Sleeping On Jupiter (22 page)

“We ran out last night. Remember?” He pointed to the empty whisky bottle on a table by the bed.

Again, the shrill whining. “So why didn’t you buy some more? You had the car all bloody afternoon!” He felt her petulance stirring that old rage inside him. A voice demanding, “Why do I even have to repair the plugs? Can’t you do one thing around this house?” Shouting, “What do you mean you didn’t get the eggs on the way back? Didn’t I ask you to?” And, “Why the
fuck
didn’t you pick up the phone?”

“So sorry,” Suraj said, taking care to stay calm. “My service standards appear to have slipped. There is always the mini bar . . . don’t think I’ve emptied it.”

“Don’t bother.” She ran her fingers through her hair, tangling it even more than it usually was, as if at a loss over what to do next. She spotted his packet of cigarettes in the circle of light from the table lamp. “O.K., if I can’t have a drink I’m going to have a smoke instead.”

She pulled a cigarette out after some moments of struggle with the packet. She reached for his lighter. Her lips circled the cigarette in a pout. She had tucked her feet under herself as always, and turned the chair into a shell in which she fitted securely.

He lay with his arms cradling his head. “I’m going to enjoy this,” he said. She looked so unlike herself with that cigarette, he could not take his eyes off her. He relaxed into his pillows, as if lying back to watch a movie. So what if he normally didn’t like people in his room. This was worth the price.

She exhaled through her nostrils. “I’m fagged out. So hot. And it took forever coming back. Do you know whom I met? The fat old lady from my train. I dropped her off at the big temple. She was hell-bent on dragging me in too, but I managed to give her the slip.”

His throat felt very dry. His skin had a crawling itchy feeling. He recited, “When Nomi has a smoke, It is a fucking joke,” as if to himself. “A pome.” It wasn’t such a bad rhyme, he thought, it did actually rhyme. He opened his mouth to repeat it, but his poem had set something off in her again. “Do you know how dangerous it was to leave me out there? Even that temple guide said so. An albino monk with long hair was following me half the time. I thought he was going to attack me.”

“An albino monk. An albino . . .” He began laughing, first a giggle, then another, then a helpless guffaw. “You’re wild, you know that? I bet you’re writing a novel. ‘The Gooroo and his Slave Girls’. Who’s Piku, tell me that? Raunchy stuff on your laptop, man!” There was something unbelievably erotic about her indignation, that cigarette in her mouth, kurta slipping off her shoulder again.

She got up, looking for a place to stub her cigarette. He pointed through his laughter. “The ashtray’s right there, in front of you. See? On the table?”

“You’ve been snooping around my computer,” she said, crushing the cigarette. She was stammering, her voice had a tremor. “You abandon me in the middle of nowhere, you don’t give a shit how I’ll get back, you don’t answer your phone, and now you’re being a smart ass.”

Her words turned his blood to acid. He sprang up off the bed. “I’m not your fucking bodyguard. I’ve had enough too.” A vein in his forehead throbbed. His face was hot. His ears rang. He lunged for her before she could move and grabbed one of her arms. It was thin and bony. He could break it in two as if it were one of his cigarettes, a limp tube of paper filled with shreds of leaves. He gripped her arm harder, pulling her towards the door. He’d fling her out of his room and never see her again.

“Hey, let go! That hurts!”

Her voice was far too loud. He needed to stop that voice.

She shook her arm, trying to free herself and her kurta started slipping further off her shoulders. Something caught his eye. He loosened his grip, his voice dropped abruptly to a whisper. “There is one thing I need to check – about that spot on your right shoulder – that mole – is it –”

“Get some sleep, Suraj.” Her fingers were at work, prising off his. “I’ll see you in the morning. We’re here to work, you’re supposed to do what I need done. I’m out of here. Breakfast at eight tomorrow. Where’s my laptop?” Her voice wasn’t trembling any longer, it was a curt, superior voice. And her unidentifiable accent was starting to get on his nerves. He wanted to chuck her out of his room, not hear that voice any more, but that shoulder – that hacked-off sleeve, he could focus on little else – that sleeve had come off entirely – and now, somehow, his hands had torn most of the other one away too. He did not know how or why her kurta ripped. He hadn’t pulled on it, she had moved away too quickly. And then – how did they end up in the shower? They were both in the cubicle, he had turned the water on full – jets of water. He held her under it, the water made her braids stick to her skull. He was rubbing shower gel all over her, but she was wriggling free, slippery with soap, just would not hold still even when he shook her and slapped her. And then she slipped from his hands – she slipped out of them, fell against the cubicle door, which swung open and she was flung out with it. She slammed down full length on the hard, shining floor. He giggled. “Hey, that is bad, shit, man!” Her legs were splayed, and she was looking upwards at the sink.

A slow red trickle appeared from somewhere behind her ears. It edged across the beige stone of the bathroom floor towards the drain below the sink. There was a creamy bathtub with a fresh white towel draped over it. He wanted to put the towel on the blood stain to stub the red out. He would have to step over her to reach the towel.

He was soaked. Cold, canned air streamed through the bathroom. He shivered.

She was not shivering. She wasn’t moving.

Now that she was flat on the floor, much of her kurta gone, he saw her breasts were no more than flattened pancakes topped by chocolate buttons. They were small. Not big enough to fill half his palm.

He found himself looking at his hands. His hands were shaking. He was shaking all over.

Not a sound but for the air conditioner shuddering.

He had to do something. What? He staggered into his bedroom towards the phone – he should call reception for a doctor. But then they would ask what had happened. He had no idea what had happened.

He heard a knock on a door down the corridor followed by a voice saying, “Turn down your bed, Sir?” They arrived every evening, drew the curtains, lit scented candles in the rooms, patted the pillows as if they were babies. In a few minutes the housekeeping service footsteps would close in. He needed time to think. He locked the door. Turned the lever twice to double-lock it.

A sound told him someone else was in the bedroom. He swivelled around. Nomi, in the shreds of her kurta, bleeding from her head, dripping water onto the floor. He wanted to shout with relief. She wasn’t dead. He hadn’t killed her.

She held her wet clothes closer. Her teeth were chattering in the cold. He could hear them, like soft castanets.

“I’m going to tell them everything,” she said. She was looking straight at him. No, not exactly at him, past him, at the door. She was holding something in one hand, he couldn’t quite see what.

He would sort it out with her if only he didn’t alarm her. It was all a stupid misunderstanding, couldn’t she see that? They were fooling around and it got out of hand. He needed to make her see that. He inched towards her. “Listen, it was an accident, I was drunk, it was bloody awful, but . . .”

The housekeeper’s footsteps were coming closer. He could hear them on the flagstones. If there was no privacy sign on the door they usually knocked twice, then let themselves in after a pause. Could they do that even when rooms were double locked?

“Listen . . .” he began again.

“You don’t scare me,” she said. She was still looking past him as if her eyes were seeing something else. That look made him feel more afraid than he had ever been. He was trapped with a psycho.

“I don’t believe your bullshit,” she said. “I’m through.” She lifted her hands as if holding a gun. She pressed. His hands flew to his eyes, but it was too late. He felt something in one of his eyes, was blinded by a fiery pain. He covered it with his palm. The pain shot through the eye into the back of his head. He could smell his anti-mosquito spray. The can in the bathroom. The bitch. His eye streamed tears, he could barely see anything. It felt as if it had burnt away.

“You don’t scare me. I don’t believe your bullshit.” The words came from Nomi in a low monotone that was not her voice.

Suraj felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his forearm. One eye open, he could see the white sheet had splashes of red on it. He looked down at himself – his arm had a gash. The blood was spreading warm and scarlet, all over his arm, his hand, the bed. And she was coming at him again with a knife. His own carving knife from the toolkit on the bedside table.

She lunged for his eyes, he ducked, and this time the knife ripped open the skin on his cheek. He could taste the salt of his own blood as it streamed down his face. His shirt was soaking red. He tried to move away and she threw the whetstone from the tool kit at him, splitting the skin on his forehead. He fell to his knees, but she would not stop, she flung all his gouges and chisels at him, one by one, as if he were a dartboard. He cowered, trying to shield himself with his arms and she aimed a vicious kick at his side. He doubled up with a howl as her foot slammed into his crotch.

Suraj managed to get to his feet despite the agonising pain. He struggled with the glass doors to the private garden at the back, stumbled out of them into the lawn. Hauled himself up over the wall that separated the lawn from the waste lot at the back, where the eternal buffalo was lowing. He was wheezing for breath, he was staggering away as fast as he could. His arm bled, his face bled, his stomach hurt, he could barely see. He had no sense of where he was going, except forward. He pushed through the undergrowth, between trees, bushes, bulrushes, tearing his clothes, feeling his skin rip.

The grassy ground turned to sand, the darkness lightened. He was on the beach. It was the grubby part of the seafront, smelling of sewage, strewn with the detritus of many meals: discarded water bottles, plastic spoons, foil plates, plastic bags. He slipped on something, trod glass shards and puddles. Then the sea was before him. He ran to its edge. His slippers floated away in the water – or had he run out barefoot? Dogs barked somewhere nearby, a stray pack. The waves crashed towards him. The barking came closer. “What did I do!” his brain sobbed, “What did I do?” The beach was lit sickly green by a strip of fluorescent lighting. He ran without looking, collided into a man watering a twig pushed into the sand. The man shoved him out of his way, went on watering the twig.

Suraj wanted to tear his eye out, he needed to stop it burning. He ran, fell, picked himself up, cursed, ran again. He came to a stop where the waves tugged at his feet. He held his head in his hands and collapsed on his knees in the water, choking on brine, throwing up.

Something emerged from the churning green water. A pillar was moving towards him. In the eerie glow of the green light it was an apparition from a nightmare. When it came closer it became a man. Yellow robes slid off the man’s powerful shoulders as he moved. White hair fell to his shoulders. In spite of the darkness, he wore sunglasses. Suraj kneeled in the surf, transfixed, as the man came closer.

Piku, I promised I would come back for you.

I tried to explain then, I couldn’t. I’ll try again.

They had locked me up with the dogs for trying to untie you. Every feature of the days that followed has been playing in a loop in my head these past thirteen years. When I came out I walked into a thick silence. It was as if fear had become a real living monster panting one step behind. I had eaten very little for those three days. My eyes were crusted with dirt, my clothes were sticky with sweat and grime. I did not see you anywhere. Instead, there was Champa. She was waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom. She looked around us to see if anyone was listening, then she asked me if I knew what Guruji had done when I was locked up.

She spat on the floor and I wondered what made her brave enough to do that. Some months ago she had disappeared for a fortnight and come back thinner, her eyes dark and sunken. The girls had whispered she had been sent away because she was pregnant and her baby had to be killed and removed from inside her. Some said she had gone with the driver of the school van. Others that it was with one of the guards. Nobody had done anything to help her. Champa had a recklessness about her ever since.

“He came into the dining room and went straight to Minoti,” she said. “He smashed her head against the wall. She bled and he laughed.”

“I don’t want to hear any more. Leave me alone.”

“That’s not all,” she went on in a breathless whisper. “He threw her down to the dining room floor, in front of all of us. He pulled her skirt up and pulled her knickers down – why are you blocking your ears? You’re only hearing this, you didn’t go through it. And you didn’t see it. Think of Minoti. She was screaming her lungs out and he was still cracking up. Then he pushed a big spoon into her. All of us saw it. The girls were crying. She was bleeding. There was food everywhere because the plates fell and the serving dishes fell.”

Do you know what I thought then, Piku? I would spend my whole life in this hell, that there was no beginning and no end. I had known nothing else since I was seven years old. I would never know any world other than this. Neither would you.

“We’re going to run away. There’s nothing to lose,” Champa whispered. This is what she said to me, Piku.

I said, “You ran away twice. The police brought you right back.”

“This time I won’t go to the police. I know better than that.”

“There’s no place for us outside. We have to stay hidden or they’ll put us in jail.”

“Forget it, they told us lies all these years. If we had run away long ago, nothing would have happened. And jail’s better than this, I can tell you. Anyway, look . . .”

Joba came in. Champa and I tried to look as if we had not been speaking. We didn’t know how long she had been out in the corridor or how much she had heard. Joba wrinkled her nose at me and said, “You’re stinking.”

She smiled at the mirror, re-clipped her hair and said, “You smell just like a dog.”

We wouldn’t allow Joba to run away with us. No. Who else would run away with us?

“Don’t be a fool,” Champa said two days later when we got a chance to whisper again to each other. “Nobody else.”

“Piku. I’m not leaving Piku behind.”

“She’ll give everything away. She doesn’t have a brain. She can’t speak properly. All she can do is bang things and yowl.”

That’s what they thought of you, Piku. But I knew better. We had a secret language, you and I, and we had spoken it for five years.

“Piku’s not like that,” I whispered back as vehemently as I could. “She’s just slow and she doesn’t speak, but she understands everything I say. I know how to calm her down.”

“Ssssh! Don’t raise your voice!”

“I’m not going without her. She’ll be finished without me. I’m the only one who knows what she’s saying!” I had tears in my eyes. I didn’t let Champa see them.

“You can come back for her. There’ll be no space in that manure truck. It’s too small. What if she has one of her screechy fits? What if Bhola hears? What then?” She did not need an answer to that question, Piku.

Champa said, “Look, the only reason I’ve even told you about the plan is because I like you. And I need you to get me into that manure truck. But if you try anything funny, I’ll figure out another way of leaving. Remember I’ve run away twice before? Without your help. You can stay with your Piku.”

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 and 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.