The Color of our Sky: A novel set in India

by Amita Trasi

  “Why are you in a hurry to work? Finish your college. You can take money from me,” Papa had said.

  I should have listened to him. But I had been—I was—determined, for once in my life to not give up, to keep at it, to do this on my own. I could finally prove to Papa that he had a daughter to be proud of. I regretted that decision as soon as Brian quit college to join a band.

  “This is just the beginning . . . you watch . . . my band will become famous someday,” he kept telling me.

  I didn’t ask him how we would pay the rent. I quietly quit college soon after that to take three jobs to support us. One of them, a job working part-time at a local newspaper office where I mostly sorted mail, was a job that allowed me to lie to Papa and tell him I was writing some articles. Some days when I heard Brian sing, I imagined Papa asking me, “What is the point of all this—staring into the distance and struggling to write songs?” But he never really asked.

  Papa’s face turned grim every time I mentioned Brian’s name, and I knew Papa thought he wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t willing to agree. Brian had qualities I adored. He belonged to a life different than the one I had, one in which he dared to live on his terms, follow his dreams. I could see why Papa could never see him as accomplished. If he did land a record deal he would never be the intellectual Papa wanted me to marry. There were times when I was compelled to wonder why I fell in love with Brian. Was it for the dreamy moments we had sitting on the sand at the beach, looking at the night sky, counting the stars like I had in my childhood, or was it for the poems he read to me or how his nose crinkled when he talked about lyrical moments like the ones I had shared with Mukta once? His music reminded me of Navin singing ragas, but more than anything it reminded me of the childhood I had left behind.

  Then there were other things about Brian people wouldn’t understand. There was a certain naiveté he carried with him, his easy demeanor; his casual behavior made him more charismatic to me. He was cool about a lot of things—he had found an escape in his music and didn’t seem to carry the burden I carried with me. I could breathe easy in his company, be myself. I smoked heavily those days and allowed myself to wander into those inebriated moments of sexual pleasure. I didn’t feel dragged down, bound by any expectations I had of myself, I felt . . . free.

  Over the five years we lived together, Elisa had asked many times, “When are you getting married?” as if going out with Peter gave her the liberty to enquire about our relationship. Now and then she would point out: “Oh, the both of you are made for each other.” Or “You look lovely together!” as if it justified us staying together. She was proud to take credit for introducing Brian and me.

  Then came the day we met her and Pete for dinner. I was surprised when she said they were getting married. Brian and I congratulated them, but I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  We have been together longer than they have, Brian, I could have said, but looking at him sleeping next to me in the car as I drove down the rickety road to our apartment, I knew it was futile. Looking back, it is difficult to say when we began drifting apart. I don’t remember when I moved from being in love to being together for the convenience of escaping my pain.

  I wonder if we would have drifted into marriage if this one evening hadn’t happened. Papa had invited us to dinner. All day at work I worried about the conversation between Papa and Brian. They didn’t seem to get along very well, especially after last time when Papa had asked him, “So what do you plan on doing for a living?”

  “I am a musician,” Brian had insisted while Papa had glared at him.

  On that fateful evening, I picked up Brian early from band rehearsal, making it a point to arrive half an hour early. I remember standing outside Papa’s apartment, looking at my watch, fumbling in my purse to find the keys.

  “Oh let’s just go in,” Brian said and rang the bell.

  We stood outside listening to the tune of the bell. No one appeared at the door. He rang the doorbell again, repeatedly this time.

  “Stop Brian. Maybe Papa’s out. He’ll be back soon. We are early anyway.”

  Brian made a face, walked back to the stairs, and sat down, his one arm leaning on a stair. I let my back rest against the wall and kept looking at my watch. When fifteen minutes had gone by, I began getting worried.

  “Something’s wrong,” I told Brian.

  “Yeah right!” Brian said. “I think we better go home. The dude must have forgotten he invited us.”

  Ordinarily, I would have corrected Brian and told him that was my father he was talking about, but right then I wasn’t listening to Brian. I walked downstairs, set my things down, and climbed the fire escape. Brian followed me and watched me climb up, shocked by my sudden boyishness. When I had reached the apartment, he was there—Papa was hanging there, from the ceiling fan; his eyes seemed to be dropping out of him.

  By the time the cops got there, my mascara was running down my cheeks. Brian stood with his arm around my shoulder looking like a lost boy, confused and scared. The paramedics arrived. The red and blue lights flashed across the walls of the building. People peered through their windows. The cop descending the stairs looked suspicious, like the inspector who had once questioned me in Bombay.

  “You’re his daughter, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t have a spare set of keys?”

  “I forgot them—at home.”

  “Hmm,” he said, “don’t worry. The paramedics are here.”

  It didn’t take them long to declare Papa dead and shroud him in a blanket. “I am sorry,” they each told me as they took him away.

  Everything after that was a blur. The investigation revealed that it was a suicide. Moments are strange, I realized then—one moment we have everything and the very next it all disappears. Everybody patted me on my back as they laid Papa’s body for the last rites then cremated him. Papa’s friends stood before me, now stripped of their ebullience, their faces dark and solemn like their clothes. Brian stood behind me taking phone calls as they placed Papa’s body in the retort and closed the door, leaving him trapped between the bricks of the furnace. It was a modern cremator, unlike the one we would have used in India, the one Papa would have liked to go in. Such memories are short and cracked; only a deep feeling of anguish accompanies them.

  Then one day, I was cleaning out the drawers in Papa’s room and came across a stash of papers. The drawer rattled as I opened it. In the living room, I could hear Elisa packing away some things as she talked with Pete over the phone. There were bank statements, documents, and a roughly written note of phone calls made to Bombay over the last ten years. The bank statement showed checks made out to a detective agency in Bombay. I read them carefully, not knowing what to think, sifted through the rest of the papers—some fax documents from the same agency. The subject line in the documents said, “Search for Mukta.”

  I re-read it again and again. It must have been a mistake. I sat on the bed looking outside the window, the fax in my hand, thinking about it. I could hear Elisa call, “Tara, where do you want me to put this?”

  She kept asking me, calling out my name, then came looking for me.

  “Oh, there you are. Couldn’t you hear me?” she asked. “Where do you want me to put this?” I couldn’t reply; I just sat there, looking out the window.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, then walked up to me, sat beside me, and pulled the paper out of my hand.

  “Mukta . . . she is the same girl, isn’t she? The one in that photograph you carry around in your wallet.”

  I nodded, the tears in my eyes threatening to fall.

  “It cannot be. They must have made a mistake. It couldn’t be. She couldn’t be alive, right?” I asked.

  Elisa looked from me to the paper, her eyes wide in alarm. “I don’t know honey.”

  All this while Papa had hidden something from me. And all along, I had agonized over the fact that I was the one who had kept things from him. I took the
paper away from Elisa’s hands, fumbled for the phone number on it, and dialed the number. The phone at the other end rang, echoing in my ear, but no one picked it up.

  It didn’t take me long to decide.

  “You are crazy! To go looking for a girl who disappeared eleven years ago?” Elisa tried convincing me to stay. I had made up my mind about leaving, going back to Bombay—the place where all this had started. I wanted to think I was going to Bombay because I wanted to find out why Papa had lied to me—why he had been searching for Mukta when he had told me she was dead—but that wasn’t the reason I had decided to return. The truth was I had lived with what I had done far too long.

  “I need to disperse Papa’s ashes in the holy river—Ganga. It’s according to the Hindu rites,” I told Brian.

  “How long will you take to sort all this out?” Brian asked.

  “A couple months, and I will be back.” I tried to sound convincing. I knew I was hoping never to return to the chaos of our relationship again.

  As I collected my bags to leave, the urn with Papa’s ashes in my hand, I left my engagement ring in a box in one of the drawers beside my bed. I wasn’t brave enough to tell Brian we were over, that it had been over a long time ago. I couldn’t bear to see in his eyes that I had abandoned our relationship the way I had abandoned Mukta years ago. So I emailed him, told him it wasn’t him, it had always been me.

  Some days I think there is no way out. It is my karma. At other times, I think of Tara’s strength and it infuses me with so much energy, it makes me think. I struggle to think of a way out. I even think I am brave enough to try to escape. But then eventually, silently, I melt into myself.

  - MUKTA

  Eighteen

  The room they kept me in had no windows. It was a small room—you could stretch your hands and touch the opposite walls. There was just enough room for a narrow bed. My only companion was a lonely light bulb that stared down at me. I talked to it, cried to it. That was the only way to keep from going mad. Talking to something, anything, helped. Mostly I would sit down there and hope Tara and her Papa would somehow be able to find me. They were the only ones who would search for me, the only ones who could find a way out of all this. It didn’t take long until I began waiting for the men anxiously, expectantly, so they’d come and take my loneliness away. It was strange—I felt guilty for welcoming a man, but it was such a relief to see a human face.

  Some days, I pressed my face to the wall trying to listen to the sounds outside. There was no way of knowing if it was morning or night. But if I listened carefully, I knew it was morning when I heard the sound of someone washing clothes, the banter of women, children giggling in the background—when the women here took respite from their nightly jobs. When I heard the drunken chatter of men, the tunes of Hindi film music beating loudly, I knew it was evening and it wouldn’t be long before a man would be standing in the doorway once again.

  One day, I was walking around that small room, my hands feeling the cracks in the walls, when a small piece of brick loosened and came away into my hand. I imagined writing with it on the wall. I thought I would paint parrots, pigeons, eagles—birds with wings that were taking flight—on the walls or maybe even write a poem. The one that I thought of the most was an awkward poem I had written for Tara. I don’t know why the words kept spinning in my head; they floated around me and settled in my heart.

  No matter how bad the weather,

  How difficult the road,

  We will always be together,

  Climbing the hill,

  Wading through the rough waters,

  Always together.

  Tara had laughed when I had read it to her. “That isn’t a poem, silly,” she had said. But they were words from my heart. I could have let the words sprawl across the walls, written them in bold so people could see I wasn’t one to break. But I was so afraid that all I did was sit down in the corner and watch the paint peel off the walls and fall to the side. Day in and day out I did this, the ceiling fan above me creaking, reminding me a world outside still existed.

  On some days, I could hear the fervent pleas of another girl, feet running, a belt hitting flesh, the constant thumping of a head against a wall, the painful wails that bounced against the walls and remained trapped in them. My only contact with the outside world was with a girl who brought me my food twice a day and helped me clean the toilet in my room.

  I soon learned her name was Aaheli, which meant ‘pure’ in Hindi. The first time she told me her name, I stared at her and we giggled together at the irony of its meaning. I looked forward to the jingle of the keys, the rattle in the locks, as she appeared everyday outside the doors bringing hot food.

  “Don’t worry, they only keep newcomers here to break them into this life. You know, you are one of the lucky ones. Since you didn’t make any trouble and don’t resist, Madam is allowing you this food. Some of the others don’t even get food.” She sighed. “What to do? We all have to work until we pay off our debts. But they won’t keep you here for too long. You will soon get a room with windows. I heard something today.” She gave me a wink.

  That afternoon, when the doors opened, I had expected Aaheli’s face, but Madam was standing there instead. I wondered what I had done wrong. Surely it was a complaint one of the men had made about me. I had heard from Aaheli that Madam rarely saw a girl unless she had an important lesson to teach her. So I sank into a corner, putting my hands against my face in case she decided to whip me. But Madam merely stood there and laughed. “What do you think I am going to do to you? You have made me quite some money in the last few weeks, and you haven’t given me any trouble. I am moving you into another room. If you try anything, you come back to this room, you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Besides, you are beautiful. If I take care of you, you will make more money for me than the other girls here.” She patted my cheek. Then she turned and left, leaving the doors of the room open for the first time. It had been such a long time since I had seen sunlight. I remember how I sat there, watching the light filtering in through the door, drawing shapes on the floor. I remember how I crawled up to it, felt the floor, felt the warmth of it on my hand.

  The next room I was given had a barred window. Dust layered the windows, and pigeons sat on the sills, fluttering their wings; light danced on the ceiling. The sky was as blue as I had left it. The sun outlined the clouds for me that day. How beautiful it all appeared. Every morning I watched the paan and cigarette shops, the daru bars, the restaurants, even the chemists across the street close, and every evening, as the brothel opened for business, I would watch them open shop to serve customers. I would see drunk, naked men with beer-filled bellies fall on the roads, the street carts pushing past them, the hawkers calling out to people to buy their food.

  Every afternoon, the children of the women living in these brothels ran amuck on streets, playing marbles between overflowing garbage cans while their mothers gathered downstairs to wash clothes together at a public tap. Looking at them between the bars on my window, I often wondered if that was why my father had deserted me, because he knew what I would become.

  Soon, I joined in their banter and befriended many of the girls and women living here. I liked the afternoons when all of us got together and sewed our torn clothes or made new clothes for the children. It felt like those comforting times when Amma was there beside me, sewing clothes or cooking. These women seemed to know exactly what I was going through. When they asked me one afternoon why I got involved in this trade, I told them without any hesitation.

  “I am a Devdasi, a temple slave. This is what I was meant to do.”

  I didn’t have to explain. They understood. Each one of us had a similar wound, a similar grief, a similar hope rising in our hearts.

  “I also was born into this profession,” Aaheli said. “I am the eldest daughter in the family, belong to the Bachara community. Have you heard of it?”

  I shook my head.

  “For u
s—the women in our family—the truck drivers who pass on the highway are a regular means of livelihood. We have our houses along the highways so truckers can avail of our services easily. I made one mistake—falling in love, thinking I could have a family. We eloped. He . . . he brought me here, sold me. I did not know then that when the brothel owners buy us, the money they give our kidnappers becomes our debt. It has been two years, and I still haven’t paid my debt.”

  Another girl started sobbing. “I wish I hadn’t accepted the mango juice from that stranger in my village. I was so hungry that day when the man offered to buy me something. I hadn’t eaten in two days. I jumped at it and didn’t think. He had drugged it, brought me to Bombay . . . ”

  Other girls spoke of the lives they had before they landed here, lives that had become mere stories now. Many of the younger girls like me would tease each other, animatedly weaving tales of nightly adventures with strangers; we would giggle when one of us said how good it felt. We forced ourselves to reinvent our tales, imbue them with hues of happiness, flourish them with colors of hope. Each of our stories was woven—with care—into our own cloak of delight to ward off the pain of those nights. We disregarded the wounds on our bodies: the gash on the forehead, the occasional swollen eye. It was better that way—reveling in stories of fantasy rather than facing reality. It helped us survive.