by Aimee E. Liu
Finally Kamla finished eating, wiped her mouth, and accepted a cup of milk tea. Joanna summoned her young assistant, Vijay Lai, to translate, and asked the child to tell them about herself. She had expected that “I am called Kamla. You are Mrs. Shaw” would exhaust the girl’s English, but to her surprise, the tale that now tumbled unhesitatingly forth was studded with phrases such as “under arrest,” “flash house,” and “break free,” which suggested either that the brothel she’d escaped had an unusually educated clientele or that the girl herself had been exposed to English earlier in her life. Joanna made a note of this, along with the core details of her story. Kamla, it seemed, had been sold by her family to the brothel keeper—or gharwaji—when she was almost too young to remember. She had served as a kind of maidservant to the prostitutes, and she had never considered running away until one day recently when the police had come. She’d been used and beaten. Only then did she flee. She remembered that Mrs. Shaw had helped the Untouchable boy and his mother. (So the police had taken Kamla after her own attempt to rescue the girl, Joanna noted with dismay.) Kamla thought Mrs. Shaw might help her. It took seven days and nights but at last she had found her way here.
Vijay and Joanna exchanged looks. The young Hindu had a kind heart, but he was not one for complications. The girl’s suggestion that the police had raped her was an indisputable complication. And Vijay clearly did not sympathize with Kamla. To him she was just another case to record, file, and dispatch. Neither the blue eyes nor the fair skin nor the defiance of her spirit shifted him out of his usual mode of thinking. More trouble than she is worth, his look warned.
Joanna held his gaze and shook her head. “Tell her she is safe here.”
He spoke the words, but Kamla frowned. Her head wiggled in an Indian shrug, at once accepting and dismissing the assurance. Joanna leaned forward—they were seated across a low brass table from each other—and stroked the back of the girl’s right hand. The blue eyes lifted as Joanna’s fingers closed around the delicate wrist. She could feel the throb of Kamla’s pulse lining up with her own. “I will keep you safe,” she promised.
Kamla smiled and nodded.
Joanna let her go. She felt Vijay watching, but turned away. She’d been warned not to get personally invested in people who were down and out, and not just here at Salamat Jannat. Over and over again, this lesson had been pounded into her by her teachers back in graduate school, by supervisors on her first jobs, at an adoption agency in Oakland, and later working with war refugees. “We ’re like doctors,” one of her co-workers had observed. “A certain number of losses are inevitable, and it’s not possible to predict which they’ll be. If we identify too closely with the people we lose, then we risk losing ourselves.”
“One step removed,” Aidan called it. In his profession this was considered journalistic objectivity. A margin of safety that divided rescuers from rescuees, observers from combatants. Aidan himself, of course, routinely crossed that line. This was, in fact, precisely what had gotten them into their current political fix. Yet even though Joanna sometimes despaired over her husband’s stubbornness in taking such risks, she wouldn’t have him any other way.
Well, this blue-eyed child was a risk she was willing—no, determined—to take.
She summoned the ayah to help, but attended personally as Kamla was bathed and deloused. Her body was emaciated, her back and arms covered with bruises and sores, and even though the girl did not make a sound, Joanna grimaced as she gently soaped the raw flesh. Afterward, Kamla lay rigid on the charpoy that served as an examining table while a public health nurse from the neighborhood clinic assessed the damage.
“Easy, child,” soothed the nurse, a Christian Dravidian with skin the color of bittersweet chocolate. Joanna held Kamla’s hand. The tightness of her grip was the only sign the girl gave of fear, but the nurse gently coaxed even that to gradually relax. The smell of alcohol seemed sharper than her wince of pain at the slide of the needle into her flesh. “Penicillin,” the nurse apologized, as if Kamla could have known what this meant.
What it meant was inscribed on her chart. Rectal fissure, lacerated vaginal wall, ruptured perineum. Infection of reproductive and urinary tracts may compromise future fertility.
Joanna closed her eyes and swallowed hard. If she’d rescued Kamla that first day at the brothel, this never would have happened.
“Such injuries are not uncommon,” the nurse said as Joanna helped Kamla into a fresh green cotton tunic and pants. “But ordinarily, a child in this condition would be doubled over in pain.”
Joanna looked down at the small, insistent fingers threading through her own. She met those blue-green eyes. “I do not think our Kamla is any ordinary child.”
Yet when she showed her to a quiet corner of the communal sleeping room, the girl would not release her arm. Joanna tried to reassure her, “No harm will come to you here.” Her voice was strong and sure, but she remembered nights when Simon, aged three, would clutch her in just this way and demand that she console him about death. One of his cats had died, and for weeks he would ask when he, too, would die, and she and Daddy, and who would die first, and then would she promise not to die, or let Daddy die, or him. And she’d promised, though she felt like a liar, for Aidan was still in China then, and what control, anyway, did one have over such things? Now, again, she was making a promise she could not guarantee. She’d already failed this child once.
She sat by the bedside, humming a lullaby as the girl curled herself into a ball and reluctantly let her exhaustion overtake her. What had happened to Kamla at the hands of the police might not be uncommon, Joanna thought, but the trust she showed in telling this story was. “I hate this inspector,” Vijay said she had told him. “He comes to the flash house, sits with gharwali. He drinks his whiskey, and when my sister Mira is passing he will take her flesh between his fat fingers, he will squeeze until she cries out, and he only laughs and says she is begging, then he must go with her.”
“And he is one of the men who forced himself on you?” Joanna had asked.
Kamla tipped her head, talking rapidly. “In the night there is no light,” Vijay translated. “She says, the men grunt and sweat and shove like animals.” He dropped his gaze. “Like goats. Like pigs. Only one is smelling like fish.”
Kamla’s eyes locked on Joanna’s. Then, “It is my first time, Mrs. Shaw.”
The clarity and control of her voice as she uttered these last words in English had stunned Joanna all over again. She did not press for more. But she also knew that protecting this girl would not be a simple matter.
She stroked the sleeping child’s forehead, smoothing tendrils of damp black hair behind one ear. She owed it to Kamla, and to herself. She would not fail her again.
Pulling the curtain to the sleeping room behind her, Joanna returned to her office. The bungalow was quiet, as the other girls now, too, settled to rest through the day’s worst heat. Vijay had retired to his cubicle on the other side of the compound to review the home’s account books. Joanna thought for a moment, then picked up the telephone and called her superior, Hari Kaushal. Typically evasive, he said he would be passing that way within the hour, and they could discuss whatever concerned her then.
Hari was no fonder of complications than Vijay, which was why he ’d signed her on. Not a month after her arrival in Delhi, Joanna had attended an embassy cocktail party, and by way of introducing herself was telling Nancy Minton, the U.S. Ambassador’s wife, about her career as a social worker, especially how her work with refugee relief had saved her sanity when Aidan was overseas during the war. She’d like to find something like that here in India, she was saying when Nancy introduced Hari. The dapper Bengali sociologist had recently been appointed to head the government Social Welfare Committee’s Moral Hygiene Programme. Before she knew it he was offering her the directorship at Salamat Jannat, a post that had been vacant for nearly a year. Joanna saw it as a chance to involve herself in the country. A viable defense against the st
ultifying teas and craft projects of the American Women’s Club. In return, Hari had not balked at such incidental obstacles as her citizenship or her complete unfamiliarity with Indian habits, customs, and language, never mind the realm of prostitution. He had also not mentioned salary. Joanna, alone of the rescue home’s staff of four, worked without pay, and five months later, this was still a bone of contention, though Hari insisted he had put in a request, and approval was “most certainly just now coming.”
A broad voice behind her broke into her thoughts. “Behold, the rescuer in her element!” She turned to find Aidan’s friend Lawrence Malcolm leaning in through the low doorway.
“Lawrence!” She frowned in confusion. “What are you doing here?”
“Sorry to surprise you,” he said. “Won’t take a minute.” He removed his solar topee and combed a hand haphazardly through his damp hair as he gave her one of his unsettling smiles. Lawrence’s eyes were different colors—one a metallic gray, the other hazel green. Though Joanna had known him now a month and, up until Aidan’s departure, had been seeing him almost daily, this singular feature still threw her off balance.
She got up and moved a chair for him, cranked up the ceiling fan. Sweat drizzled down her back. It was far too hot for company, but she tried to make light of this. “Why aren’t you sleeping like the rest of the world?”
He grinned. “Little heat never bothered me.”
“No. So Aidan told me.” The two men had become friends in the war, during which they’d reportedly had more than a few “heated” adventures, including a midsummer trek across Burma to escape the Japanese. Out of touch for seven years, they’d met up again by chance last month in Kabul, and Lawrence followed Aidan back to Delhi. “He’s been an aimless mess ever since his boy died,” Aidan told her. “He could use some friends.” But welcoming him into the family was more than simple charity. Lawrence had worked with the Australian Foreign Office. He “understood” politics, and Aidan felt comfortable confiding in him about his work, his career, even—or perhaps especially—about his troubles with the FBI. He actually said he’d trust Lawrence with his life.
Joanna couldn’t quite see it, herself. Even now, Lawrence sat without looking, his chair too close to the desk. He hadn’t left room for his knees, so he had to edge back, in the process tipping the bamboo frame, and when the legs came down again, they hit the stone floor with a crack. Joanna half expected the seat to splinter beneath Lawrence’s clumsy weight. Aidan, by contrast, was a model of grace and poise. The two friends were an odd pair, to say the least.
Lawrence cleared his throat. “I just happened to be passing this way.”
“The girls are asleep. Otherwise I’d give you a tour.”
“No. That’s all right.” He looked past her to the studio photograph hanging on the wall. Aidan and Simon dressed as cowboys, Simon in his full Roy Rogers getup, Aidan in a ten-gallon hat, both of them leaning on toy rifles. They’d given it to her last Christmas. “Cowboys in India,” Aidan had printed across the bottom.
Lawrence dropped his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was brighter than his face. “I was wondering if I might collect Simon at school, take him to the Cecil for a dunk?”
Joanna hesitated. Before Aidan left, he’d picked up Simon from school almost every afternoon and taken him to the Cecil to swim. It was one of just three hotels in Delhi that had a swimming pool, and often Lawrence would join them. Lawrence, unlike Aidan, liked to swim himself, which had immediately won Simon over. But Simon had a reckless streak. The krait with the toad in its belly stuck in her mind. Along with the fact that Lawrence’s young son had died in some sort of accident (Aidan either didn’t know or refused to tell her the specifics) when Lawrence was present. If she could get away herself to join them, she’d have no qualms, but she needed to resolve this new girl’s status, and she wasn’t sure how long that might take.
“That’s kind,” she said. “I’m sure he’d love it, but…he’s busy today… He—”
She felt his eyes on her even as she refused to look at him. She hated lying. Why was she, anyway? If Aidan would trust Lawrence with his own life, surely he’d trust him with Simon. And if Aidan would, why shouldn’t she?
But before she could reverse herself, Vijay popped his head around the door. “Mr. Kaushal is here, Mem.”
And in the next breath Hari Kaushal swept into the office, immediately taking charge.
As always, Hari was dressed after the fashion of Prime Minister Nehru, in a starched white khadi waistcoat with a red rose in the lapel. His thinning black hair lay smooth across the dome of his head, and his dark eyes snapped beneath a prominent brow. Vijay, who was in awe of Hari’s authority, followed by several paces.
Hari clasped Joanna’s right hand warmly in both of his own. “So good to see you looking so well.” But this was his standard greeting. He had already turned to her other visitor.
“This is Lawrence Malcolm.” Then she added, “A friend of my husband. Hari Kaushal, my boss.”
“Foolish me.” Lawrence shook Hari’s extended hand. “I thought Jo was the boss.”
“Indeed she is.” Hari beamed at Joanna. His standard trick. Paying in praise. She sighed, and Hari turned back to Lawrence. “Are you also a journalist, like Mr. Shaw?”
“Not quite.” Lawrence jiggled the change in his shorts pockets. “More of a researcher these days.”
Hari waved them to sit down, so as Vijay scurried off in search of snacks they rearranged the three available chairs around the low brass table in the corner.
“What are you researching?” Hari asked.
“I s’pose you could say I’m revisiting my boyhood. Got hooked on the Great Game back in school—all that old Kipling lore, you know.”
Hari rolled his eyes. They were large round black eyes that bulged enough to make this a theatrical display. “Spies and shadows. Don’t tell me you’re another would-be Kim?” Joanna could see he was taken with Lawrence.
Lawrence smiled. “Truth be told, I haven’t half Kim’s sense of adventure, nor Colonel Creighton’s strategic omniscience. But I’m fascinated by the men that did have. The actual adventurers, explorers, spies—whatever you like to call them. Not just the British, but the Indians, and Russians as well, of course. Men who made their own maps, so to speak. I’ve fantasies of writing a book about them.”
In fact, this book was considerably more than a fantasy, and Joanna had spent more than her share of afternoons listening to Lawrence and Aidan arguing about the Great Game. The whole debate bored her; as far as she was concerned, Kipling had got it right, and this hundred-year “game” between Britain and Russia for access to India through Central Asia really was little more than a contest between overgrown boys. But Aidan and Lawrence were hooked. Was it an example of colonial paranoia, as Aidan insisted, or a warranted defense against Russian expansionism? Did the benefits of exploration outweigh the imperialist mischief, as Lawrence maintained, or had British meddling permanently destabilized Central Asia? The last thing Joanna wanted was to sit here while Lawrence dragged Hari down into it, but if she was to turn the conversation, she had better act quickly.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But there was a business reason I called you, Hari. And thank you for coming so promptly, but the thing is, that hill child I told you about is here, and I’m not sure how to proceed.”
Vijay returned bearing a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of pakoras. Joanna hesitated. She felt uncomfortable discussing the particulars of this case in front of Lawrence. But Hari was rolling his hand for her to continue, so as succinctly as possible she described the alert they’d received weeks ago from the Vigilance Society, the two burn victims she had treated when she went out to investigate, and how a girl fitting the alert had come forward to watch. She told of the delays she and Vijay encountered at the magistrate’s office before being granted a warrant to take her into custody, about their return, then, to G. B. Road only to find the girl vanished and no one in the neighbo
rhood willing to admit she’d ever been there. And without going into intimate detail, she reported Kamla’s rape and subsequent escape from the brothel.
When she finished, Hari merely shrugged as if to say, one more, one less, one had to be philosophical.
“But she came here on her own,” Joanna said. “Don’t you see? The reason she was so desperate to find us is that she was raped. By the police.”
Hari slid his thumbs together and tapped them against his glass. “What do you wish to do?”
“What do you think! A crime’s been committed—one of many, no doubt, but if it is the police—”
“I see several problems,” Hari interrupted. “First, the judicial system is still in transition. Even if we bring this case before the courts now, it is bound to drag on for months. By then we will be governed by the new constitution that goes into effect this coming January. The case will no longer be argued by British advisors but by Indian prosecutors and advocates, and will bear the unique stamp of Indian reasoning. A legal action against Indian police so soon after the horrors of Partition, and over what many will consider such a trivial offense—”
“Trivial!”
“I am only telling you how the politicians will view this.”
“Damn the politicians!”
“Hear, hear!” Lawrence lifted his glass in a toast, then threw Hari a shamefaced smile as Joanna shook her head in exasperation. “I’ve done a turn or two in government myself, so I know just how sorry a lot we are.”