Sleeping On Jupiter (21 page)

She said, “When you see a donkey, it looks so alone. Like it has no mother or father or friends. Cows never look so isolated.” She flicked her lighter on, then off, then on again. She held up a finger and passed it through the flame, then said, “Don’t you love that it doesn’t get burned when you do that?”

He could make no sense of her talk. And her English, when she spoke so fast, was hard for him to follow even though she broke into sentences in Hindi. Still he followed her logic without missing a step, as if he were a blind man who had counted the number of paces between rooms so that he didn’t need sight any longer.

Having grasped that he couldn’t understand much of her English, Nomi fell silent. The sea rushed towards the beach, then retreated with a roar, as if coming in had been a mistake. There was moisture in the air, Badal could feel it. It smelled of fish and salt-water. Something made an odd grunting sound nearby – the camel, Badal thought. Then he wondered, what sounds did camels make? Did they moo like cows?

Nomi gazed out at the sea and thought she had had its sound in her ears forever. Her first memory of the sea was of being alone by the sea, her mother walking away. A dog came and sniffed at her. How alone she had felt, and how hungry. Her mother – she had spent the last ten years of her life looking for the sea where she had lost her mother. She had been in the sea in Greece – the water was purple and green and blue there. She had seen – she counted – the Sargasso Sea, the Chilean Sea, the North Sea, the Bass Strait, the South China Sea. She’d even dipped a toe in the Baltic Sea – that was icy – and grey like slate. Whole shiploads of children drowned in the Baltic Sea during the Second World War. Think how they died. Frozen. And then there was the Dead Sea – she had not seen it, but she knew that people floated in it, not needing to swim. At every sea, she would sit down like this and wait for it to tell her something, she didn’t know what, but she’d know it when it came. She would be sitting by the sea where she had been left, the one she could sense from her cement cage in the ashram.

Badal felt the wind rise. He could see no clouds, but the sky was lumpy and old, too heavy to stay up. He sensed an approaching storm. High tide too would come in a while and the next morning the beaches would be littered with sodden rubbish. Once he had found a rusted harmonica and had coaxed a few tunes out of it.

Nomi rested her chin on her arms. Those trawler lights on the water, she had thought there were buildings – a whole city across the sea. When she chanced upon a spellbinding place she kept it a secret, as if it existed only for her. Now look: this beach, the trawler, the storm coming – wasn’t it actually a magic show or a stage set? Afterwards they’d dry the wind, clean up the sand, wipe up the sea, fold away the sky, stow the camel and unstring those lights and nobody else would find this place again.

Badal drew lines in the sand with a twig. When Raghu had given him the thick milky tea he had known it was all over – worse, he had known nothing had ever been. The afternoon by the boat, his mouth on Raghu’s, that was a spell he alone had been under and understanding this made him feel as if someone had pushed a hand down his gullet, grabbed his blood-slimed heart and intestines and pulled them out through his mouth the way fisherwomen cleaned fish. His throat came up with an involuntary choking sound. The girl did not seem to hear it. She pulled out two more cigarettes and lit them, putting both in her mouth together like one who chainsmoked every day. She passed him one and he took it from her as if from long habit.

She was fiddling with the jewellery in her ears. Several silver rings. Two tiny ruby studs at the top of the left ear. One gold ring at each lobe.

He had not realised he was staring until she said, “Weird, no? So many? I didn’t plan it that way. I just collected them over the years.”

Badal swallowed this information with a smile and a nod. She did not seem to expect more.

For a long time after their cigarettes finished they sat looking out to the horizon. She was humming a song – one of Johnny Toppo’s songs. Badal could not remember which. How did she know the song? Johnny Toppo’s songs had no melodies stolen from any movies he had seen, neither were the words those of a poet. It came to him that Raghu never hummed Johnny Toppo’s songs even though he listened to them all the time; he didn’t hum any songs at all. But he would not think of Raghu. He would not think.

Then, as the wind dropped, something in the air changed, as if the storm were drawing breath before it broke loose. The trawler’s lights had faded.

The girl fished around in her bag and brought out a box of mints. She held it out to him. “You’d better have one of these,” she said. “Then nobody will know you smoked.”

She looked hesitant; she was going to ask a favour. He knew what it would be.

“Give me a ride?” she said. “Till somewhere?”

“I will drop you near the market in Jarmuli. You can take a rickshaw from there to your hotel,” he said to her. “And then I leave. I won’t go back there ever again.”

He put the mint into his mouth, felt its icy charge wipe every other taste away.

*

It was when they were looking for a gift for their driver who was not a driver that Latika had her brainwave. They were in a badly-lit alleyway lined by a series of shops that looked like rusted cupboards on stilts. Crowds of evening shoppers were jammed against each other looking at displays of cheap clothing, bags, shells, and statues. Here, set somewhat behind the other shops, as if it needed to be hidden, was a grilled window in a wall flaky with torn posters from the recent elections. A few men who had been glued to the window slunk away from it, tucking half bottles of liquor into their waistbands, then pulling their shirts over the bottles as camouflage.

“Let’s get a bottle of vodka.” Latika’s eyes were shining.

“Have you lost your mind?” Vidya had not paused to count to fifteen this time and her question came out as a furious bark.

“She has. What is wrong with you, Latika? Let’s go back and have some hot cups of tea. From that man on the beach.” Why she needed that tea so badly Gouri could not explain. But she did.

“Tea, tea, tea! I’m sick of tea. Haven’t had one cup of real coffee for five days. I’m going to buy some vodka. Wait here, Vidya.”

“Wait here? What will those . . . those
loafers
at the shop think? Respectable old women queuing up with that riff-raff to buy . . . liquor!”

“I’ve never drunk alcohol in my life,” Gouri said, pursing her lips and looking away.

“Neither have I.” Vidya’s words came rapidly, as if the very thought rattled her. “What an absurd idea. Look how those men are staring. What if they follow us? Let’s just go from here.” She pulled at Latika’s thin arm.

“They’ll never see us again. Come on! We’ll never be out together after this, away from children, away from family.”

“What’s happening to you in your old age, Latika? Since when have you been drinking?” Gouri wanted to sound sarcastic, but she never managed irony and this time too it came out sounding like a real question. It infuriated Latika. “Oh, old age! Old age! I’m tired of this.” She stalked off towards the grilled window.

“What’s got into her, really . . . Latika? Oh, this is all so exhausting, and after such a long drive and the hot sun all day . . .” Vidya followed her, calling, “Latika! Slow down.”

Gouri stood where they had left her, in the middle of the market, with its piles of garlands, fruits, rotted vegetables underfoot, the chaos of vendors shouting under gas lamps that seemed to create more shadows than light. She wondered if she too should try and stop Latika. She stole a look at the dingy shop as if a glance, however quick, might be enough to contaminate her. “
INDIAN MADE FOREIGN LIQUOR
” a sign said in blotchy red paint on the walls around the window. That decided her. She stayed where she was.

Out of the mess of rickshaws and people with shopping bags and laden carts that were being pushed through the crowd, Gouri saw a young woman approach her. The face looked familiar, but she could not place it. The woman – a girl, really – was looking at her. Gouri turned away. She wanted to avoid their eyes meeting.

The girl came towards her, as if she knew Gouri. “Do you remember me? This really is a small place, no? I’m so glad you’re here! My friend abandoned me at the Sun Temple, then I took a bus and then I got a lift on a scooter, but now someone is following me. A monk . . . see? Behind that shop with the saris? That one, with the long hair. Haven’t you seen him standing in the sea with his beads? He’s been after me from the first day I came here.”

“Child, a monk will never do you any harm. He is a man of god. Why should he follow you?” The girl looked deranged, what with her matted hair and and her strange clothes.

“Please.” The girl looked at a group of people some distance away, then turned to Gouri again. “I mustn’t look that way, he’ll see me. Just . . . if we could leave together from here? Then I’ll be fine. Please?” She put a hand out and Gouri shrank back. “If you’re going in a rickshaw, I’ll share it? Where are you going?”

Her voice was shaking. Gouri could see she was terrified – but for what reason? A monk? Monks were good. They would never touch a hair on a girl’s head. There were any number of monks at the temple: pious, holy, revered.

“I am waiting,” Gouri explained. “I can’t leave.”

“For what? For how long?”

Gouri had to think – for what? For some moments she could not recall what exactly she was waiting for. Then – of course, she remembered – she was waiting for the guide to the Vishnu temple. Vidya and Latika had gone on ahead in a rickshaw. The guide had told her he would take her on his scooter. He had asked her to wait till he brought his scooter from the parking lot, but then he had not come back. She had been waiting quite a while, her tired legs told her that. They felt as if they had been walking all day when all she had done was to rest in the hotel, praying and preparing for this evening’s trip to the temple.

She might as well take a rickshaw with this child, do her a good turn while she was at it. Perhaps the guide couldn’t find her in the crowds. What was the point of worrying about it? Whatever would be would be. They only needed to reach the temple, and then she knew her way about. They would get there right in time for the evening’s prayers and change of flags. That was such a spectacle. Young people loved that kind of thing. She would tell the girl what it all meant.

She waved towards the line of waiting rickshaws with a magisterial finger. A rickshaw broke away from its rank by the road and creaked to a halt next to them. Holding the seat for support, she heaved herself in and beckoned to the girl, who clambered in as well. “To the temple,” Gouri said.

*

At the Indian Made Foreign Liquor shop, the men by the window made way for Latika without being asked, too astonished to catcall or whistle. Latika leaned in at the window, unzipped her handbag, fished out some money and said in an authoritative tone, as if this were an everyday thing and she was buying onions or potatoes: “One small bottle vodka.”

She was stumped when she was asked, “Which brand, Madam? What’s your usual?” The pig-eyed man behind the grill was smirking, he underlined the word Madam when he spoke. He had a hairline moustache over a puffy upper lip and was picking at his teeth with a pin. The other men were sniggering too.

All of a sudden it came to Latika that she would stop colouring her hair. No more chestnut or black, no more visits to Wendy at Sunflower every month. She ran her fingers through her wind-tousled crop. She wanted it to turn grey and white that minute. She looked straight into the man’s piggy eyes, pushed up her glasses, said, “Smirnoff, of course, if you have it.” Her handbag was big enough for the bottle he handed over through the window-grill. He watched her put it away and took her money without another word.

When she and Vidya got back to the place where they had left Gouri, she was nowhere to be seen. She must have wandered off, attracted by some bauble in a shop. Exactly like that morning when she disappeared from the hotel and they found her after an hour of pointless panic, sitting on an upturned boat.

More exasperated than worried, they divided up and went in opposite directions to look for her. Whoever found her would phone the other and then they would take rickshaws back to the hotel. And not let Gouri out of their sight for the rest of the trip.

Neither of them had found her after a quarter of an hour. The street was full of people, and not one of them was Gouri.

*

When Nomi knocked on his glass door and pushed into the room the moment Suraj had opened it a crack, he realised it was quite late. He must have dropped off. She was shouting, “Why did you rush off like that from the Sun Temple? How did you think I’d come back?”

He had gone from horizontal to vertical so abruptly his head spun and he had to hold on to the door. Her voice seemed far too loud. If he tried not to think about it, he felt less dizzy, but he wanted her to stop shrieking. He put his hands to his ears. The sea was rising inside him, a tide of sour, stale liquid.

“Can’t you hear me?”

He could muster up no more than a mumble. “Why didn’t you come to the car? I waited. Then I left – why didn’t – I feel really sick.”

“I couldn’t find the car! I looked everywhere. It wasn’t where we parked it.”

“Had to move – too much sun. Just for shade – only a short distance.” He needed to sit. He sat heavily on the bed. His head hurt. His eyes couldn’t bear the light. He had come back to the hotel a while ago – when? He could no longer remember. Then he had raided the minibar, finished the last of his dope, and fallen asleep. Had he eaten? Maybe a few peanuts.

She stood over him beside the bed, remorseless. “Why weren’t you picking up your fucking phone? How could you
do
this?”

“My phone was stolen. I left it on the beach when I went for a swim and it was stolen.” He spoke as if each word was a sentence with a full stop after it.

For a while neither of them said anything. She couldn’t very well blame him for a stolen phone, did not know what to blame him for next, he guessed. She threw herself into a chair, said, “At least give me a drink.”