Leila

by Prayaag Akbar

  ‘I remember that call,’ Riz said. ‘You were crying.’ As he stared at the Ministry buildings in the distance he hooked the collar of his shirt with his finger and gripped it between clamped teeth, sucking in soft pulls. Suddenly I was exhausted, without the will to tug the cloth from his mouth, as I used to. ‘We were going to give her everything,’ he said.

  Yes, we were. But Leila didn’t have a chance to go to this school. She didn’t get to wear the pleated blue skirt with the awful belt, tie a ribbon in her curls, show off the Caran d’Ache colour pencils her mother had saved for her since before she was born. Leila didn’t get to study here but still we return once a year to this. It helps to imagine another thread, a tapestry of might-haves.

  *

  I was tired of slapping at mosquitoes. I turned to say something and Riz was no longer with me. He comes and goes as he wants now. Finding Leila is our quest, the last thing we will do together. That’s why I always buy and bury two candles on her birthday, one from each of us. Riz will find peace when we find her.

  ‘Nine o’ clock. The badminton will be over,’ I said out loud. I jammed the plastic shovel a little safer into my satchel and began the walk to the bus stop.

  TOWERS

  I am forty-three years old. A widow, living in a crumbling residential complex called the Towers. The complex was constructed near the southeastern border: head through the old city gates that look like a mouth missing its teeth, pass the landfill, the last stretch of the East Slum, the paneer-packing plant, the puffy silver-white tents of the tulip farms. When I first got here sixteen years ago the Towers stood in an empty basin of turmeric-yellow earth, the only relief in the vastness a row of factory sheds and the red and white stacks of a power plant in the distance.

  I was twenty-eight when they brought me here, though I remember only fragments. Maybe it was the pills, Dr Iyer’s pills, that left me in a muddle. Some people have reported palpitations, night sweats, a sudden inability to breathe, but the pills have helped me. I take one every night even now.

  My first nights here were warm and airless, so hemmed in that each breath felt difficult, as if a large man was pressing my face to his chest. Through a crack in the curtains a column of blank blue night. Blue light lining everything in the room. Like an invalid I examined every corner of my new home, one-room-kitchen-attached-bath. The ceramic and metal door handle. Peels of paint where seepage had furred one wall. The flimsy brushed aluminium of the stove. The cabinet for the gas cylinder was slightly warped and the door, which did not properly close, made a woody report against the frame every few minutes, making my heart jump. Riz and I were married five years. We were together, in all, eleven years, save one break of almost a year. How love changes. We were so alive, so needing of each other at first. Over time the sex became perfunctory. Our attention shifted to our daughter. When Riz and I fought, I could imagine Leila and me casting off together, better off without him. But I knew even in my anger that there were comforts I drew upon every night. The rhythm of his breathing. The peculiar smells his body issued. The way he reached for me, racked by a dream. Suddenly, for the first time in many years, I was again by myself. My bed felt too big, solitary, a seclusion, as if I’d committed a terrible infraction and my in-laws had sent me back to my parents’ home, to spend my nights alone, unloved. That was how little I understood then; how young I was when I first got here.

  Most nights I could not sleep. After hours of fidgeting I would climb from the swelter between the sheets, find the small jam jar I keep in my purse, pop the thick rubber seal and swallow down a blue and white capsule with a glass of water. Only then would I return to bed to wait under the fan.

  But they work. This little pill will turn the mind from the vigils of the day, the memories we guard, the images we polish and protect and return to. Leila’s wide, crooked smile. Riz holding me from behind in bed, safe as a swaddle. The scything ache between my shoulders wanes, memories billow and contract, now everywhere there’s a slow, warm tingle. I’m staring at something soft, something smooth, a sheet of white satin that ripples in a wind, and drawing towards it, I see there’s no distance between my self and these folds of satin memory, we are one, the same.

  The pill gives three hours. Three hours to coast on a smooth straight road glowing in the sun, to recover strength, find sleep. By three-thirty a familiar dream. Asleep in bed, my own, my lost bed, I can smell faintly the potted lavender that helps Riz’s apnoea, when there’s a small shift of weight underneath me. I sense from the way the mattress has rolled that Leila has climbed in. Something must have scared her. I open out my arms so she can slide between us. Her chicken-bone arm will now fall to my breast, her shoulder press into my ribs. I reach for her. Then I reach again. I cast my leg about but there is only empty coolness. Remembrance is an alarm, a siren that plies round my head. Gone, she is gone. There is no more sleep. I plead with the ceiling for rest as the room brims with light. Through the rift in the curtains the sky is brightly blue, a smear of empty cloud. All the while Leila floats above me, the broad bridge of her tiny nose, brown-green eyes a touch too far apart, a pert, trusting smile. She is pinning my shoulders. Stifling my breathing. I have to jump, fly from this cursed bed.

  *

  Leila had a way of copying me.

  The first time I found her doing it I felt this surge of hot love. A sense of ownership, but more than that. I belong to her as much as she does to me. Tears began to come down my face. When she turned and spotted me, she looked so worried that I ran to her laughing and we held each other. I can feel even now her arms on my neck.

  Winter, because the air was thick, grey light, purifiers pumping in every room. A few months before she was taken. Leila had gone into my bedroom and peeled off one of the bindis I kept stuck on my dressing table mirror. It looked enormous between the down of her eyebrows. She’d taken a dupatta and a pair of low heels from my cupboard. The dupatta went over one shoulder of her sleeveless sweater like the pallu of a sari. Her fleshy feet with toes like white tulips reached only halfway up my heels, but she was walking with confidence, an unsteady, willing traipse up and down the living room. She’d seated her dolls on the couch and when she reached that end of the room she scolded them with a wagging finger.

  Even as that wave of warm pleasure filled me I worried: Did I shout at her like that? When?

  *

  I was introduced to the pills at Purity Camp. When I first got there I felt in pieces, a solitary step from the brink, ensnared by the wide, open fields with the lonely gabled sheds. But I wasn’t crazy, I was clear about that. I did not rave or run about naked. I did not raise my voice in anger. The pills helped. There were other ways to cope. Many picked up odd little habits, anxious for routine. A bee that fights its way out of a beer first performs muddled rotations of the mug, looping wider and wider in the afternoon air. That’s what all of us were like at Camp. Doing desperate little things so we could remember what was normal.

  One of the inmates kept her distance from the rest of us. She wouldn’t say a word during meals or before bed. The girls called her Lady Police, a name that immediately stuck. This woman had a cascade of fine white hair, though a young face, nose and jaw still sharp, skin unlined, under the thin kurta-pyjama the smooth, fitful thrust of an athletic body. Lady Police did not walk; she’d stride about the place. Every morning and evening, at about the same time, she would strike out from the dormitories, past the playing fields, towards the scant groves that stood on the eastern edge of Camp. There was, always, something forward, something purposeful in her gait. She hardly spoke to another person but it seemed without question that she was going somewhere, as if important work was at hand when in reality there was nothing to do. Every day it annoyed me more. One evening I decided to follow her.

  Dusk had bruised the sky cobalt and purple. A wind shook the branches of the jujubes and lifted skims of yellow dust into my eyes. At first it was easy to follow her because many women walked about the cooling evening, but soon
there were only two of us, and I had to hold back, until the distance went to fifty or sixty yards. By the time I entered the grove she was nowhere to be seen.

  I walked in wide ovals, searching against the ash-grey silhouettes of bush and tree for the bob of her white head, until there she was, sitting in the mud alone, cross-legged, upright, her back to me. I had to stop short and retreat in an arc, crouching behind the mottled trunk of a young peelu.

  She awaited company. In front of her was a plate, a knife, a fork. Four place settings had been arranged. The flatware had been filched from the dining room. I should’ve been angry, because we faced shortages of everything, but out here that did not matter. Lady Police sat calmly in the soil. She would nod, smile, turn her head to the plates around her, mutter for a few seconds, take the tumbler to her lips like a child playing at a tea party.

  I can’t tell you how long I stood there. I had started following her with a sense I was doing something wrong. Now the guilt was overwhelming. I knew that I had grabbed at something special – repeated the plunder that had brought us here. I turned and ran, scrambling through the dead leaves. Most evenings I watched Lady Police leaving for the grove. I even talked to her a couple of times, but I never let on.

  *

  Riz’s corpse was likely burned and dumped in a gutter in the sandlands on the eastern edge of the city. Hundreds of men were left there, those who spoke against the summer’s madness. Riz fought so that Leila wouldn’t be taken. Me? I will die a coward, submissive to the last. Out of confusion. Because I’m scared. Alone. Because this is the way now. I have many excuses. When they brought me here they gave me a job at the Revenue Ministry. Slummers did the wet swabbing and collected refuse. We were to perform peon duties, take papers around, dust the desks, keep the appliances working. Tea for the senior officers. Open the triple-decker tiffin boxes, serve lunch, wash the plates and glasses and receptacles. Unslept, I carried a dozen cups of milky sweet tea on a thin aluminium tray, shuffling between offices, sectioning out sugar or buying milk or scrubbing the film of orange oil from aachaar containers. The hours were long, the commute terrible. Exhaustion accompanied me where I went.

  *

  Most nights I would toss in my bed for hours. This one-room apartment was another chamber for my brain, a larger casing from which each thought bounced its way back. So I walked. I’d slip out of my building and follow the mud track the shuttle buses used to take us to work, walking until a pink smudge growing in the distance split the night into land and sky. When the sun came up I would all at once feel the tiredness, the ache in my calves and feet, and turn around. These night walks helped me understand my new home better. By day all I saw was stubbled flatland, but night sharpened my awareness of the smallest inclines and descents, and under each step I could sense an ancient, subtle topography. It was on one of these night walks, just as it was turning to winter my first year, that I saw the young boy.

  A sharp, moonless December night. Everything around me very still. The ant colonies like craggy cliffs, in the distance silver trees with spectral tentacles. I had only a thin jacket so I held my arms tight across my chest, hands warming at my pits, walking quickly. This mud track is elevated, two feet higher than the farmland on either side. Once this was wheat country, but the farms were abandoned during the water crisis. By the time we were sent here nothing grew but grey-brown scrub. A pack of mongrels leapt out from behind a stack of bricks on the side of the road. They stopped barking when they recognised me. The leader, with handsome haunches and a white tip to his tail, came to lick my hand. I was glad of their company. You saw snakes twisting across these roads sometimes, their scales left a faint sodium slather on the tar. One at a time the dogs turned back to their territory, the last whimpering softly as she went. That was when I heard the steady, flat report down the road. Thup. Thup. Thup. We each hold somewhere within us the expectation we will be safe. A sense of security is our abiding illusion. No longer, not me. Each person must construct their own inviolability, fashion it from the things they find. My daughter had been taken precisely because I could not protect her. I put my hand in my pocket and felt the warm wooden handle of the switch knife I carried in my jeans. I had practised, in front of a mirror, twisting it into an attacker’s inner thigh, the blade would go in smoother there. I rubbed my forefinger against the metal flick switch and felt a surge of confidence. Even two men I could handle with this in my hand. The flat rolling emptiness helps. A car can be heard kilometres away. When I catch the chesty whine of a Wagon’s engine I stop walking, and as soon as the beams from the headlight begin to bounce down the path ahead of me I step off the track, slide down a couple of feet to the soft, loose earth.

  Now there were no headlights, only this thup-thup-thup carrying out from the well of blackness behind me. It seemed to be moving fast. From somewhere the long blare of a train. It stopped, then started again. I got on my ass and turned to lie on the dry mud bank on my stomach. Planted years ago to break the invading wind that hurtled through the crop and partnered with the sun to set off ruinous fires, the poplars had each been shorn by the long summer. They grew along the side of the road like giant besoms jammed into the mud. The earth was cold against my blouse. My knees and toes sank into the bank. A biting wind came in from the east, low, sweeping through the dry grass like a thousand slithering snakes. Thup-thup-thup. Then, unmistakable, sobbing, a young voice, muttering reassurances around each smoky breath. The boy was not more than twelve years old. He wore under a sweater a kurta that the starlight streaked silver and blue. His hair was turbaned, the knot low on his forehead. I waited as he jogged past. Before he was lost to the darkness again, I shouted, ‘Wait, child.’ Sneakers scuffed against gravel. Silent now, he studied the darkness behind him.

  ‘I can see you,’ I said. The wind grazed my cheeks like shards of glass.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he shouted, a puff of steam rising from his mouth. ‘Show yourself. Where are you?’

  ‘Don’t run.’ I clambered up to the road. ‘Don’t worry.’

  He backed away as I walked towards him. Already tall, a slight squint to his eyes, on his cheeks and jaw, down halfway his neck, long curls of hair. He took a proper look at me. ‘What are you doing out here?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m asking you that. You live around here?’

  ‘I had to run.’ He wiped his face with his wrists, and, placing two fingers on a nostril, blew his nose sharply into the dirt. A kara bounced down his arm. ‘Mummy-Papa made me. Those men came to our house tonight.’

  ‘We need to get off this road, child. They’ll be coming any moment. What’s your name?’

  ‘Roop.’

  ‘Look here, Roop, will you come with me?’

  He nodded. Taking him by the hand, we walked to the hiding spot, where we rested with our backs on the mud bank. Grey clouds raced one another against the dark sky. The rhythm-rattle of cicadas. The boy slowly regained breath and composure, his hands between my palms.

  ‘Who came for you, Roop?’

  ‘The Repeaters. They came to our house.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My neighbour … he’s fighting with Papa.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘They always fight. Every day.’

  ‘But who called the Repeaters?’

  ‘My neighbour,’ the boy said quietly. He wiped his face with the shoulder of his shirt. ‘He knew my mother is from another sector. He said my parents lied.’

  A fat, brown lizard trundled by, bloated from the bounty in these dead fields. It stopped by us, looked around and flicked its tongue. The lizard’s beady gaze reminded me of someone I could not place, a face from Camp, or the night the Repeaters came, a reptile fat on sadness. The boy was crying again, his yowls high in the air. A matter of time before they heard. I squeezed his shoulder and drew him closer to the lizard. The wailing stopped as the boy’s face scrunched in confusion. We were now so close the creature must have felt our breath on its back, but it didn’t move, it seemed not
to see us at all. The boy stared at the scales, like tiny dragon wings, along its flanks. Out of my reach lurked the memory of that angular face, jaw, nose, the insatiate darting eyes. Quick as lightning I landed my palm on the lizard’s back. It squirmed and fought, tickling my flesh. I held it by the stomach, squeezed it of its life, raised it to the boy’s face.

  ‘See, nothing to be afraid of.’ My voice was so calm. ‘Survive. That is the important thing. When they are fat and slow we will get revenge.’ I could feel him trembling. I tossed the lizard into the fields and we watched the limp body arc into the night. ‘What will you do? Do you have a place to go?’

  ‘Can’t I go with you?’

  I rubbed dirt into my hands to dry the lizard’s secretions.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But why?’ he asked, drawing the second word out, a longing in his tone that made him sound, for the first time, truly a child.

  ‘Where I live, children aren’t allowed. Especially not children like you. We have Wardens. They’d take you away.’

  ‘No children? Where are they?’ Roop asked.

  ‘We should get moving,’ I said. ‘Not together. Stay on this road. Move quickly, quietly. In about thirty minutes you’ll come to a crossing by a huge dumping ground. Be careful you don’t fall. The road becomes very tough to walk on. Take a left at the crossing. When you reach the power plant, look for the sheds for the labourers. They’ll take care of you tonight. Don’t tell anyone what you told me. Don’t mention your parents at all. If they ask, say your family had gone to a rally and you got lost there. Okay?’