She gathered the sheet around her again and said, “Like stepping out of your life. Like leaving your own story. Like disappearing. Don’t you feel like disappearing from your life sometimes?”
She took a sip of her whisky and said, “There were these women on the train, three ancients, coming on a holiday here. They were like schoolgirls, so thrilled. At first I thought, I’ve never felt this – this kind of straightforward happiness – they were full of it. They thought I wasn’t listening to anything because I had my headphones on, but I’d kept the volume really low, because I love eavesdropping – don’t you? Turned out they were sad old things, complaining about their children and their aches and pains. Like this was their last chance of fun.”
Suraj shrugged. “They might go on twenty more trips and live longer than either of us.”
“Sure.” Nomi shook her head, impatient. “We’ll both be hit by a bus tomorrow.”
“Haven’t seen too many buses in Jarmuli.” He clicked his lighter on and his face turned into hills and dark hollows. He took his piece of wood from his pocket, began to work on it with his knife, and a woody perfume drifted across the table. A faint scraping from him, the whisky going down their throats, and then the lowing again, a deep sound of anguish that filled the night. Beyond the stone wall that enclosed their garden and beyond the darkness of the waste lot was a line of coconut palms that told them where the beach was. A new, cool breeze came from that direction, ruffling the air.
“I think it’ll rain.” Suraj looked up at the sky.
“What are you doing with that wood?” she said. “I saw you at it on the beach too. It’s sandalwood, isn’t it? I can smell it. Despite your smoke.”
“Just helps to kill the time. Stops me smoking more.” The lit cigarette dangled from his lips.
“Can I see the knife?” She put her hand out.
“Careful. It’s sharp enough to kill.” He handed it over. It looked much too big in her palm and that made him feel good somehow. It was a man-tool. Its dark wooden handle was silky with use. The handle was sheathed with brass at its tip and brass rivets and bands fixed the steel blade to it. His father had used it for years, it was a knife he had bought in Berlin. Suraj tapped his cigarette into the bowl on the table and told her that. He should have stopped – there was no need to say more – but he found himself telling her about his father, how he used to be good with his hands, especially making things with wood. He could make shelves and chairs and all of that, but what he really liked making were miniatures – model houses, minuscule windmills, boats. Everything he made actually worked: the doors and windows of the houses would open, the windmill would turn in the breeze, the boat would float. It was their yearly ritual to make one perfect boat, then go off together somewhere, to a river or a sea and float it away.
“But then you’d lose it,” Nomi said. “Or did you have it on a string?”
“No strings. The whole idea was to let it go – we made it as perfect and seaworthy as we could. But after that it was on its own.”
“Yes, but a thing I had spent months making? I wouldn’t be able to abandon it like that.”
“Not to abandon it, no. It was, well, supposed to be ready for life on its own. It felt like that. We’d stand on the shore and watch it going off. And keep looking till it became invisible. Never saw one sink, not in all these years. And I make one every year even now.”
“With your father?”
“He died years ago. I was fifteen.” Suraj stubbed out his cigarette. “I always give the boat a name. What do you say I call the new one Nomi? S.S. Nomi. And if I finish it in the next few days, we can put it into the sea right here.”
She went so quiet he thought she had gone all glassy-eyed and weird again. What the hell was wrong with the kid? Wrapping herself in a bedsheet and getting spaced out this way? He felt a twinge he had not felt for a long time towards anyone, of concern.
“Not a boat. I’m not a boat girl.” She seemed to shake herself awake. “I’m a plane girl. I love airports – always bright, noisy, full of people, hot coffee and noodles round the clock. I feel like they should give me a room at an airport – you know – like that man in Terminal? I could live like that, easy. When you make a plane, you can name it after me.”
“Planes don’t have names,” Suraj said “They have numbers.” He saw a mosquito take position, spear Nomi’s neck, rocking back and forth as it drew her blood. Its needle sucked her blood unnoticed for the moment. He stared at the mosquito, mesmerised by the silky brown of the skin it was feasting on. He felt the need to look away. Soon she would feel the sting and slap it off.
She did. Stared at her palm and screwed up her face. “I didn’t go back to my coach on that train,” she said. “I wonder what happened to those women. They must be here somewhere, no? Maybe next door? Maybe the fat one is drifting around in the maze inside that temple, lost forever. Maybe she’ll forget to go back to her family. She’ll turn into a holy woman. Years later her awful children will come here and fall at her feet.”
She spoke faster and faster, riveted by the scenario she was conjuring up. “Don’t you wish it could happen? Your mind wiped clean, like a hard drive? Start again without memories?”
Thinking of the day of the dog, he knew he would like his mind scoured spotless. He thought of his wife with her new man – his old friend. They played cricket together on Sundays, she had met him at one of their games when she brought them beer and chicken sandwiches. The three of them had had a picnic by the pitch. And then, all those times Suraj was away, travelling on work, more sandwiches. More than sandwiches. Plenty of memories he’d be better off without.
They had not heard the buffalo for a while. Perhaps the owner had taken it away. But for the far-off restiveness of the sea, there were no sounds. It seemed to Suraj that they were the only two people left alive on the earth.
Nomi began a vigorous scratching of her neck and in the light of the lamps concealed under the bushes near them Suraj saw a red patch form on her skin where the mosquito had bitten her. It was swollen, it would feel hotter to touch than the rest of her skin. Saliva. That’s what made these weals subside.
He looked away from her neck. He thought out what he would say next with some care and spoke slowly after a pause, sounding tentative. “Do you usually talk so much with people you’ve just met? I don’t. I haven’t told anyone else that stuff about staying back at a random station.” His voice was gruff, as if the words were being forced out of him. She was pleased, he could tell from the way she looked at him speechless with surprise. Every woman he’d ever known melted when you said this kind of rubbish. They felt they had some special quality that made men confide in them.
Nomi spoke only after she had drained her glass and risen from her chair. “I’ve no idea. It must be because we know we’ll never see each other again after this assignment. Like people talk on planes and trains.”
“Won’t we? See each other again?” The thought made its slow way into his drowsy mind and never seeing her again appeared unlikely. They would see each other again and again. He sensed a tiny, almost imperceptible current between them. It would grow if he were careful. It had potential.
He felt drops of water on his face and looked up. “Here comes the rain,” he said. He picked up his knife and the bottle and pushed back his chair.
*
Night seeped from the ground and spread from tree to tree and house to house, gathering them into a mass of darkness. In one alleyway a portly old man heaved himself into the rickshaw he had hired for the evening and grunted, “They’re all like smelly old towels, and as much life in them. Get me a fresh young girl. With tomato-tight skin. With juice that spurts when you bite.”
On a nearby rooftop, Johnny Toppo lay with his bundle of clothes as a pillow, gazing at the bloodshot sky. His money was in that bundle too. In his head he counted the notes. Ninety-six rupees. Not enough, but something. The wind had died down. It was so airless now he thought it would rain agai
n. He had put a tarpaulin over his tea cart. He had weighed the tarpaulin down with bricks. His pots and pans and jars were locked in his trunk. Nothing to worry about. He wiped the sweat from his gaunt face. He would sleep now. His knees did not ache that much tonight, his back did not hurt. He breathed out a deep sigh and closed his eyes.
Badal lay on his string cot in his stuffy room alternately opening and shutting the mobile he had bought for Raghu. Each time he flipped it open the blue glow of its screen lit up his face and his eyes glistened in the light. His nose was still smeared with blood. Grains of sand had got into the phone. He blew on it to tease them out.
Night smudged away the hovels, the hotels, the temples, the shuttered roadside stalls, the abandoned boats on the beach. The old woman Badal met every morning slept under the neem tree, the sweet jaggery in her dream making the drool trickle from her mouth.
On the dull grey sand of the beach a madman dug a hole and tenderly planted a twig. He dipped a clay cup into the sea, scampered back to water his twig, then lay down beside it, sighing at the coolness of its shade.
At the Swirling Sea Hotel, Latika slept, tense with anxiety, dreaming of herself tongue-tied on a spotlit stage. She had forgotten the song she was meant to sing or the reason for being on that stage. Down the corridor, Gouri lay awake holding a photograph of her dead husband, as she did every night, telling him all the things she could not share with anyone else.
Between their rooms and the luxury hotel next door was a shallow creek choked with rubbish, covered in reeds and gloom. Nomi lay in a large double bed in the hotel across the creek. She had fenced herself in on every side with pillows, her backpack, her travel guide, extra blankets rolled into barrels. The portion of the bed left for her was a small rectangle into which she just about fitted if she folded her knees into her chest. She clutched a pillow close. She was trying not to think of the monk on the beach. He was out there somewhere. Had he seen her? Had he recognised her? He must have, if she recognised him.
For years she had done nothing but gather information and courage. Bit by bit she had pieced together the details, waited for a chance to come back, to see for herself. Then this assignment. It had worked out. But now? She had spent much of last night sitting under the shower shivering in the cold but not able to turn off the water. She was a coward. That was what her foster mother used to say when she came back home bloodied from fist fights: she got into fights because she was in fact a coward.
A television voice started off in the next room. Not Suraj’s room, the one on the other side. What was Suraj doing in his room? Carving his boat? An asinine thing to do, making all those boats just to float them away. What a fucking romantic. She could bet he put messages into bottles too, and threw them in the sea.
She put a pillow over her head to block out the sound from the television in the next room. Her thoughts went back to the morning, to the temple guide’s strictures about her clothes. The bloody nerve. She had been on the brink of hitting someone, she had been so furious. It had taken all her self-control not to snap with those two men ogling her under the guise of judging the temple-worthiness of her cargo pants and shirt.
Her clothes always turned out to be wrong. The orphanage had sent her with a carefully-packed duffel bag to her foster mother, who lived at the time in Reading in England. The bag contained a pink comb, a matching toothbrush, a tube of translucent green toothpaste, shiny hairclips, undergarments, and four cotton frocks, each one a different colour. They were the first new clothes she had ever owned. She could not stop touching them, but her new mother had taken them out of the duffel bag and tossed them aside with barely a look, saying that they wouldn’t do. She made a list of clothes Nomi had never heard of: tights, anorak, thermals. She was taken to a shop. It was huge, Nomi had never seen so many things in one place. She wandered from aisle to aisle, seeing nothing, hating the woman who had discarded her new frocks. She wanted to run away. She managed to slip off to a different section of the store, lurked among the merchandise. Now she was flanked by rows and rows of earrings, necklaces, hairclips, bracelets. Wonderstruck, she picked up a string of multicoloured beads. And before anyone saw, she put the necklace into her pocket. She could never explain why she stole the necklace, but it had given her a gloating sense of revenge. When she was leaving the shop, high-pitched beeps of piercing intensity began ringing around her. She knew nothing of burglar alarms and was taken aback when men in uniforms surrounded her. She hardly even reached their hips, she recalled, they were so tall. And she remembered her vicious satisfaction when her new mother, checking her pockets, pulled out the beads, gasping, “It’s just a mistake, I assure you! She’s not a thief, it’s just that she came two days ago from a different country!” One of the security guards had said, “Which country is it where they don’t know stealing from buying?”
Despite the pillow over her head, the television voices rose, and over it she could hear men: loud talk, then guffawing laughter. It was always so quiet in her foster mother’s house. Silent enough to hear leaves fall and rain drip from the roof, silent enough to make it hard for her to cry at night without being noticed. She tried to lie as motionless here as she had trained herself to do there. There was a wall between her and the television men. Thin, if it let through so much sound. But it was a wall.
A moment later, she sprang out of bed. She checked again if her cupboard was not in fact a door, looked under her bed. Ran her hands through the red curtains. Flung open the bathroom door for a look. No intruders. She fell back into bed.
She had to sleep. She shut her eyes. There was a way to sleep, it was always the same way. She made herself go back to the woods and the lake: cycling through the Norwegian countryside one midsummer – it is about one in the morning. She is with five other girls, they are straight out of school, sixteen, and she is on her first trip with girls her age. They are used to it, but to her it is new and strange. She is not saying much, just struggling to keep up, pedalling hard. She is smaller and thinner than they are, not able to cycle as fast, she gets out of breath. Around two, when they reach the woods, it is not dark and not light, it is a phosphorescent dusk, a mad light in which anything is possible. They put up two tents, she is inside one of them. The rest have not paused, they have run out to swim in the lake. She sits in the tent, not daring to come out of it. She can hear herself breathe: she breathes in the smell of the tent’s nylon, her own sweat, the spilled shampoo in someone’s backpack. Then she hears a bird. It doesn’t call, it sings. A brief, ethereal song. Another bird sings back, then the first one sings again. On and on the birds sing to each other. She crawls out of the tent, sees a sheet of silver ahead, mirroring the unearthly midsummer night, the black trees, the glowing sky. Her friends’ clothes are heaped on the bank. They are far off in the water, their voices ring out joyfully. She can glimpse flashes of gold – their hair. None of them are looking at her. She looks behind: there is nobody. She fiddles with a button. Her heart hammers her ribs. She has never done this before, not in changing rooms, or doctors’ clinics, or dorms. Never before people. Tonight she unbuttons her shirt, shrugs it off. Unzips her jeans and peels them away, and then, very quickly before she has time to reconsider, she takes off every scrap of underclothing. She feels the warm midsummer air on her skin. There is nobody looking. Nobody to gape at her scraggy, stubby, knock-kneed body striped with welts and pockmarked with burns. She steps into the water. It is chilly and she gasps. As she slides in, it begins to feel warmer. It covers her. There is nothing between herself and the water. The water flows into her and out, soft and cool. The birds are still singing to each other, she can hear them over her splashes and her friends’ cries of delight. She is charged with a wild abandon, flips over, doesn’t care who sees her breasts. Above her, the sky is opal.
By the time Nomi’s eyelids dropped, all Jarmuli was asleep. At the great temple, the priests and guides and pilgrims had gone. Watchmen sat dozing outside the shrines. The temple idols gazed into oil lamps burning gold an
d red. Far out at sea, a fishing boat’s solitary lantern bobbed on the dark water. The fish underneath swam in shoals towards its nets, eager to the end.
When I opened my eyes it was raining in the room, I could not see through the sheets of falling blood. I thought I was going blind, I thought I was losing my mind. As a child I had taught myself a game: whenever I was afraid, I pretended I was dead, the life in me had gone, nothing could happen to me again, there would be no pain, never again, and this is what I did now, I kept myself still, I willed myself hardly to breathe at all. I was a ragdoll, I was held together with thread, there was not a shred of flesh and blood in me, nothing that could hurt. When I opened my eyes again, everything was covered in a film of oil, rainbows shifted and melted and changed, my head felt undone, rearranged. A blazing skewer went through it, its pain made my stomach boil. But I could see again. I did not move a finger, only opened and shut my eyes until I was sure. The sheet below me was white and soft and pure, the ceiling above me was white and the doors were painted white as well. The red had gone, everything felt pale and damp, there were tuberoses in a vase by a lemon-coloured lamp.
My room was new, I had not seen it before, a hotel room – where was it, which city? It would not come back to me right then and I looked beyond the ceiling and the doors to the window to get a sense of where – and then I saw scarlet curtains against the sun, shifting and swelling as if they were alive, as if deciding what was to be done. Beyond the curtains through the window I could see the flesh-thick petals of crimson flowers on a leafless tree and then my heart thudded as if it would burst, the iron rod in my head was on fire, but that wasn’t the worst of it, the rod twisted and turned, there was a burning wire around my skull, and I tore off all my clothes and ran to the door, I turned on the shower, I slid to the bathroom’s polished floor. Over my head, my shoulders, my breasts, the water poured, I was sodden, I was sobbing, I scoured myself with my nails, my nails were thick and pitted and dirty and hard, they scratched my skin, but I could not stop. I don’t know how many hours I passed inside, or maybe they were minutes, I was cold, my skin felt raw as just-flayed hide, I tried, but I could not go back into the room.
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