Sleeping On Jupiter (23 page)

They had come back from the market without Gouri. The day had ended in calamity. Latika tried to digest what had happened, but her thoughts kept wandering and Vidya’s voice, when it came, came from far away. What was she saying? Something about getting things under control, organising a search party. The hotel manager had gone with a few other men, driving around to look for Gouri. Jarmuli was a small town, they were sure they would find her, after all she had only gone missing in the market and it had been just a few hours. Of course the darkness made it difficult, but they would not give up. If they did not find her by midnight they would go to the police. Vidya approved of this plan. She had found her runaway secretary long years ago, and that was in a big city. This was almost a one-street town. They would cover every possible angle.

“I’m so desperate I even looked in her room, Latika. On the off chance . . . she wasn’t there of course. I told the manager to search the Vishnu temple. Remember how she kept saying she wanted to go back there? If there’s anywhere she’d be . . . but it’s such a maze . . . how will they ever find her even if she is in there? I phoned that guide for help – Badal – he knows the place inside out. But he was so rude. Just said he was too far away and could not come! Latika? Latika! Are you listening?”

Vidya sat down beside Latika and looked at the third chair in the row. Empty. How perfect and peaceful it had been until yesterday: the evenings in that verandah, the three of them chatting late into night, the sea, this trip, the hotel, life itself. Everything had been in place. It was as if, overnight, a tornado had ripped things apart. Suraj was probably in Jarmuli, maybe in trouble, and they had lost Gouri. She would have to phone that pompous son of Gouri’s to tell him if they did not find her. Because Latika was too tipsy – could that be possible? – certainly too tipsy to make a difficult phone call. Really, she was no help at all. Latika
drunk
. What could be more unreal?

“Oh Latika, what are we to tell her son!” It was a despairing cry.

Latika opened her eyes with an effort. “The manager will find her. He’ll do it. He is a . . . most capable man.”

“But he isn’t God. Latika, how can you be this way when there is such a crisis?”

Latika had another sip of the vodka. She took off her glasses, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the wall. When she spoke her voice was so soft that Vidya had to lean forward to catch her words before the wind threw them away.

“I was in college when I fell in love with a man who lived at the other end of my street. He was from a religious, traditional Konkani family. Handsome, green-eyed, tall, Greek-looking, as Konkanis can be. His family had a beautiful house with ancient tamarind trees, sculptures in the garden, tame doves. They were very rich. We met because he would come every day in a grey car to pick up his daughter from the junior school next to my college. One day he gave me a ride home along with the girl. Over some weeks it became a habit and nobody thought anything of it because he was married and a neighbour and of course his daughter was in the car with us. Then we started meeting each other in secret – I would skip a class and he would come earlier to the college so that we had an hour in the car without the child. I knew it was mad, but there was nothing I could do to fight it. We loved each other. It didn’t feel wrong or bad. But of course nothing was possible and then bits of gossip began floating around . . . someone saw me getting into the car alone, someone else saw me with him far away from home. My brother was ragged about it in his school . . . so that was it. I was packed off to Bhopal to live with an aunt. It was an overnight train I had to take and my brother was sent with me to guard my chastity. Those old second-class coaches. The bunks on top were divided with such a low partition you could touch someone on the other side through it if you tried. My Konkani had somehow managed to get the next bunk. All night, we held hands through that jolting partition. I could hear him crying. Not sobs, but ragged breaths, sniffing sounds, as if he had a cold. My wrist ached, it got a bruise from being twisted through the partition. I felt as if I could hear my heart break. I was very young, you see. My brother was sleeping just a few feet below me in the lower bunk, and he had no idea.”

“And then?”

“Then . . . nothing. The Konkani got off the train before daybreak. His family moved to some other town altogether, so we couldn’t meet even when I came home for holidays. I never saw him again.”

The hotel was in darkness, and now that the radio had stopped they could hear the frenzied barking of dogs in the distance.

“I haven’t thought about all this for years,” Latika said. “Why am I babbling this way?”

Vidya opened her mouth to reply, but Latika went on,

“It’s the sea. The sound of it. It brought back so many old things I thought I had forgotten. I should have been thinking of Gouri, not myself.”

“Do you think we will find her?” Vidya sounded too tired now for despair.

“We will,” Latika said. “Tomorrow the sun will be up again and everything will change.”

There was nothing in their ears but the deep roar of the ocean.

Latika looked beyond the verandah’s banister, at the sky. It had a pale red glow, a storm was imminent. The moon and stars, so clear the evening before, were hidden behind low clouds.

“Shall we go for a stroll?” she said.

“Might as well. We have to stay up till the manager comes back with his search party.”

The hotel staff had furled and tied away the big striped umbrellas that dotted the lawn. In the yellow glow of its submerged lights, patterns of blue and green rippled across the surface of the swimming pool. Latika thought she saw a frog swimming in it. The grass of the lawn felt dew-wet already, and they could taste salt on their lips. They walked down the path to the gate at the back of the hotel’s garden and unlatched it.

A guard came running out of the darkness and shouted, “Aunty! Madam! Where are you going?”

“We want to walk to the sea.”

“It’s not safe this late. A storm is coming, can’t you see? I cannot let you go. I’ll lose my job if you are swept off the beach. It’s too dangerous.”

Latika walked ahead and opened the gate. The sea brimmed at the horizon. The charging waves ate up most of the sky before flinging themselves onto the sand, battering the upturned boats. Not another soul there, nothing apart from the shadows of two men further down the beach, one apparently kneeling in the sea, another emerging from it. The man coming out of the water was very tall. The man kneeling was trying to get up.

“Look! On the other side of the creek. How strange, in the water . . .” Vidya pointed at them.

“Is that man trying to kill him or save him?”

“I think the tall one is pushing the shorter one into the water.”

“No,” said Latika, “I think the tall one is saving the other one from drowning. I can’t see that well in the dark. But look, out there. The lights.”

Vidya turned her eyes to the lights on a ship far out in the sea. Then she turned back to the two men, except that now there was nobody. Nothing but the dissolving darkness, and the sea swallowing up the sand.

The wind gusted at them, tugging them ahead. They walked to the very edge of the beach. They lost the ship’s lights, then glimpsed them again where the sky met the sea, bobbing in and out of the water, and then gone.

They stood with their ankles in the water, feeling the earth disappear from beneath their bare feet with the tug of each receding wave. Latika took Vidya’s hand. Each time they were buffeted by waves they felt their ankles sink and they held each other firm.

“Do you really think we’ll find her?”

“Yes, we will. Just hold on. Everything will be sorted out tomorrow. Wait and see.”

The Eighteenth Day

It is long past midnight when she cycles up the road and reaches the pathway through the woods. She gets off, wheels the bike some distance in, thrusts it into the bushes. The trees have dimmed in midsummer’s brief twilight. She must note the spot where she left the bike if she is to find it again. She digs into one of the many pockets of her jeans. Pieces of chalk emerge. She chooses a couple of tree trunks, marks them.

She walks down the pathway, dusk soaks her, she becomes a black shadow flitting between trees. Overhead, leaves slice the pale sky into slivers. She can hear herself breathe, hear her shoes crunching earth. She steps through brambles that claw at her jeans. She smells marsh rosemary and woodsmoke. It is more light than dark, more dark than light, as is usual on midsummer nights this close to the Arctic. As she is thinking this, all at once before her is the sheet of silver that she has dreamed of before sleeping every night these many years. When she reaches the clearing she slips her jacket’s hood off and arches her back. The beads and the braids are gone. Her hair is cut so short that her head is a fuzzy bud on a thin stem. The rings in her ears catch the light.

She shrugs her backpack off her shoulders and for a long time sits by the water, chin resting on her knees. When it is almost light she slips out of her clothes. She slides into the lake, gasps at the first chill of it, starts swimming towards the centre. When she can no longer make out the shore, she comes to a stop and floats on her back in the shining water. She is a leaf, the water can take her where it will. The air is warm against her skin. She is barely moving, eyes on the stars until they start to fade. Your mother and your father and your brother have become stars, a woman had said once. Whenever you want to be with them, look up at the sky and there they are.

As daylight stains the grey trees green, she flips over. She swims back to the lakeside, climbs out of the water, dries herself and gets into her clothes. She bends to her backpack, takes from it a small stone statue. She traces its lines with a forefinger, holds it close for a moment, then drops it into the lake’s water. Its ripples widen in the light.

She digs into her backpack again and takes out a rusted metal object that is no more than two narrow bands on a rudimentary spindle. She tests several spots with her feet, plants it into the sodden mulch on the bank. She looks up to orient herself: one side of the opal sky is turning pink. She swivels the spindle until its arrow points north.

Acknowledgements

My mother Sheela Roy and her sister Sunila Rudra were my companions on a research trip for this book. They were game for everything, opened doors to worlds I wouldn’t have known existed, and even thanked me for taking them along.

For their clear-eyed comments and sympathetic reading of drafts, I am indebted to Arundhati Gupta, James Scott Linville, Manishita Dass, and Myriam Bellehigue.

I am grateful to Gina Winje and Karin Marie for help on Norwegian foliage and birdlife. Abhishek Roy for untangling the intricacies of relationships in the
Mahabharata
and
Ramayana
. Prateek Jalan for years of keeping me out of trouble, Rajesh Sharma for his unwavering support and interest, and Koukla MacLehose for a peaceful desk by the sea.

For getting the book ready to step out into the world: Katharina Bielenberg, Monica Reyes, Poulomi Chatterji, Thomas Abraham, and Victoria Millar.

Constantly beside me through the writing of this book were John D. Smith’s translation of the
Mahabharata
and A. K. Ramanujan’s translations of bhakti poetry; the lines in the epigraph are based on a translation by Ramanujan, published in his collection,
Speaking of Siva
. The snatches of poetry that come back to Gouri are from the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das’ poem “Banalata Sen”, written in 1942.

There are countless horrific cases of child abuse and sexual violence in India. I have drawn on the legal and investigative history of many such incidents; this book is not based on any particular instance.

It is a great sadness that Per Bangsund isn’t around to see where his walks with me in the Norwegian woods led.

ANURADHA ROY
won the Economist Crossword Prize for Fiction for her novel
The Folded Earth
, which was nominated for several other prizes including the Man Asian, the D.S.C., and the Hindu Literary Award. Her first novel,
An Atlas of Impossible Longing
, has been widely translated and was named one of the best books of the year by the
Washington Post
and the
Seattle Times
. She lives in Ranikhet.