Before the theft there had been three other incidents. A bag of dead rats had been thrown into the kitchen and the place had had to be treated with disinfectant for almost a week. No one had been allowed to use the kitchens, work had stopped and the food thrown away. Guests had been provided food from a hotel in nearby Fontainhas; costs had rocketed.
Then there had even been a short circuit in the central fuse-box; the switches had tripped and the electricity supply had been cut. The fuse-box had become a disembowelled gut with wires spilling out in different directions. Francis Xavier, Sharkey’s animating spirit, guard, chef and lead guitar, had examined the box and pronounced that someone had opened it and set the fuses on fire.
And there were the blank calls. Sometimes, when Indi picked up her cordless, she heard the same quick breath she had sensed on her arm.
She was not as worried about herself as she was about Sharkey’s Hotel because there had apparently been similar incidents all along the coast and in one particular case, it turned out that it was a property dispute and a sister had been harassing a brother simply to get his restaurant off her land. But the Phantom Listener couldn’t be the disgruntled descendent of a past owner. All Sharkey’s deeds were in order and had been scrutinized by lawyers. She had bought the land years ago on Justin’s advice. Years ago, she had stood here, under the Alqueria zigzag and smelt serenity in the sea breeze.
A voice floated up under the roar of water.
‘ Indi!’
A voice in which she could hear the smile or sense the embarrassment; a voice which she knew stayed focused on her; a voice in which she could remember every expression. She knew the slow grin, the frown, the unexpected anger, the energy in the shoulders. She could hear attention wander, then turn back to her like a boomerang, doomed always to return.
She knew she enhanced his world every minute he saw her, she could feel his gaze touch her face and knew that it had remained unchanged for decades.
Justin.
For almost forty years, she had pranced in and out of Justin’s life daring him to surrender. And he had conquered her by refusing to be rejected. For four decades they had tried to see who would break first. In a sigh or a question or an unguarded glance, they had looked for signs of victory.
She had never seen him old, never seen the grey hair he had told her about, nor the wrinkles or the hanging skin on his neck. She had only seen him properly when he was young. She had only seen herself young, she had been spared the sight of her own old age, even though she could feel the dryness of her skin and the ridges of stretch marks under her arms. In Indi’s blindness, Indi and Justin were perpetually, irresponsibly, youthful.
They had met over three decades ago in Connaught Place in Delhi.
He was trying in vain to wave down a rickshaw. Buses and tempos hurtled past sending him teetering back to the concrete kerb of the circular road and he flagged her down asking desperately for directions as she drove by. She had stopped, fascinated somehow.
Justin had travelled many continents by now. He’d inhaled the spirit of the Sixties and become a textbook rebel. He felt stifled by his life in the luxurious east coast where he had worked as an intern, and felt drawn, instead, to the Third World.
While in America, he had felt as if bones and open mouths were rattling at him as he walked past the gentle greens towards his classes. He saw blood pouring from his food. He saw grimy baby feet running in distant plantations to provide him coffee. He saw long rows of brown bodies with asthmatic breath sitting in airless ateliers and cutting the diamonds which glittered in his mother’s ears. He saw debt-ridden quarry workers with malnourished children working under a merciless sun to break stones that were used for the mansions of the far-away rich. He saw tiny infant fingers sewing gold thread onto garments sold to bored billionaires. His eyes acquired an unblinking stare, broken only when he laughed his slow laugh.
He had once been a glossy child with yellow curls dancing around his ears. But as he grew older he became shabby and unkempt. Shabbiness didn’t suit him because Justin’s sharp features were designed to be polished up for view. But he abused his appearance almost as much as he abused his heart.
A stubbornness began to grow inside him. He felt as if it was his responsibility to see things that other people could not. He felt impelled to ruin every dinner party that his parents forced him to attend by making statements that revealed how dysfunctional he was. After he had acquired his prized medical degree, instead of embarking on his parents’ chosen course for him as a healer of the rich, he found himself making plans to travel to India. He began work in a government hospital in Delhi where the rusty machinery was speckled with newborn blood.
He knew only one way of penitence. He yearned only for one thing. To be able to love deeply and unconditionally. To love in spite of being rejected, to love in spite of being abused and humiliated. Only such love would assuage his guilt about the international injustices and the unfair world order, of which he was deeply, consummately, aware.
At twenty-three, Indi’s beauty and figure strained against her clothes. Every time she appeared among the family, relatives drew their breaths in and whispered to Ashish Kumar that they better get her married at once. Aunts became witty with jealousy at the sight of her.
Uncles looked away because she reminded them of their favourite whore.
When Justin saw her – a cerulean-eyed Juno sitting behind the wheel of an ancient Ambassador – an anxious conviction came over him. He saw creation at its most perfect. He saw his life easily elevated to the extraordinary even as filth pulled at his feet. He became unmindful of everything except his single great mission to love and thus bring a measure of balance to an exploitative world. He realized that the reason why fate had brought him to this country was only so that he could devote his life to this woman.
And when Indi first saw Justin, she felt as if there was a kindness shining out from him that she had never seen before. An honest yet somehow defeated kindness that made her stop her car and get out to meet him.
‘ You’re American?’
‘ Afraid so.’
She laughed her throaty laugh. ‘You’re the enemy. We’re with the Soviets here.’
‘ And you?’
‘ Me?’
‘ Who are you with?’
‘ I’m not with anybody.’
‘ Good,’ he said because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘ What’s your name?’
‘ Justin. Justin Reylander. And you are?’
‘ Indira. Indira Ray. Come. Come to my house. Come and meet my parents.’
She felt inexplicably in charge of this blond American, this man whose hair colour shone with a kindness she didn’t believe in any more. As if he, of all the people who set eyes on her, was the only one who was brave enough to risk the blinding light of her dying eyes. And as if for his bravery he deserved her protection.
‘ Hey, no, that’s crazy,’ he protested like an old lover. ‘I can’t just show up at your home!’
‘ Of course, you can!’ she cried. ‘My parents are very happy today. They won’t mind. They’re having a party because I’ve just passed an important exam.’
Justin and Indi sat in silence in her room in Victoria Villa, while the party giggled in the lawn. They listened to the silence between them grow older. They wondered what life would be like if the other suddenly died. She felt as if her days would be broken in half, she would be an amputated limb if he were to now suddenly disappear. He comforted her by dispensing with the rituals of introduction, by acting as if he had always known he would find her.
‘ What are you doing here?’ she asked, walking into his gaze. ‘Are you CIA? Do you have a recorder hidden in your teeth?’
What am I doing here? I’m looking at the patterned landscape in a tumour that blossoms from a man’s stomach. The stab wounds on a child that look like the edges of a hibiscus flower. The whorls of scabies on an old man left for dead.
; He laughed. ‘I’m a doctor. I’ve come to work here at the Medical Institute for a few months. I’m doing nights in Emergency.’
‘ I’m a civil servant. I’m in the IAS. That’s the exam I passed. The Indian civil service exam.’
He leaned back in his chair and studied her. ‘You don’t look’ – her pale blue sari was tied low on her waist and her blouse was a tiny slip of cloth, tight across her breasts, her hair swung down to her hips and there were rough daubs of blue shadow above her eyes – ‘anything like a civil servant.’
‘ I’m trying not to. Why always dress the part? Why be what is expected? I have a license not to, anyway. You see, I’m half blind. Soon I’ll be sightless.’
She told him about the retinitis pigmentosa. Her retina was dying at such speed that no force on earth could stop its death. She almost couldn’t see anything at night and during the day two black prison bars stood to attention in the corners of each eye. She had lost her peripheral vision. She still had her central vision though, which tunnelled forward and beat against the prison bars. Sometime, in the next twenty or thirty years, she would be ‘legally’ blind.
‘ Yes,’ he whispered. ‘RP affects rod cells and cone cells. You might sometimes get white-out glares.’
‘ I do,’ she nodded.
I’m going blind, I’m going blind was the refrain she woke up to, the song she went to sleep with and the chorus in her ears. It was her liberator and her dictator, the looming threat, almost a sexual charge, a beast forcing her to writhe against the light and dark to accommodate its appetite for her eyes. Over the last few months, while preparing for her examinations, she had fought against herself. She had locked herself in her room while her forehead became vermilion with pain and blood pounded behind her eyes. She had walked to the window to let draughts of air touch her eyelids. The jamun had rustled comfortingly during her shivering headaches. Unmindful of the doctor’s warnings, she had stayed up all night studying and been ranked in the first ten among thousands.
‘ Unbelievable,’ said Justin. ‘An unbelievable feat for someone with RP.’
‘ Yes,’ Indi turned her face towards her palm and held it at an angle where she could see the reddish stain of the cigarette burn across her line of fate. ‘It is unbelievable. Thank god for my country and for what I can do for it.’
When the results were announced, she had thrown herself into celebration. She had lain naked on the floor of her room and kicked up her heels in glee. She had bought herself a bottle of rum and drunk a toast to herself. She had stood in front of the mirror and let her hair cascade down to her buttocks and stared at her disembodied appearance, far away in a tube of light. She knew this was a vengeance on her father. And she knew she had succeeded in fighting off her helplessness at least for the duration of her professional life.
Justin felt his senses run into each other. He felt as if he too was blind. Like an LSD crossover, he smelt her beauty and heard her perfume. He was bewildered at himself. His life in America was a universe away where she wouldn’t matter at all. He was bewildered at how willingly he became her slave. He felt as if he was dying. As if his life had been taken out of his hands and set on the slippery course to some sort of abyss from which there was no escape.
There was a complaining knock on her door. ‘They’re calling you,’ Pom had whined. ‘They’re calling you outside.’
‘ Oh maaa!’ Indi groaned. ‘I have to go. I have to go and smile and say yes and no like a programmed parrot and cross my legs and not show my teeth. There’s a pig out there waiting to “see” me. Waiting for his mother to get him married to me. Waiting for me to lead him like a fat sow into the temple. If I marry him, I’ll be the owner of a pig. The owner, actually,’ she winked at him, ‘of a rich pig.’
‘ And will you?’ he asked. ‘Will you get married?’
‘ Come,’ she whirled around. ‘Come with me. I’ll introduce you as my American boyfriend. Then I won’t have to get married. They will all guess that I’m not a virgin and that will be the end of the proposal.’
‘ No!’ he cried aghast at this disrespect to local customs. ‘No way!’
‘ Coward,’ she spun in front of the mirror. ‘You’re scared.’
He nodded, sitting on her bed with his head in his hands, surprised at how easy it was to throw one’s life away.
When she appeared in the garden before her family, the gathering couldn’t take their eyes off her.
‘ Congratulations, my dear!’
‘ Indi is an IAS officer! Such good fortune!’
‘ Indi, the pride of the family.’
‘ Come, Indi-ma,’ Shiela Devi called. ‘Come and have some of this tomato juice. A Virgin Mary for my new government officer!’ Shiela Devi giggled and looked proprietorially towards the plump suitor who stood waiting in a starched white shirt.
As they crowded around, Indi dropped one of her bombshells, fortified by Justin’s blue-eyed adoration.
‘ Why should I have a Virgin Mary, Ma?’ shouted Indi so everyone could hear. ‘You know I haven’t been a virgin since the age of sixteen. One. Six. I told you about that affair of mine. I told you.’
After the party ended Justin waited in her room, feeling Victoria Villa vibrate with Ashish Kumar’s bellows and Shiela Devi’s screams. ‘How dare you humiliate me in public?’ Ashish Kumar’s voice was so loud that the jamun tree in the garden shook with fright. ‘How dare you? You live in my house, you eat my food, and you treat me like dirt?’
‘ It was just’ – Indi turned her green tempests on her father – ‘a joke.’
‘ Joke? It’s not for you to make jokes! Who are you to make jokes about these things?’
‘ The prime minister also has a great sense of humour,’ said Indi brightly.
‘ Don’t compare yourself with the prime minister, for god’s sake!’ screamed Ashish Kumar. ‘Don’t try to elevate yourself to standards you can’t even dream of! For god’s sake, you have a responsible job now. You have a position in society! You are an IAS officer. You will control government money!’
‘ He was such a good boy,’ wailed Shiela Devi. ‘Such a decent family. Now they will never even look at us again. Soon you’ll be blind and nobody will marry you! You will ruin us. You were born to finish us.’
‘ And look at the way you’re dressed up!’ Ashish Kumar bellowed again. ‘Just look at it. It’s so cheap. Like an extra from Hindi films. No decent man will look at you. Is this how someone in the government dresses? Like a bazaar girl!’
He was tremblingly proud of her. He knew everyone regarded her as exceptional. He knew she would take the family name to far greater heights than he could. But why did she persist in letting him down? Could she not see how much he depended on her, how successfully he had fought against his disappointment when she was born?
She felt like a painted clown. A painted, unseeing clown, sitting in front of her parents, in her scanty blouse and her made-up face with her breath smelling of rum. She was a hideous caricature of a daughter. She was a drag queen, rushing out of her lair, feathered and perfumed, the butt of everyone’s outrage. She could have easily told him what the roots of her anger were and why she felt so compelled to impersonate a volcano. But she didn’t. Only Justin, waiting in her room at the back of the house, comforted her with his hidden presence.
Justin buried his head in his hands. He felt his spirit fall into a crater and then rise up again towards the moon.
When she stumbled back into her bedroom, stained with insults, shaking with rage, jumbled words and sentences pouring out of her mouth like vomit, he stared at her reflection in the mirror and sat with her until she fell asleep. He placed his fingertips at her temples to feel the thudding veins.
Then he went back to his room in the hospital and killed the running cockroaches absent-mindedly with his hands, counting the time he had left with her and the time he had left to live.
‘ Indi!’ he shouted standing on the beach in front of her cottage.
&
nbsp; ‘ What, Justin?’
‘ More trouble.’
‘ Trouble?’
‘ Computer trouble.’
‘ Computer trouble?’
An email virus had snarled the hotel reservation system. The engineers were working on it but they didn’t think they would be able to fix it in a hurry. Meanwhile all the bookings had been deleted. Newly arrived guests were wandering aimlessly around on the beach. Some of them had taken the bus to other hotels. ‘Oh god, where are you?’
‘ Here. Down at the beach. Come.’
‘ Come,’ she muttered. ‘I better come. Any sympathy for an old blind bitch like me? No, none at all. Hang on. I’ll be there in a minute.’
She reached for her cane and began to feel her way down the wooden stairs. She knew the steps well enough. Hard footsteps down the stairs, soft and sandy on the beach. Down to where the beach began to smell sharp, touch the rocks surrounding the lagoon, then turn up and left towards the zigzagging road, with the wind sluicing her at right angles.
On the curve of the zigzag, under the gigantic hum of a banyan tree, Sharkey’s Hotel.
‘ So,’ she said. ‘The Phantom Listener strikes again.’
‘ You think it’s the same person?’
‘ Of course, it is. It’s the Phantom Listener. The person or persons making the blank calls. Who stole my accounts. The rats. The person who smells of sulphur or whatever…I can feel him. I know when he comes. I can feel it when he goes.’
He put his arm around her. ‘Move in with me at the hospital. Don’t live on your own any more. Please.’
‘ Rubbish,’ she scolded. ‘I have my cane.’
‘ Indi,’ grunted Justin, staring into her face. ‘Please. I don’t have a good feeling about this.’
She walked along the zigzag with Justin, listening. The quick breath, the glare on her face, she felt it clearly. She screwed up her eyes, willing her brain to transmit an image.
‘ Justin,’ she asked, ‘is there someone here?’
Blind Faith Page 5