Sleeping On Jupiter (17 page)

Vidya gave an exasperated shrug. Given Gouri’s stately pace, she thought, it would not be that hard for anyone to catch up. She and Gouri walked ahead. The driver followed at just the right distance, telling them he was there, but he was not going to intrude.

Past the shops came an open area fenced in by railings that held the cliff back from the sea that flung itself at rocks hundreds of feet below. Looking down over the edge, Gouri was visited for a moment by the sense she had had of flying into the sky on the wings of a kite – was that years ago or just days ago? Among eternity-old ruins, it was hard to tell.

The temple’s central shrine rose straight from the cliff like a monumental rock. They had paused to look up at the tower when Latika came back to them holding a red parasol with a yellow frill. “Isn’t it pretty? So Japanese!” she exclaimed, twirling it this way and that, holding it over her shoulder, making them feel foolish in their clumsy straw hats. “She’s acting eighteen,” Vidya said in an undertone to Gouri when Latika was out of earshot. “She always does when there’s a good-looking man around. The way she repeats stories of her college conquests. And keeps mentioning how people say she looks half her age.”

“At almost seventy!” Gouri said. “Really!”

Their misgivings were confirmed halfway through their tour of the ruins. At each shrine they had to climb rock-cut steps to look at the sculptures. And all the while, the blazing, blinding, ever fiercer sun radiating off the stones. Confronted by the tallest of the shrines with the steepest stairs, Gouri dropped onto a bench below a tree and said, “Oh no, that really is too high, the sun is too strong. My head feels as if it’ll split open.”

“No escape from the sun at the Sun Temple,” their driver said, his first contribution to the afternoon’s conversation.

“You go ahead and have a look,” Vidya said to him, sitting down beside Gouri. “We’ll rest here and wait for you.”

“I don’t want to rest,” Latika said, spinning the handle of her parasol. “I’m not going to leave without exploring the whole place!”

Vidya heaved a tired sigh, and said, “Latika . . .” She started to get up from the bench, holding a knee with one hand. Was that twinge her back pain coming back?

“Why are you getting up?”

“Well, you can’t go alone, can you? What if you fall?”

“Nonsense, I won’t fall. If it makes you feel better, I’ll go with . . . him.” Latika darted a quick look at the driver. “You stay here with Gouri.”

Before Vidya could say anything more, Latika had begun following the driver towards the tallest shrine. They watched her walking rapidly away. From the back she seemed no more than forty, slim and quick-footed, in a bright salwar kameez and sensible shoes. Her parasol bobbed near the driver’s shoulder. She looked up at him and said something; he was much taller and he had to bend towards her to reply.

Vidya sighed. “Did you notice how many age-defying creams and serums she has on her bedside table? And foundation! All these years she claimed she used nothing on her face at all.”

“I visited her once the day her daughter arrived from abroad,” Gouri said. “You should have seen the mountain of moisturiser bottles she’d brought for her.” She smiled. “Those of us who weren’t pretty to begin with don’t get into a tizzy about wrinkles and fat.” She contemplated her words, then said, “I am happy to spend my last days with my grandchildren and prayers. But good tea is important. I have to have good tea, that’s all.”

“And a bit of cold cream,” Vidya said, and they both laughed. Gouri’s grandchildren loved pinching her cheeks and the loose skin of her upper arms. Soft as soufflé, her granddaughter called them.

Latika and the driver had begun climbing the steps to the main shrine, the one with the rearing horses and the chariots of the sun god. The day before the first ceremony at the temple centuries ago, a mason had toppled to his death from the tower; not long after, the king had been struck by leprosy. Because of the bad omens, the temple had never been used for worship and even now had a menacing, secretive look. The steps became forbiddingly vertical as they went higher. The people at the top looked ant-like in the distance, they appeared and disappeared behind pillars and corners. Vidya saw the driver offer Latika his hand at the steepest part and pointed this out to Gouri. They both saw her take his hand, then she and the driver vanished from view, into the shrine.

Vidya gave a sigh of resignation. “Now they’ll be gone for God knows how long, and we’ll have to wait here in this heat while he explains all those sculptures of a hundred different Kama Sutra positions to her.” They giggled at the thought and it dissolved their irritation. Vidya told Gouri of the time she had come to the temple decades ago with her husband and various other relatives. Deadpan they had walked from edge to edge, exclaiming only at the artistic brilliance of the great carved wheels and the stone lions or the otherworldly expression on the Sun God’s face. Uncles, nephews, aunts, and cousins, all had pretended not to notice that the stone couples on the temple walls had for thousands of years been entwined in complicated variations of coitus. One of her vulgar uncles had paused for long minutes before a particular panel. Vidya had a vivid memory of it: the sculpture of a man caressing the breasts of a woman who held his penis, which was as ponderous as a bottle-gourd, even as another woman sat playing at his feet with his over-sized testicles. The uncle had remarked in a loud voice on the yogic and gymnastic powers of Indians in earlier times, their free-spiritedness, but the rest of the group had walked ahead as if they had gone mysteriously deaf.

“Really,” Gouri said, “Latika can still become such a giddy teenager . . . can you imagine how embarrassed we’d have been looking at these kinds of sculptures with a strange man? A
driver
!”

“Someone’s walking on my grave,” Vidya said with a shiver. “This place has so many mysteries. Do you know, I’ve heard there’s an underground way to the sea from here? They used it to drown enemies?”

“Don’t think about all that,” Gouri said. “It’ll make you feel unwell again.” She placed a hand on Vidya’s arm. “You look hot, are you feeling alright?”

Vidya pulled a newspaper from her handbag and fanned herself with it. She dabbed her forehead with her sari. There wasn’t the faintest breath of a breeze under the implacable sky. The voices of other tourists came from far away, their words indistinguishable. In the tree above them a lone bulbul sat pecking at the figs, letting fall scorched leaves now and then. Vidya opened the newspaper. It was that morning’s, a good thing she had had the foresight to stuff it into her bag – she always had some reading material with her for just such unexpected stretches of idle waiting.

Gouri examined her bottle of mineral water and informed Vidya that it was from a Himalayan spring, pure as water from the holy Ganges. Then she observed how the Ganga’s purity had been destroyed by the very people who claimed to worship it. The paper rustled as Vidya turned its pages, the bulbul overhead sang a song. “Another bus accident,” Vidya exclaimed. “Twenty-five people dead this time. Does it make a difference?” Gouri closed her eyes and tried to listen only to the bulbul. She wanted no news. She did not want to think about anything. Then something on an inside page of the newspaper caught Vidya’s eye. She held it towards Gouri, showing her a photograph. “It’s that evil godman. He’s quite striking, isn’t he? In a creepy sort of way. Look at those eyes – something hypnotic about them.”

“I don’t want to look at such men.” Gouri turned away. “They finish off your peace. How sweetly that bird was singing. I wonder where it went.”

“Oh, come on, Gouri,” Vidya shook her head. But she said no more, returning to the paper.

“The papers are full of bad news,” Gouri said. “That’s why I seek out peaceful places like this, far away from newspapers.”

“Well, it all happened very near here, you know,” Vidya began again. “Just down the highway . . .”

“Look,” Gouri said, “Pilgrims. Japanese, I think, Buddhists.” She did not want anything to soil the purity from sea and sky, the blueness and serenity she had managed to collect and store within herself after more than an hour of prayer on her hotel verandah that dawn.

Vidya folded the paper and began to fan herself with it. “Disgusting,” she said, “Unbelievable.” Her lips were pressed one against the other as if she were stopping herself from saying more with great effort. Above them a raucous battle broke out between crows, causing them to look up at the tree. Sooty feathers were flying, leaves rained on them. They had to move to get out of the way.

The diversion gave Gouri a chance to change the subject. “Let’s think of what we’ll do this evening. Maybe I’ll go to the temple again.”

“This evening I want to go to that other beach where the open market is. I missed it the day you two went. I want to buy some things, have the tea you talked about.”

Gouri recalled something and lit up. “Do you know who we saw on the beach when we were having that tea?”

“Who?”

“Suraj! We saw Suraj there!”

As soon as she had uttered the words, Gouri clamped her mouth with her palm. She was not meant to tell Vidya about her son. Of course she was not meant to tell her! Suraj was not supposed to be here at all. Latika would be livid.

“Suraj?” Vidya said. “How could that be? He’s on an office trip to Hyderabad. Why would he try to meet me here?”

“Oh no,” Gouri’s smile was forced. She felt short of breath, managed to say, “How stupid I am, always muddling people up. I meant to tell you about my terracotta tea stall, but then . . .”

“What are you talking about? You said you saw Suraj!” Vidya stood up, agitated. “Did you see him or didn’t you?”

“No, really, I meant that husband of Parul’s: you know my niece Parul? Oh, I thought you’d met her. Well, her husband looks very like Suraj and I thought . . .”

Latika returned, full of news. “He isn’t a driver at all. He’s the hotel’s manager. He’s only brought us because, last minute, the driver didn’t appear for duty. So knowledgeable about ancient sculpture! He knew each one of them, explained what they really mean. I’ll tell you everything later.”

Vidya had no ears for any of it. She confronted Latika, hands on her hips. “Suraj was on the beach yesterday, that’s what Gouri says. Did you see him too? Why didn’t you tell me?”

*

Even as she spoke, her son was closer than Vidya could have imagined: in a different part of the same ruins, climbing a flight of stone stairs bracketed by a pair of gryphons. Suraj selected a shadowed eave to sit in. He had a handful of tourist pamphlets with him and a notebook. He could see Nomi nearby, crouched, changing a lens on her camera. She straightened, then spotted something else and this time went on her knees, bent almost to the ground. She was wearing a dark blue kurta too large for her, one of the Indian clothes she had bought for herself in her bid to blend in. She had chopped the kurta’s sleeves off because of the heat and wore it with shapeless white pyjamas to her ankles. Her feet were in red sneakers.

This was her notion of dressing demurely in Indian clothes. A lazy grin dislodged Suraj’s cigarette and he held it between thumb and forefinger, sucking in the smoke as he observed her. The kurta hung on her as loose as a shift and kept slipping off her shoulders. It was an angular shoulder that led to slender but muscular arms. His own biceps had long since softened, but she was young, she worked on hers, he could see.

He looked at her focusing on a frieze of elephants in procession. She was at work. He was not. He needed to recover from the scare of his near-drowning that morning. His chest still hurt, and his stomach had felt as taut as a drum ever since. He would not have come had it not been for Nomi’s impersonal tone of command, as if the woman from the evening before, who was fascinated by everything he said, had never existed.

So he had come, but all he had done was to roll a joint and take a drag. He felt too old at this game to bother. Greying men shouldn’t have to rush about over monuments making notes and taking photographs, there were things they should be forever exempted from. He leaned back and shut his eyes, savouring his smoke, listening to the penetrating voice of a guide doing his rounds with a group of Western tourists. After a while he heard one of the women in the group ask accusingly, “Is that a child? There in that . . .”

Nomi, straggling along behind the group, looked at the panel the woman was pointing to. It showed a buxom, narrow-waisted, naked woman in ecstatic embrace with a man, their lips pressed together, her legs curled around his hips. At their feet, caressing the man’s leg, was a figure so small it might have been a toddler.

“Not a child, Madam, no child. No children in this kind of sculpture. Not in Indian culture,” the guide said.

“Well, you’ve just about everything else, haven’t you?” The woman turned to Nomi, her grey eyes twinkling. “There’s some weird stuff out here – men with horses, women with camels, foursomes, eightsomes! Have you seen them?”

“No children, Madam,” the agitated guide said. “Look.”

He would not say the words, but what he was pointing to were the round breasts on the tiny figure. It was a woman and not a child, there was no doubt about that.

“A midget then.” A straw-hatted man in the group said. “Not a child, just a midget who’s seen a lot.” The whole group tittered and the grey-eyed woman said, “They’ve all seen a lot more than you and me!”

“Some panel show children – but only playing.” The guide was upset by their levity and pointed with a vehement, jabbing finger. “In ancient India no barrier between life and love. Erotic is creation itself, so it is celebrated in our temples. Nothing wrong. Please understand!” A voice from the group was heard muttering, “You don’t say!”

The guide’s voice grew fainter as he and his group went further away. Nomi kneeled to look at the tiny figure at the bottom of the panel. No, it wasn’t a child, the guide was right. Were there any children at all in those scenes of abandon? She went from panel to panel, inspecting one spasm of ecstasy after another. She felt composed despite the fornication on the walls surrounding her. The certainty that she would be revolted must have steeled her. Not many children in this temple, the guide was right, and certainly no little girls being fondled by old men. If there was a child at all, it was in the arms of a maternal-looking woman.