She immediately wrote a note to congratulate Rose, and sent a pretty shawl, made by one of the girls at the school. She went back to work, for there was still an enormous amount to be done on the book before she felt confident to show it to the publishers. September passed in this way and then October, and then what passed for winter in Bombay, bringing clear, warm, sunny days and sudden sunsets, and the occasional nights when the wind swept down from the Himalayas and across the Deccan Plains and you put an extra blanket on the bed.
At the beginning of November, all the children started to get excited because the full moon would soon be in Kartika, and that meant their biggest festival of all had come: the Festival of Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights. Held on the darkest night of the year, it marked the arrival of winter, the return of the Hindu divinities, Sita and Ram, a time for celebrating light over the forces of darkness.
For weeks now, lessons had been interrupted by local tradesmen calling in to ask for donations to help build pandals, the huge floats that would soon be transporting gods down the streets of Byculla. The dormitory above Viva’s head had vibrated with the feet of children scrubbing their rooms from top to bottom, whitewashing walls, and then making their own statue of Durga—a towering edifice of tinsel, paper, and lights—that Viva had been called upstairs several times to admire and advise on.
Fireworks, set off early, stopped them sleeping, and outside the school gates, on the corner of Jasmine and Main Street, sweet vendors were sitting selling traditional milk-based Diwali sweets like barfis and laddus, and making delicious fresh jelabis on their charcoal stoves.
On Tuesday, November 3, the night before the festival was to open, Vijay as Lord Ram had rushed around, cardboard sword in hand; Chinna, an orphan girl from Bandra, had played Sita.
While they were all clapping, Daisy had put her head around the door and asked Viva, Mrs. Bowden, and Vaibhavi, an Indian social worker, to come to her room.
“I know how tremendously busy you all are,” she apologized when they were crammed into her small office, “and I don’t think we need get too steamed up about this, but something happened here yesterday that I can’t in all conscience keep to myself.”
She got up and moved a few books from the bookshelf.
“As most of you know, this is the safe. Not much coin in it, alas, but some important documents about the home. Two days ago, when I came to work, it had been broken into. Whoever it was took my address book and some lists of the children and left a rather impertinent note.
“Now, I don’t want to spoil the children’s fun tonight,” Daisy had taken off her glasses and was polishing them carefully, “and after the fireworks I shall be having my Diwali party as usual, to which you are all of course cordially invited, but be aware perhaps of the need for some caution.”
“What are you saying?” asked Mrs. Bowden, who liked things black and white and who had already made it plain she wouldn’t be going to the party.
“Only this,” said Daisy. “Point one: be careful with your personal possessions. Point two: follow the rules about head counts when you take the children out on the streets. Diwali is a very exciting time, and although most of the locals are wonderful, not everyone likes what we do here. That’s all.”
She gave them her toothy, reassuring grin. Nobody looked alarmed as they left her office. It was easy to feel that not too much in the world could go wrong if Daisy was around.
The children insisted that Viva dress up for Diwali. At five o’clock that afternoon, as she put on her red silk dress, she could already hear drums beginning to beat in the streets outside, the cracked sounds of horns, shouting and laughter, and from above her head, the vibrations of children’s feet running faster and faster in their excitement.
A few moments later, there was a knock on her door. Talika stood there dressed up in her new finery: a peach-colored sari, her skinny arms covered in glass bracelets, kohl around her eyes, her small ears weighted down with gold hooped earrings. She looked so proud and shy and radiant that Viva longed to hug her, but she kept her distance. A few weeks ago, when Viva had asked her if she missed her mother’s hugs, Talika had said stoutly, “My mother never hugged me. She came back from work in her factory and she was too tired.” Another cat that walked alone.
Behind Talika was little Savit, the boy with the badly burned leg. He was wearing a brand-new kurta and had a gold crown on his head. Neeta behind him wore a purple sari with a small tiara set with jewels and fake rubies and pearls that hung over her forehead.
“How do I look?” Savit asked her.
“You look wonderful,” she said. “Like Lord Ram himself.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, and shuffled his little wasted leg. This was almost more excitement than he could bear.
An hour later, when Viva stepped out into the streets with her little charges, they were watching her face and when she gasped, they laughed and clapped their hands. The dingy shop fronts and collapsed verandas of the street had been transformed into an explosion of lights that shone as bright as the stars above them. Every stall, every conveyance, every inch that could be lit was ablaze; windows were filled with clusters of candles, skinny trees were garlanded and glowed like Christmas trees against the sky, and crowds of people, dressed to the nines and dripping with jewels, greeted one another in the street.
She wandered with the children for a while between stalls sagging under the weight of sticky sweets, carrot halva, and almond cakes. Savit was having trouble with his cardboard crown but refused to take it off. As he limped along beside her through the crush of bodies, he explained in a breathless shout that Uma Ooma, goddess of light, had come.
“She brings light into our darkness,” he said.
She heard drums, a discordant trumpet, and then above the swaying heads of the crowd came a lopsided pandal with a gorgeously decorated goddess inside it, garlanded with magnolia flowers and surrounded by roses and jasmine petals.
A man holding a fat toddler on his shoulders obliterated Savit’s view for a moment. The boy stood patiently waiting.
Now Talika was tugging at her sleeves. “Mamji, Mamji,” she said. She often called her mother when she was excited. “Lakshmi comes tonight.”
Lakshmi was the goddess of wealth. Viva knew already that tonight every single door in Byculla would be open so she would come and spread her munificence around. And then the fireworks: Catherine wheels spitting like fat in the orange night air, and then banging rockets, staining the faces of her charges with blue and yellow and pink light, and making the huge crowd gasp with delight.
Two weeks ago, when local traders had begun pestering people to donate to the Diwali fund, ringing the bell at the gate of the home, interrupting lessons, asking for money for fireworks, Viva had complained to Daisy that it seemed an awful waste letting all that money go up in smoke. Now she saw that she was wrong.
Here was the heart of the matter: tonight, on the darkest night of the year, in one of the poorest countries on earth hope was being celebrated. And she was part of it, standing there, gaping, humbled by their undefeated joy, their faith that things would get better.
“Isn’t this fun?” Daisy had appeared at her side, a piece of tinsel hanging from her hat. “I hope you’re planning to come to my party later?”
“Try and stop me, Daisy,” she’d said, grinning. After weeks of hard work she suddenly felt lit up and ready to enjoy herself.
It was midnight by the time the street celebrations started to die down and she’d got the children to bed and stepped out into the street again. Small crowds were drifting home through the haze of multicolored smoke from the spent fireworks. A pie dog wandered around picking up scraps underneath a trestle table.
Stepping from the curb, she heard the ping of a bell and then the whirl of wheels, the soft touch of a hand on her arm.
“Madam sahib.” A wiry little man with one eye cloudy like a sugared almond pointed inside his rickshaw. “Miss Barker sent for you. Get in, please.”
He set off, his skinny legs pumping up and down, and she, tired from the evening, settled back against the shabby seat and dozed for a while. When she woke, she pulled back the canvas flap that separated her from the road and saw that they were bumping down a narrow dirty street with washing hanging on either side.
“This isn’t it,” she said. “Miss Barker lives near the Umbrella Hospital. Could you stop, please?”
But the wheels kept on whirling and he didn’t turn.
“Stop now!” she called, but he didn’t reply. The next thing she felt was a jarring bump and her heart thumping as she looked around her and saw nothing that she recognized. “Excuse me! Excuse me.” It felt important to be polite to him. “This is not where I want to go. Wrong street!”
She tried to lean forward but was flung back in her seat by the speed with which he accelerated.
They were jolting down another narrow street where the cobbles made her teeth chatter. To the right of her she could see the slum dwellings the locals called chawls, a grim collection of buildings where itinerant workers could stay. They were mostly in darkness now except for small pinpricks of light from kerosene lamps. With a jerk, the rickshaw turned right; on the street corner she saw two women in saris standing in a pool of yellow light in front of a narrow building with grilled windows. Street girls, she thought.
The road was churning underneath her feet. She sensed a slowing down, a rise in the road: opening the curtain again and seeing the road so close, she thought if she chose the right spot it should be perfectly safe to jump out. She was gathering up her shawl when a turn to the left threw her off balance and scattered the contents of her handbag—lipstick, compact, notebooks, and pens—on the floor.
She felt the rickshaw stop. A cloudy eye appeared around the curtain. She saw the jagged edge of his teeth stained with betel juice.
She felt the tip of a knife underneath her ear.
“Get out,” he said.
Her black notebook had flopped to her feet in the gutter. It had all the notes in it she’d planned to type up the following day.
“I want that,” she said, trying not to move or blink. “Can I please pick it up?”
The tip of his knife settled deeper into the hollow between jawbone and ear.
“Don’t move,” he said.
A scuffed shoe kicked the book into a heap of rubbish near an open gutter.
“Please,” she said. “Take all the money in the purse, but give me my notebook back.”
The knife jumped against her throat this time.
She heard him sigh. His right leg hooked the book toward her.
Briefly, as he picked it up and handed it to her, the knife went away. “Thank you,” she said, but he shook his head.
He punched her roughly in the back. “Walk,” he said.
There were no Diwali decorations in this part of town, just the faint orange of the night sky above them, and shuttered dark slums on either side.
He led her down a passageway so narrow that she had to walk ahead of him. On one side of them was an open sewer that stank of human waste, and on the other heaps of rubbish, parts of a bicycle, and what looked like the dreadful remains of a medium-sized animal, maybe a donkey. She caught a glimpse of fur, of staring eyes as she walked by.
Her ears strained to pick up scraps of sound behind the slum windows: a baby crying, the clink of a bottle on a table, a tangle of music. He prodded her painfully from time to time, muttering, “Gora”—foreigner—and obscenities she recognized from the street boys.
At the end of the street, the rickshaw man stopped. They’d reached a high narrow house with a solid-looking studded door. The windows were covered in dirty louvered shutters; there were no lights visible behind them.
“We’re here,” he said.
The door opened. She felt arms pulling her down a narrow corridor lit by an oil lamp. There was a soft patter of feet. Someone held her hair back, and before she had time to scream, a petrol-smelling rag was forced between her lips.
A door opened; she was pushed so hard into the clammy darkness that she hit her head on a solid wooden object, a chair or a windowsill. She heard a man shout, the scrape of a chair as she fell down. The last thing she felt were ropes being tied around her wrists and neck, and then a blow and a darkness that tasted of metal.
Chapter Forty-five
When Viva woke, a man, middle-aged and wearing an embroidered cap, was staring at her. His eyes were large and protruding, their whites yellow. His breath smelled of garlic.
“She is awake.” He spoke in Hindi to someone she couldn’t see.
She was cold. There were red swellings on her wrists, and marks where they had been tied tightly with rope. The piece of sacking around her shoulders smelled of hemp and mold.
“My name,” the man in the cap said, “is Anwar Azim.”
He was a small but powerfully built man, with a large nose set slightly off center, and a sprinkling of gold teeth set in a fleshy mouth with a ridge on the lower lip where it looked as if he’d been cut and had stitches. He had the deep phlegmy voice of a heavy smoker, but he spoke good English, though without a hint of warmth. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time.”
He cleared his nasal passages noisily, a contemptuous sound that filled her with dread. When he’d emptied his mouth in the brass spittoon in the corner of the room, he looked at her again impassively.
Her head ached so badly it was hard to focus on him or the room she was held in, but she saw it was small, about ten foot by twelve, with stained walls and a torn carpet. In the corner, a table marked with cigarette butts held a gaudy shrine to Ganesh, the elephant god. The plaster elephant had a garland of dead marigolds around its neck and, inexplicably, a red toy car in its arms.
His eyes followed hers. “This is not my room,” he said.
In the middle of his temple was a dark brown mark and the slight indentation of a devout Muslim who kneeled to pray several times a day.
She must have lost consciousness then, because when she woke up again, a young man with a wispy beard and a pleasant, pockmarked face was looking at her. He was lying on a charpoy placed in front of a locked door. A bolt of pain shot through her head as she turned to look at him.
“I’m thirsty,” she said. “Can I have a drink?”
To her surprise, he leaped up immediately.
“Of course,” he said. He picked up a carafe of rust-colored water and poured her a glass.
He held the glass to her lips and she heard her noisy gobbles. He looked away as though she disgusted him.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a posh, precise voice, “this place is a bit of a fleapit. I have no idea what sanitary arrangements will be here.”
She felt herself gaping at him.
“Why am I here? What have I done?”
“I can’t tell you,” the young man said. “It’s not my part of the ship. Mr. Azim will return later. In the meantime, do you want something to eat?”
“I want to go home,” she said. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Her head was hurting her so badly it made her feel sick, and although one part of her knew she was in danger, a huge lassitude was creeping over her like a fog, and what she most wanted was to lie down, to go to sleep, and to let what would happen happen.
When she woke again, she looked toward the window where a closed wooden shutter filtered bars of light across the room. The rope around her wrists had been untied and her hands lay uselessly in her lap. There was a large fluid-filled blister near her watchstrap.
A fat woman in a dirty sari stood in front of her with a tray holding two chapattis and a small pot of dhal. The bearded boy with the refined English voice who had spoken to her the night before appeared at the doorway. He spoke sharply to the woman, who removed the plaster elephant statue, tucked it under her arm, and took it downstairs with her.
Viva wasn’t hungry but forced herself to eat, hoping it would clear her mind. While she ate, her ears strain
ed to hear anything that might help her: she heard a tin can knocking in the street outside, a door closing, the rumble of a handcart, a bird.
She looked at her watch—eight thirty-five in the morning. Surely they’d be looking for her at the home by now? Daisy had expected her at the party, she wouldn’t let her down, but then a bad thought came. If it was Wednesday, which she was almost certain it was, Daisy taught a morning class at the university, and the others might think she was with her. Also, how on earth would they find her here? A room in the middle of nowhere.
While Viva ate, the boy lounged on his charpoy and watched her. There was a gun on the mattress beside him and two lethal-looking knives.
When she had finished her meal, he left the room suddenly, shouted into the darkness and the woman came back with a rank-smelling bucket. As she used it, she dimly remembered someone telling her that Indian men were mortified at the thought of a certain kind of woman having bodily functions.
The woman, who had a rolling walk and coarse open pores, tied her up again. The look she gave her was curiously blank, and empty of either malice or curiosity, but at the sound of heavy male footsteps coming upstairs, both of them stiffened, and the woman’s movements became jerky and rushed as though she was scared, too.
East of the Sun Page 40
