The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

by Emily Barr

  I thought I heard something on the other side. I redoubled my efforts, slamming into the door over and over again, screaming at the top of my voice, right up until the moment when she pulled me from behind and pushed me all the way down the stairs.

  I lay at the bottom and knew I had messed this one up completely.

  10

  At Mumbai she got off the train with everyone else, jumping down to the platform and feeling the solid ground beneath her feet. She stood, her legs shaking, and stared around.

  There were other trains, and Arty tried to picture them leaving, all setting off for different places, going across India and maybe into other countries too, because she knew India had borders with Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and other places. The world had opened up, and Arty was here, with money, and she had nothing to lose because everything had already all gone.

  There were two women lying down, looking as if they were asleep, with brightly coloured bundles of maybe laundry next to them. There were wooden carts with wheels. People were taking boxes off the part of the train that said LUGGAGE AND BRAKE VAN. The sun was hot on her head, but the air was thick and she struggled to pull it into her lungs.

  She wondered how many of these new people knew who she was.

  Everything was loud. Arty took a deep breath and walked through the middle of it, and only once had to tell a man to leave her alone. She just walked, finding herself in a place where people waited looking at brightly lit screens with places and times on them, and then she walked past a few shops (one of them was a pharmacy, and she looked in case the shop man was the round-faced man who’d had to go to hospital because of her, even though she knew it couldn’t have been). Then she was outside the station, and her ears were filled with cars shouting at each other, and a man was asking if she wanted a taxi.

  ‘No thank you,’ she said, and she walked past him, walked past a lot of yellow and black cars that were all waiting in a line (taxis, she supposed) and stood at the side of the road.

  She couldn’t move. The cars. She took a step to one side to stop herself falling over. The air was impossible to breathe because it was filled with pollution from hundreds of cars. Thousands of cars. She gasped and struggled for breath. It felt so different inside her.

  And everything was so loud.

  The cars were honking at each other constantly, driving round each other, ducking into spaces, taking up the whole road. If they could have, they would have driven over the top of each other to get to wherever they were going more quickly. They were like a swarm of bees, crawling over each other. Arty looked, and she knew it was too much for her. She had no idea what to do. She had thought the roads in Lonavala were busy.

  She watched an old woman crossing the road by ducking into spaces and letting the cars go round her. She watched a man walking along in the traffic, heading in the same direction. It was all too much like the crossy road game that Zeus had played on Joe’s phone, and that game always, always ended with you being flattened.

  She stepped out all the same, just to see what happened, and several cars blasted their horns at her. She stepped straight back again. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t even know where she was going. She stood and stared for quite a long time, just standing still and letting the city – her first city! Mumbai! – move round her. She looked back at the front of the station, which was bright blue with a picture of a big building and a blue sky, with writing in maybe Hindi; if it was, that meant she didn’t understand Hindi when it was written down.

  She only knew one person in Mumbai, and that was Joe. She knew he had come here yesterday, and that his retreat would start tomorrow. He was here today. He must have arrived at this station. He had to be here somewhere.

  But he had told everyone about her coming out of the woods. She had never told him not to, but she hated it that he had done it. It made it harder for her to run away.

  ‘Taxi, miss?’

  A man was beside her. She looked at him, and looked behind him to the line of cars. He was about Vishnu’s age, and he was thin, with a moustache. She thought his eyes were kind.

  ‘Do you know if there’s a Nepalese boy from Germany here?’ she said.

  ‘A Nepalese boy? From Germany?’

  She switched into Hindi because it felt like that would be easier. Or Hinglish, rather. Someone had called it that, but she couldn’t remember who. When she didn’t know a Hindi word she said it in English.

  ‘I’m looking for a Nepalese boy staying here. He’s from Nepal but his family live in Germany. He came here yesterday. Do you know where he might be? His name’s Joe.’

  ‘You want a hotel? German person would stay at hotel.’

  ‘Yes please.’

  He looked at her for a long time.

  ‘I’ll take you to Colaba,’ he said. ‘That is where tourists go. We’ll go near to the Regal Cinema. Leopold Cafe. The Gateway of India. The hotels around there, that would be your best place to find a German boy, I think.’

  He smiled at her, and it was a lovely smile that changed his whole face.

  She smiled back and committed those words to memory. Regal. Leopold. Gateway.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘You are kind. Let’s go there. Don’t worry – I have some money.’

  The man looked at her. ‘Maybe one, two hundred rupees on the meter?’

  She thought of the eighteen and a half thousand in her bag.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s OK.’

  She sat in the back of the taxi, clinging on to the door with one hand, holding the seat beneath herself with the other, and could not take her eyes off the scenes outside. At first she had to take herself away from her body and do controlled breathing, but whenever she closed her eyes to concentrate she had to open them wide again because she couldn’t not look. It was the most incredible thing.

  Mumbai was huge and it had everything in it. The world was here, all of it, right here. Hundreds of people, thousands of cars, and that was just on this bit of this road. The sky was hazy and everything faded away in the distance, as if she were in a dream, a little bit of sharply focused world surrounded by sleep and mist.

  ‘First time in Mumbai?’

  He pulled her back to reality, if that was what this was.

  ‘Yes! First time. Definitely.’

  ‘Which country?’

  ‘Just India. I came on the train from Lonavala. My mother is English. My father is …’ She thought of Vishnu’s different countries. ‘Indian,’ she said.

  ‘Welcome, welcome!’

  ‘Thank you.’ She gasped as he squeezed the taxi into a tiny gap. Arty had no idea how he’d done that. He just used his horn to tell everyone he was there, and somehow there had been space for him. ‘What about you? Where are you from?’

  ‘Me? From the north of India. A little village. I had no education there. I got married at seventeen because my parents said so. Then divorced. No children. I came to Mumbai alone and learned English. I was like you when I arrived here. Very shocked. Very, very shocked.’ He chuckled. ‘Like you. Don’t worry, my dear. You will get used to it.’

  Arty wanted to know all about his story, and he told her. He told her how he had worked and saved the money, then run away. He had travelled third class to Mumbai, riding on the roof of the train.

  ‘The roof of the train?’

  ‘Indeed!’

  She gasped at every bit of it. She would never have imagined that people other than herself found it scary to arrive here, and it all made her feel a bit better.

  ‘I always dreamed of Mumbai,’ he finished, ‘and now I’m here.’

  ‘Why did you always dream of Mumbai?’

  He turned round and grinned, while driving into a tiny space and round a corner. Arty closed her eyes. She listened to the cars blaring at them.

  ‘Bollywood!’ he said. ‘It was Bollywood of course! I am a big, big fan of Bollywood, and particularly of AMK. You know?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

 
‘Me? Salman.’

  ‘Salman. I’m Arty. The thing is, Salman, that I don’t know anything. I don’t know what Bollywood means, or anything else, and I have no idea what AMK is. Is Bollywood like … Hollywood? I’ve heard of that.’

  He laughed. ‘You don’t know Bollywood? Wow. You are in for a treat! You must go to Bandra. You can see AMK’s house there. And many others. But AMK. He is the greatest movie star who ever lived. That is a true fact.’

  ‘The greatest movie star that ever lived!’

  ‘Indeed he is. Very wonderful man.’

  ‘Wow. I’d love to see him. Can I watch … movies … at the cinema you said?’

  ‘The Regal Cinema. Yes! Very famous cinema. Best in the world.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘This is it here now. See? Regal Cinema.’

  She looked out of the window. They slowed down and stopped, right outside a building that did indeed say it was the Regal Cinema. Arty stared.

  Her legs almost gave way as she got out of the car. ‘That was a scary ride,’ she told Salman. ‘But thank you for bringing me here. And thank you for talking to me. Have you seen me on your phone, by the way?’

  ‘It’s normal for Mumbai,’ he said, ‘not scary. And it was a pleasure to talk to you. I haven’t seen you on any phone.’ When she started counting out the money he said, ‘No. No, it’s a present from me to you. You remind me of me. Good luck to you, Arty.’

  ‘Really? Thank you for the present. Thank you, Salman!’ She wished she had something she could give him, but she didn’t have anything at all.

  ‘Go to Bandra.’

  ‘Bandra. Yes. I will. I promise. Thank you. I’ll find AMK. Thank you, thank you.’

  She watched his car vanish into the traffic. Soon she couldn’t tell which one it was. She stood on the pavement and looked around. This was where tourists went, and it was where she might be going to find Joe. She wasn’t sure where to start. A man came over and said, ‘Would you like beautiful shawl from Kashmir?’

  ‘No thank you. Do you know if there’s a German Nepalese Buddhist boy here?’

  ‘Beautiful shawl?’ he said. ‘Handmade. Excellent price.’

  Arty really didn’t want a beautiful shawl. She thought she might have liked one, now that he said it, but she didn’t want to spend her money on it. She needed this money until she could find a job, and she wasn’t really sure how to do that. Needing money for everything certainly made life complicated.

  ‘Is cashmere what it’s made of?’ she said, because he was still standing there. She had heard of cashmere. In books it was really expensive and special. She thought she would like to touch it, just to see.

  ‘No. Kashmir. From Kashmir. In the north. It’s a very beautiful place. Come into my shop!’

  She thought about it, but she could see that his shop was empty.

  ‘No thank you.’ She walked away. Everything about this place was breathtaking. The cars were speeding past, beeping at each other. People were laughing, talking, arguing or walking along in silence. Some of them, she thought, would be families. Some would be friends. Some would like each other and some would probably hate each other. The scale of it blew her mind and she tried to focus on the tiny things.

  A jasmine bush that she could just see down a less busy road.

  An ant walking up a wall.

  She stood in front of the Regal Cinema and wondered what it would be like if she watched a film. She had thought everyone sat on chairs and watched a big screen together, but now she knew that phones had screens (some of them with her picture on them), and that trains didn’t puff, and that cars were like bees, so she was sure she had the cinema wrong too.

  All the same she had done it. She stood still for a moment next to a stall selling gold jewellery, and she appreciated the fact that she was here. She was in Mumbai and, even though she knew that Gita and Vikram would guess she had come here, it felt like the biggest place in the world, and she was sure no one would find her in the crowds. She would hide among the people.

  She was in a place that she had never imagined. A part of the world that was not so far from the clearing, but that might as well have been Mars. A place that was by the sea, though she hadn’t seen it yet.

  She had gone from being one of eleven, to one of two, to one of seven billion. It felt like all seven billion were right here in Mumbai, all of them trying to squeeze along this pavement right now.

  ‘You like some pretty earrings?’ said another man. There were so many men. She looked at this one, hoping that he didn’t know she was the girl from the woods, but he didn’t seem interested in her, just in whether she wanted earrings.

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ Arty said. ‘But I don’t really. Thanks, though.’

  Lots of people were offering her stuff. She walked along, saying ‘No thank you’ to everything, because she knew it would be rude to ignore them. She looked at every person to see if they were Joe but all of them weren’t. She pretended she was Venus, before Arty herself had been born, walking along here not much older than Arty was now. She wished she had asked her mother every single thing about her old life, rather than almost nothing.

  When she noticed that a sign said LEOPOLD CAFE she stopped because she knew that Salman had said it was a place she could go. Joe might be in there. She stood in the street and looked in, because it had a big wide doorway.

  There were lots of people, and those people were eating food. Arty realized that she was hungry.

  A little crowd was standing outside, and a woman in uniform was in charge.

  ‘One person?’ she said when she saw Arty looking.

  Arty nodded. Now there was just one of her.

  The woman wanted to look inside Arty’s bag, so she showed her, and the book and the bear and the other bits and pieces in there seemed to be all right. She called out to someone inside, and the man nodded and beckoned for Arty to follow him, so she did. She stepped into the cafe, pleased that she had been to one before so she didn’t need to panic about what to do at this particular point. Though this one was much bigger and more clattery and echoey than the previous one. He showed her to a little table with two chairs. Arty sat on one of them and noticed the menu on the table under a glass top.

  Almost every table had people at it. They were eating, and talking, and laughing. Some of them had pale skin and some were darker, and everyone seemed busy. She watched two men at a nearby table drinking from huge bottles of beer that weren’t Kingfisher, but which looked the same. She stared at the list of things to eat.

  Gita and Vikram must be looking for her. She could picture it. Vikram would probably have gone to work before Gita went to wake Arty up. She must have found the empty bed and the note. She would have told Pia, and everyone would be wondering where she was. And she was here, sitting in a cafe in Mumbai, all on her own.

  The woman at the door was looking at her and talking to another woman. A man joined them and they all looked at Arty together, and then away.

  She felt her heart pounding and turned her attention to other people’s plates instead. Those two men were just drinking beer. Some women at another table were eating something that was sizzling and brown, and Arty was pretty sure it was meat. The thought made her stomach clench and she looked away, though her eyes kept stealing over to it. There was a woman on her own on the other side of her, an old white woman with short white hair. She had a plate of green sauce, with, Arty thought, vegetables, and a piece of bread.

  That looked all right.

  She could see that the waiter was coming and she could feel that she was breathing quickly as she tried to work out what she was going to say to him, and hoping that he wasn’t going to say anything unexpected to her. She planned it in her head. Talking to a new person was still weird. Her breathing was getting faster and faster.

  The old woman saw her looking. ‘Everything OK there?’ she said.

  ‘What is that you’re eating?’ said Arty, her words tumbling over each other.
‘Because I don’t know what to order. And that looks nice.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s bloody amazing, sweetie. Do it. Palak paneer with a roti. Perfect.’

  ‘Palak paneer with a roti. What shall I get to drink?’

  ‘What are you after, darling? Masala chai? Coffee? Mango juice? Lassi?’

  Arty smiled at her. ‘You are so kind,’ she said. ‘I love chai. We used to drink it a lot.’

  ‘There you go then. Get that.’

  The waiter was standing beside her. Arty had never spoken to a waiter. When they were in the other cafe Pia had done all the ordering.

  She took a deep breath. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Could I please have a palak paneer and a roti and a cup of masala chai?’

  He nodded. ‘Sure you can. Anything else? Maybe a bottle of water?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘Right away.’

  He went away and Arty turned to the woman and smiled. She couldn’t help it.

  ‘I’ve never ordered from a waiter before. And it worked! Thank you for helping me.’

  The woman looked at her. ‘You did good. The first time in your life? How old are you, darling?’

  ‘Seventeen.’ She told the lie on impulse.

  ‘All alone?’

  Arty closed her eyes. Everything was dark red and that was good. Red was the colour of blood, and blood meant life. That meant she was all right. This woman was making her feel alive by talking to her. Her words were travelling through the air into Arty’s ears, and Arty’s brain was taking meaning from them. She was here. She was present. I am present in the universe. Her feet, in their green flip-flops, were on the ground. She felt the floor of the cafe through them, and she knew there was earth beneath that, and that it went down and down to the liquid centre of the planet.