Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  I did not believe these boys could be so stupid as to trouble an American lady, yet the way their eyes flicked back and forth between Mem’s face and mine as we started toward them told me they did not wish us well. Mem only made the situation worse when she took my hand. They spat and stood, a current of disdain passing among them at the sight of a white woman touching a low half-breed.

  Khan Market was a square arrangement of stores set around an inner court. To reach Hormasji’s Tog Shoppe we needed to pass in front of these men and through a long dark hallway to the colonnade on the other side. “Dignity,” Mem said under her breath, tightening her grip on me. “Just look straight ahead. Ignore them, that puts you in control.”

  I felt her eyes press forward to the light at the end of that hallway. I sensed the protection this light promised her, like the white moon she wore on her upper arm. I now wore a similar moon since she’d taken me to Simon’s doctor, but even standing beside her, with her hand wrapped securely around my own, I had experience enough to know that not all of Mem’s immunizations would work for me. Ignorance for girls like me was a source of weakness, never power. So I did not look ahead. I looked to one side, then the other, staring my accusers down.

  One had orange teeth and a mole shaped like a rabbit above his left eyebrow. Another was missing part of an earlobe—it looked to be a birth defect. Two more were exceedingly short, perhaps brothers, whose hooded eyes seemed to bear their affliction. It was a trick of the flash house, one Bharati had passed on to me as a survival tool. Even the most powerful of men, she told me, will possess something you can pity, and the sooner you locate that weakness, the sooner you can claim their power for yourself.

  One boy after another flinched. Then the current shifted, and with another few steps we had passed them and were through the murky tunnel to the inside square of stores.

  Mem hugged me to her. “Remember that. Never let them get to you.”

  There was light in her voice, and her step bounced a little. I did not dispute her. If it pleased her to think that our victory over the layabouts was due to a shared strategy, then why should I disagree? What pleased me was her hand lingering on my shoulder, the sway of her body against my own as we proceeded down the colonnade. My fingers curled in the folds of her skirt, and I remembered how I had dreamed of such a moment when first I claimed Mrs. Shaw.

  But, of course, we could not hold on forever. We had business to do. We entered Hormasji’s Tog Shoppe, with its racks of Western-style clothing packed so closely under the swinging light bulb that the colors seemed to run together. Behind the counter two elderly men glanced up from a game of checkers. They did not offer assistance but nodded for us to look ourselves among the blouses and skirts.

  “Which do you like?” Mem asked, easing two blouses from the rack and holding them to my chin.

  One had a square collar and pearl buttons and was the color of the night cream on Mem’s dressing table. The other was dead white trimmed with scratchy lace and puffed-up frills. Unable to decipher which she favored, I nodded.

  “What does that mean? You want both?”

  My head slid back and forth in the gesture, like an Indian shrug, that I had acquired in the flash house. For some reason it irritated Mem. I knew this and during our trek I had all but cured myself of the habit, but in Delhi it came back to me like a native accent. By the time I stopped myself she had already put down the blouses and cupped her hands over my ears to still my head. “You can have both blouses if you want them. You can have different ones. You will need some skirts and sandals as well. You will wear Western clothes to school, Kamla, but I want you to choose them for yourself. I want you to know your own mind. I want you to decide. ”

  The ferocity of her words came down hard between us, but her emphasis perplexed me. “I choose this one,” I said, laying my hand across the pearl buttons. In fact I knew my preferences perfectly well. If anything, decision came too easily to me—dangerously easily on occasion. In quick succession, I selected a pleated blue skirt, a pair of buckled English-style sandals, and a package of white bobby socks. If she wants me to be decisive, I thought, then that is what I will be.

  In any case, the clothing meant little to me. All that mattered was that hug outside, the lightness of her smile. But now she seemed to distrust my decisiveness. Her lips pursed as she watched me, so that I stopped and began to put things back. I thought of the revolving door at the entrance of the big hotel where Lawrence and Mem had recently taken us swimming.

  She told me not to move anything else. The clerks had halted their game. At Mem’s signal they busied themselves scribbling in their account books, making the second and third and fourth copies of receipts that every transaction in India seems to require, to this day. While Mem signed the four receipts I drifted toward a display of barrettes. Yellow, pink, purple, red enamel ornaments in the shapes of birds and butterflies. I was only looking. At this point I would not have dared to ask for anything else.

  Without warning Mem plucked one of the pink butterflies from the tray and tossed it in with the garments the second clerk was wrapping. My confusion must have been written on my face, for she leaned over and brushed her cheek against mine. “It’s not a crime to want more than you think is allowed,” she whispered.

  The shopkeeper finished his tallying, and Mem paid the total. We were standing in the doorway when two foreign women passed down the colonnade in front of us. They wore pink and yellow shirt dresses and flat white hats, white gloves that buttoned at the wrist. They did not show that they recognized Mem, but I knew from the way they glanced at her and the way she in turn fixed her gaze on their backs that the women and Mem were not strangers.

  “If it were my husband,” the words of one floated back to us, “I’d have gone home the first day and be camped out in Congress demanding a proper investigation. What can she be thinking to stay on here?”

  “But her husband’s a Communist.” The other one halted, checking her reflection in the next shop window as she straightened her hat. Her voice boomed. “Why would anybody in Congress lift a finger to bring him back? No, I can see why she might hide out here, but someone told me she’s actually trying to adopt that native girl. Imagine!”

  Mem stepped forward. I thought of her earlier advice, to “never let them get to you,” but she spoke in a tone that dared these two to turn around. “Of course your husbands’ politics are pure as the driven snow. And you can hardly bring yourselves to speak to the natives, God forbid loving one of them. So exactly what right do you have to pass judgment on me?”

  The two foreign ladies looked back, breathing out in little gasps. Mem bent down and stabbed my forehead with a kiss. Then without waiting for them to answer, she took my arm and led me away.

  God forbid loving one. I would repeat this phrase over and over to myself in the years to come, turning the syllables in my mind like leaves of a book that defied me.

  The next morning I scrubbed myself head to toe, dressed in the new navy skirt and white blouse, tied my braids in two round loops, and was ready long before Simon. While he spilled his milk and ran upstairs to change and then came back and complained his toast was cold and too brown to eat, I sat arranging and rearranging my pencil box and paper in the book bag Lawrence had bought for me. I had a clear vision of my new life at school, and I was impatient to get there.

  Within minutes of our arrival, however, I saw that this All-Nations School was not what I had expected. Oh, there was plenty of laughter and scribbling, but the other children used odd terms such as “milk money” and “roll call” and “recess.” Boys sat together with girls, and I had to learn to raise my hand and follow the rules and restrictions of countless new games. The very colors and sizes of my schoolmates awed me. They came in pink and chocolate brown and white, some stick thin, others round as coconuts. They wore clothes of all styles and colors as well. The language of the school was English, but knots of boys and girls would form to speak in foreign tongues. Our teacher, Mis
s Le Doux, told me that the children in our school came from sixteen different countries.

  Miss Le Doux wore a Western-style dress tailored from a scarlet sari. Golden bangles draped her arms, but she had the soft cheeks and rounded chin of a comfortable, protected life. She informed us this was her last year of teaching, as she was soon to be married to a young gendarme back in Lyons, which she pointed out for us on a large map of France, her home country. I tried to picture Miss Le Doux bedded and pinned beneath her new husband. I thought of my sisters in the flash house. I thought of Mem and Lawrence. I recalled that square of black bars, blue night, Golba and his men, and I wanted so badly to ask Miss Le Doux if she had ever known what it is to feel a man’s skin inside her, if she should not ask me to teach her a thing or two.

  I tried to explain that I, too, had come to India from another country, but Miss Le Doux plainly saw no comparison. Nor did the other children, whose laughter and gossip and notes were often slanted at me. Boys with hair like cornsilk would call me Blackie and Jap. Girls who giggled behind cupped palms would turn from my approach. It was not merely that I was “native”—there were several Indian students at the school, but they, too, kept their distance from me. No, the children knew, as children do, that I was different in another way. “She’s from the streets,” I heard them whisper.

  Miss Le Doux was content to let Simon and me sit off by ourselves in one corner of the open-walled tent that served as our hot-weather classroom. This pleased Simon, for he was new to this school, too, and here she rarely called on him. She never called on me. In fact, I thought she must look on us in much the same way Simon and I watched the monkey wallah who came down Ratendone Road every morning. How else to explain the marvel on her face when she returned this monkey’s first reading quiz with a grade of one hundred percent!

  “It appears I have underestimated you, cherie,” she said to me in a voice like gushing water.

  Simon beamed. He had had to explain three times before I understood what was meant by this word, “quiz.”

  But now she was saying that if I continued to perform this well she would recommend my promotion to a class of children closer to my age. I felt Simon grip my hand. A look of confusion passed over his face. He had just realized that the object of the game we were playing was not to win, but to lose, for Miss Le Doux was not suggesting that Simon should be promoted with me. I stroked Simon’s fingers to reassure him. I would continue the charade as long as I could. For his sake, I would play at being a child. But the falseness of the game was in front of us now.

  That night for the first of many times I woke to find Simon under my covers. He had crept in under the mosquito net without waking me and now was sound asleep. The closeness of his sticky hands and warm boy smell aroused such tenderness that I was tempted to keep him with me. But soon the antics of his sleep changed my mind, as he flung an arm across my throat, twisted the sheet into knots.

  Simon rolled over, his cheek against my bare shoulder, his sleeping palm on my stomach. His knee pushed the hem of my nightdress up my thigh. His closeness was innocent, harmless—but I knew that I myself was neither.

  I whispered in his ear, stroked a fingertip inside the collar of his pajamas, found the shallow softness there behind the bone. When he was half awake I took his hand and gently stood him up, guided him in a kind of trance back to his own bed. In the morning I opened my eyes to find him staring down at me through the netting. His expression was half accusing, half meek. I let him think he had been dreaming.

  8

  Lawrence leaned against the balcony railing outside Joanna’s bedroom. Scarlet clouds stippled the sky, and the plane trees along Ratendone Road cast umbrella shadows over the afternoon bicycle traffic. Inside the high white compound walls Joanna’s garden was lush, thanks to the old mali Musai, who loved and tended the foliage as dotingly as if it were his own. He was down there now with Kamla, the only member of the household who seemed to understand his thick northern dialect. Lawrence couldn’t hear what Kamla was saying, but he could see her smile. As she and Musai moved across the lawn she caught back her long black hair with her hands and twisted it on top of her head. She wore a celery green blouse and brick red skirt. At the edge of the grass she squatted beside the old man. Simon came crawling out from under the hedge and excitedly held up his palm, and soon the three of them were engaged in what appeared from Lawrence’s vantage to be an animated conversation with a snail. He could have stayed there happily spying all evening. When Joanna entered the room behind him, he turned and beckoned her to join him.

  She waved down at the children, then stood very still looking into the sky. “It’s so beautiful. I forget.”

  “That’s a bad thing to forget,” he said.

  She caught her lower lip between her teeth, worked it for several seconds. Her eyes still distant, she asked, “Will you help me do something?”

  “I suppose that depends.”

  She nodded and came back to him then, taking his hand and leading him inside. They stopped in front of Aidan’s closet.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. They had gone through Aidan’s desk weeks ago, finding nothing of relevance, but she’d been unable to face his clothes.

  She yanked open the folding door. Her eyes traveled the jackets hanging inside, the trousers and rows of expensive shoes. “Nagu tells me the children come in here. Simon plays dress-up in his father’s clothes. Maybe it would be better if he borrowed yours instead.”

  Lawrence had been careful never to leave his belongings here. “Is that an invitation?”

  There was a long silence.

  He sighed. “Well, one step at a time. What shall we do with these?”

  “Up there.” She pointed to a compartment above the closet, reached by standing on a chair. “We can put them back in the suitcases he used coming over.”

  They worked together, packing Aidan’s clothes into the luggage and restowing it up top. They didn’t speak, and Joanna hardly glanced at the garments she was folding. Half an hour later the closet stood empty except for some boxes on the upper shelf. “His hats,” she said.

  Lawrence began to move these up with the suitcases, but the last two boxes weighed more than the others. “These are no hats, Jo.”

  She took the first from him and lifted the lid. “It’s his helmet from the war.” She frowned. “We argued over his bringing this. I said, the war’s over, and anyway, what would a bureau chief need with a helmet. He said, war’s never over—and in this part of the world the military would hardly share their precious equipment with journalists.”

  Lawrence said nothing. Aidan might reasonably have taken this helmet to Kashmir, but it would have been a dubious burden on the trek to China. Was this evidence that he’d planned the trek going in?

  She held the helmet between her hands. “Once, back in Maryland, we took a whole roll of pictures of Simon wearing this thing, strutting like a little soldier, but Simon accidentally opened the camera, exposing the film, and we never thought to do it again.”

  Unable to look at her, Lawrence took the helmet. U.S. Army issue. Definitely war vintage, with two pronounced dents at the back and one nick just above the left strap. “Do you know when he got it?”

  “It came back with him from China. For a while he ran a listening post in the foothills near Burma. Sometimes, he said, there were skirmishes. I always assumed he meant with the Japanese. But…he never talked about it.” She turned abruptly and paced the length of the room.

  “He didn’t talk because I didn’t ask,” she said. “He had an affair in Chungking. Serious. Maybe you know this…?” She glanced back at him. He shook his head. She returned her gaze to the ceiling. “It ended—or I believed it ended when he came home. We got past it. Through it. But now I wonder—maybe the affair was the least of it. Why do you think he brought that thing here?”

  “If it were me—”

  “Aidan’s nothing like you,” she said gently. Then she came back to him. “Tell me what you real
ly think.”

  He watched her clench her hands. This morning those same tapered fingers had caressed his face.

  “He never talked to me about Chungking, Jo.”

  Without speaking she put the helmet away and opened the other box. She pulled out a pad of paper. One of the three that Lawrence had given him, of the two Aidan apparently had left here.

  He hesitated, then said quietly, “These are one-time pads. It’s a system of encryption we used during the war. Each pad belongs to a pair, each pair having its own code. At least in theory, a message written on a one-time pad can be deciphered only by someone who possesses the corresponding pad and code.”

  “Why would Aidan have these?”

  Lawrence shook his head. “They were standard issue in the Office of War Information. Still are, throughout the foreign service.”

  “Aidan’s not in the foreign service, Lawrence.”

  He felt her look at him, heard the accusing undertone. He reached into the box. An unmarked manila envelope lay at the bottom. He opened it and removed the document inside.

  The policy was dated September 1948, naming Aidan as the insured, Joanna as beneficiary of $10,000 in the event of his death.

  She stared at the date. The amount. “He took this out before we left Washington.” She spoke so softly he could hardly hear her. “And never told me.”