Sleeping On Jupiter (15 page)

They walked through groves of old trees, twisted, chopped, vandalised. Pomegranate trees hung with what looked like organs cut in half: shrivelled fruit opened by age. Some of the trees had red flowers. The girl hunched before the trees, her arms wrapped around herself, holding her own body in an embrace.

They came into what appeared to be a central courtyard which had the remnants of a large structure, the pile of bricks and construction material was almost as high as a building. Beyond it was the outer boundary wall of the place. She walked back in the opposite direction, almost colliding with the driver. “Can you see a jamun tree anywhere?” she asked him. “Would you recognise one?”

Swatting early evening mosquitoes the driver said, “Half the trees are chopped down, Madam, can’t you see?”

She went back to the outer edge of the compound and ran her finger tips over sections of the boundary wall that had fallen to the ground. It was tipped with shards of broken glass and upturned nails.

“It looked big from outside, but inside it’s not so big,” the driver ventured. “I think there’s no more to see.” The girl was unstable, he was sure, and the oddness of her interest in the ruin was unnerving him now.

She murmured, “It isn’t. I always told Piku it was too far for her to walk to the gates. It wasn’t.”

They walked to where the frame for another gate stood, a smaller one, entirely off its hinges. At its edge, where the wall curved into an inlet, a giant banyan tree shaded the clearing. Tarnished brass bells hung from its aerial roots and were strewn around its trunk. Fragments of cloth, ribbons, pieces of tin, evidence of long-ago worship, now dead, were visible in the dust. The girl bent and prised out from the ground something barely visible to the driver – a rusted metal cross, he saw, once she had rubbed the earth away from it with her fingers, with an arrow on one of its arms. It was rubbish, yet she held on to it, swivelled the arms this way and that.

“Madam, we must go now,” the driver said, his voice insistent. He did not like driving in the dark. The tree formed a canopy under which a few grass-thatched huts nestled in even greater darkness than the road beyond it. All around the courtyard were shapeless forms like corpses wrapped in sheets.

The girl turned to follow him, then appeared to take fright. She scurried closer to him. “Did you see something? Isn’t there a man – behind those bushes? There, look. In robes?”

The driver squinted. “I didn’t see anyone.”

“I’m sure I saw someone. A tall man in robes? We should leave.”

“That’s what have I been saying . . . all along,” the driver panted, trying to keep up with her. She was moving too quickly for him. Then he noticed it wasn’t dark any more. There was lamplight, dancing among the trees, giving their bodies long, irregular shadows. A man had materialised behind them, and was now blocking their way. A tall, hunched form shrouded in yards of cloth – a lungi below, a cloth over his head and shoulders. An arm as thin as a bamboo cane stuck out from the folds of his clothes, holding a hurricane lantern. He was shining it in the girl’s face, lighting up the coloured threads in her hair and all the gold and silver in her ears. He swung it towards the driver, saying, “Come. This way.”

As their eyes adjusted to the new brightness of the light, Nomi saw that there was a congregation of stone figures in the courtyard, some quite small, some so large their faces were too high to make out. Gryphons, elephants, Buddha figures, apsaras. Most appeared fully finished, a few were still struggling out from the stone. The man shone the light close on one of the statues. A woman made of flowing lines and blind eyes, nearly ready for a temple niche.

The man shuffled forward, swung the lantern on another piece of sculpture, this one a winged horse. Then a dancing girl. A lion with moustaches and potbelly. He would not hold the lantern still long enough for them to look properly at the pieces.

“My family has been sculptors to the emperors of this land since the time of the Buddha,” the man said. His voice was reedy and he sucked his gums between words. “They were sculptors when the great old temples came up – and let me tell you truthfully, my family has a chisel hidden away in a place so secret nobody else knows about it – a chisel that carved the walls of temples then, eight hundred years ago.”

The man stopped and swung his lantern on to a gargoyle. “That one’s no good.” He coughed between his words. “The eyes aren’t right. I will always tell you if something isn’t right.”

“Have you been here many years? Were you always here?” Nomi said.

“Always. For generations. If you came here a hundred years ago, you would still have heard the sound of a hammer on a chisel in these parts. Why, it was a flourishing village then, of people from our caste. Now we’re only a few left, all dying of hunger. Who wants these statues? Everyone wants things made in a factory. Of plastic.”

She hesitated, drew a breath. “This ruined place next door to you – what was it before?”

“What was it before?” The man brought his lamp down. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything but my own work. I kept to myself, never went in there.”

He moved ahead. “Will you buy something? Look around, a gift for a friend, all the way from the Bay of Bengal? There are smaller ones too, easy to pack.” He went from statue to statue, shining the light on them. “That one is made from sandstone . . . that is pure marble . . . that is black granite, the Buddha, you can see. Foreign people like Buddha statues. Elephants too, all sizes, look.”

“All I want to know is . . . Do you know what happened to the people who lived next door? The children?”

“This one, see? It’s a replica of the chariot in the Sun Temple. Been to the Sun Temple?”

The driver said, “Madam, we should leave now.”

Something caught the girl’s eye. “There, I want to see that one.”

The man brought the lamp across and shone it to where she was pointing, at a statue that sat in a corner of a verandah, as if cast aside. There was a tulsi plant next to it in a terracotta pot and a plate of stone-carved food lay before it as an offering. This one was different from the gryphons and apsaras and Buddhas they had been looking at. Only about a foot high, carved in black marble, soft folds of clothing shaping the form beneath, the sculpture showed a young girl squatting on the ground with her elbows resting on her knees, her palms cradling her chin. Her ears stuck out saucer-like from a large head, her hair fell in two plaits on either side of her face. She had a squat nose and her stone eyes had been given a slight squint. The eyebrows were bunched together in a frown as if she had been too impatient to sit still while being sculpted, she wanted to run off and play instead.

The man swung the lamp away from that statue and it went back into the cover of darkness. “That one is not for sale,” he said.

I remember the sculptor who once came to the ashram and sat there chiselling an idol. It was going to be huge. Slowly the rock yielded some parts of a face, then a neck, then the shape of an arm. He didn’t finish making it. He went away one day and we never saw him again. We wondered for a day or two, but we never asked. So many things happened around us that we did not ask about – and whom would we have asked? The half-made idol lay under a tree saying nothing either, unfinished, half a head, a blind eye, an arm and the curve of a shoulder, the rest a block of mouldy grey stone.

I remember many other things that happened, things we could not talk about. How Piku lay in bed and whimpered all night. When she was beaten she didn’t understand why, when she was left alone she had no idea why. The older girls bullied her too. Sometimes they would pin her frock to the bed so she would tear it trying to get up. They would steal her food and the oddments she collected and hid. They would hold those things out as if to give them back to her and when she ran towards them looking delighted, they would fling them far away, out of reach, and guffaw at her tears. I was always getting into fights because of her. I could never fight with words, I didn’t know the right ones, so I would fling myself at girls much bigger and older. I might be bleeding and screaming, but I wouldn’t let go, I tore out clumps of hair from the other girls’ heads if they did anything to Piku. She stuck to me, she trusted only me. I was her protector.

I remember a cat. Its face was in the stomach of a pigeon. When the cat noticed me it lifted its head out of the bird. It was gluey with blood and feathers. Its eyes were shining amber.

I remember how Jugnu would stand in the quadrangle at dawn, screaming, “Evil sucks you in. It’s sucked everyone in! Wake up, you fools! Look around you! Wake up!” He would groan, “Weep, little children, weep that you didn’t die.”

Jugnu would tell me the sea was nearby, pointing at the horizon, saying softly, “Listen and you’ll hear it.” I tried, but I couldn’t hear it. His weathervane had rusted now and hardly moved at all. Still I thought I would wake one morning to find the arrow had turned northward and we were setting off, sailing away.

I remember the boat that had brought us to the ashram, an open motorboat with an oil-tarred hold in which we were hidden, stacked against each other because there was no space. The boat rocking, then steadying itself for long hours, then rocking again. The creamy yellow of the vomit flowing into the pools of black grease all over the floor of the hold. Its stench. Girls crying “
Ma-go
,
Ma-go
”, as if moaning would bring our mothers back.

I remember once we got mutton stew to eat for lunch. Why? We did not ask. Its gravy was dark brown and thick. There was a bone in my helping which I saved till the last. I sucked the marrow out of the bone. It slipped into my mouth and down my throat before I had tasted it properly. We never got meat again so I forgot the taste.

I remember the time when Champa was brought back by the police. She had gone to them when she ran away the second time and they brought her back because she was a ward of the ashram. She was dragged in by her plaits and locked up in a cottage. I remember the thorny rose branch which Bhola cut and took with him into the cottage. How he grinned at us standing outside and then went in and locked the door. We stood there with our eyes fixed on the cottage. There were banging and thumping sounds. Shouts, and then the screams for help so loud it was as if there was no sound in the world but Champa’s frenzy.

I remember the silences in between that only made her cries more terrible. When Bhola came out of the cottage his white lungi was flecked red. The rose branch was bloodied and bent.

I remember when Jugnu was locked up for a week with hardly any food. He could not stand up, he crawled on the ground when he was let out. He tried protecting his head with his hands. Bhola was kicking him. When he saw us he shouted, “Come on, you all, come and play football with this bastard.” We stood there in our coffee and cream school skirts and blouses and neat braids, rooted to the ground as Jugnu moaned in pain. Bhola screeched again, “Come on, I’m ordering you!” He kicked him again to show what he meant. I remember how Minoti, a girl with a deformed leg, prodded Jugnu in his stomach with her crutch. How Jui hit him with her geometry box, how the instruments inside the metal box rattled as she raised it and brought it down. How the box made a sound like stone hitting wood when she banged it on his head. How one girl stamped on his palm with her foot again and again with her teeth bared. I remember the way Bhola kept saying, “That’s the way! One more time! Break the fucker’s bones.”

I remember the first time I went to a church, somewhere in Italy. The coloured glass windows, the death-stench of incense and the enormous painted stone statues of Christ dripping blood, the priests in their robes. I ran down the aisle and out into the square and in the bright, hard day my head spun, my eyes went sun-blind and I threw up near the fountain. The tissue with which my foster mother wiped my face smelled of lavender.

I remember the day my first period came, at the ashram. I had just turned twelve. My legs were sticky with blood and there was a damp red patch on my sheets. I was put away in the hut where every girl who got her first period was locked up. My stomach, my back, my thighs, everything hurt. The pain made me throw up. It gave me a runny stomach. I sat all day looking out of the tiny window, waiting for someone to come, feeling desperately alone.

I will never forget what I saw when I was locked up that time. The smell of smoke. The huge whoosh of flames going up somewhere in the direction of the coconut grove. Drumming feet. Jugnu standing at my window, shouting, “Set the child free! Unlock that child, set this whole place on fire! Fire burns evil!” The girls told me later that when he saw me being locked up Jugnu had gone mad with rage. He had crept to my hut on two nights to open the door and let me out, but they had found him and beaten him half to death. The minute he could stand and walk again he went from tree to tree with a flaming torch. The dried up coconut fronds had needed only a touch to start burning.

I crouched by the window watching in the dark as Bhola and the others appeared, dragging Jugnu behind them. They tied him to a tree. And then they kicked and punched him. In the orange light of the flames I could tell that they were using rods, stones, feet, belts, and fists.

I remember I saw Guruji poking Jugnu with his feet in the end. I remember Guruji’s face in the firelight. It had no expression, as if his feet were nudging a sack of mud.

They carried Jugnu away. Maybe he was struggling still, or maybe he had become a dead weight at which the men were spitting out filthy curses. Did I really hear them? Did I dream it or see it? I cannot have seen it all, someone must have told me of the men grey and white in the moonlight, rushing down the sand towards a stormy sea. The sea from which Jugnu had come and all the rest of us had come, hidden in boat-holds. Nobody knew he had ever been here. Nobody would know he was gone again, forever.

On the seventh day of my confinement I was made to wash my hair with shampoo and bathe with a new bar of soap. The soap was pink and round. Padma Devi lined my eyes with kajal saying, “Can you see colours with black eyes? Or is everything black?” She gave me a set of new clothes. A long blue skirt with silver sequins and a blouse of darker blue printed with scarlet flowers.

I waited as I had been told, for Guruji to arrive and perform his rituals. The prayer bells rang at the puja hall. Midday. The conch shells. The end of prayers. The school bells. Lunchtime.

My hands were icy and my knees shook, I remember, counting the bells. I did not know why.

I remember how Guruji came in, locked the door, sat down and patted his thighs. How he stroked my legs as he spoke. How he told me I was a nun in the service of God. I was the chosen one. How he had always known there was something special about me and so, from the time I was seven, he had been training me for this day. He said again that he was God on earth and I would be purified by serving him. He held my face between his hands and stuck his greasy lips on my lips, pushed his tongue in. It felt like a wet snake. I remember the way he kept stroking my body at first over my clothes, then his hands went under them. I remember breaking away, trying to run, reaching the door, pulling a stool to it to unlatch it, and that when he stood up, he looked large enough to smash me against the wall.

My body felt as if it would tear into two when he forced my legs apart, then wider apart. He stuffed cloth into my mouth to stop me shouting for help. I remember my screams made no sound. There was blood. A burning between my legs. The sense that my body was being split open.

I remember how night after night I would run to a tap and sit under it, clothes and all, to wash it away: the smells, the touch, the bad taste in my mouth after Guruji summoned me to his room.

I remember how Piku was punished for not going to Guruji. They tied a big bag of dung to one of her ankles and she had to drag it with her wherever she went. She wasn’t allowed into the school or the dining hall. She ate outside, tied to that smelly sack , flies buzzing around. I remember how I was punished for trying to untie her: three days in the kennel shed, no food. The kennels had six dogs and their smell was close and sharp. The dogs growled at first. They came to me to sniff me with flattened ears and snarling lips. Later I slept among them, ate scraps from their bowls and when they licked my face their tongues were rough and their breath was hot. One of the dogs was called Pinto. He was red like a fox, with a pointy nose. He slept against me in the afternoons, his rear wedged into my stomach.

Sometimes, journalists would come to interview Guruji. They printed articles about the ashram which were pinned up on the walls of our school. My picture was in the paper once. We were a line of girls standing in front of a tree in the square between the classrooms and our dormitories. I was third from the right. I had two pigtails tied with ribbons. My face was sulky, my eyes were screwed up, I was knock-kneed. Guruji stood behind me. He was smiling his fatherly smile. I remember I could feel his flabby belly and his stump pushing against me between my shoulderblades. But you couldn’t tell that from looking at the picture.