I remember once we got mutton stew to eat for lunch. Why? We did not ask. Its gravy was dark brown and thick. There was a bone in my helping which I saved till the last. I sucked the marrow out of the bone. It slipped into my mouth and down my throat before I had tasted it properly. We never got meat again so I forgot the taste.
I remember the time when Champa was brought back by the police. She had gone to them when she ran away the second time and they brought her back because she was a ward of the ashram. She was dragged in by her plaits and locked up in a cottage. I remember the thorny rose branch which Bhola cut and took with him into the cottage. How he grinned at us standing outside and then went in and locked the door. We stood there with our eyes fixed on the cottage. There were banging and thumping sounds. Shouts, and then the screams for help so loud it was as if there was no sound in the world but Champa’s frenzy.
I remember the silences in between that only made her cries more terrible. When Bhola came out of the cottage his white lungi was flecked red. The rose branch was bloodied and bent.
I remember when Jugnu was locked up for a week with hardly any food. He could not stand up, he crawled on the ground when he was let out. He tried protecting his head with his hands. Bhola was kicking him. When he saw us he shouted, “Come on, you all, come and play football with this bastard.” We stood there in our coffee and cream school skirts and blouses and neat braids, rooted to the ground as Jugnu moaned in pain. Bhola screeched again, “Come on, I’m ordering you!” He kicked him again to show what he meant. I remember how Minoti, a girl with a deformed leg, prodded Jugnu in his stomach with her crutch. How Jui hit him with her geometry box, how the instruments inside the metal box rattled as she raised it and brought it down. How the box made a sound like stone hitting wood when she banged it on his head. How one girl stamped on his palm with her foot again and again with her teeth bared. I remember the way Bhola kept saying, “That’s the way! One more time! Break the fucker’s bones.”
I remember the first time I went to a church, somewhere in Italy. The coloured glass windows, the death-stench of incense and the enormous painted stone statues of Christ dripping blood, the priests in their robes. I ran down the aisle and out into the square and in the bright, hard day my head spun, my eyes went sun-blind and I threw up near the fountain. The tissue with which my foster mother wiped my face smelled of lavender.
I remember the day my first period came, at the ashram. I had just turned twelve. My legs were sticky with blood and there was a damp red patch on my sheets. I was put away in the hut where every girl who got her first period was locked up. My stomach, my back, my thighs, everything hurt. The pain made me throw up. It gave me a runny stomach. I sat all day looking out of the tiny window, waiting for someone to come, feeling desperately alone.
I will never forget what I saw when I was locked up that time. The smell of smoke. The huge whoosh of flames going up somewhere in the direction of the coconut grove. Drumming feet. Jugnu standing at my window, shouting, “Set the child free! Unlock that child, set this whole place on fire! Fire burns evil!” The girls told me later that when he saw me being locked up Jugnu had gone mad with rage. He had crept to my hut on two nights to open the door and let me out, but they had found him and beaten him half to death. The minute he could stand and walk again he went from tree to tree with a flaming torch. The dried up coconut fronds had needed only a touch to start burning.
I crouched by the window watching in the dark as Bhola and the others appeared, dragging Jugnu behind them. They tied him to a tree. And then they kicked and punched him. In the orange light of the flames I could tell that they were using rods, stones, feet, belts, and fists.
I remember I saw Guruji poking Jugnu with his feet in the end. I remember Guruji’s face in the firelight. It had no expression, as if his feet were nudging a sack of mud.
They carried Jugnu away. Maybe he was struggling still, or maybe he had become a dead weight at which the men were spitting out filthy curses. Did I really hear them? Did I dream it or see it? I cannot have seen it all, someone must have told me of the men grey and white in the moonlight, rushing down the sand towards a stormy sea. The sea from which Jugnu had come and all the rest of us had come, hidden in boat-holds. Nobody knew he had ever been here. Nobody would know he was gone again, forever.
On the seventh day of my confinement I was made to wash my hair with shampoo and bathe with a new bar of soap. The soap was pink and round. Padma Devi lined my eyes with kajal saying, “Can you see colours with black eyes? Or is everything black?” She gave me a set of new clothes. A long blue skirt with silver sequins and a blouse of darker blue printed with scarlet flowers.
I waited as I had been told, for Guruji to arrive and perform his rituals. The prayer bells rang at the puja hall. Midday. The conch shells. The end of prayers. The school bells. Lunchtime.
My hands were icy and my knees shook, I remember, counting the bells. I did not know why.
I remember how Guruji came in, locked the door, sat down and patted his thighs. How he stroked my legs as he spoke. How he told me I was a nun in the service of God. I was the chosen one. How he had always known there was something special about me and so, from the time I was seven, he had been training me for this day. He said again that he was God on earth and I would be purified by serving him. He held my face between his hands and stuck his greasy lips on my lips, pushed his tongue in. It felt like a wet snake. I remember the way he kept stroking my body at first over my clothes, then his hands went under them. I remember breaking away, trying to run, reaching the door, pulling a stool to it to unlatch it, and that when he stood up, he looked large enough to smash me against the wall.
My body felt as if it would tear into two when he forced my legs apart, then wider apart. He stuffed cloth into my mouth to stop me shouting for help. I remember my screams made no sound. There was blood. A burning between my legs. The sense that my body was being split open.
I remember how night after night I would run to a tap and sit under it, clothes and all, to wash it away: the smells, the touch, the bad taste in my mouth after Guruji summoned me to his room.
I remember how Piku was punished for not going to Guruji. They tied a big bag of dung to one of her ankles and she had to drag it with her wherever she went. She wasn’t allowed into the school or the dining hall. She ate outside, tied to that smelly sack , flies buzzing around. I remember how I was punished for trying to untie her: three days in the kennel shed, no food. The kennels had six dogs and their smell was close and sharp. The dogs growled at first. They came to me to sniff me with flattened ears and snarling lips. Later I slept among them, ate scraps from their bowls and when they licked my face their tongues were rough and their breath was hot. One of the dogs was called Pinto. He was red like a fox, with a pointy nose. He slept against me in the afternoons, his rear wedged into my stomach.
Sometimes, journalists would come to interview Guruji. They printed articles about the ashram which were pinned up on the walls of our school. My picture was in the paper once. We were a line of girls standing in front of a tree in the square between the classrooms and our dormitories. I was third from the right. I had two pigtails tied with ribbons. My face was sulky, my eyes were screwed up, I was knock-kneed. Guruji stood behind me. He was smiling his fatherly smile. I remember I could feel his flabby belly and his stump pushing against me between my shoulderblades. But you couldn’t tell that from looking at the picture.
The Fifth Day
Suraj woke at dawn and decided to go for a swim. There were only two days left for the work in Jarmuli to be finished and he had not swum once. Swimming in every new sea he encountered was one of his life’s unbreakable rituals, like making a boat every year or adding a dash of water to a malt whisky or taking the first drag from a cigarette only after a sip of coffee.
From his room he had to walk for ten minutes down brickbound hotel paths to reach the sea. He swivelled his shoulders and stretched his arms, drinking in the early morn
ing’s grey-blue. After he had flung aside his slippers and torn off his T-shirt he realised his mobile was in a pocket of his swimming trunks. He couldn’t go back to his room to put it there: the perfect air and light would last no more than another half hour. He scanned the beach for a safe spot to hide it. It was too expensive to risk leaving on the sand.
He saw Nomi’s favourite tea stall being set up. The bent old baldhead was placing blue benches along its front and had busied himself with kettles, pans, jars. A boy was walking towards the tea stall bent sideways by a heavy looking iron pail and further down, a monk was meditating in the water. There was nobody else. Making his way to the tea stall he asked the man if he would look after his things. He left his shirt and slippers in a heap on the bench, covering his mobile with them.
Suraj lay at first at the edge of the sand, fingers trailing in the white, lacy spume. Then he moved further in, lying on his stomach in the water, feeling the sand being sucked away from under him in the backwash, each time a little more, sending him further and further out. It had been four days of hard work – that girl was a workaholic, dogged beyond the call of duty. She had dragged him over every inch of Jarmuli. They had mapped out the whole town, walking every street to make notes about possible locations for shoots; they had visited shrines, big and small, and almhouses for indigent pilgrims; they had done bits of video recording in the kitchens of roadside shacks; they had gone out with fishermen in a boat, photographing as they cast their nets; they had taken night-time pictures in the red-light area and, dreaming of photography awards, Suraj had gone into a brothel to take more photographs on the sly. He was thrown out, and they were chased down the street by a pair of foul-mouthed pimps as they ran. He certainly needed a swim. Now there was only a sun temple left, and that would be their last assignment together this time.
Thoughts streamed in and out of him as he swam. He went back to the evening before, he and Nomi drinking again in their private garden at the hotel, she telling him about her visit to a village sculptor’s and he telling her about his afternoon with government babus sorting out permissions to film. He had sat with her sipping his whisky, smoking his cigarette, fiddling with his half-finished boat, thinking how pleasant it was to spend evenings this way, rather than alone as he was trying to get used to now. Nomi had turned out fun to be with after working hours. She changed. She cracked jokes, chattered about nothing in particular, and laughed at his stories until she had tears in her eyes. He liked that. It was sexy when she laughed that way, throwing her head back, helpless, showing a beautiful long neck. But now there were only a couple of days left. And after that? More internet searches?
By degrees, the swell of the waves was below him, and he was swimming with long strokes. There were no big waves, the water was gentle against his skin. A long distance from the shore he found the absolute solitude he had been hungering for at dawn. It was as if he had become a shark slicing through water unnoticed, no connection with human life. Across an infinite stretch of aquamarine was the arc of the horizon holding in the sea. Last night, after leaving Nomi in her garden, he had idled in bed, typing a text message to her which said, “The bottle’s finished, but the night is not.” He had neither sent it nor deleted it, and was now relieved he had not been drunk enough to send her such corny drivel. The future was obvious. She would go home to some Nordic hulk of a boyfriend and he would go back to divorce papers from Ayesha.
Floating on his back, he opened his eyes against the light. The sky was now a bright cobalt and an aeroplane crossed it miles above him, toy-sized. After the boat was done he would make a plane. He hadn’t told Nomi how in each of his boats he tucked in a letter to his father. Nobody knew about it. A handwritten note, barely legible, on a piece of paper that he then wrapped in cling-film and twisted into a roll that fitted inside the boat’s cabin. The letter would sink unseen, along with the boat, somewhere far away.
He felt weightless, his limbs loose and limp. Nomi’s story of missing her train came back to him. How she had said, “Don’t you feel like disappearing from your life sometimes?”
He stopped moving his legs, felt his feet fall away down, felt them pull him in after them. Something was sucking him downward and outward.
The dog he battered had lived. Lame, blinded in one eye, but alive. He had fed it scraps of meat and bowls of milk every day in atonement. The dog would drag itself away when he came with the food to its street corner. It would inch back to eat only when Suraj was out of sight.
He would not move his arms. He would not move at all. The sea could have him. Out there somewhere his wife was drinking beer, eating sandwiches, making love with his friend, and that dog was dying.
His legs followed his feet, his hips followed his legs. He sank further down. Nothing mattered any longer but this sense of letting go and never having to try again. Not his wife, not her lover, not the dog, not the first boat that he made at sixteen and sailed alone after his father died. When the water closed over him, all sound disappeared. Not another living thing in the world, nothing to go back to.
Just when his lungs felt as if they would blow up and he was about to open his mouth and let the water fill him and take him, he found he had instead erupted into the air gasping, coughing and flailing. He struggled to stay up, sank, let out a choking cry for help as he swallowed a bellyful of seawater. Thrashing around with all he had in him, he fought himself out of the water again. A boat had appeared from somewhere, it was bobbing next to him. It was painted green and yellow. Four fishermen were looking at him over its side, saying things he could not hear. One of the fishermen pushed an oar in his direction. He managed to get his hands on it.
He was dragged into the boat, fell against rusted tin and nets and ropes. The four men looked at him, pulled at their oars. He was very far from the shore, they said, these were dangerous waters with strong undertows and people were often sucked under. The fishermen were bare-bodied, their arms were sinews and muscles and veins held in by parchment-skin. Each man wore a head-cloth against the sun. It was more than half way up the sky now, fierce enough already to have burnt away the dawn.
Suraj sat gasping for breath, listening to the fishermen cackling about their lousy luck, tossing insults and jokes back and forth. After an entire night at sea all they had caught was a man! What’s a man good for, eh? Can you eat a man? Can you fry it and feed it to your children? Now a fish: you can use all parts of a fish from its head to its fins to its tail. You can chew on its spine. You can fry its roe or eat your rice with its oil. The tiny ones you can eat whole: heads, bones, eyes and all, fried to a salty crunch. Fish can swim and sing and fly, they can even kill men. If not fish, a woman was a better find. If you fish a woman out of the water you can lay her or sell her or set her to work. But what use is a man? If you had netted a man you might as well throw him back in.
One of the fishermen pointed at him and said, “You’ll be back as a big fish in your next life. And we’ll catch you.”
The boat stank of fish and kerosene oil. Suraj could see damp boards, cans and rags, a tangle of dead squid in a net. The oars sliced the water with slow splashes. One of the fishermen bared a mouthful of yellow teeth and said, “Wanted to die? There are better ways.” Suraj heard their words as if from far away. His head was brimming with water.
When they reached the shore the men forgot all about him, busying themselves hauling their boat in, unloading their nets. The beach was more crowded with early morning walkers and fisherwomen. Suraj needed to find that tea stall, but did not know which way to go. Sand in both directions, infinity curving inward and out. Where was his hotel? He had thought he had swum straight, but he must have gone far out in a diagonal. Nothing was familiar on this stretch. He sat on the ground, limp as a puppet without its strings. He could not move, not yet. He watched the fishermen. It was hard work, pulling in those heavy nets and ropes, tugging and rolling in unison. Their teeth jutted out in their thin faces as they grimaced with the effort. They were like their own boats
, bony spines for keels, ribs for frames.
He watched them until the sun had dried the seawater on him into sparkling, itchy salt crystals. When they had finished their work and were about to leave he went up to one of them and said, “I’ve got no money on me now, but tell me the way to the hotels and if one of you comes with me, I want to, I mean . . .” He had nothing but the trunks he was wearing, he was crippled without his clothes and mobile. He wished he had his wallet and could give them all the money in it.
When one of the men had taken him back to the tea stall he found his clothes in a heap on the bench, where he had left them. The phone was gone. Johnny Toppo said, “Babu, what do I know? I didn’t touch that bundle. You left it, I was serving customers. The bundle was there – nobody came near it.” Then something seemed to occur to him and he yelled “Raghu!”
Far down in the other direction, Suraj could see that the boy who had been struggling with an iron bucket was now talking to a man – he could not be sure, but he thought it was the surly guide with the long red fingernail, the fellow who had taken him through the temple. They paid no attention to Johnny Toppo’s shout. Suraj felt a deep fatigue overtake him and sat down on the sand to wait.
Johnny Toppo strode forward, cupped his mouth with his palms and yelled at the top of his voice. “Raghu! You little prick. Are you deaf? I swear today’s your last day with me, I swear it. I’ve had enough.”
This time the boy appeared to hear Johnny Toppo. He left the guide in mid-sentence and ran towards the tea stall, arrived panting. Johnny Toppo snarled, “Take your time, you’ll have plenty now that you’re sacked. This Babu left his telephone with his clothes here, have you seen it?”
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