“Still?” She sounded incredulous.
Badal shook his head and repeated, pointing again at her cargo pants and towards the priests at the gates: “Not allow.”
His tone appeared to infuriate her. “Not allow, not allow!” She exclaimed, turning to Suraj. “I can’t stand it, these temples, all these men laying down the law. Don’t wear this, don’t wear that, don’t do this, don’t do that. Half those men around the door aren’t even wearing shirts. Fuck it. I’m not going in there.”
“And you’ll do what? Wait in the car? We can come back once you’ve changed. Or do this tomorrow.” Suraj rubbed his aching eyes. A temper tantrum when they hadn’t even begun work. This was going to be a fun week.
She turned on her heel before he could say more. “I’ll go for a spin, I’ll look around. We need to put other stuff in the film, don’t we? I’ll go and see the temple later if you think anything will work in there – the permissions, space – all of that.”
Suraj stopped on the brink of entering the temple gates. She had been paid good money by a television company to come all this distance to research their film. They had agreed to his over-the-top fee for being her point man. Here they were after more than a month of e-mail negotiations and preparation – and she was was giving up the very first day?
He snapped out of his shambling manner and loped off behind Nomi with surprising speed. After a moment’s paralysis, Badal followed, shouting, “Where are you going? What is happening?” He had plans already for his morning’s extra earning, it wasn’t going to slip away, he would not let it.
The two men panted to a stop near the car just as it was revving to leave. Suraj pulled open the door and slid in. “Right. I’ll do this later too. Go,” he said to the driver. “My head’s splitting,” he explained to Nomi.
“But . . .”
“I’m not in good shape today . . . I’ll miss too much . . . had thought you’d be the second pair of eyes. We’ll do it together later. Whenever. Let’s do something else today. The beach. Food shacks. Something not too exotic.”
“It’s daily life here! It’s not exotic for them, they come to pray here every day. It’s not exotic for him, see? It’s how he earns a living!”
As if to prove her right, Badal was holding the window frame, banging on the car. “I left other people waiting, I turned them away, to take you to the temple.” He thrust his face into the window, refusing to let the car move. Suraj saw the man’s eyebrows came together in the middle of his forehead in such a way that his face was cut into two. The whites of his eyes were yellow and forked through with red lines. The hand that held the window had circles of rough skin on the knuckles and one long red nail stuck out like a painted talon. “You’re not going to get in there without me, you know that?” Badal said. “Not today, not on any other day.”
“We’ll go tomorrow. We’ll meet you here. We’re not running away,” Suraj said.
“Tomorrow’s not O.K,” Nomi said. “We haven’t enough time, and we’ve got stuff to do tomorrow! Just finish this today. Could you please do that?” Was she begging him or was she ordering him? During their e-mailing, he had searched for her on the net but found not a single photograph. His repeated google-clicks had dredged up no information. Odd, when she was on the circuit. From the self-assurance of her e-mails he had built up an image of a tall, athletic, and he had to admit it – white – woman in his head. A sensuous blonde. Along the lines of Anita Ekberg or Britt Ekland, a Scandinavian Valkyrie ready for anything. They would zip around on a hired motorbike, their packed days of work followed by long swims in the sea and siestas in a big double bed. Then, yesterday, in the hotel’s reception, there was this – this brown shrimp. He had looked past her, beyond her, around her, not wanting to believe that this was the woman he had been writing to. His boss for the next few days. Unbelievable. Just when he thought his luck had turned.
He got out of the car without another word and watched it crawl away from the parking lot through the crowds. When he turned back towards the temple again, he almost collided with Badal. The man was standing inches away, his close-set eyes drilling holes into Suraj.
“We will go into the temple now? Please remove your shoes.”
Inside the temple, Suraj followed him around, nodding at everything Badal said. Shrine after shrine, square after square. He should have been looking out for possible camera angles, for the falling of light and shadow, for examples of striking sculpture, but within minutes of starting the tour he had discovered that the temple allowed no cameras. How would Nomi’s company deal with this in their film? Would they use stock photos? Pictures of the exterior?
His head ached too blindingly to allow thought. He put one foot in front of another, dreaming of chilled beer. A tall glass beaded with a million drops of water, froth at the top. He stared at the square they were in as Badal said, “If you come here in the evening, you see a stunning sight – a priest climbing to the top of that tower.”
Suraj looked up at the tower. The sun behind it turned it into a black mountain. He could not take it. Not with a piercing hangover. If he opened his eyes fully they might fuse like light bulbs. He said, “I’ll sit for a while. I’ll think of God. I want to pray.”
Badal crossed the courtyard and stood in a corner pretending not to observe his client. He saw him take out a small piece of wood from his pocket, then a knife. The man scraped at the wood with his knife for only a minute or two before he stopped and sat there, gazing into space. He was taller than average, had a slight stoop. The short sleeves of his T-shirt exposed biceps starting to soften. The T-shirt was black but for a grey dragon that reared up its chest. The fellow had a shock of hair cut in such untidy tufts it was as if he had taken a paper knife to his head. A bristly salt and pepper stubble darkened his face. Badal had smelled soured alcohol on his breath.
He spotted a friend and nodded to him, pointing at Suraj across the square. “See that bastard? If I don’t milk him like a prize cow my name’s not Badal.” His friend bowed low in a mock namaste, saying, “You’re the king, we all know that.”
Suraj leaned his aching head against a pillar. His eyes half closed, he was vaguely aware of the milling crowds around him. Such a swarm of people. Singing people, chanting people. People with beads, people ringing bells, people reading holy books, children, ancients. People everywhere, going from shrine to shrine, searching the stones for some traces of the salvation they had come to find. He was an impostor. Everyone must know he wasn’t there to pray. Not that they cared. They were too fired up by their proximity to the Lord, intoxicated with finding this hotline to paradise.
At the end of the courtyard was the entrance to a stone shrine. It might have been a stage door, the courtyard the stage, the pillars and arches around it the proscenium. He stared at the door. Surely someone would step out of its shadowed rectangle into the sun. A man. A muscular man with shaggy hair. An actor. He, Suraj. In those red robes he had worn at his college drama society’s final-year performance, the spotlight on him, the rest of the stage dark, the audience below invisible, all eyes on him.
What were his lines? From an old poem: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for? There was tubby old dhoti-clad Mishraji flapping about like a wounded bird, certain he would screw up those precious lines. He had not. Despite that joker of a teacher he had made it to film school. And then what? Nothing. Zero. Reach exceeded grasp. It always did. Cut to now: he was not an actor, not a director, not even a real cameraman. Just some guy who lived off assignments, doing the homework for other film-makers. The real guys. Some day he would make his own film. He had a screenplay. He thought back two years, to the time a couple of producers were about to bite. Long telephone calls that left him sleepless with excitement. Then nothing. A good story, they had said. Award-winning stuff. Their chequebooks firmly in their deep pockets.
The pillar he was leaning his head against began to feel too hard. He straightened, remembered the wood in his
hand. He rubbed it in his palm as if to warm it, started whittling again. It was a block of sandalwood, soft and responsive, which he had managed to get through a friend in the forest department. He loved the scented exhalations from the wood as he carved and scraped, growing steadily more focused, all but forgetting where he was, until he noticed a man coming towards him down the square. He was not walking. He was full-length on the stone floor of the courtyard. Painfully, slowly, he was rolling his bare body towards the next shrine, all the while chanting a mantra.
The knife froze in Suraj’s hand. Inconceivable to feel as devout as this man, so certain of the existence of God and certain that this God looked after you personally. The ground was paved with rough granite and as the man came closer Suraj saw that grit had pierced his body all over, peeling skin away, making it bleed. Pink bits of his flesh clung to the courtyard’s stone. His eyes betrayed no pain, they gazed skyward: entranced.
Suraj shut his eyes. His breakfast rose into his mouth – bitter coffee. He swallowed it back and shut his eyes, fending off thoughts of wounds and gore. His head filled with the yelping of a dog, his nose with blood, rum and night jasmine all mixed up into a familiar stink of rage and fear. He had to struggle not to throw up.
He opened his eyes and saw himself looking directly into Badal’s face. The man had a mocking expression. He did not speak, only raised his joined-up eyebrows and curled his lips. He stood exactly where the blood-stained man had rolled past. He did not seem to notice that the dust below his feet was speckled pink.
Suraj stood up. He put his wood and his knife back into his pockets. He had seen enough, he would not go to another shrine. In fact if he could help it he would never go to a temple or church or mosque or monastery ever again. He would, instead, go and eat. He felt suddenly famished, as if he would pass out without food, his mouth flooding with salty drool at the thought of the crabs he had feasted on yesterday. He would have a whole plate of rice and that crab curry. It was rich and red and smelled insanely delicious. He felt his teeth crack the claws, he sucked out succulent white flesh, licked up every last drop of the gravy. Maybe they ought to shoot a test scene at that restaurant, right there, the air smoky with crab. Those shabby restaurants were made for travel films, with their turquoise walls and parrot-green chairs, the bottles filled with scarlet syrups and sauces, the gleaming brass pots and pans that stood in a row at the back.
Badal said, “So, shall we carry on? The next courtyard is the one where . . .”
Suraj said, “No more courtyards. Just show me the way out, and help me get my shoes back.”
Badal smiled as if infinitely regretful. “My morning is gone. You’ll need to pay me even if you don’t complete the tour.”
“I already paid your friend,” Suraj said, “the other man . . . what was his name?”
“Ah, but that was just the advance. He must have told you.”
“That definitely wasn’t what he said,” Suraj said, although he was too hungry to battle. “Not at all.” He remembered his expense account and said, “Oh what the hell. How much?”
*
Badal stood looking at the money in his hand. Five hundred rupees. And he would get the rest from Hari later. More than he had ever made from one client in half an hour. Ripping off the ungodly was somehow more satisfying, it made the world a better place. He stood rubbing the crisp notes one against the other. Brand new. He hated folding new notes. He slid them into his wallet, taking care to keep them flat at the edges. He would use his free time and the windfall to buy something for Raghu – maybe a shirt, maybe a watch. One of those watches that told much more than the time.
Badal left the temple and scoured Jarmuli’s main market for a present. He had never given Raghu anything and now that the thought had crossed his mind it had become a pressing need. He looked through stacks of resplendent polyester shirts at one clothing store after another, then watches. He changed his mind, thought he would buy the boy a radio and examined transistors of all prices and sizes, almost bought a sleek silver and black one shaped like a torpedo. After more than an hour of indecision, he settled on a made-in-China mobile phone. With a SIM card in it, it added up to quite a bit more than he could afford, but it would impress Raghu no end. He was sure of that.
He urged his scooter towards the beach until the old machine’s rattle made it sound as if it were dying under him. He couldn’t wait to give Raghu the mobile. He reached the promenade when it was well past the time Johnny Toppo shut the tea stall for his lunch and siesta. Business only took off much later in the afternoon when the beach swelled with stalls selling food, trinkets, souvenirs.
He skidded to a halt near the promenade and hurriedly parked the scooter, running to the beach. The sand felt hot enough to roast peanuts in. Not many people were about, only the diehards determined to make the most of their holiday, dashing in and out of the water. Badal made his way towards an isolated nook further down, where Raghu tended to laze most afternoons. The sun was a million crystalline pieces in the sea, glittering far into the distance. Badal never wore glasses against the sun, looking directly into it sometimes, daring it to do its worst.
He turned the curve and there Raghu was, half hidden by the prow of an upturned boat. The tea stall was shut. The boy could have gone off, but he had not. Had he been waiting for Badal? He must have been.
Badal came closer. He saw that the boy had gnawed at the skin on his chapping lips until the lower one – the fuller, fleshier, darker one – had bled. Burst open like a fig, Badal remembered from somewhere: your lips, bitten when kissed, burst open like a ripe fig.
Was it only two months ago that he had met Raghu? Three? He had been sitting on the tea-stall bench recovering from a quarrel with his uncle. Raghu had come to him and put down a tiny clay cup of tea unasked, saying, “Careful, it’s hot,” and Badal had looked up into the largest, darkest eyes he thought he had ever seen. The boy’s voice had a husky edge that made the words taper off and retreat where you could not follow them. It left Badal wanting to hear him speak again, so he had said, “You’re new?” Raghu had smiled in reply and Badal had caught sight of the dimple in his left cheek. All his annoyance had dissolved into euphoria.
It must have been the sight of the bleeding lip that made Badal sit closer now than he had dared before. Raghu said nothing, he held out his packet of gutka to Badal. They looked at the water. They never spoke much, but Badal had only to be within sight of Raghu to feel a deep contentment, as if he needed nothing more in the world than silence and the knowledge that Raghu was in it somewhere. He sensed that Raghu felt this too. Once or twice he had hidden himself behind the hull of a boat and watched Raghu look up each time a man approached the tea stall and droop with disappointment when it was just another customer. He was not a hundred per cent sure, but then what was a hundred per cent sure?
Badal’s days now existed for the mornings and afternoons when he could escape clients, family, customers, priests, God himself – and run to the beach to sit holding a clay cup of Raghu’s tea – just sit with his voice within hearing, his body within touching distance. Raghu brushed past him – on purpose, he was certain of it – as he went about serving customers, rinsing cups, doing whatever he did at Johnny Toppo’s stall.
Ten days ago when he was at the tea stall and Johnny Toppo not there, Raghu had asked him out of the blue, “Have you ever been beaten? Thrashed?”
Raghu had not called him “Babu”, as Johnny Toppo did. Badal paused over the thought. Raghu did not call him anything. He used neither his name, nor the deferential Babu, or Sahib, or Dada. It felt loaded with meaning, how he took care not to distance him that way.
“Many times,” Badal had said. “After my father died, my uncle used to clobber me till my teeth ran around in my mouth like dice. With anything at hand – his shoes, his belt, even with the stick the bastard killed rats with.” He smiled as he answered Raghu’s question. He had suffered, he wanted Raghu to know, but he was nonchalant about it.
Raghu pulled up his shirt to show Badal a welt on his back. “Yesterday.” He had said nothing more.
The rage and tenderness that had flooded Badal that afternoon came back again. He wanted to ask Raghu about the wound – had it healed? Was Johnny Toppo the bullying swine who had done it? The boy was gazing at the sea, a finger in one of his ears, then scratching something on his leg, his jaws working the tobacco in his mouth. The lusciousness of that itch, that hand moving from ear to leg – a boyish, scarred, beautiful hand, the wrist bone jutting out in a knob. What beauty – how could such beauty possibly exist?
A red bead of betel-juiced spittle trickled from the corner of Raghu’s mouth and he sucked it back in. The sun turned the sea into jagged blades of light. A faraway white-topped breaker gathered speed as it began its run for the beach. On the horizon was a grey, indefinable shape that might be a building or a small island. Was it an island Badal had failed to notice all his life? Arrow-like boats streaked past, criss-crossing. A group of brown dogs chased each other up and down the sand and into the water. Near Raghu’s feet a coin-sized crab dug itself out of the sand and skittered away. Badal looked up from the crab, saw that his island had moved west. And then after a while, further west. Everything stood still and speeded up all at once. The faraway breaker came closer, it grew taller, it roared and bellowed, it flung itself at the sand, and without warning or preparation Badal found his lips on Raghu’s, his hand roaming his smooth bare chest, following the line of the fine hair down into his shorts. The blood on Raghu’s lips tasted of salt and sea and rust. He sucked the grainy tobacco off Raghu’s tongue and felt it going straight to his head, making him dizzy, sending his hand deeper down. And then the boy pushed him off and ran away along the beach, leaving him empty and short of breath.
He clambered up. Everything was in disarray. He stumbled, hunting for his slippers. They had travelled over the sand in two different directions. His legs had turned into stilts, his feet would not fit into his slippers, as if he had grown extra toes. By the time he managed to put them on, Raghu was nowhere to be seen.
Sleeping On Jupiter Page 5
