Sleeping On Jupiter (20 page)

The rest of the drive down the highway was suffused with a sense of things ending. Vidya was already tense about her electricity bill. She was sure it had come by now and if the bill wasn’t paid on time she might lose her connection. And then? In a few minutes her mind felt as if it were an undone skein of wool: impossible to find the beginning or end of the problem of the unpaid bill. The car speeded down the last of the twilit roads and secretive trees. “At day’s end, like the hush of dew comes evening,” Gouri murmured to herself. “The kite wipes the scent of sunlight from its wings.” She could not remember the next few lines or where she had read the poem. Perhaps at college. After a moment some snatches came back to her and she whispered, “All birds come home, all rivers, all of life’s tasks finished, only darkness remains.” Looking out of the window she said sadly, “It’s over so soon.” They were approaching street lights, cars, buildings, Jarmuli’s market.

“It’s not! Let’s get off at the bazaar! I don’t feel like the hotel yet.” Latika twisted herself back to look at them. “Come on now, you two, let’s have some fun.”

“Aren’t you tired?” Vidya said. “We can go tomorrow. We were there just yesterday.” The sense of misgiving which had taken root in her after hearing that Gouri had caught sight of her son weighed her down, and tired her out. First her ill health, then that molten sun pouring down on her head all afternoon, then Suraj. She tried reminding herself of the many times Gouri had confused one person with another. But the same thought went around her brain in concentric circles that tightened into an aching noose. Why had her son followed her to Jarmuli? Did he need to speak to her about something? But then they had spoken the morning she left, when she had phoned him. Had she imagined his unease, his attempt to hang up minutes after she called? He had been sounding evasive and abrupt for many months – one had to be grateful he answered his phone at all, which was more than she could say of her daughter-in-law, Ayesha.

Latika was still urging them to stop the car and get off at the bazaar. “Let’s, please!” she begged them like a child. “We can take rickshaws back to the hotel, it’s only ten minutes away. It’s such a lovely evening.” Vidya drew breath to snap at her, then counted, as she had taught herself, a slow fifteen. “Fine,” she said after her pause. “Fine, we’ll do as you want.”

They were in a dilemma about the driver’s tip and held urgent whispered consultations. How did one deal with a tip when he was not really a driver but the manager of the hotel? It was difficult conferring when he was inches away, listening. Ultimately, Latika whispered, “Gift, gift,” and they got off. Now that there was a purpose to the market trip, Vidya did not feel as irascible, and after a long cold gulp of a fizzy drink her anxieties over Suraj and the electricity bill receded.

*

After leaving his uncle’s house for the last time, Badal drove out of town towards the Sun Temple, down Marine Road, shaded by the casuarina trees that flanked it. It was a lonely stretch, close neither to Jarmuli nor to the huddles of earth and straw that made up the dismal villages which lived off the temple. At one point, where he sighted an opening in the foliage and a pale stretch of sand, he abandoned his scooter and walked down to the shore. White-topped rollers came crashing in, a wind had risen in the orange sky.

Why had Raghu shown not a sign – not the tiniest flicker – that their afternoon by the boat had meant something to him as well? The cruelty of his indifference opened an abyss inside him. It wasn’t indifference alone, there was ridicule as well. He could not stop himself thinking about it. He reworked every second of their togetherness into separate images, as in a slide show, as though this would keep him from losing them. He wanted to throw himself into a thorn bush, cut himself with a razor, smash his toes with a stone – anything to fight pain with pain. He stood by the sea and the song Johnny Toppo had been droning that morning played in his head:

He sat on the sand, head in his hands, clutching his hair, trying to drive the song and his headache away. Once he had asked Johnny Toppo, “Can’t you sing a happy song? Why are all your songs so gloomy?” And Johnny Toppo had said, “They aren’t sad for me. They’re all I have left of my world. I’ve no cameras like these tourists – clicking all the time. Smile, smile! Click!” He had tapped his forehead. “I keep it all here. It makes me happy to remember.”

“So what was your world?” Badal had asked him. “Tell me, why don’t you?” Johnny Toppo had turned away. After a while he had said, “I sell tea, I was born ten years after the great earthquake in Bihar, I live in a tarpaulin shack, I have nobody, nothing to worry about, nothing to lose. I’m happy I’m above the water and below the sky and I’ve got beeris to smoke and a half-bottle to drink. I know from the songs in my head that I used to have another life long ago. That’s all there is to say about me, Babu.”

In the far distance, across the water, a line of lights glimmered. Fishing trawlers, living their secret lives. The lights dipped, disappeared, came back. Their nets went deep down to the floor of the sea. They would be at work all night, trapping and killing thousands of gasping creatures.

Badal had had a trick since childhood, of sitting by the sea with his back to it. He would position himself close enough for the waves to wet him with spray, knowing that if a big breaker came it might sweep him out to sea. He knew all about waves and currents, about riptides formed by winds hundreds of miles away that sucked swimmers under or sluiced away people standing on the shore. If you fought the current and tried swimming back against it, you would drown. The thing to do was not to oppose it but to fool it and swim away from it, in a diagonal. Badal had seen the washed up corpses of those who had battled the currents and lost. But he still sat with his back to the water, as if at the edge of a cliff, playing with death.

A wave crashed onto the beach and he moved away from long instinct. The nearby waves told him which ones would come further inland than the rest. Still, this one had managed to wet the bottom half of his clothes. Two more waves followed, lapping at him. At times he wanted to stop their rush and roar, freeze them mid-charge for a moment’s stillness. To know how absolute silence sounded.

He grew tired of his game and turned to sit facing the sea. He had grown up beside it, yet its endlessness was a thing his mind could not come to grips with. This coast he was sitting on – going towards the Dolphin Hotel, the Swirling Sea Hotel, past Vishnupada Road and the Vishnu temple and beyond it to Grand Road and the market and Matri Mandir and the Kanakot highway – went onward, curving voluptuously past the tigers and honeycombs of the Sundarbans towards Burma, and downward towards Pondicherry, where the same water flowed, and the same winds that blew here blew there too, pushing that water into waves that travelled towards the southernmost tip of this tongue-shaped country before they curved upward again on their journey past Bombay and Goa to Karachi and Iran, Arabia and Egypt – names from dreams and textbooks.

Jarmuli radiated outward to Asia, the world, the solar system, the universe – it was every child’s incantation in school, and even now, when he wanted to be out of the reach of his aunt and uncle, he dreamed of living on Jupiter and sleeping under its many moons. When his teacher had told their class it had sixteen moons he had wanted to ask her if this meant that there was a full moon on Jupiter every night. Or were there crescent moons and half moons and round moons all at once in that other sky?

If he put his feet into the water here at the beach in Jarmuli, he was dipping them in the universe. If he could only step into the sea, swim and swim, and land in Zanzibar. He knew nothing about it, had never wanted to know anything about it beyond its place in the school atlas, merely loved the sound of its name: Zanzibar.

Badal rose, not knowing where to go. He trudged to his scooter. Where did Johnny Toppo live, he wondered. In all these years of drinking his tea he had never found that out – where was that tarpaulin shack?

Where would he go now? What was he to do?

He was fiddling with the key to his scooter when he heard a woman’s voice.

“Whose is that camel?” the woman was saying. “I’m going to untie it.”

Badal saw the tasselled leather bands on the woman’s ankle, the coloured braids in her hair. That girl in the wrong clothes at the temple. She was still in strange clothes, he saw, an overlarge kurta whose sleeves appeared to have been hacked off. It was being whipped around her by the breeze. Billowing pyjamas. Red sneakers. But she had made an effort: he had to admit these were Indian clothes, after a fashion.

The girl was pointing to a forlorn, barrel-chested camel tied to a post by a shuttered souvenir stall. Its hump had collapsed, its eyes were rheumy. Its coat was moth-eaten and its ribs showed through. The girl stroked the camel’s side. She looked at Badal as if she had had a brilliant idea and said, “Shall we untie it? Let’s!”

“Where will it go?” he said. “It has nowhere to go. And what will it eat?”

“It can be free for some time. Here it’ll live without ever knowing anything else. No?”

Was she merely whimsical, like many of the foreigners he encountered? Or was she addled enough to think the camel had emotions and spent all its life yearning for freedom? He had always seen camels in Jarmuli, brought there from thousands of miles away for tourists to ride on the beach. They were replaced by others when they dropped dead. They were so timeless in their solitude it had never crossed his mind before how far away from their natural homes these animals were.

And he? Could he live if someone cut the invisible threads that bound him to the great temple? The temple that had been his life and his heart and his soul from when his memory began.

The girl said, “I’m going to untie him.”

Jarmuli was quite far, it struck him, and the sun had almost set. “What are you doing here?” he asked her. “It is not safe. A woman was . . .” He stopped himself from telling her a woman had been attacked nearby the month before, left for dead.

“Let’s find something to cut the rope with,” she said. “Unless we can untie it.” She began to prise open the knots.

Badal pulled out his tin box from the scooter’s basket and extracted his father’s Swiss knife. It had never been used and the gadget had rusted. The springs were stiff. After a struggle he managed to open the blade, and held it towards her. How odd he had the knife with him, he thought, as if he had known all along they would meet again, she would need a knife.

She said, “Will you hold him or will you cut the rope?” She had a small, pointed face, now split open by a comic-book grin that showed all her teeth and a bit of her gums.

He held the rope. The camel smelled of hide and dung and mould, a strong animal stench that made him gag. It had tearful eyes and drooping eyelids fringed with long lashes. Its nostrils quivered as the girl sawed at the rope – on and on until first it frayed, then frayed some more, and then fell apart.

She patted the camel’s side and said, “Go! Run! Far! You’re free now!”

The camel did not move. It hung its head, looking too weary to take another step.

The girl pushed the camel and said, “Shoo, go . . . before they come back!”

The camel stood its ground. It had never heard these words before, nor the tone of voice. The girl pushed with all her strength as if the camel were a stalled car. “Move!” Then half giggling, half annoyed, she sighed. “O.K. I give up. It’s your life.”

This time the camel took one tentative step to the left, then another.

“Good!” Nomi said. She walked away from the camel and stood gazing at their surroundings, hands on her hips. “Bleak, no? This place? Not on the tourist trail, right?” She fidgeted with a lighter and from her bag pulled out a bottle of water. She was talking in English now, assuming he understood. He did, after a fashion, but his answers were halting and slow.

The girl lowered her face to shield her cigarette from the wind. She was exactly the kind of person he usually found repellent. Those rings in her ears. That crazy hair. And a woman smoking? He should walk away and leave her to her fate – such people invited trouble. He looked towards his scooter and fingered the keys in his pocket. The girl circled the cigarette to light it. She kept the lighter flame on, waving it at his face and saying, “Want one?”

Badal said, “I don’t smoke, I work at the temple,” and simultaneously put his hand out for one. When she leaned over with a smile to light it for him, he saw that, like Raghu, she had a dimple. Hers was in the right cheek while Raghu’s was in the left, as if the two of them had two halves of the same face. A black smog of grief rose to his throat, choking him.

She shrugged and said, “I don’t really smoke either. But I stole these from a friend of mine when he wasn’t looking. He dumped me at the Sun Temple and left. No explanation, nothing.”

“That is not good,” Badal mumbled. He knew the man she meant, someone drunk, rude, disrespectful, the kind of man he did not want in his head. He had spotted him early that morning on the beach with Johnny Toppo. That man was the reason Raghu had to rush away when he was being given the phone.

“I had to hitch a ride on a bus. It turned off at some village and they told me, Get off. Just like that. Serve that driver right if they found my chopped up body in the bushes. What a relief to find you. I recognised you in a second. You don’t recognise me.”

They sat on the sand. She looked over her shoulder to see where the camel was going. It had hardly moved. “Have you ever seen a donkey’s eyes?” she said. “They’re so beautiful. This camel has eyes like a donkey’s. I’d have loved having those eyes, you know?”

“No,” he said. “I have not looked carefully at a donkey’s eyes.”

He was puzzled by her question. Her eyes – he hadn’t considered them before. Now he saw they were long-lashed and very dark and large, like Raghu’s.