by Sharon Maas
All this time the guard had been standing in the doorway, picking his teeth with his fingernail and watching silently. Now, hospitality established, the woman spoke brusquely to him and shooed him away. The man shrugged, stepped backwards into the lobby and closed the
door.
The woman was still on her feet. She stood in the middle of the room, looking inordinately pleased with herself. She patted herself on her voluminous breast and said, ‘Subhadai, Subhadai.’
Janiki pointed to herself, saying ‘Janiki’.
‘Leetle English,’ the woman explained. ‘Koppee? Koppee?’
It took a while before Janiki could figure out that the woman was offering her coffee. She nodded and smiled. The woman busied herself with boiling water and coffee powder, which she served in a mug on a saucer with three biscuits on the side. Only then did she return to stringing beans. And all the while she talked. Janiki did not understand a word. She was impatient, eager to be out there searching for Asha; she felt that each passing minute, each second accepting the hospitality of this woman and waiting for a mysterious Dr Ganotra, was wasted. She should be wandering the streets again. Futile as such a search would be, it would at least make her feel useful, unlike sitting here with this woman.
After an hour Subhadai had finished stringing the beans and chopping the onions: she had placed a pot with rice and water on a kerosene flame; the coffee and biscuits had been digested; the morning was drawing to an end, lunchtime loomed near and Dr Ganotra had not put in an appearance. Janiki decided to find out if there was a chance of meeting the good doctor today; whether he would be returning and, if so, when. If not she might as well return to the streets.
Her carefully worded, slowly enunciated questions to this end produced only a further waterfall of words. Janiki interrupted, repeating, ‘Dr Ganotra coming? Today?’
She gestured as she thought appropriate, moving her fingers like walking legs, patting the table to signify ‘here’. She pointed to the alarm clock and spread her hands in an open question.
Subhadai understood.
Excitedly she began to explain; Dr Ganotra, it seemed, was indeed coming. She pointed at the clock, at the cooking food, at her own mouth, made eating gestures. Then she moved her fingers like walking legs, pointed again at the clock and held up one finger.
‘Ek, ek, ek,’ she said.
Janiki understood. He’d be coming at one o’clock, for lunch.
Subhadai suddenly stopped talking. She placed a finger over her lips and cocked her head, gazing into space. Janiki, too, listened; and she heard. The sound was unmistakable; somewhere in the bowels of the house somebody was crying. Subhadai nodded and stood up. At the doorway she hesitated, as if making a decision, and then she gestured for Janiki to follow her. She led her into the lobby and up the creaking stairs. The crying was louder in the lobby, and grew louder still as they walked upstairs: the forlorn lament of a soul that has lost all hope of solace and every right to happiness.
On the second floor there was another lobby, but less gloomy than the one below, for it was lit by a large window at the front of the house. Subhadai opened a door and entered a room. Janiki followed.
The cryer was a girl, sitting on a charpai, leaning against the wall with knees drawn up. She might have been twelve years old, or a year or two older, a year or two younger – it was hard to tell, for her body was tiny and emaciated, the body of a young child, whereas the expression on her face was ancient. Her hands lay limp, palm-up, on the mattress; her uptilted chin was half turned to one side, her lips trembled as she wept, her eyes were vacant. She sat immobile, weeping apparently not because of any specific cause but because that was all there was left to do in all the world and in all of life. She did not so much as turn her face to look at the newcomers.
Janiki felt like an intruder into some intensely intimate experience, unwelcome and inopportune. She backed towards the open doorway, but Subhadai took hold of her upper arm and stopped her.
Subhadai walked over to the charpai, taking Janiki with her. She was speaking to the girl, and though the words were unknown Janiki could tell they were words of comfort. The girl did not react.
Letting go of Janiki, Subhadai sat on the edge of the charpai in front of the girl and reached over to stroke her cheek. The girl showed no reaction, did not look at Subhadai, did not pause in her weeping. Janiki stood awkwardly watching, the urge to flee struggling with compassion and curiosity. She stayed.
She stood before an abyss of misery so deep and so dark it filled every space in that child’s soul. Janiki needed no explanation – she knew it. The blankness in those dull black eyes, the downward pull of the trembling lips, the wretched whimpers: all spoke of unimaginable woe, too awful for words. This child was lost.
Is grief contagious? It had to be, for an involuntary trembling took hold of Janiki. She tried to control it, but couldn’t; her hands shook, her heart raced, a feeling of dread spread through her entire being, the fear of being drowned and destroyed by whatever agony possessed this child. Again, the desire to flee – to turn her back and never return to this terrible place – took hold of her, to be immediately superseded by its opposite: compassion, love even, the need to enter into the jaws of despair, defy its power, deny its existence. The trembling stopped as suddenly as it had set in.
Subhadai stood up and gestured to Janiki, who sat down on the charpai, directly before the girl, and took the trembling hands in hers.
‘Ratna,’ Subhadai said, pointing to the girl.
Janiki looked into eyes that saw nothing. Not even a flicker of acknowledgement. It did not matter. She leaned forward. She placed both hands on the girl’s shoulders, drew her away from the wall. The child did not resist. She was passive, a rag doll. There seemed not a remnant of human will left in her. Janiki spoke to her, knowing she would not be understood, but it did not matter.
‘Hello, Ratna. I’m Janiki,’ she said. ‘I’m from Tamil Nadu and I came to look for my sister. My sister is the same age as you. I hope I can find her. Her name is Asha and I’ve lost her. I think she too is sad. I think she too is crying. I really want to find her.’
She instinctively lowered her voice, softened its edges; knowing the words themselves could not be understood, she filled them with feeling, with heart, knowing that somewhere, deep inside this child’s being, was someone who would receive that feeling and understand it. She spoke on a level of communication beyond thought, beyond speech, and superior to both. The girl, whatever was still alive in the girl, would understand. She brushed a strand of hair away from the little face, held the little head in both her hands, centred it so that the eyes were directly in front of her. The child wept on. The eyes stared, not seeing. Empty. Dead.
She is dead, Janiki thought. Dead inside. But no. She can’t be. If she were dead she would not cry. Somewhere, deep inside, there is a last spark of life. She has heard, she has understood.
Suddenly a door flew open; not the door into the corridor, which still stood open, but a second, leading to the next room. Looking up, Janiki saw another girl, this time older, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, standing on the threshold.
This new girl was entirely different. She looked first at Janiki, then at Ratna, then at Subhadai. A short exchange of words took place between her and Subhadai, and then her gaze returned to Janiki and she acknowledged her with a curt nod. She walked to the window and stood there for a while looking out before turning swiftly, walking to the connecting door and leaving the room without speaking another word, slamming the door behind her. This girl was angry.
The first girl had looked up at the newcomer, and then slumped back against the wall, and so she remained, her whimpering the only sign of life.
Janiki stood up, and gestured that she wanted to go. She could not bear it. She wanted to be alone, to grieve, to gather her thoughts. Subhadai indicated that she would stay, and Janiki left the room and found her own way back to the kitchen.
Meeting the girls upstairs had at
the same time given her hope and plunged her into a morass of despair. It seemed fairly obvious, now, what this house was about. A sort of refuge, a safe house. The girls upstairs had been rescued from some kind of terrible fate; they were being provided for, supported; this Dr Ganotra would be involved and might, somehow, be able to help in the search for Asha.
But where was he? When would he come? She looked at the clock. The hands crept slowly forward towards one.
At twelve-thirty Subhadai finished cooking. She prepared a tray of food and took it to the girls upstairs; Janiki went with her, and helped serve it. Then she and Subhadai ate, a simple but tasty meal of rice and vegetables on a stainless steel platter in the dining room across the lobby from the kitchen, a room bare of any furniture save a long wooden table with six chairs around it.
After lunch and washing up, Subhadai spread a cloth on the kitchen floor, lay down on it and fell promptly asleep. Janiki could not dream of sleeping. The girl upstairs nagged at her; that face! Those eyes! She made her way back up to her and entered the room. The girl was now, blessedly, asleep, the tray with the empty plate on the floor beside her. Janiki bent down, stroked her cheek, took the tray and returned downstairs.
At two Dr Ganotra still had not yet arrived. Janiki waited, leafing through a pile of old magazines. Time crept forward.
Subhadai woke up, but seemed to have lost interest in her; she clattered around in the kitchen, went up and down the stairs a few times, swept the floor for the third time. The house was full of sounds; the crying had gradually subsided, but the background drone of a radio or a television set from upstairs was persistent. At one point Janiki heard the clatter of the chain on the front gate and ran to the open window, expecting to see Dr Ganotra, but it was only a very dark old man in a turban, depositing a sack of something round in the garden. The waiting continued.
Chapter 30
Janiki
When Janiki again heard the chain it was almost three, and she had given up any expectation of ever meeting Dr Ganotra; she decided she would return to the streets. Walking up and down the lanes of Kamathipura seemed a better use of her time than sitting here, waiting. She glanced out of the window more from boredom than for any other reason, for she had read India Today and the Times of India from beginning to end; and so she started on a local paper, Mumbai Drums.
A few minutes later the door opened and Dr Ganotra entered. A tall, lanky Indian with a neatly trimmed beard, he was a prepossessing figure, and Janiki felt authority radiating from him. She stood up and greeted him with a pranaam: hands together at her chest.
‘Namaste,’ she said. ‘I’m—’
‘Janiki,’ said Dr Ganotra. ‘Yes; I was expecting you. Sorry I’m late; my time is unfortunately not my own.’
Dr Ganotra walked across the room and filled a kettle with water; turning on the gas stove, he put the kettle on the flame.
‘Coffee?’ he asked. She nodded, and then began.
‘As I told you, it’s about my little sister—’
‘Little Asha,’ he finished. ‘You’ve been able to follow her tracks to Mumbai? To Kamathipura?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’m not quite sure – I’ve been walking about in Kamathipura but it seems to me…’
‘A needle in a haystack,’ said Dr Ganotra, nodding. He placed a coffee filter on a jug, filled it with ground coffee and waited for the water to boil. Subhadai, in the meantime, had stood up and was busy dishing out a plate of food from the pots on the stove. She gestured to him to sit down, indicating that she would finish the coffee, and placed the plate on the table. Dr Ganotra sat down and began to eat; hungrily, hastily, as if eating were a waste of time. Between mouthfuls he spoke to Janiki.
‘You met the girls upstairs, I presume. Ratna? And Sita? Two rescued girls out of so many still in hell. I can’t make any promises. I don’t know if we can find your Asha, if we can save her, but I’m happy to try. I’m always happy to try. One at a time we find these girls, and one at a time we save them, bring them here.’
Janiki nodded. Dr Ganotra’s words tore at her. Asha, lost for ever? In Kamathipura? It could not be!
‘I have to find her!’ she said. ‘If you can help…’
‘I can help, but as I said, I can’t make any promises. This place is a refuge; I do my best, but sometimes I feel it’s like water on a red-hot stone.’
‘I know,’ said Janiki, her voice trembling with the despair she felt. ‘I can’t imagine – I can’t even begin to imagine—’
‘How a place like this can exist in a modern city like Mumbai,’ Dr Ganotra finished. ‘How men can do this thing to young girls, to children. Ratna is still a child. Men have ravished her. Not men, but animals. I’ve been doing this work for many years now, and I still don’t understand how a human can lower himself to such depravity. I still don’t understand it.’
‘What are our chances of finding Asha?’
He shrugged. ‘You expect me to put a number on it? To find one girl, and pluck her out of there? I’m sorry, but I need to be blunt, and you need to be realistic. There are about thirty thousand prostitutes in Kamathipura. Ten per cent are minors, children; and you can be sure the minors are kept hidden away, because they’re illegal. Do you know what that world’s like? It’s an anthill – teeming with people. Brothels on top of brothels and behind brothels; stinking hellholes where you wouldn’t even keep a dog. And you are looking for one single little soul in all of that. You can figure out your chances yourself.’
‘But,’ said Janiki, determined not to be discouraged by numbers, ‘We do have clues. I’ve been investigating; I was able to find some information.’
She told Dr Ganotra about the emails, about the names and the hints she had been able to glean. She rummaged in her bag and brought forth the little notebook in which she had written down those names, as well as the photo of Asha she had printed out.
‘Interesting,’ said Dr Ganotra, ‘but still – don’t think you can just walk in there with a few names and find a single particular girl. I’m sorry to throw cold water on your hopes. I’ll do all I can to help, but, well, one girl among thirty thousand, well, you can figure out the odds. However, miracles do happen. You’re passionate about this one particular girl, and it’s always good to have passion. Passion helps. And so does faith; it’s true that faith can sometimes move mountains.’
Janiki nodded. ‘That’s what I believe too,’ she said. ‘And there are three of us. Kamal is coming tomorrow – that’s her father – and Caroline.’
‘That’s good. So your father is going to be helping to look for her too? That’s encouraging. You understand, in that trade especially it’s better to have a man investigating. As a young woman, you—’
Janiki raised her hand in a stop signal. ‘Kamal isn’t my father,’ she said.
Dr Ganotra looked up from his food – he had almost finished by now – and raised his eyebrows. ‘But Asha is your sister, and his daughter – I thought…’
‘Foster-sister. It’s a long story. She’s my cousin-sister. We aren’t related. My mother was her foster-mother. Kamal is her biological father. He’s coming with Asha’s mother, Caroline, his wife – ex-wife. She’s American.’
‘Ah, that’s why she’s so fair!’ said Dr Ganotra. ‘A very beautiful little girl, wheatish complexion. Fair girls like her are luxury products…’
Janiki winced. He continued. ‘…I know it hurts for her to be described as a product but that’s the reality. That’s how she’s seen in the trade; superior quality, she’ll be labelled, like a carpet, or a patola-silk sari. And in a way it’s a good thing, from your point of view. Luxury products are treated with more care. They can’t be blemished; they can’t be ruined. They are kept apart, for customers with high demands. Especially if they are virgins. Some men believe that virgins can cure AIDS. So a fair-skinned virgin might have a good chance of being kept with more care.’
‘But just now you said she was just one out of thirty thousand,’ said Jan
iki.
‘Yes, and she is. And I’ll help you as much as possible and share my knowledge with you, but to me every one of those thirty thousand girls is worth saving. For a few days I will devote myself to this one. But that girl upstairs, and thousands like her still out there,’ – he gestured out of the window – ‘they are all equally precious. Every human life is precious. And I will save them, one at a time. Perhaps it is your Asha’s turn to be saved. I won’t take that hope from you.’
Janiki, lost for words, said nothing. Dr Ganotra shovelled the last mouthful of food into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and then said, ‘Asha is lucky. She is privileged. She has family looking for her, family with the means to stop their normal lives, come to Mumbai and spend time and money looking for her. Other girls are not so lucky. They have no one looking for them. Their parents back in the villages can’t come here to look for them. Yet each one is as precious as the next. I’ll help you look for Asha, but only because out of the thousands of such girls, she has the luck to have you here working with me. See those girls upstairs? We were able to save them but what can we do with them now? Where can we put them? They can’t tell us where they came from, and even if they could, it’s more than likely we can’t send them back. Their parents might love them but they can’t go back after Kamathipura, for their villages will reject them. There’s no going back after Kamathipura. They will carry that shame all their lives, through no fault of their own. They have lost their homes, their parents, their lives. That is my dilemma. And that is the only reason I can devote some time to one particular girl: because there is hope for her after Kamathipura. That is rare. Still: don’t hope too much. It will take nothing short of a miracle.’