He thought of his only friend at the time – a boy who lived down the alley. They walked together to school, studied and played together. Once, crawling through an unused sewer pipe by the road for fun, they had come face to face with the head of a just-slaughtered goat that someone was holding at the other end. Its teeth were big. Its eyes bulged. Its pelt was lathered to its neck with blood. The head shook because the person holding it was laughing so hard he couldn’t keep it still. When the two boys had tried crawling away from it, backward through the pipe, fright had made them do all the wrong things and they had got stuck inside. He no longer remembered how they came unstuck, how they got out. But he remembered how gently his friend’s mother had washed his face that afternoon, then sat him on her lap and fed him soft, warm parathas and sugar before sending him home.
He felt starved thinking of those parathas. He had not eaten since morning. He hauled himself out of his cot and went to the kitchen on the other side of the courtyard. He opened the latch on the kitchen door and saw a row of shin ing, upturned pots. In the basket where his aunt stored vegetables were three potatoes and an onion. The room smelled of overripe guava. He tracked down the smell to a single fruit, soft as a banana now, and blackened in patches. He swallowed it in two bites before its putrid smell could invade him. He looked around the kitchen. Through the mesh on the cupboard in a corner he could see three covered bowls of food. The cupboard was locked. He yanked the lock to check if it would give. That hammer began driving the burning nail through his forehead again. The lock would not budge. He went to the line of tins on the kitchen shelf and opened them one by one – rice, flour, dal – weevils crawling among the grains of rice. A bottle of oil.
He saw his hand pour the oil onto the floor, then empty out the rice and flour and sweep through the line of washed pots. They fell with a deafening series of clangs. He turned on his heels as his uncle began screaming, “Jadua, the cat! It can’t be the cat! Thief! Stop the thief!” Badal knew that if he had found a box of matches, he would have thrown the kerosene stove to the floor and put a flame to it.
He went to his room only to pick up his scooter keys and the tin box where he had, years ago, hidden away his father’s spectacles and rosary, a Swiss army knife, and a pocket-sized glass model of the Taj Mahal. An afterthought propelled him to his cupboard and he collected a few clothes and the papers and chequebook for the bank account his uncle knew nothing about.
On his way out he uprooted what remained of the shiuli he had planted.
He burst out of the door, slammed it behind him, stuffed everything he had taken into the basket of the scooter and kicked it alive. The roar of its rackety old engine made his muscles jangle to his fingertips.
He had gone only a few hundred yards when he had second thoughts and skidded to a halt.
The scooter’s wheels scooped up some more dust as he turned and made his way back down the road, retracing his journey, slower this time. He came to a halt near the old woman’s shrine. A wisp of smoke trailed from the incense the woman had lit. Badal touched his head to the floor before the tiny idols inside the shrine and saw that the images were decorated with red roses today.
The woman who tended the shrine was balled up in her usual place on the pavement, in the shadow of the neem tree. Her spectacles were askew, she had fallen asleep without taking them off. A thread of drool shone in the trench that went from her lips to her chin and it had collected in a damp patch on the bundle she had placed under her head as a pillow. Three thick white hairs sprouted from a spot on her chin like the roots on an onion. Her steel plate lay beside her, in its usual place on the pavement. It held five rose petals and a rupee coin.
Badal took his wallet from its usual place in the left pocket of his kurta. It had a hundred and fifty rupees. Keeping no more than a few tens and twenties for himself, he emptied the rest of his money onto her plate. Then the thought struck him that the money might be stolen while she slept. He had a sudden irrational urge to wake her, bundle her onto his scooter, take her with him. Instead, he picked up the plate and edged it into the shrine for her to find when she woke.
*
The Sun Temple’s parking lot was a square of baking grey cement patrolled by a sun-shrivelled attendant who stopped giving Suraj meaningful looks after his first few glances at the packet of cigarettes went unacknowledged. The excitable clamour of tourists and guides was no more than a distant murmur here. Suraj perched on a low wall shaded by the bulk of a four-wheel drive. He counted the dents on the car, speculating about their causes. The owners must be slobs: the car was dirty both inside and out, muddy and scratched. His own car, when he could buy something that wasn’t a dinky Korean toy, would gleam, it would smell of leather. He would never smoke inside it. He had always wanted a four-wheel drive – a real, heavy, roaring Jeep whose top could be rolled away so you could drive with the wind in your face. He would drive to Ladakh in that Jeep, right from Bangalore, taking a month, maybe more, wandering coasts and forests along the way, foraging for food in wayside dhabas, picking up hitchhikers, letting them go, stopping when tired, then carrying on, filming the journey.
If he had told her about it, Ayesha would have called it another of his schemes to run away from life – as if life were something that you had to grit your teeth against and endure. She said he was an escape artist – when all he wanted was the freedom to just be, to come and go without a hundred accusatory questions from strident wives and anxious mothers. He lied to them both for no reason at all sometimes, merely to feel himself free. Why shouldn’t he tell his mother he was in Hyderabad when in fact he was in Jarmuli?
It struck him that he should call Nomi. He had left her so suddenly up there on the way to the tallest tower, shooting off like a bullet the minute he sighted Latika Aunty holding hands with a stranger. Maybe Nomi hadn’t heard him when he told her he would wait for her in the car. What if she thought he was going to come back to the ruins for her? He slid his hand into his pocket for his phone.
It wasn’t there. Of course. It had been stolen on the beach that morning.
He got up from his wall and found his driver chatting nearby in a knot of other waiting drivers. He borrowed the man’s phone – then was stumped trying to recall Nomi’s number. He had never needed to memorise it.
He retreated to the warm shade of their hired car and sat inside it, sweating, wondering if he should go back and find her – but if he went back he would very likely bump into his mother and her friends. He decided to wait. He fidgeted, drank some water, smoked a cigarette. He thought he would stretch out on the car seat and take a nap, but it was full of things. He stowed away a tube of Nomi’s sunscreen and bottles of water. One of the many elastic bands she used for her hair lay on the seat too. It had a plastic daisy on it. He slipped it round his wrist like a bangle to give her later.
Then his hands fell on her computer. She had left her laptop in the car. He sat tapping the lid, listening to his nail on its surface, a metallic sound. It had a sleek body, slim and light. He had never seen one of these machines, they had just come out. He opened the lid. He shut it again. Should he go on?
What if she happened to arrive just then and saw him? She would be furious he was snooping. But he wanted to snoop. He had to know: where had she disappeared to that morning when she abandoned him at the Vishnu temple? And then yesterday, when he thought they would go together to clear a few permissions to shoot, she had made an excuse and not come back till the evening, when she came up with that cock and bull story of going to see a sculptor.
He opened the laptop’s lid again. There was the lit screen – she hadn’t even shut the machine down and he had to tap no password to access the files. Really, people as careless as her deserved what was coming to them. His fingers revelled in the familiar pleasure of trackpad and keys. He navigated her machine swiftly and surely. He was good with computers, it took him seconds to find his way around new ones. He opened her photo application and found it empty. That was odd. He had nev
er come across people who didn’t store pictures on their machines. He started up her e-mail programme – it wasn’t configured. That meant she used e-mail off the internet, but since there was no connection here, he wouldn’t be able to see what she did on the net.
He began searching her folders. Quite a lot of notes and writing – he couldn’t linger too much on those – she might come back. There was a folder named after him. He paused over that, but it contained only copies of his own e-mails to her.
The door of the car clicked open and Suraj slammed the laptop shut, his mind racing to find explanations to give. “I was hunting for your phone number,” he would say. That was the most plausible.
But it wasn’t Nomi. It was the driver. “We should go,” the driver said. “It’s getting late, we have a long way to go and it’ll get dark. We can’t wait any more. There are buses from here also – she must have gone back to Jarmuli on one of those.”
Suraj agreed with the driver – she must have misunderstood and taken a bus. Why else was she taking so long? The car slid out from its slot in the parking lot, the air conditioner came back on, and its first cool currents made Suraj sigh with relief. He opened the laptop, this time with no sense of urgency or stealth. He tapped the trackpad.
*
Latika seemed to be in the grip of a curious exhilaration for hours after her visit to the ruins at the Sun Temple. She swatted away Vidya’s questions about Suraj. “You know how confused Gouri is about faces! She thought she saw him, but it was someone else entirely. Who was it, Gouri?” She insisted she would sit in the front seat on the way back because she had felt squashed between Vidya and Gouri during the drive from the hotel. She ignored Vidya’s troubled glances and chattered on, even with the driver who was really the hotel’s manager. He was no longer the taciturn man who had driven them out, and Vidya caught snatches of their conversation from the back, the two of them sounding as comfortable as old friends. At times they heard Latika humming “Are you lonesome tonight” in her husky voice which an admirer had once described as sand and smoke. When they stopped midway to look at a confluence of river and sea, Latika walked into the mirror-still water, unconcerned about wetting clothes and sandals. She would not come out of there until Vidya said, “Really, Latika, be reasonable, it’s getting dark.”
The rest of the drive down the highway was suffused with a sense of things ending. Vidya was already tense about her electricity bill. She was sure it had come by now and if the bill wasn’t paid on time she might lose her connection. And then? In a few minutes her mind felt as if it were an undone skein of wool: impossible to find the beginning or end of the problem of the unpaid bill. The car speeded down the last of the twilit roads and secretive trees. “At day’s end, like the hush of dew comes evening,” Gouri murmured to herself. “The kite wipes the scent of sunlight from its wings.” She could not remember the next few lines or where she had read the poem. Perhaps at college. After a moment some snatches came back to her and she whispered, “All birds come home, all rivers, all of life’s tasks finished, only darkness remains.” Looking out of the window she said sadly, “It’s over so soon.” They were approaching street lights, cars, buildings, Jarmuli’s market.
“It’s not! Let’s get off at the bazaar! I don’t feel like the hotel yet.” Latika twisted herself back to look at them. “Come on now, you two, let’s have some fun.”
“Aren’t you tired?” Vidya said. “We can go tomorrow. We were there just yesterday.” The sense of misgiving which had taken root in her after hearing that Gouri had caught sight of her son weighed her down, and tired her out. First her ill health, then that molten sun pouring down on her head all afternoon, then Suraj. She tried reminding herself of the many times Gouri had confused one person with another. But the same thought went around her brain in concentric circles that tightened into an aching noose. Why had her son followed her to Jarmuli? Did he need to speak to her about something? But then they had spoken the morning she left, when she had phoned him. Had she imagined his unease, his attempt to hang up minutes after she called? He had been sounding evasive and abrupt for many months – one had to be grateful he answered his phone at all, which was more than she could say of her daughter-in-law, Ayesha.
Latika was still urging them to stop the car and get off at the bazaar. “Let’s, please!” she begged them like a child. “We can take rickshaws back to the hotel, it’s only ten minutes away. It’s such a lovely evening.” Vidya drew breath to snap at her, then counted, as she had taught herself, a slow fifteen. “Fine,” she said after her pause. “Fine, we’ll do as you want.”
They were in a dilemma about the driver’s tip and held urgent whispered consultations. How did one deal with a tip when he was not really a driver but the manager of the hotel? It was difficult conferring when he was inches away, listening. Ultimately, Latika whispered, “Gift, gift,” and they got off. Now that there was a purpose to the market trip, Vidya did not feel as irascible, and after a long cold gulp of a fizzy drink her anxieties over Suraj and the electricity bill receded.
*
After leaving his uncle’s house for the last time, Badal drove out of town towards the Sun Temple, down Marine Road, shaded by the casuarina trees that flanked it. It was a lonely stretch, close neither to Jarmuli nor to the huddles of earth and straw that made up the dismal villages which lived off the temple. At one point, where he sighted an opening in the foliage and a pale stretch of sand, he abandoned his scooter and walked down to the shore. White-topped rollers came crashing in, a wind had risen in the orange sky.
Why had Raghu shown not a sign – not the tiniest flicker – that their afternoon by the boat had meant something to him as well? The cruelty of his indifference opened an abyss inside him. It wasn’t indifference alone, there was ridicule as well. He could not stop himself thinking about it. He reworked every second of their togetherness into separate images, as in a slide show, as though this would keep him from losing them. He wanted to throw himself into a thorn bush, cut himself with a razor, smash his toes with a stone – anything to fight pain with pain. He stood by the sea and the song Johnny Toppo had been droning that morning played in his head:
Where is my mud-brown hut?
My young guava tree?
Where’s the black cow that came
When I called her to me?
Where is that pretty stream
As blue as the pure blue skies?
The only streams I know now
Flow from my two sad eyes.
He sat on the sand, head in his hands, clutching his hair, trying to drive the song and his headache away. Once he had asked Johnny Toppo, “Can’t you sing a happy song? Why are all your songs so gloomy?” And Johnny Toppo had said, “They aren’t sad for me. They’re all I have left of my world. I’ve no cameras like these tourists – clicking all the time. Smile, smile! Click!” He had tapped his forehead. “I keep it all here. It makes me happy to remember.”
“So what was your world?” Badal had asked him. “Tell me, why don’t you?” Johnny Toppo had turned away. After a while he had said, “I sell tea, I was born ten years after the great earthquake in Bihar, I live in a tarpaulin shack, I have nobody, nothing to worry about, nothing to lose. I’m happy I’m above the water and below the sky and I’ve got beeris to smoke and a half-bottle to drink. I know from the songs in my head that I used to have another life long ago. That’s all there is to say about me, Babu.”
In the far distance, across the water, a line of lights glimmered. Fishing trawlers, living their secret lives. The lights dipped, disappeared, came back. Their nets went deep down to the floor of the sea. They would be at work all night, trapping and killing thousands of gasping creatures.
Badal had had a trick since childhood, of sitting by the sea with his back to it. He would position himself close enough for the waves to wet him with spray, knowing that if a big breaker came it might sweep him out to sea. He knew all about waves and currents, about riptides formed by winds hundre
ds of miles away that sucked swimmers under or sluiced away people standing on the shore. If you fought the current and tried swimming back against it, you would drown. The thing to do was not to oppose it but to fool it and swim away from it, in a diagonal. Badal had seen the washed up corpses of those who had battled the currents and lost. But he still sat with his back to the water, as if at the edge of a cliff, playing with death.
A wave crashed onto the beach and he moved away from long instinct. The nearby waves told him which ones would come further inland than the rest. Still, this one had managed to wet the bottom half of his clothes. Two more waves followed, lapping at him. At times he wanted to stop their rush and roar, freeze them mid-charge for a moment’s stillness. To know how absolute silence sounded.
He grew tired of his game and turned to sit facing the sea. He had grown up beside it, yet its endlessness was a thing his mind could not come to grips with. This coast he was sitting on – going towards the Dolphin Hotel, the Swirling Sea Hotel, past Vishnupada Road and the Vishnu temple and beyond it to Grand Road and the market and Matri Mandir and the Kanakot highway – went onward, curving voluptuously past the tigers and honeycombs of the Sundarbans towards Burma, and downward towards Pondicherry, where the same water flowed, and the same winds that blew here blew there too, pushing that water into waves that travelled towards the southernmost tip of this tongue-shaped country before they curved upward again on their journey past Bombay and Goa to Karachi and Iran, Arabia and Egypt – names from dreams and textbooks.
Jarmuli radiated outward to Asia, the world, the solar system, the universe – it was every child’s incantation in school, and even now, when he wanted to be out of the reach of his aunt and uncle, he dreamed of living on Jupiter and sleeping under its many moons. When his teacher had told their class it had sixteen moons he had wanted to ask her if this meant that there was a full moon on Jupiter every night. Or were there crescent moons and half moons and round moons all at once in that other sky?
Sleeping On Jupiter Page 18