I tumbled into an overgrowth of creepers and weeds and brambles, scratching and bruising myself as I hoisted myself over a moist jungle. Landing on a small clearing of wet grass, I stood still, recovering my breath. Around me, the shells of old homes, all painted white, all roofed with brown shingles, all with yards that had been overrun by fallen trees and uncut grasses. Was this the one-time Kushi residential colony? Some poor families’ washing was strung between trees and slung on bushes, and everywhere else the detritus of trespassers: plastic wrappers, bottles, paper plates.
I peered into one of the homes through the wooden slats of a window. Nothing inside, no furniture, no belongings, nothing but an old fridge caked over in dust. That and a raggedy carpet, worn down by rats into grubby filaments. The houses were all numbered, and I could tell by their design and size and Europeanised layouts, that the employees had been rewarded well. Even by contemporary standards, these homes were grander than most Indian homes. Why wasn’t the land claimed by some new developer? Was this, like other rotting spaces in our country, trapped in never-ending litigation? A little ahead, I sighted the rusted chassis of an Ambassador, a car that used to signify high status during my parents’ younger days. The rounded skeleton seemed to be grinning at me, like some ogre from the past.
The initial homes were numbered 1 to 15, so I plunged ahead, looking for House No. 48. I trampled across the bushes, grazing my skin on the thorny growth, stomping on wet leaves and twigs and shards of glass. All around me, there was silence. Broken now and then by cicada chirps and howling winds, but no human being in sight. The skies were rumbling again and the light dimming.
I shambled through the fallen birches and stumpy oaks, but hadn’t found the 40s yet. The numbering wasn’t as ordered as Fantasia, because somewhere near the 20s, a promising pathway looped into the 60s. Did the disordered numbering stem from Mehta’s numerology hocus-pocus? Because where were the blasted 30s and 40s?
The rain started pitter-pattering and quickly turned into a torrent. I stumbled around in my soggy salwar and kurta, desperate to dodge the relentless downpour. At 65, I spotted a porch with a dusty garden chair, and tumbled towards it. As I sank into it and slowed my breathing down, I almost toppled over when I looked through the dust-encrusted window into the erstwhile living room. Resting on a broken table was that doll, the Kolkata doll that featured in my dreams, the doll that my son held in his arms that evening. The doll held by that anonymous girl who died many years ago. This doll was flaked with dirt but the familiar grin cleaved at my insides with the raw surprise of a new wound. Was I hallucinating again? Was this even possible?
The skies crackled, and lightning sheeted across the ghostly colony, where everything seemed to be sheathed in some unknowable evil. I didn’t dare look into that room again, but I couldn’t leave the porch till the rain subsided. Slivers of grey light were blotted by the sluicing rain, and even the trees and bushes and homes had turned into dark hulking forms.
When the rain petered out and turned to a light drizzle, I bounded out of the porch and restarted my search for the elusive #48. Distracted by the choking fear the toy had evoked in me, I almost didn’t spot the grimy brass plate on the outer wall of a home. A plate that bore the last name ‘Khan’. With palpitating fingers, I scrubbed the dirt encrusted over it to reveal the whole name: Khan, Abdul. Was that Tushar’s father? A vein on my head was throbbing with the sense that I had uncovered something crucial, though I was too wet to think clearly. My parents had spent a fragment of their lives at Dhoolvansh, and so had other parents from Fantasia. In particular, had all the selectors’ parents dwelt here in the past?
I examined other brass plates, scraping off the hardened dirt with bloodied fingers. I spotted a Kapur, an Ahuja, a Raman, all unfamiliar names. I arrived at the 70s, but still no 30s and 40s in sight. Had I missed a detour somewhere?
A few meters away, the painted house numbers were worn off. Without the house numbers to guide me, I lost all sense of direction. Every dry bush looked like every other dry bush. A thin cat darted out from between clumps of trees, a streak of fur with a feral glare. Brushing against my legs, it wailed loudly, with the unnerving cry of a human baby. On some other day, I might have screamed. But my voice had congealed inside me. I followed the cat down a narrow path, my feet squishing wet leaves into brown sludge. The path twisted into another serpentine trail, leading to more shell homes, all rotting and abandoned and corpse-like. I picked at more dirt-encrusted brass plates to uncover other unknown names, Rajan, Sharma, Aggarwal, but no 48 yet. At last, I spied a No. 37 and then a No. 38. No. 39 was tucked away to the side and a small fork in the dirt led to 40. The numbers on 41 to 46, had faded out, but No. 47 was still stark, its black paint unrubbed. The neighbouring wall held no number. The house just beyond was No. 50. This colony, too, was built without a 48? And my rough survey seemed to indicate it had 80 homes. Or only 79, just like Fantasia.
I peered into No. 49. A rust-coloured bird shrieked from the top of its sepia-tinted wall. Another garden like all the other gardens, with parched hibiscus bushes and sapped mango trees. On the ground, on the one-time lawn, sodden fruit fallen among sodden leaves.
Then I looked again at the mango tree. The colony was filled with mango trees and hibiscus bushes, but this tree wasn’t any tree. My eyes rested on its trunk, studying the whorls on its surface like the crease pattern for a new sculpture. My sight shifted to its main sagging branch, its bark turned silvery with some insect’s deposit. The branch sported a few leaves, some dried and withered, some doggedly green. I could sense a tingling sensation in my spine, the feeling that alerted me that I was in the presence of that nightly Evil. That grin. That swinging doll. That tree.
Something shifted in the late evening light, the brightness momentarily swelling, a silvery sun emerging behind parted clouds. I crouched behind a withered hibiscus bush. And suddenly the stillness in front of me dissolved into something else entirely, into a scene that flashed before my eyes with such blinding clarity, I felt like I had shed my adult body and merged with a part of my being that had always stayed crouched behind that particular bush. I would have howled if my vocal cords had not been tangled into dysfunction by a smothering fear.
Because as I watched, three men, all wearing black hoods, had entered the backyard where Mira, the fat boy and I were playing hide-and-seek. The boy and I were crouched behind bushes, so they didn’t spot us. Mira was the seeker, she roamed across the garden, calling out, ‘I can see you, I can see you,’ her tiny feet skipping over twiggy pathways. It was dusk, the sky turning a crepuscular orange, the clouds slowly losing their egg-shell whiteness. Everything else was still, no gusts of wind, no bird calls, no insect cries. Everything else but Mira, crying out with her pretend six-year-old bluster: ‘I know where you are, I can see you.’
With a panther’s nimbleness, one masked face seized her and slung her over his shoulder, while another tied her hands behind her. She was too surprised to start screaming yet. Perhaps, she thought we were still playing, perhaps we had invited new ‘Bhaiyyas’ to join the game. There had been times in the past when Bhaiyyas from the colony—security guards, cleaners—had briefly joined our hide-and-seek games. She did not protest when they bound her eyes with a black cloth. The third masked man slung a rope over the bent branch, our favourite branch, the branch we rode to play Sailors and Pirates. She had started kicking, making small muffled sounds. Perhaps fear had started creeping into her, but she still didn’t know what was coming. Neither did we. Who were these playful men, lifting her up with such litheness, towards a sun that still shone with a brutal brightness? Who were these men, who tossed her around as they might have tossed a ball, passing her from hand to hand, their deft movements contoured against an amber light? The men still merciful towards the bewildered child as they gently tugged her head through the rope’s loop, the strands of that twisty cord barely grazing her ears. Mira had now started saying, in a trembly voice, still puzzled: ‘Didi, are you there?’ For a
few seconds, the rope, and the tree and Mira froze in a gelatinous silence.
Then the garden tilted. Everything moved. Everything was crackling, tumbling, with Mira’s scream. A liquid sound, as if our planet had been sliced open and its juice was being squelched out. It poured into everything around us, into the pulpy mango fruit, into the saggy Sailors and Pirates branch, into the trunk, into the beetroot and spinach patch, into the hibiscus bushes, into my ears, drowning out all other thoughts, and all other awareness of what we had just witnessed.
Even now, thirty years after that evening, the sound ricocheted off the broken wall, the withered hedges, the shattered windows, the sound swelling into a throbbing, giddying presence, urging me to escape from that dappled nook behind the bush, from the whimpering six-year-old who had fallen there, too frightened to rescue her friend. On the ground below Mira lay the doll, its grin slicing into the shadow of her swinging form. The sound was still with me, wafting around my body, coiling itself around my dreams as that cord had wrapped around Mira.
And somewhere in my unconscious, aided perhaps by my dissembling parents, the doll had taken Mira’s place. It was the only way out. The only way I could have survived.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE NEXT DAY WAS like an antidote to the previous one: intensely hot and dry. As we headed out to the Dhoolvansh Missionary School, I had been looking forward to washing up in the river’s clear, blue waters as the motel’s tap was unyielding when I tried to fill a bucket. But when we reached the bridge, and rode over a sludgy swamp, dotted with clumps of garbage and blue-green algae, I hadn’t realised we were crossing the Kasuri till the rickshaw man pointed it out. It was hard to imagine that this foul-smelling stillness, with its plastic debris and iridescent oil spills, had once imbued the land with enviable fertility.
Still stunned, my thoughts eddied around Mira, around fragments from the past that continued to flash inside my head even after exiting the colony. Other memories came into view. Images that my parents had artfully suppressed, but never quite erased. Of Mira, me, and the fat boy, huddled behind clumpy bushes, muddying our palms with the red soil that carpeted our garden. I was the group leader, the bully. Mira’s mother, Kanthabhai, worked as a maid at our place. We were always together, after school, on holidays, during the sticky summers that dotted our faces with glistening beads. We scooted between trees, waded into the river’s shallows, skimmed pebbles on the garden pond.
The boy was nameless and shadowy, but always hanging about. He was dimpled and fat, and wore tiny shorts that gripped his thighs like the tight sleeves of a sari blouse. Though I was the ‘boss-girl’, Mira was the sprightly one, crackling with ideas and bristling with stories. She spooked us with stories about the ‘monsters’ on the other side of the river. Monsters who could not walk or think or talk. A cowherd who could not smell his cow’s piss or dung. Or a farmer who could not plough his fields, a teacher who could not count. Or infants born so deformed, the monsters had possessed them inside the womb. I was too small then, but I could see it now: those monsters (who must have been Mira’s neighbours, the inhabitants of the slum-sea that we were riding through) had been beset by strange issues, just like our kids at Fantasia.
My thoughts circled back to that evening, when the Evil crept in. Who were those hooded men who had stolen into our garden, and lynched Mira on that tree? Why did they pick her and not me, or the fat boy? Was it because of something that Kantabhai had done? Or did Mira’s murder stem from something much larger?
Just beyond the concrete bridge we rode by an infinite expanse of squatter tenements. A sea of slum homes. There were slums in Bangalore too, but the morass of desolation that seemed to reside on this side of the sludge exceeded anything I had seen in our city. At this time, only a few people roamed the narrow spaces that separated the tightly packed make-shift homes, modeled inventively from the country’s refuse: tin sheets, aluminium boards, broken bricks, coconut thatch, rope, packaging tape, bottle fragments. A slum like any other slum in the country, except that on this sodden side of the river, every nook and tiny cranny was blanketed by grey ash, imbuing the bleak landscape with the poetic spareness of a black-and-white photograph. A TV screen playing a raunchy Bollywood song stood out like a patch of incongruous multicolour.
The rickshaw churned the dry land, whipping up dust clouds that seeped into my hair and eyes. The sky was grim and austere, the clouds as desolate as the earth they hovered over. My mind slithered into a crevice that I was reluctant to revisit. When Mira had said, ‘Didi, are you there?’ I could have responded, yelled out, screamed for help. A few still moments only, but filled with an infinite stretch of possibilities. Surely, Kanthabhai had been inside the house, and other adults within hearing range? Why did I just cower behind the bush, my eyes agog but my lips sealed shut? Was Sajan’s death a punishment for my cowardly silence?
Past the slum, the rickshaw turned into a smaller street, strewn with the same rubbish and rubble that had marked our earlier path. The street contained a small market, where soot-covered vendors sold vegetables and grubby fish. A little ahead, I spotted the familiar archway, the one that had been featured in Simi and Jacob’s brochure. The few letters that hadn’t been blotted by the sticky black dust, indicated that we had reached the right place: Dh..l..n..h M.s.io..ry Sc…l. Inside, the pathways had been carefully tidied around daubs of colour—petunias blossoming in little pots, chrysanthemums circling a bed of tiny ferns.
The rickshaw man dropped me off in front of a tiny office building, from which a bespectacled receptionist stared at me as if I had parachuted into the place from another planet. The school, I realised, must hardly receive visitors. ‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘Can I meet with the Principal?’
‘For what?’
‘I need some information. I’m coming from Bangalore.’ I was hoping the distance traveled would impress her with the seriousness of my mission.
‘I will check,’ she said, dialing a number from the old-fashioned rotary phone on her desk. A few minutes later, with a derisory look on her face, she rose from her seated position and escorted me across a cobbled pathway. Along the way, we passed other concrete buildings, that had once been whitewashed, but were now tinted by the black dust that covered everything else. On the way, I peered into raucous classrooms, filled with soot-blackened children, who seemed delighted by our distracting presence.
We reached a squat yellow building with a cross on top. A convent that housed the nuns? We stepped into a waiting room with cushioned cane chairs and a short cane table. In a short while, an Indian nun dressed in a white habit shuffled into sight with a quizzical look on her face. ‘Yes?’ she asked. ‘I’m Sister Priscilla, the Principal.’
‘Yes, Sister,’ I said. ‘I just wanted some information about ex-students.’ I then launched into a story about gathering tidbits from my parents’ pasts to surprise my father with a slideshow for his 80th birthday. My voice quivered with a surprising nervousness. Suddenly, in Sister Priscilla’s presence, I was reduced again into the skittish student I had once been inside my Kolkata convent school. Our nuns had dressed exactly like this.
‘1979 is a long time ago. I was not even here. Mr. Wilson was the Principal.’ Sister Priscilla had a narrow face, thick whiskers dotting her upper-lip, and a Malayali accent. ‘There’s a picture of him and his Mrs., right here.’
On the wall above, garlanded in sandalwood, and anointed with kumkum was the picture of a broad-faced American man, with a thick neck and prominent double chin. Near his shoulder, his curly-haired wife simpered into the camera. Gazing into her creased eyes, I felt disoriented. I clutched at the arm rest and almost toppled over the cushioned cane seat. There was a lightness in my chest, as if the air had been sucked out. It was a black and white picture, but even bereft of colour, the resemblance was striking. The woman was undoubtedly Joanne’s mother and Mr. Wilson, the school’s erstwhile principal, her father.
‘Where is he now? Mr. Wilson?’
‘He went back.’ She laughed as if the thought were somehow funny. ‘Home.’
‘Where’s home?’
‘Minnesota, America. His wife also, she was a teacher here. They were the founders of the school.’ Had it been Mr. Wilson who was subsequently killed in a highway accident? In Joel’s presence? Was that an accident, or like Sidhappa’s death, another convenient mishap? Fantasia’s gruesome links with this place were deeper than anything I had conceived of earlier.
‘But would you have any records…’
‘No, I’m so sorry. You’re asking for very old information. It’s not possible for us to fish out all those things.’ Nothing flitted across her face. She had the quality of concealment my school nuns had possessed. It was difficult for me to read her thoughts.
‘I’m also a friend of Jacob Mathew, you know, I think…’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know—’
‘Shyam Mehta is also a friend.’
‘I’m sorry? I don’t know…’
‘I know Kusro,’ I said, trying to steady my voice.
As soon as I mentioned Kusro’s name, the expression on Sister’s Priscilla altered visibly. At last I felt like something had cracked. Her impatience vanished, and a welcoming glow radiated from her brow. ‘Kusro? Why didn’t you tell me that he sent you. He’s one of our main funders.’
‘Yes, he’s a very good friend,’ I said, lowering myself into a cushioned seat.
‘Will you have some tea?’ Sister Priscilla asked, ringing a small bell to summon an ayah. A few minutes later, as I sipped warm, cardamom tea and bit into unbelievably delicious sponge cake, I dwelt again on the protests in 1979.
‘It was always a fight with the company. The workers were getting poisoned. You have seen this place, it’s so polluted. Even I have developed severe asthma after coming here,’ Sister said.
No Trespassing Page 23