An Unrestored Woman

by Shobha Rao

  The bed was pushed away from the wall and he shoved her onto it. He began tying each of her arms and feet to the bed. The first one—her right arm—was the hardest; she struggled, squirmed mightily, but he moved a knee onto her chest, and he pressed down harder until she looked like she might choke. By now he was besieged by her scent. They were so close his own pores seemed to emit it. Once he’d secured her to the bed he paused. He breathed deeply.

  Then he knelt in the dark behind the bed and made sure she was still there. She was: her yellow-banded body was as exquisite as he remembered it. He looked into Lavinia’s eyes, wide and fearful; he took his knife and sliced open her blouse at the shoulder. The fabric fell away and revealed to him that gentle curve, that lovely sea of cream on which he’d always sailed. He bent over it; his fingers hovered over its slight crest. He heard a groan and he rushed to console her. “Nahi. Nahi, memsahib. Not to worry,” he said. “That thing, that thing I won’t do.”

  He picked up the spider by the flat of his knife. He studied her. How beautiful, he thought, and then he thought, There is no end to the beauty and venom in women. Then he placed the spider on Lavinia’s shoulder. The touch of the cold knife made her writhe but it was when she saw the spider that she leapt in terror, tugged against the ropes. Yelped with fear. But the spider held on, as he knew she would.

  * * *

  He went east. But first he locked the door of the room in which Lavinia lay. He walked along the Gomti. There was no one on the shore at this hour but he looked around, just once, before throwing in the key.

  * * *

  He arrived in Jaipur almost a month later. He’d walked most of the way. Sometimes there had been a bullock cart. A few miles of luxury on a freight train. But mostly he’d walked. He went to an ashram and bathed and ate a meal of dal and roti and potato curry. He heard from one of the other journeymen that the Palace Hotel was hiring, so he went the next morning to the hotel—a massive, glittering white building with blue shutters and bougainvillea—walked around to the back where the menial staff was congregated, and asked who he should see for a job. He was hired the following day as a cleaner, safaiwala, and all-around coolie.

  It didn’t take Arun long to note that most of the guests at the hotel were wealthy. He began, with this knowledge, working at his job quite earnestly and was soon promoted to the position of bellhop. After that it was only a matter of time—a week or so—before he opened an old British matron’s luggage and found enough of what he was looking for.

  He slipped the money into his bellhop’s jacket, walked out of the main doors of the Palace Hotel, and headed east.

  * * *

  He paid cash for the Bikaner Rest House—a crumbling roadside stop that catered to lorry drivers—and renamed it Arun’s Restaurant and Bar. He didn’t care to change very much; he was happy with the low shack made of clay and jute, the walls hung with cinema posters. The only thing he added was a simple courtyard, facing the highway and cleared of scrub. He bought a few orange rattan tables and chairs, and planted a young khejri tree in the middle. He liked the way it looked: lonesome and emaciated, but alive.

  * * *

  The years passed. He remembered vaguely that he’d had a mother, perhaps some sisters. He remembered that he’d once worked in a large white building with blue shutters. He remembered a family of some sort, a dull, quiescent family whose recollection left him inexplicably agitated. He avoided memory. Instead he sat for hours on one or another of the orange rattan chairs, watching the highway, waving to lorry drivers, shielding his face from the sand and hot winds that rose and fell in the long afternoons. He thought this life suited him; that the emptiness of the desert was an emptiness he had always known. It was only rarely that he recognized anything more, that a layer or two would peel away. There was the time one of the lorry drivers asked if he served nimbu pani and for no reason he could understand, Arun felt a shiver run down his spine. And there was another time, just the other day, when he’d seen two people in the distance walking toward him. They were on the highway, in the heat of the afternoon, and they approached slowly. Maybe they were hungry. At one point one of them, maybe the woman, stumbled, and the man bent to help her up. She was on her hands and knees, and the man was bent at the waist, his arms reaching down to lift her. And in that moment, in that very instant, through the desert haze, there occurred to him the mirage of a creature with eight legs. A creature he had perhaps known long ago, one that was scented like dusk, and whose eyes had gleamed like the Gomti.

  KAVITHA AND MUSTAFA

  The train stopped abruptly, at 3:36 p.m., between stations, twenty miles from the Indian border, on the Pakistani side. Kavitha looked out of the window, in the heat of afternoon, and saw only scrubland, an endless yellow plain of dust and stunted trees, as far as the eye could see. She knew what this meant. One of the men in the berth, the tall one Kavitha had been eyeing, calmly told the women to take off all their jewels and valuables and put them in their shoes. “They’ll search everything,” he said with meaning, which made the young woman in the corner blush. Two or three of the women gasped. The old lady started crying. There were eleven people crowded into their berth, including Kavitha and her husband, Vinod. They were all from Islamabad, and had been squeezed onto the wooden benches of this train now for seven hours. There was an older couple that seemed to be traveling with their middle-aged son and his wife. The young woman in the corner was traveling with her mother and older brother. And the tall man was with his son, or so Kavitha presumed, though they looked nothing alike. The boy was not more than eight or nine years old, but out of all of them, he seemed to remain the calmest, even more so than his father. He serenely took two thin pebbles, a curled length of twine, and a chit of paper, maybe a photograph, from his pockets and put them in his shoe.

  They heard a clamor farther down the train, a few baleful screams then a series of thuds. Every door would be barred, they all knew, but when they were done looting the train, Kavitha hoped they would let it continue on as it was. She had heard stories, though: sometimes, they uncoupled the bogies and sent them in different directions. At other times, they forced the men to disembark and allowed the women and children to continue. More than once, she had heard, they boarded with kerosene. Kavitha reached out and took Vinod’s hand. It was out of habit, she realized, but it was still a comfort. They had talked of this, now and then, in the course of their ten-year marriage: which one might die first. Kavitha had always insisted that she wanted to go first, that she could not possibly bear the pain of living without Vinod. But that was a lie. She knew very well she would manage just fine without him, maybe even better than she had. Their marriage, arranged by their families when she was sixteen and he twenty-two, and aside from one or two instances, had been mostly uneventful. Boring, really. He’d seemed handsome enough on the wedding dais, but when she took a long look at him, a week or so after the wedding, his forehead was squat, and his eyes were dull. As the months went by, she noticed that the dullness persisted; they flickered for a moment, maybe two, when he was on top of her, but then they died out again. Dull eyes? her friends had exclaimed. Just be happy he doesn’t beat you. True, true, Kavitha had agreed, but had secretly wondered if perhaps that is what it would take to bring his gaze to life: violence.

  * * *

  There were four of them. The one who entered the berth first had a distended ear, fanned out like a cabbage leaf, and was clearly the leader. He stepped inside, holding a machete by his side, by the handle, swinging it like a spray of flowers. The others crowded behind him, holding sticks, and one a metal rod. Now there were fifteen in the berth meant for six, the heat growing even more unbearable, and the middle-aged man, the one who was there with his wife and parents, lunged, with a cry, at the metal bars of the train’s windows, trying to loosen them. It was pointless. They were welded in place. His wife and mother tried to calm him but he was weeping.

  “Look, how sweet,” the leader said. “We have a baby in the berth.” The
leader smiled serenely, looked at each of them in turn, then put his hand on the shoulder of the man at the barred window and said, “Here, let me help you.” The man—with a tremulous look, his face stained by tears, his hands and shirtfront stained by the rust from the window—turned and looked at him. “Come, come,” the leader said, “let me show you the way out.” He pushed the others aside, and led the man to the door. The man, still shaking, the surprise of being led from the berth hardening into flight, took one quick look at his wife and parents and bolted out of the berth.

  Cabbage Leaf smiled. “You see how easy that was,” he said.

  They stood in silence.

  “Would any of you like to leave?” he asked. A fly buzzed. They waited motionless, as if they had all anticipated the sounds of the scuffle that reached them from the other end of the bogie, followed by a loud thump, a scream, and then a strange and preternatural quiet. The old lady—the mother of the man who’d left the berth—let out a long, piercing wail. “Now, now,” the leader said, “there’s no need for that.” Then his voice dropped, it grew fangs. “Your jewels,” he said.

  * * *

  It was a rainy afternoon. Kavitha was at home, preparing the evening meal of roti and dal with spinach and sweet buttermilk. Vinod was the tax collector for the district of Taxila, and was home no later than eight every night. She sweetened the buttermilk because Vinod preferred sweet buttermilk to salty, and she didn’t have a preference. In fact, in the time since they had been married, it seemed to her that she’d lost most of her preferences. She had once liked taking evening walks, but he’d always said he was too tired. She had liked weaving jasmine into her hair, but the scent had made him nauseated. When she noticed fallen eyelashes on her cheeks, she’d put them on the back of her palm, close her eyes, and make a wish. Then she’d blow on them. If they flew away, she liked to think the wish would come true. If not, she’d wait patiently for another eyelash. She’d believed this since she was a child. He noticed her once, collecting the eyelash, blowing it away, and asked her what she was doing. He hardly ever asked her about herself, so Kavitha looked at him, astonished, then talked for ten minutes about the eyelashes, and the wishes, and the waits, sometimes lengthy, for the next one.

  Vinod’s eyes seemed to flicker—or so she thought—and then he frowned.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “It’s just plain silly.”

  “So what?” Kavitha said. “I’m not asking you to do it.” It was the first time she had talked back to him, and she felt good for having done it.

  That was when he slapped her. Not hard, but just enough so that she understood. Understood what, she wondered. She looked, in the instant after the slap, into his eyes. They were empty. Not a flicker. Not a sign of anger, or regret, or even satisfaction. She looked down. She too felt empty.

  That was years ago.

  On this night, after preparing the evening meal, Kavitha sat at the window of their flat. Vinod would be home in an hour. The window was big and looked out onto a row of facing flats, and most clearly into the flat directly opposite. A young couple lived in it, Kavitha had noticed, and she liked to watch them especially. This was about the time the young husband was due home, and Kavitha waited anxiously for his arrival. It was not that they were ever lewd or inappropriate, or even that they did anything interesting or unusual; it was just that there was such sweetness between them. She could tell just by their gestures, by how they moved, by how their bodies seemed to lighten the moment the other walked through the door. On previous afternoons, she’d noticed that the young wife wore a plain, cotton sari during the day, and just before her husband was to arrive, she would change into a more colorful, fancy sari. Today when she emerged from the back room, she had on a yellow sari. Kavitha squinted and thought that it might be chiffon, with a blue border of some sort. The breeze swept up her palloo as she walked from room to room. She looked like a butterfly. She looked like the petals of a flower. When the husband arrived, he had clearly brought home snacks to eat with their tea—perhaps pakora or maybe samosa, Kavitha guessed—because the young wife dashed to the kitchen and returned with a plate. Then she went back, and after a few minutes, brought out their teas on a tray. Kavitha watched them with envy. She nearly cried with it.

  * * *

  “Your jewels,” he repeated.

  The middle-aged wife and the mother of the recently departed man wept silently. It was odd, but it felt like only now, only after there was one less person in the berth, did a pall descend on the group. They moved slowly; the shadow of the train lengthened. The August heat was oppressive. Sweat trickled down their faces, their clothes stuck to their bodies. Flies entered the berth in droves but they were too scared to swat them away, to make any sudden movements. Kavitha licked her lips and tasted salt. “Hurry up,” the leader said. The three other men were outside the door, standing guard, Kavitha assumed. The leader, though, watched the passengers keenly. Each of the women had left a small piece of jewelry visible, so they wouldn’t suspect the ones in their shoes—Kavitha had left her earrings in, the young woman her nose ring, the middle-aged wife and the elderly mother a few bracelets. They took them off and placed them in a pile on the wooden bench. Cabbage Leaf looked at the pile, shook his head, and laughed. “I know you have more jewelry than that,” he said. When he finished laughing, he said, “Would you like me to help you look?”

  The women glanced from one to the other then they looked at the men.

  Cabbage Leaf—whose name was Ahmed; Kavitha had heard one of the men guarding the door call him that—waited patiently. When no one moved, he placed his machete next to the pile, seated himself beside it, and said, “I’m going to enjoy this.” Then he wrapped his arm around the waist of the young woman standing closest to him, and pulled her onto his lap. “Yes, I am,” he breathed into her neck, pulling her chunni off her shoulder.

  The brother of the young woman lurched forward. His mother caught the very end of his wrist but he slipped out. It didn’t seem possible in such a tiny space, with so many people crowded into it, but it appeared to Kavitha as if he sailed across the berth, his arms reached out as if to strangle Ahmed. But Ahmed was quicker. He swerved to the side, so that the brother landed in a heap against the seat. And in a flash of metal, one of the outside guards, the one with the rod, swung at the brother. All Kavitha heard was the thwack of metal against bone. The brother let out a howl, gripping his arm. Blood spurted from the wound. His mother knelt next to him, using the palloo of her sari to staunch the blood. It wouldn’t stop. It was now covering the floor of the berth, pooling around their shoes.

  My shoes, Kavitha thought.

  “Get him out of here,” Ahmed growled. “We have enough flies as it is.” The guard went into the passageway and yelled for help. Another one of the guards came in, and he and the one with the metal rod dragged the brother out. He whimpered as he left the berth.

  “You see what happens to heroes,” Ahmed said.

  Their berth was the last in the bogie, on the far end, next to the lavatories. Kavitha, seated next to the door and directly across from the little boy, caught a glimpse of the tiny steel sink that was used by the passengers to brush their teeth, and it was against this sink that the brother was propped up. Blood was still pouring out of the gash on his arm, and she wondered if he might die. She looked up, and the little boy was watching her. There was, she noticed, intention in his gaze, and she only looked away when Ahmed addressed her.

  “You,” the leader said, pointing to Kavitha, “give me that.”

  She had forgotten about her mangal sutra. She’d swapped out the gold chain of her wedding necklace for turmeric-soaked thread just before the trip, for safety’s sake, but the round lockets were made of gold. How could she have forgotten? She slipped it over her head and handed it to him. Vinod seemed to wince. Was it for her or for the gold? Ahmed bounced it in his palm—the wedding necklace she’d no
t once taken off in ten years—up and down, up and down, as if weighing the gold. It must still hold the warmth of my skin, she thought. And then she felt a thrill, a rush of heat, flooding her body, to think that a man, any man, held in his hand the warmth of her body.

  * * *

  The boy was still looking at her. Kavitha couldn’t understand it—his stare—but she felt too faint to return it. She hadn’t eaten in over seven hours; they had emptied their water bottle three hours ago. She closed her eyes. There had been a pregnancy in Kavitha and Vinod’s marriage, but the child had been stillborn. The stillbirth had been a culmination of many years of trying for children, and the next time Vinod had reached for her, an appropriate number of weeks after the failed pregnancy, she had looked at him evenly, a little sadly, and said, “Please. No more.” In her memory, that was the second instance of a flicker passing across his eyes. She knew it was unfair—all of it—but she felt gratitude toward Vinod for understanding, for not having touched her since, and in a small way, he had increased, incrementally, her love for him.

  When she opened her eyes, Ahmed was by the window. He was searching the bags of the older couple. The many buckles and belts had been hacked off by the machete, but there were still bundles tucked under the wooden seats, and the couple and their daughter-in-law were making matters worse by their distress, by opening and reopening the same bundles and folding and refolding the same clothes. Most of these clothes were now strewn across the berth. Vinod, who was sitting next to Kavitha, reached over and patted her hand, as if to calm her, but she was already strangely calm. Even with one of the guards standing right next to her, on the other side of the door, close enough to touch, so close that his metal rod was within Kavitha’s arm’s reach.