‘I can’t go alone, Auntie. I’m scared.’
Again that note of ache, of yearning. I wanted to wrap him in my arms, keep him safe forever. Instead I said, ‘You have to go now, Roop. Your parents will come looking for you. They must be able to find you.’
He turned to me with a curious, pinched expression. The scraggle of hair on his chin no longer danced with fear. He swung a leg up and was onto the road in an instant. A furrow appeared on his forehead. He seemed about to say something but then decided against it, and I had the unsettling feeling, from the way he looked down, that to him I was no different from that lizard. A chasm in my gut as he jogged away. It felt like I’d just retched. This hairy, dirty boy, so many years older than my little girl. I hadn’t spoken to a child in months. One moment the boy was leaning on me, breathing heavy, his whimpers throaty and wet. Then he was gone.
I sat sunk in that loose gravel it’s hard to say how long. The wind burned against my chest. I huddled into myself. Then I heard the Wagon, a giant SUV, enamel-white, flags rippling in the slipstream. The driver leaned on the horn though he steered the only thing on the road. My perch under the road felt secure, warm. I lay face-front against the mud bank again, watching the headlights swing from side to side, occasionally sink or rise, growing steadily until each blue beam was like the iris in my eye. All the while yelps and rabid howls from the men hanging out the windows, poking out the sunroof, drinking deeply from a plastic bottle filled with booze, intoxicated by their sudden primacy.
I wonder sometimes how the boy is. If they caught him that night and took him wherever it is they take our children. Why didn’t I sit with him a while longer? Only a few minutes more and the Repeaters would’ve gone right past.
Him too I did not protect.
*
Leila had her typhoid booster. She was brave about the injection, but I knew the inevitable tomorrow – small kicks under the bedsheets, breath like coal dust in her chest, fluttering eyelids, the heat in her arms. I took her from the pediatrician to a playpen on the ground floor of a new mall. Between the inflatable slides and a large bungee swing, a train with red, yellow and blue carriages, making beeps, whistles, soft chug-chugs. A slender man in striped overalls and hat watched the sides of the train from the back while another drove. Children waved when they went by their parents. Giddy expressions as they were carried away, on some faces furrows, momentary panic, the anxiety of separation written sharper.
Leila wanted on the train at once. We walked up together when it halted but the conductor rose from his seat in the rear carriage and waved his flag angrily until I stepped back. Leila wrenched her arm free of my grip and hopped onto the carriage, claiming a spot on a bench by the window. Her sudden movement surprised me. I must’ve stood in that spot for a few seconds, clutching at the air. When I turned around a woman holding a little boy by the hand was smiling at me. I looked away, embarrassed, but later smiled at her. I wanted to say, I’m proud, just look at my daughter.
Tiny hands clenching the apron of the window for balance as she stared at the silvery shop-fronts, unperturbed by a pair of boys squabbling behind her. The driver took the train around an island of potted plants, and then I could see her properly once again, a bit confused, shivering with excitement. When she spotted me a light seemed to fill her face, a huge smile erupted, and then she was pointing at me, clapping, bouncing in her spot. The way she looked at me. I was filled with a golden warmth. Replete. She and me together, the track, the circle.
Now the memory of Leila’s face is like a skewer. Jiggling pigtails, bright shopper’s lights, the green eyes twinkle. A sudden deep smile because we had come together once more. Her need for me, mine for her. The memory burns, takes me forward through these days like a goad in an elephant’s neck. Our eyes will meet. When I see her she will smile like that again.
*
Warden Khanna and I sat with the others watching a middle-aged pair take on two younger women. Wafts of spoiling milk from a ground-floor apartment. The four darted about the court: grunts, racquet whips, sneaker screeches.
‘Do you know, Shalini, they were the ones who built this court,’ Khanna said.
‘Who did?’
He pointed to the older couple. ‘Ms Poonawalla, Ms Dwivedi. Do you know them?’
‘Yes, of course. Nice ladies.’
A serve sailed into the air. Orange sky streaking to purple. The taller of the young women bounced in the backcourt, coiled to smash, but at the last underarmed a return. Dwivedi was ready, leaping up as her racquet whistled from high over her head, pushing the younger women to the edge of the court, where they began a frantic grunting defence, bent low, a soft tock springing from the racquets each time a desperate arm retrieved the shuttle inches from the concrete. Whip-smash-ungh-tock, whip-smash-ungh-tock, the saves bringing gasps from us watching. One of the young women deftly dropped her hands, and this time the shuttle looped to the forecourt, where Poonawalla had watched the exchange with her racquet poised, thrumming, eager to intrude. She took three side steps and went so hard at the shuttle that it caught the tape and bounced back to her feet. She screamed out a curse. Some of the women giggled.
‘Usually they are nice,’ Mr Khanna laughed, shaking his head. ‘Padmini takes her badminton very seriously. She used to play before she was brought here.’ He had an air of sheepish self-importance. ‘They came to me for permission to put the court up.’ Khanna leaned back, flexing the legs of his chair until the red plastic joins whitened under his weight. I wondered if they would suddenly snap. ‘I only got them the net.’
‘I remember two women making the chalk markings. They were so serious. Measurements in a little notebook. Their tape rule. My god, so much time has passed. Look at them now.’
Khanna patted his belly and smiled. ‘They look quite fit to me.’
‘Of course, of course,’ I said. Another sharp smash and the cork of the shuttle cracked loudly on the stone. The younger women slapped hands. In the surrounding towers tiny squares of light popped into life.
The years have passed slowly. Outside it is difficult but here good women try to rebuild their lives. This badminton court is one thing we have. They string up lights on the poles that hold up the net. By dusk the rest of us come down, someone organises tea. At first I never went down in the evening. It seemed so strange, grown women playing the games of children, of men, but I’ve come to appreciate it now.
‘What’s this I’m hearing, Shalini, that you aren’t happy at work?’
‘Who told you that, Wardenjee? That’s not true.’
‘Then why did you apply for a transfer?’
‘Oh that.’ It’s still a surprise that Warden Khanna knows so much about my life. How does he keep track of every woman in the building? ‘I thought it was time for a change.’
‘Change?’ Khanna turned to look at me. Lines ran like a rainbow across his forehead, so deep they looked cut with a knife. ‘You know the Council doesn’t like that. We have to stay where we are. In the work we’ve been given.’
‘I’ve tried two or three times before.’
‘Yes, I know. They told me that this time you’ll go before a tribunal.’
‘I’m not afraid.’
‘You’re not?’ He sat half-twisted, like a lemon, staring into me. Does he know I’ve worked towards this transfer for sixteen years? He pushed himself to his feet. ‘That’s up to you, of course. But be careful. These tribunal people have many powers. Okay, Shalini. Come over one of these days.’ He put two fingers of his right hand on his heart. ‘Purity for all,’ he said.
I put two fingers on my left breast, eyes on the badminton. ‘Purity for all.’
MA AND PAPA
A single clear memory of what it was like before, though I must be four years old. My parents are taking me to lunch at a new grill at the Sheraton. I’m excited, dressed up, nervous. We travel to the top floor in a mirrored elevator. Even this is something new, and I remember the reflection it presents: the bunched f
olds of Ma’s sari, my favourite headband, baby blue with rows of white polka dots. The elevator opens into an oak-panelled vestibule where two hostesses are waiting to lead us through a curtained door to a restaurant floor warm with sunlight. I let out a little gasp. A picture window along one wall offers a flowing view of the city below. I run to see. The treetops are different lustrous greens, gently swaying and leaning into one another. Even Ma is surprised by how many trees there are. I press my nose to the chilled glass. A toy city, overgrown with broccoli. Through the leaves you see houses, white or yellow, small rooms on their roofs. It is the sight of the trees that stays with me. A trembling canopy over the city, properly broken only in a few places: a crop of office buildings, the stadium, the domes of the medieval monuments, each cupola shining smooth as a beach pebble.
Some forty years after Purity One was erected there are no trees. The stunning canopy is gone. Now there are hundreds of walls, no one sure how many. Each wall is fifty-nine feet high and two feet thick, in agreement with Council law. They loop through and around the city, bigger than anything except the tallest buildings. My father detested these walls. Now that I use the Outroads every day, I live with what they expel. I must see their shit and slime, the cascading brown water and showering refuse. Smells so thick you can taste them. When children fire bottle rockets over the walls of their sector, trying to hit the Slum roofs, smouldering dregs of fireworks come floating down on me as I’m walking. If a load dumped from a trashtower comes gush-tumble-bouncing down a sector wall, the warm, gritty splash carries to the other side of even the widest road, leaving a rain of brown drops on my shoulders, my hair. Papa was right. These walls diminish us. Make us something less than human. Go out of the city, to the low hills in the west perhaps. Look at this place at night. The silent grey walls and between them the flyroads thrumming with headlights. We are in an enormous maze.
A hundred years ago the city’s first wealth settled on Lakshmi Hill. Rice merchants, factory owners, or, like my great-grandfather, builders for the British, raising the new city. My father grew up on the Hill, in a ground-floor apartment with a long hall that his cousins and he used to race tricycles down. Bedrooms one side, kitchen and living room the other. He married a pale, pretty nineteen-year-old from the Wadhwa clan in the front garden, with champagne and a jazz band. My mother gave birth to me in that apartment. We only lived there until I was seven, but till the day I married my home was always the Hill. There were so many things to love. Going barefoot up and down the cold marble steps leading up from the portico. The high ceiling of my room. French windows that opened on to our own lawn. The cook’s cubbyhole behind the kitchen, where I would sometimes hide, where it smelt like incense and, faintly, mattress mildew. The fuzzy bear ballerinas I’d stuck in their different poses on the doors of my cupboard, staring back at me even after we’d emptied the room.
One summer, while we were still in that apartment, Papa, Ma and I went on a walk. A dark evening, with a cool, crackling wind such as there is before rain. Papa swung angrily at a cloud of mosquitoes that hummed over his head. He nodded to the other walkers. He had biscuits for the mongrels. Once upon a time, he announced, the cigarette vendors and dervaans would salute as we walked by. He pointed out the trees, the sharp, sour smell of the toddy palms, the cloying aroma of the figs, bittersweet tamarinds, the acidic coconut smell of the banyans. My father taught me to recognise the trees that grew there by their smell.
I wanted to race my mother down the road, but she swatted my hand away. ‘That woman has been digging through our trash again,’ she told my father.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ As Papa spoke his neck flushed into two patches of pink. ‘Does she go through it herself? She’s that crazy?’
‘I’ve caught her doing it. Now she brings a servant.’
‘You know how rich she must be?’ my father said, shaking his head. ‘Looking for bones! I’ve never heard anything so crazy. What does she do when she sees you?’
‘She’s bloody brazen. Doesn’t care. She kept rooting through it, saying, “Nothing personal, dear. Try and understand.” I knew I had to keep cool. So I told her – very politely! – “My husband’s family has been in this building sixty years. We’re an old family. A good family.” She was totally unmoved. Kept saying – in this calm voice – “Of course, of course, I know you’re not just anybody. But the rules have changed. We have our own habits. There’s no need for there to be such a fuss. We simply want to live with people who follow our own rules, from our own community.” “So we have to go, is that it? So you go through my trash?” I asked. To which she replied, in that infuriating deadpan, “Madam, you know the rules. Rules were changed with the building society’s permission.” “So you’re getting rid of us because we’re not the same caste?” You should’ve seen how horrified that bitch was,’ Ma said. ‘Her eyes went really big. “Caste? No-no-no-no-no. How can you say this? There is no such thing any more. This is only our community. We want to keep our homes pure. Our surroundings.” I wanted to hit her.’
We walked past an idling truck. From its uncovered stern a lean, sinewy man polished like teak by the humidity arranged gooseberries in the pannier perched on his wife’s head. She carried each load to a row of fruit stalls on one side of the road.
‘Why didn’t you?’ my father said with a laugh. ‘Might have made it worthwhile.’
‘Will it rain? Should we turn around?’
‘No. It’s not going to rain,’ Papa said.
It was the same story all over the city. What we put into the body is so personal, intrinsic to family, belief. No politician dared argue against walls built around food. Purity came to have different meanings. Some people wanted no meat at all, some would eat only fish. In other areas Muslims were evicting anyone who drank alcohol or ate pork. Once a community had control, its society revived laws written by colony builders a hundred years ago, ensuring land could not be sold to those who did not belong.
*
In the living room of that garden apartment we had a gramophone with a brass horn. Next to it a waist-high Ganesha. Against one wall was a rolltop desk I could never open without a struggle, and on top of this a rotary telephone sat. When I was about four or five I had a game. I’d put the barbell-receiver to my ear and rotate the dial, in turn from each number, starting at the satisfying spiral of clicks at nine and finishing at the abbreviated twirl at one, in between each rotation pressing down on the nipple-like disconnect button again and again to listen for the ding from the other end.
One afternoon I was pacing about the living room anxious to play this game. Ma was on the phone. She was facing the wall, as you had to while using this instrument, leaning forward with an elbow on a fat phone book. Perhaps she was already upset. My only interest was getting to the phone. Was I buzzing around her, worrying at her, urgent in my need to resume this game? Or was I further back, striding up and down the long living room, tummy turbid with longing, when she slammed her palm on the phone book? It made such a thump I jumped back. ‘Will you fucking stop!’ she shouted. Her voice bounced back from the corners of the room. I was terrified. But I can’t even remember now if she was yelling at me or into the phone, at Papa or someone else.
*
With the money for the flat my father bought a white stucco house in a neighbourhood that was bisected by a sewer. We left there within a year. The next one I hardly remember. Localities were self-enclosing. Papa seemed to age each time we moved. Increasingly, he looked beaten. He died eleven years after we left his childhood home, never taking his evening walk again. I was angry, but now I’m glad. He went before the eternal order took root, found the fissures and crannies, pried us apart like volcanic rock.
One evening we three were watching the news. He was on his armchair, Mummy on a bench, while I lay on my stomach on the thick rug between them, flicking through a textbook. I must have been in my teen years by then; I remember being aware that this was a novel way of delivering the news, no longer the so
litary monotone, resplendent moustache or starched stiff in sari, instead four or five people crowded around a table, this new breed of newsman at the centre, conductor of the cacophony. One of the studio guests, a thin, bearded man, was shouting into the screen. ‘Real estate listings have become like matrimonials! Brahmin-only, Yadav-only, Parsi-only. Is this the way they want us to live? As if we must be separated, like fighting children?’
Papa put his drink down and leaned towards the screen. There was a change in the air in the room, a sharpening. My mother looked up from her crossword.
On screen, a frail, paunchy man rapped on the table. I had noticed him at once because he looked like my Indian music teacher, wearing a white kurta and dhoti, and rectangular half-frame glasses he’d derisively polish whenever anyone else had the camera’s attention.
The anchor was now deferential, his plummy affect withering. ‘Mr Joshi, you have the floor.’
Joshi cleared his throat and went immediately into a tirade. ‘Who are you to criticise?’ He looked directly into the camera, speaking to the viewers, gently establishing the other’s inconsequence. ‘These intellectuals think they know everything. But I know, I know, they are thinking only about Western values. They show no care for our own values, how we have always lived. Don’t go by these foreign ideas of what is right, what is wrong. This is our way of living. There is nothing wrong. It is the flowering of an ancient consciousness.’
The bearded man made some sort of interjection, making my father nod and grunt, but to me his words seemed pallid, forceless, of such little weight that they escape me altogether. He was given a handful of seconds and then the newsman, recovering his vaguely colonial accent, called upon Joshi once again.
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