An Unrestored Woman

by Shobha Rao

  The red glow from the man’s beedi pulsed like a warning. Alok Debnath hesitated. He could describe her, sure, but it would be a description of her ass. The tiny dimples, the downy hairs, and oh, the exquisite roundness of it. “She’s a young woman,” he said.

  The young man laughed. “Compared to you everyone is young.”

  “She said she lived in Pancha Ganga Ghat, on the western edge of the mosque.”

  “Servant?”

  “No.”

  “Whore?”

  The young man let out a puff of smoke. Even in the dark Alok Debnath could see his smirk. “Pancha Ganga, you say?”

  “Near the mosque.”

  He thought for a moment. His voice lifted. “What is her pimp’s name? Naagi?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Follow me,” he said. They plunged back into the labyrinth of alleyways. They walked away from the river. Deeper and deeper into the incense-choked passages. The alleys grew narrower, more breathless in the looming dark. Shouldn’t it be morning by now? Alok Debnath struggled to keep up. His feet ached. His lungs burned. He wanted to tell this strange man to stop, to tell him he wanted to go home, to tell him he had never felt so lonely. “What’s the matter, grandpa? Can’t keep up?” The man laughed and pulled him along. A rat scurried past. Alok Debnath stopped. “No, no, no,” he heard the young man saying. “You can’t turn back now. We’re almost there.” The close alleyway was still dark, doors and windows were shuttered on either side, but when he looked up, Alok Debnath noticed that the sky had lightened. Just a little. Just enough. It’s morning, he thought with relief, it’s almost over.

  * * *

  Alok left the Victoria Memorial, dripping wet, and walked along Cathedral Road back down to Chowringhee. He stopped in Elgin Park. It was near their flat, and he was exhausted, and the night was cool. There were no benches in the park—just a strip of grass and some trees. He walked to its center and sat cross-legged on the grass. A goat walked toward him. There was a high iron fence around the park, and Alok wondered how the goat had gotten in. Through the gates, like anybody else, he guessed. Maybe it had jumped over the fence. It seemed miraculous to him: that a ridiculous-looking creature like a goat could sail gracefully over such a high fence. It ambled over to him and stared at him with a forlorn look in its eyes, as if Alok were sitting on the juiciest patch of grass in all of India. “Come now,” Alok said to the goat, “you can’t want this exact patch, can you?” The goat blinked and continued with its sad stare. “Fine,” he said, giving in and getting up. He was dusting off his pants—their dampness had collected every dry blade of grass and dirt in the vicinity—when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Sarojini.

  “My God,” he cried, and took her in his arms and pressed her close to him. He had never done so in public, had never so much as touched her, but what did it matter? She was here, in his arms. He wanted to ask her a million questions, but the goat was still watching them. He took her hand and said, “Come, he’ll start crying if we don’t leave this patch of grass.” She laughed, and it seemed to him that he’d never really heard her laugh before. They settled themselves under a neighboring chalta tree. “Look here,” he began, “Where—”

  “You’re soaking wet,” she said in alarm.

  He thought he might explain to her one night about jumping into the reflecting pool and the seaweed and the boy and his monkey that told his future (wrongly, he thought gleefully) but not tonight. Tonight he held her under the chalta tree and watched the stars.

  * * *

  The young man turned into an alley that ended abruptly at a green wooden door. He knocked twice. Alok Debnath rested his hand against the wall and it came back wet. A stinking sewer sloshed past them. He looked up and saw the mosque. After a few moments they heard footsteps and the door opened. The person who had opened the door hid behind it, though by now Alok Debnath’s vertigo had traveled up his body and reached his eyes. The close dark veranda they entered swam before him and he collapsed into a nearby chair. The young man spoke in whispers to a fat wheezing man who’d emerged from the inside of the house. He was smoking a cigarette. A rare American cigarette. Alok Debnath could tell from the smell. After the fat man went back inside the young man sauntered over to him and asked, “Tired?” His voice was more frightening than solicitous.

  “No, I want to go home.”

  The man smiled. “What about Rekha?”

  “Who’s Rekha?”

  The young man eyed him suspiciously. A voice called from an interior room, “Bring him in.” Alok Debnath made no move to get up. The man grabbed him under the arm and pulled him up by force. They entered a small room lit by a kerosene lantern. It was cold. There was an overhead light, just a bulb swaying at the end of twisted wires, but it was unlit. The fat wheezing man was in the corner. Another man, younger and thinner, sat at the table that held the lantern. He was wearing a dirty undershirt, soiled yellow. His eyes too were yellow, as if he was jaundiced, but his face was perfectly calm. Even happy. He looked with what seemed like true delight at Alok Debnath and he motioned with his arm. “Come, come, sit here, old man, sit by me.” His arm, as it motioned, bulged with muscle. His face twisted into a smile. Alok Debnath sat opposite him, and that is when the man’s other arm emerged from under the table holding a knife. He laughed. “Oh this,” he said. “Don’t mind this, old man, just a bad habit of mine. I’m Naagi,” he added jovially. “The little bird who brought you here says you’re looking for someone.”

  “Yes,” Alok Debnath said. “I’m looking for my wife.”

  There was silence. “Your wife? He didn’t say anything about your wife.” Alok Debnath turned to look but the young man he’d come with was gone. It was only he, the fat man, and the man with the knife left in the room. They seemed to be waiting, so Alok Debnath waited with them. The young man returned a few minutes later with a woman. The moment she saw Alok Debnath she squealed with surprise. “You,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “He says he’s looking for his wife,” the fat man said.

  She walked past him and Alok Debnath, with a small inexplicable glimmer of joy, looked at her ass. She stood behind the man with the knife. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’s a crazy old coot. His wife’s been dead for twenty years.” Alok Debnath nearly wept at these words. Where was Sarojini? Who were these people? Why did they say she was dead?

  “But his daughter,” the woman continued, “now she is loaded. Lives in the biggest house in Taktakpur.”

  “Taktakpur?”

  The man laid down his knife. His eyes widened, he turned to the woman. “Is that right?” he said. He relished each word, as if they left the taste of money on his tongue. He studied Alok Debnath with a smile on his face. Then he turned back to the woman and yanked at her arm until their heads were together. He whispered into her ear. She nodded excitedly and said, “Yes, yes. Ji, yes. I’ll go there first thing,” she said.

  They both looked at Alok Debnath. The woman smiled maliciously but the man looked at him with benevolence. “It’s all up to your daughter now,” he said. “Get comfortable, put your feet up. Rekha, bring the man some water!”

  Rekha. The name was vaguely familiar. Maybe he was mistaken, maybe he knew these people from long ago. He gripped the table and tried hard to focus. A sliver of light seeped through a crack in the wall. It was the sun. “It’s the eastern edge of the mosque,” Alok Debnath said. “You told me it was the western.”

  “What?”

  “When I asked where you lived. You said the western edge of the mosque. But look,” he said, pointing to the shard of sunlight.

  The woman named Rekha ignored him and turned to the man. “We should send something with the note. Something to prove we actually have him, and no one else.”

  The man nodded. He picked up his knife. “But what?” he said.

  They all seemed to look at Alok Debnath’s right hand at once. He whipped his hands off the table and jumped away so quickly that the lantern went out wi
th a crash. He turned to flee, but the fat man was already at his side, clutching both his wrists. Then everything seemed to fall at once: Alok Debnath back into his chair, his right hand back onto the table, and his senses back into place. No, these were strangers, they were criminals, and they were cruel.

  The woman switched the lightbulb on but it remained dark. She lit a candle, turned it over so that the hot wax dribbled onto the table, then anchored the candle on the soft wax. The light was flickering but it was enough. The fat man still held him by the wrist. Alok Debnath’s sixth finger stuck out toward the man and his knife as if it didn’t have a care in the world. As if it had already gone on and made a life for itself separate from his own. He thought then of how dark it was in Elgin Park. Had they fallen asleep? He didn’t know but when he opened his eyes, his new bride had taken his sixth finger into her mouth. He barely breathed. It was the greatest pleasure he had ever known. And yet he was still aware of everything around him. The branches of the chalta tree rustling in the breeze, he sensing their soft swaying above him. And the stars, the stars glimmering like distant bonfires. Too distant to light our world. And so there was no need to close his eyes again; it was dark. He could hardly even see her. Only feel the heat and wet of her mouth, the strength of her tongue.

  Oh, my love, he thought, let there never again be light.

  THE ROAD TO MIRPUR KHAS

  My wife comes into the room, shutting out the sun as she closes the door, and lays the wad of bills on the table in front of me. I can’t look at her. I want to feel shame but I only feel a thin pleasure, like a fine layer of skin, puckered and white and soulless, floating on cooling milk. On another shore, perhaps, the desert has an ashen end; and forests are merely silent folded wings. On that shore poverty doesn’t have an animal stink. And when we touch the face of another, we draw onto their skin a moonlit path, and not the metallic rust of our weakness and our fear.

  But on this shore, on this morning, there is only money.

  She walks to the other end of the hut and lies down on the reed pallet, turned to the wall and silent, not even bothering with the blanket, as if she means to die like a wild animal. But at the sight of her hips desire floods me—not love, not any longer; love is simply a feeling that we walk off and forget at the side of the road, remembering it only hours later, and wondering—because we cannot go back, because we have come too far—at the lightness of our load.

  * * *

  The first of our money was stolen just after we left Jaisalmer. We were barely two days out but I could already see the row after row of mango trees waiting for us in Mirpur Khas, heavy and sagging with fruit. “It’s harvest time,” Ram had said. “They’ll need workers bad, no telling how much they’ll pay per bushel.” But even as he’d said it he’d looked sidelong at Arya, bent low over the cooking fire, and I knew he was no longer thinking of the kind of mangoes that grow on trees. Still he was considerate enough: he gave me a month’s wages for the journey, along with the name of a friend of his who owned an orchard. I’d tucked the money into the rusted Bournvita tin that held our savings, twenty rupees in all, along with the name of the orchard owner, and then wrapped it tightly in Arya’s red woolen shawl. The first night I slept with the bundle under my head; the jasmine-scented coconut oil Arya used in her hair was a lullaby and I dreamed the most beautiful dreams. In one I was standing under a waterfall, laughing, my eyes narrowed, trying to distinguish between the water and the tiny sparrows that fluttered everywhere. It was almost as if the water, as soon as it hit my body, was turning into birds, their wings warm and quivering and soundless.

  Then I woke and the money was gone. We’d gotten off the main road at nightfall and had found a sheltered spot under a grove of sangri trees. I’d lain awake most of the night listening to the desert sounds—the slither of lizards and snakes and the scurry of a few roaming gazelles—but I must’ve fallen into a deep sleep in the early morning hours. When I woke at daybreak the entire bundle was gone along with the chappals I’d placed in the hollow of a nearby tree. We had nothing left except the few rupees I’d folded into the tail of my dhoti. And we had at least a two or three weeks’ journey remaining to get to Mirpur Khas; now we’d have to do it barefoot.

  * * *

  She’s stopped speaking to me. At times the silence is so deep that I can hear the howl of distant jackals, and I’m reminded of the mangoes hanging in faraway orchards, their tough unscarred skins so unlike—so unlike what?—I don’t know, I suppose my own.

  I’d searched for the bundle: I’d left Arya crying as I climbed and slipped across the endless sand dunes. I knew the twenty rupees would be gone, certainly, but maybe they’d thrown off the shawl or the chappals, cracked as they were, the soles full of holes. I walked for a mile or two in either direction, scanning the dunes. I even looked inside foxholes and in the branches of scrubs. Nothing.

  It was when I returned later that morning that Arya had pointed at the ground. “Look,” she’d said, indicating a scatter of footprints near the area where we’d slept. “We know they’re not ours. These people had shoes.”

  I looked at her. It was the first time since we’d been married—barely six months ago—that she’d spoken to me with such distaste. We’d not once quarreled in all that time. Nor had she ever looked at me like she looked at me then: her eyes shadowed, disappointed, full of fire and sadness, and something I cannot describe, maybe the ache of being without shoes, in the desert, her husband poor and useless, drawn by the jasmine-scented dream she did not have.

  She turned and walked away from me. Toward what, I wondered. Yet I didn’t call out. The wind pushed the lilac fabric of her shalwar tight against her body. The round of her hips, the gentle curve of her back made me shudder. I watched as she scrambled up a particularly steep sand dune, her chunni fluttering behind her like a torn sail, her arms outstretched to keep balance. And it was these arms; I seemed to be seeing them for the first time. Thin, almost twigs, balancing so bravely against the force of wind and sand and steepness. Angling to right themselves, pushing forward. The sleeve of her shalwar reaching just past her elbows and the brown of her forearm emerging as smooth as a new branch. Flowers have sprouted from less.

  But then she fell. Arms first. She rolled down a ways, stopped, gathered her chunni around her shoulders, pulled her knees to her chest in the trampled sand, and simply sat there. No expression on her face. I watched her for a moment but she didn’t move, as if she was determined to be as indelible and as piercing as the line of ridge above her.

  I thought then of our wedding night and how, when she’d entered the hut, she’d stood shyly in the shadows until I’d coaxed her into the candlelight. She hadn’t looked up until I took her chin in my hand, and only then had she raised her eyes to me. She’d seemed a wisp of a girl, no more than a fledging bird, and I’d been overcome with the thought that she was mine—this golden, candlelit face, these firm, ample breasts, and this dizzying fragility, so sweet and untouched.

  * * *

  She’s lying on the reed pallet. The hut is dark though the sun must’ve crept higher, is no doubt slithering past the thatched roof. We’d found it abandoned a few days ago—one of so many huts abandoned during the riots, left for fear of being trapped inside, the smell of burning flesh always in the air, a reminder to keep moving—all the pots and pans and mats and even some clothes were left behind. But we have decided to stay. The location is ideal: the lorries stop just a few yards away. It is a way station for the drivers. They sleep in the cabs of their lorries and eat and wash at the collapsing shack nearby called Arun’s Restaurant and Bar, a clearing of littered and drifting dirt with a few orange rattan tables scattered here and there. When we reached Arun’s we could barely walk. We hadn’t eaten for three days. Hadn’t drunk a drop of water in two. I had none left for sweat, my feet dragged along the dirt. I begged the owner for some water, food. A morsel. Anything. He looked at Arya—his eyes indifferent, his teeth rotting and green near the gum line, the hairs o
n his ears thick as wiring—and said, “Anything?”

  It was then that I heard it. A sound I will never forget: the quacking of ducks. We were in the desert—Arya beside me, the owner chewing on a gob of betel nut—and yet the sound was as clear as if I were standing on the edge of a lake. I’d heard of inland seas, and pools that spring silently in secret, forgotten ways. And even in my weakness I imagined standing on its shore. The ducks rising, the flap of their wings. I imagined them gliding along on the unruffled waters. And yet it was the sound—their quacking—that gave me hope. That stilled my sorrow. And I knew then that this suffering—this dumb and gleaming suffering—wouldn’t be the only language with which we’d speak.

  Arya moved quickly in front of me, her face defiant with hunger, and said, “Anything.”

  They disappeared behind the screen, to the back of the restaurant. It was strange, how intently I watched that screen. I don’t know why; it was so ordinary. Just woven jute that was quite battered and faded from the sun. And yet it held my attention with such force that I nearly knelt in front of it with a keen and baffled reverence. A small hole, punched into the top right-hand corner and no larger than a mango, was particularly captivating. How did it get there? Maybe rats had chewed through it but how could they have climbed so high? And to what end? The streaks of light that passed through it: was it the sun or an interior lamp? And how focused, that light, almost as if it were trying to indicate some truth, some error. But then I blinked, or something essential calmly passed before me, and the effect was gone. I couldn’t understand it. It was a plain old jute screen again, as it had always been, but I was so bereft I could’ve wept.

  I stood there, unable to move, staring at that awful hole in the jute screen—the light now sickly and quailed—when Arya returned. She held out four roti and some day-old cactus curry to me. Her hands were steady but mine, when I reached for the food, were trembling.

  * * *

  We lost the rest of the money soon after the bundle. We’d kept moving. We heard from others on the road to Mirpur Khas that riots had destroyed most of Jaisalmer, and very likely our hut on the outskirts of town had been burned to the ground. I cried when I heard this; Arya didn’t even wince. At a crossing I suggested buying chappals but she said no. “What will we eat if we waste money on chappals?” she’d asked, picking out the tiny grains of sand and pebbles lodged in the cracks of her heels. So we kept walking.