An Unrestored Woman

by Shobha Rao

  On the morning of the third day a lorry pulled over on the side of the road in front of us. The driver, thin, wiry, eyes bloodshot from driving through the night, face and hair gritty and browned by the sun, slid his eyes over Arya and offered us a ride to the border, still a week’s walk away. His name was Mohammed. “No, no, no,” he protested when we declined, his mouth red and seeping with betel nut. “How can I allow my sister to walk all that way. She is too delicate, nah?” He nudged me, smiling, and I smiled back though I knew he was mocking me. Arya glanced at me nervously. When we had a moment alone she whispered, “But we don’t even know him. What if he leaves us at the side of the road?”

  “We won’t be any worse off than we are now. Besides,” I said, “I’ll protect you.” She bent her head and I knew she was thinking of the twenty rupees. We could’ve taken a bus with that money—neither one of us had ever been on one—or maybe even a train. I squeezed her hand as Mohammed urged us onto the seat beside him, smacking my shoulder jovially and chattering about the hordes of other refugees he’d seen crossing into Pakistan. “But none as unblemished as your fruit,” he said, winking.

  I helped Arya into the cab of the lorry even as my stomach tightened with a strange and gnawing hunger. I ignored it and for the first few hours we bumped along, the desert scrubs and sangri trees whizzing by. I’d never seen the desert in this way—seated high up in a lorry, the glass windshield between us. How different it looked. When we walked the desert seemed to unfold endlessly, and devouringly, like a bolt of cloth unfurling in all directions, which the slightest wind raised and flapped like the sides of a tent. And though it was overwhelming it was also oddly intimate. As if—even as we walked—we were a set of pins holding down the sides of this tent. But in the lorry it was merely a painting. It passed before us, and along us, and though the speed was exhilarating, I hardly recognized it. I tried to focus on something specific—a jojoba or khejri tree, a distant camel—but we were going so fast that it was instantly lost.

  Once, when we slowed, I saw a red fox with a hare hanging limp in its mouth, drops of blood like a necklace on the sand. I pointed to it but Arya’s eyes were closed. Occasionally we passed clumps of people on the road, bundles and small children balanced atop their heads or tucked under their arms. I was watching a crowd of a dozen or so villagers, heading deeper into the Indian side, when Mohammed pulled over. It was nearing twilight. A blue and steady darkness crept behind us, blanketing the dunes and the sprinkle of shrubs and a distant clump of trees in shadow. I felt envy for that shadowed stillness, rooted as it was, and always would be, unaware of our passing.

  The lorry came to a complete stop. Arya blinked her eyes open. We got out to stretch our legs. Mohammed took me aside. “Listen, bhai,” he said, looking over his shoulder at Arya, “we’re running low on petrol. Maybe you could help out, seeing as I’m driving you all that way for free.” He seemed to be studying the horizon as he spoke, as if he were reading something that was written there. I watched him, felt the handful of rupees hidden in my dhoti; the gnawing in my stomach returned. Arya had gone off into the bushes, the top of her head darker than the darkening shrub. The desert stretched in every direction, shivering and forlorn under the deepening sky.

  We both looked down the length of road, barely visible now except a thin white mist that crept silently along its edges. He shuffled his feet. “Five will do,” he said finally.

  “Where will we get petrol this time of night?”

  “There’s a station not far from here.” He climbed into the lorry and pulled out a bag of stunted potatoes pocked and nibbled through by rats. “Here,” he said, holding them out to me, “have her make these. I’ll be back with roti.”

  I handed him the five rupees, thinking if we could just get to the border I’d be certain to find work; we were Muslim, and we’d be in Pakistan, after all. He stuffed the notes into his shirt pocket, started up the lorry, and kicked up a cloud of dust in his wake. As soon as Mohammed started the engine Arya ran over to me from where she’d been waiting, in the dark beyond the headlights, too far for her to hear. “Where’s he going?” she cried.

  “To get petrol. Look what he gave us,” I said, holding out the bag of rotting potatoes.

  Her mouth twisted then in an ugly way. “You fool,” she said coldly, turning away from me, “he’s never coming back.”

  She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. And though I laughed at her poutiness, in the end she was right: he never did.

  * * *

  We’ve been in the hut by Arun’s Restaurant and Bar for five weeks now. I’ve grown almost fond of the low shack, hung with faded film posters and braided ropes of drying chilies. Sometimes I sit outside and order chai. I drink it slowly, under a khejri tree barely taller than me, watching the lorries come and go on the highway. The spattering of orange rattan chairs and tables in the courtyard—dusty and yellowed with sand—along with the withered grasses lining the road, are somehow comforting. They are familiar to me in a way that nothing else is; even the desert, though I’ve spent my whole life in its midst, has become a strange place. Its immensity aggravates everything, even the milk in my tea, and the khejri tree. The thin distant line of the horizon convulses with each passing lorry.

  Still I wait, the afternoons drifting through my fingers like sand.

  “Let’s stay here,” Arya said when we first arrived. “Just until we have enough money to hire a bullock cart.” We’ve had enough money to do that for some time now. Then we decided to stay just long enough to have money to take the bus. Safer and quicker than the bullock cart, Arya reasoned. They wouldn’t torch a bus full of people, she said. But now we’ve decided to stay until we have just enough money for a few nights lodging in Mirpur Khas. Just enough money, she keeps saying, just enough. I sometimes wonder—during the long hours alone in this hut or in the courtyard of Arun’s—how much, exactly, that is. And how much it’s already been.

  She has a routine. She’ll go out toward twilight, when the lorry drivers begin to pull into Arun’s for the night. From the hut I can hear the rumble of their engines, the squeal of their brakes. I hear the slam of their carriage doors and I get that same gnawing in my stomach. It is a tightening so severe that my eyes water. I vomit bile. On some nights the pain is so awful that I sit near the latrines, out behind Arun’s—the stench of urine combats the pain—and listen for the quacking of the ducks. That’s the direction the sound had come from that first night. I’ve never heard it again but I’ve grown used to the scent of urine, so thick I can practically chew it like cud.

  She comes back at daybreak and sleeps. She sleeps so long sometimes I think she’ll never wake up.

  That’s when I watch her. Her breath steams the air between us. And her hips rise and fall, rise and fall. This morning I leave the wad of bills on the table and go toward her. But before I even reach her I smell the stink of other men. It’s in her hair, under her fingernails. It is a wall, an ocean; it is a country I cannot cross. I want her more in that moment than I ever have before.

  * * *

  A week or so ago a car came along with two women and a driver. It was late in the evening. The desert around us lost in darkness. I was in the latrine behind Arun’s. They stopped for tea and one of the women—short, with a slight limp, I could only see her silhouette in the dim starlight—began talking to someone wedged deeper in the darkness. It was Arya.

  They talked in muffled tones for a few minutes until the limping woman coaxed Arya toward their table. “How long?” she asked.

  “A few weeks.”

  The two women looked at each other. “You know he’s not coming back.”

  Arya shrugged.

  “We have a camp,” the other woman said slowly, taller, her voice more tender. “It’s for women like you, refugees, whose husbands have left them. They’ll help you find your people.”

  “Besides, how long can you do this,” the stout woman said, waving her hands vaguely toward the desert.

/>   Arya turned her face. I saw it then in the half-light, angled toward a lorry that was pulling in. She looked at that lorry with such longing that even I thought she might be waiting for her husband to step down from it—hers, the one who’d once been brave, who’d once have stormed out from behind the latrines and called those women and their camp nakaams.

  There was a long silence. The khejri tree under which they sat swayed as if to speak.

  “No, I’m staying here,” she finally said.

  “But, beti,” the taller one began, “what’s left for you here? How long will you wait?”

  Arya shrugged again. “As long as it takes,” she said. Then she rose and trailed off after the lorry that had just pulled in. The women watched her go, clucking their disapproval. The tall one said, with a sigh, “These girls. They think their men will save them.”

  The short one laughed and the laugh rang through the desert quiet. “Pagals. They won’t even come back for them.”

  * * *

  “Why didn’t you go to the camp?” I asked her the next morning.

  I’d woken her up. I’d slammed pots and pans on the table. Pushed open the door of the hut. Sunlight streamed in and she blinked her eyes open, the irritation rising to her face after a moment of confusion.

  “Close the door.”

  “Why didn’t you go?”

  “The door, you animal.” She threw her pillow toward it, trying to catch its side and swing it shut. She missed.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Go. With those women.”

  She tossed away the blanket and gathered her hair in her hands. Then she pulled it into a knot at the top of her head. She stood up, shook out her clothes. I could see the rain of sand in the sunlight. She looked at the empty pots. “Didn’t you make tea?”

  “You could’ve gotten away.”

  She scoffed. She lifted a cup of water out of the vessel and drank it. “The least you could do is make tea,” she said.

  “Maybe even make a new life for yourself.”

  She threw the cup across the room. It struck the mud wall with a dull thud. Water streaked across the dirt floor; the steel cup gouged the opposite wall before clanging to the ground. Then it rolled toward me. I moved to pick it up. Arya turned and slumped into a chair. She bent her head and I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep again but after a long while she said, “Why bother? This one’s lonely enough.”

  * * *

  She’d cooked the rotting bag of potatoes and we’d eaten them. Then we’d slept together, huddled against the cold night air. When we woke, all those weeks ago, she’d looked at me sorrowfully and said, “Let’s go back home.”

  “We can’t.”

  “But why?” she’d asked, as if the answer would change.

  I’d reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. I smiled; at least she was talking to me. “How much do we have left?”

  I untied the end of my dhoti. I held the coins out to show her. “Eight annas.”

  “Let me have them.”

  “Why?” I said, looking at the empty dunes around us. “There’s nothing to buy.”

  “You’ll see,” she said, and walked off in the direction we’d come.

  I waited for a few minutes. When she emerged again on the crest of a near sand dune she had a milkweed flower in her braid. “Where’s the money?” I asked.

  “I buried it.” She laughed. “We’ll dig it up on our way back.”

  Our way back: how beautiful, that simple string of words. I looked past her; the honeyed scent of the milkweed drifting between us. I thought then that perhaps life would never again be as exquisite as it was in that moment. With that cool early morning breeze. Sunlight, shy and tremulous, reaching for the curved body before it. And my Arya, my nymph, her eyes so hopeful and alive, raised to my own. And not an anna between us. As if—in the burying—she’d said, What need do we have for it? As if—in the burying—she’d said, When we have each other?

  * * *

  I make rice and dal. I set out a plate. I am quiet so as not to wake her. These days I have trouble sleeping, even during the hottest part of the afternoon. My thoughts wander through mango orchards, under the shade of their wide leathery leaves, and I think of the red woolen shawl. I think of how when I find it I will spread it under them. And how I will lie down in its jasmine-scented softness and close my eyes and fall into a deep and restful sleep. The deepest and most restful I have ever known. How I will dream again of waterfalls. And how I will wake, and Arya will smile. And no mango—in all of that orchard or in all the orchards of the world—will rival the sweetness of that smile.

  For now I wander out toward Arun’s. It’s midday. The previous night’s lorries have gone. New ones will stop here tonight. Everyone is asleep. There’s no wind. I can almost hear the desert breathe. The rise and fall of its bosom. I can only walk in the shade and even then—even with the new chappals Arya bought for me—my feet burn from the heat of the sand. I settle against the side of the latrines, in an alcove protected from the sun.

  I haven’t eaten in two days. I haven’t had a drop of water in over one. The sky above me twirls and spins. It is red and green and lilac and splinters like sparrows. I shut my eyes against its beauty.

  I know the road to Mirpur Khas goes on for another hundred miles, and beyond that is Karachi, and beyond even that is the Arabian Sea. In Jaisalmer, they’d said, Go, they’ve made a new country for you. But all I can see is sand. And the only borders I know are the ones between our hearts.

  I want to be hungry again. I want to arrive again at Arun’s, like we did all those weeks ago. I want to be just as hungry, just as thirsty. I want to look into his indifferent face and I want him to ask again, “Anything?”

  And this time I will step forward. Me. Not Arya. And this time, I will say, “Anything, except her.”

  The alcove too is now filled with light. My eyes blur with heat and tears. I see Arya, though how could it be? She’s asleep. And yet she’s bending over me and asking, over and over again, “Why? Why are you sitting here?” And then she draws her hand toward me and cries, “You’re burning up, you fool. You’re raging with fever. Come inside.”

  But I catch her arm. It’s smooth and cool like alabaster. I want to cry into it, I want it to carry me, but instead I say, “Don’t you hear them?”

  She tugs. “Come inside.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Hear what?”

  I tilt my head toward the sky. “The ducks, of course.”

  She listens for a moment. Her eyes brim with tears, or maybe mine do. She lifts my chin as I’d once lifted hers. “Yes,” she says finally, almost in a whisper. “Yes. I hear them.”

  THE MEMSAHIB

  Before Arun opened his restaurant on Gadra Road—the road that led to Mirpur Khas—he was a sweeper and general coolie at the Palace Hotel in Jaipur. And before that—from the ages of nineteen to twenty-one—he was a servant at the home of British Army colonel Francis Chilcott on the colonel’s estate outside of Lucknow. And about the time before that, that distant childhood of his, Arun remembered nothing. The colonel had a fussy wife, Arun thought, though he rarely saw her. Most days she stayed firmly secluded in the shadowy parts of the house, ringing the servants only when she wanted her jug of Pimm’s refreshed in the summer, or more woolen blankets in the winter. She was gone for months at a time, jumping right quick at any opportunity to board a ship for England. The colonel had a grown son, Dicky, who’d joined the Indian Civil Service, and was home only on leave. He was jovial, arrogant, rarely acknowledged the servants with more than a wave of his hand, and the last time he’d been home he’d tripped over Arun as he’d been cleaning the floor with a wet rag; Dicky had looked down at the kneeling Arun, both of them twenty years old, and had said, with a great and buoyant voice, “What a marvelous posture for you people. Really, you were quite made for it.” The colonel had a daughter too, whose name was Lavinia, and it was Lavi
nia—beautiful, maddening Lavinia—who snuck nightly, still, into Arun’s dreams, and hovered like death around his days.

  He didn’t see her for the first few months that he worked at the Chilcott home. She was at boarding school in Dharamsala, a place that the elite of the British Raj sent their daughters and that, as Colonel Chilcott complained to Mrs. Chilcott, “spoiled them worse than we do.” The first time Arun saw her, she arrived for her winter holidays in a flurry of rickshaws and trunks and hatboxes and foreign-looking packages, finally emerging from the Durant her father had sent to the train station, clad in a yellow linen dress that seemed to Arun as thin and pearlescent as onion peel. She hurried past him, so close that Arun noticed a fine layer of perspiration on the ridge of her collarbone, and dainty pink spots on her throat that had brightened like petals in the winter sun. She trailed behind her a dusky scent—equal parts musk and frangipani and the just-departed monsoon. In fact, he thought afterward, she was much like the monsoon: billowing, vast, and the greatest relief for a parched and anguished earth. He could’ve stayed enveloped in her scent for the rest of his life but he was immediately dispatched to draw Miss Chilcott’s bath. “Daddy,” she was saying as he left the room, “why couldn’t you send the car? That train was absolutely dreadful. The conductor was insolent and I saw an Indian sitting in first class. Just sitting there, Daddy.”

  That night Arun pulled the overhead punkah—not so much for the breeze as to keep away the mosquitoes—while the family gathered in the sitting room. Dicky was there, as well as Mrs. Chilcott. The dark teak of the floor gleamed in the lantern light, the crickets sang with full-throated delight.