I thought I had torn the thing out, it would never come back. Nobody would cow me down, I would attack. I could slam my fist into a brick, not feel the pain, lick the blood away, hit the brick again. I would kick a ball hard and cry with joy. The boys sniggered, but it made me feel whole, it made me weep because that ball wasn’t a ball, it was a man’s head, it was that man I was kicking dead. This was the way I broke it, the thing was half-killed, I thought it had lost the will to fight but then I came to this hotel. It is by the sea, I had chosen that deliberately, to stare it down, to say you can’t do anything more to me, but then at breakfast by the pool there was a man with a knife that he plunged into a melon not once but twice, thrice, and then again, and when he was done he prised the slices apart, and the juice inside poured out in red spurts. I told myself it was just fruit. A woman came around with glasses on a tray. Her eyelids were blue, her hair was gold, sapphires sparkled in her ears and I told myself it was just fruit, but my breath stuck in my throat, I thought I would choke, yet I picked up a glass, said thank you. It was all about willpower, I told myself, it was just a fruit and I would not look at it, but I did and there was the melon, cut in pieces on a flat white plate, red against white, just like the grapefruit we picked, my brother and I, that my mother sliced in half.
The Third Day
Vidya threw up in the early hours and lay in bed till late morning. Her head was spinning, her temples ached, her neck hurt. Quavering, she refused breakfast, even dry toast, and urged the other two to go out without her. “I’ll be alright.” She tried to sound brave. “It must be my B.P. Or the food I ate at that roadside stall yesterday.” She had her zipper bag of medicine beside her and was dosing herself with Nux Vomica 30. “I’ll be fit enough to play football by tomorrow, just wait and see.”
Latika handed her some iced water. “Sip slowly. This has salt and sugar. You mustn’t dehydrate. Really, Vidya, what a thing to do – it looked poisonous, all that prawn floating in oil and chillies. Whatever possessed you? The sea air?”
She clucked partly to mask her resentment. They had only two more days in Jarmuli. Could they afford a whole morning commiserating with Vidya? Latika longed to spend the day on the beach, feeling the waves lapping her ankles. It was many years since she had been to the sea: the last time, a decade ago, it was with her husband, in Goa. He stood on dry land shouting, “You are too rash, Latika! You’ll float away and not know until you’re miles out and can’t swim back.” Later they had eaten grilled salmon and drunk sweet Goan port wine sitting in a rush-covered shack, looking at the moonlit sea while in the distance someone sang slow Portuguese fados. Her insides melted with certain kinds of music. She felt herself twisted and wrung; tears poked at her eyes. Forgotten things from years ago had come back to her under that shack – doves in the next-door house, the tamarind tree she climbed to pick its stick-like fruit, stone images in a garden, the long grey Buick – until she realised her husband was speaking to her, waiting for a response, annoyed at her farawayness. It was their first holiday alone in decades, soon after their daughter had gone off to university in Montreal.
In the early evening, only an hour left before sunset, Latika stroked Vidya’s sweat-dampened hair and told her, “We are going for a walk on the beach. You must phone me the minute you want us.” Vidya shut her eyes. “All I do is doze off, there’s no need for the two of you to waste a whole day as well.”
Latika and Gouri left the hotel in a rickshaw that took them towards the promenade. “Shouldn’t we have told someone at the hotel that she’s alone?” Gouri said anxiously as the rickshaw started to move. “What if she feels dizzy and falls? I did that once and . . .”
“She’s better now,” Latika said, “all that a stomach upset needs is rest and fluids.” Their rickshaw rattled along, the breeze carried salt and sea and as the distance between them and the hotel increased, Vidya and her troubles receded.
It was a Sunday. Walking away from their rickshaw, Latika and Gouri approached the crowded part of the beach. Here an open market tumbled over the sands, with makeshift stalls selling everything from conch shells to cowries and fried prawns. Children made gleeful sorties into the waves, then scampered back to land. Boys tugged at their saris, holding out sea-shell key rings and bead necklaces, proclaiming unbelievable prices. The air smelled of drying fish, frying fish, old fish, fresh fish, but in the wind that gusted in from the sea none of it smelled bad.
Gouri held Latika’s arm for balance and sloshed the water at the edge of the beach with her feet, dreamy in the heaving murmur of waves which snatched away the voices of people around them. The wind twisted their saris around their ankles. They laughed into it, pressed down blowaway hair. Abandoned their slippers to walk barefoot. Sidestepped tiny, translucent crabs which dug themselves out of the sand and skittered towards the water, disappearing again.
Looking at Gouri smiling, Latika thought their freedom from care was no more than a pause in time, a postponement of the inevitable even as the predator inside Gouri’s mind rested, gathering strength, never letting her out of sight. Gouri appeared to have no recollection of the way Latika had found her in her room the afternoon before, packed and in her mind waiting to leave for Jarmuli – when they had scarcely arrived. How had she confused her hotel room with her home in Calcutta? And if she could not remember which city she was in, could she ever be left alone? What future was in store for her now? A prisoner in her son’s care? Or would he put her into a nursing home?
Her life was on the brink of catastrophe and yet she haggled over the price of a sea shell, serenely ignorant. She bought a plaster model of the great temple. Then she noticed a man selling tea and the musky smell of rain-wet earth in tea served in clay cups came back to her. She could not remember when she had last had tea smelling of rain. She told herself she would get atleast three cups right away, to make up. Where, back home in Calcutta, would she find terracotta tea? No, it could be many years; she was certain she wanted to drink three cups.
Or should it be two? She had a tiny sugar problem. Not yet diabetes, but she needed to be careful: her father had had diabetes.
As she dithered, Latika said, “Look, isn’t that the guide who was showing us around the temple yesterday?”
“What? Oh yes, you’re right, it is! Yes, Badal,” Gouri said happily. “Let’s go and –”
“He’s a strange fellow – so silent and contemptuous – if he smiled a little he wouldn’t look bad.”
“He’s not strange, Latika. He’s not silent. On the scooter, when we were going to the temple, he told me all about himself. We had such a lovely chat. His father died when he was a child and his uncle stole everything he should have inherited and now he makes him do the work and takes away his money.”
“How did you find all that out?” Latika began, but Gouri had started off towards the tea stall with a smile ready on her face to greet Badal. Midway, she stopped. From a distance she could overhear an altercation between him and the vendor. Latika caught up with her and grabbed her arm. “Don’t rush off like that into the crowd, I’ll lose you.”
“I’m not his mother or father,” the stall man was saying. “He can go to hell.”
“But where could he have gone? What if something’s happened to him? He’s just a boy.” Badal’s voice was anguished.
“A boy! And I’m a baby born yesterday, aren’t I? What is it to you if he hasn’t come? You don’t pay him, do you?”
“Pay him?” Badal stammered. “Why would I –”
“What would you pay him for? The money going down the drain is mine. He’s a waste of time, Babu. Look at me: now I have to wash the pans, make tea, collect money, attend to people – everything – did I hire the boy just so I would do his work for him?” He spotted Gouri faltering a few feet away. “Babu, I have customers, I’ve work to do.”
Badal turned and saw the customers Johnny Toppo was getting agitated about. He looked away to avoid meeting their eye. The garrulous fat one who had sat on his scoot
er the day before – the woman’s mouth opened and shut like a frog’s all the time and words, words, words, endless words spewed out. Pointless observations, prying questions. And that thin red-haired one who had mocked him at the temple. There were questions he needed to ask Johnny Toppo about Raghu, who had not been seen since the night Badal had spotted him with the monk. But not now, not with these women around. He walked off swiftly as Johnny Toppo shouted past him, “Chai! Chaaai!” putting on a kind smile for the two women to forestall a migration to some other stall.
Gouri had already decided to have his tea, however, and now she hurried towards him in her wobbling, lopsided way. She leaned against his handcart and called out, “Look, Latika, clay cups!”
Latika followed saying, “I’d give anything for some coffee.”
“Didi, biscuits? Will you have some biscuits also? Sweet and salt, jeera and elaichi?” Johnny Toppo pointed to the jars he had on his cart. His tea bubbled in a big dented saucepan that was leathery with old layers of burnt grease. A rag stained to dirty brown bandaged its handle. Johnny Toppo held the pan high up as he poured from it into the clay cups that he had lined up in a row. A finger of pale froth formed against the rims of the cups. It was a trick he had devised over years of practice, to half-fill the cups this way with froth.
Latika blew on her hot tea, dipped a chunky biscuit into it. It had an earthy crunch different from the packaged biscuits at home. Should she buy some to take with her? Of course it would not taste the same if it were eaten sitting alone at the coffee table in her seventh-floor flat, waiting for the phone to ring. It was different eating it here, out in the windy open, with Gouri next to her and the teaman crying “Chai, Chai!” every now and then. Soon the sun would begin its dip into the sea and the day would be over. She would not think of that. Gouri murmured, “The days go so fast.”
Johnny Toppo had no other customers. Even so, he kept stirring the pan of milky brown tea on his stove, his way of telling the world he was still in business. He talked to himself in a mutter. “I’ll sack the bastard, pity is the root of all trouble.” Then, switching thoughts, he hummed lines of songs that Latika tried to follow, blocking out Gouri’s chatter and every other sound. Was he singing of a village? Where was it?
Emerald green are the paddy fields, my love,
Black is the back of the crow,
But nothing is as dark or as deeply black
As those eyes that look at me now.
Your eyes are the light of my life, my love,
I am tied in the strands of your hair,
That red flower bush by the stream, my love,
It’s for you. I planted it there.
Latika wanted to ask him – why should she not ask him?
“Is that a folk song?”
“Ah Ma, it is nothing, I make these things up in my head.” Johnny Toppo laughed his gap-toothed laugh. “And they all have the same tune. There is only that one tune. It’s a tune from my village.”
He turned away, busying himself with soaking a stack of new clay cups in his bucket. Latika wondered why he wore a thick twist of cloth around his neck even when the day was so hot. That was another thing she wanted to ask him, but she could not.
“Mostly, you know, Ma,” he said over his shoulder, “I don’t even know what I’m singing. I never sang before, not until I left everything and came here.” He laughed again, his face creased, his eyes turned into lines between his crow’s feet, and Latika wanted to sit on his bench and ask him, What about the woman in the song? Who is she? Where has she gone?
But Johnny Toppo now had other customers and was asking if they wanted the sweet biscuits or the salty ones in exactly the tones he had put those questions to Latika and Gouri. Latika turned away, disappointed that his voice was so indiscriminately distributed. Her discontent returned and she wished again that her tea were coffee.
It was when they were drinking their second cups of tea that Latika tugged at Gouri’s hand and whispered, “Isn’t he . . .?”
For a while, Gouri couldn’t tell what Latika had seen. “Who are you talking about?” And at that moment, she saw.
It was Vidya’s son, Suraj, idling at one of the stands. With a girl. The stallkeeper urged trinkets upon them, picking up one thing, then another. Latika saw him thrust by turn a stone temple, a sea lion, and a key-ring at the girl. Then a long shell necklace. The girl stared at it as if she had never seen a necklace before, turned away abruptly. The stallkeeper offered it to Suraj next, seeming to coax him into buying it. After some resistance, Suraj dug into his pocket, paid the man, then followed the girl. He held the necklace out to her, got no reaction. He said something, touched her elbow. She seemed to pull herself back to the present. She smiled at him and took the necklace.
“That isn’t Ayesha, is it?” Gouri adjusted her glasses. “I’m sure Ayesha has short hair. But maybe I’m mistaken. I have a bad memory for faces.”
“Of course it isn’t Ayesha, can’t you see?” Ayesha, Vidya’s daughter-in-law, was at least ten years older and ten kilos heavier than this chit of a girl who was now fingering the shells on the necklace.
“Can’t you see, Gouri! It’s the girl who was with us in the train!”
“In the train? What train?”
“God, Gouri! In our compartment! The train in which we came from Calcutta. That girl – you even spoke to her, you exchanged seats – the girl in our compartment who got off and never came back. Remember?”
Suraj and the girl began to stroll towards the tea stall and the women started away from it in a confused hurry. Johnny Toppo ran after them, scolding, “My money, my money!”
“We were going to have one more cup,” Latika said to him. “We weren’t leaving.” She searched her bag with an urgent hand for the right amount of money, keeping an eye on Suraj, telling Gouri to carry on ahead, placating the vendor as he eyed a wavering pair of customers at his stall and complained, “Quickly. My boy hasn’t come today, I’m managing alone.”
On their way back to the hotel the two women didn’t speak, too full of things to say. When they reached the hotel’s gate they looked at each other and Latika said, “Not a word about this. We can’t spoil the holiday for Vidya.”
“But Latika, maybe the girl’s just a friend of his. I thought she smiled politely, nothing more. You know how friendly children are with each other these days. Why the other day when –”
“Friendly! What’s she doing walking on the beach with a married man, making him buy her necklaces? Didn’t you see how come-hither she looked?”
“No, she didn’t. Really, Latika, you’re making too much of it.” Gouri said in a soothing voice. “Just because your –”
She stopped herself, but it was too late. Latika’s lips had tightened, her face had crumpled as if someone had let the air out of her. She straightened her back, said, “Never mind me.” She took a breath to steady herself. “Vidya doesn’t need to know about this right now. Forget that this ever happened.”
But would she? There was something perverse about Gouri’s amnesia, it had an unfailing way of making her blab about the wrong things. This time Latika wished she could put cards into Gouri’s handbag to remind her to forget: not just Suraj and the girl, but also her own husband’s escapade with his student. Such a wretchedly stupid thing to have confided in Gouri of all people! She had of course counselled refuge in God and told her that every misfortune hid a blessing. And ever since, brought up the topic when Latika least expected it. It was thirty-one years ago. Yet the merest mention of those two months in her life turned the lights off inside her.
The good humour in Gouri’s plump face had evaporated and she nodded at Latika solemnly. “You’re right. What mothers have to put up with! There’s no need for her to know about this now. First that boy married a girl Vidya didn’t like. Remember how upset she was when he said Ayesha was years older than him? And now he’s romancing another one half his age.” If they let slip what they had seen, Vidya would be thrown into an i
mmediate turmoil of shame and anxiety. She had never cared for her son’s wife, she had often wished her away, true. But to chance upon her son with a lover on their own beach! For all they knew the fellow might be at the next hotel. What if he was in the same hotel, doing god-knows-what down the corridor?
Latika pushed her glasses up her nose and shook her head as if to reorder her mind. She would not allow herself to dwell upon long-ago things. She must live in the present. Suraj. Yes, she must focus on Suraj. She had known him from when he was a toddler, she had shared Vidya’s jittery delight when he first climbed the steep stairs of her old house. Through his boyhood Latika had taught him how to recite lines from poems. When he first began to act in school plays, she had gone to all of them, clapped hard. They had thought he would be a famous actor. She had given him singing lessons. Suraj and her daughter, the same age, would stand next to each other, singing by her piano, both slightly off-key but persevering. He used to shut his eyes when he sang and frown until his little-boy forehead puckered like an old man’s. As a boy he was irresistible, the most popular in school, the one the girls followed around. He had a beautiful face, and she remembered how, in the light of the sunset that came in through the window by the piano, his cheeks turned orange, his light-brown hair on fire as if he had become the sun he was named after. Once, she had her husband photograph him like that and gave the picture to Vidya, framed. She had wanted to caption it, “Suraj in the Sun,” but it would have seemed too pat. The picture still stood on Vidya’s bedside table, its black and white turning to sepia.
Nothing in that photograph predicted the Suraj she had seen today, dopey-eyed, degenerate, flirting with a virtual teenager. The girl from their train. She had looked such a child. How deceptive appearances could be. “It’s true,” she murmured, “what they say. They grow up quicker in the West.”
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