The Lost Daughter of India

by Sharon Maas

  That woman – she watched me like a snake watches its prey. Especially when the train stopped – at those times she would grab my wrists and not let me go, in case I ran away. When the train started up again she would relax her grip. When the train stopped sometimes food-wallahs would come on board and bring meals and that was how we ate. There were four other ladies in our compartment. One of them had a baby that cried all the time. There was a mother and a daughter a bit older than me and a much older lady. They all chatted among themselves and sometimes they asked the lady called Sita Aunty questions and she replied to them but told them only lies. She said she was my aunt and she was bringing me to Bombay to get married. All the other ladies laughed and smiled at me then. But I did not smile back. I did not say a word, except when I needed to relieve myself. Then the lady called Sita Aunty would accompany me to the latrine and wait for me outside and then we would return to our compartment. The train tore through the countryside like a bullet, through the night like a comet slashing through the black sky. I slept and woke up and the scenes flitting past the windows changed and then we were in Bombay fighting through the crowds at the station.

  The woman bundled us into a taxi and the taxi drove through streets so congested it felt as if we were in a metal box creeping through the streets, inching past other metal boxes full of people who were all happy and knew where they were going, and I was the only one with no inkling as to what was happening. I did not ask again where we were going because I knew the answer would mean nothing to me.

  At last we came to a big house and she made me climb some stairs ahead of her. Up and up, up and up. I thought we would climb for ever and end up in the heavens but at last she made me walk down a dark dingy corridor that had not been swept for months or years, and took out a key and opened a door and pushed me through. I found myself in another hallway, darker and dingier. Then she opened another door and made me enter. The room was very small. Against one wall was a charpai, and that was all the furniture. She pointed under the bed and I could see a pail peeping out. The pail was for my excretions. Then she left me alone and I waited.

  * * *

  I waited and waited and then after what seemed like an eternity the door opened and two men entered. They made me stand up and stared at me, talking. They spoke Hindi. I had learned a little Hindi at school but they spoke so quickly I could not understand them. All I could understand was that they approved of me. They did not tell me that. They did not speak to me at all, just watched me, looked me up and down, as if I were a cow for sale in a market.

  But I knew. And somehow I knew that their approval was not a good thing, but that their disapproval would be even worse. I do not know how I knew these things. I just did. It was an instinct. And then they left. Now and then the woman I had travelled with to Bombay came in and brought me meals, and water to drink. Once she removed the pail and brought me an empty one to replace it. I was so embarrassed by that. I wanted to tell her I needed another pail, one with water to clean myself. But I could not speak. It was as if a demon had clamped my throat so that no words could emerge, and all the words I wanted to say were just collecting inside me, unable to escape, jammed together in my innards where they turned into a huge quivering mass of fear, and that was all I was, fear. And all through the fear a tiny voice called for Janiki but the fear drowned out that voice. I could not even pray. Amma had taught me to pray throughout all my fears and darkness, that prayer was a lifeline I could cling to, but I was not strong enough to cling and my fear seemed to devour me from within. I was so alone, so alone in this huge strange city, and outside my walls were so many millions of people and not one of them could help me, because I was locked in this tiny room.

  There was a window I could not open. And it was hot, so hot. And all I could do was lie on that charpai and hope that sleep would carry me away but I could not even sleep because the fear drove sleep away. Sometimes I tried to remember the good times. I remembered the village streets where I had played with my brothers and with Janiki, laughed and jumped and ran with the other village children, not knowing that one day I would be in hell, far away from all that I knew and loved.

  How I longed for the oblivion of sleep! But it did not come and when dawn broke the next day it was a small comfort, because at least it would be light and the light was better than the dark.

  But at least on that second day there was some change. Nothing is worse than being shut alone in a room with your fears and your thoughts and your feelings. Nothing is worse than being alone with all the monsters that live within, because those monsters are all you have for entertainment and entertain you they will. If only I had something to read! Anything. Even an old dictionary or some stupid film ads, anything, anything I could latch my mind to so that the monsters that dwell within could not rise up; so I could not see them. This is what I learned in that little room. That my worst companion was myself, and there was no running away, nowhere to go and no control over those monsters. And I longed for something, anything, to anchor myself on so I would not have to face my own wretched self.

  And so I was happy when the woman spoke a few curt words and told me to follow her down the endless stairs again. Yes, I said that word, happy. I was happy in my home in Gingee with the people I loved, before Amma and Appa died. But compared to being alone in that room, walking down the stairs with that lady, well I felt almost bliss. And then we were on the pavement and her hand tight around my wrist once again. A car was waiting at the kerb, not a taxi this time. A car with a driver, and she pushed me forward and forced me to enter a car, and the car moved off to I know not where, and even that seemed like joy compared to being in that room. I did not know that one day I would look back on that room and long to be there again, regard that room as joy. And the car moved into that slow-moving beast of metal crawling through the streets of Bombay, became part of that beast. So many people! I could see them on the pavements, crowds of them, moving here and there, and I longed to leap from the car and throw myself on their mercy, but next to me was that woman and I knew that leaping from the car was futile as her grip was firmly closed around my wrist.

  The car drove up outside a house and I was ushered through the door and into the arms of the woman who, from then on, was to be my new prison warden. She received me with what anyone would have mistaken for a welcoming smile, and welcoming words, but I knew in my heart that she was welcoming me into something so terrible I could not even imagine it. How could I know such things? I just did. And yet once again I knew something like joy, because unlike the stern silent woman who had brought me to Bombay this new woman greeted me with a big smile and chattered all the time, and better yet, she spoke English. And though her friendliness was feigned, it was better than the sheer desolation of being silent and alone.

  But if I had known what was to come – oh, I would have screamed and struggled and fought like a tigercat. But I did not know. I was docile as a kitten, handed from one woman to another. I was docile because I did not know. I could not imagine. I took her smile, and her words, as a sign that better was to come.

  ‘You are a very fortunate girl!’ she said to me, and my heart leapt because I believed her.

  I should not have.

  Worse was to come.

  Chapter 32

  Janiki

  The next morning Janiki arrived at Tulasa House at the break of dawn; there was no time to be wasted. Today Kamal and Caroline would be arriving. A big day lay ahead. Dr Ganotra was there, before her; Sakhi, he said, would be arriving soon and he’d be grateful if Janiki could be there to receive her, to translate from Tamil, to make her feel welcome.

  ‘Of course,’ said Janiki. ‘I’d love to help. But…’

  She wanted to explain that Kamal and Caroline were due in – they had taken the first flight into Bombay – and they’d presumably be busy all day. But she stopped speaking, for the door to the kitchen had opened and Kamal stood in the doorway, Caroline right behind him. Janiki’s hands dropped, and against
her will she stared at them.

  In her mind, up to now, Kamal had still been Kamal Uncle; a much older man, an uncle after all, a generation above her, an authority, a father figure almost, tall and prepossessing, and she the little girl who had looked up to him; the little girl who had mothered his child, but a little girl all the same, a child.

  But in the intervening years she had changed. Grown up. Become a woman. And he had also changed. Almost beyond recognition; and yet he was the same, the same Kamal. It wasn’t just his physical appearance. No: it was the very substance of him, something that could not be seen but which imparted itself to her through countless signals, imperceptible to the senses but immediately recognised by the rhythm of her soul, the drummer within, who all her life had doggedly beat a pulse of its own and who now, as if activated by the entrance of this new individual into its radius, suddenly went wild – ratatatatatatatat at a breakneck speed.

  Kamal wore khaki cotton trousers and a nondescript, faded, striped cotton shirt. He wore cheap flip-flops. He was tall and straight-backed, golden-brown in colour. His face was angular, almost gaunt, his eyes under thick eyebrows deep-set and large, the look in them probing, severe even, and at the same time veiled, seeing all while revealing nothing. A short beard covered his chin, a moustache his upper lip. He was unsmiling. The overall expression was of distance and authority. He was unapproachable. Yet still she smiled. ‘Hello, Kamal!’ she said.

  Kamal did not return her smile, and only vaguely raised his hands in a peremptory namaste, did not even greet her. It was Caroline who smiled, stepping forward from behind her former husband to sweep Janiki into her arms.

  ‘Janiki!’ she said. ‘It’s so good to see you again! I can’t believe how much you’ve grown – you’re a woman now!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Janiki, feeling shy all of a sudden. Caroline was so American; in the year she had spent in California she had grown used to the overflowing enthusiasm and friendliness of American women, but here, in Bombay, it seemed all at once alien, out of place, inappropriate, given the circumstances.

  Caroline, in contrast to Kamal, was dressed in casual-but-smart attire: well-cut, obviously expensive trousers and a long floral blouse that would have been more appropriate in the lobby of a luxury hotel than here in this so shabby room. She wore shiny leather sandals with heels and a blue silk scarf around her neck. On her slender fingers she wore rings; expensive rings, one with a sparkling diamond, and a white-gold wedding band. Though still beautiful, she had aged, and bore no resemblance at all to the hippie-styled young woman in flowing skirts who had shared her home when Asha was a toddler. This woman was a stranger, and strange, incongruous here in the bowels of Bombay.

  Caroline, as if recognising that her enthusiastic greeting of Janiki was somehow over the top in this sombre place, loosened her embrace and stepped back, her smile dropping away, her features falling into a grimace.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re here, doing this!’ she said. ‘I can’t believe – that Asha – my baby – is here. What a mess. Did you—’

  ‘Have you any news?’ Kamal butted in. ‘Have you made any progress? You must be Dr Ganotra.’

  He turned to Dr Ganotra, who now stood up from the table where he had been eating his breakfast.

  ‘No,’ said Dr Ganotra, walking to the sink to wash his hands. ‘I was just telling Janiki yesterday. There won’t be any miracles. This is slow, tedious, frustrating work and success is not guaranteed. You’re looking for a needle in a haystack.’

  ‘A cliché,’ said Kamal impatiently. ‘Asha is not a needle. She’s my daughter and I will find her. I’ll find her if I have to spend the rest of my life searching.’

  ‘Right,’ said Caroline. ‘We’re here to find her and we won’t turn back. I’m not going before I hold her in my arms again.’

  Dr Ganotra, wiping his hands on a towel, only shook his head, almost imperceptibly, and even Janiki, having recovered most of her equilibrium, felt that they both, Kamal and Caroline, had spoken too hastily, too confidently, too brashly. They had not yet walked the streets of Kamathipura. They seemed naive; such presumptuousness, she feared, might jinx the entire mission. She felt the need to put a dampener on their assertiveness.

  ‘Kamal – Caroline,’ she said, ‘I’ve made a start. I went out looking yesterday, just walking around the area. And it’s… well, it’s a bit depressing, really. It really does seem like a needle in a haystack.’

  Only after she’d spoken did she realise: she’d addressed Kamal not as Uncle, but as an equal, as her peer. She hoped he wouldn’t think it rude. She wanted to make a good impression on him. But he was so austere, so grim, so brusque; she was lost as to how she would appear to him. As a little girl? As the precocious teenager he’d treated with kindness but distance in the past? As a grown woman? He seemed hardly to have acknowledged her up to now; his mind was filled with Asha. He had not even greeted her. Disappointment welled up in her, but only for an instant.

  Janiki, she told herself sternly, what are you thinking? This is your Kamal Uncle, a much older man. What you are thinking is outrageous! But then she remembered Rani Abishta, and her outrageous desire to pair her off with Kamal – and Rani’s suggestion at the moment didn’t seem outrageous in the least. Except that obviously Kamal hardly even saw her.

  All these thoughts ran through Janiki’s head in the space of an instant; and then she came back to earth. In that one instant she had forgotten Asha, and the direness of her situation. She had, for that moment, forgotten what she was here for, carried away on the wings of – what? A stupid female dream. She physically pinched herself to bring herself back to the task at hand, which meant aligning herself with the desperation that fired both Kamal and Caroline.

  'Look why don't you just go to Kamathipura now and look around a bit? I mean, I've only been there once myself but you should see the place to get a better idea of how to organize the search.'

  ‘Yes – you do that,’ said Dr Ganotra. ‘I’m going to be busy this morning – Sakhi will be here soon.’

  ‘Sakhi?’ said Kamal.

  ‘A girl we rescued yesterday. She’s in hospital now and coming here today. A Tamil girl. Your Asha is not the only girl in trouble. She’s one of thousands. I’ll help as much as I can, but later today. At four this afternoon I’ve scheduled a team meeting – some of the people who work for Safe Haven will be coming around to discuss some urgent matters, and they’ll be able to look into the Asha problem, and you’ll be able to ask for advice, help, maybe develop a strategy. But remember we’re all very busy. After that, if you still have questions, we can have our talk. Now, it’s best you go off with Janiki. She’s been a great help.’

  For the first time, Kamal looked at Janiki with something more than distraction in his eyes, as if he only now acknowledged her presence. He nodded.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go, Janiki. Let’s see this hellhole.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To Kamathipura; where else? I want to see where my daughter might be hidden.’

  Janiki looked in panic at him, and then at Dr Ganotra.

  ‘But – is nobody going to come with us? Show us around?’

  Dr Ganotra sniffed in exasperation.

  ‘We’re all much too busy to give guide-tours, sorry. Best you just go, plunge in and discover it all by yourself. Get a feel for the place. Later at the meeting you can maybe exchange a few words with someone if you have a lead or if you feel you want a closer look; maybe someone can find the time. But – well, best you just go.’

  Just as they were about to leave, Gita arrived, Sakhi in tow. Sakhi was limping, but she seemed much better than yesterday, not flinching when Janiki leaned over to hug her, and even managing a half-smile. Janiki introduced Kamal and Caroline, then looked at Gita with something like desperation.

  ‘We’re off to Kamathipura,’ she said. ‘Yesterday you said you’d show me around a bit – do you – could you – I mean, we’re supposed to be going now, and I know
you’re busy, but…’

  Gita looked at her watch. ‘I guess I could spare an hour or two,’ she said. ‘If Dr Ganotra doesn’t mind? We’ve got the team meeting at four…’

  She looked at Dr Ganotra, who looked at his watch.

  ‘Subhadai will look after Sakhi,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some HIV patients at my clinic this morning – I’ll be back this afternoon for the team meeting. All right, Gita, go with them. Show them the place.’

  Janiki breathed out in relief; she hadn’t even realised she’d been holding her breath. It had seemed, for a while, as if Kamal and Caroline were both relying on her for a guided tour of the city, as if she had been here a year instead of just a day.

  The four of them stepped out onto the pavement. Gita went to hail a rickshaw, but then she stopped and turned to Caroline.

  ‘Caroline,’ she said, ‘it’d be better if you remove those rings– they look so expensive! You’re going to attract attention anyway as a white woman; we’re going into a high crime area. Can you take them off for a while?’

  ‘But – I always wear them – I…’ Caroline sighed. ‘Oh I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that. OK. I’ll take them off.’

  She did so, and then turned her back to Janiki, lifting the curtain of her blonde hair. ‘Janiki – can you undo the clasp on my chain, please? I’ll put the rings on it for the time being.’

  Janiki opened the clasp, and Caroline hung the two rings through the gold chain on which a single simple crucifix hung. Janiki remembered that, back in the day, Caroline had worn a golden OM symbol around her neck. Marriage and respectability had obviously changed her religious affiliation. She relocked the chain for Caroline, who grinned.