Sleeping On Jupiter (13 page)

Padma Devi told the audience that we were a few of the destitute children that Guruji had adopted as his own. She said we were fed, clothed, and went to school at the ashram alongside paying students. Padma Devi’s yellow hair and blue eyes looked brighter under the lights against her pink sari. Her lips twisted to one side when she spoke so her flat, shiny face went out of shape. She thanked the audience for their generous support and gifts of old clothes and books. The audience clapped and cheered, but I saw that all of us were looking at our toes. I wanted to run out and throw away my clothes and books and pens and pencils. I plucked at my frock with my nails. I hated the pink flowers on it and the green polka dots between the flowers. I hated my round-toed shoes and the ribbons in my hair. When I grew up I would run away from here and have so many new clothes that ten cupboards would not be enough to hold them.

The Fourth Day

By the next morning Vidya was well enough for toast and tea. But when she and Latika went to fetch Gouri for breakfast, she could not be found in her room: they knocked and waited, knocked and waited, then got the receptionist to open the room with a duplicate key. Gouri’s handbag lay on the coffee table. When they went through it they saw her purse was missing, as were her prayer beads in their cloth bag. Nothing else that they could see was missing.

“Those address cards!” Latika said. “She’s left them in her bag.”

She must not appear over-anxious. She had not told Vidya about finding Gouri utterly muddled, packed and ready to go to the station the day after they had arrived in Jarmuli. Now she was too scared to confess it. What if Gouri had actually left the hotel this time, thinking she had to catch a train? She said, “She must be in the hotel somewhere. She didn’t like her room, maybe she’s still nagging them to change it.”

Vidya replied, “I do all I can, what more could I have done? Look, two cards missing. What do you think that means?”

She sank down onto the bed. Perhaps she hadn’t quite recovered after all and her head was swimming because of her stomach trouble yesterday.

“Oh, what will we say to her son!” Latika said. “He didn’t want her travelling in the first place. He said so over and over, ‘She can’t be trusted alone any more, she forgets everything!’” What if Gouri became one of the missing whose grim, grainy faces one saw in black-outlined police advertisements in newspapers? And this wasn’t even the worst of the possible calamities.

“We ought to phone her son . . .” Latika could see his bald, pompous face in her mind’s eye. His thin moustache and his jowls. The way he said, “I’ll try and make time, but I can’t promise,” whenever you asked if he could drop Gouri over on his way to work. The way he pursed his lips when called upon to smile.

“If that fellow had his way, Gouri would never leave the house at all. Remember what he said to me at the station?” Vidya put on a baritone. “So, Vidya Aunty, what mischief will you girls get up to on your wicked weekend, hmm?” She seemed to gather energy and resolve at the memory of his voice. “We’ll find her, wait and see.” She had dealt with many kinds of problems during her time in the bureaucracy, including an absconding typist.

They walked through their hotel describing Gouri to anyone they saw. They went into a satin-cushioned room they had never seen before which was called the Mumtaz Bar; they crossed the dining hall, the lobby, the corridors, the row of chairs around the bathtub-sized swimming pool, the strip of land in front with its evenly-spaced columns of coconut trees – Gouri was nowhere. Vidya interrogated the chowkidar at the gate, who in turn asked the ragged bunch of rickshaw-wallas parked there if any of them had ferried an old, stout, white-haired woman that morning. They even tried going through a set of latched doors to the kitchen, but they were stopped by an agitated waiter.

At the back of the hotel was a garden. Along its edge ran an earthen pathway pillared by palms. It ended in a low iron gate. They had not noticed the gate before, but now they saw it opened directly onto the beach. Stepping through the gate, they were confronted by the white and blue of ocean and beach in limpid morning light. Bare-chested fishermen were pushing wooden boats into the surf, chanting prayers together for luck. Women in fluorescent knee-high saris walked past in pairs and threes, with fish-baskets on their heads.

Vidya and Latika took their slippers in their hands and walked barefoot, scanning the beach for a round form in a sari. They passed a scent of cloves and ginger. Latika remembered the tea stall and turned around to find it, but as she turned she glimpsed someone who looked very like Suraj from the back. She grabbed Vidya’s hand to propel her the other way, babbling, “Look, they’re selling lobsters there. And crabs too. By those boats.” Upturned boats rose out of the sand like the carcasses of prehistoric animals. Latika pointed Vidya in their direction.

They hurried away, Vidya protesting. “If we walk this quickly, we’ll never find her. Slow down!” The tea-man’s morning song came to them in snatches, “The rain came again that night. And again and again and again.”

A familiar voice interrupted the song. “Awake at last. And I’ve been up and about since dawn! You should have seen the sunrise. Today I decided I would say my prayers out here by the sea.”

She was parked on the hull of an abandoned boat. Despite her prayer beads and white hair and bulk, Gouri looked more sinister than grandmotherly. She wore round sunglasses that they had never seen on her before, and a necklace of rose-pink pearls acquired minutes earlier from a vendor who was offering them identical strings now. She bared her teeth in laughter at their furious faces and the stark white of her dentures gleamed in the sunlight. “Oh come, come,” she said gaily. “I am not under house arrest here too, am I? And anyway, I have a stuffy old room, yours are much nicer.”

They did not know what to say, feeling their pent-up emotions drift clear of their bodies.

“I can’t bear to stay in my room, it suffocates me,” Gouri stated as she rose from her throne.

“Why didn’t you at least carry the cards I made for you?” Vidya’s voice rained hailstones when she was this furious. The voice that was said to detonate bombs under the chairs of sleepy clerks when she was Director General, Social Welfare.

It did not intimidate Gouri. She whipped out one of Vidya’s handwritten cards from somewhere inside the layers of her sari and waved it in her face. “I didn’t carry my handbag, that’s all. It’s so heavy.” She sounded even more smug now.

For a long time neither of them could speak to Gouri. It was only after breakfast, when they reached the bazaar, where they had to pool voices to discourage beggars, that they forgot their anger. They shopped, then found a restaurant to eat lunch in. Steaming mounds of white rice and daal and vegetables, too much for any of them to finish, were served by a waiter who seemed in a hurry to be somewhere else. Bells began ringing all over the town, bhajans battled each other on competing loudspeakers. From above, the first floor of the building, they heard voices chanting hymns, intoning the Sanskrit in exotic accents. A band of pilgrims passed them, singing kirtans, tinkling their cymbals. There were young women, men, even a child or two, all in saris and dhotis, their foreheads marked with the tilak of Vishnu. They smiled at the women through the glass front of the restaurant.

“Let’s eat quickly,” Vidya commanded. “We have other things to do.”

As they began their meal the singing stopped and half a dozen men and women came down the stairs. They were foreigners in saffron and yellow robes. Sprigs of hair sprouted from the backs of their shaven heads like stalks from berries.

Gouri noticed that the foreigners were being served only bowls of grapes. Why was that, she asked their waiter in a whisper, “Don’t they like the food?” He gave her a withering look. “They are fasting,” he said. Then more emphatically, “For Shivaratri. Some of them won’t touch water either all day. You’ve forgotten?”

The disdain in his voice, its air of authority, reminded her of home. It was how her son spoke when he said, “Your widow’s pension was to be picked up, didn’t you remember? The children were to reach their tennis lesson at two, didn’t you remember?”

She remembered her terracotta tea and told herself she must have that third cup before returning home. And she would go back to the temple. By herself.

*

On the morning of Shivaratri the great temple was more crowded than usual. Badal was escorting a man in his eighties who hobbled along, trying to keep his footing in the cavernous inner sanctum. As always it was half dark, lit largely with flickering lamps.

“Please hold on to my arm, you might fall.” Something about the man reminded Badal of his father. Perhaps the over-large ears. The sign of a good man, Badal’s father used to say, pulling at his own elongated lobes. Look at the ears on statues of the Buddha.

The man said, “I may look feeble, son, but let me tell you, in my time I’ve climbed the Himalaya and swum half way across the English Channel. I just didn’t reach the other side because . . .”

Inside the
sanctum sanctorum
, the image of Vishnu glowed red and gold and black. In his infancy, Badal had felt a sense of dread in the temple, even though his father held his hand. The oil lamps cast black shadows everywhere, the air thrummed with chanting, and there were people in such raptures of devotion that they appeared insensible to the world. They frightened him then, with their swaying bodies, their dazed eyes, their delirious singing. He used to be frightened too by the temple’s priests in their white dhotis, bare bodies melting into the gloom, the image of the Lord looming above them all with the impassive might of a mountain.

But what mountains had he seen? He had never left the shores of the sea he had been born by. A few nights ago, he had dreamt of them: snow peaks and ranges of blue hills. He was following people who were trudging up the rocks and ice. They had a dog with them. It was cold, the sounds were muffled. Everything was happening very slowly, every step took an aeon. All at once he was transported to a long, red-carpeted corridor and someone was shouting at him: “The doors are shut. They won’t let you in.” The shouting voice had woken him.

Awake, he had felt with superstitious certainty that he had dreamt of his own death, and the people he had been following were the Pandavas on their long trek to heaven. In the
Mahabharata
, the Pandavas too had been stopped at the gates of heaven. Indra had appeared and ordered them, “Abandon your dog, dog-owners have no place in Heaven.” And Yudhishtira, defiant, had declared to the king of the gods that he would abandon heaven before he gave up a friend.

Badal would never abandon Raghu, whatever happened. He would forget what he had seen: the monk, the beer bottle, the tight black jeans. He had not been able to find Raghu since. He had to have him back, he would not ask any questions. All he needed was to hold Raghu so close that he would not be able to tell their heartbeats apart.

A din of voices and exclamations broke into his thoughts. Commotion everywhere, people pushing each other, stumbling on the slippery floor. Badal realised he had been standing in a dream, his eyes shut tight. The old man he was meant to be looking after had wandered off. He tried to find his way through the crowds in the half light, damp with instant sweat. You must not panic, he told himself. Keep your head, you’ll find him.

The old man’s daughter, who had lost sight of him as well, heard a thin, shaking voice from some corner, turned to look for him, could not see anything in the dimness until she spotted a huddle around a figure on the floor. “Papa!! Papa!” she cried out.

Terror snaked through the crowd. People began to push each other aside to get out of the shrine, thinking something was wrong. A man fell and cried out. A voice shouted, “There must be a fire! Something’s caught fire.” The pushing and shoving grew more urgent.

Badal managed to reach the old man. “There’s no fire. I have him safe,” he called in a raised voice. “He’s not hurt.”

He sat the old man down on the steps at one of the smaller shrines outside. A shrunken widow singing kirtans for alms interrupted herself to bring them water in a small brass pot. “At such a great age,” she said to the daughter, “it’s hard. It’s hard for us old people. The ground slips away.” The old man’s hands were shaking. Badal held the pot to his lips and tipped it a fraction. Most of the water dribbled down the man’s trembling chin to the front of his clothes. Over the man’s head, he exchanged a look of shared relief with the daughter, whose eyes shone with unspilled tears. She dug into her handbag and brought out two hundred-rupee notes which she pressed into the hands of the widow, saying, “Please. For all of you. Sing a kirtan for us. God has been very good, He has seen to it that my father is not hurt.” When they were leaving, she leaned out from the awning of their rickshaw towards Badal. “I don’t know what we would have done without you. I should never have let him come. But he doesn’t listen.” She had a chubby face and a lopsided smile that gave her a rueful expression. The old man, who had recovered his spirits, quavered, “The next time I’ll make sure you show me the whole temple. I want my money’s worth, I’ll be back!”

Badal waited, saw their rickshaw find its space in the crowds of cycles and rickshaws and scooters in the narrow lane. He stayed where he was till he lost sight of it. He met so many people in a year, his head had become a room filled with a faceless crowd. Even so, he knew he would never forget this woman and her father. He felt he had been responsible for the old man’s fall. He should have been taking better care of him. The irony of their gratitude! If the man had come to any harm – he did not want to think about it. He felt reduced by their generosity.

Yet the afternoon filled him with contentment. Usually he had no interest in the pilgrims he had to conduct around the temple. They were work, and when they were gone it was over. But these people – he wanted to show them around Jarmuli now, take care of them, see that father and daughter came to no harm, feed them the special fish and rice at Manoj’s lean-to behind the bazaar, then the warm, succulent sweets at Mahaprabhu. Take them to Johnny Toppo’s tea stall.

That tea stall! The shadows from the night before lifted as if by magic, the mid-afternoon sun dazzled. Badal went off to the lane where he had parked his scooter. He would eat something. Then he would go and look for Raghu. Maybe he was back and waiting. At long last, he would give him the mobile. He sang aloud as he turned the corner. One of Johnny Toppo’s songs, sung every day:

Business was slow at the tea stall. Not many people on the beach and so many women fasting because of Shivaratri, it halved the number of customers. Johnny Toppo was by himself, pottering about. White spikes of stubble stuck out from his chin and his bald head shone. Raghu had wanted time off and he had told him to disappear. It was a relief to be rid of that boy. Johnny Toppo was sure the rascal was stealing; he was a sly fox, that one. Just thinking of Raghu today was putting him in a bad temper even though he had woken that morning feeling as light as the froth on his tea. More often than not, he found himself grinning about nothing even when alone, and at times he was gleeful without reason, like a simpleton or a child. The other day he had been gazing at the madman watering his dry twig and then making his daylong sorties into the water when he had abandoned his stall and sprinted off in daft pursuit. He wasn’t thinking, he hadn’t planned it, it was the end of a tiring stint, almost night, and there he was, racing the lunatic into the froth and back again, shouting nonsense, and then the two of them had laughed like hyenas and pissed into the sea side by side. Yet today he could not stand the sight of that filthy, ugly loon. And he wished his customers would disappear as well. But he needed to earn, didn’t he? He had to grin at tourists and brew tea and grin again. Some days he wanted to turn his table into a raft and sail off into the Bay of Bengal. He’d be washed up on an island nobody knew, and live on fresh fish, beeris, and palm toddy. And not one drop of tea.