China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

  ‘Get her. She’s probably waiting already. Ears like bats when they want to, those three.’

  Suraj, relenting, face crumpling: ‘Will you do it?’

  ‘What is this nonsense, Suraj? Get her now.’

  Inside the room, at the sound of him approaching, all three women reach for their heads and snap down their veils. Mehar smiles, eyes lowered, heart loud in her chest, and a new bride all over again. Riding into the city with her husband. The two of them, for all to admire. She imagines her sisters-in-law’s faces when she returns in the evening. ‘I’ve known for a while,’ she will say. ‘Isn’t he the most handsome of them all?’ Might she also tell them of all they did on their nights together, when Mai was away? No, no. That should remain a lovely secret, something forever untouched. When the sunlight on her knees is momentarily dimmed, she knows he must have passed across the slatted window, and seconds later she hears the door opening. His shadow – his legs, those narrow shoulders – lengthens over the grey stone floor, his head finishing somewhere by her sandalled feet. She is almost rising off the charpoy when he says: ‘Might you please come with me, Gurleen?’

  20

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  He blinks away the tears and rolls his shoulder to destroy those that have already spilled down his face. He thought he’d been silent but evidently not silent enough, for she’s realised from behind her veil.

  ‘I think Mai plotted this trip,’ Gurleen goes on. ‘For us to go together, I mean.’

  ‘Because you spoke to her? Because I’ve not been asking for you?’

  She says nothing.

  ‘What does it matter,’ he says, and he cracks the rein, once, twice, then again and harder again, determined to force the animal to circle towards the city gate and do as it is told.

  21

  Something in the way the moth flits at the slats, the way it gloats about the flimsy seeping light, brings on the sensation. It is as if the insect is deliberately exposing to Mehar its little hissing head, the bristling crawl of its legs. She hauls herself up, a hand to her sweat-glazed forehead, but she feels herself being pushed back down. There are voices, smudged sounds. Is it a man? God, no. Please no. Where’s her veil? Is she veiled? She tries to scream, but all her energy seems taken with the effort to keep her breath, which is coming horribly short and fast. The doctor gives a few tugs to reset the mercury and then tries again with the thermometer. He asks one of the women to lift the patient’s tunic so he might inject the quinine directly into her stomach. ‘It’ll dissolve better in her own acid,’ he adds, smiling all round, feeling the need to explain why he is asking for the girl to be partially undressed in front of him, a Muslim. These Sikhs can be temperamental. Working in the fields – in this heat! – it must addle their brains. He rubs zinc lotion into Mehar’s feet and leaves a phial of white oil on the stone counter with instructions to allow her a sip of it each morning. Finally, he presses borax into the lacerations she has made on her arms and neck, an application that causes the poor girl to thrash and wail before she succumbs to exhaustion and sleep once more.

  22

  This time, when Mehar wakes, it is dark, terrifyingly so. She needs air. She needs to throw up. Her head feels heavy and black, as if her neck were no stronger than a piece of straw. Reaching for her veil, she pushes up on to her feet, waits for the dizziness to settle, and then negotiates her way out of the room, across the courtyard, and to the edge of the wheat fields. She is not sick, though feels certain she needs to be, and the moon isn’t helping, hanging so bewilderingly high. Nothing is helping. She takes some long breaths and slowly turns on her heel, keeping her head very still, and she’s a few steps back into the yard when she sees his shadow and then him, sitting oddly against the wall, levitating. His eyes are as white as chalk. Has he been here the whole time? When did he return? Is she imagining this? She swallows, panic rising up her throat. Back in the room, she stares at the stone floor, at the gecko calmly eating its own leg. Or perhaps she is imagining that, too. Mehar closes her eyes.

  ‘No better?’ Harbans asks, an arm around her. ‘Try to sleep. Get in with me.’

  From the second charpoy, Gurleen huffs, and as Mehar falls on to her bed she sees in her mind’s eye that it was his upended dhol, his drum, that he was sitting on, there against the wall.

  * * *

  Once we had smashed off the bolts and Laxman had planed the door, I took up residence. Mosquitoes rarely entered that room and at dusk the bats flew straight past with their tiny busy noise. A long stone slab stuck out from the wall and I kept my suitcase and rucksack open on that, along with my toothbrush, shower gel, bar of soap, and sixteen-pack of LuxGo toilet paper. I’d arranged my charpoy in the corner by the window, which I’d uncovered, prising a thick square of wood away from the ledge and then kicking it off. As the light streamed past the five iron bars and made a cage on the wall behind me, I wondered if Laxman had looked at me so hard because he saw a family resemblance. I’d always been told I take after my mother’s side, it was true, and now I thought of my great-grandmother lying here, cooking here, in this small room with its forbidding bars.

  At first the room reeked of stale smoke, of dung and overripe fruit, but washing the walls and leaving the door open got rid of the smell, or maybe I stopped noticing it, at least during the day. The only thing I couldn’t scrub clean was a semicircle of ashy grime, signs of a cooking fire, about a foot wide and directly beneath the counter. At night, though, faint smells returned and what sleep I got was flooded by images of decaying fruit, of mulch and maggots. When that happened, I got up, climbed the stairs to the flat roof, breathed. Everything was black and quiet. I couldn’t see the ground below me and had a sense of being free from gravity, of floating off into some corner of space. It reminded me of the first time I jacked up, and how I came home, went up to my room and stared out at the night. My vague reflection in the window was superimposed across the dark sky and, for once, looking at my face didn’t feel difficult. It felt almost wonderful. I switched on my torch and cast a beam across the farm, over the barn. The moths came rapidly and I watched them swarm and flit in the wide cone of light.

  * * *

  *

  One afternoon, a woman arrived on a green bicycle while I was poking a stick at a scorpling, prodding it into my bucket. It gibbered about, clawing at the iron sides, and I was at the water pump ready to drown the thing, when she told me not to. I did it anyway, threw scorpling and water high across the field and returned to the yard, where she was waiting, standing very straight with her bicycle at her side. She looked familiar, tall, graceful, but I couldn’t place her. Her hair was uncombed and scrunched back, as if she’d tied it in a hurry, and she had the kind of face, with its strange semi-smile, that even in repose seemed wry.

  ‘I was going to say you should burn it. They can survive a bit of water.’

  She must be on her way to the next village, a couple of kilometres further down the track. Come to see how the foreigner was getting on, no doubt. She wasn’t the first. There’d been several intrigued and uninvited visitors in those early days, locals who’d heard that the English grandson was living alone on the ragged farm. That Kuku had thrown him out. They never stayed long, and I was too wary to ask them to.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Your uncle asked me to give you this. Seeing as I was coming this way.’

  Her bike had a front basket of thick white wire and she handed me an envelope lying flat at the bottom of it. My A level results. I’d given permission for my dad to collect the grades on my behalf, and he must have called Jai with the news. I slid the paper into my back pocket and frowned, the sun in my eyes. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘All good, I hope?’

  ‘It’s all fine. But I shouldn’t take up any more of your time.’

  I expected her to remount her bicycle and head out of the gate. Instead, she surprised me: she l
eaned her bike against the wall, freed the hem of her long skirt from where it had snagged on a spoke and turned to the house, smiling at it.

  ‘I’ve always wondered about this place, every time I come this way.’

  She really was tall, our faces were almost level, and I was over six foot. ‘Do you ride out here often?’

  ‘Oh, not really.’ She gave a small laugh. ‘I made it sound as if I’m always racing by, didn’t I? Once a fortnight, maybe. Whenever I’m setting up a drop-in at Sunra.’

  She was the doctor, of course, the one who’d visited my uncle’s house that time. Her name was Radhika, she told me, Radhika Chaturvedi, and now she was here she seemed intent on exploring. Leaving me at the pump, she ambled about the porch, a hand on one of the flaking pillars. ‘Is it your family’s?’

  ‘It’s my uncle’s.’

  ‘And is your uncle not your family?’ She gave me a shrewd look and walked over to the barn, asking, ‘What’s through here?’ but went inside before I could reply. When she returned to the yard I was in my room, rubbing sun cream into my face. It was in those minutes, with us both in separate parts of the house, that I realised she was different from others. ‘Do you get many visitors?’ she called.

  ‘No welcome ones,’ I said, stepping outside again.

  She made a face, faux hurt. ‘Going for the whole castaway look, I see. I don’t remember a beard the last time we met.’

  I crossed back to the pump, where a pile of my clothes were waiting to be washed, and bent down over the bucket.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  I twisted around. Sunshine on her hair. Her face backlit.

  ‘After you threw that scorpion away, as you came towards me, you rolled down your sleeves. Why?’

  I hadn’t realised I’d done that, it had become so much a reflex, but I said I thought she knew why and then neither of us spoke for the longest while. When I moved away, saying there was something upstairs I wanted to show her, she followed me up to the roof, and from there I gestured back across the fields, over the main centre of the village, to some red scaffolding erected around a stump the colour of blue sky.

  ‘What are they building?’

  ‘That statue thing? It’s going to be Krishna, I think.’

  ‘In the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘In a field owned by some feudal lord or other. God knows these village ways. From what I hear he’s having it built huge so it looks down over the village. Protectively.’

  She took a red packet, some Marlboros, from a pocket in her skirt, a box of matches, too. The match flared and she inhaled, blowing the smoke sidelong out of her mouth.

  ‘I only hope they won’t be too pious and will let him play his little flute. Some music, you know? God, how I miss proper music.’

  ‘He makes them work through the night,’ I said. ‘I see them. Sometimes I think I can hear them.’

  ‘This far out?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I can. When I’m in bed, I think I can hear voices around me, working, talking.’

  ‘It’s hard. But it’s work. A balm.’ Then: ‘So you’re still not sleeping.’

  I felt exposed, a feeling compounded by our being on the roof. She was gazing at me with that ironic half-smile, but rushed to extinguish her cigarette at the sound of another bike clattering down the dirt track. It was Prince, Laxman’s grandson. He usually came before sunrise, and we’d speak briefly while he deposited my new tiffin and collected the old one. He was a sparky, joyful boy with a fluffy moustache no wider than his nose. Though usually I looked forward to seeing him, I felt suddenly embarrassed that he’d turned up in her presence, that she’d learn that my meals were brought directly to my door, as if I considered myself royalty.

  Prince didn’t help matters: ‘I bring food for our special guest!’

  Radhika and I wandered down the stairs and into the yard, where Prince explained that he’d brought tomorrow’s tiffin today because he was heading to Delhi later to apply for a Dubai visa.

  ‘Oh, not you as well, Prince,’ Radhika said. ‘There’s no alcohol there, you know.’

  ‘Madam, as if I would!’

  ‘Bring me back some perfume.’

  ‘If you’ll pray my visa is granted.’

  ‘Daily.’

  As I washed the old tiffin at the pump I saw Prince, who was still straddling his bike, jump forward off the saddle. ‘Don’t go in there, Madam!’ he called, almost laughing.

  Radhika looked back from where she’d been peering through the iron bars and into my room. ‘Por que?’

  ‘It’s the china room.’ He gave her a deep wink. ‘It was for the women.’

  ‘And what am I?’

  ‘I’m joking, Doc! Go where you want. It’s only that Baba told me how a woman was locked in there for doing’ – he clicked his tongue knowingly – ‘that with someone who wasn’t her husband.’ His laughter dwindled as rapidly as water down a plughole when he caught my eye, calculating perhaps that if the story was true then this woman might have been someone to me. He left soon after, with our good wishes for his visa application, and I felt acutely that I needed to explain to Radhika that I didn’t imagine myself to be – which didn’t mean that I wasn’t – some overindulged relative, and a British one at that, who expected to be waited on.

  ‘I make my own tea,’ I said, nodding at the outdoor mud-oven and the charred kindling.

  ‘Really, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Having this food’ – I half-raised the tiffin in my hand – ‘brought to my door. As if I was a king.’

  ‘Or a prisoner. That was the first thought that popped into my head.’

  I hadn’t until then considered that my uncle might prefer to keep me away, that he wouldn’t want me out in the bazaar, an embarrassment to be hidden. In the days I’d spent with Jai in his house, had people been coming up to him in the bank and asking about me and how ill I looked? About how much I stank of drink? Was I the cringe-worthy British relative?

  Radhika was looking up to the roof. ‘What a fucking waste – as if cigarettes aren’t hard enough to come by,’ she said, scowling. She wheeled her bicycle out of the gate, pointed it back down the track and climbed on, rearranging her skirt just so.

  ‘Sunra’s that way,’ I said, gesturing in the opposite direction, and she looked at me so candidly I felt disarmed. She was beautiful, and appealing in the way that people unashamedly themselves always are. ‘You said you only ever came this way if you were setting up a clinic.’

  Her face broke into a massive grin. She took her broad-rimmed apricot hat, which I’d somehow not noticed before, from the white wire basket, secured it on her head and pedalled away, waving once she fell into a rhythm.

  * * *

  *

  I waited until I could no longer see her, and then until my head had cleared, before taking out the results slip and looking at it properly. I’d flunked, as I’d expected. I hadn’t turned up to two of my exams, too desperate to realise that I shouldn’t be sweating in a park wood folding my sleeve up to my elbow when half a mile away my desk sat untaken, the paper unturned. So, no, I wasn’t surprised at my marks, only sad at how disappointed my dad would have been as he collected the grade slips.

  I thought how lucky I was to still be going to university, especially given my interview, when I’d jacked up in the toilets of Luton coach station on the way down to Victoria, hoping in vain that it would see me through the afternoon. It was my first time to the capital proper and everything seemed to pop with unreality: the classic Tube signs promising an underground world I was half-surprised to discover really existed; the sound of South Kensington, a name dripping with Royal icing; the light on the blond bricks of the Natural History Museum. After a speech by the faculty head, a tour of the maths department and a buffet lunch from which I grabbed more than most, we were shown to our p
lastic orange seats to await our turn. I didn’t say much, though I wanted to. My feet were starting to itch, and then my shins ached, and I knew that soon my whole body would be rattling. I hugged my knees to my chest but when it felt like one of the other students was looking at me funny I put my legs back down. I went to the toilet. I still had half a bag left, wrapped in foil, but had thrown away my needle in Luton. So I pulled out my lighter and smoked it, sitting on the closed lid, the cubicle expanding with light.

  By the time I was invited into Professor Nolan’s office, I was awake but not present, my sensations, if not quite underwater, then certainly afloat across the lulling ocean of my mind.

  ‘Sorry about the wait. If you might give me a moment.’ Professor Nolan searched about his desk for my papers while I took in his big frame and comically pink face, which was full of broken capillaries. His white hair was swept back, revealing a widow’s peak.

  ‘Here it is,’ he said, and repeated my name in his high Irish voice, making a hash of the pronunciation. He seemed speedily to absorb my personal statement. ‘I see your masters expect great things from you.’

  We called them teachers at my school but I didn’t feel able to say that.

  ‘Tell me a bit about yourself, then. What do you like about mathematics?’

  ‘It’s good to get an answer,’ I said, after what felt like an hour.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it is. Life can be quite indeterminate, can’t it?’

  He was smiling encouragingly and perhaps he expected me to go on, but I didn’t, couldn’t, my mind felt too soft, too cushioned, nothing was leaving an imprint, everything was settling back into plump nothings.

  ‘Let’s do something together, yes?’ He scribbled a few equations down and slid the paper towards me, along with his pen. ‘No rush. Take your time.’

  The symbols were familiar, and I knew that if I could only focus I’d be able to prise out the answers. But my hands didn’t leave my lap, his pen rolled off the desk, and something in my face prompted him to say: