Sleeping On Jupiter (2 page)

The First Day

At four in the afternoon, the sleeper train to Jarmuli shuddered to life and wheezed out of the station. Passengers locked into companionship for the next fourteen hours eyed each other sidelong, wondering how it would be. In Coach A2, three women were exchanging glances. “You ask her,” Gouri’s imploring look said to Latika and Vidya. Their eyes refused to meet hers.

The three of them, friends, were going on their first outing together. They were in a compartment, all grey and blue, with two large plate-glass windows and four berths. To climb to one of the upper berths you needed to be agile. Gouri, whose ticket number pointed her upwards, could just about manage stairs these days if she placed her weight on the right knee instead of the left. She turned to the fourth person in their compartment and said, “Excuse me, if you don’t mind . . .”

The girl was bent over a travel guide, pen in hand. She turned a page and scribbled in the book’s margin. Gouri waited. The girl did not look up. Gouri looked at Vidya for confirmation, murmured an excuse me again, then stepped closer and brushed the girl’s shoulder with a finger.

At this the girl jerked to life and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh! I didn’t want to . . . I mean . . .” Gouri stepped back. You’d think she was a two-headed ogre and not a round-faced old woman.

The girl shook her head, as if to clear it. Her hair was a bird’s nest, streaked brown and black, some of it braided with coloured threads. She reached under the braids and a pair of earphones emerged from ears spiral-bound with rings, silver or copper but for two tiny circles of gold at the lobes.

Gouri had not wanted to ask this intimidating young creature for a favour, but old bones left her little choice. She collected her breath and said, “My ticket is for the upper berth and you see, I no longer have the knees to be able to climb up – do you mind – you must sit at the window of course, as long as you like. Only at night, to sleep, if you could exchange . . .”

The girl wore a turquoise T-shirt over which the words “Been There Done That Binned It” undulated as though travelling over hills and valleys. Her pants were cut off at the calves and the fabric was held together with a dozen zips that traversed the legs. The women glimpsed tattoos and could not be sure if the glint at her eyebrows came from a stud. Vidya was longing to say, “Have you seen how young girls dress these days? And then they complain if men bother them!”

The girl shrugged. “No problem.” Her face broke into a smile of unexpected sweetness. “I like the upper berth.” She reached for her earphones again.

Huge black eyes in a pointed face, like a deer’s, and she seems as jumpy as one too, Latika observed. She turned away and busied herself with her phone so that she would not stare.

Encouraged by the smile, Gouri beamed at the girl. “My friend Latika can still manage to climb to those upper berths, not me. Not many years left, you know, that we’ll be able to travel! We said to each other, we’ve been friends all our lives and never been anywhere together. I said, Jarmuli! I’ve always wanted to go back to the Vishnu temple. And Latika, that’s Latika, she just wants to sit by the sea and drink coconut water – so we left our children and grandchildren and here we are! My name’s Gouri, by the way, and this is Vidya. And you?”

“Nomi,” the girl said, her smile fading at Gouri’s cascade of information. “Pleased to meet you.” She fiddled with her earphones.

“Are you going on a holiday to Jarmuli?” This time the question came from Vidya, who looked at the girl over the rim of her glasses. “Where are you from?”

“From . . . I’m from lots of places. Mostly Oslo, I guess,” the girl said. “Not a holiday. I’m here to . . . to research a documentary.” Even as Vidya started saying, documentary about what, she added, “On religious tourism, temple towns, all of that. My boss wanted the Kumbh. Took some doing, but I persuaded her Jarmuli might work.”

The girl took up her book, replugged her ears, and tried to find her page. In the corridor, a bullet-shaped child in red shorts narrowed his eyes, revved an imaginary motorbike, then hurtled up the aisle. From somewhere in the train came a woman’s voice tight with anger: “No,
you
control him.”

“Film! How interesting! My son, he does the same kind of work.” Vidya smiled, delighted by the coincidence. She leaned forward to tell her story and the girl removed her earphones again, this time with obvious reluctance.

“Oh, the comings and goings when he was single and living at home – his madcap film friends, even famous actors! They’d be there all night! Such a racket, so much coffee, so much food cooked for hours and gone in seconds. Once . . .”

Surely anyone could see the young woman wanted to be left alone! Sometimes one’s friends were so obtuse, yet however old the friendship there were things you could not say out loud for fear of offending. “Did you bring me that Dick Francis to read, Vidya?” Latika said. “Or did you forget?” Diversion tactics, her husband would have called it. Tact, that’s what she called it.

The girl used the interruption conspicuously to return the earphones to her ears and go back to her book. Vidya stopped speaking mid-sentence, snubbed. She busied herself with a sheaf of blank cards that she took from her bag and placed on a book, the one Latika had asked for. She always brought herself back to an even keel with work. She began to write on the cards. She noticed Latika did not ask for the Dick Francis again. She hadn’t wanted it in the first place, Vidya knew that, not right then.

Now, just outside the city, the train sped past slums that flowed down the banks of the railway lines. People had settled into their seats and taken out magazines, munchies, packs of cards. The boy who had been torpedoing through the aisles had been stationary for a while. Now he started his motorbike again and soon afterwards crashed into a woman coming the other way. “Whose child is this?” the woman shouted. “Why don’t you keep an eye on him?” The boy lay prone on the floor at the woman’s feet. Then after a whimper followed by a full-blown sob, he began to howl with rage. A man’s voice said, “You go get him.” A woman said, “Always me!”

“What a pest that child is, I’m sure it’ll cry all night,” Latika said. At once they chorused, as if at an old, shared joke: “
Badly brought up
!” Even Vidya had to laugh. She went back to writing in careful block letters, but now she had a smile on her face.

“What are you doing, Vidya?” Latika said, relieved the silence had been broken. “You’re always so busy.” Forty years in the bureaucracy and a preoccupied self-importance was now Vidya’s natural way of being. She did not lift her head until she had finished inscribing her set of cards. Each one said:

G
OURI
G
ANGULY, STAYING AT
S
WIRLING
S
EA
H
OTEL
, J
ARMULI
,
TILL 14
F
EBRUARY 2006
. P
HONE 697565437
.

P
ERMANENT ADDRESS:
T
ARINI
A
PARTMENTS
,
13
A/5 H
AZRA
R
OAD
, C
ALCUTTA
.

“I want you to put a card into every pocket of your handbag, Gouri,” Vidya said. “If you drift off and can’t remember where you are, it’ll be easier for someone to bring you back to us.”

Her voice exuded wisdom and forethought. Everyone who knew Vidya admired this about her: she thought of everything, and for everyone. She had a square, broad face in which eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth, everything was in proportion and the right shape, yet the sum of it, inexplicably, did not go beyond symmetry. Her crisp cotton sari, her neat bun, the modesty of the plain gold studs in her ears all spoke of her habitual efficiency and practicality. She wore the waterproof sandals she had bought the day before specially for this trip to the seaside and in her bag was a bottle of hand sanitizer, a packet of rose-scented wet wipes, and phials containing basic homoeopathic medicines. After packing these she had sat for a full five minutes of quiet next to her luggage, to run through in her mind a list of the many things she and her friends might need that had not yet gone in.

Gouri, head against the train’s window, was humming a bhajan under her breath. Her eyes slid over hutments, pylons, shops, drains, restive huddles of people at level crossings, and an advertisement repeated on every wall the train flashed past. It was painted in such tall black letters that she could not look away from it:
HARD IN A MINUTE, PLEASURE FOR HOURS.

She turned her gaze to dogs rooting around a garbage heap. Soggy hovels of plastic, brick and mud in ditches of stagnant water. Forests of T.V. antennae on their roofs. A glimpse of a rice field and then it was gone. Only at times, for rushing seconds, she spotted silhouettes of mud huts and shining surfaces of ponds and thought of the village where she had climbed trees with her cousins and chased them through riverside grass gone cloud-white with flowers in the autumn, grass so high they lost each other, called out, held hands when they found each other again.

“Why must she carry so many cards?” Latika’s voice broke into Gouri’s reverie. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?” She rummaged through her bag for a hairbrush, stealing a look at the girl. Did that hair ever need brushing? How did people manage with braids and beads and thread in their hair? Latika’s own was cut into a crop that tended to fly around, but it was always clean, and it framed her fine-boned face nicely and set off the tortoiseshell glasses she wore. It was coloured to a glossy burgundy. She had agonized for weeks before settling on the shade, yearning for the simplicity of times when hair was either black or white, no shades in between, but was secretly pleased with herself for throwing caution to the winds and going for something bold.

Vidya’s attention had not wavered. “Gouri needs many cards. She forgets where she’s put what. Remember how we missed the first ten minutes of that film because she couldn’t find the tickets in her bag?”

“That could have been any one of us,” Latika said, “I can never find anything in my bag.”

“Well, I just want to be prepared since we’re going to be in an unknown place, that’s all. Especially when she’s even forgotten to bring her phone.”

Did she sound too harsh? Vidya gave Gouri a nudge. It was meant to be affectionate, to show she meant no criticism, but her friend – she could not help thinking this –
wobbled
away from her. Every year that passed seemed to make Gouri more plump. Vidya wondered how she and Latika would manage her. Her limbs were spindly, but her torso was a mound, a pumpkin perched on matchsticks. It was a small miracle she didn’t topple. Her mind was on the edge as well. Over the last two years it was as if her brain had termites tunnelling through it. She repeated herself, she forgot where she put things, she forgot names. She would even forget that she had eaten and begin serving herself again. Gouri was usually meek, but now she needed handling. When she took offence she became combative: “No, you did not phone me yesterday,” and “Of course not, I haven’t yet had a fish roll.” Vidya often woke at three in the morning and stared into the darkness. Those creatures turning Gouri’s brain to dust might be biding their time for me. They must be there. Waiting.

“It’s not so bad,” Gouri said from the corner she had retreated into. “I just take a little longer with things, that’s all.” She wished they wouldn’t discuss her this way, not in front of that young thing in the opposite seat – what was her name? Had she told them her name?

Gouri turned towards the window and saw that rainwater had rippled the glass. The countryside was now a barely legible shadow. A sagging face – her own, she realised – looked back at her. Behind her she could see Vidya, eyebrows arched, mouth opening to gather breath for more admonishing words. The deepening shadows outside had turned the train’s windows into mirrors. Gouri noticed something and put her hands to her earlobes, wondering what she had done with the pearl studs she thought she had worn. She had taken them from the cupboard, put them on her dressing table last night, of that she was certain. Or had she? She leaned her forehead on the rain-flecked window, cupped her palms to shield her eyes from light, and peered into the early night. There was nothing to look at, but she kept her face there, staring into the void.

“Suppose you forget the name of the hotel. And you can’t remember your home phone number. What then? What’s the harm? These cards aren’t heavy!”

Gouri picked up her handbag. The zips whined open and shut one after the other. She put a card into each of the compartments of the bag. When she finished she looked up without a word and Vidya turned away saying, “I’m sure I packed some of those sweets, you know, those chutney ones everyone used to eat on trams.”

The train picked up speed and the awkwardness passed. They began to talk of neighbours and family, the drudgery of daily living. “She has to juggle a hundred things to come and see me,” Latika said of her daughter who lived in Florence and came home every other year with her husband and their children. “But if she knew how many grey hairs each visit gives me! You know I’m not the greatest housekeeper in the world. Of course, I love seeing my grandchildren – and my son-in-law – but the amount of mineral water I have to stock up! Sausages, pasta! And cheese! The children eat nothing else.”

In their own homes, surrounded by family or servants, they could never gossip this way, but here they didn’t have to worry about being overheard. The girl was half dozing against her window now, book abandoned, her head and shoulders occasionally swaying to the music being pumped into her brain.

“Yes, the mineral water – cartons and cartons – each time my nephew from New York visits,” Vidya said.

The ticket-checker arrived and his frown sobered them. They were all travelling on senior citizen concessions. The checker demanded proof that they were over sixty. Gouri and Latika obediently held out identity cards. Vidya rummaged through her handbag muttering, “I’m sure it was here, of course it was.” Eventually she emptied everything onto the seat in a cascade of tissues, medicines, pens, safety pins, and rubber bands, but she could not find the driving licence she had thought would do the job for her.