Leila

by Prayaag Akbar

  The water tower stood alone at one end of the compound. Still, we were almost there by the time I realised it was Iyer’s destination. I assumed he wanted to talk about the water problem, though walking all this way seemed a strange amount of effort in the heat, unless Iyer preferred effect to comfort, and he seemed too soft, too plushy. It turned out the tower had been dry many years. Dr Iyer used it for something quite different.

  We pushed through a low gate. A sprinkle of rust came onto my sweaty palm, glittering like sushi roe. This small enclosure was overgrown with brambles, various nettles. Someone had dumped long twists of barbed wire. Iyer stepped carefully through the vegetation, pointing out half-buried wire jags as he went. A staircase snaked around the massive pillar-base, its steps cracked and sooty with age. The railing was gone. Only the spokes stood, every four steps, rods of blackened, twisted steel. Iyer hopped onto the staircase. He looked once to see I was following, then began a speedy ascent. The climb was scary. I tried to stay as close as possible to the pillar-base. Some of the steps were broken in half. Many were missing altogether. As we went higher, in a number of places two steps were missing in a row, and we had to jump without looking at the dizzy emptiness below, trusting ourselves, trusting the concrete not to crumble underfoot. Iyer turned out to be nimble, faster than I expected. We kept climbing. The wind picked up. The air wasn’t as dry up here, no longer a hot-sand scrub. Gusts came strong and frequent, jiggering my each step. I was frightened. I called out to Iyer but he wouldn’t listen, so I decided to slow down. Essential now to be more careful than I’d ever been, to remain safe, healthy, simply to remain. Leila was at the mercy of these delusionary men. She needed me to find her. The railing appeared, briefly, gone within a dozen steps. It felt like a missing crutch. I couldn’t bring myself to look down but I knew how high we’d come. Already we were above everything save the surrounding hills.

  Finally we came to a parapet that wound around the base of the giant tank. We must’ve been a hundred feet up. The parapet wasn’t broad, only two feet, though here at least the railing remained. Suddenly it all caught up. The day, the party, the Repeaters, the price they took. I felt drained, every muscle frightened. The wind was wicked now and my head spun from the height and exhaustion. I began to crawl, inching along the parapet, three or four steps on my hands and knees, my new kurta snapping in the wind like a mast. But crawling also felt dangerous because the railing was higher than me. If a gust suddenly grabbed hold I would go tumbling out beneath it. With my palms on the curving tank, I got to my feet. I tried to take a deep, slow breath but even that was short-lived. As I stood up I grabbed the railing, which rattled alarmingly. For a terrifying instant I thought I’d gone over, but the railing just vibrated in its groove. Tremors travelled along the railing, right around the water tank. Iyer heard. He came around from the rear, walking casually, looking out to the horizon, a hand shielding his eyes from the sun, like a pudgy little sailor up on a ship’s crow’s nest.

  ‘Do you like the view?’ he asked.

  I had my back flat against the concrete tank. ‘Is that why you brought me here? To show there’s nothing around us? Nowhere to run?’

  ‘Tch, tch. You’re thinking too much, Shalini. You must put away your anger. That is why we’ve come here.’

  I wanted to scream in his face, but I couldn’t step away from the wall, relinquish the security of it at my back. I had to calm down. Only then could I speak. ‘What did you expect, Dr Iyer? Tell me, how should I act?’

  ‘Be angry. That’s what I’m saying. That’s why we’re here. We call this Anger Tower.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s my solution,’ he said, beaming. ‘Do you like? Whenever things become too much. When you’re remembering your daughter, your husband. You come up here.’ He pointed down to Camp. ‘Here you can do anything. The nurses down there, they don’t allow too much talking, complaining. If they catch you crying you’ll have many problems. But come up here and you can shout. Abuse as you want, kick, scream. You can even abuse me!’ He made this last proclamation as if it were an absurdity.

  ‘You think it’s that easy. That all of us will just put it aside? Just like that?’

  A squall of anger suddenly rolled across his face. ‘All of you? Ask the girls in your truck. The rest know. It’s only you, women like you. You grow up thinking you are already abroad. Some TV-world you live in. That such things are your right. But see these girls you came with, girls from different places, ask them. They won’t be surprised. They knew what they were doing when they chose to live this way, what risk they were taking. They don’t act so shocked, like you do. They know there are things bigger than themselves. Rules bigger than themselves. That’s why I brought you here. Go on. Shout, scream. You will only stop shouting when you see it’s your fault. You didn’t understand the first thing about your own home, your own life. They accept. You want to fight.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ I shouted. ‘Old and crazy. You don’t know what you’re saying. They’re just as angry as me.’

  ‘You will see for yourself, Shalini. I don’t have to tell you.’

  With that he walked to the stairs. He spun around when he reached them. He had a prim expression, a placatory smile. I realised suddenly that he wanted me to think him a good man. ‘There is no question of extirpation, of course,’ he said. ‘We aren’t animals, like some. But you will stand as a symbol. An example. You must show the rest.’

  I stayed there alone some time, trying to calm down. Below was stifling, the air unmoving. It felt good to be in a breeze. Good also to be so close to the edge, the narrow, rotting parapet and wobbly railing and tremendous height. I realised this later. On most days at Camp I felt our separation as a physical hollowness. But up here that long numbing ache was replaced by a rush, my body reminding me that I had work, that I needed to go on. This place sharpened my senses, my mind, burnt a path through the shadows closing in. Much of the time at Camp I felt exhausted, but not here. To be a single step away from death made me feel alive.

  Was it that first morning, up on the parapet, that I made my list? This is what memory suggests. But I remember also the weakness of my mind in the first weeks, how everything seemed a muddle. Was I clear enough to make this list, to hold it in my head? (I didn’t dare put such things on paper.) The list I made:

  More Info Needed:

  – They hadn’t found Leila when they took me.

  – How can I get word to Mummy?

  – Where did Sapna go?

  – Was it Naz? Could it …

  We slept in a long room on low bed frames set on concrete blocks. They kept the fourteen of us together for most things. Meals, group sessions with Iyer, Purity exercises, gardening duty, clean-up. I learnt to properly sweep a floor with a jhadoo, down on my haunches. Learnt not to be revolted by the stiff black rag they gave to mop the floor with, the filth in the corners. Evenings I swept and mopped the four floors of the dormitory. At night my knees felt on fire. For the first time it occurred to me that no one – not Riz, not I, our friends, family – had thought to buy long-handled brooms and mops for our homes. Did we enjoy keeping these women’s noses to the ground as they cleaned? We brought in televisions and cars and phones and everything else from abroad, why not these simple things?

  By the first night alliances had begun to form amongst the thirteen others. I didn’t know how to join in, where to. They seemed so different. A few spoke no English at all. At first the rest treated me with something like deference, but as time went on in Camp, and the congruence of our routine, our circumstance, became clear, those differences seemed to matter less. I farted one night just after we’d gone to bed, thinking it would make no noise. For a few seconds there was silence. Then Prarthna, the mousy girl, started laughing, and soon we all were.

  Prarthna was in truth far from mousy. She was a tough little thing from one of the Kayastha sectors. It was she who first opened up, talking as we lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling of th
is queerly elongated room. She had bribed a judge to marry her to her lover, a woman she’d met on the production line in a car factory. They claimed to be roommates and rented a place in their own sector. Both sets of parents had grudgingly accepted their choice. They lived quietly, happily. Six months on things began to change.

  ‘Someone was whispering in my parents’ ears,’ Prarthna told us. ‘I know who. My father began coming to our flat when my wife wasn’t there, begging me to leave all this, to come home. He was a good, gentle man. Never bad to me or my sister. He said my mother was being shamed in the market, on the street. It was difficult for him at work too. People had somehow found out. They wouldn’t let it go. I refused. So many times he came and each time I said no. We had our own problems, I told him. Still he kept coming. Once he even warned me. He’d heard that our elders were aware of my situation. That the Repeaters were prowling.’ She broke off, cleared a catch in her throat. ‘I didn’t believe him. I thought he was saying it to get me back home.’

  All those women were tough, tougher than me. Iyer was right. They knew what they were doing, they did it anyway. I thought we were safe because we were well off, because we knew important people. These were strange and beautiful women with the courage to slash at every expectation. There was one girl from the Haryanvi Jat sector with light brown eyes that danced with the sun. Sonam was strong and fit and tall. She fell in love with a boy from the same village, the same gotra. Their community had retained many tribal traditions, such as this strict forbiddance of love within the clan. Sonam would walk with her boyfriend to school. By fifteen they knew no one would accept their relationship. One day they went down to the railway tracks that ran along their hutment. Young couples from their village, sure of their love, unwilling to contemplate life beyond it, stood at a curve on these tracks, clenched together until the train scattered them into a thousand pieces. Sonam and her boy walked to the tracks, stood at the fated curve, felt cleansed by the cold breaking current of the great engine and its load as it hurtled by them. They decided to run instead, to hold on to their love. The Repeaters found them in a station hotel.

  We were all curious about the girl with the big bandage. An expression of confused sadness had claimed her face. I can’t remember when Vasanthi told us her story, it must’ve been a while, because the bandage was gone by then. She was a Thevar girl who’d fallen in love with a Dalit boy from her college. ‘We were at the bus stop. Earlier my husband’s family would come with us if we travelled, to keep us safe. But after one year of marriage we decided it was safe to travel alone. They were in a gang. Hacked him to death. They held my arms and my head and they made me watch as they chopped at him with axes and swords. My brothers were there. Father too. One Repeater thrust a sword into my shoulder. After that I don’t remember much. After that it was the truck.’

  It is a litany, a litany of our shame. There was a Muslim girl who’d run away with a Yadav boy. Elders from both communities sent gangs after them. A Yadav girl who’d run away with a Dalit boy. They made her watch as they force-fed him poison. Night after night I felt weighed under, as if these stories came from every side, demanding submission. There was a chubby girl with wet, red lips, Sana, who looked different, younger, less sure of herself. Later I realised this was because she was a virgin. Sana had been so quiet the first days that I couldn’t tell she was like me, well spoken, well brought-up. Bohra Muslim. She hadn’t found love outside her community like the rest of us, the elders had chased her out.

  One day – the hottest we’d had – the two of us were weeding the vegetable patch. Maybe it was the heat, or the work we did, the garden fork’s gleaming metal prongs, the digging, uprooting, the flat plate of the hoe slicing again and again into the loose earth. Sana decided to tell me her story.

  ‘People hated me. Since I joined college they hated me. They said I was too smart. You know how they say it? Smerrt. She is too smerrt. As if it’s an insult.’

  ‘Because you went to college?’

  ‘Not that. That the elders like. It makes them feel they’ve been very benevolent to us, to the young women. They’re proud to let us go. It puffs them up. Look how it used to be. Look what we allow now. They want us in college, but they don’t want us to think. That is what’s dangerous.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I had started a campaign against the khatna.’

  ‘Khatna?’

  ‘A very old practice in our community. They cut the girl’s genitals well before puberty.’ She stopped to mop the sweat off her face. ‘I started a movement, demanded they end the custom. That’s when the trouble began.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Everything in their power,’ she said quietly. ‘First no more college. Slowly, one by one, they turned in everyone. My mother had been against me from the beginning, but my father believed it was time for change.’ Sana’s fingers, halfway in the dirt, scrabbled against something hard. She pulled them out of the soil. Her nails and knuckles were dark brown. Picking up the trowel as if it were a spoon, she plunged it deep into the earth. ‘They made his life miserable,’ she said. ‘No work. Named him infidel, traitor. They said all of us would have to leave the sector. That’s when I went. I told the Repeaters myself. Take me.’

  POLAR NIGHT

  I don’t like taking the bus in the evenings. Sitting at the bus stop makes me nervous. Gnats and moths make dizzy loops to my torch. I can’t see the furry line of kikars in the distance. When the Council first sent us out here I could walk at night because there was hardly anyone around. Now I hardly dare. A woman walking the Outroads alone belongs to no community, no one. Fair game.

  The bus appeared, diving and lifting with the potholes. A stream of red-eyed women exited the bus. A hunched girl, gaunt of face, pallu cinched tight around her waist. A young woman with a phone around her neck playing a film song. One lady only had one arm, her other limb veined green with muscle. None would meet my gaze, staring at the puffs of dust kicked up in front of them. Women recruited as day labour, most likely, working on one of the new construction projects.

  Three men and a woman remained on the bus. I found a seat towards the back and began to rehearse my testimony. In less than five minutes my eyes were burning. I was reading through a blur. Over the years oval rims have bruised the tissue around my eyes, jagged ellipses of smooth, pink, slightly softer skin: raccoon eyes. You find them on everyone who moves about the Outroads, because the air down here is thick with particulates from the factories, cars, travelling smoke from the burnt sharecrops. The particulates itch slowly, they form a film between eyeball and lid. It’s impossible not to rub the skin around the eyes, harder and harder, like each has been sprinkled with some fiery powder.

  These rims around our eyes are a badge, a signal of the depths we inhabit. We try and get rid of them how we can. Cucumber, chamomile, milk and honey. Nothing works like water and baking soda. Earlier in the day I dunked one side of my face into a bowl and forced the eye open, rolling the salty solution around my eyeball. I repeated it with the other eye. It nibbled delicately, like a tiny fish. But it calms the inflammation.

  *

  Three people I’ve loved most of all. Daughter, husband, mother. I don’t know where any now lies. Everything I do feels random, without real purpose. Like a balloon unstopped, zipping one corner to the other, every moment weaker, lesser.

  When there’s a news report from a Council school I burst into a panic. As details unfold the fear burrows deeper inside me. Abuse is rampant. One boys’ school is buggering down the line. Teachers on students, seniors on the little ones. A flesh market on the premises of a girls’ junior school. Begging rackets, mutilation, disease, drugging, theft. No one cares about the children in these schools, not really. We are a people of family, of community. When the parents go, aunts and uncles and grandparents step in. What kind of child has no community? Only those from the very end, the tattered last. Only children from outside the walls end up in a Council school.
>
  Not Leila. Leila will be a lawyer. She is tall, like her father, like Ma, with pale skin and a still-raw garrison of pimple scars on her cheeks. One of this year’s incoming students in the law faculty. Unless she’s gone another way, an artist, hair sensibly back, kameez careless at her shoulder, dabs of dried clay on her arms and neck and chin.

  Ma? She is dead. Dipanita told me that years ago. Did they cremate her? Send her down a river? Did they perform the rites or throw her away? Her body, the way Dips described it: cold in a cold bed, lips pale from the poison. And Riz. Is there a chance? If he were alive, they’d have told him I was dead. He would have no way of knowing. He could be living in a Slum. Maybe he also looks for Leila. Maybe he’s forgotten me.

  *

  The conductor was at my side, a young man not more than five feet tall but firmly built, with a gleaming coal stripe for a moustache. He walked with his chest out, strutting his small frame. I felt a spike of pity. Years of pubescent despair, waiting to catch up with the taller boys, taking a hard job at a construction site to build strength. His khaki uniform smelt of drying fish.