by Amita Trasi
“I am from an NGO,” I heard myself saying.
“Here by yourself. No one else.” She grinned at me and blew rings of smoke into my face.
“My name is Sylvie,” she said. “That’s my friend Sweety.”
Sweety was talking to a man, giggling, and whispering something in his ear as she led him up the stairs. Her green eyes lingered on me for just a second before she continued whispering in his ear.
“What is it you wanting to know? I knowing you a journalist,” Sylvie said, “you wanting to write article? Our story? Many coming here, but I not doing anything without any money.”
“No, I’m not a journalist. I am here to help if you want it.”
She laughed.
“There are many who telling us they can help, but no one can help. It is stupid to think you can.”
“I can really help you. But I am looking for a girl . . . a woman . . . she is—”
“I think you should go—” she said looking over my shoulders. Her face had a sudden frightened look of a child.
“No . . . but I am looking for this—”
“What do you want?” a man’s voice boomed. I looked back.
“Who are you?” he asked. Two tall, hunky men followed him.
“I am from an NGO . . . ” I explained.
“I think you should go. We don’t want people like you here.” His bloodshot eyes looked me up and down. He scratched his cheek as he spoke. He smelled of country liquor.
“See, I don’t want to cause any trouble. I am just passing through. I am from an NGO,” I tried convincing him.
“That’s what we don’t like—others poking their noses in our business.” His voice was louder now.
He signaled to two kids playing cricket in the middle of the street. Two dustbins posed as wickets. One kid walked toward us, dragging his bat behind him. The man snatched the bat from his hand and waved it around me.
“Look, I am . . . going,” My heart was pounding so hard I could almost hear it.
“Now what is it that you want? Tell me again.” The man advanced.
There was a sudden shiver in my legs as if I’d collapse. I felt lightheaded.
“I . . . I . . . ” I slinked away from him. He took a sudden swing at me; I ducked and ran. But I had hardly covered a few feet when I felt myself falling. My feet had hit something heavy. My chin hit a rock and there was blood pouring out of it. My arms and shoulders hurt from the impact. A few feet ahead, I could see the bustle of the busy street I had left behind. Without another thought, I got up and started running. I didn’t look back. I could hear laughter as I ran. I ran alongside cars and trucks, pushing pedestrians away from my path.
It seemed like I ran for a long time with a sudden superhuman energy coursing through my body. Then I heard my name—several times. There was a car driving alongside me.
“Tara,” the man called from inside. I slowed down. The car slowed down alongside me.
“What’s going on?” the driver asked, peering through the passenger window. I kept looking at the man inside.
“Are you all right?” he asked. It was Raza.
“I was . . . I . . . ” I looked around me. I was quite a distance away from Kamathipura. How had I run so far, so fast? People were looking at me strangely, some even stopped to stare.
“Get in.” Raza opened the passenger side of the car.
I was shaking when I got in. My hands struggled to close the car door. My clothes were soaked in sweat and felt cold against my skin. Raza didn’t ask any questions, just kept driving until we came to my apartment. It was only when he stopped the car outside the gates of my apartment complex that tears started pouring down my cheeks.
“You shouldn’t have gone there on your own,” Raza said softly. His hands clasped mine.
I continued crying. Raza sat silently beside me.
“Let’s go upstairs to your apartment . . . take care of those wounds for you.”
I touched my chin. Blood had dripped down my chin and onto my clothes. My jaw hurt. In the car mirror I could see that my lip had swollen to twice its size.
“We can file a police report if you want.”
“I won’t file any report. I’ve had enough of that.” I stormed out of the car and started climbing the steps to Papa’s apartment. Raza followed me.
I sat on the carpet in the living room of my childhood home, where Mukta and I had once played hopscotch, and cleaned my wounds with an antiseptic.
“Let me make some tea,” Raza offered while I went to change my clothes. In my bedroom, I lay down on my bed and watched the ceiling fan whir above me. This was where I was lying when Mukta got kidnapped. Was the fear I felt today even close to what she must have felt? Did anyone deserve to have a life after they had destroyed someone else’s?
I switched on my computer and sat at my desk. Pictures drifted on the monitor—pictures of Elisa with her baby sleeping in her arms, another of her baby in a Santa cap, smiling at her. I could almost hear the gurgle of the baby, feel the happiness on Elisa’s face. I had sent my congratulations to her and Peter on the arrival of their firstborn just a few days ago. I liked to look at these pictures—my only respite from the side of the world I had been observing for two years, my only way to believe that happy smiles and innocence did exist in some distant corner of the world. Today they were a relief to look at.
I should not have been this shook up after all that I had seen in the last two years. I had become actively involved not just with Raza’s organization but also with Dinesh and Saira’s organization. I volunteered to teach English to some of the rescued girls and women. At times, I had stayed behind at night and held the girls as they woke up terrified and cried in my arms. I thought of the girls I had met—some as young as ten—girls whose pasts would always be marred by something brutal, and yet they had learned to survive. I had learned something from them about life, about the way it lets you down and yet helps you move on. Their fortitude gave me courage, a hope that if they could survive what they did, Mukta could still be out there alive.
“What were you thinking?” Raza asked, bringing me tea.
Our friendship had grown by leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. In moments of despair, I knew I just had to look around me to find him by my side. It had been comforting—this friendship that we shared, our working together toward a common goal—going to food drives in the slums together, talking to the needy together, accompanying Dinesh on the brothel raids. But how was I to explain the emotions that rose in me when we rescued those women. For me, it was almost as if the highest joy of being able to rescue a girl rested uncomfortably with the deep sorrow of having put a girl there.
“What were you thinking?” Raza repeated and then sighed when I didn’t reply.
“Let’s go out to dinner. Have you eaten anything?” he asked.
I shook my head. He didn’t give me a chance to protest. Within minutes we were walking down a lane, standing under the streetlight outside a food stall with open air seating. I noticed it was actually a nice, neat place—a dhaba. Raza said the place was run by a north Indian family. Around us many table and chairs were arranged along the street. People were devouring their food, chatting loudly while the music played softly in the background.
“I know the search for Mukta looks dismal, but it will all work out, trust me,” Raza said. “More than anything, I think, you have to let it go.”
“Let it go?”
“Let go of the regret you feel for something you did such a long time ago. When you came to Salim to hand over that note, your mother had just died. Grief does that to people at times—you just can’t think straight. Besides there was nothing you could have done that night during the kidnapping. You were a child. So . . . let it go.”
I hadn’t realized, until then, that he knew—had known all along—my deepest, darkest secret, without my telling. I had failed to see him in my memories, standing right behind Salim, when I had sent the boy to deliver my note all tho
se years ago. All this while, I had been let down by my memory of him not being there that evening. Now, his eyes were clear as he spoke, as if he thought what I had done was worth forgiving.
“It’s all right,” he said as I looked away, “we all do things we regret. Sometimes we just don’t know any better.” He looked up at the clear sky.
Over the years Raza and I had grown close, and it shouldn’t have mattered to me that he was being honest, but my eyes burned with tears. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
He shrugged and looked around, searching for a waiter. Let go, the thought smoldered inside me. “Maybe we should go,” I said, my words like a rapidly rising tide.
“Why? You didn’t like what I said? It’s the truth isn’t it? Isn’t that why you went all by yourself to Kamathipura today? You wanted to see what it felt like to be in a place like that; you wanted to feel the fear Mukta might have felt—the abandonment, the loneliness, the terror. Isn’t that why you went by yourself? You knew it would be foolish to go looking for her by yourself. You would never find her that way.” He glared at me. I gulped. He had read my mind.
“Look,” Raza said, his eyes softening now, “you have to be patient. There is no point in putting yourself in danger. It’s not going to help you find her. We are doing all we can.”
“Well, it’s not enough. You don’t understand . . . ” I let out a sob.
He clasped my shaking hands.
“I am here for you,” he whispered.
His face was the same as when I had first met him more than two years ago. There was a furrow in the middle of his forehead that had deepened to form a permanent line and pock marks on the sides of his face, a reminder of the scars left by his past. What had changed? Was it his brown eyes that turned soft whenever he looked at me? Was it the look of concern when he saw me upset? Had they been trying to tell me a story all this while, one I hadn’t been listening to? Why had he been so patient with me even though I knew he wanted to yell at me, admonish me for my stupidity?
“How you doing, Raza Bhai?’ The waiter, a boy no more than eight in a torn shirt arrived at our table, carrying two glasses of water, and wiped the table with a washcloth. I wiped my eyes quickly and made an effort to smile.
Raza put his arm around the boy’s shoulder, “Tara, this is Chottu. Chottu, where is the shirt I brought for you the other day.”
“I wearing new shirt to school every day. Thanks you Raza bhai, you sending me to school.” His lips spread into a broad smile.
“Do you like going to school?” I asked Chottu.
“Yes Madam. Very much,” he said, wobbling his head. “I want to be a doctor when I grow up—help people, just like Raza bhai.”
In his eyes, I saw the same zeal to study that I had once seen in Mukta’s, the same glimmer of hope, of survival, flickered there. Sitting under the stars, being served food by an eight year old, I told Raza, “I won’t ever give up, if that’s what you are thinking. It seems like a lost cause. But I won’t give up.” Crickets chirped in the distance, as if trying to confirm what I was saying.
“I know you won’t give up. I don’t want you to.” Raza smiled as he offered me a naan from the plate. “You know, when I see all these goondas on the street—these ruffians who beat people up—I go home and thank Allah that I met Dev Sahib. Otherwise I would have probably ended up just like them.”
“Dev Sahib?”
“Yes, Dev Sahib. You know, I was born in a very poor family. Salim and I knew no other life growing up. The idea of a better life for us, the possibility even, was only through selling drugs and robbing people. It seemed like such a good idea then. We didn’t know we were hurting people, or maybe we just didn’t care.”
I watched his eyes as he continued—looking away, lost in another time.
“I loved being seen with goondas like Salim; it gave me a sense of power to be part of the gang. With them, I wasn’t as helpless as I felt inside. I joined them when I was eight, like many boys my age. I tried to learn the ways of the street, trying to decipher my life through it. I used to pick pockets very well, you know.” He laughed at his memories of childhood.
“I sold drugs and got caught by the police a couple of times. I remember one time, how they made us take our clothes off, tied us naked upside down, and hit us with a rod. I still have the scars on my back. It should have taught me to stay away from the gang, but it made me more resilient, more determined to do better with the gang. I was fourteen when Salim tried to get hold of you in the middle of that street. I know I have apologized before, but whenever I look at you, I relive the guilt of what I did. I am sorry about that, I truly am. I was lost; I didn’t know what I was doing.”
There was pain in his eyes, regret on his face.
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said. “You’ve apologized enough.”
“Allah was meherbaan that I met Dev Sahib. He rescued me when I was badly beaten in a police raid, and he and his wife nursed me back to health. I had never known a family before that. My mother was a drunk who slept on street corners and begged for a living, and I never really knew a father. Home was a cloth tent my mother had put on a street corner. We had to re-build it every time there was a strong wind, or when rain lashed too hard on the streets, or worse when the municipality would drive by breaking all the huts because they were illegal. I must have been seven or eight when I ran away from her; I don’t know what happened to my siblings. I did minor jobs—worked in restaurants as a waiter, helped shopkeepers carry their goods, garbage. I slept on a bench at night in the park, and when it rained I slept on the patio of a shop, the roof becoming my shelter for the night. Those were the good days when all I was worried about was one meal a day.”
Raza stopped and sighed. The evening had turned into night. Chottu had cleared our plates and wiped the table; people around us had started dispersing and the food shack was dimming its light.
“Then you got involved with the gang Salim belonged to?” I asked.
“Yes. I was mostly involved in robberies, pickpocketing, minor thefts, and selling drugs. It is easy to use children to transport drugs. Nobody suspects them, and the police mostly let them go without doing a thorough check; all the while, the kids are carrying drugs in their undergarments. After sometime you get used to it. I left behind that life once I met Dev Sahib. ‘I will pay you a good salary if you work for me,’ he said. I was fifteen years old, and despite my gratitude towards him for nursing me back to health, I couldn’t let go off my old ways. He caught me carrying drugs twice, but he was a patient man and knew change didn’t happen overnight. I found the work—carrying paper and other stationery from the shops to the office, carrying food his wife made for the slum dwellers—I found it all mundane and boring, far from the adrenaline rush I felt with the gang. But with his help, I persevered.”
“What about the people you worked for? Didn’t they come for you? I have heard it is not easy to leave a gang.”
“You are right. But I had never climbed the ladder in the gang. When Dev Sahib discovered me, I was still at the lowest rung of the ladder in the underworld, and people above me couldn’t care less if the bottom-feeders left.”
“I worked with Dev Sahib for a long time. Initially he made me run small errands for him. I would live with them—he and his wife, they treated me like a son. I became a part of his family. He had two sons and a daughter. I never knew until then what it felt like to have a meal with people laughing and sharing stories, talking about their day. It was like having a real family. Dev Sahib said I should go to night school and finish my education. I never had any education to begin with. He taught me all the basics so I could take exams that allowed me admission into the third grade. There were young kids all around me, and it was embarrassing at first. But I learned quickly and moved to a higher grade. He enrolled me in night school, and I graduated when I was 24. I decided I wanted to follow in Dev Sahib’s footsteps and become a social worker. I joined Dev Sahib and his wife in their task
of keeping boys from being sold to gang leaders as beggars or girls being sold to brothels. The sight stirred something in me, and I realized there were things more important than me, that I could think beyond myself.”
“And your wife worked with you.”
“Yes, Naima was a social worker. Like me, she was rescued by one of the NGOs. She worked at the school, taught science and history to kids. I met her there. I have never seen anyone more passionate about helping the needy. She especially cared for the girl children sold to the brothels here and worked with several of the NGOs here.”
“So where are Dev Sahib and his wife now?
“They were with Naima during the bomb blast.”
“I am so sorry. How have you not told me all this before? We’ve known each other for two years!”
He smiled. “I didn’t think you would be interested in knowing so much about me.”
An awkward silence crept between us.
“So tell me about you,” he said.
“What about me?”
He shrugged. I told him about Papa, about the happy childhood days I shared with Mukta, about the kidnapping and how I planned it, about the despondency I felt when I left India, and how when we landed in America Papa had become aloof because of his grief, about how hopeful I felt when I first met Brian.
“I met Brian in America . . . at a party my friend Elisa dragged me to.” I laughed. “When I first met him, I had a feeling we shared something deeper, but it just didn’t work out.”
