‘Was it an environmental protest?’
‘So many protests, for everything. For better wages, for better working conditions. You should go to the court, you can look at the records. They were fighting a case, the slum dwellers.’
‘Was there a child who died that year? A little girl who was holding a clown doll…’
‘I have heard that story, yes. There were some rumours also about the way she died…but you can’t believe rumours.’ I stopped breathing. The muscles in my body seemed to slacken all the way through.
‘What were the rumours?’
‘They said her employers hung her on a tree.’ I wondered if I would just liquefy and turn into a puddle in Sister Priscilla’s presence. Her employers? Baba and Ma? But it wasn’t them, I knew it wasn’t them. Hadn’t those hooded men come in from outside? But how could I be sure? After all, the faces were masked. But what was I even thinking? They were my parents, they couldn’t be murderers.
‘Why did they do that? Kill a child?’
‘I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t here then. Maybe you should go check in the court, maybe a case was filed.’
Sister Priscilla watched me with her judgemental nun’s face, as if she were affixing a cross to that gutless six-year-old in the garden.
THIRTY-SIX
THE DHOOLVANSH DISTRICT COURT, the rickshaw man said, was on the other side of the swampy river. The Eastern side held little else, besides the slum homes and the school.
As we rode towards the Court through another zigzag of pavement markets, the terrain around me swirled in dizzying circles. To steady myself, I focused on the driver’s knuckly spine. He wore the same embroidered shirt he had worn yesterday, but the scarf was new, bold blue and yellow checks today. Despite the dusty heat, despite the beads of perspiration that trickled down his bony back, he hadn’t taken it off. As I watched his back, Sister Priscilla’s statement continued to echo inside my ears. They said her employers had done it to her? Was that why Baba and Ma had left the place in such a hurry? To escape those aspersions? My thoughts continued to swirl, as the rickshaw pedaled through the smoldering town.
The Dhoolvansh District Court was a red-stone palatial structure, endowed with domes and thin metallic spires. Two police constables guarded the iron gate, but fortunately the rickshaw-wallah seemed to wield some local clout, because he had shortly waved me in while he rolled the rickshaw towards a parking spot. Around me, dozens of lawyers, all garbed in white pants and black coats with black ties, chattered in incomprehensible Bhojpuri. Inside the court building, on long benches outside the courtroom, lawyers rifled through papers or confabulated with fellow lawyers and clients. Two heavy green doors that barricaded the courtroom were guarded by two more constables. When I asked a lawyer where I could find the court records, he directed me upstairs, along broad concrete steps splattered with paan stains and other mysterious spills of yellow and brown. Upstairs, another green door led to a large room, in which many noisy ceiling fans whirred above clattering keyboards and chattering clerks.
All the men and women in the room typed notes into anachronistic desktop machines, reminiscent of the terminals that were used in the 1980s. I approached the first clerk who led me eventually to an inside room through another green door. In that room, an old man with grey curly tufts sprouting above his ears, was painting his small fingernail red.
I posed as an academic conducting research on environmental protests. ‘I’m interested in two events: a child was killed in a garden, and there were protests against a company…’ I hoped he wouldn’t pick up the tremor in my voice. But, I could have been speaking in Latin, because nothing in his visage shifted to indicate that he had absorbed anything of my painstakingly constructed plea. I repeated myself. Finally, still painting his nail, he asked for a permit slip from the State Government.
I resorted to a tactic that many Indians have been inured into employing since early childhood. I fished out a wad of 100 rupee notes and asked if the records could be made available without the permit. His eyes flickered, but it was a movement so slight, an untrained eye would have missed his acquiescence. With another swift movement, he tucked the wad into a drawer and led me to another room that had ‘Records’ etched on a brass plate nailed to the door. Inside the room, piled from floor to ceiling, lay heaps of frayed files, all wrapped in thin brown paper. Some were tied with jute strings, some held together by rusted steel clips. But the disorder was so stark and appalling, it was impossible to conceive that these were the records of any serious institution.
‘Isn’t everything computerised?’ I asked.
‘Only from 1990,’ he said. ‘Every year, we add older records.’
I was already sneezing inside the musty room. ‘What would it take to find them?’ I asked. ‘The two cases…the protests against the company, the child’s death in the garden.’
‘There was only one case, that child’s death stopped everything. Even the protests…’
‘Why?’ My voice was barely audible as I tried to wrap my thoughts around his words. Mira’s hanging had stopped the protests? Was it a warning to the protestors?
‘I don’t know everything, only hearsay -- I will get you the records, you can read yourself…’
‘How soon can I get them?’
‘It will take at least three months,’ he said.
‘Three months? That’s too long for me. Can you find it in three days?’
He looked at me with goggly eyes and snorted, as if I were asking him to shatter the laws of physics.
‘Three days? I will call you in three weeks,’ he said.
Three weeks? I couldn’t stay at Dhoolvansh for that long a period. Not with Rhea at Fantasia. As much as I had wanted to accomplish everything in a single visit and flee, I would be compelled to return to this place. I asked him to call me as soon as he found anything, and promised to compensate him for his efforts.
When I mentioned compensation again, he extracted a slim ball pen that had been held atop his ear, and scrawled a number on his palm: 50,000.
Fifty thousand, with Manas’ business showing no promise, seemed like an impossibly bloated demand. But what choice did I have?
On the way to the bus station, as we trundled through another market street, my attention was drawn by another sight. Inside one of the ‘Fancy Stores’, above a shelf crammed with cheap cosmetics and fake jewellery, rested a heap of clown dolls, all mocking me with their painted grins. Those dolls again? And in such abundance? I asked Govind to halt the rickshaw and stepped over basketloads of green and red chillies to question the shopkeeper. But the man merely shrugged his shoulders when asked where he procured his stuffed jokers. ‘Old stock,’ he said. A few feet ahead, another shop displayed them atop a wooden cupboard. In a third, they were strung behind flapping chips packets and paan masala pouches. Strange that these dolls were unavailable inside sprawling Bangalore malls but so commonplace in this remote town.
A fourth shopkeeper, who also stocked the grinning leftovers shouted at an assistant inside: ‘Madam asking, where we got Kushi dolls?’ Kushi dolls? Even with my faltering Hindi, I should have made the link earlier. After all, Kushi meant happiness. That grinning clown face was the Kushi logo. Those wretched dolls must have been manufactured by the company to promote their brand.
THIRTY-SEVEN
MY LIFE AT FANTASIA, after my brief whirl inside the country’s underbelly, felt absurd. I could no longer relate to drab exchanges with friends, with lives that seemed to loiter and slacken behind our heightened walls. The vicissitudes of the surrounding city seeped into our days only through newspaper accounts or workplace conversations. Our palm-lined driveway with its incandescent street lights felt like a realm where historical forces no longer reared their ugly heads, where the clocks had stilled themselves into a soporific state. My thoughts started gnawing at my head like ants, their feet going pitter-patter over my brain as I waited restlessly for the clerk to call me.
Manas was occupied by some new m
arket shift, fortunately, and hardly attended to the feeble account of my trip. I was loath to share my findings with him yet. Loath to voice the dread and horror stirred up by my recent encounters. I was afraid even of falling asleep, of brushing against my child-self. Mira had spoken about monsters who lived across the river. Were those monsters the ones who killed her? Or were the masked men stooges of the company?
A couple of nights after I had returned, and Rhea had been tucked into bed, Manas and I were lounging in the family room upstairs on our lazy-boy recliners, me with a scribble pad, him with his iPhone. As he fiddled on it, I was immersed in memories of my trip. When would the court clerk call me? What else would he uncover?
‘The Federal Government has taken a decision to ban all toys from Dongguan, China, because of new fears about lead contamination,’ the red-suited TV anchor was saying.
Manas was about to change the channel when the psychologist woman came on. She grabbed my attention because she looked Indian, but she must have been Hispanic, because she had a Spanish accent.
‘What does lead poisoning do to children? Why should we be so careful about the toys we give them?’ the anchor said, a look of furrowed concern on her face.
‘Lead is a terrible toxin, it can affect the kidneys, the nervous system, the brain. It can alter behaviour, cause issues like attention deficit, juvenile delinquency, and in severe cases, intellectual disabilities. It’s one of the most dangerous substances our children can be exposed to. Earlier we used to have many cases of toxic lead paint in homes, but that’s not an issue anymore in most American homes. But we have to be careful with Chinese toys. We should ensure that our children are protected from this toxin at all costs.’
At the bottom of the screen, they had her name scrolling, some Dr. Gonzalez. I was wondering about the resemblance between Hispanic people and Indians, when suddenly a thousand lights switched on in my brain and I was blinded by an engulfing whiteness. My fists curled as an image slid into my vision: that book in Baba’s drawer. Hg, Cd, As, Cr, Ti, Pb were all heavy metals.
Manas grabbed the remote from my hand. ‘One minute, I want to check the score.’
‘Manas,’ I screamed, not even sure if my voice belonged to me anymore. ‘Did you hear what that woman said? It’s that! It’s always be..buh..been with us. It’s on our walls.’
‘What?’ said Manas, switching to ESPN or one of those other cricket channels.
‘MANAS, GIVE ME THE REMOTE,’ I yelled, and there must have been something savage in my voice, because he dropped the remote at once.
I switched back to the news channel, and the psychologist had disappeared but the news anchor was talking again about the poor quality of Chinese toys.
I felt like my head and body were throbbing with a new sensation, and if Manas hadn’t risen to clutch my trembling arms and lower me on the recliner, I might have fallen. For a few minutes, I sunk into the soft leather and shut my eyes. But a new creature had entered me, a creature that had been at my side all along but had suddenly decided to seize the reins. I shook him off violently, and he stumbled, reeling backwards. He stood there gaping, while I headed out to the kitchen to fetch our serrated bread knife.
It took me only a few minutes to scrape the paint off our family room wall, from a patch above our TV screen. ‘At least you could have chosen a less public, and a less visible spot,’ Manas said later, but I could hardly attend to such matters then. I sealed the paint flakes in a plastic ziplock and dangled the evidence before my bewildered spouse.
‘My god, Manas, this must be it. I’m so embarrassed that it didn’t strike me earlier.’
‘This must be what?’
‘What’s happening here—it’s been with us all along, it’s been on our walls.’
‘What are you talking about, Vedika?’ said Manas, his fingers edging closer to his iPhone where a new, unopened message blinked.
‘Manas, this place is poisoned. With lead.’
Manas had picked up the TV remote and switched to ESPN, while distractedly scrolling through his iPhone.
‘Our children, you, our Fantasia residents have been poisoned with L-E-A-D, lead, Manas.’ I whisked the iPhone from his palm and flung it on our centre table, where it knocked against a coffee mug. He looked up, resigned and fatigued.
‘But how?’
‘Manas, listen to me, we need to get our walls tested. You have to help me with this.’
‘Get them tested for what?’
‘Gosh, are you even listening to me? I feel like I’m talking to a brick. We need to get the paint on our walls tested for lead.’
‘But Veds, in such a premium project, they must have used the highest-quality paint ever.’
‘But someone’s poisoned us. Don’t you see? They’ve destroyed our children.’
He tried to feign his usual unconcern, but something had shifted inside him. At last, my husband seemed to have realised that I was on to something. For months he had been thinking that I was going crazy, but I could see recognition in his eyes now.
I didn’t sleep that night. I googled research labs in Bangalore that could test the paint for me and found one in Banashankari. I was determined to head out there the next day.
The lab technician said the results would take two days. Those two days, I kept my suspicions to myself, but I spent inordinate hours googling the effects of lead and I was suddenly sure, regardless of the technician’s findings, that I had stumbled on the truth. Lead, like that psychologist woman had said, could cause many of the conditions I had spotted at Fantasia. Many experts claimed that children were particularly vulnerable, that it affected their central nervous systems and brains, resulting in cognitive impairments, autistic and Asperger’s like features, attention deficits and several other learning and behavioural disorders. Lead could contribute to juvenile delinquency, and crime even.
Two days later, I called the lab. ‘Bad paint,’ the man said, ‘definitely contaminated.’
I should have been dismayed at this - after all this was our home, our two million dollar home! - but I was elated. Delighted because I had been right all along. There had been something going on here, a slow but deadly poisoning behind our fabulous façades. I almost felt like yelling with the jubilation of an adolescent: ‘I always knew it.’
With the test results in hand, I scurried across to Raj’s house. The doorbell was hidden by an overgrown plant that hung from a ceiling planter and in my excited state, I couldn’t spot it at once. I knocked on the door like an impetuous child and an astonished Ahana peered through the living room window.
‘Oh, Auntie, err, come in,’ she said, opening the door.
‘Is your father in?’ I asked.
‘No, he’s out. Please sit, Auntie. Shall I call Mummy?’
‘Um, yes,’ I said, disappointed that Raj wasn’t home at such a critical moment. Hansika didn’t seem like the right person to confide in.
But when she walked in a few minutes later, in her usual disheveled state, and with little Adit drooling on her shoulder, I couldn’t stop myself. With everything bottled inside me for the last few days, months, years, my words streamed out in a rush, uncaring of their effect on the listener. After I’d covered everything from my early suspicions before their child was born to the recent lab report, Hansika’s face was suffused in tears.
‘Oh, Hans, I’m so sorry, I know you’ve been personally affected by this...and I have too… After losing Sajan…’ I didn’t mention Sajan’s fogginess yet, but she knew what I meant.
‘Veds, this sounds bizarre, but I’m so relieved to hear this in a way. You see, Raj has always been implying that my genes are responsible for Adit. He keeps pointing to weird people in my family, though, in fact, there are more eccentrics on his side, but I don’t dare point that out. You know how Raj is...Oh, my god, Veds, I just thought of something else, you know that painting project that I did during my pregnancy, you think that might have worsened it somehow?’
‘Maybe, Hans, it’s all
possible... but we need to test the kids’ blood for lead levels, and we should do that for all our Fantasia kids. I’m going to test Rhea, too.’
‘I’ll go with you right away to test Adit’s levels. Do you know of a place that can do this?’
I did, but when I looked at Hansika’s face then, I had to tell her. Because there was a glimmer there, a glimmer that I had seen on other occasions, in the presence of that guru for instance. ‘Hans,’ I said, in my gentlest voice, ‘you do know in Adit’s case there may not be a cure. Even if the lead levels in his blood are high, the damage might be irreversible.’
‘Veds, we’ve been living with this for years, I’m beyond that now, but I want an explanation if there is one. And maybe this test—Raj still thinks this place is flawless. He’s blinded, he has no clue.’
At Fantasia it was common for women to disparage or berate their spouses, but this was the first time I had heard Hansika criticise Raj. Even as Rhea and I accompanied her to the clinic, my heart was thumping. Something told me that I was crossing into dangerous territory, a risk I was willing to take for myself - but was I also endangering Hansika and Adit?
On the way back from the lab, I asked her to keep the findings to herself till we discussed next steps. The next day, Hansika emailed the lab report. Little Adit’s lead levels were at a whopping 45mg/dl. The report recommended chelation therapy, a cleansing treatment to rid the blood of lead. Rhea’s report arrived a few hours later. Her lead levels were mildly elevated, and I needed to meet with a paediatrician to discuss next steps.
Manas’s face, when he returned from work, was already creased with worry. When he collapsed into the living room couch, I felt remorseful about sharing Rhea’s report with him. But what choice did I have? She was our baby, the only one we had left.
‘We need to move out Manas, get her out of here.’ I thrust the lab report into his hands, obscuring his mobile screen. He stared helplessly at the columns as if the numbers were meaningless. ‘Rhea’s been affected –’
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