Tanya Tania

by Antara Ganguli

  And then you see a building with a shop on the ground floor that is completely burnt. No sign, no counter, nothing except for a naked old man lying across the threshold of the shop, looking, except for the way his legs are bent, as if he is peacefully asleep. You turn your face away from his genitals, like softly spreading wax between his legs.

  It’s the bakery from Nusrat’s chawl. You look up and it doesn’t look like the same building with all the windows boarded up. Where are the petticoats hanging outside windows? Where is the underwear with holes?

  You stop at the small doorway of the building and wrap your dupatta around your face so only your eyes are visible. You wish for your father again. You wish for a torch. You wish you had eaten carrots so you could see better in the dark. But you climb up the steps and into the dark.

  You hear keening.

  You want to run away but you grip the wall, palms pushing into cold stone, and you slide inside slowly. The dark is a monster and you, who have never been afraid of the dark, are terrified.

  The keening gets louder and it’s behind a closed door. You knock on it softly but it can’t be heard. You bang on it, the dark is closing in on you.

  The keening stops and someone comes to the door. You can hear them and you imagine them scared, you imagine them wrapping their dupatta around and you wonder why it is that women cover themselves with flimsy cloth when they are scared as if cloth ever stopped anyone and you know it doesn’t because it never stopped Arjun but you are doing it too and so there you are, you and the woman behind the door who has stopped keening and both of you have dupattas wrapped around your head as if it will save you from each other.

  The door opens a crack and a shadow of a face shows. She asks you in Hindi who you are. You say Tania because you can’t think of anything else and as soon as you say it you wonder if you should have said a more Hindu name or a more Muslim name and how did they know to kill the guy with the right side of his head chopped off had they asked him his name?

  The woman is silent and you whisper that you are looking for Nusrat. The woman shakes her head and shuts the door and won’t open it even though you knock loudly, urgently, continuously.

  She opens the door again and she looks tired. ‘Please go away,’ she says.

  ‘It’s my friend,’ you say. ‘Please Aunty.’

  ‘Friend!’ she looks at you. ‘My husband is missing and you’re looking for a friend!’

  ‘Sister!’ you shout, holding the door open with your hand. ‘My sister! Please Aunty please! I’ve been looking for her for so long!’

  The exhaustion and the heat and the buzzing in your head all come together and you can’t bear it anymore and you sag against the wall. The corridor sways and recedes, sways and recedes.

  The woman makes an exclamation of disgust, looks both ways into the dark corridor and pulls you into her house.

  Inside it’s dark and it smells bad except for two incense sticks that burn in front of a picture of a fair man in a white cap with a gold border that you’ve seen at your Bohra friends’ houses.

  She pushes you at a mat on the floor and disappears. You discover the warm, fast breathing bodies of two very small children on the mattress, one a baby.

  She comes back with a steel tumbler of water and you can’t help but remember everything your mother had ever said about drinking water outside your house but you can’t help it, you take the tumbler and drain it at one go.

  ‘Now go,’ says the woman, taking the tumbler. ‘Please leave. I don’t want any trouble.’

  ‘Nusrat Mohammedbhai,’ you say. ‘Her father is a carpenter. She is mute.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But she says it too quickly and you don’t believe her. You grab her hand. ‘Please Aunty please, she really is my sister. Please tell me. I know she lives in this building but I don’t know which floor.’

  She shakes off your hand and begins to cry.

  Why is she crying? What does it mean?

  ‘I hate them!’ she says. ‘I hate all of them. It’s to protect them that my husband went.’

  ‘Protect Nusrat?’

  ‘Protect the women of the building. My husband and two other men took all the women to the mosque in the next neighbourhood. They left six hours ago when the trouble started in the morning and they haven’t come back yet.’

  Her voice broke on the last words and she started crying, softly, still very softly, muted into her dupatta, as if it was dangerous to be scared, dangerous to be sad.

  ‘You’re sure Nusrat was with him?’

  She suddenly looks at you with hatred in her eyes.

  ‘Bhaarh mein jaaye teri Nusrat! Bhaar mein jaaye!’

  You oddly want to comfort her, to put your arm around her. One of the children’s sleeping arms falls on your lap and you almost scream.

  She picks him up and you see that it is a baby. He is peeing in his sleep.

  ‘I’ve drugged him,’ she says, her voice quavering. ‘I’ve drugged him so he won’t cry. I wouldn’t let them take him. But he hasn’t woken up since morning, not once.’

  She holds him close and her face disappears in the curve of the sleeping boy, his arms hanging slackly over her shoulder. There is something disturbing about his deep sleep. You wish you could pick him up and take him home so he would wake up among the gay mosaic tile in the kitchen where he would crouch on his baby haunches, picking at the margins.

  ‘Please tell me where they went.’

  She looks at you suspiciously. ‘Why? Who are you? Nusrat has no sister.’ She looks at your shoes which shine white in the darkness.

  ‘I’m her friend from school.’

  ‘What’s your surname?’

  ‘Sheikh. Tania Sheikh.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Colaba.’

  She is silent, disbelieving.

  ‘I have come with my father in his car to take her back home with me. She is my second cousin. My father’s brother’s daughter. Cousin.’

  ‘Salim Mohammedbhai’s brother?’

  You nod.

  ‘Salim Bhai has rich relatives,’ she says finally. ‘If only he wasn’t so hot-headed he wouldn’t be poor and here with us.’

  ‘Where did they go, Aunty?’

  ‘To Momin Masjid,’ she says finally. ‘Near the big Catholic school.’

  You jump up. You know the school. You had passed it on the way. It is cream and green with a fake Christmas tree right inside the gate and a giant sign in popsicle sticks saying MERRY CHRISTMAS although half the T has fallen off.

  ‘You should not go.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  Her eyes light up which you suddenly notice are beautiful, a soft brown with vivid edges. But then she shakes her head and tightens her arm around the comatose baby.

  You get up to leave and she grabs your arm. ‘Find my husband! Please, find my husband! I will do anything for you, just find my husband!’

  To your shock, she falls to the floor, the baby still in her arms, and tries to touch your Reebok shoes. You say, ‘No, no, no Aunty please no,’ and you feel foolish saying it because she barely looks older than you, even with her two drugged children and missing husband.

  ‘Islam Hasan Ali!’ she says. ‘His name is Islam Hasan Ali! Please find him, please bring him home, please …’

  She is crying to herself, no longer looking at you. You leave quietly. The image of the weeping woman on the floor, her head resting on the lax, lolling baby, his head fallen back at a nonhuman angle follows you.

  Islam Hasan Ali. Salim Mohammedbhai. Nusrat Mohammedbhai.

  Outside you blink in the sunshine but the smell of smoke is immediate and acrid. You begin to run.

  Nusrat. You have to find Nusrat.

  You can’t find the school and you run through the streets again forever. Everything is spinning around you, the sun beating down hard on your head, the headache back and the pounding of your heart so loud between your eyes that you could barely see. Things f
lash by: a turned over vegetable cart with tomatoes split under sharp beaks of crows, a Hanuman temple with a headless Hanuman and a priest lying next to it, a mound of garbage, a dropped bag of bread, pamphlets in Marathi with pictures of swords and a smiling blue god sitting on a rock, a dog (Was it the dog from the store?) sitting solemnly on top of an empty cart, watching you run by for the second time as you try frantically to find a way to the school.

  You run into the green and cream wall of the school. You climb over the gate and fall on the other side, hurting something in your left leg badly. You purse your lips and ignore it. You have a bad feeling you’re running out of time.

  Nusrat. You have to find Nusrat.

  You run through the school and the red floors make you think of my house with its red-floor balcony and even as you’re running, across the playground, through the corridor, with classrooms on the sides, you think about me and you wonder why I haven’t written, if I’m alright. Because Nusrat was right, Tania Ghosh, you have a kind heart. A stupid, kind heart.

  The shouting hits you like a wall of sound. You run out into the front courtyard of the school and you can see through the tall black posts of the front gate of the school that there are two big mobs facing each other, both with flags and swords and machetes and bricks and broken bottles still dripping with orange soda. One mob has men, women and children. The other mob has men.

  You run to the gate. You grab the posts and look for Nusrat.

  When you see her, your heart leaps in relief. She’s right in the middle of the crowd, holding an older woman who must be her mother. Her mother is crying but Nusrat is dry-eyed and solemn, holding her mother tightly as if to prevent her from falling to the ground. She is jostled continually by the crowd and she ducks and flows with the crowd stoically. For a moment you just look at her, thinking how beautiful she is and how you can’t wait to hold her hand and drag her away to safety. Your heart begins to slow down. It looks like a big shouting match but no one has hurt anyone. Maybe they will all go away. They won’t hurt each other in front of a school.

  It all happens quickly. One minute the men are just screaming at each other, a mix of slogans and abuse and indecipherable noise. The next minute, there are stones flying through the air and people falling to the ground. The women start screaming. The children start crying. You just keep your eye on Nusrat. She is being pushed and shoved. She puts her arm around her mother. She is trying to drag her to the side.

  Suddenly a man breaks out from the mob with Nusrat in it. He runs across the empty space between the two crowds and enters the other mob. He has a large iron rod with him. He starts to hit men around him, waving his rod around. Blood blooms. The men in the other crowd close around the man and you can see the bodies pump up and down as they beat the man.

  Suddenly police vans appear on the edges and scores of policemen pour out of them with revolvers in their hands. They jump into the crowds and disappear in the dust.

  And then Nusrat runs after the man and disappears where the men are beating him.

  You scream her name over and over again. NUSRAT! NUSRAT! NUSRAT!

  But you can’t see her anymore. She has disappeared. You begin to climb the gate to get to her.

  And then the gunshots.

  Once, twice, thrice.

  Many times together. Many gun shots.

  Everyone is screaming now and everyone is running in the same direction—away from the square of confrontation, into lanes, into streets, into shops, into the dust growing opaque.

  The dust is immense and through it you scream. NUSRAT! NUSRAT!

  Your voice disappears into the mayhem and then quickly, as if it is a movie script, the square is silent and a moment ago where people had stood screaming at others, moments ago where there had been so many people beating Nusrat’s father, moments ago where people were pushing and shoving and screaming, there is nothing but silence, nothing but dust.

  You stop shouting and stand still, peering through the dust, hoping to see which direction Nusrat had run in. You are tired of running after her. You want to find her and you want to go home. You are beginning to feel angry.

  NUSRAT! Let’s go home now! NUSRAT! It’s Tania!

  NUSRAT, you scream through a now total silence, your voice ringing out into all corners. NUSRAT!

  When the dust clears you see Nusrat. She is lying on the ground, on her side, looking straight at you.

  For a moment you smile. She has seen you! Nusrat!

  And then something is very wrong because how can her head be at that angle and who is that woman coming running towards her also calling her name and why isn’t Nusrat getting up?

  Nusrat! Nusrat! Nusrat!

  The woman throws herself on Nusrat and you shout at her to not do that because who knows, maybe Nusrat broke a bone and you have to be really careful about not moving broken bones and why isn’t the woman listening?

  Nusrat! Nusrat!

  Why isn’t Nusrat getting up? Why isn’t she smiling at her mother who is crying stupidly in a way that infuriates you?

  Nusrat! Get up! We have to go home, Nusrat!

  Nusrat! My parents are on their way. They are coming to get us! Come on Nusrat!

  Nusrat! NUSRAT!

  Three men come from nowhere with a stretcher that is half torn. One of them pulls Nusrat’s mother away and you see that Nusrat’s back is red, bright red, a red you have seen many times today. The men lift Nusrat and put her on the stretcher. Her head lolls forward and one of the men closes her eyes.

  Nusrat! Nusrat stop acting! Nusrat! Come on get up! I’ll take you to a better hospital! Nusrat it’s not funny!

  One of the men turns to look at you. Go away, he says. This is not for you. Go away.

  NUSRAT! Nusrat!

  You stand there watching them take away Nusrat.

  You can’t stop screaming her name even as the stretcher turns a corner and you can’t see her anymore. You can’t stop screaming her name even when your parents find you and it takes both of them to prise your hands off the school gate and you can’t stop screaming her name all the way home in the car and you can’t stop screaming her name when you’re in your room and you see the mattress where she had slept last night and you can’t stop screaming as you take the picture of her and you by the sea that you had taken the last time you both had gone there to throw popcorn at kissing couples and while you’re screaming, while you’re holding the picture to your heart as if it can mend what has happened inside, someone slides an injection in your arm and everything is finally, blessedly silent.

  It takes you a week to find my letter. It takes that long because you are heavily sedated. You lose ten kilos and are admitted to the hospital. Every time you open your eyes you scream her name and you pull all the tubes out, hurting yourself and etching large blue and green bruises all over your body.

  You can’t bear to see anyone. Not your parents not Neenee not anyone.

  On the eighth day you decide you want to go home so you allow the IV to pump into your body and you allow your mother to feed you and you allow them to put clothes on your body and take you home.

  When you find the letter, you pick up the phone and call me. You tell me that I’ve killed Nusrat. You describe to me everything that happened. You tell me thirty-seven times that if it hadn’t been for the letter, Nusrat would not have left the house. You read out the note she left you. The one in which she said, I will always love you more than anyone else in the world because you are my best friend. You tell me that she always has been your best friend. That she always will be your best friend. You tell me I am dead to you.

  Your voice is clear and does not break. You do not let me speak. You hang up the phone and don’t pick up when I call you back. I called you back seventeen times. From my house, from Ali’s house, from a public telephone, from my school. You never pick up the phone. By the time I come out of the hospital for mad people, you have changed your number. You sent me all my letters, cut up in pieces.

  I
t takes you three months to go see Nusrat’s parents. You’re stunned by how much it hurts to go to that old building, to see the corridor lit by a tube light, to see the drugged baby crawling carefully outside his house. His mother averts her eyes from you and pretends she does not recognise you.

  It hurts even more to see her parents. Her eyes, older and full of tears. Her chin, so sharp like an old beloved question mark. Her hands, sure and finely veined. Her house is full of her certificates all of which have been framed and jostle for space. You finger the pictures of her, from when she was a baby at a studio with thick black kajal in her eyes, her fearless smile and bright green dress she would have made fun of when she was older. You try to suppress the feeling that if you just concentrate hard enough, your fingers will touch her and she will touch you back.

  Her parents give you her tahveez that she had worn since she was a baby. They tell you that you were her best friend and that she loved you and that you made her happy. You want to break down and cry, on the older, rounder Nusrat shoulder and be comforted. You want to tell them what had happened and you want them to tell you that she knew you loved her. That she knew she was your best friend. But you never ask. Instead you put the tahveez around your neck and promise the old couple that you will not forget them, that you will visit them.

  It takes you a year before you can go down to the sea again. On her birthday (she would have been eighteen and you had bought little gold earrings, the same pair for her and for you) you go down to the sea, the tahveez hot against the hollow of your throat.

  At the sea, everything is the same. The same couples, the same children, the same dogs, the same smell of shit. It has taken you a long time to stop looking for her over your shoulder, feeling her hand on your hair, smelling her breath on your face, opening up her notebook to see what she has written. But here by the sea it comes back, the desire to have her next to you and it almost kills you, the intensity of knowing that she will never be there when you turn around.