Tanya Tania (27 page)

Of course she's fond of you. She's very fond of you. You must never doubt that.

I also told her that I'm sure you do have friends to go back to and that she shouldn't worry about you. I feel like I would have wanted that said about me if I had been you. Keep your pride. Keep your dignity.

I hope I haven't overstepped my bounds in writing to you. I hope you understand the very good intentions this letter comes from. After all, we both want what's best for Tania.

I'm probably going to come visit her soon before I leave for college in America. It would be lovely to meet. Are you sure you are not interested in studying abroad? You have a compelling profile. If I can offer any guidance or advice, please don't ever hesitate to ask. I'd be so happy to help you.

With warm wishes,

Tanya

13

Nusrat has been gone for six hours and thirty seven minutes when you leave to look for her. Your parents were united in their refusal to take you even though you cried and begged. The curfew was absolute, they said. They told you that the police were shooting on sight. That everything had broken down and that nothing could be done. You had screamed at them, what is the point of being rich then? And they had looked back at you with infinite pity in their eyes.

You slip out of the house in the middle of the afternoon, leaving the door ajar so the sound of it closing wouldn't wake them from their nap. There is one moment of paralysis when you imagine people entering your house through that open door, the mobs coming in to kill them in your absence. But the yellow lift doors open as they always do. You get in because you have to find Nusrat.

Downstairs a soft breeze comes in from the sea and for a moment you are tempted to run to it to see if she is on the rocks there, just waiting for you with a big smile and fanciful comments in her notebook for you to read. You are wearing her salwar kameez and now you wrap her dupatta around your head so that her scent surrounds you, her stubborn smile almost real in front of you, her bangles clinking against your hand.

Everything is silent downstairs. There is no napping watchman, no drivers wiping down cars, no maids chatting in a circle under the banyan tree, no children playing in the garden. There is only a mountain of garbage piled up in the corner, black with flies. A surfeit of dead leaves blows restlessly across the grounds. You are suddenly and acutely aware that no one knows that you are outside. You badly want to turn back and go home but you don't because you have to find Nusrat.

You can't leave through the gate where five policemen stand in bulletproof vests unzipped in the heat. There are long, thin guns resting next to their plastic chairs. The guns make you recoil, you Bombay girl who has never seen them. You turn around and leave your building through a secret hole that children use to go out to the candy man, five sweets for a rupee and one extra sometimes if you smile just so and say please.

No one sees you leave.

You run quickly down the road in case your mother wakes up and looks out the window. There are very few cars on the road. You remember your childhood desire to lie down in the middle of the road and watch the gulls swoop above and think that today, if you had time, you could do that. Today if you lie down right before the traffic light, in front of Sun restaurant and Croissants Café, no car would come and find you there, spread-eagled right on the big white arrow that points, of its own accord, to the sea.

You know the way to Bhendi Bazaar because you had looked it up on a Western India Automobile Association map your father keeps in a drawer with the car keys. You have it with you, drawn out on a piece of paper with the landmarks you know. Breach Candy hospital, Noor Mohammed's furniture store, the shop with the sev puri, the Jain temple, Cadbury House, Heera Panna with its smuggled shampoos and then straight on from there towards Tardeo and Byculla where your knowledge of landmarks ends. All you know of Nusrat's house is that it is in a crowded street in an old chawl with petticoats and underwear hanging from every window. On the ground floor of the chawl is a crowded bakery whose wiry team of teenage boys had impressed you the one time you had dropped Nusrat home in your car. You remember stopping the car to stare at them. How quickly they took orders and how quickly they dispensed soft buns of bread in tiny brown paper packages tied up with the same brown string that Nusrat had wrapped up her certificates in.

Bombay is become a city for ghosts and you don't recognise it. The roads are wide with no cars, the pavements loom empty with no street vendors, no gaggle of beggar children, no balloon seller, no crazy woman hitting her forehead and haranguing the world. Only the crows and gulls and vultures cry out, much closer to the ground than usual surely because their shadows graze your skin.

You can't shake the feeling that people are watching you even though all the windows are closed and in the old buildings, the cracked blue and green shutters are boarded up. You walk fast, looking at no one because you have to find Nusrat.

You smell Noor Mohammed's furniture store before you see it. When you reach it, the gaping black emptiness is incomprehensible, the stench of burnt furniture makes you stumble. You reach out to steady yourself and your hand falls on the remains of a glass-fronted cabinet you had made fun of with Neenee only a week ago, laughing at the gaudy gold inlays and wishing it into each other's wedding trousseaus. It is lying on its side now, half of it gone, the gold edges black with soot. You wish now that you hadn't made fun of it. You wish, absurdly, to go back and put your arms around the shiny gold cabinet and say to it that you're so sorry for making fun of it, that you would have loved to have it in your house.

You start to run. The carcasses of the burnt furniture seem alive and you can't bear to see the legs of chairs stick out into the pavement, as if trying to escape their burnt bodies.

There are police huddled in jeeps at some intersections. You stay away from them, running in the shadows of tall buildings. They stay away from you too, sitting in their cars, not seeing you in Nusrat's salwar kameez, servant girl, invisible.

The traffic lights go from green to yellow to red and then back to green but there are no cars to stop and no cars to go. If Nusrat was with you, she would have understood the lump this brings to your throat. The solitude of your witness oppresses you.

You walk and run and walk and run. Sweat runs freely down your back and you wish you had thought to bring along water. You wish you had thought to bring along many things that occurred to you only now that you were on the streets—water, money, a knife, a stick, a torch.

It had not seemed so far on the map.

You come to a market. There are now more policemen and more police jeeps. You heard the crackle of their wireless sets as you walked by, indecipherable shouting and crackle but the policemen stand glued, watching each other with anxious eyes. You hear the words ‘Muslim' and ‘Hindu' and ‘dargah' and ‘masjid' several times. You hear ‘aag lag gaya' once, a high-pitched shriek that make the men stamp their legs uneasily like horses. But they stay where they are and they don't see you. You keep going because you have to find Nusrat.

The streets narrow and become dirty. Garbage is strewn everywhere. You see a dead crow, its head and beak absurdly intact while rats nibble on dark red entrails.

All the shops are boarded up and the boards are full of smiling actors and cricketers holding batteries, biscuits and Bournvita. Where there are no boards, there is tarpaulin tacked tightly across windows and doors and you wonder absently why tarpaulin is always blue and decide that it must be to keep away mosquitoes although you can't remember why you think that. You think that Nusrat will know and you remind yourself to ask her when you find her.

The road becomes a street and the street becomes narrow with barely enough room for two people to walk side by side. But you can feel people. Behind barricaded doors. Behind barred windows. Somewhere a baby cries.

You feel like things are touching you, people are touching you. At first, every noise makes you run but you are tired now. When someone coughs so close to you, it feels like it must be a spirit in your head; you steel yourself to not run and you continue to walk, endlessly, pretending not to hear the baby whose weeping follows you.

The silence feels slick to you. It takes energy to not imagine your father coming to get you (and in your daydream he comes for you in a little white Maruti he used to have but had sold a long time ago) and you give up trying to hold the fantasy at bay. You think so long as you keep going it's okay to imagine him coming to get you. So long as you keep going to find Nusrat. So long as you find Nusrat.

You want to call her name but will they think you are Muslim and what if that is a bad thing? Or what if they think you are looking for her because she's Muslim? Better to stay silent.

It is when you get to the end of the galli that the smell hits you so that before you know it, you're bent over double and vomiting, your torso bent forward because even in the act of vomiting you remember not to get it on your new Reebok shoes.

Later on, when you remember that moment, you can't understand how it is that you knew what the smell was but you did. You even thought you were prepared for it when you turned the corner.

What hits you the most is how casually they are dead. One is sitting on a step outside a house, leaning against a pillar that is red with blood from a hole in the side of his head where flies buzz. The rest of him is untouched in blue and white shorts.

Two other men lie together, with blood pooled between their chests and one man's leg flung over the other as if they had died in an illicit embrace.

You walk away slowly, trying not to step on anything, trying not to hear the pitter patter of blood dripping from their bodies into muddy pools of water where the road had been potholed by the rain several years ago and had never been filled.

Nusrat. You have to find to find Nusrat.

There is a sound in the background. Like a continuous breeze rustling. Like the sound of waves. Like very, very soft music. You have been ignoring it for some time but it is growing louder and it no longer sounds like the sea or the wind or music.

The absolute silence around you suddenly makes sense, why there was no grieving wife or mother prostrate over the bodies of the dead men. It is the silence of fear. Somewhere there is a sea of angry men, crazy men, coming down the road towards you. You realise, with a sudden, sick certainty, that this is why everything is hidden, this is why everyone is indoors.

You see a shop that has no door anymore. A tiny stall of a shop that used to sell light bulbs and wires and switches and extension cords. Torn Diwali lights hang from the ceiling but almost everything else has been taken, the shelves are bare and broken glass lies everywhere. There is a crunch of glass and a dog appears. You look at the dog and the dog looks at you. You enter the shop and the dog enters behind you. The counter is miraculously still standing and you think about hiding behind the counter. You make a space and crouch in the corner and the dog comes and sits next to you, both of you hidden from the street by the counter of the shop which has no goods for sale in its display cases. The dog is staring at you without blinking. You hold out a hand but he doesn't move. He sits next to you, watching you, measuring you. In a shard of mirror you see yourself on the floor and for a moment you think you have found Nusrat.

There is suddenly noise outside. Sounds of running footsteps. A man shouts once, twice, ‘Samir!'

There is a banging of a door and then there is silence.

The sound of the crowd is becoming louder and louder. It is the voices of people, all raised, all shouting, an indistinguishable protest that wafts down the silent street to you as if it is a smell. The dog gets up and leaves.

You wish for obstacles to put between you and the coming men. You wish you had taken boxes and crates from the street and put them in front of you. Anyone who looks into the shop, anyone who peers over the counter will you see hiding in the corner. Your heart is beating so loudly that you think people in the street will be able to hear it and you clasp both your hands over it. Your body is burning, you have fever and any moment your father's hand will descend with a cool wet cloth on your forehead and you will be in bed at home, cold from the cloth, hot from the fever.

The sound of the crowd is coming closer and closer, it grows louder and louder. Your father doesn't come, your fever doesn't go. Your body catches fire and turns electric.

You can make out words now.

A roar: ‘Jai Bhavani Jai Shivaji!'

A roar: ‘Pakistan ya kabristan!'

A roar: ‘Shiv Sena Zindabad!'

A roar: ‘Haath mein lungi, mooh mein paan, bhago laundya Pakistan!'

Your world has shrunk to the gap between the counter and the wall of the shop whose broken glass reflects pieces of the street. You hope they can't see you the way you can see the hazy reflection of a bobbing wave of men marching down the street, two by two, two by two, two by two.

You can smell them now. Sweat and alcohol and rotting garbage. They are marching past the electrical shop. You think about what you will do if they find you. If they will take off your clothes and hurt you. You admit to yourself that if you had known, you would not have come, not even for Nusrat. Yet now here you are lying on the floor of an electrical shop, the kind of shop that would never supply bulbs and sockets to your beautiful house with its chandelier from France and sweet, fake lanterns from a beach in Goa. A small shop, a small shop in a crowded market lane you could never have imagined going to and yet here you are lying on the floor, taking shelter in its walls, worrying that they will find you, worrying that they will drag you out and do things to you. You see yourself dead, draped over the counter of the shop and you hope that if that happens, someone will call your mother and not your father.