We that are young
Page 47
In Papa’s safe house there are no books. All Sita has with her is her Tamil-English dictionary, bought in the summer and carried all this way. Between its leaves she has pressed seedlings. When she sits with the dictionary, no one disturbs her. For an hour or two each day she can be lost in its definitions.
Lost. Definitions and Meaning of ilantu – in English –
Adjective
· not caught with the senses or the mind
· unable to function; without help
· no longer in your possession or control; unable to be found or recovered
Examples:
· lost friends
· his lost book
· spiritually or physically doomed or destroyed
Examples:
· a lost generation
· the lost platoon
· not gained or won
Example:
· a lost prize
· having lost your bearings; confused as to time or place or personal identity
Example:
· perplexed by many conflicting situations or statements; filled with bewilderment
Examples:
· bewildered and confused
· a cloudy and confounded philosopher
· incapable of being recovered or regained
Examples:
· lost in thought
Noun
· people who are destined to die soon.
Ilantu. In her daydreams she is dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, roaming the ancient kingdom of Polonnaruwa, sleeping in a tent and rising each morning to find she is sharing her bedroll with bald-headed macaques. Nervous and trembling in the day, at night they creep under her canvas to find warmth against her skin. They blink at her with reptilian eyes from the beginning of the world. They leave her a gift of poop and pee-pee. They have adopted her while she works to keep them safe.
Inhale. Exhale. For the eco-warrior-Indian-daughter, there is no such thing as a Duty Free smoke. She stubs out the cigarette; ash falls on the pages of the dictionary, she wipes it. Burned paper absorbs back into itself. She marks the page with the pressed, dried seed-pod of a Hopea Cordifolia. Endangered, almost extinct. She closes the book. One day she will return.
She wants to go outside. Just at the end of the street the beautiful day is waiting – a hopscotch of warm and chill. Sita cranes her neck – she can almost feel the market bustle, taste freshly baked moons of girda and lavasa. The hot bread smell reminds her of Cambridge on winter mornings, coffee and a Fitzbillies Chelsea bun. Spinning down King’s Parade on her bicycle after nights spent studying or drinking or debating, then climbing Castle Hill to watch the sun rise over the town. It was a small hill, but it was something. Up she would climb, and stand, then run down. The whorl of bread, currants and sugar was her climber’s prize.
She breathes on the glass and writes her name: Sita. She watches a woman in a black chadar go along the street; her small daughter in hijab and smart school kilt and blazer skips next to her. The two are holding hands, talking, maybe about school – What will she learn in class today? The little girl looks up at her mother, she says something and they laugh, then the two turn the corner and disappear.
All her life, Sita’s sisters have told her of times they spent in Srinagar. Radha liked to talk about her first sight of snow. How she had to hold Gargi’s hand because Nanu told her to, when all she wanted to do was run and slide and tumble, to dig like an arctic doggy, right down into the cold. Radha would climb into her bed, show Sita how the little pups made their lairs in winter. Radha loves her bed so much she should marry it – this is how they used to tease her. Gargi’s memories were of playing croquet and baby-golf on the lawns of the Grand Palace above the city, while Papa and Ranjit Uncle worked to make deals. That is the kind of thing Gargi remembers. It would have been 1984.
Papa always told her the city belonged to her, and he would make sure she got it. She let him talk until she could not hear him any more. At college, she read every India book and article and blog, every passionate report and counter-report from the archives of the world’s media, its NGOs. She watched vlogs of activists and of patriots, collected blogs of triumph and of resistance, ordered books of the dead by poets and playwrights, journalists and peers whose words have left her weeping – lines of black and white mourning blurred until they seemed to be waving to her.
In 2010, when military curfew shut Srinagar down, when 100 protesting teenagers were shot by Indian soldiers, Sita was safe in a Cambridge library. She organised student seminars in her faculty, she invited speakers, she wrote to journalists, she excavated, debated and discussed her own mother’s history – had plans to visit her mother’s people, still in camps in Jammu. People, camps, cities – these things existed for her in the space between words and life. She held film screenings and put up posters of every movie made in Srinagar since her parents met. The anti-Muslim films starring Indian army heroes, the gangster flicks of local resistance. The independent men with their movie cameras: screening their lives for a festival world. The disappearing sons and the heartbroken women; even the bittersweet lovers of Kabhi Kabhi. Feeling Gargi’s hand smoothing her hair as she watched that one in the dark. Transfixed by the land behind the actors – lush and green, hiding so much sorrow, so loved. And realised it was not enough. And tried telling herself this was not all in her hands.
Somewhere in this city right now – she has read – an Indian director with a passionate mind is scouting locations, for the first film to be shot here in years. She wonders, if she met him, what story he would tell her. Would he ask, as someone always did in her sparsely attended seminars – in the lectures she organised – why her father, a man so dedicated to his nation that they call him Mr India in the West, was opening a hotel here at all? What would she answer? I don’t know. Maybe this director would want to talk with her, as no one else did, about her mental state, about the state-sanctioned rapes of women and girls, the blinding of boys and men with pellet guns and rubber bullets. Maybe he would ask her to answer with her body for Papa’s hubris, for her sisters’ myopic obedience to him.
She longs to explore. She knows she should not be here. Kritik Uncle says she is free to go out, but so far it has been ‘discouraged.’ She wants to find her mother’s house – and, no matter what Kritik Uncle says they have done, see her sisters again.
A week since she arrived. On the first morning she sat with Kritik Uncle in the first floor reception room. They were served kahwa, rich with cinnamon and saffron, in china mugs painted with English flowers, wild irises, yellow gorse. A selection-plate of Parle biscuits was offered and accepted. Sita poured the tea, Kritik Uncle took a biscuit; he told her that over the summer, while she was gone, power had turned Gargi’s head.
—Now she is playing at directing the Company. Sorry, the India Company. What arrogance!
Kritik Uncle snapped the biscuit. He ate half, then half, brushing the crumbs from his mouth. He said that though Gargi herself tried to delay the transfer of shares Ranjit Uncle wanted to gift Sita, it was an issue likely to drag on, to remain disputed in court for years. It would be the thorn in the Company’s side. He wanted to try to resolve it, he said. By presenting Sita and Bapuji to her sisters on opening night, with everybody there.
He called her ‘Sita beti’. He said that she should have more power than Gargi. He took another biscuit; this one he soaked into his tea.
—And Radha? she had asked.
He sucked on the biscuit and called Radha a junglee. Chi chi chi chi chi. Now – Kritik Uncle said – she is eating all night, sleeping until noon. Cutting up her suite. Refusing to travel without at least twenty-five security men for the shortest of excursions, sometimes demanding even more. He said that he was not surprised – because, as everyone knows, there was always hysteria on her mothers’ side.
As if this could not be any worse, he told Sita (and though she already knows, it shocks her to hear it):
—Your Bubu Jiju is dead.
As if he could sense he was losing her, Kritik Uncle had said,
—Do you know Bubu and Radha almost killed a man of mine, by letting him burn in the sun? Then, your father was made to feel so unwelcome, they forced him to brave the great storm. Now look. He is as broken as the Napurthala Palace.
—I want to see my sisters, she said. Kritik Uncle, you promised once we got here, we would go to them.
He promised that as soon as the moment was right, they would go – drive through the city and up the winding road, new built, for this exact purpose, to the gates of the new hotel. She had to trust him, he said. She must wait.
She asked Kritik Uncle about Jeet Bahiya. He had told her instead about Ranjit Uncle’s illegitimate son, Jivan Singh, who had come home from America and – here Kritik Uncle stopped and cleared his throat, once, twice, again – was now taking care of Radha, all the while becoming indispensable to Gargi – closer to her than that kameena, Uppal ever got. He said:
—And do not even question me about Ranjit. Blinded. By your sister’s nails. Gone.
Hiding her shock Sita asked, Where is he? Where is Jeet?
There were no more biscuits on the plate. Kritik had looked at her, shaken his head.
—I don’t know, he said.
He has no idea where Jeet is. This, after all, makes her believe that every other story he has told her is true.
She paces her room in the safe house. She thinks of Gargi doing the same in Delhi, never able to share her feelings. Always so critical. Dressing Sita in pink when she begged for purple, blue, yellow – anything else. Always talking about her achievements loudly, in public, while pushing her out, out and away from the family, into the world, sometimes so emphatically it felt as if her sister didn’t really want her around. And Radha, who taught Sita to smoke and to shave, who peeled a banana behind Nanu’s back and used it to demonstrate the difference between blowjobs and handjobs and the texture of sperm, which she made by squeezing the banana into mush when Sita was thirteen. Radha – her sharp, silly jokes and her kuch-puch words, her MrGee Twitter (which she thinks no one knows about) – neither of her sisters ever mentioned Jivan, in all the years of growing up.
Sita locks all of her inner doors. By herself in her bedroom, she smokes. There are only five cigarettes left in the carton. She will go out today and buy more, in an English accent, to help her courage. As she inhales, her lower muscles spasm. Another thought occurs – she has brought no tampons. Perfect. She does not know the city, but Kritik Uncle cannot stop her from going to buy supplies. There are no women to ask. Even the food is prepared by Kritik Uncle’s men: daal, chawal, mutton, paneer. Not much else alongside.
Scratch-scratch on the outside of her door. She stubs her cigarette, she smoothes her kameez, adjusts her dupatta: smile-smile. Hasn’t she seen Radha do this everyday, for all her growing-up years? Looking the part is just one of Sita’s new survival skills, her sisters would be proud.
She opens the door.
—Yes Kritik Uncle?
Here he is, in a heavy wool pheran, down to his ankles. A putti still tied around his face. She understands the warm covering but not his headgear: he says that he wants to blend into the streets. As if he can assume the habits of this city. It is a lie, she thinks. He should not do it.
—Any news? she says.
He smiles his ‘sorry’ smile. She thinks – You are not sorry. Why didn’t you stop this? It was in your hands. You could have stopped it all and you didn’t. She thinks that pride, which he calls plainness, is his crime.
—I brought you apricots. Look!
From his pocket he produces a small bag of dried fruits. Fat, gold with the promise of the outside world. She takes it. The apricots are hard, wrinkled. Her other hand goes to her throat, pressing lightly on the ridges under her skin.
—Kritik Uncle, she says. Thank you so much for helping Papa. I don’t know what he would do without you. What I would do.
She takes his empty hand, leans forward and adds a kiss on his cheek, to punctuate.
—Of course, Beti, of course. This is nothing. You are my daughter too, no? Isn’t it enough for me that you have come home?
She turns away from him to put the apricots into her bag. She gathers her useless phone, her laptop, her dictionary and diaries. She has no connection here, there is an e-curfew, state-wide, it seems. She must go, find an internet café – a bookstore – there are some, she knows, she has read about them. In her notebooks are lists of names, email IDs – all the student protestors she left in Delhi. They read now like a wish list of alternative lives.
—What are you doing? he says.
—Kritik Uncle, when can we go to see Gargi and Radha? she says.
—Tell me what is the matter. Are you feeling scared? Is someone bothering you?
He clears his throat three times.
Keeping her voice light she says,
—You should go change, Uncle, I can’t look at you like this. What are you wearing? Please, go and make yourself fresh, wear your proper suit. Then we can talk more. I don’t want to imagine what you have been doing dressed like this. Please change, and come back as yourself.
—My dear Sita. What is upsetting you? He clears his throat and bows his head to one side.
—Kritik Uncle, I need to go out. I have to buy some women’s supplies.
He comes to her; he takes her shoulders in his hands. They are standing by the bed; the window is behind him, the bright blue day.
—Be careful, Sita. Troubles are on hold right now, but you can’t just go out and about. For you especially, it is not safe. Tell me what you need. I will procure it.
She raises her arms to adjust her dupatta; he has to let her go.
—No. I’ll wear my shades and take my backpack. I look like a tourist anyway. You’ve always said yourself that tourists here are safe. If they aren’t, why are we fighting so hard for the hotel?
—Sita. You are the daughter of a high-profile VIP. There are wounds here that you do not understand.
—I won’t go to the old town, if that is what concerns you. But I will go out. I will be back before Papa wakes up.
Kritik Uncle says he does not mean danger on the streets.
—Must I spell it out? I have not told you all that your sisters have done, if only to protect you, my dear. But they won’t hesitate to do – such things! If they know we are here. So. Let us go and do the puja, and see if we can wake Bapuji up.
—Kritik Uncle. Just send me in a taxi to Lal Chowk, then I’ll walk and do my shopping. I will be careful. No one will see me, I promise. If you send someone to follow me, I’ll be very upset. It’s that time – I need supplies.
He smiles, and considers her for a moment, then shrugs. He steps back, allowing her to pass. The doorway is there, he gestures to it. He lets her go.
She almost skips. She didn’t expect him to give in so easily! Before she leaves, she checks on Papa. His ravaged face: mouth open, saliva collecting at the corners, beloved eyes shut. The cheeks she has kissed so often, now sucked into themselves. He has slept time away, as if waiting for some magic to wake him. He has not been fevered, only confused. Exhaustion, says the nurse. Respiratory infection. The pressures of the campaign, his fast, all of it has weakened his immune system. Only rest, and Sita, can heal him.
She strokes his forehead. She swallows her sorrow and reminds herself that life is sacrificed in a blaze of red and gold each autumn; then spring comes again. It is bound to happen, nature makes it so.
The taxi stops on the corner of Lal Chowk, the heart of commerce in Srinagar. Sita knows this place from her reading, her films – she tries not to scrabble at the car door to get to it. Take it slowly
; cover your head for Kritik Uncle’s sake. Then, she greets the city. The rush hour people, normal people, so many young people, perhaps artists or accountants and shoppers and secretaries, leaving their buildings. They take no notice of her; they brush past her. She is swept up by their movement, by the sounds of Bollywood love songs drifting out from the music store, by the ones of young men and the twos of lovers and threes of young families, all sharing the street. Light bleeds over the concrete malls. There is a thick, sweet smell of roasting chestnuts. The sellers look up, offering her paper cones full of their dark treasure. She sees the faces of young men, their skin lined beyond their years, their eyes hooded, the sudden smiles and shouts they give each other as they greet friends in passing. No one is following her here.
Behind the shop windows on a tree-lined street, there are white plastic bodies draped in shawls and scarves. A leather shop has bags and belts that she loves – she will come back tomorrow. There is a shop selling spices; packets of saffron are on display in the windows. Everywhere bright apples are stacked in carts and outside stalls – deep red, russet, speckled gold. Another place sells pure honey, in hundreds of jars from Kashmiri bees. Among the liquid gold she browses the flavours, tasting each sample from a small stick. Papa will love this one: made by local women, scented with kesar and gulab.
She crosses the road, towards a Punjabi restaurant where the smells of ghee-soaked naan and tandoor spices are losing to the stench from the stagnant drains. She feels something brush at her, hears a sound: a woman crouches on the pavement, her blackened hands reaching out. All five of her fingers are missing and her elbow has been broken into new shape. Her face could only have been burned; half of it is puckered – the eyes are bruised, the throat is ringed in marks as if from a wire. She is draped in rags, so loose on her skeleton that her breastbone is visible. Her breasts and nipples are like Papa’s. Sita walks; the scarred woman shuffles along, trying to tell her something. There is a picture of a young man on a cord around her neck. Around her the car horns blaze.