Sleeping On Jupiter (4 page)

She sat in her chair and her head dropped to the desk. The bandage on her head had a round patch of red on it right at the top. Under the bandage her head looked as smooth as a ball.

She pulled her head up after a while and said, “I had an accident.” Then she took a sip of water from the glass on the table and replaced the cover on the glass. She held up the arithmetic textbook and said, “Page five.”

There was shuffling and fluttering as all of us opened our books. From one of the other classrooms we heard a teacher shout, “Siddown!”

“Repeat after me,” Didi said, “two wonza two, twotwoza four, twothreeza six, twofourza eight.”

We repeated the tables. All of us were gaping at her.

Two wonza two, twotwoza four.

She had shut the unbandaged eye and clasped her arms and was swaying to the rhythm of our singsong version of her tables.

Twofivezaten, twosixza twell.

I kept losing track of the numbers. I repeated them without understanding what I was saying.

“Twoeightza sixteen,” Didi said. “I had sixteen stitches in my head.”

All of us repeated, “Twoeightza sixteen, I had sixteen stitches in my head.”

At that she opened her eye. She stopped swaying. I saw that the eye had a cut at the edge. Blood was caked over the cut like a bit of burnt plastic. She said slowly, “My hair had to be shaved off for the stitches. My plaits had to be cut off.”

We did not repeat that. Nobody said anything. The fan made a whirring and squeaking and clacking noise. Didi looked at us, expressionless. “That’s what’s waiting for you all,” she said. “All.” She had a glazed, dazed look. She put a hand to her head and touched the places where her plaits used to be. Without warning she got up. She did not pick up her books and the ruler with which she used to rap our knuckles. She left the room without saying another word.

For some time we waited for her to come back. Then we began murmuring to each other. After some time two of the girls got into a fight, started tugging each other’s hair and scratching and biting. The rest of us watched the fun. The teacher from the next class stormed in and yelled, “What is this madhouse? Where is your Didi?”

“How long will you stare at your cereal and keep muttering to yourself, Nomi?” my foster mother’s voice broke in. “Look what a mess you’ve made with all that torn up tissue.” She cleared my bowl and brushed away the shredded paper, shaking her head to say she had given up all hope of sense from me. As if she had no idea what she was doing, she took a big jar of pasta shells and began to fling handfuls of pasta into a pan on the stove top in which she had put eggs to boil. “I asked at your school here, you know, and they said, What? Doesn’t she talk at home?” Half the pasta missed the pan and fell to the floor, but she kept throwing in fistfuls, uncaring. Her voice sounded too high. She had been told by the teachers that I had friends in school, that I played football and went to kickboxing classes. She had looked in my room, she confessed, found that I had filled drawing books with dead birds, broken weathervanes and barbed wire. She wondered why I didn’t draw some happy pictures. Flowers, the sun, green meadows. She wondered what she was doing wrong. Drops of boiling water splashed out, scalding her. She stopped throwing pasta shells into the pan. She stood there with her hand in the jar and her shoulders slumped.

The Second Day

Badal sat cross-legged in a padmasana, knees jutting out, meditating fingertips pressed together. His back was as straight as the wall behind him. His lips flickered, but his eyelids were sealed.

It was a two-storeyed house in Jarmuli, its rooms opening onto a small courtyard. Badal sat on the floor of the verandah that bordered the courtyard on three of its four sides. The way the house was built, sounds ricocheted off the mouldering walls. Somewhere upstairs he could hear his aunt threatening her son, “Are you going to get up or shall I empty a bucket of water on your head?” A knife scraping a steel plate, that was her voice. Chalk squealing across a blackboard. The screeching fan belt in a car.

From the room where his grandfather slept came coughs that sounded as if the old man was spilling his innards out. Each burst of coughing was followed by hoarse wails. “Call me to you, O Ram, O Vishnu, O Krishna, call me!”

Every morning at precisely four-thirty, a conch was blown in a house across the alley – once, twice, thrice. A long, high-pitched bleat that tottered towards the end as the blower’s breath weakened and then gave way. Every morning, Badal wanted to shut them up, blow it for them instead. He could produce flawless, melodious notes from any conch, however hoarse it might sound in other hands.

He took a breath and released it, “Ommmm.” The choppy waves in his mind subsided.

At dawn it was his practice to sit and chant this way, longing for what used to come to him as naturally as breathing: a sense of the deep, everlasting hum of creation, an intimate, effortless closeness to God. He could not describe the sensation in words and he could not reach it by thinking about it. The more he tried to extricate himself from the quicksand of life, the more relentlessly it sucked him in. What was his work today? There were the errands for his uncle. Nothing else. It would be slow. And in the evening? He grimaced. “Three old biddies from Calcutta,” the hotel had said, when booking him to take them around the Vishnu temple. An image of his father flitted through Badal’s head. Large, grey-haired, and imperious. As a temple guide his father had exuded a dignity and authority that could crush whole squads of matrons, the kind who made Badal quail even though he had wandered Jarmuli’s great temple with his father from childhood and few guides knew it as well as he did. He told himself the manager of the hotel had sounded anxious to book him for the women, and how many guides were trusted this way by good hotels? He counted them off in his head – no more than a dozen. The rest had to wait like scavengers for pilgrims at the temple gates. The hotel took a cut from his earnings, it was the way the world functioned.

He took another breath and murmured, “Ommmmm.”

His morning was free.

He could spend more than his usual few minutes at the tea stall.

He took a deeper breath.

Water thundered into a metal pail in the far corner of the courtyard. He opened his eyes a sliver and saw his uncle at the tap, bulbously naked. His chequered loincloth clung to his flesh like red and white skin. It was wedged between the cheeks of his uncle’s shuddering buttocks.

A radio sang out from upstairs: “Tojo! Washing Powder Tojo!”

His uncle muttered, “Om Vishnu, Om Vishnu,” twice for each jug of water he poured on himself. The stone paving around the tap was grey-green with moss. His uncle stepped warily. His head was bald, but his body was matted with coarse black hair. “Like a cautious water buffalo,” Badal breathed out. “Ommmm.”

A round pool of sunlight in the left side of the courtyard lasted from about nine until eleven in the morning. Within its circumference Badal had planted a shiuli sapling. In four or five years it would be taller than he was, reaching for the sky that the courtyard inscribed into a blue square, and it would sprinkle the earth beneath with creamy, sweet-scented flowers. Wider and wider the circle of flowers would grow over the years and one day it would bury the courtyard’s squalor. Badal watered the shiuli every day, examined it for signs of new leaves.

When he opened his eyes to see how far his uncle was from finishing, he noticed someone had stepped on his sapling. Its stem jutted out at an angle, like a broken limb.

All at once he plucked his fingers apart, got up, and pulled open the iron latch on the door that separated the courtyard from the street outside. It was the main door to the house, but it was small and warped and faded and the latch was the old kind where a heavy iron chain climbed upward and fitted a loop on the doorframe. He had to bend not to knock his head as he stepped out – but that was the only change from when, as a child of two, he had found his way to the world outside for the first time. He swung the door open as he had for the past twenty-six years, with his foot, and slammed it shut. The door knew it was Badal. Kicked open and banged shut this way for years, it hung askew on its frame and responded to him with a series of creaks and groans.

Outside the house was a narrow alleyway where Badal’s scooter was parked, but at this time of day he did not want his scooter. Instead he walked down the road to a shrine at the corner. The shrine was no more than two feet high, a few bricks at the foot of a tree, plastered together and whitewashed by the old woman who tended it. Badal took ten rupees out of his pocket and held it towards the woman who sat by the shrine threading flowers into a garland.

“What flower are you giving your God today? Hibiscus? Put in a few from me, will you?”

When the woman looked up at him, all that Badal saw were two squares of glass as thick as bottle-bottoms and crushed muslin for skin.

“He is your God too, and everyone else’s.”

She had a cackling, old-woman voice and smiled as she spoke. Her sari was threadbare, her body as bent as a sickle. She reached into her bowl of kumkum, dipped a finger into the paste and when Badal bent his forehead to her she planted a circle of red on it. She went back to making her garland as he kneeled and touched his head to the door of her shrine. He was still for a moment, then rose and walked away. He was out of earshot when the woman said, “Will you get me some gur and bananas on your way back?”

He was always in a hurry at this time of day, going to the sea. It was not far. Not so far that it was a tedious walk, yet enough to be a different world. Long before he reached it, he heard the waves roaring, receding, roaring, receding. He began walking faster as he neared the promenade and when a gap between buildings gave him the expanse of sand and water he knew so well, his steps slowed. He would turn the corner, he would see Raghu setting a bench before the tea stall, and old Johnny Toppo lighting the stove.

This early in the morning the beach was uncrowded, the breeze fresh, the day’s heat gathering ferocity somewhere on the horizon. There were fishermen at work on their boats and nets. A monk as tall as a tree stood waist-deep in the seawater, wearing dark glasses and yellow robes, saying his prayer beads. He was there every morning. Loose white hair cascaded to his shoulders.

Johnny Toppo took no notice of Badal. His tea stall was nothing more than a barrow and a bench, but he made a great to-do setting it up every day, lining up his charred pots and pans, the tea, spices, milk and sugar, the mortar and pestle for the ginger. Last, he put out his biscuit jars, the pair of them, their glass now clouded, blistered, finely cracked. They had grown old with him, he liked to say. He soaked stacks of clay cups in a deep iron pail of water. He hunched over his stove, fiddling with matches. His bare chest was rib-striped and a shark’s tooth hung from his stringy neck on a length of black twine. His bald head gleamed in the sunlight as he lit the stove and breathed a song into it to get it going:

Badal scanned the beach in either direction, shading his eyes. It was a while before he spotted Raghu, not far away, to the left. There he was, on one of the concrete plinths by the beach, facing the sun, body stretched: sinking and rising, arching and drooping, as gracefully as if it were a dance, into stretches and push-ups. Sculpture that had stepped off the walls of a temple.

Badal stood motionless, his eyes fixed on the boy. He did not notice the fire-tipped waves or the fishermen pushing out a boat farther down the shore. His gaze did not waver when Johnny Toppo’s singing turned into curses: “This time I’m going to smash his pretty nose in two. Raghu! Come here and get to work. And where’s that fifty I put into the biscuit box yesterday?”

Raghu straightened. A solid orange sun was floating out of the sea behind him, lighting up his mass of hair. He had taken off his T-shirt for the morning’s exercises and Badal saw that it was true, what he had only imagined: the boy had no hair on his body but for a shadow that vanished into his grey shorts. He saw the beginnings of hard muscles, the faintest of bulges at the shoulders. Raghu reached for the red T-shirt on the plinth and his spine became a bow arching down the length of his back. He looked in Johnny Toppo’s direction and noticed Badal’s eyes on him. He shrugged himself into the T-shirt and when his face emerged through the neck it had a half-smile.

“One tea, no milk, no sugar, lemon only?” he said to Badal as he went past him to the stove.

The monk lurched in the waves as a breaker charged the beach. Buffeted, he seemed to be in danger of being washed away, but he went on fingering his rosary. You could not tell if the eyes behind the dark glasses were closed in prayer.

*

Jarmuli had white beaches and many miles of coastline, but the waters were treacherous. Riptides could suck in swimmers and innocuous waves could turn savage, picking people off the sand and sucking them into the ocean. Most people came to Jarmuli for the temples, not for swimming, and pilgrims too tended to stay away during the long monsoon when cyclones ravaged the bay, lashing it day after day with rain. The morning’s lazy beauty had to end, work had to be done while the weather allowed. After the thrill of seeing Raghu at the beach was over, Badal stood at a food shop near the Vishnu temple, casting his eye around for possible clients, clinking the coins in his pocket. There wasn’t enough money, there seldom was. His wallet too had barely a hundred in it. But he had eaten nothing at home and decided to spend his loose change on a samosa.

He had idled near the temple for only a little while when Hari, another temple guide, tapped his arm saying, “Bhai, Badal. I need to leave – something urgent – and I’ve two people waiting for me. You take them to the temple, give them a quick round.”

Luck appeared to be on his side. It had to do with his early morning glimpse of shirtless Raghu, he was certain. Or perhaps it was those ten rupees and prayers at the old woman’s shrine. He remained carefully unsmiling and continued chewing his samosa. Between bites he said, “I’ve no time, got another group soon. And in the afternoon I need to get home.” He had no work till evening, but Hari did not need to know that. He looked towards the temple gates. He must not let Hari’s clients escape. He had to slow it down to extract as much as he could from Hari, but not too much.

Although the street had been swept that morning it was a stewing mess already: fruit, flowers, spilled food, pulverised by the heat. A foul smell rose from the blackness in the drains and penetrated everything. It was the only workplace he had ever known. He didn’t mind the stench. He stuffed the last of his samosa into his mouth, then grabbed the plastic jug from the counter. He poured water into his palm, slurped it in, and with calculated slowness swilled his mouth and spat into the drain. They both knew what this was about, but it had to be gone through.

Hari said, “Once. This one time – only because – look, I’ll tell you the reason later, it’s at a delicate stage now, you get it? Be quick, just show them a couple of shrines. They won’t know the difference. Or else I’ll get it in the neck from you know who.”

Badal drew a green plastic comb from his pocket, ran it through his oil-slicked hair, examined his nails. All clipped short apart from the long one on the little finger of his left hand. That nail was now about a quarter of the length of his finger, and he kept it coated with tomato-red nail polish. It was his good luck nail. He admired it for a moment, burped, then said, “I think I’ll have something sweet too,” and went back into the shop. He emerged with a leaf cup that held two creamy white squares. He offered one to Hari, who shook his head. “I’ll give you my cut, don’t refuse. I’ll come and deliver the cash at your house. Tell me when and –”

“No,” Badal interrupted. “Not to the house. I’ll get it from you here tomorrow, same time.” His uncle did not need to know about these extras. He had a bank account too that his uncle did not know about.

Negotiations completed, Badal stood before the main gate of the temple, talking into his phone. After several minutes of mis-understandings and misdirections he located Hari’s clients waving at him from near the shack where visitors to the temple had to leave their shoes. A man and a girl. He walked up to them. The man had sleepy eyes and crazy hair; the girl looked puny, reduced by the massive temple gates and her tall companion, whose shoulders her head barely reached. The beggars and idlers on the street were gawping at her beads and tattoos and coloured braids. Badal turned away from her tentative smile. How was he to put this to her? He took the man aside.

“She can’t go in like that.”

The man seemed not to understand.

Badal switched from Hindi to English and enunciated the words: “Clothes. Not good.” He gave the girl a rapid look, turned away as if embarrassed. How could she have come to a temple looking like that? Didn’t every guide book make it clear how women must dress for this temple? Nothing shorter than ankle-length, no tight clothes, everyone knew that.

“The priest say no. Not allow.” Badal pointed to the gates of the temple, which towered over the alley. Its stone arches were carved with gargoyles too high to see properly. Within the arches were heavy metal doors studded with brass clasps and rings. Half a dozen priest-like figures stood at the gates, bare-bodied but for their dhotis, chadars, and sacred threads. “She can rent something there,” Badal said, Hindi again, the English eluding him. He was gesturing towards a counter by the gates. “A sari to wrap around herself.”