Sleeping On Jupiter (3 page)

The ticket-checker waited with a look on his face that said he was trying to be patient, but it was hard. His white uniform was stretched tight over his belly. The draughts from the airconditioning vents were icy yet his nose shone with sweat and he had to push his glasses back up every now and then with his fore-finger. “There will be a fine if you can’t give me proof,” he said.

“You used to have an identity card from your office . . .”

“It’s years since I retired, Latika!”

Gouri blinked at the man through her glasses. A sweet muffin with raisins for eyes, that’s my Dida, her grandson always said. “Can’t you see we are white-haired ladies, old enough to be your mother? Even her hair – ” Gouri smiled at him and pointed at Latika. “Even her hair’s not really that colour.”

The ticket-checker’s eyes wandered to Latika’s head for a moment, then he turned to a careful study of the tip of his pen. Latika was appalled. She stuffed her hairbrush into her bag, seething. She had felt dubious about this outing from the start, she should have trusted her instincts and stayed at home. If they hadn’t travelled together before, the three of them, there must be good reason: they would probably feel fed up in half a day together. Across the aisle she saw a couple sitting pressed against each other, staring at something only they could see. If only. In an earlier time, when her husband was alive, there was always someone to go on holidays with. So what if he had never sat like that with her, not even as a young man.

The train clacked over a bridge; a steward walked past thumping stacks of sheets and blankets onto empty berths. Vidya was hunting in yet another bag now, but something in the way Gouri had spoken had melted the man and he said, “Alright then.” The clipboard arm relaxed, the tapping ceased. He wagged a finger at them as if they were errant schoolgirls. “This time I’ll let you off. Don’t try it on your way back. You’ll have to pay double.”

He turned to the girl next, and stood for a moment observing her. Nomi’s shoulders and neck were twitching to her music. Her eyes were shut.

“Madam?” the ticket-checker said, making the word sound like an insult. He rapped the formica counter that jutted out from the wall between the facing berths. “Ticket!”

She sprang up at the noise and pulled out her earphones. Drowsy and confused, she unzipped first one trouser pocket, then the other, then a third. At length she prised out a sweat-damped, dog-eared piece of paper and sat back with a sigh of relief. The checker held it between his fingertips, as if it were too grubby to touch. “Nomita Frederiksen, Female, age twenty-five.” He tallied the name on the ticket with the one in his chart, peering over his clipboard to look at her. Then, to show that he was merely doing his job, he turned back to her ticket and checked the details on it a second time.

The girl kept her eyes on the landscape outside the window which flared now and then with flashes of light from the villages and stations they sped through. When the checker at last gave her ticket back, she put it into her rucksack, pushed her earphones in again and once more shut her eyes. Bare, toe-ringed feet on the berth, chin resting on knees that she hugged close to herself, she occupied no more space than a curled-up dog might, and appeared to be just as self-contained.

*

An hour, perhaps two, had gone by when they stopped at a station. Lights glowed outside, white neon dimmed to a sickly yellow by the train’s tinted windows. People surged towards their coach, suitcases and bags in hand. Just outside their window was a tea stall. A tattered woman hung around near it, hoping for food. She wore a grimy sari petticoat and a too-big man’s shirt buttoned wrong. Her shapeless rags and matted hair somehow intensified the raw beauty of her face. Latika wanted immediately to get out of the train and rescue her before she came to harm.

The woman was sidling up to the people on the platform, tugging a shirt in passing or nudging an arm, as though she thought that their revulsion at her touch would make them cough up a rupee or two. Everyone sidestepped her as she edged closer. When she went up to a stocky, thuggish-looking man and put a hand out towards him, wheedling him with a smile, Latika shut her eyes. She didn’t want to look. She would never know anything more about this ragged woman in the murky haze of this platform, what became of her on it. Their train was just a parcel of people rushing through a landscape they had no connection to. Already too many snatches of other people’s lives were stored inside her, the built-up sediments from which bits and pieces floated up at times, into her dreams.

When she opened her eyes she had lost sight of the woman and the girl in their compartment was standing up. She hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder.

“Where are you going?” Vidya asked her.

“Just to look around? Everyone’s getting off anyway.” The girl gestured at the aisle, the people walking up and down, leaving the train, some coming back with bottles of fizzy drinks.

“But there’s nothing to look at. How long will we stop here? Already so much of the stopping time is over.” Vidya peered out. “I can’t tell which station it is. Do you think it’s Kathalbari? Then it’s not a long halt.”

The girl had disappeared into the aisle before Vidya was finished. They saw her reappear a minute or two later, on the platform. Separated by window glass and distance, she looked even more a foreigner. Gouri, who had just finished her evening prayers, put away her beads and opened her eyes. “What a thing to do,” she said. “Getting off a train! Is she buying food? I’d rather starve than take these risks.”

Latika laughed at the improbability of chubby, rosy-cheeked Gouri either starving or taking risks. “That would be the day! I’m sure you’re thinking of dinner already.”

The girl went towards the stall, jostled by crowds. Everyone was pushing at each other to get on the train or buy food at the stall before the train left. She was surrounded by men ogling her braided hair and ringed ears and the curves outlined in turquoise by her T-shirt. Inside the train, the women were shielded from all the noise and shouting on the platform, but they could see her lips move. She looked smaller and slighter among the men, and had to stand on tiptoe to be seen by the vendor. She waved a fifty rupee note over her head. The man reached out, took her money, gave her a long look, plucked a packet of bread rolls from his rack and handed it to her. Then a plastic cup of tea.

“Why doesn’t she come back?” Vidya said. “She’s got what she wanted, hasn’t she? I should never have let her go. A foreign child!”

“She was hardly asking your permission,” Latika said. “It feels long, but it’s only been . . .” She checked her watch. “Two minutes.”

They saw the girl walk past them on the platform with her tea and bread. When she veered left, to where the ragged woman had reappeared, they realised she must have bought the food for her. The girl went up to the woman and held out the packet. The woman did not notice her, so the girl tapped her elbow.

Latika noticed the famished gaze on them of two men idling on the platform. She drew a sharp breath, shook her head to dismiss her sudden sense of foreboding, told herself not to be melodramatic – then saw one of the men sidle closer to the girl. He was leering and saying something to her. She paid him no attention. As if by mistake, still grinning, he brushed an arm against her breasts. The girl stepped backward and in a single move that appeared to take no more than a second, she thrust the bread at the woman and flung the hot tea in the man’s face. She kicked his shin and his crotch as his hands flew to his face. The man stumbled, fell to the platform.

All of a sudden, as if watching a silent film, the women in the train saw the food-stall outside starting to slide backwards. The lamp-post by the stall moved two feet back, then three. They saw the girl turning around to see her train moving out of the platform, the girl running towards the train, very fast despite her backpack, running as if her life depended on it, the second of the two men running after her. The crowds on the platform obliterated them for a moment, then they reappeared. They saw them falling further and further behind and Gouri let out an anguished cry. “What is she going to do, what is she going to
do
?”

“Pull the chain! We should pull the chain!” This was Latika, who had jumped out of her seat. They looked above their heads to where the emergency brake pull should have been and saw that it was hanging loose from the wall, its spring broken. “
TO STOP TRAIN PULL CHAIN,
” a sign in red said below the broken chain. “
Penalty For Use Without Reasonable and Sufficient Cause. Fine Up to
. . .” The rest was obscured by graffiti.

They turned to look out again but the train had escaped the neon-lit confines of the platform and was already moving in inky countryside. Striped squares of light from the train’s barred window glided alongside as it speeded ahead. It was too late to do anything. They sat back, hollowed out with anxiety. They stared at the empty window seat. It had all happened too quickly. Where was the girl? Had she managed to climb onto a different coach of their train, or had she been left behind at that nameless station? What if that man had caught up with her? What if she had fallen? Onto the tracks?

Latika said, “She can’t have fallen trying to get on. The train would’ve been stopped.”

Vidya peered under their seats. “Is that backpack all the luggage she had? There’s nothing else here. Why did she carry it out?”

“Maybe she thought it would be stolen if she left it,” Latika said. “That’s what they’re told when they come here.”

The train, as if lighter from shedding the girl, swayed and began to move faster. It clattered over bridges, tore through village stations and roared past trains hurtling the other way into their own oblivion. Within the coach a low hum of conversation, boxes snapping open and shut. The boy on the imaginary motorbike had begun booming up and down the corridor again.

The three of them sat motionless, their holiday high spirits snuffed out by the absence of a girl they knew not at all. When the dinner trolleys came around they had to tell the attendant to take away the fourth meal. The man asked no questions. Expressionless, he shoved the unwanted steel tray of rice and dal and vegetables into his trolley and moved ahead. He came back to them a while later to collect the empty trays and saw they still hadn’t opened the foil covering their food.

Later, Latika spread out her blankets and sheets and then hoisted herself to the upper berth. Vidya was already in her bunk, an inert shape on her side, eyes shut. Latika lay in the blue glow of the train’s night light, listening to the rumble of a snoring man alternate with the train’s rattling and clanking. The noise kept her awake all night – or so she thought until she opened her eyes and it was morning, the train had stopped, the sunlight was radiant, and her skin could feel the nearness of the sea. They got off at Jarmuli’s station, saying nothing to one another, each of them searching the busy platform for a glimpse of coloured braids and turquoise.

There is a dream I often have. I am a baby in it, held aloft by a man. He is on his back on a bed, his legs are bent at the knee, he is holding me high above him, my face is above his face, his hands are under my arms, and he is rocking on his back until he almost somersaults. He takes me each time to the brink. Then is still for a second. After that he rocks backward again. I want to beg him to stop, but my voice has died and I can’t say a word. I wake up soaked in sweat.

I knew that the place where I had grown up was near Jarmuli. Although I had left the place as a child, I thought it would all come back. I got off at the station in Jarmuli and on my way to the hotel I devoured the landscape and buildings as if they would fill me with memories. Nothing happened. I waited for a moment of recognition. It never came. When I reached my hotel room I did not pause to unpack, I reread my bunches of clippings to persuade myself I had it right. By afternoon I was tired out. I laid the clippings aside and closed my eyes. It was only after I woke from my old dream of the man rocking me as a baby, with the familiar terror suffocating me, that I felt certain I was in the place the boat had brought me to when I was six or seven.

After we had got off the boat, we travelled a long distance in another van. The road ran by the sea sometimes and sometimes we drove through villages and past ruins. My first milk tooth fell out in that van. I tried to find it under the seat, but when I knelt to look, it was lost in a forest of legs and fallen scraps of paper and bits of food.

In the end the van went through high gates made of metal sheets with a line of iron spikes above. The gates closed behind us. The van stopped and we got out. The woman with us led us further in. We walked down earthen pathways, red and pretty, through gardens in which there were small houses. We were taken to a square building. One by one we were put under a tap and bathed. I saw the other girls in their underclothes, wet like birds in rain. They were thin and knock-kneed. They looked like me. Newly washed, in cotton tunics, hand in hand, the twelve of us were shown into a cottage. The cottage was screened by creepers and trees. Inside, in the room where we waited, the sunlight in the windows had gone pale green and yellow.

The room had many pictures of a long-haired man. There was one that covered most of the wall on one side. It was much taller than any of us. I could not look away from it because his eyes in that picture seemed to follow me around. In front of it were incense sticks that smelled as sick-sweet as death. As we waited, the sticks turned into furry stems of ash. There were dark red mattresses and bolsters on the floor. I don’t know if this is exactly how the room was that day or if I am remembering it from all the later times when I went there and had to wait. It was always the same: the pictures, the incense, the red bolsters. Two women stood by the door, their palms full of rose petals. One was the woman who had come with us on the boat, the other had golden hair.

After a while, the man in the pictures walked through the door and both the women stood straighter. The golden-haired woman gestured towards his feet and said “Guruji”. He hardly looked at us. He waved us away as we bowed down and strode past us into the second room, crushing the rose petals the women scattered in his path.

Now, when I think of the time my turn came, and I stood in front of that second door, my mind changes the image. The door stays shut. Before my turn, I slip out of the line and run into the garden outside. There, under a tree, is my brother. He is smiling at me in his gummy way. “Silly donkey! Where did you wander?” he says. He swings me onto his shoulder. “You’ve got no front teeth any more!” he says.

But that is not what happened. I couldn’t have run to the garden because the women would not let us step out of the line. The one with the hair like spun gold and eyes as blue as two drops of sky was taller than anyone I had seen before. She placed a long finger on her lips, she rolled her eyes, shook her head. I could tell she was saying just as my mother used to: “Quiet, not a word.”

The door opened. A square of light. I stepped into it. The door shut behind me. The man who had just walked past us was sitting on a wide chair at the other end of the room. Guruji. He wore yellow robes and he had glossy black hair to his shoulders. He was not like other sadhus I have seen since. His face was clean and smooth like a woman’s, there were no matted locks nor a beard. He looked at me as if he saw nothing else. He sat there observing me for a long time, saying nothing. I thought he could see into me, through the tunic and my skin and bones, right inside. When he held up his hand to beckon me to come closer I saw that his arms had twice the girth of my father’s arms. My father was a skinny man even though he could lift big branches and chop tree trunks with his axe.

Guruji patted his lap to make me climb on to it. Then he held me against him. His chest was warm and bare, and I could hear his heart beat.

“You think you have nobody,” his voice said over my head, and I could feel its vibration enter my body. “That is not true. I am your father and your mother now. I am your country. I am your teacher. I am your God.” He said it like a chant, as if they were words often repeated, and always the same.

His smile was kind. I must have smiled too because he put a finger into my mouth. He stroked the gap in my gums where my milk tooth had been.

“When did that fall out?” His voice was tender, as my father’s used to be when I fell and hurt myself. He shut his eyes and murmured a mantra. “I have prayed for you. Whenever you are frightened, think of my face. I will keep you safe. You have come to my ashram now. This is your refuge. Nobody will harm you. There is food and there are clothes and you have friends to play with and you will go to school.”

He put his hand into a steel box and brought out a laddu that he popped into my mouth. “Don’t tell the other girls I gave you this, I haven’t given it to them,” he said. “Be very quiet, not a word about this to anyone. This is your Initiation. You are born again.”

*

I remember the ashram very well although I cannot remember a single thing about what was around it. Were there mountains or tall buildings? Were there shops or houses nearby? Did a road go past it? Could we hear any traffic sounds when we were inside? In my head the ashram is in the middle of nowhere, it is the only building on earth. Sometimes I wonder how much of what I remember is true. I have read that your memories can be concrete and detailed even about things that never happened to you and places you have never been to. Like fungus that takes birth in warm and wet places, memories ooze from the crevices of your brain: spawned there, living and dying there, unrelated to anything in the world outside, the slime can coat everything until you can’t tell the real from the imagined.

I remember clearly, though, how enormous the ashram was and dark with trees. At night we were scared to be out alone especially because we had heard that five dogs were let loose every night to patrol the place. There were cottages in the grounds that were set at a distance from ours, in which Guruji’s disciples stayed. They came and went. There were many, from everywhere in the world. In our part we had Guruji’s cottage and a few other cottages, our dormitory building, a dining room, a puja hall and our school.

Many years later, my new foster mother would ask, after another long silence at the dinner table: “Tell me about your school there, tell me about your friends, tell me about the building, tell me
something
.” And I would wonder what to say, where to start. I could tell her my very first school, at the ashram, was in a yellow building – that was easy. It made her look hopeful. She waited for more. I said nothing. We both listened to the sound of a neighbour clipping his hedge. A boy cycling outside shouted to a friend. Still I found nothing to say. Then her sister phoned and my foster mother gave up waiting for me to speak.

Outside, I could see a blue and white bird and the hedge that went around her tiny lawn and, across the road, white houses with red roofs. Each house was exactly like the one next to it. The sun was like a moon in this country, and in its light I felt as if I was looking at everything through a pearl. It was cold and the trees had no leaves. I had never seen a leafless tree before. My foster mother dropped her voice, speaking fast and softly, even though I could not understand what she was saying to her sister.

What else could I tell her?

Of course she knew I had been in orphanages before I came to her, and when I spoke about the ashram I made it sound like yet another orphanage. I told her the school was not far from the dormitory where we slept. We went there after our morning’s milk and banana. I told her the school had a courtyard with a jamun tree. I got stuck trying to explain what a jamun was: was it sour or sweet or bitter? How to explain its strange taste, and the way our tongues went purple and fat after eating them? And wondering how to explain jamuns, I would be distracted remembering how all day we did our lessons or our chores as if we boat girls were like other girls, but at night I would hear one girl grind her teeth fiercely enough to set mine on edge and another girl sob. Only when I felt my pillow wet with tears and spit would I know I had been listening to myself crying. How could I tell my foster mother this? I would begin to tear tiny shreds out from the paper napkin she never forgot to set beside my bowl of cereal. I dipped my spoon into the cereal and tried to count how many raisins there were in it, and how many bits of nut, and this way, by examining the cereal hard enough, I dissolved the lump that had somehow appeared in my throat. My foster mother watched me and waited for a while, then sighed and got up and began to wash dishes at the sink. I hunched over the shreds of tissue, unaware of her, the room, or the cereal I kept stirring around in its bowl uneaten, and in my head the rasping calls of crows grew deafening and I was back in that hot classroom, the bench hard and narrow under me.

Our ashram school had many students. There were girls and boys who came to it from outside for the day. They kept to themselves and in the classroom their seats were in rows away from ours. They were taller than us, their clothes fitted better, their shoes were less scuffed. They looked at us and then away, as if they had not seen us at all. We regarded them as people from another country, one that we would never go to, not even to visit. Some of the boys stayed at the ashram just as we did, but they came in through another door, they sat on the other side of the room, and when classes finished they left for their dormitories, which were so far away they were taken there in a van. We never saw them outside of school.

The first day at our school we were each given a set of books and a box of crayons. There were twelve crayons arranged in a row, like a rainbow inside a sheath of cardboard. There was also a metal box with a pencil and sharpener and rubber in it. I must have opened the box and shut it many times. I remember how those boxes shut with a click. I am sure I took out the rubber and smelled it, even pressed my teeth into it, as I like to do to this day.

The woman who handed us these things wore her hair in two plaits. Her eyes were painted black around the rims with kajal. “I am your teacher,” she said. “You will call me Didi. Draw a balloon in your drawing book. Colour it with a crayon.”

She turned her back to us and drew a balloon on the blackboard. It flew on the board attached to a long line. I opened my new drawing book and on the first page I copied her flying balloon. I picked out the navy blue from my row of new crayons. I started filling colour into my balloon. I pressed the crayon hard to the paper. The colour coated the page like grease. If I touched it, my fingertip turned blue.

The teacher’s voice, very close to my ears said, “When you colour something, don’t go in every direction, colour in one direction.” She took the crayon from my hand and said, “Like this.” Her strokes with crayon were sure and smooth. She said, “Stay inside the line, never go out. Understand?” This is what we were taught at the ashram: that we were never to go outside. Outside the line was danger. Outside we would be killed or locked up in jail.

The teacher’s face had so much powder it was white like chalk. She had a black moustache. When she was bending over my drawing book, her plaits hung in front of my nose. They had ribbons at the ends. She had a smear of ash on her forehead and a red dot inside the smear. If I think of her the smell of the incense in Guruji’s cottage and of coconut oil and soap comes back to me. She moved her face away, laid the crayon on my desk and walked to the rows ahead. I kept staring at her, the plaits with the ribbons that swung when she took a step.

Before I could stop it, my crayon had rolled off the desk to the floor.

I ducked under the bench to pick it up. Down below there were only legs – boys’ legs, girls’ legs, table and chair legs. It looked much bigger than the room above. It was a maze. I could not find my crayon because the maze made me as dizzy as when I was hunting for my fallen tooth in the van. I crouched there not daring to come back up without the crayon.

I don’t know when it was that a girl came wriggling under the bench and crouched next to me. She had stalk-thin limbs. Her head looked too big for her. She crouched on the ground underneath our desks and she smiled at me. She had crooked buck teeth when she smiled. Where I had a shaggy mop, she had straight thin hair to her shoulders. Her eyes were watery, so big that they seemed to bulge. Later I found out that her name was Piku.

With Piku down below, everything became less strange. The furniture legs became furniture legs again. She crawled between the chairs – I was little myself, but she was even littler. It took her only moments and then she held the crayon up to me. That was how I became friends with Piku.

I don’t remember many other things about my first year at the school, but I remember how one day we were told that our teacher had been taken ill. We made up stories about her. One of the girls said she had run away to get married and another said she had died and become a ghost who lived on top of the neem tree. But our teacher did come back: maybe it was days later, maybe weeks. A hush fell over the room as she entered. Her head and one of her eyes was wrapped in a bandage. Her ribboned plaits were missing. Her lips were like two swollen rubber chillies. We did not know we were staring, but after a while we remembered and stood up, chorusing Good Morning, Didi as we did every day.