by Sharon Maas
‘That hag!’ said Caroline. ‘The awful woman! Listen, Asha! I came here to rescue you, and I will. We’ve all been looking for you. Not just me: your daddy too, and Janiki. We’ve been looking for you for ages and now I’ve found you I won’t let you go again.’ Caroline couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a flicker of something in the staring eyes at the name ‘Janiki’. Certainly, Asha was closest to Janiki, and the fact that Janiki was also nearby must have given her… Hope? Longing? Or simply the absence of terror, a drawing back of shadows? Whatever it was, Caroline was encouraged, and continued.
‘Oh, Asha!’ she sighed. ‘Maybe you think I abandoned you. Maybe you think I didn’t love you, and that’s why I left you behind. It’s not true, my darling. I always loved you. There hasn’t been a day, a minute, a second, that I haven’t thought of you in all these years. I left you because – because…’
Because what? Caroline thought. What reason can I give, that she would understand? She stumbled on. ‘Because I was ill, Asha. I was lost, just like you are now, just not in a physical sense. I was lost in my mind, lost in a darkness I could not banish. I wish it wasn’t so. I wish it had been different, that we could have been together, that I could have been your mom all your life. But I can’t turn back the clock. I can’t change the past. But I can change the future, Asha, and I will. I promise. I will be a proper mom from now on.’
She talked. She talked to Asha as the shadows lengthened and the noises outside the room grew louder: female chattering and buckets clanging. She talked when the door opened about six inches, and a blackened aluminium pot was pushed through the opening at floor level – Caroline got a glimpse of a tiny hand, the hand of a child, pushing it in, the fingers flicking it forward, and then quickly jerking back to safety. The door was slammed shut again, the latch rasped, the lock snapped.
The pot contained rice soaked in a yellowish liquid. There were neither plates nor cutlery. By now Caroline was ravenous, and she supposed Asha was too. She forced herself to take three mouthfuls – scooping up the rice with her fingers – before giving up and turning away in disgust. Asha ate even less. No wonder she was so thin. So Caroline continued to talk.
Asha meanwhile huddled in her corner; now and again she fell asleep, her head lolling to one side, her body leaning abjectly against the wall. Even in her sleep she shifted several times, as if unable to find a comfortable position
Caroline kept on talking, in a voice that she hoped was calm and soothing and trust-evoking. She spoke about her life before coming to India, about her family, her dreams, her plans for Asha. Asha seemed not to be listening, but still Caroline talked, because she knew that somewhere, at some level of her consciousness, Asha heard and understood.
While talking Caroline tried to stay calm, but that calmness was filtering away with every passing minute. The endless waiting with no sign that it would ever end. Her ramblings for Asha’s benefit now seemed more banal even than the silences they broke; her ears constantly strained to pick up noises from beyond the door. Occasionally she heard voices or footsteps from the bowels of the house but they never came up to this floor. Her sense of frustration was like a rising tide of boiling water within her; she wanted to get up, move around, stretch her limbs, aching from so much sitting. Occasionally she did; but the cubicle was too small to bring any relief and every time she simply flung herself back onto the mattress. Only Asha seemed resigned to this infinity of waiting; or rather, she didn’t wait at all, but simply existed, as if her mind had lost the capacity to measure time, to even conceive of a better future, to hope for change. As if she had given up.
Near the door was a rusty pail, which obviously served as a toilet and also had obviously not been changed for a day or two. Caroline had grown used to the stench by now; occasionally she stood up and walked to the opening that served as a window to sniff the fresh air that seeped in through the wooden slats. She looked through the windowpane, but it was so smudged that not much could be seen except the vague outline of the opposite building, an almost black tenement with barred windows just like this one. Caroline inspected the window more closely, to see if there was any chance of opening it, but it was nailed securely shut, and the bars outside it were obviously solid, so that even if she broke a pane of the glass there could be no escape that way; nor would shouting down to the street be of any use, for who would hear them? And who would care?
Asha was asleep again, huddled against the wall, and Caroline took the liberty of touching her again, helping her down into a lying position and covering her with one of the torn sheets. Asha did not wake. Caroline longed to partly undress her, to check her for wounds; she longed to stroke her hair. If there was one thought that made this predicament bearable it was the thought of Asha. She may have been impulsive, reckless, headstrong, giddy – but she had been right. She was with Asha. Better that she should be with Asha, than that Asha should be alone.
The night seemed even more endless than the day; the sounds filtering in from the street, muffled though they were, helped keep Caroline awake. The street had been quiet during the day; now, at night, it seemed to wake up and the melange of loudspeaker music, raucous laughter, shouting and a thousand other noises conspired to ensure she could not escape from her carousel of thoughts for even half an hour at a time.
She hugged Asha to her, kissed the top of her head. She smelt; she had obviously not had a bath or washed her hair for days. Caroline pulled her closer yet, and closed her eyes, and somehow, perhaps through sheer exhaustion, dozed off.
It seemed only seconds had passed when she was abruptly shaken out of her restless nap. The light bulb glared overhead; there were voices in the cubicle, loud male voices, and, as she saw on rubbing the sleep from her eyes, the men to go with them. Beefy Indian men, clones of each other, and of every Bollywood villain who ever scowled on an oversized hoarding on a Bombay street corner: the thick moustaches, the slicked-back greasy hair, the sideburns, the puffy jowls, the hooded long-lashed eyes. Caroline would have laughed at the cliché if she did not feel more like crying.
The woman was there too, chattering loudly and coarsely, pointing and glaring at her. She bent over and snatched Caroline’s handbag, which was lying on the floor. She opened it, found the purse and took out the knife and the rest of the paper money. She threw the bag back onto the floor, counted and folded the hundred-rupee notes and stuck the wad into the neckline of her blouse.
‘Don’t try any trick, we got knife! We got gun!’ said one of the men, and ‘Who are you?’ said the other. ‘Why you come here?’
‘I’m her mother,’ said Caroline, ‘and I’m staying with her.’
At that moment, Asha woke up. Rubbing her eyes, she squeaked, ‘Mom? Mom? I’m scared!’
‘Don’t be scared, honey. I’m with you.’
‘She talking?’ said the first man.
‘Of course she’s talking. She’s my daughter.’
‘You going. We not needing you here. She is ours.’
‘She’s not. She’s my daughter and I’m not leaving her anywhere.’
‘Mom, Mom!’ Asha kept crying, clinging to Caroline.
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. I won’t let them take you away.’
There followed a conversation in Hindi, of which Caroline understood not a word; except, now and then, the word ‘foreigner’, and ‘English’ and, occasionally, the name Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri, that rang a bell. Wasn’t it the name that Janiki had found on one of her Internet searches? The name they’d all grasped like drowning people grasped at a lifebuoy, only to discard as useless?
One of the men pulled out a black brick-like gadget, which Caroline recognised as a mobile phone. He pulled out an antenna, punched one of the keys and spoke some sharp words in Hindi, eyes fixed on her all the time. Caroline could only recognise the word ‘Kamini’ every now and then. The man listened, nodded, then put away the phone. He spoke to his companion who, abruptly, spat on the floor and, with quick shooing gestures towards the door, sai
d in English:
‘You can go. We don’t want you. Only girl. You free.’
‘No! You’re not taking her anywhere!’
Asha clung to Caroline.
‘Mom! Mom! Stay with me!’ she cried.
‘I’m staying with you, honey. They’re not taking you away.’ To the men, she repeated: ‘I’m staying with her. You can’t take her away.’
One of the men tried to pull Asha away, but she screamed and clung to Caroline. ‘Mom! Mom! I’m scared!’
There was a struggle; Caroline holding onto Asha and pulling her away, Asha screaming and clinging. The other man pulled out the phone again and made another quick call.
Putting the phone away, he spoke sharply to his friend, who let go of Asha.
‘OK OK. You can come. Both of you can come. You come with girl. But you come quietly otherwise I shoot you. I got gun.’ He tapped his pocket, where indeed a gun-shaped bulge was visible.
‘Where are you taking us to?’
‘You will see. Better place than this, to be sure. We take her, with or without you. But better with you.’
The man strode over to the charpai and made as if to grab Asha again, but she shrieked and clung to her mother. Caroline laid a protective arm around her, hugged Asha against her.
‘Don’t touch her. We’ll come. We can talk. I can pay for her, buy her off you. We are wealthy foreigners. Take me to whoever is your boss and I’ll talk to him.’
Chapter 48
Caroline
They reached the front door and then were out in the street, Asha clinging to Caroline’s arm. Caroline felt a tight grip on her other arm; one of the men had taken hold of her and was urging her forward, up the lane. Glancing to her left, she saw that Asha was being held on her other side by the second man. She looked over her shoulder; The street was half deserted. She saw a few women in bright saris standing in doorways as they passed. Late male stragglers made their way to the end of the lane, where the main thoroughfare, in the daytime a roaring, fuming chaos of motor vehicles, lay quiet and forsaken.
A black car crouched at the roadside. Its back door opened silently at their approach, as if by the hand of a ghost. Caroline and Asha were summarily bundled into the back seat; the car door slammed and they were enclosed in the black, musty interior.
There was a third man already waiting in the driver’s seat, reeking of some heavy aftershave and smiling in a manner that made Caroline cringe and draw back in disgust. Their two male escorts slid into the back seat with her and Asha, one on either side, next to the doors. The motor coughed once, twice, then relaxed into a quiet purring. They drove off.
It seemed an endless drive all through the night and into the dawn. But it could have been one hour, and it could have been three. Caroline dozed off now and then, only to be startled into wakefulness by a dream or a memory or a sound, then to drift back into sleep. Sometimes when she was awake she heard the men talking; sometimes she heard nothing but the hum of the engine. When she woke up for the last time the car had stopped and she felt fresh air on her cheeks and heard raised male voices. She blinked, and could make out only the silhouettes of houses and a few male figures. Were they still in Mumbai? She could not tell.
Someone pushed her out of the car. Loose gravel crunched beneath her bare feet. She reached for Asha’s hand and held it tightly.
‘It’s OK, honey. I’m here,’ she whispered. Yes, she was afraid. But how much more afraid must Asha be? It was her job to calm that fear, and doing so helped calm her own. She could see nothing but those dark silhouettes, and here and there a dim light against a building. The tight hold on her arm did not relax for a fraction of a second. They entered a door beneath one of the outside lights; behind it was a dim passageway leading to a steep flight of stairs. She walked up, still clinging to Asha’s hand. Asha’s bare feet padded beside her own. The voices around her were loud and rude, the grip on her arm tight and uncompromising. All that could be seen were walls.
They reached the top of the stairs and then there was a woman’s voice, speaking three or four sharp words, and uncouth hands tugged at her and pushed her inside a brightly lit room. Caroline blinked at the harsh light, then looked around. The men from the brothel had been joined by a woman. She did not look at Asha, for the woman was staring at her with such intensity she could not look away.
The woman could have been anything between thirty and fifty. She wore a faded beauty with the dignity of a queen, though she was not dressed to fit that role. She had obviously been roused from her bed, for she wore a long neck-to-ankle cylinder of a nightgown in pink seersucker, slightly gathered around a buttoned bib that rose above a generously loose bosom. She had skin the colour of dark honey, high cheekbones and long heavy-lidded eyes that seemed to have slid slightly lower down her cheeks than was originally intended. Her hair hung in a long plait over her right shoulder. She wore several gold rings on her fingers and a small gold stud at the flare of her nostril. She was speaking to one of the men, but her gaze flitted now and again from Caroline to Asha, summing them up with cunning expertise. Caroline felt like a collector’s doll being offered for sale.
The woman had obviously been unprepared for their coming; she was also obviously of higher rank than the men who had brought Caroline and Asha. She was arguing with them, but Caroline, of course, could not understand a word. Finally the woman addressed her directly. She shrugged. One of the men spoke, and she understood the one word: English. The woman addressed her again, this time in her own language.
‘Your native tongue is English?’ Caroline nodded. Asha neither nodded nor spoke. The girl was edging behind her, trying to hide. The hand in her own trembled like a small captured bird. The woman addressed Asha now; she reached for her, gripped her by the upper arm and pulled her out from behind Caroline.
‘Let me look at you,’ she said, and turned Asha around, forcing her to let go of Caroline’s hand. ‘You have grown so thin, Kamini. What have they done to you? Did they starve you at that place? Well now perhaps you can appreciate how lucky you were before.’
Asha did not answer. The woman spoke to the man who appeared to be the senior, the taller, darker, bulkier one of the two.
There followed a long conversation in Hindi, in which the man spoke the most, the woman merely shaking her head and saying ‘acha, acha’ at intervals. Then the woman took over. Finally they seemed to reach a sort of agreement, for the tone of voice changed; it became friendly, almost. The man and his crony turned and clattered down the stairs. The woman gestured for Caroline and Asha to follow her, and led them a short way down the corridor and through a door. They were in a fairly large room now, sparsely furnished with a double bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe; frugal, but, compared to the room they had just left, a queen’s chamber, for it was clean, the bed had a sparkling white sheet, and both the windows were open, though barred by wrought-iron patterned grids.
‘It’s late,’ the woman said to Caroline. ‘You should get in the bed and sleep now and we’ll talk in the morning. You are Kamini’s mother I understand, and you have caused her to speak again. That is a good thing for Kamini. We only have to decide what to do with you. It is not my decision. If Kamini is speaking it is very good for her. I will explain all in the morning. Now take rest. You will be fine here but don’t try any tricks. I’m kind but I don’t stand for any nonsense. Don’t give me any trouble and I won’t give you any. Are you hungry? Shall I bring you some food? There’s water in the jug over there.’ Another flick of her thumb, this time towards the flask and two glasses on a tray. ‘Look, I’m tired and I have to go and finish the business with those men so I’m leaving now. I’ll talk to you in the morning. You’ll find night garments in the top drawer.’ She pointed to the chest of drawers.
Then she was gone, and Caroline’s reply, that indeed she was hungry, they were both hungry, and could she have something to eat, died on her lips. They key turned in the lock.
Caroline sighed and, assuming there would
be a breakfast within a few hours, helped a passive Asha out of her sari and into one of the nightdresses the woman had indicated. While doing so she had the perfect opportunity to see, for the first time, the three bloodied welts across Asha’s thin back.
The vicious witch, Caroline thought angrily. It must be that hag at the brothel. People like her ought to be publicly flogged. One of the wounds seemed to be infected; it ought to be dressed properly, but Caroline knew there would be no help tonight. Tomorrow would have to do.
Caroline then pulled on the other nightdress. It was white, starched and ironed, and smelt strongly of washing powder. Whatever the future held, at least their conditions had drastically improved since yesterday. She thought of her friends. Kamal, and Janiki, and Gita. Gita would not know where to find her. Why, oh why, had she not let Janiki arrange things her own way? Why had she leapt in where angels fear to tread? I did it for Asha, she said to herself. At least Asha is no longer alone. The words that had been, and would be, her single comfort throughout the ordeal. She thought of Wayne. They cannot keep me imprisoned for long, she thought. I am an American citizen. This time, they will have to act. Have to set the police on me to avoid an international incident. Wayne had influential friends in government. They would put pressure on – whomever it was necessary to put pressure on. Wayne would help. She touched the rings on the chain around her neck. What was she thinking of, to even contemplate getting back together with Kamal? Wayne was her husband. She loved Wayne. When this was over it would be her and Wayne and Asha.
Kamal might want Asha too, said a little voice inside, but she brushed it away impatiently. Kamal’s chances of getting custody were exactly nil. She was Asha’s mother; she was married, and she and her husband could provide a happy family for Asha. A single man like Kamal – not a chance.
