Leila

by Prayaag Akbar

  ‘What has the government done all these years?’ Joshi shouted. ‘Nothing at all. What-all people coming from everywhere. Where are they coming from? What they are eating? Sleeping on the streets, in parks, underneath our new bridges, doing their morning business right in the gutter, gutters where there is no water. Good people are getting angry. The anger is palpable, I tell you, palpable! This is our chance. We can free ourselves, at last, from these ghastly visions.’

  ‘Why do we have to watch this every night?’ my father suddenly shouted, convulsing for an instant, knees jerking up, palms going to his temples as if the discussion was painful to his ears. The remote was with him, the question rhetorical. Still both Mummy and me were quiet, scared of adding to his anger. We watched as he landed finally on a showing of film songs from the fifties and sixties, coiffed heroes, black and white, the angular beauty of the actresses further pronounced by the ageing film stock, and this seemed to slowly soothe him; wisps of remembered rhythms, the memories they brought forth, first infatuations, first tremors.

  *

  Under pressure from my mother, Papa relented and bought a two-storey home in the Arora Pavilion. I remember my disappointment, the first time we drove into the neighbourhood, because we didn’t have a Purity Wall. I’d never seen one up close. All the girls and boys in my class had been taken by their parents to see Purity One. This made me even keener to go. But my father was adamant.

  One afternoon, as Papa was driving me home from piano class, we had to take a detour because some of the roads had been cordoned off for a Council convoy. Papa slumped low in his seat. I was reading a book and ignored him at first, thinking he was trying to be funny – he had slipped so low that his shoulder bumped against the gearshift as he stared upwards, beyond the windshield. Then I saw it myself. Gunmetal grey and shining in the sunshine, darkening much of the road with its giant shadow, like something from a movie, an alien ship settled. I had to slide down so I could see the top of the wall. Papa couldn’t focus on the traffic. Each time he looked at it he made these soft clicks with his mouth, saliva emerging in mercury spurts. He swerved across three lanes of cars, parked in the last, and jumped from the front seat, grunting at me to follow.

  I caught up with him when he was very close to the wall. He slowly moved closer, neck craned, placed his fingertips on it and gently pushed. I ran to the wall. Smooth stone, wonderfully cool, like the granite floor of a temple’s sanctum. I put one cheek to its surface and enjoyed the descending shiver. Papa looked sunk in thought. He said, ‘You go one hundred steps that way. I’ll go this way. No more, okay? Come straight back. Run. Let’s see how far this wall goes.’

  As Papa walked away he trailed his fingers on the wall. I headed the other way, walking past a group of European tourists who were taking photographs. I realised the wall was following an indiscernible curve. After a while I stopped, struck, all at once, by just how enormous this was: either side of me the serpentine wall stretched off into the horizon. Later, as I walked back to my father in the lee of this enormous thing, I felt an overpowering urge. I stopped again. When there was no one in sight I measured out a little more than an arm’s distance from the wall. My eyes closed and arms spread wide, I began to twirl in a tight circle, gathering speed, pounding my foot against the asphalt, once with each spin like a kathak dancer, enjoying the sudden breeze against my face, chest, arms, freedom from balance and position and sense, eyes screwed tight even when the giddiness became too much and I had to hurl myself back-first against the wall and it was hard to tell now where the wall ended and ground began, as if the level world had yielded and everything swayed like a ship rocked by wild waves. I was submerged, backed up against it, for delicious seconds slumped in that high. Slowly a sense of calm returned. When I came to, the beads of sweat on my upper lip and temples and forehead were gone, a nip coasted the air.

  Papa was walking in a frantic oval exactly where we’d left one another. ‘I found a gate!’ he said. ‘Why did you take so long? I want to check it out.’ A muscle had begun to twitch just above his right eye. He took my hand. The gate was black, solid metal, twice my father’s height, cordoned off by a red and white boom. Half a dozen men strewn on plastic chairs, heavy wooden sticks by their sides. White vests showed under cheap cotton shirts opened to the heat. They spoke in lilting drawls, making casual injuries to each other’s mothers and sisters.

  As we watched, the three rows of metal spikes on our side of the gate withdrew into the road. The rope-man heaved and the barrier sprang up as the gate opened and a long car came through. Beyond the gate neat, narrow roads, pavements of pale pink kota. Next to the road a pathway for pedestrians. A line of one-storey houses with handkerchief gardens and a sudden current of heathery fresh-cut grass from a park where children my age swung and slid and chased each other. A small temple. A wall of gleaming brass bells with strips of holy cloth tied to the clappers. Papa made for the pedestrian entrance. He gripped my hand so tight the bones at the flanks of my palm wrenched. Our forgotten car, which he’d parked by half-jumping onto the pavement, was at the tip now of a snarl of cars and bikes.

  Two men leapt to their feet at our approach. Only one walked towards us, a long wooden stick in his right hand. The street lights had just come on, their filaments unnerving behind the big glass cases, like the glowing, trembling antennae of a rank of cocooned insects. ‘What do you want?’ he asked, unsmiling.

  Papa returned his grimace. ‘We thought we’d take a look inside.’

  A smirk. ‘This is the Patel sector. Only Kadva Patels inside.’ He looked at us closely. ‘For non-residents … you have permission? You will need permission.’ He walked to a shed built like a phone box, with gaps between the wooden slats, and looked through the cardboard container they used as a drawer. He came back with a form in his hand. ‘Fill this out and mail to the office. They will see.’

  ‘You mean I can’t go in just now? My daughter and I can’t just walk in?’

  ‘Get permission,’ he shrugged.

  Papa made a familiar movement, shoulders rising sinuously until his back was straight and he was standing his full height. ‘Who are you to tell me where I can go?’ my father asked. ‘I go where I want! This is my city.’

  This time no mistaking the smugness. ‘Go where you want, Uncle. But not here.’ A wet, mocking chirp of commiseration. ‘Don’t worry. Get permission from the elders. Then who am I to stop you?’

  ‘I don’t need permission. From you or your bloody elders.’

  The other guard whispered something into his mate’s ear and they both laughed, blocking the path shoulder to shoulder. ‘We protect our people from what-all goes on outside,’ the second guard said. ‘Filth in air. In character.’ Two fingers of his right hand went across his chest. ‘Purity for all.’

  Papa was so disturbed he couldn’t stand still. ‘Purity for all? Have you gone crazy, all of you? Who told you this was allowed?’ he screamed. ‘That you could do this to my city?’ At the raised voice, the other guards jumped up from their seats, plastic legs grating against the concrete, and ran with short, quick strides to us. They formed a semi-circle around Papa. I realised with some surprise that my father was not a large man. His wrists were slender, sleeves flapping around his biceps. The crop of white hair added to his frailty.

  ‘Stay over there, Shalini. Stay over there.’ He turned back to the men. ‘You think I take orders from people like you? You’re going to tell me where to go?’ The men were angering. One, who looked like their leader, smacked his stick on the ground. Each time it came down with a splintering sound.

  ‘Who are we? What maharaja are you?’ this man growled. He placed a thick finger on my father’s chest. ‘What’s your name? Which sector are you from? Why are you coming here?’ Rapid questions each culminating with a prod in the sternum. My father went bright red. He twisted the leader’s collar into his fist and put his other hand on the man’s shoulder and propelled him backwards, so quick the others didn’t move. The Repeater
kept balance, flailing, for a few steps. When he went to the ground he took Papa with him. He rolled my father around and pinned his shoulders to the pavement. He slapped him hard across the cheek. A slim scarlet line appeared just below the eye. I screamed and ran towards them but someone, the first guard, scooped me off the ground. He held me by the shoulders as I tore at the air. The other guards had surrounded my father now. They pummelled, kicked, some used hockey sticks. In my panic I couldn’t hold a thought.

  ‘Calm down, calm down,’ the guard was whispering. I opened my eyes. The beating had stopped. The Repeaters stood around my father. His face and neck were spattered with blood. The top buttons of his shirt had popped and salt-pepper chest hair showed. The guard put me down and knelt so we could look eye to eye. ‘We could do much more. But he is an old man. Confused. Get him out of here.’

  ‘Yes. I will,’ I sobbed.

  ‘If the elders saw what happened they would make us punish him properly. If they had seen, it wouldn’t be in our control.’

  On the drive home, the cut under Papa’s eye puffed like a paperweight until he couldn’t see. His arms, back and chest had blue and coffee-brown streaks. When he lit a cigarette in the car, hands still shaking, a narrow black welt showed on his forearm. After this day we stopped talking so much. The ease we’d shared all our lives seemed to evaporate. It wasn’t all his fault. Maybe I avoided him too. Those guards handled him as if he was nothing more than a nuisance. I could no longer look at him in the way I once had, impervious, invulnerable. He probably saw that. Saw me. An ungrateful, unthinking daughter.

  CENTRE OF HIS PALM

  The Yellowstone school bus was a dust-striped rattletrap. On winter mornings it emerged from the fog with two giant eyes square on you. The seats had filth written across their backs and always felt damp. The floor revolting – anything you dropped green and grimy in seconds – though with a pretty pattern in aluminium in parallel tracks down the aisle. Mornings we were all subdued by the day ahead but the afternoons were better. By a quarter to four, when we got on the bus, the heat was dimming and the wind had picked up, and a sense of abandon washed through the air.

  Some couldn’t properly handle the few minutes we idled in the parking lot. There were squabbles, little ones crying, fist fights. A teacher with a printed list checked off names as we formed a loose line around her. There was a tall, curly-haired boy from a year above, a poorer kid, you could tell that right away, his uniform faded from extra washing, cheap shoes. This boy with the heavy curls jumped aboard and ran to the back, tossing his school bag to claim the long back seat, the white Rexene fraying with slashes from compass points and dividers. He shouted something out the window, combed his hair back with his fingers, began to pulse his pelvis in tandem with an ally on another bus. This sort of behaviour was what the teachers called ‘filmy’, ‘roadside’, ‘cheap’. Certainly not acceptable. But the teachers waiting to climb on board with us ignored him. They were like that at this time of day, sinking into the front seats as if they’d been switched off. By the time we were on the open road there would be water bottle fights and bra-snapping. Long-term couples would retreat to the back. Some boys would wrestle. The forward ones would swipe the scrunchies from our hair, stick their hands out of the window, threaten to release them into the wind until we begged.

  On some days the din became too much and the junior school art teacher, Mr Basak, was sent to quieten us. An old Bengali, losing his hearing, touched by Parkinson’s. One afternoon Basak came lurching down the aisle. A boy had pulled the white casing at the top of each seat a few inches up so that when Basak clutched at one it would collapse uselessly in his fingers instead of steadying him. Twice he stumbled. The old man was furious, his glasses opaque, a pair of frosted windows. We shook with silent laughter. He threatened to involve the other teachers. Then, a few rows down, a boy with his hair slicked into a middle parting popped up above the seats like a prairie animal. ‘Woil ou please sayt,’ he shouted, and ducked. Basak whirled around dangerously. Through our years in school we’d made fun of his Bengali accent, thick rolled vowels and dropped consonants. Hearing this good-looking boy copy him, I was holding my stomach, tearing with laughter right in front of the old man as he repeated, ‘Oo said thees? Oo said?’

  Riz was a year above. I’d seen him look once or twice as I walked down the bus aisle. Maybe he liked how much I enjoyed his joke. The next day he took the three-seater just in front of me. I was playing a game with two girls from my class. You put down the name of a boy next to your own, cancelled out the letters that were common, this was supposed to tell if you were destined to ‘love’, ‘hate’, or be ‘friends’. A film song played over tattered speakers. The smell of a leftover lunch being eaten. I was cutting letters out with practised speed when a voice broke in.

  ‘You should try it with my name,’ Riz said. He was up on his seat on his knees, arms wrapped around the top of the backrest.

  ‘It’s just a stupid game. For kids,’ I said. I was annoyed at myself. There was a greenish tinge where his skin had been inflamed by a razor. He smiled coquettishly, like a movie star. Strong sunlight through the half-tint windows left amber shimmers in his hair. Through the rotting speakers the song turned to a wail. As he spoke he flicked his middle parting into place, a movement that sent a warm thrill down me. A pencil moustache made his jaw a perfect square. Maybe it was his unhesitant admission of interest, unusual at that age. I felt instant hunger.

  We did try the game. The result it yielded escapes me. He displaced the two girls next to me, surprising me by pulling a harmonica out of his bag and putting it to his lips. Then he shook his head and slipped it into his breast pocket, saying, ‘I’m trying to learn.’ My hands were flat on my thighs, and I was aware, suddenly, of how grimy my elbow pits were. Rubbing them with a finger left grains of oily dirt, like eraser dust. When he wasn’t looking I rolled the sleeves of my shirt down. Everything happened so fast, just as I wanted the bus to take the longest way home it could. I talked about the essay competition I’d entered. He told me about the squash team, that he’d spent most of the summer playing one-pound video games on the ‘awesome’ machines at the Trocadero in London. ‘That’s a lot, like fifty rupees. But the games are much better than they are here.’ He’d learnt to drive already, he said. Just before his stop he took my number and wrote it in his notebook, the last page, covered in scrawls, stalemate noughts and crosses, doodles of Archie-comic-shaped girls. I was sure he wouldn’t call.

  He did, that very night, so late that my parents were asleep. At first it was awkward. Then he told me a secret: a friend from the squash team was two-timing the most popular girl in their batch, a cold-eyed stunner called Radhika. I told him about a chubby girl on our bus whose ancient math tutor would lightly rub her nipples between his forefinger and thumb, shivering all the way through their one-hour sessions. That was how we went, bartering confidences until the sky started to glow. From that first night it felt warm and natural.

  A few hours later, on the bus, I took the window side of a two-seater, blocking the adjacent seat with my school bag in anticipation. He walked by me without a glance. Was that a smirk? I was mortified all the way to school, alone in a double seat, unsure he would join, sharply aware of each spent minute. In school I stewed all day, picking apart what I’d said last night to find something wrong. But in the afternoon, without acknowledging the morning, he once again left his friends and scatted my companions away. The night’s intimacy came rushing back. We held hands. I used my finger to trace circles in the centre of his palm, as a friend had taught me. He squirmed, closing his eyes. We took the turn for Nizam’s Abode, the Ashraf sector where he lived. Just before his stop, by a billboard with a girl in a sparkling hijab, we kissed for the first time.

  By then my family had settled down as well, in accordance with the new way. Living inside the Arora sector left you with a subtle – not always unpleasant – feeling of enclosure. As soon as you passed the gates you felt them looming
behind your neck. The walls were visible almost everywhere. Papa had found a narrow two-storey in a line of identical homes with pocketbook gardens and fez-like red-tile roofs. From my bedroom, looking out to the east, the wall was two hundred metres away. It hung over the spread of little houses with the placidity of a mountain. From the sliding window in the living room and the parental room directly above it the wall was more than a kilometre out. Still you could see it in patches, though most of this side was obscured by a manmade hill on which the richer families of our community had constructed their mansions; you’d see it again, behind the segmented white shikhar of the Shirdi Sai Baba temple; in the northwest, standing sentry beyond the succession of soccer and cricket fields. After a while I hardly noticed, and coming home felt like you’d been brought back somewhere safe, tucked in, paddocked.

  For months I tried to hide the relationship with Riz from my parents. Then Ma said one day that she could hear my phone ringing every night through the paper-thin walls of our new home. She promised not to tell my father, but at dinner some weeks later, Papa told a story about Riz’s dad, gossip from the club. Riz’s father and other garment exporters had bribed key bureaucrats to keep the rupee below value. Grubbing is typical of exporters, my father said suddenly. It was strange, because Papa never cared about my friends or their families. I don’t remember him mentioning Riz again.

  Summer arrived with a loo wheeling in every day from the western desert. The wind rasped like sandpaper and left a smatter of maroon spots on your skin. School broke a week early because two young children dropped with heatstroke. Riz and I planned to sneak out to a movie, on a Monday, because that was when Ma had a long lunch with her college friends.