Then there is my husband’s voice, cracking slightly as he strains for volume, ‘What the hell is going on here?’
Everyone turns. Riz stands at the top of the stairs with a brass candlestick and a child’s cricket bat loosely gripped in either hand. I haven’t a clue where he found them. The foyer lights make him glow. He drops the bat at his feet and brandishes his cell phone in the air. ‘Any idea whose house you’re in?’ he shouts, his chest forward, legs shivering with rage. ‘You know who I can call? Get out of here before I have you all thrown in jail.’
For a few seconds no one says anything. The hoodlums on the lawn look desperate to get to Riz, but something is holding each of them back, a thread hobbles them, mad horses spancelled by an invisible rein. ‘But who will you call, Nawabzaada?’ It is a taut voice, smooth as honey oak, ringing out behind me, slicing the young silence. The first thing I see is a dollop of white hair. ‘Tell me now, who – who will you call?’ Unmistakably, the same Repeater who led the charge the other day, walking with a deliberate tread down the garden path, an emperor entering a battlefield after the vanguard has supped.
Rizwan does not respond. He’s racing through his phone book when a young Repeater hits him from behind, swinging a lathi with all his might onto Riz’s lower back, sending him springing forward, the candlestick falling from his fingers, arched, head thrown back, a straitened cry escaping. He finds no footing and tumbles down the steps. Bizarrely, the leader of the Repeaters and I are running towards my husband at the same time, from opposing ends of the lawn. Nakul, one of our oldest friends, Riz’s usual squash partner, is charging to the steps himself. Out of nowhere a lathi spins through the air and catches him just below the Adam’s apple. He falls to the ground, unable to scream, whimpering and clutching his throat. His wife runs to him and she is yanked to a stop by her ponytail, collapsing to her knees.
Riz is breathing in quick gasps when I reach him. I cradle his head. Then I sense the arrival, tremors from the pounding feet, the stench of angry sweat, the drawled invective, it comes from all around, every point on the wheel, closer and still closer until we are subsumed, struck by knees and feet and fists, pushed down to the soil. When I blink out the blur from the tears I see the streaming gash above his eye, his shirt bloody and ripped to the waist. Our guests are in two lines, men and women. I have been separated from the group.
‘What did you think?’ the leader shouts. He is walking in between the two lines of guests, looking into the men’s faces, appraising the women. ‘Everywhere we are dying for water and you live like this? Rules don’t apply to you? Giving bribes?’
A Repeater is standing behind me, a flabby man with a sharply sloping forehead. I turn and he raises his stick, bringing it down on my thigh. As I recoil my legs open and he slips the stick into the slit of my long dress. Suddenly the leopard-print triangle below my belly button is showing. ‘This one is dressed like a hotel whore,’ the Repeater says, laughing. I cover my thighs again but everyone has seen. The sense of unreality has not dimmed. I’m suddenly ashamed that I sprinkled my panties when I peed earlier.
‘Bring her here,’ the leader orders. I’m propelled by the Repeater, a hand cupping a cheek of my ass, fat fingers scrabbling at the seam of my underwear through the thin cotton dress.
‘You don’t remember me?’
‘No.’
Naz might remember him but I don’t – Naz, where is Naz? He could help. When did he leave? – I want to erode this man’s aura, make him small. ‘You? You think I would remember someone like you?’
‘You should. I kept you safe as a child. Kept all the filthy people out. Guarded your walls. We have the same blood.’
‘I didn’t ask you for anything. I didn’t want to be guarded.’
‘But I remember you.’
I want to scream out. My oldest friends are avoiding my eyes, they look so different, I don’t know these faces. Nakul laid out on the ground. Aurie on her knees. She’s sobbing, stroking his cheeks. He writhes in little starts, like an internet video buffering.
‘Your husband was a violent man,’ the Repeater shouts across the lawn. ‘It must be in his blood. They only understand the same thing.’ He kicks him once swiftly in the side. ‘You think you can take anything?’ he asks, looking down at Riz.
‘What d’you want with us?’ I shout. ‘Please. Anything. What can we do for you?’
A Repeater comes up from behind. ‘We were told you have a daughter.’ Skin hangs in folds around his eyes, as if he never properly sleeps. It’s only me and this man now. No one else is important.
I take a step towards him, bring my hands together, stare deep into his face, offer a look of love. ‘Please, sir. She is innocent. Please.’
‘I know she’s innocent,’ he says. ‘That’s why we’re taking her.’
‘Don’t, sir, please. Don’t do this.’
‘She will be taken care of.’
My head is spinning. I can’t break my thoughts into words. A vision suddenly of Leila running towards me. A long low moan emerges, again and again. Dipanita has come to my side. I am leaning against her, I fall to the ground. In a few seconds, when I come to my senses, my friend is being dragged away. She is screaming too. Three Repeaters have gathered for a conference around their leader.
‘She’s not there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That photo the brother sent. No girl upstairs looks like that.’
Their leader is looking at me. ‘Where’s her maid?’
‘We can’t find her either,’ a Repeater responds. ‘We thought they were hiding in the cook’s quarters. But it was empty.’
The leader curses and swings his stick, hitting a tree trunk. ‘Idiots, all of you. Take this one to the truck, whenever it gets here.’
Four men are carrying Riz. He stares at me, apology in dull eyes. Still I haven’t understood what is happening, what has happened. How can my husband go for tomorrow’s big meeting with his face bruised up? Mishra, his manager, will come to get him in the morning. What will I tell Mishra?
They are taking Riz away. In my last sight his face is horribly contorted, someone familiar but not who I expect, like a sudden glimpse of yourself frowning in a mirror.
Then I am alone. Leila is alone. I have failed in my only work, my single charge.
Glass of water. I must have a pill.
PURITY CAMP
It is not something from me but something of me that has been taken. The part that could feel warmth, happiness, desire. Perhaps I have yielded something of myself.
The truck drew up to a metal fence so tall its upper panels bent reedlike with the wind. Half the sky blotched like old carbon paper. The Repeaters sat by the truck’s cabin, facing us. We were on benches with our backs to them, staring out the open canvas flap of the truck. The party was already blurred, locked in an obscure past. But for a few moments, or less, shadows pressing into my mind like a hot iron: the scarlet gash above Riz’s eye, it won’t stop leaking, mud, hair, blood caking his face; Leila upstairs and under the covers, whispering to her best friend, thrilled, ignoring the movie, ignoring me; her cake was a house, a home, smoking chimney, curving path, crosses for the window frames. Her birdlike hands in mine we pressed down with the big plastic knife into its heart.
All night the Repeaters clanged their sticks, their quivering rods, against the metal truck frame. They gave us no water. I hardly noticed the engine’s din, the heat from the metal floor. Only later I felt the blisters on the pads of my feet.
I held on to one thought, a single delusion, I see that now. It ran through my brain, incessant as the chain of white stripes that halved the road and slipped out from under the truck’s carriage into the black gulf behind us. The delirium: I could turn this truck, turn the stripes, this very road. If I turned this truck around, I could make it back to the party, to Leila and Riz, to how things were. Leila could spend tomorrow opening her presents. Riz could still go to his meeting. We would celebrate by going out to d
inner. If I could just find my home again, Riz would come back, Leila would be there. All I had to do was get back home. As the distance between us grew I began to feel a deep pressure in my shoulders, a resistance band, Leila, Leila holding on as they forced forward.
A tear reached the corner of my mouth, warm and thick with salt. One woman had pissed herself, wetting the plywood bench. At first I jumped to the side, a reflex action. Yet it hardly seemed important. With perverse detachment I felt my dress wicking the liquid, smearing onto my thigh. Another young woman sat against one side of the truck, intermittent in the road lights, a naked face, shorn of the daily artifice – displaying every vulnerability. She stared ahead unseeing. It felt as if I’d caught sight of myself. We came to a gate. Along its length the fence had red skulls on signboards promising electrocution, but above the gate there was no sign, nothing to mark the fork in the path.
The darkness lifted with a stark grey light lining the brushwood and the fields of scrub earth. We were fourteen women, most young, around my age. One girl had a bandage on her shoulder blotted red and iodine-yellow. When we climbed out of the truck the long blue sheath I was wearing tore. More flashes from the party, again with that sense of distance: the maid laying out choices on my bed, tentwaalas erecting orange and red shamianas on our lawn. Leila lifted her frock up to her waist just before she cut her cake, everyone laughing, everyone singing. What had she wished for?
As the sky paled to pearlish blue the birds woke, swooping and soaring in the drifts, their freedom inimical, ludicrous. The Repeaters took us from the truck to a mud yard outside a small white building. They had us line up on our knees. The flaps of my dress rode up my thighs. My arms and shoulders were bare, goosefleshed. But morning brought relief, a sense that the danger had passed. When the sun is up men remember their responsibility. At night they will do anything, as if their vileness, their desperation to possess, can only be seen in the day’s glare. We were vulnerable – the loose, the ripe – choosing sex over family, over the wishes of the elders, the intentions of the community. Through the night the Repeaters had prodded us with their sticks, finding a fleshy thigh, a side of stomach, thrusting in the splintered end.
We waited on our knees. The woman first in line was shouting. As they dragged her into the building she began to scream, round, lupine yowls. This isn’t her fate. It was never her fate. I tried to get my bearings. The compound was surrounded by low hills, granite and coppery mud, from which jagged chunks had been quarried out. Even now you could see two yellow excavators biting at the earth like Cretaceous birds grubbing. The excavators pushed out thick red clouds. I sensed already, that first morning, that this was a place apart, separate from everything else. Even months later, any sign of outside existence, of things going on as they always had – birds, a motorbike on a distant ridge, dynamite from the mining, the reports pinging around the hills before landing in our basin – always seemed strange, unreal.
A vision comes. Leila walking on a broad, empty road. Her back is to me. I feel my panic rise. Thrust the sight away. But it returns, insistent, finding a chink to slink through like smoke.
A strapping nurse in a long white smock and loose pyjamas came up to us. She was the biggest woman I’d seen. Six feet tall, each forearm like a clothes iron, carrying a huge plastic bottle of water, its slender neck between two fingers like it was no weight at all. Condensation fogged the plastic. How thirsty I was. We all leaned forward in anticipation. The nurse walked to one end of the line. ‘No wasting,’ she said, and in turn poured a stream, silver from the sun, into the cup each woman made with her hands. She was two places down from me when someone grabbed her knee.
‘Where are we?’ this girl asked. Her voice was gone. She’d cried through the night. A mousy thing, so thin her slim-fit jeans sagged at the buttocks. ‘What is this place?’
‘All questions will be answered,’ the nurse said.
‘Wait,’ the mouse quivered. She tugged at the nurse’s smock wretchedly, like a beggar. ‘You don’t understand. I have to go back. You have to take me back.’ The nurse had an indulgent smile. A woman to my left let out a guttural snarl. ‘Let her come down the line, goddammit.’ Grumbles of agreement. ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ the nurse said. She freed herself, continuing down the line with that same smile. The girl broke into sobs.
The water was sweet and cold, an icy current into my chest, taking my breath away. I drank until the nurse stopped pouring. After that I could look around once more. There was an L-shaped structure, four floors – from the evenly spaced windows and doors, up and down, clearly a dormitory. A water tower with an enormous crack along the equator of the cylindrical concrete tank. Further, past a stand of thorn trees, a gabled shed built like a barracks, with dozens of windows almost kissing the ground. The Repeaters who’d made the night journey with us were walking towards this shed now, each carrying a little backpack. They were everywhere. Flanking the building in front of us, patrolling the perimeter, on the roof.
A group of women dressed in white emerged from the dormitory led by a pair of towering nurses. In silence we watched them perform a callisthenic routine. By the time the guard came for me my knees were pounding from the inside, a steady bloodbeat radiating out. The sun was high in the sky. He put the toe of his boot on my thigh. I ignored him. He grabbed my elbow, yanked me up. My knees stung so badly I almost crumpled to the ground. I fought him away. It took me a minute, but I walked myself into the small office building.
*
An open-air corridor with a number of shuttered green doors. In the middle room a bald man sat behind a desk. He had horn-rimmed glasses and a rather timid smile. An air conditioner hummed. Sweat had soaked the back of my dress, making me shiver. The Repeater pointed to a wooden chair with a sagging jute string seat, then silently withdrew.
‘I’m Dr Iyer,’ the bald man said. He extended his hand casually, as if I’d walked in off the street for a consultation. No photographs on his desk or the walls. ‘Was your journey okay? Some of the measures …’ – he searched for the right word – ‘they’re unfortunate.’ A grave shake of the head. ‘But necessary. Very necessary. Understand? Tell me, when was your last period?’
‘My what? What is this place? Where have you brought me?’
‘We call this Purity Camp.’ His smile brightened, turning beneficent. ‘It’s for you all.’ He poured himself a glass of water and drank it in a gulp. ‘Your last hope.’
What does that mean?, I thought. Mistaking my gaze, he pressed a button on the desk. ‘I’ll get you a glass,’ he said. Then he opened a drawer and took out a gleaming wooden box, the size of a notebook, with a miniature nickel latch. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’
I tried to keep anger from my voice. ‘You call yourselves fancy names. But I know what you are.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘We will end these cycles of violence. Restore equilibrium. Order will be there, and purity.’ He flicked open the latch with the nail of his index finger. The box was lined in burgundy velvet and contained blue and white pills. He scooped up a few, presenting them on his open palm. ‘Do you know what these are?’
They had a faint smell of plastic. ‘They’ll help you sleep. Help you find peace. We synthesised them with great effort. Ingenuity. Because we care for you.’
The nurse walked in. She held a tray with an empty glass, and, dangling from her broad wrist, in a clear polythene bag, a new pair of thick-soled rubber slippers atop a folded set of clothes. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. The doctor gave a sardonic laugh. He dropped the pills into the box and took off his spectacles. He was like a frog now, eyes too big for his forehead.
‘You don’t have to believe me,’ he said finally. ‘But you have to believe someone. Who will you believe, Shalini?’ A mild smile replaced the bitter laugh. It made my blood boil. ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘we’re the only ones left. The only ones you have. Believe or don’t believe. But there’s no need for me to lie. Why would I both
er?’
I may have shouted. I may have got to my feet.
‘That won’t be possible. Not now.’ He spoke calmly. Hot tears needled my eyes.
‘You know what happened. I wasn’t there. I haven’t spoken to anyone. But even I know what happened.’
I wanted to leap over the table. Get hands around his neck, squeeze until the life left, bury teeth in his flesh. ‘Where’s my daughter?’ I shouted. ‘Leila! Why were your men searching for her?’
‘Your daughter will be raised properly. For her sake. We want an ordered society. Parents like you, she would never see the value in our way of life. Never fit in. Don’t you want her to fit in?’
Tears dropped down my face without check. ‘You don’t have her. You don’t,’ I said softly. ‘She was saved. She hid. She saved herself.’ I tried to wipe my face with my shoulder. My skin was filmed with the dust of the road, my thin blue shift a belch of truck smoke, under my arm old sweat like vinegar.
‘Right now you have too much anger, Shalini. It’s okay. Don’t cry. I can understand, I can understand.’ He pointed to the clothes and slippers the nurse had left behind. ‘Why don’t you get comfortable? I’ll wait outside. Don’t worry. No one will see.’
I needed fresh underwear, but I went to a dark corner away from the windows and changed into the starched kurta-pyjama. I folded my dress, held it to my face. In its weave I searched for Riz, searched for Leila. On a sudden impulse I left it on Iyer’s desk, before his empty chair. Part of me wanted to keep it, but that dress wasn’t any more for me. We left the building from the side, crossing the vegetable garden. Iyer shouted at a dog – ‘hoouwf, hoouwf’ – until it charged away. The four women I’d left kneeling in the dirt in front of the office were still there, roasting in the sun. I couldn’t care. I had to find out anything I could about Leila. What they intended, how much they’d managed to do already. Dr Iyer wouldn’t say. As we moved across the loam fields I felt like a child, asking questions in tow. I brought her up time and again. He would return an enigmatic smile and keep moving. We came to a small scrub forest where the trees looked like barbed wire. Months later I followed a woman we nicknamed Lady Police to this very grove. By then I’d become so accustomed to life at Camp that a sense of curiosity, a need to pry, had returned.
Leila Page 10
