No Trespassing

by Brinda S Narayan

  Baba wasn’t her only acolyte. Sajan, when he was alive, had immediately taken to her. So had Rhea. I couldn’t put a finger on it exactly, but there was something about her, maybe the vivacious laugh, that drew people in.

  They hadn’t flown down after Sajan’s accident because Baba was unwell. But I was grateful for the manner in which my daughter had been cared for when Manas and I had been paralyzed in shocked grief. But now that they were visiting our complex for the first time, I was nervous.

  For the past few months, Asha had also been calling with a message that I could not stomach: Baba had been diagnosed with dementia and his memory was declining. Slowly. Instead of flying out to Kolkata at once, I had shoved the news into a void inside my brain. After our recent jolts, I didn’t feel like I could withstand another lightning strike.

  My parents, when they arrived on a Saturday afternoon at Fantasia, seemed to consciously avert any mention of the tragedy. Despite the wait at the airport and car journey, Asha stood inside our dining room as stately and trim as ever in her mustard-coloured organza sari. Baba, whose pants were always hitched up too high, whose shirt was often only partially tucked in, seemed relatively bedraggled. Manas had picked them up from the airport and driven them around the complex on a guided tour. Baba, more reticent even than my quiet husband, withheld his observations. But Asha, watching Manas wheel her suitcases into the guest room, was gushing with such compliments, I was afraid she might extend her stay: ‘Such a beautiful place, Manas. Really! Absolutely splendid. A forest within city limits—what a fantastic idea! Did you see that pool, Debashis? Looks better than our Tolly pool.’

  Hovering near the dining table, where I was sure the spread wasn’t cooked to Asha’s exacting standards, I could have agreed or stayed silent. Like a peevish teenager, I was goaded into provoking her. ‘Yes, but a terrible place for kids...’

  ‘Vedika, you can’t blame the place for that. That was an accident.’ Her voice seemed angry, riled that I wasn’t grateful for the lifestyle bestowed on me. But in their presence, my mother’s combative voice crackled between my ears and seemed to emerge from me in a derisory rumble of words.

  This became, annoyingly enough, the theme of their stay. Asha would say something positive about Fantasia, and I would counter with something negative. Baba, his cabbage nose flaring slightly, merely stared into the paper, or stirred his tea.

  ‘This morning,’ Asha would say, ‘I walked through the golf course. How beautiful those greens are. And the fresh air so invigorating.’

  ‘It’s a waste of space if you don’t play golf. And that walk is dangerous, because at any time, those balls can hit you.’ Truth was, it was my favourite walk. I loved hearing the golfers putting in the distance, their loud whacks and shouts puncturing the silence that hung over those vast, rolling grasses and lily-fringed ponds.

  ‘Have you walked through the forest, Vedika? You should try that every morning.’

  ‘Filled with snakes and leeches.’

  Rhea’s feelings about their visit were less complex than mine. She loved having them around. She played extensively with Baba—riding across his ‘horsie’ back in the living room, inviting him into her secret hideouts—and trotted around the complex with Asha, pointing out her favourite swings and slides and muddy nooks.

  Asha also became a favourite with my friends, who bumped into her at the gym or at the golf course. ‘Your stepmom’s awesome, so much energy and so young at heart,’ Manjushri said.

  One evening, at dinner, Asha said: ‘Your gardens at Fantasia are simply splendid. Debashis, you must have had lovely gardens at Dhoolvansh, isn’t it?’

  My father’s eyes had glazed over, like he wasn’t listening. There were many moments like this now, blank moments that brought back memories of Sajan’s fogginess.

  ‘What’s Dhoolvansh? My parents always lived in Kolkata,’ I said.

  ‘We used to live in Sindhri, those colonies always had beautiful gardens. I’m sure Dhoolvansh…’ Asha looked at Baba intently and my father, who was picking at his rice and dal in a desultory manner, startled into a sudden lucidity. ‘Asha, don’t want you talking about fucking Dhoolvansh.’ Baba’s tone was sharp and cutting, his words uncharacteristic. I had never seen Baba angry earlier, never heard him reprimand any wife till then. Even Manas looked surprised. Baba, who always had the mildest disposition, rose from his unfinished dinner and walked into the guest bedroom. He slammed the door shut.

  ‘What was that about?’ I asked.

  But Asha, all teary-eyed, had her lips clamped together.

  Later, when we were doing dishes, I tried to comfort Asha. ‘I’ve never seen him like this, do you think it’s his dementia?’

  ‘He’s often like this now, whenever I bring up the past, he loses his temper. I can’t understand why.’

  My heart sank as I soaped the steel tumblers. Was it the disease or was it Sajan’s death that had engendered the change? Was anything separable anymore? ‘What were you saying about Dhoolvansh?’

  ‘Your parents used to live there, isn’t it? I was just asking him about their gardens. In Sindhri, where my father worked, we had so much space and such splendid gardens…’

  The steel tumblers clattered inside the sink’s bowl. My feet stiffened on the kitchen’s damp tiles and the pulse ticking on my wrists accelerated. Asha’s mouth seemed to hang open like the entry to a dark cave, from which words streamed out like twists of coloured paper. The throb in my wrists travelled towards my spine, while my thoughts tunnelled into my dreams: Three children are playing in a garden…

  ‘How do you know they lived there?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Dhoolvansh.’

  ‘Your mother must have mentioned it to me. I’ve always known, why is it such a big deal?’

  ‘Did I live there, too?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know that, Vedika. I don’t know the details, but I don’t see why your father… and even you now, why are you making such a big deal of this?’

  The next day, when I badgered Baba, he said Ma and he had lived there briefly before my birth.

  ‘Why were you so angry with Asha for mentioning it?’

  ‘My job didn’t go well there. I didn’t want to be reminded—’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t want to think about it, Vedika. Besides, it has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘But I always had those dreams about a garden… and then something terrible…’ I didn’t tell Baba that the nightmares had returned. I was somewhat mortified at the panic they continued to evoke. I felt like I was repudiating my scientifically-disposed parents by dwelling on the irrational sensations they stirred up.

  ‘You never lived there. Dreams don’t signify anything, you know that.’

  He was right. But Sajan’s death had imbued my days with a hallucinatory quality. Like something that had been sealed tight was cracked open, creating a fissure through which strange images tumbled in. Everything spoke to me, even falling leaves and flapping pigeons, calling out with an ominous hum that crescendoed at night into a child’s shrill cries.

  Baba’s disclosure also called up another image: that ID card inscribed with ‘VANSH’ in Sajan’s drawer. Was it from Dhoolvansh? Had it belonged to Baba? Had Sajan found it inside our Kolkata home, and stowed it away with his things?

  I showed it to Baba, and his fingers trembled as he held it up to view. Then he shrugged. He said he couldn’t remember it, but it might have been his.

  Till their departure, I persisted in questioning Baba. Each time, he stonewalled my attempts with curt responses. Once, he responded as violently as he had that day. ‘Vedika, we will NOT FUCKING talk about this.’ And he slipped more frequently into vacant states that forbade further probing.

  TWENTY-TWO

  FROM THE EVIDENCE I had gathered so far, I pieced together the following account of that fateful, now long ago evening. Six kids had abandoned the birthday games to play the more dangerous Batman game inside the
generator room. Joel, Suhel, Akshay, Gaurav, Bijoy and Sajan. Before our little fiends had entered the soundproof, concrete structure, the security guard had already deserted his post. At some point, Sajan had been locked into the diesel generator’s smoking cavern. According to the other five, speechless Bijoy was the last kid to leave the room. Was the only witness to my son’s preposterous end. But there wasn’t any fire, as originally reported. The smoke was generated by toggling the black switch outside, by repeatedly restarting the unit. Moreover, a pigeon’s nest had sealed my son’s fate.

  But even this uncanny account left many questions unanswered. Why were the last two kids, Sajan and Bijoy, beset by brain conditions? Why had the other kids and then their parents spun different accounts of that evening? Had those kids, in a cunning bid to exploit Bijoy’s speech impediment, foisted the blame on him? And what was saucer-eyed Bijoy, trying to communicate with his agonising ‘juh, juh, juh’?

  I needed more insight into the kids’ characters. I had gleaned little from talking to them. With scornful grins and sullen responses, they seemed intent on averting me. They defended each other while accusing the only child who couldn’t defend himself.

  As much as I respected my neighbours’ privacy, I needed to peer into the kids’ rooms. I felt like I might spot something there, even if I didn’t know what I was seeking. But I couldn’t enter those homes without arousing the community’s suspicions. My movements would be caught by the all-pervasive cameras and reported to the committee by our zealous security. Besides, there was my law-abiding husband to think of. Whose rebukes, if my transgressions came to light, would be as vociferous as the committee’s.

  There was another, less obtrusive way of gaining access. Through the maids’ network. After all, I had gathered more information from Fantasia staff than from anyone else. Surely, they could be recruited to gather more evidence?

  When I dangled large monetary rewards, my maid agreed to apply for jobs at our target households. And also recruit a few other trusted maids into aiding our venture. ‘I will only hire from my Havaligi ooru, from my Kamma caste,’ Thimakka said, as if such shared origins would assure me of their integrity. ‘Whoever you can trust,’ I said, dwelling briefly on Gowri’s puzzling disappearance. Was I justified in employing Thimakka’s services? Was I endangering her position in Whitefield merely to secure my family? But I could hardly abandon my pursuit at this stage. I had lost my son, and needed to do everything to protect Rhea.

  Thimakka giggled when I taught her to take pictures with my Samsung Galaxy smartphone. I encouraged her to repeatedly press the camera icon and capture different slices of my room. It took her several attempts to master the timing and guide the screen’s vision towards specific segments. With shaky fingers, she overcame her coyness in opening cupboards to glimpse the contents of various shelves and drawers. My make-up, my jewellery, my lingerie and stoles were captured by her shy camera eye. I couldn’t help feeling somewhat disconcerted about revealing the abundance in those guarded compartments. I no longer cared, as I might have once, about Thimakka stealing my objects. But the chasm between our lives, the scarcity in hers, the excess in mine, was vividly captured in those rectangular shots of stilettos and Cashmere sweaters, taken by that rough, shaking hand.

  She had never, she said, been encouraged to transgress into such spaces. An act that seemed, to her, as forbidden as drawing water from an upper-caste well. Again I hushed the irksome but persistent voice inside: Could I do this to my neighbours? Could I do this to Thimakka? But, for the first time since that evening, a cheerful flush had returned to my face as I guided her less-than-agile fingers to succumb to my bidding.

  What I wanted, I explained, were photographs of the kids’ rooms, of the insides of their cupboards, their drawers, their desks, their beds and toilets. I also wanted verbal descriptions. Sometimes, the human eye could capture details that a camera might miss.

  Entry, by my cabal of spies, into the target households was possible only when the ‘Madams’ in question were on the hunt for replacements or for temporary stand-ins. As soon as Thimakka had obtained a passport into Suhel’s room, I inundated her with questions. I gathered from her somewhat blurry shots and summary descriptions that the boy’s room was cluttered with the usual stuff: Virat Kohli, Dhoni and Deepika Padukone posters, tennis rackets, basketballs, books and electronic gadgets. In his cupboard, heaps of clothes, and inside his drawers, a few beer cans stowed out of sight. Thimakka was particularly excited by the last finding, and even asked me to call Asma with the ‘news’. I balked at her carelessness. ‘Never, ever discuss this with anyone,’ I said. ‘This is top secret.’ Akshay’s and Gaurav’s rooms only reinforced Kalpana’s reputation for flawless housekeeping and parenting. The kids had tons of academic books and posters with lofty quotations by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. How did she raise them like that?

  At first, Joel’s room seemed like another disappointment. His walls were pasted over with ugly posters, of faces slashed with lines, bodies scabbed with wounds. Bicycle chains and handcuffs hung from nails on the toilet door. Inside his cupboard, black jeans and black T-shirts seemed to echo his dark thoughts, but there wasn’t any evidence of his involvement in Sajan’s death. Then in Thimakka’s final shot, I spotted something that jolted my attention. Nestled inside the leathery wrinkles of a black bean bag, lay a pearly pink gun. Sajan had a gun exactly like that, his uncle had gifted it to him. We had laughed at its colour, and the feminine whorls inscribed on its edges. Sajan loved it. ‘Bang, bang, bang’ he screamed, skidding around the house with his new weapon. ‘The kind of gun a female agent might tuck inside her Gucci purse,’ Manas had said. ‘Made in China.’

  A few weeks after the accident, Manas had donated Sajan’s clothes and toys to the village kids. Besides the keepsakes stuffed into that first drawer—the cricket gloves, the ping pong balls, his drawings and photographs—and the third drawer filled with twigs, my son’s room had been emptied when I last visited. How had this gun, this ridiculous plastic toy, wound its way to the village and then back into Fantasia? And that too, into Joel’s room?

  I instructed Thimakka to visit Joel’s room again. To capture any other objects that might justify my uneasiness about the boy’s character. She returned with another arresting shot. Of Sajan’s cycling cap, slung carelessly on Joel’s guitar. A blue cap with ‘Our Hero’ embroidered across its front.

  For many months, Sajan had ridden a bike with training wheels. One day, he dismantled the training wheels on his own. And rode steadily ahead on the pathway around the lake, without toppling over. I called Manas at once, my voice throbbing with pride. ‘He’s done it, Manas, he’s riding the bike without trainer wheels.’ Even as Manas responded with a provocative, ‘He’s my son, what did you expect?’ our boy fell. Squashed his face into the muddy pathway. ‘Sweetie, maybe you should just use the training wheels a little longer?’ I teased him. He had acquired his cycling skills with a surprising obstinacy, and Manas had rewarded him with the ‘Our Hero’ cap, a souvenir he picked up on a trip to Madrid.

  If I had been a bit uncertain about the gun, the cap sealed my doubts. How and why was Joel acquiring Sajan’s giveaways from the village kids? Unfortunately, further entry into Joanne’s home was thwarted by Joanne herself. Since her permanent maid had returned from a short vacation, the temp was dismissed.

  Then one evening, Thimakka called me excitedly. Apparently, Bishnu had hired her to clean Bijoy’s room. ‘Madam, something for you to see.’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked, the air receding from my lungs with an almost audible whoosh. What had Thimakka found? ‘Have you taken photographs?’

  ‘Madam, I will show you tomorrow.’

  ‘Is it something of Sajan’s?’

  The network signal was weak, so Thimakka’s response didn’t come through clearly. But I did catch a few words: ‘Look after’and ‘Rhea’ and ‘house inside the tree’. Did she mean to say, ‘Watch out for Rhea’s safety?’ Why? What had she seen there?
What did she mean by the house inside the tree? Was she referring to the Shangrila tree-house? Half-way down the forest path, a few parents had joined forces to build a tree-house on a wide, banyan tree that marked the centre of the woods. The kids often picnicked there, scampering on its squeaky wooden flooring, hiding under its thick bamboo roof. How was that connected to Bijoy?

  It was already late evening, and Manas wasn’t home yet. But I couldn’t risk another lead vanishing. Not after the last time. Besides Thimaka’s faltering words—‘Rhea, look after’—evoked a queasy feeling. Like a sandbag had spilled its contents into my stomach. So I tugged Rhea along, despite her protests, ‘for a little outing, not very far’.

  When we stepped out - the purple Jacaranda trees lining the lakeside path, the pink-orange sunset leaking through the clouds, the shadows glowing purplish behind the lake - all the scenes I had soaked up in my happier moments acquired a dark menace.

  We hurried out of our palm-lined terrain, beyond our gates, where the cleanliness and order ended - to where the grime and grimness began. Rhea wanted to play on the swing set in the golf course park, but I didn’t have anyone to supervise her. She continued to whine: ‘I don’t want to come, I can be alone.’ Never, Rhea, never. ‘Please Ma, leave me in the park.’ What if the dreaded Joel and Suhel were around? Even if they weren’t, of late, in my indulgent motherly vision, her cheeks had grown more angled, her eyes more bewitching. I worried that the ‘big boys’ might notice her blossoming appeal. I ignored her pleas.