Sleeping On Jupiter

by Roy, Anuradha

  I went quiet. I could not get out without Champa, I knew nobody in the world outside. Champa was older. Because she had escaped before and been caught she knew what not to do. She said that during her time in the hospital she had found out about a home for girls like us, abandoned or orphaned. They would tell nobody about us, they would look after us.

  Now that freedom seemed within reach, Piku, I could not let it go. I began to think our only chance was if I managed to get out. Then I would come back for you.

  “I’ve heard they find parents for children at these girls’ homes, rich parents. Parents abroad. It’ll be a different life,” Champa said when we were sitting side by side one evening making garlands from a pile of jasmine. It was almost time for the puja and we had to have all the garlands done and ready in another half hour. My red thread flew in and out of the white jasmine at the ends of fat needles while Champa whispered the details of our escape to me.

  I said, “Those adoption things must be for babies. I’m twelve. You’re fifteen. Who’s going to adopt us? We’ll just get caught and have to come back.”

  “If you don’t want to come, don’t come. I’ll find another way of leaving.”

  *

  The manure van used to come from far away a few times a year. I can’t recall how often. I felt as if scarcely a month passed between each delivery of cowdung and sodden leaves. Since Jugnu went, it had been my job to unload the van. I shovelled the manure with a spade into a smaller basin that I carried on my head just as he used to, and tipped it out into a heap by the shed. It took me two days. At about six in the evening on the second day, the driver came to where I was working and stood watching me. “How much longer? She looks like a stick and tries to do the work of a man,” he said. “That bastard Bhola has no brains. I should’ve been out of here hours ago.” He spat a red stream towards the basin I was filling.

  He went off to the hut where Bhola and the others were smoking and drinking. “Call someone to help,” he shouted, “I need to get going in an hour.”

  This was as Champa had planned. I waited for Bhola to say I could get someone else to help.

  In a minute, Bhola’s voice: “Go get someone. Move that skinny ass.”

  I shouted, “Is anyone there? Is that you, Champa? Can you come here? I need help.” She had been waiting nearby.

  She ran towards the van saying, “What do you want? Don’t expect me to do all the heavy work!”

  The two of us scurried about emptying the van. There were still five sacks left to unload. My legs trembled and my arms shook as I struggled back and forth with the basin. Our heads and bodies stank of manure. My hair was crawling with dung beetles.

  Before the driver came back, Champa and I hid ourselves under the heap of empty sacks in the back of the van, among the rest of his junk. There was a spare tyre, empty liquor bottles, flower pots meant for delivery to some other place. I was suffocating under the scratchy sacks. They smelled of rotted dung. Bugs and ants crawled over me. I was itching all over, but we had to keep still. It felt days, those minutes of waiting. I thought people would start looking for us at the ashram. There was a desperate moment during the wait when I thought I could run back, fetch you, Piku, and smuggle you into the van as well. There was enough space, and you would have taken up so little. But it was too late: we could hear the driver coming. He came towards the back. Then we heard him lurch off towards the front and get into the seat. The door banged shut. The van jolted forward. Long minutes later it came to a halt. We heard the scraping of metal, the clank of latches and chains. A voice said, “Still here? Want to spend the night or what?”

  The driver said, “Nope, I can find better chicks out in the city. More flesh on them.” They tittered and someone thumped the side of the van. It sounded like a bomb blast inside, where we were. You would have started screaming for sure, Piku. You were always scared of loud sounds. The van began to rumble along again. There were jolts and bumps that threw us against each other.

  I cried all the way in that van, thinking of the smile on your face the evening before when I stroked your knobbly legs and arms in the way that always soothed you. I kept telling you I would come back for you. Did you understand that? I was the only person who knew what you were trying to say with your whimpers and squeals. That evening you made no sounds at all.

  The van stopped after quite a while. I did not know why or for how long it would stop, but Champa poked her face out of the sacks, then stabbed me in the ribs with her fingers and said, “Out. Get out.” The two of us had barely scrambled out from the back when the van started again. It trundled ahead and then it was gone. It took only a few seconds.

  My knees felt weak. My eyes were blinded by the beep-beep-beep of horns. A woman’s high-pitched voice was sing ing on a loudspeaker. Bright, white headlights from cars. And people – I had never seen so many people. I didn’t know the world had so many people in it. They didn’t pause for two scrawny children fighting their way down a street.

  Champa held my hand and dragged me towards a line of auto-rickshaws. She pushed me in and she told the driver where to go. The auto-rickshaw began to move. Then moved faster. We were breathing open, fresh air. Gas lamps peppered with insects hung over hand-carts selling everything from boiled eggs to hot parathas. And in the distance, all along the road, was a frill of white foam on black cloth – the sea that Jugnu had told us was very close.

  The sea he had been thrown into.

  Champa had told me what to say when we reached the girls’ home. We were cousins. We had no parents. Our uncle used to beat us and so we had run away. We had enough scars and bruises and cigarette burns for this to be convincing. “Not a word about the ashram,” Champa said. “Everyone rich and famous is his disciple, they all think he’s a god. They’ll never believe anything bad about him. They’ll take us straight back there and then we’ll be dead, like Jugnu.”

  “What about Piku? What about the other girls? We can’t just leave them there. We should tell the truth.”

  “Just stop being such a saint,” Champa snarled. “I’ll throw you out of this auto right now.”

  I spoke to you in my head then. I speak to you in my head all the time. Do you know the taste of betrayal? How would you know it? It’s as if your clothes are full of sand, so full of sand that the grains bite you and pierce you and scratch you. You shake out your clothes, you wash them, you wash yourself, but even then, days later, years later, in the crevices of your toes, in the lining of the pockets, the grains pierce you. They’re unbearable, those grains that don’t go away whatever you do. You no longer know the real from the nightmare. Your heart, mind, mouth, everything is filled with sand.

  For a month, maybe three or six months, I stayed at the girls’ home. They put Champa somewhere else soon after we got there. I don’t know where she went – to another home or to a family. The home never told anyone where its children were being sent. I did not see her again. They had told me that they would soon send me off as well. They were hoping to find foster parents for me. Nobody would know about me either. Not even you, Piku.

  I did not talk about the ashram to them, but I wrote. All day I wrote. Half the evening I wrote. I used an exercise book with many pages. I wore out pencils. I started with the day my father was killed and wrote everything I could remember. I wrote especially about you. I wrote about how you would die if you were left in the ashram because of the way you were.

  When I had finished writing, I kept the book safe until it was time. I was to be sent off to my new home: first to Delhi, then to some other country. A happy future, they told me, with a woman who had waited a long time to adopt a child.

  I stole out of the home the day before I was to be sent to Delhi. I had taken down a newspaper’s address from the copy of it that came to the home every day. It was the same newspaper that had written about us once – the article which had a picture of me and some of the other girls with Guruji. I had pasted together sheets from the exercise book to make an envelope an
d written the newspaper’s name on it, then put in my exercise book and stuck my envelope fast with glue. I walked more than an hour, asking every second person on the road for directions, and found my way to the newspaper office. After a moment’s panic that I would lose the book if I let go, I dropped it into the big letter box at the gates of the office. It fell in with a hard thump.

  I wrote that for you, Piku, so they would read it and get you out of there, and get the others out of there. They would come to know what went on in the ashram, then they would go and see for themselves.

  *

  Out there, far away, years later, I found a picture of Guruji on the internet and glued it to a wall. I looked him in the eye every day, I stuck pins into his face. He will not scare me again, not from a distance, nor when I stand face to face in the same room with him and say I was there: I was there from the start, I know everything. In my dreams I tell everyone the truth, I leave nothing out, even if it makes me sick to the stomach.

  You are standing beside me. You haven’t changed at all. You cannot speak, but you still smile the same way.

  *

  It was when Latika had worked through half the vodka that a radio somewhere began to play an old Geeta Dutt song. “Piya aiso jiya mein samae gayo re, ki main tun-mun ke sudh-budh gawa baithee,” the voice from years ago sang. “My lover has so dissolved into my being / That I have lost all control over my mind and body.”

  She was sitting alone in the hotel verandah. Below the verandah were the tops of young palm trees and beyond, the sea, which heaved and sighed. The fronds of the coconut palms were tossed in the rising wind. After the heat of the day, the mild night air spread a gentle languor through her limbs. Her head felt as if someone was slowly, very slowly, stuffing it with clouds. The whoosh of the sea became a roar in her ears.

  They had come back from the market without Gouri. The day had ended in calamity. Latika tried to digest what had happened, but her thoughts kept wandering and Vidya’s voice, when it came, came from far away. What was she saying? Something about getting things under control, organising a search party. The hotel manager had gone with a few other men, driving around to look for Gouri. Jarmuli was a small town, they were sure they would find her, after all she had only gone missing in the market and it had been just a few hours. Of course the darkness made it difficult, but they would not give up. If they did not find her by midnight they would go to the police. Vidya approved of this plan. She had found her runaway secretary long years ago, and that was in a big city. This was almost a one-street town. They would cover every possible angle.

  “I’m so desperate I even looked in her room, Latika. On the off chance . . . she wasn’t there of course. I told the manager to search the Vishnu temple. Remember how she kept saying she wanted to go back there? If there’s anywhere she’d be . . . but it’s such a maze . . . how will they ever find her even if she is in there? I phoned that guide for help – Badal – he knows the place inside out. But he was so rude. Just said he was too far away and could not come! Latika? Latika! Are you listening?”

  Vidya sat down beside Latika and looked at the third chair in the row. Empty. How perfect and peaceful it had been until yesterday: the evenings in that verandah, the three of them chatting late into night, the sea, this trip, the hotel, life itself. Everything had been in place. It was as if, overnight, a tornado had ripped things apart. Suraj was probably in Jarmuli, maybe in trouble, and they had lost Gouri. She would have to phone that pompous son of Gouri’s to tell him if they did not find her. Because Latika was too tipsy – could that be possible? – certainly too tipsy to make a difficult phone call. Really, she was no help at all. Latika drunk. What could be more unreal?

  “Oh Latika, what are we to tell her son!” It was a despairing cry.

  Latika opened her eyes with an effort. “The manager will find her. He’ll do it. He is a . . . most capable man.”

  “But he isn’t God. Latika, how can you be this way when there is such a crisis?”

  Latika had another sip of the vodka. She took off her glasses, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the wall. When she spoke her voice was so soft that Vidya had to lean forward to catch her words before the wind threw them away.

  “I was in college when I fell in love with a man who lived at the other end of my street. He was from a religious, traditional Konkani family. Handsome, green-eyed, tall, Greek-looking, as Konkanis can be. His family had a beautiful house with ancient tamarind trees, sculptures in the garden, tame doves. They were very rich. We met because he would come every day in a grey car to pick up his daughter from the junior school next to my college. One day he gave me a ride home along with the girl. Over some weeks it became a habit and nobody thought anything of it because he was married and a neighbour and of course his daughter was in the car with us. Then we started meeting each other in secret – I would skip a class and he would come earlier to the college so that we had an hour in the car without the child. I knew it was mad, but there was nothing I could do to fight it. We loved each other. It didn’t feel wrong or bad. But of course nothing was possible and then bits of gossip began floating around . . . someone saw me getting into the car alone, someone else saw me with him far away from home. My brother was ragged about it in his school . . . so that was it. I was packed off to Bhopal to live with an aunt. It was an overnight train I had to take and my brother was sent with me to guard my chastity. Those old second-class coaches. The bunks on top were divided with such a low partition you could touch someone on the other side through it if you tried. My Konkani had somehow managed to get the next bunk. All night, we held hands through that jolting partition. I could hear him crying. Not sobs, but ragged breaths, sniffing sounds, as if he had a cold. My wrist ached, it got a bruise from being twisted through the partition. I felt as if I could hear my heart break. I was very young, you see. My brother was sleeping just a few feet below me in the lower bunk, and he had no idea.”

  “And then?”

  “Then . . . nothing. The Konkani got off the train before daybreak. His family moved to some other town altogether, so we couldn’t meet even when I came home for holidays. I never saw him again.”

  The hotel was in darkness, and now that the radio had stopped they could hear the frenzied barking of dogs in the distance.

  “I haven’t thought about all this for years,” Latika said. “Why am I babbling this way?”

  Vidya opened her mouth to reply, but Latika went on,

  “It’s the sea. The sound of it. It brought back so many old things I thought I had forgotten. I should have been thinking of Gouri, not myself.”

  “Do you think we will find her?” Vidya sounded too tired now for despair.

  “We will,” Latika said. “Tomorrow the sun will be up again and everything will change.”

  There was nothing in their ears but the deep roar of the ocean.

  Latika looked beyond the verandah’s banister, at the sky. It had a pale red glow, a storm was imminent. The moon and stars, so clear the evening before, were hidden behind low clouds.

  “Shall we go for a stroll?” she said.

  “Might as well. We have to stay up till the manager comes back with his search party.”

  The hotel staff had furled and tied away the big striped umbrellas that dotted the lawn. In the yellow glow of its submerged lights, patterns of blue and green rippled across the surface of the swimming pool. Latika thought she saw a frog swimming in it. The grass of the lawn felt dew-wet already, and they could taste salt on their lips. They walked down the path to the gate at the back of the hotel’s garden and unlatched it.

  A guard came running out of the darkness and shouted, “Aunty! Madam! Where are you going?”

  “We want to walk to the sea.”

  “It’s not safe this late. A storm is coming, can’t you see? I cannot let you go. I’ll lose my job if you are swept off the beach. It’s too dangerous.”

  Latika walked ahead and opened the gate. The sea brimmed at th
e horizon. The charging waves ate up most of the sky before flinging themselves onto the sand, battering the upturned boats. Not another soul there, nothing apart from the shadows of two men further down the beach, one apparently kneeling in the sea, another emerging from it. The man coming out of the water was very tall. The man kneeling was trying to get up.

  “Look! On the other side of the creek. How strange, in the water . . .” Vidya pointed at them.

  “Is that man trying to kill him or save him?”

  “I think the tall one is pushing the shorter one into the water.”

  “No,” said Latika, “I think the tall one is saving the other one from drowning. I can’t see that well in the dark. But look, out there. The lights.”

  Vidya turned her eyes to the lights on a ship far out in the sea. Then she turned back to the two men, except that now there was nobody. Nothing but the dissolving darkness, and the sea swallowing up the sand.

  The wind gusted at them, tugging them ahead. They walked to the very edge of the beach. They lost the ship’s lights, then glimpsed them again where the sky met the sea, bobbing in and out of the water, and then gone.

  They stood with their ankles in the water, feeling the earth disappear from beneath their bare feet with the tug of each receding wave. Latika took Vidya’s hand. Each time they were buffeted by waves they felt their ankles sink and they held each other firm.

  “Do you really think we’ll find her?”

  “Yes, we will. Just hold on. Everything will be sorted out tomorrow. Wait and see.”

  The Eighteenth Day

  It is long past midnight when she cycles up the road and reaches the pathway through the woods. She gets off, wheels the bike some distance in, thrusts it into the bushes. The trees have dimmed in midsummer’s brief twilight. She must note the spot where she left the bike if she is to find it again. She digs into one of the many pockets of her jeans. Pieces of chalk emerge. She chooses a couple of tree trunks, marks them.