His home, built on top of a used auto-parts store, had a living room cum bedroom and kitchen. I seated myself on a wooden cot that was covered with a vividly coloured curtain. On the left, a shelf contained cutlery and glassware, framed photographs of his six-year-old son in suits of various shades and calendar pictures of Lakshmi, Ganesha and Shirdi Sai Baba.
Dhanraj’s face showed the beginnings of leucoderma, the light pinks mapping out on his ears and forehead. His hair was scanty, but he seemed to have painstakingly dyed his remaining tufts an inky black. His voice had a slight tremor as he spoke: ‘Madam, that day, I would be there, but boss call me.’
My mind kept whirling around possible bosses. Raj, our President? Or one of the other committee members? Or simply, another resident? Or was Dhanraj lying to explain his own absence? Yet, given his tone, and the candid expression on his face, I didn’t think he was. ‘Boss? Which boss?’
‘Some guard say Villa 37, when I go there, that Madam not know anything.’
Villa 37? Why didn’t it strike a bell? Why didn’t I know anyone who lived there? ‘And then, when you got back…?’
‘Gowri already took away the boy.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘She tell me later, Madam.’
‘What did she tell you, exactly?’
‘She tell me, the boy scream. When she came to room, the child was locked into DG1 room.’
‘Locked in? What are you saying Dhanraj? Are you saying my child had been bolted into that cramped metal room?’
‘Yes, Madam, children playing. One child lock him, another child press start button. Too much smoke, so....’
What kind of vicious game had they been playing?
‘Dhanraj, this is worse than what I thought. Do you know who the children were? The one who pressed the button, the one who locked Sajan in?’
‘Madam, I not know names. But that boy with metal teeth is a bad boy.’
Metal teeth? Joel with his braces?
I rose to leave, when the guard suddenly lifted the lid of a steel trunk that had been shoved under the cot. ‘Madam, this for you.’ He fished out a doll, a cloth clown doll stuffed with cotton, with one gloved hand slightly burnt.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘Your son doll, I found it in the room where he died. All these days, I kept with me.’
Sajan’s doll? Sajan didn’t have a clown doll, at least none that I remembered. And I was familiar with all his toys, after all I had always cleared the clutter after his imaginary games. And yet, as the guard dangled its gloved hands, there was a chilling familiarity about it, its round eyes and wide grin provoking the clammy fear of my juvenile nightmares. I could sense my knees going slack, folding over like my paper figurines as a strange fear overtook me.
Ignoring the tremble in my fingers, I extended my hand. The doll wasn’t mine, it wasn’t Sajan’s, but nonetheless I wanted it. Perhaps, it belonged to one of the other kids, but if Sajan had been clutching it in his last moments, now it belonged to me. I held the doll—with its bizarre striped shirt and dotted pants, its collar and ankle frills—to my nose, sniffing it for my son’s odours. Had Sajan really held this? Was Dhanraj telling the truth?
That night, I was consumed by the recurring clown motifs. The grin surfacing in Raj’s home, on Gowri’s door, in Sajan’s hands. Was someone transmitting a message? If so, why did it elude me? Why did it feel so close, like something I ought to remember, yet out of reach?
FOURTEEN
THOUGH VILLA 37 WAS constructed on the fringes of Utopia, it didn’t possess a lake view. Technically, it belonged to Shangrila, the forest cluster adjoining ours. Since we were, by then, mingling closely with people from all clusters, I was surprised that I hadn’t encountered the 37 folks yet.
When I walked by their front yard, I was struck by their oblivion to Fantasia’s finicky standards. Their honeysuckle hedge was overtaken by weeds, their lawn uncut, and their white-laced euphorbia bushes swollen into frost mountains. Creepers on a yellow flowering tree had grown thick, and plastic packets and small cardboard boxes were strewn on the lawn.
At Fantasia, folks cherished their gardens. The project had won an award for ‘The Best Community Gardens’, a recognition that was flaunted amongst city-dweller friends and relatives. Residents scouted nurseries for exotic varieties and unusual colours - ecuadorian roses, oriental lilies, hollandia tulips. Often, they rated each other’s gardens during morning walks. If something was startling or eye-catching, like purple orchids sprouting from a tree trunk, soon a few more trunks or trellises would be speckled with pinks and purples.
So I wondered if something had transpired between the gardener and the Villa 37 folks. Maybe some quarrel about the salary, or maybe he just hadn’t turned up? When I walked up to their front porch, I noticed that their newspapers were piled up, unread. Were they away on vacation? During the school year?
I buzzed the doorbell, and I was greeted by silence. I waited for many minutes and buzzed again, but no one came to the door.
Calls to the clubhouse guard elicited an indifferent response. He said a Mr. and Mrs. Rao lived there with two children, but they were in and out. Sometimes in town, sometimes not. They hardly emerged from their home, so no one knew their whereabouts.
I started walking by that villa often, at different times of the day and night. Once, after dinner, when Manas was travelling, Rhea and I strolled past it in our sweatshirts and pajamas. That was the other comforting aspect about Fantasia: this was our home, this whole complex. We could walk about it as we pleased, in our nightclothes or daywear. It was Rhea who spotted the shaft of light, seeping from behind the flowering tree. She was a sharp child, and she had picked up that I was watching the place with more than abstract interest. ‘Ma, someone’s there,’ she said. And she squeezed through the hedge before I could respond. I followed her in, shouting, ‘Rhea, it’s dark, there’ll be snakes. Come back here.’
But Rhea had already scampered into their garden, as I stumbled behind her, my steps less surefooted inside the littered yard filled with unknown shapes. Their garden lights were turned off, so everything around us acquired a menacing quality. I plunged my hand into my pajama’s pocket to retrieve my mobile, but it wasn’t there. Hell! I must have left it at home. ‘Rhea,’ I said, my voice louder than the last time. Where had my child disappeared? The torch beam or whatever else we had seen behind the tree had been turned off now. I moved slowly across the narrow passage that made up their sideyard. Why had Rhea just run in so impulsively? Just as I turned into their backyard, I heard muffled sniggers. Then spotted a flash of shoe-clad feet leaping over the hedges. Two boyish figures tumbled into the dark. Before they vanished, one of them turned back to look at me. There was a dim light here, hurled by the neighbour’s garden light. Just bright enough for me to notice a glint of metal. The security guard’s words flashed into consciousness again: that boy with metal teeth is a bad boy. Joel? What were he and Suhel—because who else could it be?—doing here at this time? My heart skipped a beat and my throat felt parched. Where was Rhea?
I wheeled around the #37 backyard, feeling both frightened and absurd. As if some higher force were assisting my search, the clouds had by now slid off the full moon, which now cast a faint, silvery hue on the empty yard. On the dried out grass, their pungent-smelling kitchen trash spilled out of a plastic can. A thin wire was strung between two papaya trees. Over the wire, hung what seemed like a poor man’s washing. Had the family left some caretaker behind? Or was one of our workers exploiting their absence? My eyes skipped across the familiar accessories of Fantasia backyards: a stone turtle, a pebbled island, the rounded plastic tops of embedded lights. ‘Rhea,’ I called out again. How could she have melted out of sight when she was with me just a few seconds ago? Could time and space be tilting again into some treacherous otherworld?
I heard her first. A soft whimper. Then her voice. ‘It’s okay, pussy, little pussy.’ She was crouched on their portico, so
ftly stroking something with her hands. My chest flooded with relief, the lightness masked quickly by my sharp-tongued parental self: ‘Rhea? Silly girl! Why did you run?’ And what was that soft, still shape under her fingers? A cat. That cat? The cat the boys had been torturing? ‘Ma, can we take him home?’ Him? Every animal that fell into Rhea’s orbit assumed human characteristics. Often, she seemed to grieve as much for Topsy as she did for Sajan. This had riled me at first. How could she equate a dog with our precious boy? But then again, as Manas pointed out, maybe it was a Freudian thing. A transference of sorts? We were both equally flummoxed and even startled by her strong affinity to all animals. Manas and I were slightly wary when a neighbour’s dog nuzzled against our knees, always afraid that the creature’s temperament could never be sufficiently quelled by a leash. Our fear hadn’t been transmitted to Rhea, who communed more intensely with lizards on her bedroom wall than she did with her kindergarten friends. I hoped, as a parent, I could retain the special qualities she had been born with. Not try to reshape her into some mould that I held in my head.
‘He’s hurt,’ she said. ‘Badly hurt.’ She was crying already, the cat’s pain streaking through her little body. A stain was forming around the cat. The creature was bleeding! Did Rhea really want to take it home? Yet, how could we leave it—him?—untended in this abandoned yard? Wasn’t some cat-mother expecting her cat-child to bound home unhurt?
‘Rhea baby, come with me. Let’s fetch some guards to help us.’
‘Won’t leave him,’ she said, still gently stroking his neck. My daughter was trying to infuse the furry creature with everything she had. A warmth and compassion flowing from her stroking fingers as they might from an expert caregiver.
I gently tugged at her arm. She obstinately refused to budge. ‘He’ll die if I leave him.’ It still jarred me that death was such a pervasive thought in my five-year-old daughter. My eyes, more accustomed now, to the soft moonlight, fell on a row of cactus plants, many with sharp thorns on their fleshy, rounded leaves. Again I shuddered. Had those boys done something again? How else had the cat hurt himself?
I was afraid the boys were still lurking in the vicinity, watching us. Joel was not the kind to fear adult authority and Suhel always seemed emboldened in his presence. At any point, I expected to hear their muffled giggles burst through the air. So—because what other choice did I have—I allowed Rhea to cradle the injured cat in her arms as we trudged back to our villa.
Later, that night, I was less surprised by Rhea’s attachment to the cat than I was by my own resolve. Something in me determined that the creature, whose neck had been punctured by a thorn that was still embedded in its clotted fur, should survive at all costs. With Hansika’s help, we forged a little cushioned seat for him in our car, and Rhea and I sped, with palpitating hearts, all the way to the veterinary hospital. Right through the car ride, Rhea stroked little ‘Thambi’ as he was named later, transfusing her strength and optimism into the animal.
Thambi lived. And brought a new verve into our household. Even if Manas and I had never formally acceded to adopting a pet, we now had one. Of course, I disliked clearing his litter or dusting off his hairs from every conceivable spot—the living room cushions, our bedroom pillows, the curtains—but I was also forming an unbidden attachment. While Rhea spent most of her time with him, darting about the house with gurgles that we hadn’t heard in a long time, Thambi curled up on the foot of my bed in the night. Manas objected to the animal’s presence in our room, but even he detected the slight shift in me, and decided to make peace with his presence.
Though we bought him a collar with a silver bell on it, the scar on his neck stayed like a warning. The danger that swallowed my son still lurked around our complex.
I dropped in at Joel’s villa one evening, Rhea tagging along in her favourite denim jumper. We seated ourselves on cushioned cane chairs on their front porch, with Joanne poised on the edge of the seat, as if she expected the meeting to end soon. She was dressed like always in a shapeless cotton kurta and flared cotton pants. Her garden, edged with pink champa trees, reflected the setting sun’s crimson flush.
‘I’ve always been wanting to ask you, how did you decide to come to India. Surely, it can’t be easy—’
‘Subbu,’ Joanne said, her voice firm, as if she were punctuating my question with an irrevocable period. Subbu? Surely, in this day and age, a woman like Joanne wouldn’t submit to her husband’s whims like some docile village bride?
‘But he could have stayed in the US….’
‘He wanted to live here.’ Was Subbu like Raj, regressive and authoritarian inside the household? Whenever I’d met him, he seemed like a much softer man. I had heard that his Chennai-based mother, on the other hand, was quite the termagant, but surely that should have dissuaded Joanne from living here.
‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘I need to be with Subbu.’ As much as I admired Joanne’s fierce Indianness, I was taken aback by how submissive she seemed, in all respects. ‘What about your parents? Don’t you miss them?’
Perhaps I had trodden on a vulnerable terrain, because something passed over Joanne’s face. Her lips, papered with dry skin in the cold weather, quivered. ‘My father died a few years ago. A road accident -- Joel was with him.’
‘That’s ghastly, Joanne, I’m so sorry to hear that.’ I could only imagine what the child must have faced, being extricated from a mangle of steel on an American highway, watching helplessly as his grandfather lay folded under crushing weights. Even after so many years, the memory of that day seemed to be gliding back, infusing Joanne’s face with a strange pallor.
‘That must have affected him so badly. Do you think he still suffers from some kind of stress?’
‘It was a long time ago.’ Her palms, mottled with freckles, tightly gripped the ends of the chair. Something in her face had shut down, as if to indicate the topic was closed. ‘Would you like some tea?’
‘I’d love some,’ I said, eager to seize any excuse to extend our stay. ‘Can I help you make—’
‘Mamta will get it. Would you like a cookie?’ she said, turning to Rhea. My daughter nodded shyly. Joanne called out to her maid to bring two teas and cookies out. Was that why Joanne stayed here? Having maids constantly waiting on us was perhaps the most seductive feature of living in India, many Fantasia residents said.
‘Are your kids fitting into Le Meilleur?’ I asked. ‘I’m planning to move Rhea there after kindergarten.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of…Joel hates his school.’ Besides Joel-Jaikishan, Joanne had a second son, Michael-Mohan, their Indian names hyphenated like after-thoughts.
‘Really? Why?’
‘Maybe it’s the Indian teachers, or the system here. He’s so distracted, he hardly studies.’
‘But this is an international school, Joanne. It’s a British curriculum.’
‘He hates it. He wasn’t like this earlier. After moving here, he’s lost all interest in school and work.’
‘Are you planning to change his school?’
Joanne sighed. Her strawberry curls were spiraling out in all directions, almost like a hornet’s nest. ‘Subbu won’t listen, he thinks the child will turn around. But I’ve seen children, I’m not naive. This kid, after moving here, it’s like he’s possessed. He’s not like he used to be.’ Possessed? The word seemed to describe the manner in which my little boy had been overtaken by his fogginess. But Sajan had turned quiet and dreamy, while Joel seemed aggressive and malevolent. Was the memory of his grandfather’s death still stirring inside him?
‘I thought you loved India, Joanne.’
‘I still do, but Joel hates it. Subbu wants to stay on here, so I hope the kid just settles down. Maybe it’s just a phase.’ Joanne was looking at me almost with a plea in her eye, as if she expected me to allay her anxieties. I remembered how worried I’d been when Sajan was in that foggy state, but I couldn’t stop the next question.
‘Is it just hi
s studies, Joanne? The other day, I saw him with Suhel, they were hurting this cat.’
‘There are some kids here who are not a good influence, but what can I do? The kid needs friends.’ I didn’t say that it seemed to be Joel influencing Suhel rather than the other way around, because Joanne was being so candid with me. Without an inkling of what I was really pursuing. There was something guileless about her, but I wondered, as well, if her even facade masked deeper currents.
‘Did you ever talk to Joel about that evening, by the generator. You know, when my son...’
‘Joel said that Sajan wasn’t keeping up with the rest of them. The place was all smoky and he hadn’t run out.’ Joanne drew her breath in with an almost audible hiss.
‘Someone told me he’d been locked in?’
‘That’s rubbish, you shouldn’t heed rumours around here.’ Joanne’s forthright tone had suddenly changed, become distinctly frosty. The earlier candour had vanished from her eyes. Her expression, when she lifted her face, was suddenly as inscrutable as her son’s. ‘Besides, there was a guard there, wasn’t it?’
‘The guard had been called away, by some boss...’
‘Vedika, I’m not like other women here, I don’t gossip.’
Just then, Michael stepped out. While he wasn’t as strikingly handsome as his brother, he had the standout features of many biracial children. ‘Mom, can Rhea come in and play with us?’
Us? Was Joel inside? The last thing I wanted was for Rhea to play with Joel and Mike. ‘We have to leave, Joanne. Thanks so much for the tea.’
‘Ma,’ said Rhea, softly. ‘Please. Can I go play with them?’ My still friendless child seemed as perked up as she was on the day Thambi returned from the hospital to stay with us.
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