by Sharon Maas
‘I have an idea,’ said Kamal. ‘Since she – the woman at the house – doesn’t speak English let’s get a translator.’
‘Good idea,’ said Caroline, uncurling. She stretched out her legs again, thought for a bit, and remembered a woman she had once befriended, a friend of Sundari’s who spoke tolerable English as well as Tamil. ‘Vasanthi! Let’s go to Vasanthi. She can translate for us. And explain what happened. I hope she’s home.’
She was. Vasanthi burst into smiles when she saw Caroline, but then her smile vanished, for Caroline was crying now, tears of fear and frustration – and relief; Vasanthi would surely know more?
‘Cold hands!’ said Vasanthi as she gripped Caroline’s hands in her own. ‘Come in, come in.’
She led them both into the cool dark interior of her home, and bid them take a seat, gesturing to a pile of cushions in the corner. Caroline and Kamal took a cushion each and sat down in front of a low wooden table. A small naked child was crawling on the tiled floor; Vasanthi scooped him up and in a fluid motion set him on her hip, one arm around the little bare back. The child smiled at the newcomers and waved. Caroline and Kamal waved back, but unsmilingly, and the child too stopped smiling and reached out with both hands to be put down, grunting in impatience. Vasanthi returned him to the floor, where he quickly scooted off through a doorway. Vasanthi lifted the hem of her sari and sat down cross-legged on the bare floor opposite her guests.
‘Tell us what happened,’ said Caroline, and Vasanthi did.
‘Sundari and Viram, both accident on street, car hitting, both dead. Viram, he live three days then dead. Viram brother family move into house.’
‘What happened to the children, Vasanthi? What happened to Asha?’
Vasanthi shrugged.
‘Children, they go another school, secondary school in town. Asha too. My children tell me.’
‘Vasanthi, we want you to come with us to help us speak to Viram’s brother’s wife. She speaks no English – could you translate for us?’
Vasanthi shook her head.
‘Don’t want speak with that woman,’ she said. ‘She bad woman.’
‘Please, Vasanthi! Please come!’
‘We need to speak to her husband too,’ said Kamal. ‘I think he’s the one we really need to blame for this. He’s stealing our money, literally! Fees for that school are high, by Indian standards. He’s taken Asha out but is still pocketing the money we sent. That’s theft.’
‘Paruthy bad man. Bad teacher too. Beat children. He beat my son with ruler, bam! Bam!’ Vasanthi held out her palm and clapped it with her other hand to demonstrate how her son had been hit.
‘I’ll be after him. But we have to go, Vasanthi, to find out where Asha is. And to talk to that man. We need you, Vasanthi; please! Come with us.’
‘Please, Vasanthi! I’m so – so…’ Caroline didn’t know what she was any more: fearful, confused, desperate, guilty (because this was all her fault); yet full of hope because, after all, they were going to get Asha and nobody would ever take her away again, and she would make good for all the years of neglect. Asha: you will be first in my life. From now on, you come first.
Vasanthi, seeing the tears in Caroline’s eyes, reached out and pulled her to her, placed her arms around her.
‘I will come,’ she said. ‘I am mother too. I will come. I will help. One minute please.’
Vasanthi needed ten minutes to dress her child and make herself presentable, and then they all got into the taxi, Vasanthi in the front seat with her child on her lap, where he kneeled, both hands on the open windowsill. Vasanthi laughed. ‘He never been in car before!’ she said.
Caroline had an idea.
‘Shall we just go and pick up Asha and not bother with going back to that house? Why should we even talk to those people? What can they tell us? I think we should just get a Tamil lawyer and sue the skin off them. How dare they not inform us of Sundari’s death; how dare they take Asha out of school!’ Her eyes blazed with indignation. Now that Vasanthi was with them she felt emboldened. ‘All I want is Asha. Let’s just go to the school and get her. We’re her parents. We have the right.’
‘Definitely, a lawyer,’ said Kamal. ‘But we don’t know which new school Asha attends. And I need to speak to those people myself, look them in the eye. Besides, we need to pick up Asha’s papers. Her passport, at least. They’ll have that in the house.’
The same woman opened the door when they knocked, but this time she called into the interior, and a moment later a man, her husband no doubt, replaced her in the doorway. A man with a sickening false smile plastered across his face, his gaze wandering nervously between Caroline and Kamal.
‘Tell him we want to know where Asha is and why he took her out of school,’ Kamal said.
A long exchange in Tamil took place between Vasanthi and Paruthy; they seemed to be arguing.
‘What’s he saying?’ Caroline interrupted. Vasanthi turned to her and switched language. ‘He say Asha naughty girl, not good behave in school when Viram and Sundari dead, bad girl, school make her leave.’
‘You mean, expelled her? That’s a lie. Tell him we just came from the school and we know that he took her out and all Sundari’s other children and replaced them with his own. Tell him we met his daughter. Go on, tell him.’
Caught out in the lie, Paruthy didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. He launched into a new endless speech.
‘What’s he saying?’ said Kamal to Vasanthi.
‘He said Asha bad behave at home. Not helping in house. Rude to his wife and always fighting his daughters. Therefore he had to remove her.’
‘Remove her from – where?’
‘From the house, Caroline. He remove her from the house.’
‘I don’t understand. Remove her? She doesn’t live here any more?’
‘No. She gone, Caroline. He send her to Madras. Wife brother was looking for maid and he send her there to work.’
White-hot rage consumed Caroline. She sprang at the man, at his face, fingers spread, screaming, ‘I’ll kill him, I will! Lies, lies, lies! Where’s my daughter!’ The man gave her a hard shove so that she tumbled backwards to the dusty ground. The front door slammed in their faces. Kamal helped Caroline to her feet, dusted her off, put a calming arm around her. Caroline tried to fling herself at the closed door but Kamal held her back and turned to Vasanthi.
‘Is it true? Is that what he said? That he sent Asha to Madras to be a maid?’
Vasanthi nodded. ‘Is true. I not know. My son say Asha not in school for long time, but I not know she in Madras. That man just now telling.’
‘But – but… how could he?’
Vasanthi shrugged and said nothing.
Kamal thought for a while. Then he said, ‘Janiki. We need to talk to Janiki. Where is Janiki, Vasanthi? Do you have her address?’
‘Janiki not here, gone America long time ago. Don’t know where.’
‘Damn!’ said Caroline, now slightly calmed. ‘Oh, how I wish I’d kept her address! Contacted her!’
‘Then maybe one of the brothers? One of the elder boys? They would be at school, wouldn’t they?’
‘The eldest, Pandu, is at engineering college in Madras. Sundari told me that a while ago. The others must be living at home still. With those people. How could they DO this, Kamal? How can people be so horrible? So mean? Poor little Asha. How scared she must be. Kamal, I want her back! I want my daughter back? It hurts so much!’
The last words came out as a wail. They were still standing outside the Iyengar house; Caroline flung herself against the door and pummelled it with all her might, wailing and sobbing. Kamal quietly drew her away and to himself, in an embrace that seemed to quieten her; her sobbing relaxed into a silent heaving of the shoulders.
‘They’re obviously not going to help without pressure,’ said Kamal, though Caroline wasn’t listening. ‘We need a lawyer. And police.’
Vasanthi nodded. ‘Police!’ she said. ‘Bad pe
ople. Police help find Asha.’
‘Right. Come on. The law it is. We’ll find her, Caroline, I promise. We’ll find her. Wherever she is. We’ll squeeze the truth out of those people. They chose the wrong victim this time.’
An arm around a weeping Caroline, he led the way back to the car.
* * *
There followed hours and hours of the debilitating, exhausting, mind-draining bureaucracy that Caroline so hated about India. Sitting in a waiting room filled with rows of plastic chairs under a slow-rotating ceiling fan while a police officer deigned to listen to their story and file a report. Another waiting room, this time a lawyer’s, this time on a wooden bench, where Caroline sat squeezed between several Indian ladies while Kamal stood in the hallway swatting away flies. Vasanthi had long gone home, not without inviting them to lunch; she had waited to file the police report in case no one spoke English. But neither of them was hungry, and the hot midday hours slipped by with hardly an inch of progress made.
The lawyer proved far more helpful than the police, and once he understood what had happened, and that these were clients who would pay well for his services, he sprang into action. He picked up a phone and spoke a Tamil diatribe into the receiver.
‘Police!’ he explained as he replaced the receiver and stood up, tucking his shirt into his waistband. This man did not waste time, Caroline was happy to see. He unceremoniously shooed his other waiting clients away, marched her and Kamal down to the taxi and gave sharp instructions to the driver.
Back to the Iyengar house; they arrived simultaneously with two policemen on a motorbike.
‘He must have offered a bribe,’ Kamal whispered to Caroline and she nodded. This lawyer meant business, and for the first time for hours hope swelled in her heart.
Reinforced with the law, it was easy to gain entry to the Iyengar house. Much talking, some shouting took place, of which she understood only the occasional word. Asha, and Madras, and school, and rupees, and foreigners. The man, belligerent at first, turned into a cowering mass of fear in the presence of the police and finally produced a flimsy-paged notebook, which he leafed through until he found what he was looking for. He passed the notebook to the lawyer, who smiled up at Caroline.
‘It is Asha’s address in Madras,’ he said. ‘She is working as a maid for this man’s wife’s cousin.’
‘How dare he! How dare he!’ Caroline quivered with rage and would have flung herself, nails bared, at the man again had not Kamal held her back.
‘He will face the full force of the law,’ said the lawyer. ‘There will be a charge of abduction as well as perhaps other charges. He did not fully understand who he was dealing with. Seemed to think she was just some abandoned girl he could exploit to the maximum. He is in deep shit now, though!’ He chuckled, and Caroline too nodded and grinned at the choice of words, so unusual coming from an Indian mouth.
‘I hope he drowns in it. He deserves it.’
The lawyer finished copying the address into his own notebook, tore out a page and handed it to Caroline. ‘This is the place where your daughter is staying,’ he said. ‘You can go there now and hold her in your arms. She is waiting for you.’
Caroline wanted to jump at him and hug him, but knew it was inappropriate in India, and maybe even in America. Instead, she hugged Kamal, who hugged her back, and as they walked towards the waiting taxi – leaving the police to deal with the man – she whirled him around and laughed out loud, her body loosened by the elixir of relief.
‘Back to Madras!’ she sang. ‘Straight to that place to pick up Asha!’
Just as they reached the car, a boy in school uniform rushed up to them.
‘Kamal Uncle! Caroline Aunty! I am so glad to see you!’
‘Daav!’ cried Caroline. Indeed, it was Sundari’s second son, now a handsome teenager taller than herself. She had always liked Daav; he was bright and friendly and had loved her stories about life in America. ‘I will go there when I am big!’ he had always said, and Caroline had always promised, ‘I will help you. When you apply for studies there you must ask me. I can help.’ Now here he was again, twice the size and grinning in delight at seeing her.
But then the grin faded from his face.
‘Oh! Aunty, Uncle, Janiki is trying to get hold of you. I have been looking for your address but could not find it. You must email her straight away. Asha is missing.’
‘Yes; we know that. She’s working as a maid in Madras. We have the address.’ Caroline waved the notebook page at him.
‘No; she’s not there anymore. Janiki said she’s gone. Disappeared. Janiki thinks she’s been abducted. By child traffikers.’
Chapter 27
Asha. Madras, 2000
Two policemen came back into that house. They came to get the computer. But they heard me because when I jumped back into the bench the lid fell down and made a noise so they came looking and pulled me out. I stood there while they spoke about me. They were not expecting me. I did not know what they were talking about. One of them put handcuffs on me. I did not understand why. What had I done wrong? The other did not agree with the handcuffs. They were speaking much too quickly for me to understand. In the end they removed the handcuffs.
They began to question me. My name, where I came from, who my parents were. I answered as best I could. I said my Indian parents are dead but I have other parents who are far away. My mother is in America and my father is in Dubai. Who is looking after you, they said. Nobody, I replied. I have a sister in California. She told me to go to a certain address in Madras. It is there I want to go to. I opened my bag and took out the scrap of paper on which I had written Naadiya’s address. It is here I need to go, I said. And then my sister will come and get me. The sister in America. She will come and get me. She will take care of me.
We will take you to this address, said the policeman who had put the handcuffs on. I was scared of him because of the handcuffs. I liked the other one better as he did not want me in handcuffs. He was kinder. At least that’s what I thought at the time but it turned out not to be true.
They collected the computer and took it out to a police van waiting outside. And then they told me to get in the van too. And I did, and then we drove off. They drove the van to a police station and took the computer in and then the kind policeman said he was taking me to Naadiya. But he didn’t. He took me to a woman and told her something I didn’t understand and then I was on a train with that woman. That was the next day, after I had spent the night with her. I kept telling her that I want to go to Naadiya and she kept smiling and saying, naligi, naligi. Naligi means tomorrow. But tomorrow we did not go to Naadiya. Tomorrow that woman took me to the train station and made me get on the train with her. I wanted to run away at the station but she was holding onto my wrist all the time. Tightly. So I could not run. And I did not know where to run to as the policeman had taken away Naadiya’s address. I was scared. There were so many crowds at the station. And then we got on a train and when I asked where we were going, she said,
‘To Bombay.’
Chapter 28
Janiki. Mumbai, 2000
Bombay: City of gold, they called it; or city of dreams, dreams that came true or were extinguished in a puff of breath. You either love it or hate it, a friend who grew up there, and therefore loved it, had once told her. Janiki knew from the start that she would hate it. Somewhere among these twenty million people rushing here and there, living in luxury or scraping a living from the pavement, was Asha. A grain of sand on an endless beach. How would she ever find that single grain?
Bombay, or Mumbai, as it was now to be called, was the enemy. She arrived prepared to do battle, prepared to wrest from its bowels that precious jewel, her Asha. But first she had to find that jewel. Find the hiding place. She would encounter Bombay – as she would always call it – at its ugliest. Let herself be sucked into its belly, dig down to its deepest abyss of depravity. She couldn’t do it. But she had to.
Janiki looked up, gazing into th
e distance, spiral notebook in hand.
She absent-mindedly clicked the tip of her ballpoint pen in and out, biting her lip, searching for a starting point. She had arrived by train from Baroda just the day before, having finally, with Daav’s help, made email contact with Kamal and Caroline. She had found a reasonably priced hotel – though she soon discovered that ‘reasonably priced’ is relative, for even the cheapest Bombay hotels seemed as expensive as the best of Madras – and immediately made her way to the hellhole of Kamathipura.
She had first found mention of that place buried deep in the emails she had trawled through, seeking a clue as to where Asha might be. She had dismissed those mentions at first – they had nothing to do with Asha, obviously – she assumed Asha was safely in Madras. Though again, ‘safely’ was relative; relative to this monster city-within-a-city whose jaws she had voluntarily entered.
And then, in a more recent email, the chilling words: This latest one is useless. We are sending her to Kamathipura.
She had heard of Kamathipura before, of course. Which educated Indian hadn’t? Fascinating and horrifying at once, its notoriety was known to anyone who read the newspapers. Bombay’s red light district, the place where men went to satisfy their most base urges. Where women lived like sardines in dirty, rat-infested holes, or even in cages overlooking the street, beckoning in their customers in the red glow of streetlamps. Kamathipura was a city of the night, for women of the night.
Now, in daylight, as she walked through the narrow lanes she felt a mounting panic, for the atmosphere seeped deeper into her consciousness; like glue, clammy, sordid, vile, clinging to her like a hungry leech. And, she realised, these are only the streets; I am only an onlooker; I am safe. Behind the crumbling, grey facades that lined those streets – there the horror took place. Day after day after day. Night after night. A thousand wretched voices silently cried out to her: she heard them. And somewhere in the cacophony of woe she could make out a single anguished strain – Asha’s voice of innocence, calling in vain.
