My little mud house as old as time,
Is on a hill with pomegranate trees,
Sweet lime grew there in the valley,
And fields of tender green peas.
He pumped his stove, he smiled, at times he interrupted his song to call out “Cha! Chaaii!”
Nomi closed her eyes tight when he sang. It was unbearable. She wanted him to stop singing. At the same time she wanted him to sing this very same song forever. They would live in a hut and have hens and pigs and grow yam and bananas and play in the stream nearby, she had promised. Piku used to light up whenever she started talking about the hut, so Nomi had added more and more detail each day: new plants, new animals, new things they would do. That was the game, dreaming together. After the lights were put out Piku crept across the dormitory and snuggled up to her in her narrow bunk. Nomi would sleep comforted by the sense of her breathing, her movements in the night. By dawn she was always gone.
“Sweet lime grew there in the valley, And fields of tender green peas,” sang Johnny Toppo. And then shouted, “Chai, Babu, Chai! Jeera biscuit, elaichi biscuit!” When he turned to the girl to check if she wanted more tea he saw her eyes were shut and her lips were moving. Not a hippy, then, a meditating type. He shrugged her off and returned to his song.
“My little mud house as old as time, Is on a hill with pomegranate trees.”
Nomi’s lips were barely moving as she whispered, “Do you remember, Piku, how we climbed the pomegranate tree? Was it a few months after that teacher had gone or was it much later? Were we seven or were we eight then?” They had been wandering outside, not sure what to do with themselves. It was a grey afternoon, the kind when it wants to rain but does not. They were kicking the dust somewhere near Guruji’s cottage when they noticed the pomegranate trees. The ripe fruits hanging from the tree were red and bright. Nomi had never eaten a pomegranate and she had never seen what it looked like inside. There were so many that she did not think anyone would notice if they picked one. There was nobody about. It was the hour between school and evening prayers, when everyone was in the meditation hall. The tree had small leaves and it was bushy and green. Piku stood below it, skipping around, holding her skirt out like a basket while Nomi climbed the tree. She hoisted herself up to the first fork in the trunk. The next fork was easy. And then she was near a fruit. She plucked it and aimed for Piku’s stretched skirt. She hoped Piku wouldn’t shriek when the fruit came down: that was how she was, hopping up and down, shrieking when she pleased, and there was no stopping her. After the first fruit Nomi felt braver and climbed two more branches. She reached out her hand for another pomegranate inches away. That was when Piku made an odd sound. Nomi looked downward to tell her to shut up and saw that Piku’s skirt had dropped and the first pomegranate lay at her feet. Her mouth was open, her eyes were bulging more than usual. Guruji was standing next to her.
He neither frowned nor smiled nor asked a question nor shouted a scolding. He did nothing. But Nomi remembered how he did not take his eyes off her, how she had that familiar sense he could see right into her. Did a breeze rustle the leaves of the tree or was it utterly, absolutely still? She thought maybe a low rumble of thunder had sounded from behind the clouds. She knew she had wanted to cry. She could not move a limb. She had the sickening feeling that if she moved she would wet herself. She clenched her muscles.
Guruji had said, “Come down. Just take one step at a time and you’ll come down. Look at your feet, there’s a fork in the branches near you.” He sounded kind and was smiling. Nomi knew that punishments at the ashram were terrible, sometimes the girls could not walk for days after a beating. But if Guruji was smiling, she thought she might escape with just a cane on her palm. She started climbing down, knot after knot, fork after fork. It was only right at the end that she put her foot on a weak branch and it creaked and splintered and then broke. She crashed through the rest of the tree, down among the seeds of the broken fruit, at Guruji’s feet.
He bent towards her. He put his hands under her arms and pulled her up. Nomi was shaking, she remembered that clearly: the way her whole body shook. She was hurting all over. Her foot had a cut, her toes were stubbed, the skin of her knees had been scraped away, her frock was torn where it had caught on the tree. Guruji held her hand and led her towards his cottage. He put her on his lap facing him, the way her mother used to when she oiled Nomi before a bath. She would make her lie flat on her outstretched legs, the child’s feet towards her chest. I was so small then, Nomi thought, the whole length of me fitted along my mother’s legs.
Guruji sat on the stairs to his cottage holding her foot. He looked at the bit that was bleeding. He wiped the blood away with his chadar. Through her pain and fear, Nomi had marvelled at how he didn’t care that the blood and mud were spoiling his clothes. He had stroked the skin around the bleeding part of the foot and then lowered his head towards it. She thought he was going to put her toes into his mouth and suck the blood away the way she did when she cut herself. But he only blew on the cuts so that they felt cool. He said, “Don’t do things that are forbidden. There is a reason why. When you want fruit, just ask me.”
He set her down and stood up. And then, out of thin air, from the folds of his chadar, he had produced a ripe pomegranate. Just like that! Everyone said Guruji performed miracles, they said he could produce sweets and sacred ash from nothing. But the two girls had never seen it happen. At the sight of the miracle pomegranate, Piku squealed. Guruji merely smiled. He held the fruit out towards the children and said, “Share this.”
How gentle was his voice that day, how his skin gleamed and his large eyes shone! His hair was a dark cloud that lay on his shoulders and his teeth were very white. She remembered he had looked and sounded as she used to think God must look and sound.
That night Nomi had stayed awake holding her half of the pomegranate. She had eaten a bead from it for the taste. It was sweeter than anything she knew. She had sucked on the seed until nothing was left of it but a tasteless grain. Then she chewed that and swallowed it. Next to her, Piku was mumbling in her sleep. She had clawed out the seeds from her half of the fruit, dripping red juice, the moment Guruji had gone into his cottage. Nomi had not eaten it then, and hours later, after sucking on that single bead, she did not eat any more. It was the only proof she had of what she had seen. Everyone said he was God. Now she knew they were right. She stayed awake for most of the night with the fruit next to her pillow. She did not know when she fell asleep. In the morning the fruit’s pulp was like blood on her sheets. Dark red.
Nomi opened her eyes. As if she were rising from below water, she heard sounds again, saw that there were people everywhere, the tea man had many customers, and there were three children pointing at her and giggling from a few feet away. She must remain calm, she must remember why she was there. She had work to do. She lifted her camera, looking through the lens. Suraj swam into view again. She zoomed in until he was close enough for her to see the strands of grey in his hair and the dark brown handle of his knife. When they had met after weeks of talking on e-mail about the film locations they were to scout, he had looked at her in the way people did: with a certain wariness, the kind that comes from encountering up close an animal that might prove unpredictable. His eyes had rested on her when he thought she wouldn’t notice, taking the measure of her. She was used to it and often played up to it, acting more erratic than she was. It was both method and disguise, one she had perfected as the eternal outsider, a way to disappear when physical escape was impossible.
As she turned her camera away from him out to the sea, she saw something else. Moving to find a better angle, she toppled her umbrella, tipped over her tea and crushed the cup. Her lens was now focused on a monk in the water. He was wearing dark glasses. His long white hair was loose to his shoulders. His chunky fingers were counting beads off a rosary.
She was about to take a photograph, but something made her stop: although far off, the monk appeared to be looking straight
into her lens. His eyebrows, she could see, were as white as his hair.
She let go of the camera. She got up and started to run down the beach, past the hotels, around the upturned boats, away from the crowds and into a birch forest, threading her way through the bone-white trunks of trees, the glow of a burning house in the distance, away from blood streaming down its wall and in her head a girl’s voice cried out again and again for her brother, so loudly that she did not hear Johnny Toppo agitating for his money until he was in front of her, blocking her way. She could see dark stars. She closed her eyes, opened them again, saw that the sun had gone and the sea had turned to foaming blood.
When I was eight I was given duties in the ashram, like the other boat girls. My new work was to help in the gardens. I knew nothing about plants and I was born clumsy. I would step on one plant when trying to reach another. I would uproot freshly-planted seedlings when weeding. Gradually I became better at it and in time it would become the only bond between me and my foster mother. I don’t know why I became a sullen, monosyllabic lump around her. She persisted in being friendly, but her efforts only oppressed me. I felt trapped and restless, I would try to put up with her talk, try and try, then before I could stop myself I would leave her in mid-sentence and walk out through the door. One day, three long, fraught years after I had started living with her, I saw her looking out of the window at me. I was kneeling over the hard, cold earth planting bulbs for the spring. The fat promise of those bulbs: I had loved them even at the ashram, where we planted tuberoses and lilies. A bulb was a secret between the soil and me until the green tips of leaves poked out months later and gave it away. That day I was planting the crocuses, snowdrops, tulips, and daffodils my foster mother liked. When she saw me she came out and began to plant them too, some distance away. As we progressed along our patches, we moved closer and closer. Above us, the slate grey sky was low. There were powdery drops of rain on our anoraks. I said nothing, but I may have smiled at her. I saw her pale pink lips tremble, and when her glasses misted over she said it was the rain.
In the ashram’s gardens I had to work with a man who had recently arrived. He once told me he had been a refugee like us, and from the same place, but he had spent a few years hiding in the forests between our old country and this one. Nobody knew what had happened to him in those years and nobody asked. We never spoke about that part of our lives.
The new man’s name was Jugnu. He had a thin face and long arms and he walked like a monkey, with his shoulders drooping. His nose was twisted to one side. His neck had a scar that looked like wrinkled pink satin. He too had come by boat and his hair stood on end as if the sea breeze had never gone out of it. He lived in a corner of the garden shed that he had made his own, with a mat to sleep on and a stove on which he brewed sweet tea. He was known to be very devout. He sang hymns and was often found sitting in the ashram’s puja hall as if in a trance. Usually, though, he was hunched over plants. His hands were scaly and big, the fingers looked like knots in a tree trunk, but when they went into soil they were so careful that he never broke the frailest, finest hair from the roots. After he came, the ashram started to look prettier and smelled sweet everywhere, especially in the evenings when the night flowers bloomed. He was devoted to Guruji and planted beautiful flowers all around his cottage.
During the morning the ashram was such a busy, bright place that I don’t think anyone looking around would have known that there were twelve girls in it who had nobody. Everyone came to hear Guruji’s discourses at the big audience hall. Holy men came from other ashrams to listen to him. I saw so many monks I could not tell one from the other. They all looked the same: long hair and yellow robes. Then there were our teachers, a cook, and Jugnu. In the afternoon the visitors left. The students who came from outside went off in their buses. The boys in our school went back in a van to their dormitory, which was in another building, far away. The teachers who did not belong to the ashram went home. The monks from the visitors’ side of the ashram returned to their cottages across the fence. We were by ourselves then.
When school was over and everyone was gone, I had to work in the garden for two hours. I don’t remember much about what I did for those two hours, but one such afternoon was so strange I can’t forget it. Jugnu had told me to fork the earth below Guruji’s window. I was doing that when I heard sounds from inside: grunting sounds, whimpering sounds, screaming, which stopped abruptly, the sound of something banging and thumping. Suddenly Champa shot out of the house. I dropped down behind the bush. I heard a man’s voice: “You wait and see. See what happens.” I could not tell whose voice it was, but it frightened me so I stayed behind the bush for a long while, being bitten by insects.
Champa was a favourite of Guruji’s. She had her own room like all the older girls. Her bed had a striped bedspread and she had a vase for flowers and a picture of Guruji on the wall. The other older girls had none of these things. She used to worship the picture and light incense in front of it. I thought when I grew older I would have a room like that.
Champa was the only one among the boat girls who had a few things from long ago and these were never taken away from her. She kept her things in a brick-sized aluminium box with a clasp. A little lock went through the clasp. Nobody had ever seen the box unlocked. We did not know what was in it. In the evening of the day I overheard her screaming, Bhola made a fire in the quadrangle outside our dormitory. He was one of Guruji’s trusted helpers and he had been at the ashram right from when the war started. Guruji had found him half dead and brought him back to life: it was one of the miracles he was famous for.
Bhola broke open the lock on Champa’s box with a sharp rap of a stone. He picked something out and held it between two fingertips as if it were filthy. “A duster? A hanky?” he said. “Whose? Your father’s?” Champa did not answer.
The heat from the fire in that warm evening made sweat pour down Bhola’s pitted face. A bomb had left one side of him maimed. He hobbled to Champa with the rag. “What is this cloth? Give me an answer and nothing will happen to it,” he hissed at her. Now I know he must have relished every second of being a villain who bared his fangs and growled to scare little girls, but at that time there was nobody more terrifying or cruel even in our nightmares.
I do not remember the exact sequence of the things that happened next – that evening is a series of dark images in my head. I think Champa mumbled something and Bhola tossed the cloth into the fire. He picked up a photograph from the box. “What an ugly fat woman,” he said. After the photograph had sizzled to ashes he picked out a tiny doll. Its head lolled and its arms were limp and it wore a printed rag as a sari. When she saw that doll, something happened to Champa. She made a choking sound as if she would vomit and she turned away to run into the dormitory. Savita-di, our matron, held her back by her arm. “You can leave when Guruji tells you to, not before,” she said.
It was only then that I noticed him in the shadows, watching everything. Guruji stood as expressionless as when he had caught me on the pomegranate tree. Champa was crying, “I won’t run away again, I will never run away again.” He said nothing. We did not know Champa had tried running away. We had been told never to leave the ashram. We knew if any of us was caught outside, every other boat girl would be in danger. We thought: if she ran away she deserves punishment. How just Guruji is, he punishes even his favourite.
After all the things in the box were burned, we were told to go back to our rooms and dormitories while Champa was led away to Guruji’s cottage for an audience with him.
Not many days after that it was my turn. I had been hiding between the bushes and trees in a complicated game with Piku, and before we knew it we had drifted to the outer boundary of the grounds. There was high barbed-wire fencing. Beyond the fences were rows of cottages and parks. It was the visitors’ part of the ashram. I had only glimpsed it before from high up in the pomegranate tree. Now we could see men and women sitting at meditation. Many were just like us and some were for
eigners with light hair.
If we had stayed quiet we would have got away with it. But Piku tried to make one of the foreigners notice her by standing up and shouting. She could be so stupid. The man turned. He was tall, with yellow robes, and he had a long beard and long hair and held prayer beads. I have never forgotten his face because he was young, but his hair was snow-white, his eyelashes were white, and his eyes seemed white too. He looked around, trying to find where the shouts had come from. I pulled Piku to the ground and behind the bushes. I knew there would be trouble if we were spotted. I led her away through the grass at a crawl. I thought we had made it. Then we heard a snuffling and growling and there, behind us, was Bhola and with him on a chain was one of the dogs that roamed the ashram’s grounds at night.
Bhola’s teeth were yellow and red because he chewed tobacco all day. Below his shirt he wore a lungi. Seeing us at the boundary he dropped the dog’s chain to the ground as if he had forgotten there was a fierce animal at the end of it. He only stepped on its chain at the last instant, when the dog was very close to us. He rolled his lungi to his knees and put his hands on his hips. One of his hands held a bamboo switch.
“So, shall I let him go?” he said. He said many more things, but for some reason this is what I recall. Maybe I thought I would be eaten alive by that dog.
Piku was smiling at Bhola, showing all her teeth. As if smiling would get us out of trouble. Bhola picked up the dog’s chain and poked her with his freed foot. He said, “Hey, nothing to smile about, you dolt. Nothing at all.”
I think of myself then, standing up very straight, hands on my waist, daring him to do his worst, saying, “We haven’t done anything, you can’t hurt us.” Was I really so brave? My head must have been just about level with his waist. My hair was still in two plaits. I knew that only a fortnight had passed since Bhola burnt all Champa’s things. I didn’t care. I had no box full of things for him to burn.
Sleeping On Jupiter Page 7