The Color of our Sky: A novel set in India

by Amita Trasi

  As she spoke, I imagined our life together—Sanjiv and me. I could clearly see the beauty of the home we would have together, the children we would have. There was a voice inside my head saying I shouldn’t trust him. He was just like the other men. The lure of love is futile and disappears after a while, Sylvie told me. But I wasn’t listening.

  The love I had sought so desperately was within reach now, I was sure. “Are you listening? Don’t try anything,” Madam’s voice thundered.

  I nodded. I wasn’t listening at all.

  We planned everything meticulously, chalked out the smallest detail—how to slip away from the bodyguards and make sure they did not follow us. The evening came like a sandstorm and all the details had become blurry to me. Ripples of fear ran through my mind.

  Sanjiv put his arms around my shoulder and said, “If you look worried, they will know we are up to something.”

  I nodded solemnly, and we walked out of the brothel, the two bodyguards following us. At the fair, I tried to appear relaxed and enjoy the rides, watching the children on the merry-go-round as they shrieked in excitement. When I looked below us from the Ferris wheel, I could see the guards standing there among parents whose eyes lit up in delight as they watched their children on the ride. It was going the way we had planned. The trick was to get the men to see how much we were enjoying the rides, get them to relax and turn their attention away to something else. That way when we got the opportunity, we could slip out, right under their noses.

  The plan was to go to Sanjiv’s friend’s house after we escaped and stay quiet for a while. Nobody would be looking for us there, and, within a few days, we would move to Delhi. Sanjiv had already let go of his rented apartment, and we had decided to stay at another friend’s place in Delhi until we found our own apartment and settled in it. I had assured Sanjiv that once I was free, away from the eyes of the security, the brothel owners did not have enough resources for a nationwide search.

  Everything appeared surreal from the Ferris wheel: the stars that shone in the sky that night, the wheel that propelled us towards our potential escape, the sudden explosion of power inside us. When we got off, we ducked the guards, mingled with the crowd, and ran towards the entrance.

  We hid behind a ride very close to the entrance. There was chaos there—the laughter of kids, the excited chatter of grownups, the smell of fried food and ice cream. A distance away, the guards were becoming frantic when they couldn’t spot us, scanning the crowd with their eyes, pushing people as they made their way through. My heart was sinking, a certain dread filling it. Sanjiv nudged me and said, “Let’s go.” But I couldn’t move; fear had taken hold of me. I couldn’t move.

  We sat there for a few seconds before I regained my confidence in us and in our love. I often wonder what would have happened if I had not felt that paralyzing fear. It wouldn’t have given the guards an advantage over us. We might have disappeared before they spotted us. But by the time we started running away from this hiding place, one of them saw us. We were running out of luck; there wasn’t a cab on that road so we had to run into an empty alley and hide there. There was no way we could come out in the open to hail a taxi. So with bated breath, we waited. I looked at Sanjiv one last time—his confident, fearless face, sweat streaming down his forehead—in awe of what he was going through for me.

  The next thing I knew, we were being dragged onto the street outside. I saw the man bash Sanjiv’s head with a bat, and blood began streaming from his forehead down the sides.

  “Please,” I cried, “let him go.”

  Sanjiv fell to the ground; I watched them beat the life out of him until his body could take no more. They dragged me away while I looked at his lifeless eyes one last time, the same eyes that had looked at me with such warmth for so many weeks, giving me hope of a better life. I knew as they piled me onto the backseat of the car—when I looked at the long road we were leaving behind, his body lying at the end of it, disappearing from sight into my memories—the dreams I had of us together had always been an illusion.

  “Look at this girl,” Madam said, as soon as I set foot outside the car. “She thought she was brave enough to escape.”

  One of the men pulled my hand and lugged me up the stairs. I looked at his brown shoes covered with mud from the alley and the spots of blood that had spread on them like a painting of Sanjiv’s dying moments. I looked at his eyes, determined to get me upstairs, unmindful of what he had done. Other girls—women I had known, befriended, and narrated stories to—stared at me in horror, clinging to the railing above.

  I didn’t see it coming. The sudden slam on my back, the thud of the metal rod against my bones, the repeated ramming against my body, the pain spreading through it like the roots of a tree must spread through soil—firmly, deeply. For a moment, I wondered if the pain was from seeing Sanjiv die, if the pain in my heart had extended through my body so that it physically hurt to be alive. But it was Madam, standing over me, letting out her anger on me. I collapsed on the floor, closed my eyes, let myself drift into the darkness.

  Most nights, I was in that same dark, windowless room as when they first brought me here; I was beaten every night—drugged and helpless—the way I was back then. Then one day I could hear screams, the shuffling of feet, and a thumping up the stairs. Sylvie opened the door of my room, and stood there, while I squinted at the sudden light.

  “Come on! It’s a raid. The police are here,” she said, gesturing to me to move.

  I reached the doorway but was unable to move as fast as she could. My legs and my body still hurt from the bruises. The police caught up with Sylvie and me as we were trying to run down the stairs. They pulled us by our elbows, and we found ourselves in the police van, sitting next to the other prostitutes. Some of the younger ones were crying, their kajal dripping down their cheeks. The older ones knew it was just another raid, a routine one in which we would be jailed for a night and then released with a warning in the morning. It was apparent the police were bribed well by the brothel owners but still wanted to conduct a raid once in a while to make everybody aware that they were doing their jobs. But this raid was different; the police seemed determined to find something or someone.

  “This is all because of your stupidity,” one girl said to me in the van. Her eyes flashed with anger.

  “Yes, it’s all because of you. You had to go get involved with that wealthy man’s son and try to escape with him. What did you think would happen?” asked another.

  I looked at Sylvie, searching for answers. She was sitting with a bored expression on her face. She scratched her neck as she explained, “Sanjiv’s father is giving this brothel a tough time; the police are here because he complained. He suspects this brothel had something to do with his son’s disappearance. What they don’t know is that they must have disposed of his body so far away that he will never be able to find out what happened to his son.”

  I looked at her astounded, thinking of that father who would never know what happened to his son.

  “Don’t worry,” Sylvie said to me, patting my back, “there will be a few more raids, then they will quiet down. After all, the mafia owns the brothel. Who ever wins against the mob?” She gave a chuckle.

  “What about the nights we waste sitting in jail? The money we could make will be added to our debt, and God knows how much longer we will have to keep working this way,” a woman said, almost pouncing on me in her fury.

  Sylvie shielded me. She grabbed the woman’s hands as she advanced towards me and thrust her back into her seat. “Shame on you . . . on all of you! Haven’t you ever fallen in love? Haven’t you ever wanted to escape? So what if one of us had the guts to do something the rest of us couldn’t?”

  The women lowered their eyes now and became very silent. I couldn’t fathom why one act of mine had alienated them from me. I didn’t know if they envied my audacity or if they simply worried about their own lives. We were released the next morning, and thankfully, there wasn’t another raid. T
he brothel owners had suppressed it. But there hasn’t been a day gone by that I haven’t thought of Sanjiv or agonized over that evening we tried to escape, wondering if there was anything I could have done differently. I agonized just as the trees must grieve for their wilted flowers, like parched earth must feel separated from rain.

  When I told this to another customer who was fond of me, he asked, “Didn’t Sanjiv’s father come here searching for him?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrug in reply.

  I walked over to the wall and took a couple of the loose bricks out. I had saved the book Sanjiv gave me. It had been a while since I had taken the book out; it was dusty and I blew on it gently, afraid I might hurt what was left of him. I showed it to this customer. He opened the book and scanned the pages.

  “They are the poems Sanjiv read to me.”

  He nodded and flipped through the book. The dried petals from the roses Sanjiv had once given me fell lightly to the floor and crumbled into red dust—the color of blood, the smell of blood; those thoughts of love came rushing back.

  His lips trembled and he clenched them together. “I’m sorry,” he said as he crouched down and tried to gather them.

  “It’s all right,” I assured him. “I have to try and put them behind me just like my other memories.”

  I wonder if we all carry invisible scars in our lives that drive us to do what we do?

  – TARA

  Twenty-one

  2004

  I stood outside Meena-ji’s apartment on that cloudy morning, hesitant to ring the doorbell. Did Aai know if Mukta was my half-sister? The answer frightened me. I knocked on the door. My heart raced when I heard the clinking of the chain lock, and a woman with gray hair opened the door partly, her face hidden behind the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Meena-ji?”

  The woman opened the door farther now, leaned toward me, and looked at me carefully. Meena-ji’s face had grown leaner, wrinkled with age, and her hair had lost its abundance. There was a flicker of recognition in her eyes. “Are you . . . ?”

  “It’s me, Tara.”

  “Arre, you look so much like her. How did I not recognize you? Come in, come in.” She smiled and unlocked the chain from the door.

  She pulled out a chair, waved at me to sit down, and sat on the chair opposite me.

  “Such a surprise,” she said. “I thought you had left India for good. How is your father?”

  “He died a few months ago.”

  “Oh, Bhagwan shanti de . . . God rest his soul,” she said looking upward.

  We were quiet, not knowing what to say to each other. Then she got up abruptly, awkwardly, and said, “Let me make chai, get you some biscuits, haan.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Look at you with your firangi accent and all, have you forgotten we Indians never allow our guests to go hungry?”

  I smiled reluctantly. She left me in the living room as she hurried inside. I wanted to ask while I still had the strength, before I changed my mind, but I waited instead. I looked around at the wall hangings that had been there for as long as I remembered. I could hear the clank of pots and pans in the kitchen, and before long she was out, wobbling into the living room, holding a tray. I stood up and took the tray from her hands.

  “So what brings you back to India? Amreeka has so much to offer. Of course, whatever anybody says, this is always apna desh.” Our country.

  “Meena-ji,” I took a long breath, “do you remember Mukta?”

  “Mukta?” She took a moment to think. “Haan . . . yes, that village girl who used to trail behind you all the time.”

  “Yes, I wanted to know . . . to know if . . . ” I stopped briefly to ponder what I was about to say and if it made any sense at all to bring it up.

  “Yes?”

  “I wondered . . . if Aai knew.” There I said it. I could hear the pounding of my heart, the quickening of my breath.

  There was silence at her end. She seemed to understand what I was trying to ask. She looked away briefly outside the window, and my eyes followed hers. There was nothing to see but the bare sky.

  “How do you know?” She sighed, “Did your father tell you?”

  “No, my grandmother.”

  “We were never really sure. We only suspected. She looked so much like him, the green eyes, the fair skin . . . your Aai, she was an intelligent lady. I admired her patience. She had her suspicions when your father brought Mukta home. Her eyes were your father’s—anybody could see that. But nobody said anything until that afternoon when your mother came knocking at my door. She sat right here on this floor, her head in my lap, sobbing all afternoon. She said if it were true, if your father had a child with another woman, what could she do? She couldn’t dare ask your father if it was true. After all, she had nowhere to go. Running away from the village, defying her elders, she had invited a curse, she said. She had no proper education to rely on and then she had you to think of. How could she deprive you of your father’s love? She had to live with it, she said, and as long as she lived, she did. It is all in our kismet—a woman’s fate.”

  She sighed. I tried to feel the cool breeze on my face. We didn’t say anything, just sat there for some time listening to the kids playing hopscotch in the courtyard, their excited screams throbbing through the air.

  “She loved you, your Aai. There was nowhere else she would have rather been but with you,” Meena-ji said. “And I don’t know if I should bring this up, but for a while there was a question in my mind if she was Anupam’s child—he had the same green eyes, too, you know. I told your mother, and for a minute she looked relieved. Maybe, she said, maybe Tara's Papa is being kind to Mukta out of the goodness of his heart, like he is good with all those orphans he brings home. Then she started sobbing again, said she was convinced that Mukta was your father's child."

  “Thank you,” I whispered. I placed my cup silently on the table and walked out.

  Was that why Aai hated the sight of Mukta? Was that why she burdened Mukta with work? The thoughts that came to mind were disturbing. Before I knew it, I was on the street, walking, on and on, tears pooling in my eyes, blurring my vision. I was unaware of the crowd that engulfed me on this choked footpath. People walked by me, some rammed into my shoulder, some screamed behind me, “Can’t you see?” And I wanted to scream back, tell them I couldn’t see. For many years, I hadn’t seen that my Papa was in such a deep dilemma. When we left for America, Papa had not just lost his wife, he thought he might have lost a daughter too. I had failed to see that; I hadn’t recognized the terrible grief in his eyes. I had failed to see that Mukta just might have belonged in our family. I could not see that a girl who deserved better was treated so badly. How many such children had we ignored or treated badly simply because they weren't our blood or didn't belong to the "right" caste?! How many such children continue to become victims of our traditions...My thoughts went on and on and I kept walking. Finally when my legs felt like lead, I sat down on the steps of a shop. People bargained with the shopkeeper behind me, sifting through a bag of grains, making sure it wasn’t contaminated with stones. Clouds began to gather in the sky, dimming the light around me, and droplets of rain began to fall. Two kids sat by my side slurping on their iced golas, giggling. I didn’t know where to go to escape from my memories, from that girl in my past sitting beside me, pouring her heart out to me on just such a rainy day. I fumbled in my purse, begged for something to show up and give me an indication—a sign showing me a way out. I searched in my purse, threw out things—a pen, a note pad, my makeup kit. Passersby stared at me as if I were crazy. Then there it was—Raza’s card. Maybe that was a sign. I let the card fall back into the purse and signaled to a rickshaw to stop.

  Just as the rickshaw stopped outside Raza’s office, my mobile phone rang.

  “I found Salim.” It was Raza’s voice.

  On our way to Salim’s apartment, we sat in a rickshaw that bumped over potholes in the Mumbai stree
ts. We stopped outside a building. I was about to enter it when Raza took me by my elbow and led me away from it, toward a gulley.

  “I prefer walking through this gulley. The street is so narrow that often rickshaws are a nuisance to the slum dwellers here,” Raza said. I nodded and followed him.

  “Tell me something, why didn’t you tell the police? In fact why won’t you tell them you know Salim is the kidnapper? It would make your job easier, wouldn’t it? Rather than confront a man who had once tried to hurt you?”

  I think of the note, the one I had scribbled for Salim to take Mukta away, how it had rolled over and plopped into that gutter.

  “I’d rather do things my way, I guess.” I shrugged.

  “He has something on you, doesn’t he?” Raza stopped to look at me.

  I met his eyes briefly and lowered my gaze. He continued walking and didn’t ask any more questions.

  As I walked along these shanties, I could see people inside their homes, watching TV or chatting, the womenfolk cooking or cutting vegetables, kids playing. They nodded and smiled at me as if they were used to strangers walking by their door every day, peeking into the privacy of their homes.

  People emerged from the slums and greeted Raza, “Namaste Raza Sahib.”

  Raza either waved or shook their hands and inquired about their wellbeing. People seemed happy to see him. It reminded me of when I used to hold Papa’s hands and walk down the streets, the shopkeepers waving to him, greeting him, the same expression of gratitude in their eyes.

  “You help them, don’t you?” I asked as I followed him down the lane.