The Sleeping Dictionary (22 page)

Lucky pulled my hand so hard I could not ignore it. I finally understood that if we stayed, we would be hurt. As we hurried against the procession’s tide, I saw police heading for us. One constable raised his lathi overhead; but his companion shouted something that made him put it down.

“Run home to Mummy, girls. Not the place for you!” the second policeman said to us, with a kind of half leer. My cheeks burned with embarrassment. Too many people could tell our background without our saying a word. I was ashamed of this and also for not being as brave as the people who wouldn’t run and were suffering the consequence. I could never be the kind of freedom fighter that Pankaj had written about.

Five minutes later, we had found a rickshaw on the outskirts and were on our way back to Rose Villa.

“I’m not going shopping with you again,” Lucky said in a shaking voice.
“My new magazine’s torn, I lost a heel, and if that English policeman says something about us to Chief Howard or Mummy, we will be ruined. Mummy wants no conflict with the British whatsoever.”

Lucky warned me not to say anything at tea about what happened, so I didn’t. We just passed around the
Photoplay
magazine. By the next day, however, the riot was public knowledge. The servants reported that in the downtown section, one man died and three dozen people, including women and children, had severe injuries. I knew that we were fortunate to have escaped when we did, but I still felt like a coward.

IN THE NEXT week, Mummy accepted 401 rupees for me from the Marwari merchant who had bought Doris’s virginity years ago. He’d come in from Calcutta by train and would not leave Kharagpur, he said, until he’d had his satisfaction. I asked Mummy about the odd number, and she said plus one was for good luck. But I didn’t feel as fortunate as everyone thought I should.

That evening, while he was paying Mummy downstairs, I took a hot bath scented with rosewater. My thoughts turned to Bidushi and our long-ago imaginings of her wedding. I was glad that Bidushi would never know about tonight. How disappointed she would have been to learn that the first male hands touching me were not a handsome bridegroom’s but those of a wrinkled old man. And Pankaj! I was sure he would not remember me, nor would he understand that I would always wish for him, no matter what I’d become.

Briefly, I thought of submerging myself so I would drown: the death that by all rights should have been mine five years ago. But I could not, because the other girls kept coming in to wish me well. When I was drying off in the bedroom, Bonnie delivered a cup of warm milk with saffron that she said would relax me. The more I drank, the dizzier I became. Through the haze, I knew that I should
have stayed in the protest march in town and not come back to Rose Villa. Now it was too late. Almost a hundred rupees had been spent on my clothing and food and such; I could not possibly pay it back to Mummy.

Bonnie took me by the hand into the Lotus Suite. I wore no jewelry, only perfumed skin cream and a transparent lace nightdress. I lay on the bed with eyes tightly shut and did not open them even when the stranger came into the room. But then he made me stand up and dance for him while he slowly clapped his hands and sang. So I had to open my eyes to keep from falling down.

In the room’s pink light, I saw a man the age of my own grandfather, but heavy and with a face like a ghoul. How wrong it was for him to use a girl my age; to make me stand and take off the nightdress for the dance. When he finally bade me to lie down, I thought that at least I could close my eyes against his contorted, pockmarked features. But his hands, with their moist, worm-like fingers, were everywhere.

Inside my mind, a horrible film was playing. I was out on the street seeing the enraged faces of the English officers and the Indian constables and protesters. The camera moved closer to show the pursed lips of the little boys spitting at the police and the open mouths of their worried mothers calling them back. And then it showed the townsmen with their lathis, hitting so hard. The fighting had moved inside me: blow after blow after blow; pain and pushing, all at the same time.

“You are only hurting yourself by moving. Stay still!” he huffed into my face with breath that smelled like onions.

I had changed my mind about everything. But as I struggled to get out from under the man, he moved his elbows so that I was pinned in place. All I could hear was
still . . . still. . . .

I was too weak to fight him. Despite my drugged mind, I understood that I could not escape this man or the other customers who would come after. The same horrible scene would replay each night, in an endless loop.

CHAPTER

12

My trial is hard indeed. Just when I want a helpmate most, I am thrown back on myself. Nevertheless, I record my vow that even in this trial I shall win through. Alone, then, shall I tread my thorny path to the end of this life’s journey.

—Rabindranath Tagore,
The Home and the World
, 1919

N
o longer was I considered a girl. At fifteen, I was a working lady. This was hard for me to understand, because I did not look any older than before, but I was earning thirty rupees a day, on par with the top earners: Bonnie, Lucky, and Natty. This was not because I was any good at my work. Every time I lay down, my mind blacked out. I ran away to the cupboard of my childhood memories, burying myself in the fairy tales, songs, and stories once told by my mother. And I felt that through all of it, Ma was holding my hand. She comforted me from her faraway place and kept me alive.

My mental absence was not noticed by the men. They saw me as new, and that was enough. Five more times, Mummy sold me as a
first-time debut. So many men thought they had won the auction that they were truly delighted and did not notice the small vial of chicken blood I used. And as for the French letters—how they pleaded against using them, since I was supposedly innocent. Yet I mustered my courage to dress their members with the sheaths, all the while murmuring praise and endearments. I had caught no diseases, Dr. DeCruz said with satisfaction after I visited him each fortnight. No babies, either.

The one thing I’d caught was sadness. All the money was not enough to make up for the way my heart sank every time a customer sitting in the parlor pointed at me. I understood what it meant, but I didn’t know whether he would be straightforward or a game player. Or whether he would be quick or someone who would thrust for an hour or force me to keep my mouth open too long.

The other Roses took pity on me, trying to teach me what I could do to make the man reach satisfaction more quickly. Doris said a woman’s best weapon was her tongue—and with Doris’s repertoire, the proverb took on new meanings. Natty had a special skill at humiliating gentlemen. She said that the ones who’d gone to boarding schools in England liked that especially.

One skill everyone felt seriously about developing was called woman’s intuition. This was the way a woman understood another’s feelings through listening carefully and noticing slight physical cues. Just by looking at a man’s shoulders or the movement of his eyes or hearing the pitch of his voice, one could determine whether he would be easy or difficult, kind or selfish. Woman’s intuition could be used to read anyone, even females: Bonnie explained how she’d known I was desperate for shelter when she saw me slumped on the bench; the
Statesman
on my lap told her that I had advanced English skills.

Just as I’d suspected, the way I spoke English was my greatest asset. In the dark bedchambers on the second floor, customers called me Anne or Margaret and other names of girls they had lost or never had in the first place. Without being told, I understood I was to say
that I desired them, loved them, and would be theirs forever. Sometimes, they would stay in bed with me for hours, just talking. That type of encounter was the best, for it earned me a lot of extra pay without a moment of pain.

Outside the suites, I used my intutition to learn more about the secret lives of the others. Beside Natty’s bedroom door each morning was an empty bottle of whiskey. Sakina’s room was perpetually fogged with a haze of opium smoke. I did not smoke or drink yet, but I wondered if I might need to later on, when the reality of what was happening finally drove the fairy tales out of my mind.

Sometimes I dreamed of Pankaj’s sad, handsome face and a grand house with a marble staircase leading up to a bedroom without spy holes or boxes of French letters: just a plain white bed covered with pink and red rose petals. In these dreams, I was not Pamela but Bidushi in a lovely bride’s sari, with a ruby hanging from the neck. That jewel remained my lodestone for that which was beautiful and pure.

It had crossed my mind that the loss of Bidushi’s ruby was what had taken the life spirit from her. If only Bidushi had lived and I had been able to accompany her to Calcutta as an ayah and live the rest of my life at the edge of her and Pankaj’s marriage. Then I’d not be dreaming of the ruby on my neck. The gem would only touch my hands when she gave it to me for polishing, and I would help her to keep from never losing it, in order that one day, it would pass to her firstborn daughter.

My refuge for such imaginings was the bed I slept in at the end of each night with Bonnie. With her on the other side, breathing softly, I could sometimes trick myself into feeling that I was in the hut in Johlpur with my sisters nearby. I felt so close to Bonnie. So when she asked if I’d take a matinee with her and Chief Howard one day, I agreed. It was not that I was eager for her touch, but a prearranged job meant time away from the choosing parlors that evening.

“We sleep together every night, don’t we? It will be easy.” Bonnie winked as we went together to the Hibiscus Suite with the big red bed
and overhead mirror. “Just follow what I’m doing and listen to what he wants. He’s really just an overgrown child.”

MR. HOWARD WAS chief of the Kharagpur police and protected Mummy’s business from trouble. And even if the Midnapore police had alerted their nearby colleagues about a jewel theft, I doubted that any description of a young servant girl with a messy braid could be matched with what I looked like now, dressed in fine silk, with glossy hair that fell freely to the middle of my back, kohl-lined eyes, and hands and feet as soft as satin.

The chief arrived in his khaki uniform, complete with pith helmet, lathi, and pistol. In the suite, Bonnie helped him take off his clothing, all the while shooting me looks to do something more than pick at the bedspread. I took his shirt, still steamy and pungent, to hang out on the clothes press as we always did for the customers while they rested. His trousers were of the same material but very long. As I folded them over my arm to bring to the press, the chief called out for me not to remove them from the bed’s footboard.

“Bobby sometimes likes me to wear the pants, doesn’t he?” Bonnie giggled.

I wished I could speak with her privately. When I’d touched the trousers, I’d felt an object in the front right pocket. It was hard and thin. A rush of fear went through me as I worried it might be a knife. But he would not use a weapon on girls he liked. Mummy had always said her customers were Kharagpur’s leading gentlemen. And he had taken it upon himself to be Rose Villa’s protector.