Sleeping On Jupiter (6 page)

He urged his scooter towards the beach until the old machine’s rattle made it sound as if it were dying under him. He couldn’t wait to give Raghu the mobile. He reached the promenade when it was well past the time Johnny Toppo shut the tea stall for his lunch and siesta. Business only took off much later in the afternoon when the beach swelled with stalls selling food, trinkets, souvenirs.

He skidded to a halt near the promenade and hurriedly parked the scooter, running to the beach. The sand felt hot enough to roast peanuts in. Not many people were about, only the diehards determined to make the most of their holiday, dashing in and out of the water. Badal made his way towards an isolated nook further down, where Raghu tended to laze most afternoons. The sun was a million crystalline pieces in the sea, glittering far into the distance. Badal never wore glasses against the sun, looking directly into it sometimes, daring it to do its worst.

He turned the curve and there Raghu was, half hidden by the prow of an upturned boat. The tea stall was shut. The boy could have gone off, but he had not. Had he been waiting for Badal? He must have been.

Badal came closer. He saw that the boy had gnawed at the skin on his chapping lips until the lower one – the fuller, fleshier, darker one – had bled. Burst open like a fig, Badal remembered from somewhere: your lips, bitten when kissed, burst open like a ripe fig.

Was it only two months ago that he had met Raghu? Three? He had been sitting on the tea-stall bench recovering from a quarrel with his uncle. Raghu had come to him and put down a tiny clay cup of tea unasked, saying, “Careful, it’s hot,” and Badal had looked up into the largest, darkest eyes he thought he had ever seen. The boy’s voice had a husky edge that made the words taper off and retreat where you could not follow them. It left Badal wanting to hear him speak again, so he had said, “You’re new?” Raghu had smiled in reply and Badal had caught sight of the dimple in his left cheek. All his annoyance had dissolved into euphoria.

It must have been the sight of the bleeding lip that made Badal sit closer now than he had dared before. Raghu said nothing, he held out his packet of gutka to Badal. They looked at the water. They never spoke much, but Badal had only to be within sight of Raghu to feel a deep contentment, as if he needed nothing more in the world than silence and the knowledge that Raghu was in it somewhere. He sensed that Raghu felt this too. Once or twice he had hidden himself behind the hull of a boat and watched Raghu look up each time a man approached the tea stall and droop with disappointment when it was just another customer. He was not a hundred per cent sure, but then what was a hundred per cent sure?

Badal’s days now existed for the mornings and afternoons when he could escape clients, family, customers, priests, God himself – and run to the beach to sit holding a clay cup of Raghu’s tea – just sit with his voice within hearing, his body within touching distance. Raghu brushed past him – on purpose, he was certain of it – as he went about serving customers, rinsing cups, doing whatever he did at Johnny Toppo’s stall.

Ten days ago when he was at the tea stall and Johnny Toppo not there, Raghu had asked him out of the blue, “Have you ever been beaten? Thrashed?”

Raghu had not called him “Babu”, as Johnny Toppo did. Badal paused over the thought. Raghu did not call him anything. He used neither his name, nor the deferential Babu, or Sahib, or Dada. It felt loaded with meaning, how he took care not to distance him that way.

“Many times,” Badal had said. “After my father died, my uncle used to clobber me till my teeth ran around in my mouth like dice. With anything at hand – his shoes, his belt, even with the stick the bastard killed rats with.” He smiled as he answered Raghu’s question. He had suffered, he wanted Raghu to know, but he was nonchalant about it.

Raghu pulled up his shirt to show Badal a welt on his back. “Yesterday.” He had said nothing more.

The rage and tenderness that had flooded Badal that afternoon came back again. He wanted to ask Raghu about the wound – had it healed? Was Johnny Toppo the bullying swine who had done it? The boy was gazing at the sea, a finger in one of his ears, then scratching something on his leg, his jaws working the tobacco in his mouth. The lusciousness of that itch, that hand moving from ear to leg – a boyish, scarred, beautiful hand, the wrist bone jutting out in a knob. What beauty – how could such beauty possibly exist?

A red bead of betel-juiced spittle trickled from the corner of Raghu’s mouth and he sucked it back in. The sun turned the sea into jagged blades of light. A faraway white-topped breaker gathered speed as it began its run for the beach. On the horizon was a grey, indefinable shape that might be a building or a small island. Was it an island Badal had failed to notice all his life? Arrow-like boats streaked past, criss-crossing. A group of brown dogs chased each other up and down the sand and into the water. Near Raghu’s feet a coin-sized crab dug itself out of the sand and skittered away. Badal looked up from the crab, saw that his island had moved west. And then after a while, further west. Everything stood still and speeded up all at once. The faraway breaker came closer, it grew taller, it roared and bellowed, it flung itself at the sand, and without warning or preparation Badal found his lips on Raghu’s, his hand roaming his smooth bare chest, following the line of the fine hair down into his shorts. The blood on Raghu’s lips tasted of salt and sea and rust. He sucked the grainy tobacco off Raghu’s tongue and felt it going straight to his head, making him dizzy, sending his hand deeper down. And then the boy pushed him off and ran away along the beach, leaving him empty and short of breath.

He clambered up. Everything was in disarray. He stumbled, hunting for his slippers. They had travelled over the sand in two different directions. His legs had turned into stilts, his feet would not fit into his slippers, as if he had grown extra toes. By the time he managed to put them on, Raghu was nowhere to be seen.

He would not try to find him. Not right then. It was a kind of slow magic that had overtaken the day. The sky blazed. The sea shone. The waves came at a stately pace as if they had all eternity. There was time. He searched his pocket for his comb. The feel of its hard plastic teeth on his scalp made his eyelids droop with pleasure. There would always be time. He would give Raghu his gift the next time they met. They would talk, he would buy him a bottle of cola and Raghu would tell him everything. Who had beaten him, where his parents were, where he had come from, where he was headed. Badal knew the answer to that one. Raghu’s wanderings were over, his lonely days were over. He would not go away. And if he did, Badal would be with him.

He covered his mouth and nose with his palm to breathe in the scent of Raghu. He touched his own lips to see how they had felt to kiss.

He wandered the beach that afternoon for longer than he knew, half expecting Raghu to return, running his tongue’s tip over his lips at times. Where had he run off to? How had the boy vanished from a beach so empty? It was almost four by the time he snapped out of his stupor and remembered that he needed to get home, wash himself, change his clothes – all that to be done before he went to meet the Calcutta group at their hotel. Day after day, evening after evening, it was the same: gaggles of squawking hens in starched saris rustling through the temple in his wake without a notion of what it meant to be wasted, scorched, flayed, devoured with the passion of pure devotion. Was his whole life to pass in this way?

He hurried to his scooter. It was not far. He had not thought so – it now seemed further.

When he reached his parking place he saw that a tiny puddle of oil on the road was all that remained of his scooter.

He felt in his pocket for the key. There was his almost empty wallet, his green comb, a soiled handkerchief with which he mopped his sweating neck and face, but no key. He began to wonder if he
had
come on his scooter. Calm down, he said, starting an urgent conversation with himself: You didn’t walk, did you? No, of course not. You came on the scooter. You locked it and put the key in your pocket. Maybe the other pocket – but no, the key wasn’t there either.

He began to walk, trying not to run. He must have left the key hanging in the ignition, an invitation to any passing thief. He walked as if he had to reach somewhere, although he had no idea where he was going. Go home and tell his uncle the scooter had been stolen? What then? Scooter-less, how would he get to places in time for all his waiting clients? He was all of a sudden back where he had been after his father’s death: a blubbering boy cringing from his uncle’s blows. Grow up, Badal said to himself, what can he do to you? You’re stronger than he is now. He needs you more than you need him.

He walked fast. He was alone on the road. He had not imagined a daytime street could be as eerie as this. It looked different. There was a powerful smell of rotting fish he had never noticed before. The doors of the houses on either side of the street were closed against the afternoon sun. The heat had made a shimmering ribbon of the road, the sky pressed low upon it, and far down its length squares of water hardened into tarmac just when they came close enough to wet his feet. There were no shops. There were no people: not one person, not a dog or cat or cow – what street was he on? When he heard a scraping behind him and sensed rough feet dragging on the dirt, his heart thudded. Only an empty cardboard carton pummelled into imbecility by the late afternoon breeze. He walked on, faster. The sliding door of a van roared on its castors inches from him. The van’s windows were covered with black sun-film and gave nothing away. But he could see in them the dark windblown reflection of his own high cheekbones and jutting chin. His hands went up to his chin, then his hair, and he smoothed it down before he remembered there must be someone inside the van looking at him – the person who had just slammed the door shut.

He turned and fled. He could not tell what unnerved him. Directionless he ran and it took him a few minutes to work out where he was and find the street going homeward. He dashed past the tiny shrine near his house. He did not notice the old woman in the thick glasses still sitting beside it. She beamed with anticipation as she saw him and called out: “The bananas and gur? Did you bring me the bananas and gur? I haven’teaten all day.” He hurried on to his house, hearing nothing.

He stepped through the outer door into the half light of the courtyard, where saris, pyjamas, shirts, and underpants grey beyond the powers of detergent were strung on lines from end to end. Crows perched on the lines dribbling creamy droppings on the washed clothes. They rose in a cawing cloud as he went to the tap and poured a can of water on his head and shoulders. He flung himself into a rope-strung cot in a corner of his ground-floor room, too numb to throw off his wet shirt. He tried to stay awake, to push aside his anxiety about the scooter and relive instead the earlier part of the afternoon.

But in a minute he was asleep, and in a vivid dream: his shiuli sapling has grown to a tree with so many flowers that the courtyard is waist deep in the tiny blossoms. He is wading through them, in a white and fragrant sea, when his uncle waddles out in his wet towel and pours jug after jug of water over the yard to wash the flowers away. Their sweet scent fills the courtyard long after his uncle has destroyed every last flower.

Waking, he realised that his dream had been perfumed by the incense his aunt lit for her prayers at sunset. He looked at the screen of his mobile and sprang out of his cot. He was going to be late for the old hags from Calcutta. But for his aunt’s determined blowing on the conch for her prayers, he would have kept them waiting half the evening, and then it would have been futile going to the temple at all.

When he stepped outside the house he saw it was twilight. The harsh magenta of the building across the road had mellowed to a soft pink. A breeze was blowing in from the east, and children were screaming at a hopscotch game in the alleyway. The evening train hooted from the nearby tracks.

And there, against the wall, was his scooter, the key in the ignition.

Even as he was walking home, Badal’s clients were resting in their hotel, readying themselves for the long evening ahead at the great temple. Gouri, however, could not lie still for thinking she had forgotten something. She turned her three bags inside out. She sat down on her bed, now strewn with her things, and wondered – what was she searching for? She looked around the room with a helpless gaze. The bed was covered with a red-and-blue striped sheet. The pillow was too bulky for her spondylosis so she had put it on the chair, a padded one covered with brown cloth of the kind some hotels favoured to save on cleaning costs. She heaved herself up from the bed to the chair and lifted the pillow to see if the thing she was searching for was underneath. No.

Sometimes it helped to go back to the room where the thing had originally been in order to remember. But where would she go? She opened the cupboard. Stared at the door leading to the verandah. She did not think she had gone out to the verandah yet. Curious, she opened the door, stepped out, lowered herself into a chair. The ocean was on her doorstep. She gazed outward at the slashes of sea and sky that lay beyond the verandah. A kite skimmed the sky, knife-sharp. It flew higher and higher. Her eyes followed it into the limitless emptiness of unblemished blue, not a wisp of cloud. The kite climbed further. It was a speck of sunlit red in the blue air.

Gouri’s lips began to move unprompted through the lines of a sacred hymn she was in the habit of singing. She was a feather on the wings of the kite in that borderless sky. She was airborne. From high above she saw the waves in the sea frozen into white-topped serrations. The coast was a sand-white strip bristling with coconut trees. She could see herself as if from a great distance, as a mound of clothes in a plastic chair in a verandah facing an ocean. She soared higher. She was an immaterial speck, an atom dissolved in the elements. She was helpless to resist. She did not want to resist.

Loud, unfamiliar voices just below her verandah brought her down to earth. She could not move a limb. They felt heavy and alien, as if they didn’t belong to her any longer. She became aware that her back hurt and her legs had pins and needles. Inch by inch, as she tried to move her painful muscles, she remembered why she was out in the verandah – she was meant to be looking for something. She should get up and look for whatever it was.

It was hopeless. She knew her friends were right about her ineptitude. She lost things, she forgot things. In spiritual matters she felt powerful and knowledgeable – but who valued that nowadays? It had long been evident to her that Vidya and Latika had the kind of minds that locked out spirituality. The deaf would not care if Tansen himself sat before them and sang. Nor had her friends the least sense of the ineffable, the God whom she experienced in a manner so real and moving and yet so unfathomable that she could not try communicating it. But she hoped they would admire the legendary Vishnu temple. It was her territory; she had arranged everything for this part of their trip. She wanted it to be perfect: it was after all the reason for coming to Jarmuli.

It began to trouble her again, that thing she had lost. Where else could she look to remind herself? She forced herself to get up from the chair.

Perhaps the solution was in the bathroom. It was a tiny cubicle in which she was finding it difficult to manoeuvre. She pushed open its door and ran her gaze over the white sink, the shower, the toilet bowl.

Then she spotted her face in the mirror and her hands went to her bare ear lobes. She broke into a triumphant smile. Of course. The pearl studs.

She went back to her things to search afresh. She wanted to wear the studs to the Vishnu temple, and the haldi-coloured sari that her husband had given her long years ago when they went on the Badrinath pilgrimage together. “Fire on the mountain,” he had called her, as he photographed her in that sari against the white snow peaks. In the picture she looked daring and shy and delighted all at once.

*

Two doors away from Gouri, Latika lay on her back, staring at the pale, translucent lizard glued to the ceiling by its belly, looking back at her upside down. It moved a fraction, its eyes now fixed on something she could not see. It had a streak of grey going down its back and although it was high above her, she shuddered to think of its skin: rubbery, cold, possibly damp to the touch. She remembered the time her daughter when still a toddler had stumbled towards a lizard before anyone could stop her and poked it with a pencil. It slithered away into hiding behind a cupboard but left a part of its tail on the floor, a fragment of beige flesh that wriggled and twitched before it fell still. Her daughter would not have slept a wink in this room. She would have summoned half the hotel’s staff to drive out the lizard.

Latika turned on her side, wishing she had not complained in the train about her daughter’s need for pasta and wet wipes. Why had she said all that to Gouri and Vidya, what need had she to talk so much? “You have no loyalties,” her husband had said to Latika once in bitterness. “You’ll say anything for a laugh. All you want is popularity.” She could not remember what had brought on this particular caustic jab. He was often that way with her, especially in front of other people, reducing her to long, shamed silences.

She turned on her side again. An alarm clock by the bedside lamp counted the seconds. She had set it to 4.00, for a brief siesta to recover her energies. In the evening they were to go to the temple. It was their second day in Jarmuli. That morning, she had gone for a long walk on the beach, all by herself, and her ankles and calves still ached from the unaccustomed ploughing through sand. Vidya had predicted this would happen, and would tell her she had told her so. How was she going to survive the walking they would have to do this evening? She had heard the temple was enormous – a perfectly preserved medieval town – and that was the only reason she was going. She was not religious, not like Gouri in her sanctuary of gods and goddesses, meditating and chanting all the time. At times she wished she had her friend’s faith – it must account for Gouri’s tranquillity, she thought, her way of saying, “Oh well, whatever will be . . . What’s the point of worrying?” Latika wasn’t made like that. Her husband called her a high-tension wire, humming with faint vibrations, even when apparently still. Her flaming-red hair matched how she was inside, she thought, even if the red came from a bottle.

She stretched her legs, trying to rid them of the pain, then got up from her bed.

The three of them had rooms connected by a verandah that ran the length of the side that faced the sea. Latika opened the door to the verandah and a gust of wind plastered her hair to her face. Walking on the beach that morning, she had seen that their hotel was one among many set along the seafront. Next door was an opulently unobtrusive five-star, half hidden in foliage. On their other side was a shiny glass and stone building shaped like a boat with a vertical red sign going down its front saying, Pure Veg Meals, No Onion, No Garlic. Further along, the beach was fenced away by more hotels, and between the hotels now and then, like tiny rowboats stranded among cruise liners, were shuttered old houses whose owners must have refused to sell. She could hear the faint cries of children from the beach now. She smelled fish, and a spicy scent she could not place. Perhaps the blossoms on the tree that was on the other side of the verandah.

She walked past the windows to Vidya’s room and then Gouri’s. Vidya’s curtains were drawn close. The curtains to the next room were open and she could see Gouri sitting in her bed surrounded by the contents of her handbag. Latika knocked on the glass and Gouri looked up with a start. She came to the window, wide-eyed with fright. Latika realised she had forgotten to put on her glasses and could not recognise her, so she called out, “It’s me.”

Gouri retrieved her glasses and opened the verandah door. “Is everything alright?” she said. “What’s the matter?” And then, not waiting for an answer, “Do you know, I found my pearl studs. I hunted for them all over . . . and all the time, I had them in my handbag.”

Gouri’s bags, packed and locked, were by the door. She had strapped her sandals on securely. Her hair was tied in the two girlish plaits she always made at night, because it made sleeping easier. She was in her travel sari, an indestructible georgette.

Latika drew her back into the room and sat her down on the bed. She said in a gentle voice, “Didn’t you say you would wear your orange sari for the temple? Did you change your mind? Why have you packed your things again?”

“But aren’t we leaving in a bit? On the train? We are going to Jarmuli, aren’t we? We’re getting late. We need to reach the station in time.”

*

That afternoon, Nomi stood by Johnny Toppo’s stall drinking tea. There were no other customers yet, it was too early. They would come when the sun turned the waves into that molten copper he could not take his eyes off though he saw it every day.

Nomi asked him in halting Hindi, “What is that song you were just singing? It made me feel so sad.”

Johnny Toppo looked the girl up and down – young, thin, with coloured threads in her hair, rings in her ears: to look at, like one of those starving hippies who reeked of old sweat, but this one smelled fresh and clean. One of her arms was covered in fine, shiny sand and she had a big camera hanging from her neck.

“You feel sad at a song if you are already sad, your eyes get wet if there are already tears. What’s a girl like you got to be sad about?” He grinned at her, and his mouth looked like a piano’s keyboard, black gaps alternating with white teeth. “Look at me, teeth gone, knees creaking, back bent. I’m the fellow who should be sad. But I feel like singing all day.”

“I’m looking for my mother. She’s here somewhere. I lost her by the sea. This sea, I think. This sea.”

“What? Louder. I’m old, my ears are full of water.”

“I said, I was looking for one more tea. One more like the last one, with ginger and cloves.”

She sat on the sand and began to fiddle with the lens of her camera. She focused it on people paddling in the foam. She scanned their faces through her telephoto lens. She did not know who or what she hoped to find. Since arriving the day before, everything seemed so familiar and so alien that she could not tell the remembered from the imagined. Like the time she got lost in a birch forest in Norway, trying to find her way back, starting up paths that looked right, realising they were wrong after she had walked a long way. Turning back again.

Johnny Toppo poured water into his aluminium pan, then crushed a piece of ginger and half a clove in a stone pestle. He could no longer afford to put in a whole clove. He scraped the contents of the pestle into the pan. When the tea was ready he came up to where she was sitting and handed it to her. “The sun is still strong. If you want an umbrella to sit under I can give you one, only five rupees,” he said. She wondered where she had heard that voice before. Could it be – no it couldn’t, of course.

The beach grew more crowded as the heat dwindled. Suraj appeared, faceless behind sunglasses, wandering in search of the right spot, choosing an upturned boat. He sat on it and took something out of his pocket – a piece of wood, she saw through her camera lens – and began to scrape at it with a knife. She observed him for a while. The piece was quite small and his movements with the knife precise and controlled. He gazed for long moments into the horizon, then went back to his work. His scowl, his dragon-black T-shirt, his stubble, made him daunting to vendors of sea shells and beads. They left him alone, instead attaching themselves with the persistence of bluebottles to the girl with braids in her hair. Nomi ignored her clamorous followers and began strolling along the beach, lifting her camera occasionally for photographs, pausing at times with an assessing look that arced over the shoreline. She came back to the tea stall as if it were her new home, following the scent of cloves and ginger and kerosene, and the sound of the old man’s gravelly voice. He was deep in his work now, noticing nothing but potential customers. She sat straight-backed in the shade of her newly-acquired umbrella, to listen.

He pumped his stove, he smiled, at times he interrupted his song to call out “Cha! Chaaii!”

Nomi closed her eyes tight when he sang. It was unbearable. She wanted him to stop singing. At the same time she wanted him to sing this very same song forever. They would live in a hut and have hens and pigs and grow yam and bananas and play in the stream nearby, she had promised. Piku used to light up whenever she started talking about the hut, so Nomi had added more and more detail each day: new plants, new animals, new things they would do. That was the game, dreaming together. After the lights were put out Piku crept across the dormitory and snuggled up to her in her narrow bunk. Nomi would sleep comforted by the sense of her breathing, her movements in the night. By dawn she was always gone.

“Sweet lime grew there in the valley, And fields of tender green peas,” sang Johnny Toppo. And then shouted, “Chai, Babu, Chai! Jeera biscuit, elaichi biscuit!” When he turned to the girl to check if she wanted more tea he saw her eyes were shut and her lips were moving. Not a hippy, then, a meditating type. He shrugged her off and returned to his song.

“My little mud house as old as time, Is on a hill with pomegranate trees.”

Nomi’s lips were barely moving as she whispered, “Do you remember, Piku, how we climbed the pomegranate tree? Was it a few months after that teacher had gone or was it much later? Were we seven or were we eight then?” They had been wandering outside, not sure what to do with themselves. It was a grey afternoon, the kind when it wants to rain but does not. They were kicking the dust somewhere near Guruji’s cottage when they noticed the pomegranate trees. The ripe fruits hanging from the tree were red and bright. Nomi had never eaten a pomegranate and she had never seen what it looked like inside. There were so many that she did not think anyone would notice if they picked one. There was nobody about. It was the hour between school and evening prayers, when everyone was in the meditation hall. The tree had small leaves and it was bushy and green. Piku stood below it, skipping around, holding her skirt out like a basket while Nomi climbed the tree. She hoisted herself up to the first fork in the trunk. The next fork was easy. And then she was near a fruit. She plucked it and aimed for Piku’s stretched skirt. She hoped Piku wouldn’t shriek when the fruit came down: that was how she was, hopping up and down, shrieking when she pleased, and there was no stopping her. After the first fruit Nomi felt braver and climbed two more branches. She reached out her hand for another pomegranate inches away. That was when Piku made an odd sound. Nomi looked downward to tell her to shut up and saw that Piku’s skirt had dropped and the first pomegranate lay at her feet. Her mouth was open, her eyes were bulging more than usual. Guruji was standing next to her.