she had extended her hand to me once, would she not do so again, even now? I did not know, but the thought of Mrs. Shaw gave me strength. I remembered her bare hands against the white bandage, the sureness and quickness of her movements. I remembered the flashing amber of her eyes as they reached up and took me in. And I knew as suddenly as if she had spoken the words herself that my spirit was still intact.

  Looking up I saw a crack of dusty light. Some days earlier, when I was still too weak to move, I had watched a rat nose through this seam in the roof. It was also a favorite passageway for lizards, and occasionally a pigeon would light here, pecking at the opening for bits of straw come loose from the mud brick. I was small, and the room was tall, but I thought if I could somehow climb up to that crack I might widen it enough to break through. I could not allow myself to wonder what I would do after that. I believed that Mrs. Shaw’s world was far from any I had ever known, and I had no idea how I would go there. But I did know what lay ahead if I stayed.

  For the next hours, as the light through the crack changed from white to gold and finally dusky gray, I dragged the sturdiest sacks and boxes I could find into that back corner. All through the night, spurred on now by the same sounds of laughter and lust that days before had consoled me, I tested my ladder, climbing and tumbling, rising again until finally I succeeded in pressing my palm against the tin roofing.

  The scraping when I pushed seemed as loud as a tonga horn, but gradually, bit by bit, I forced the gap wider. The dark morning air rushed through like water. I could hear the chug and shuffle of women rising to their chores, the wooden creak of bullock carts on their way to the river. Birdsong.

  Fortunately, I was as narrow and light as I was weak. I felt for a chink in the wall with my toes and stretched my arms out and over the top. The sun was just coming up. A twist of smoke leaked from the stovepipe at the other end of the roof. That would be Bharati, starting a fire to cook breakfast for Shanta. Quickly, silently, I slithered down the outside wall until I hung from my fingers, then dropped the remaining distance to the ground. As I began to run I heard Indrani screeching for her tea.

  Looking back, I realize that the only reason I was able to escape was the time of day. A few hours earlier or later, every doorway along the lane would have bristled with arms reaching out to catch me—friends of Indrani’s, thugs visiting the brothels, babus trying to be helpful. As it was, the merchants who operated the ground-floor shops that fronted on G. B. Road were opening for business, and I could hear the grind of buses and horns barking from that direction. But most of the residents of this alley slept until late morning. Only Surie and his mother caught sight of me as I raced away, and they were not yet sufficiently recovered from their burns to give chase. Soon I was running along streets I had never seen before.

  I had no plan, you see, no sense of the city. Although I had traveled hundreds, even thousands of miles to get here, in Delhi I was not allowed to leave our lane. You will be kidnapped. You will be raped. The police will arrest you. Beggars will attack you. These were the dire threats with which Indrani had kept me close. But now all but the last of these things had been done to me, and if I was myself a beggar, then why should other beggars attack me? The only fear I felt now was of Indrani and the goondas I was sure she would soon enlist to find me. There was a girl I had known from another flash house who was caught trying to escape, and when the goondas brought her back, the flesh from inside her body was hanging between her legs. I needed to get away from the red-light district as quickly as possible, but where would I go to?

  The general flow of carts and bicycles led me first to the banks of the Yamuna River, where I found throngs of dhobis doing their morning wash. I was so tired and weak that the motion of the laundrymen’s arms, the long white sausages of cloth arcing high and then smashing down on the wet stones, mesmerized me. The rhythmic sound, the unison, made me think of a flock of cranes, though I could not have named them as cranes but as birds I dimly recalled from a river buried in my childhood. Coming back to myself, I bathed and drank. I loosened my hair until it streamed about me in the water. I was free, yet this freedom was meaningless. I could beg, but as a beggar without protection, I would soon end up in another flash house or worse, one of the cage brothels I’d been told of, where girls were penned like animals. I could apply for work as a maid, but who would hire a scrawny child? The same for factory work. And in every case I would be at the mercy of men, though I no longer believed men had any mercy. Mira had mercy, but no power. Only Mrs. Shaw possessed both.

  I asked the dhobis if they knew where the firenghi lived and worked. They told me to go to New Delhi, on the other side of the city. By bicycle or bus only half an hour away. I had no bicycle or money for the bus, so I set off on foot. By day’s end I had made my way to the white colonnades of Connaught Place. I had discovered the broad, tree-lined avenues designed in the time of the British. I had even tasted firenghi food, in the form of a sandwich dropped on the pavement by a small yellow-haired boy. That sandwich was all I had to eat until late that night, when I heard a commotion down an alley and found a group of street children scavenging scraps from behind a restaurant. I joined the group—four boys and two other girls about my age—and they led me to a park where the shrubbery was dense enough to conceal us as we slept. But when I woke, the others had left, and I was as lost as ever.

  The size and strangeness of the city alone threatened to defeat me. Crossing the busy streets I would cleave to wandering cows so as not to be struck by the trucks and buses whirling past. When I came to the sweeping lawns near the government palaces I shrank like a mouse back into the hubbub of the smaller streets rather than risk walking in such open spaces. In one of the bazaars I picked up a yellow rag, which I wound about my head as a disguise. I pinched a salted plum here, a betel leaf there. I followed a group of passing for
eigners in the hope they might lead me to Mrs. Shaw. They led me to a street of white palaces just like the home I had imagined for Mrs. Shaw, and even though I did not find her there, I discovered to my delight that I was slender enough to pass between the bars of certain private gates. For the next three nights I slept in the gardens of the rich.

  These were cherished hiding grounds, so carefully groomed and tended that the very earth smelled privileged. Soft and rich and dark, the dirt held me like a mattress, and with summer arriving I was not cold. Sometimes, if the mali had watered late in the day, I would bury my hot feet in the mud, or scoop a cold pack of it onto my legs and arms where the skin was still raw. I would lie behind beds of cannas or underneath the drape of an oleander bush. Snails and centipedes would work their way over me, and through the foliage I would watch the lights of the house attached to the garden, the silhouettes of family and servants moving through their evening rituals. Sometimes there were children with loud, shrill voices, sometimes scolding, sometimes soothing ayahs. Once a foreign couple sat on their veranda not ten feet away, though it was so dark that I knew they would not see me, and they argued until the memsahib was in tears. I had been pretending that the couple were Mrs. Shaw and her husband, and the lady’s evident misery was causing me some distress until I realized that their discussion centered around a certain fancy dress the sahib disliked! No, I thought fiercely, Mrs. Shaw would never waste her tears over such a thing. My indignation rekindled my desire to locate the real Mrs. Shaw, and long before the mali could catch me the next morning I was on my way.

  Mrs. Shaw. I turned the name over and over on my tongue. I had heard her Hindu escort address her as they wandered through the district, and committed it to memory on the spot. The name was as much a part of her as the amber color of her hair or the emphasis of her smile. Little enough good it would do me. In those days I could speak bits and pieces of four languages—Hindustani, Urdu, English, and my native tongue—but I was penniless, and knew nothing of Delhi society. Today I might look in the telephone listings, or ask at the American embassy. I might go to the International School and ask one of the chowkidar if he had seen a woman of such and such description. But then New Delhi was to me a puzzle of walls and faces, glittering storefronts and meaningless signs. “Mrs. Shaw?” one old mali repeated, smacking his toothless mouth at the question. “Why not ask for Mrs. Singh, or Mrs. Mukherjee, or Mrs. Jain?”

  “Are there so many?” I asked, incredulous.

  “As many as there are memsahib,” replied the old liar. Almost certainly, he did not know even his own memsahib’s name, but I took him for an expert and went on my way quite undone.

  I had only her image to go by. An image of matching hair and eyes, the color of dying fire. Of narrow bones and thin wrists, a bird’s neck and big feet in black strap shoes. Of dresses that clung to the dampness of her skin, and caught the breezes as she walked. I thought of the hollows of her cheeks, the deep settings of her eyes, the high square forehead and sharpened jawline with small knots of muscle that betrayed her tense nature. As I wound through the crowds, ducking out of the way of tongas and taxis, I practiced carving her image with words.

  Meanwhile I strained to listen to the talk of the markets, the drivers for hire huddled outside big hotels, the schoolboys in their crisp white cricket uniforms assembling in the park. By nightfall of my fifth day on the streets I had found my way to a monument of an angrezi, very tall, with hat and waistcoat and sword in hand. Taller trees around him cast shadows in the twilight. A group of girls leaned against the statue, calling to one another, laughing.

  They wore thin saris tied low across the belly and left their heads uncovered. The jitter of their glass bangles sounded like laughter through the groan of traffic. The road here was a small roundabout faced by compound walls, with other roads pulling like spokes of a wheel. So many directions to flee, I thought, as I worked up the courage to approach. A bicycle rickshaw slowed as if on parade, though I understood it was the girls who were on display, while the passenger, invisible in his covered cab, was the spectator. The cab stopped in front of a short, thick girl with round cheeks and flowing hair. A shirt-sleeved arm parted the oilcloth canopy. She climbed in, and the vehicle jerked away.

  “Hey, little sister,” called a voice. “Better shut your eyes or they’ll fall out of your head.” The girls all laughed, but it was not malicious laughter, and when they summoned me to join them I crossed, dodging cows and bicycles and pi dogs. The scents of rose petals and jasmine floated from their skin. Their eyes were rimmed with collyrium, their mouths with vermilion, and the gems in their noses and earlobes twinkled. They sniggered at my rags, the dust in my hair. “You will do no business like this,” they warned. “Not even at your age.”

  Their attention was warm and soothing as nan, and I wished I had returned to the river to bathe, only so that these girls might stretch a hand, might feel moved to pet me. To praise me. But perhaps this failure on my part was also my saving, for their disgust, the friendly joking that now turned disdainful reminded me of my true business here. Before the next customer could approach, before they had begun to tire of me, I called out the words I had rehearsed that day. I described the foreign woman with the kind, not beautiful face, the body of sharp turns and soft skin and ignorant gestures. I did not speak of rescue, did not call her Mrs. Shaw. I only said she was known by the girls of the flash house and asked if she ever came here.

  None knew her. In fact, a chill current seemed to sweep among the girls at the mention of a firenghi who would travel in their midst. I had not, after all, said what possessed her to seek their company. And then an automobile crept toward us, and the girls edged apart, each striking a pose like the cinema posters, hands on hips, lips pushed forward, saris draped to show off a comely throat or midriff or breast. But as I drew out of sight, a hiss beckoned me forward.

  The eldest of the street girls hung back from the others. As I approached I saw that her eyes were so heavily blackened that they appeared like gouges in her skull. Her sari was threadbare and, beneath, she wore nothing. Painted shadows exaggerated the roundness of her breasts and hips, and rouge enlarged the nipples. She reeked of sandalwood. After the car had stopped by one of the other girls, she turned to me. “This woman you seek,” she whispered. “She is good firenghi?” At my nod, she said, “Yes. I know her. Mrs. Shaw. I have seen her rescue home. There is nothing for me there. But you are still young.”

  Quickly, she spat out an address, directions, which I committed to memory without understanding. Then she pushed me away.

  I repeated the address to beggars, sweepers, rock pickers, ayahs on their way to work in the foreign houses. Two mornings later, I was waiting outside the gate of Salamat Jannat—Safe Haven—when Mrs. Shaw stepped out of her small green automobile.

  4

  First she ate. In the relative privacy of Joanna’s office, with the windows open to the courtyard and the ceiling fan doing its best, the child stuffed herself with nan and vegetable bhaji and lhassi and fresh mango. Joanna was both impressed and concerned by the sheer volume she consumed. She must not have eaten in days. But though she used her hands greedily and unabashedly, there was something dignified about the way she sat, erect and silent, shoveling rice into her mouth, catching the occasional stray grain on a fingertip, sliding it between her lips with an amused—yes, amused—glance up at Joanna. She was pleased with herself. That was it. After Joanna had made two trips to rescue her, she instead had come here on her own. Filthy, she was, too, and raggedly hollow-eyed, yet there was nothing needy about her expression. She appeared to believe she deserved this food, this attention and all the protection that Joanna wished she could give her, as if it were her due.

  Joanna pretended to busy herself with papers while the girl ate undisturbed. Salamat Jannat was a “Safe Haven” in name only. In reality it was little more than a dumping ground for girls remanded by the courts. There were sixteen of these inmates at the moment, all older than this child
and most of them seasoned harlots, some wild and mean, some devious. As a newcomer to India and only recently appointed director of the home, Joanna had no choice but to temper her expectations. She could document the girls’ exploitation and see that they received the necessary medical attention for the gonorrhea and syphilis, the abrasions and contusions, addictions and hysteria that were the side effects of their trade. She could offer them the means and contacts to attempt a different livelihood, but despite her best efforts, the girls were loath to give up their lifestyle. Among her charges were two devadasi, “temple girls” raised from birth to believe that sex was their spiritual calling. Another was a Beria, sent by her family into prostitution as a mandatory vocation—as were all the girls from her village according to centuries-old tradition. Still others had been lured to Delhi by friends or relatives promising easy money, or had fled alcoholic parents who would only beat them and send them back to the street if they went home. Hindu and Muslim cultures alike taught these girls that they were good for nothing but more of the same that had spoiled them. In the face of such teaching, Joanna knew that promises of hope must be made with care.

  But this girl—Kamla—was obviously different. Her youth—and those arresting eyes—were the least of it. She stole another glance as the girl lifted her glass of lhassi with both hands and drank so deeply that her throat rippled. None of the other girls had come here voluntarily, let alone found their own way. And it could not be the home’s reputation that had drawn her but some reading she had taken on Joanna herself. Joanna found it at once poignant and more than a little daunting to think how this child must have sized her up that day at the brothel, secretly marking her, then traveled the full length of the city to imagined sanctuary. How could Joanna not honor such faith? Certainly, she felt compelled to try.