Dead Water (15 page)

He fashions a blindfold from a pair of silk long-johns, makes a tiny tear to see through, and goes on with his preparations. A first-aid kit. Matches. A compass. Water. Pemmican: several weeks’ supply. Chocolate. Dalebø’s handgun: a Colt M1911. Plenty of ammunition. His packing is limited only by what the dogs can pull. He is at this moment – and setting aside the crucial loss of his goggles – the best-equipped man on the cap.

After a short nap Eric Moyse scouts a suitable crossing place. He expects to find Tor’s body washed up on the beach. There is no sign of him.

Eric leashes his dogs to the sled and, with barely a nudge of the runners, negotiates three easy cracks in the ice. In twenty minutes he is on the pack. The irony implicit in this easy passage is choking: he forces it down.

He rides all night, a lone figure hurtling as fast as he can from the scene of disaster, yet dragging every detail of it with him, the images stored indelibly behind his eyes. For hours he follows a wide canal which runs due north, and so straight you could land seaplanes in it. Eventually a line of jumbled ice on the horizon forces him to steer away. He beds down around noon the next day and wraps more rags around his eyes.

The dogs wake him. He has staked them out in a protective triangle, the way Dalebø once taught him, and he listens a moment, assessing the direction of their cries. He reaches for the pistol.

The sky is clear. The sun is bright, high in the sky. His blindfolds have fallen off in the night. His whole body sings with the cold. He climbs a rising shelf of ice and looks down at the dogs. Stiff and alert, they are watching three polar bears. It is a family group, moving west, some fifty or sixty yards away. The dogs’ clamour has made the bears curious, but they do not seem aggressive. Eric raises his gun and takes aim. The bears amble out of range. Eric lowers the gun, returns to his tent, and breaks camp.

The air is still, the sky acquires an even overcast, and the going is good on adequate ice with a healthy covering of snow. Thirty hours after his encounter with the bears, Eric reaches the shores of Foyn. There are no birds here, no plants, no soil. Eagerly he seeks out dry lichen to make a fire, but the stuff stubbornly refuses to burn. Demoralized, Eric chews down some chocolate, sleeps for a couple of hours in a cleft in the rock, then scouts for a place to establish a more permanent camp.

As he struggles in snow shoes over icy rocks, the dogs bound away from him, snarling and yapping. They gather round an outlying rock. Eric approaches. The snow around the rock is darkly splashed. He runs forward, yelling and waving his axe. The dogs retire, whining.

The rock is a man. For a split second, Eric has the crazy idea that it must be Tor Dalebø. It has been badly mauled. The face has been chewed off, the remains so black and swollen they suggest something vegetable – a mess of tubers.

Eric tries to read the remains the bears have left behind. This looks more like a monkey than a man. The arms of his blue flight jacket are overstuffed. Shirts and jerseys: too many layers, packed too close together to hold warmth. The bears must have had a hell of a time tearing through all that cloth. They have had to practically rip him in two to get at the meat.

Eric tries to turn the body but it is stuck to the ice by its own blood. He takes off his snow shoes. He works his way round the body, kicking it, jamming the toe of his boot in to break the bond between the ice and the man’s clothing. When the body is free, he rolls it over – and there are the dead man’s snow goggles, unbroken, waiting for him in a nest of blood spots. He tugs them off the ice and pulls them over his head. He fumbles the lenses over his eyes. The relief is instant, as though cool water is pouring down the insides of his skull.

This has to be one of the
Italia
’s crew. The short, inadequate jacket, the amateurish layering beneath: this is a man who had no business being on the ice. At least they found him some decent felt boots. Is it Eling or Bonfanti? He tugs at the shreds of the man’s jacket, searching for pockets. The dogs, gaining confidence, approach. They sniff the ice. One paws at the ground and begins to truffle. It tugs something red out of the snow. Eric gets to his feet. The dog scampers up the slope, defending its prize. Eric goes after it. At last he manages to extract the thing from the dog’s jaws.

It is a red leather pouch. He wipes the dog’s drool away with a gloved hand. Inside the pouch is a notebook, bound in the same leather. He opens it.

He turns the pages, trying to make sense of it. Clumsy scribbles crisscross each other every which way in a palimpsest. There are matrices and chequerboards, graphs and diagrams, ruler-straight and upwardpointing arrows crossed with strange, sinusoidal lines. There’s stranger imagery, too: shamanic eyes and scales and fangs.

Behind him, the dogs edge forward, circling the shambles in the snow.

In the S.N. Medical College in Agra surgeons gather round Roopa’s bed. Their arguments disturb her morphine sleep. Students lean in to peer inside her mouth, and worse, to prod. Police constables hover outside her curtain to catch a glimpse of the damage.

She cannot talk. Her mouth is broken. Her lips. Her tongue. She wakes on a wet pillow. Pink stains, drying, have made maps on the cotton. Her mouth is a mess of stitches and swellings. The stumps of her teeth are white with ulcers. She drinks cold soup through a straw. When she speaks, or tries to speak, saliva runs over the ruin of her bottom lip and gathers under her chin. She mops up the stringy droplets with the edge of her sheet. Pink.

Yash Yadav comes to see her, pressing a handful of pamphlets to his chest. ‘Nice company your husband keeps.’

Roopa cannot speak, cannot grimace, cannot communicate. She makes a sound.

‘There’s no need to defend him, Roopa.’ Yash lays his hand on hers. ‘Hardik confessed.’

She says nothing.

‘Very much the wounded husband. Never mind that we picked him up in a motel off the GTR with another man. That’s honour for you. Very keen on honour, these fascist fags.’ He sits on her bed and leafs through the pamphlets. ‘They tell me the baby is all right.’

She will give him nothing. Not a tear. Not a sigh. Nothing.

‘If anything had happened to the baby – well, Hardik would have been looking at some serious charges.’

One by one he drops the pamphlets on the bed where she cannot help but see them. Amateurish typography. Banyan trees. Hindu swastikas. ‘We picked up the men who raped you. You should be pleased. Vermin like that off the streets. Incidentally, we stumbled over these in your apartment.’

She doesn’t need to open the pamphlets to know what’s inside. She’s familiar with the crazy edges of Hardik’s sort of politics.

‘Stumbled,’ she mouths. Saliva burns through a tear in her bottom lip.

Yash leans over, handkerchief extended to wipe the spittle from her chin.

She turns her head.

‘We have to make a decision. About your husband. Teaching his wife a lesson is one thing. Something like that gets so easily out of control. You can see how it happens. But his politics. I’m worried, Roopa.’ He strokes her hair. ‘Anyway,’ he says, tiring of the game, ‘it’s not up to me any more. Next week I leave the force. Well, why make the scandal any worse? There are family interests in Chhaphandi that I can be looking after. It’s a fresh start, you might say.’

Roopa understands that this is the outcome Yash expected. It is what he wanted. She understands that she has failed. Her heart hammers in her chest.

That evening she writes a letter. ‘Yash Yadav is in no way derailed.’ She writes to the new Police Superintendent at the Maharashtra ACB. ‘I will accept any posting, however menial.’

Two anti-terror officers in plain clothes come to talk to her about her husband’s political activities. They will not tell her where they are holding him.

Ijay, Roopa’s youngest brother, comes all the way from Mumbai to see Roopa home. He is stiff, reticent, appalled. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘we will look after you. Whatever has happened. Whatever it is you’ve done. The family is behind you one hundred and ten per cent.’ This is a phrase he has picked up at work.

In Thane, Roopa gets better, after a fashion. Her nerves heal. Her shattered sleep sticks itself back together. Her face changes character as it heals. The smile is gone. What emerges in its place is not ugly or deformed. The most you can say about her now is that she looks unremarkable. She has the face of another woman completely now. Her own father wouldn’t recognize her. The assault has made her plain.

It fills her with a terrible glee, that she has somehow escaped herself. Sometimes she thinks about getting rid of her body, not because of its pain or its shame, but simply to realize her freedom completely. Anytime I want, she thinks, I can walk this thing under a truck. Then her baby kicks. It spasms. It shakes in dumb horror, and she is overwhelmed by an intense, nauseating remorse.

She learns to look upon herself as a machine. A machine acquires dignity by operating smoothly over a long period of service. You cannot humiliate a machine. Here is this baby, baking inside her, bubbling, rising. By the third trimester her future is clear. It is up to her to reinvent herself.

The priests call. Ceremonies follow in their proper sequence. The baby is born early in August 1996. It is a boy. When he is six days old he is laid on a blanket and his palms and the soles of his feet are painted with a red paste. The family gathers around the blanket and prays. This is the point at which the child is supposed to acquire a soul. On the eleventh day he is named. Roopa calls him Nitesh. He is happy and placid and he looks exactly like Yash Yadav.

A couple of months later, Roopa Vish boards a coach heading inland, along the Sher Shah Suri Marg, back to Firozabad. Little Nitesh lies across her lap, hands spooling as though already set to some industry.

The coach’s on-board video offers instant Technicolor relief for eyes bruised by too many miles of the same thing, too many frilled and tattooed Tata trucks rattling past, too many mayfly villages, but Roopa pays no more attention to the screen than she does to the view through her window. The lovers’ on-screen agonies, their ecstatic musical interludes, their battleaxe of a mother-in-law: it’s all one to her. Underneath the folds of her child’s blanket, Roopa’s knuckles are white. She is her father’s daughter and she is going to get her man.

A
bhangi
can go anywhere. A
bhangi
is invisible. A
bhangi
cleans the toilets and carries the shit away in a bucket on her head: who the hell ever looks, or wants to look, at a
bhangi
?

A
bhangi
is never short of work, because everybody shits. A
bhangi
gets to know everybody’s shit, eventually. Chhaphandi’s elementary school is full of shit. Odd-smelling, mealy, faintly caustic, faintly rotten shit. The school governors obeyed the state-wide ban on dry toilets and installed a modern flush-operated system and within days they were wading through – well...

A
bhangi
is invisible. A
bhangi
doesn’t count. A
bhangi
can scoop shit out of a toilet in one cubicle while boys are picking on a child in the next. A
bhangi
hears everything. Every hateful, shitty thing. Your mother sucks your uncle’s prick.

A
bhangi
learns.

Roopa has dental plates to replace her missing teeth. They are temporary things, grey, like shark’s teeth. She does not wear them. She has money: she does not spend it. She has a plan: she does not share it. She rents a room in a block owned by Ekram Badbhagi, Chhaphandi’s postmaster. Badbhagi divorced his wife after her fifth miscarriage and he’s all over little Nitesh, the son he never had.

For all its surface clutter, posters and cheap glass ornaments, this place is typical of the buildings erected by Yadav Construction and Homes Ltd. You can find their rabbit hutches thrown up in villages all along the Sher Shah Suri Marg: single-occupancy accommodation for transients moving, with painful slowness, from one menial job to the next, one village to the next, towards the mega-cities of Delhi and Mumbai. The walls of the room do not quite join. There are no shutters and no rails for curtains. The monsoon is coming. Yesterday, banks of filthy, sand-laden moisture from the Arabian Sea roiled through the sky and broke over the village. Roopa’s walls dribbled and steamed.

Roopa wakes in darkness, Nitesh sprawled in the crook of her arm, the room’s air sweetened by the smell of a soiled nappy. After the elementary school and Chhaphandi’s kids – their weird little heads and their weird rabbit-droppings, small and hard as bullets – cleaning up after Nitesh is an active pleasure.

There is enough light in the yard below to clean her son by, because a couple of wall-mounted arc lamps light up the back of the roadhouse where lorry drivers plying the Sher Shah Suri Marg come for their medicine. This trade’s an open secret. The Grand Trunk Road is one and a half thousand miles long and something has to get them through the night. The trade is swift, smooth, discreet. The drivers are not furtive, not delinquent, not ashamed. They are professionals, with legitimate needs: athletes of the long-haul.

Off to the side there are string mattresses stretched across posts in the earth. Only one hammock is occupied tonight. Some derelict.

Nitesh sleeps late into the morning. Once she has fed him, Roopa carries him across the yard and lays him in one of the string cots while she goes to buy breakfast. Her walking so brazenly into that space – a woman, and barely touchable at that – is calculated to turn heads and ruin conversation. The regulars here know she rents a room off Badbhagi, so there is nothing they can say about it. She asks for chai, and gets it. She leaves her coin on the counter. The proprietor leaves it on the counter until she has gone. He doesn’t want to encourage her.

Coming out, she sees the derelict from the night before lying sprawled across his cot, playing peek-a-boo with Nitesh. Trying to: Nitesh is too small to respond.