It was true. He knew it to be so, had known it ever since his first lisping, toddling visit to the temple in his father’s arms. He remembered his own fierce intensity, his infantile scholarship. He had mastered every twist and turn in the epics, the intricate ancestries in the Mahabharata unknotted themselves in his childish mind when he was only eight. If someone said “Arjuna”, he would chirrup, “Born of Indra!” He knew even then that Vyasa was the father of Vidura and Gandhari the daughter of Subala. He could fast all day and never ask for a drop of water. Neighbours wondered if he was a child saint.
He longed to be with real seekers, those who would understand the depth and gravity of his words. He turned away from the women, knowing his contempt would show on his face. He cut short their round of the temple and shepherded them to another courtyard to watch the nightly pennant-changing ceremony. Hundreds of people waited there in orderly, patient anticipation. He showed them to a place where they could sit and then walked away, merging into the crowds.
*
One moment here, the next moment gone: had they not been warned never to lose sight of the man? Latika wondered where he had disappeared to. Perhaps to a toilet? Were there toilets at the temple? She wanted one with a sudden desperation and made noises about following him. But Gouri was now even more ostentatiously the expedition leader and paid Latika no attention. She had been in a state of otherworldiness since they had entered the temple, and it was impossible to communicate with her about matters as lowly as toilets. Latika clenched her muscles and hoped she would survive.
The main shrine had three connected towers, the tallest of which seemed as high as a ten-storey building. They stared at the flags fluttering at their tips, trying not to blink and lose the first glimpse. A man began to climb the stone peaks of the temple’s lowest tower. Latika saw Vidya clutch Gouri’s hand, so she clutched Vidya’s. Shouts and murmurs. How his yellow dhoti flared and fluttered against the black sky! As he climbed, unprotected by net or rope, his figure grew small, then smaller, until by the time he had reached the pinnacle of the tallest tower he was a tiny mannequin that might any moment be swept off by the gusts of wind gathering strength in the Bay of Bengal. Anxiety rippled through the crowd. There, on top, as frail as a scarecrow against the immense darkness, he began the process of taking down the old flag and unfurling and positioning the new. Would that flag billowing in the high wind twist around him and tug him into the sea beyond? Would it become his shroud?
With the new silk flag in its place at last, they realised that alongside the hundreds around them they had been holding their breath, which they let out all at once. The wind too seemed to sigh and die down. People began to exclaim and chatter, recognising an intermission. A child near them demanded a biscuit. Latika said, “Now I really must find a bathroom, or I’ll burst.” A few minutes later, at the end of an unusually hot day, it started to drizzle, the air grew dense with the scent of water meeting dry earth, and everyone fled for cover. Scurrying to the gates, saris over their heads to shield themselves from the rain, Gouri said to Vidya, “She has no sense of occasion. Couldn’t she wait two minutes before she said something so tasteless?”
*
It was still drizzling but with a powdery lightness. The night air was fresh and cool. It had taken Badal quite a while to find his three old matrons after the pennant ceremony and take them back to the Swirling Sea Hotel, but now at last he was free. In his breast pocket he felt the reassuring shape of the new mobile phone. He had put in the prepaid SIM card, already topped up with fifty rupees. Raghu would be wonderstruck. And he himself would never again have to wander the beach looking for him; it would be the work of a fingertip now.
He rounded a corner and turned into Grand Road, usually crowded with stalls and vendors, now windswept and rain-dampened. Too late for shoppers or merchants. But it was not empty. Not far off in the deserted street, he could see two tall figures and two shorter ones lit by the one streetlamp that was working. They were strolling, pausing at times to drink from a bottle. Coming closer, he saw that one of the men had dark, curly hair. The second man, in a kurta and pyjama, had white hair down to his shoulders and held a cigarette in one hand while his other hand kneaded a boy’s buttocks.
He stopped his scooter.
The boy was Raghu. He had to be.
Raghu had an arm around the dark-haired man’s waist and was begging for a swig of beer. Badal could hear his voice, unfamiliar in its archness: “Go on, just a few sips.” And the man replying, “Hey, you’re a kid, you know, it’s illegal.” His Hindi was strongly accented. He heard Raghu laugh as he ambled between the two, looking even slighter and smaller by contrast. He was not in his usual red T-shirt and grey shorts. He had on a black shirt tucked into tight black jeans. Badal had never seen those clothes on Raghu, did not know he possessed such clothes. His heart contracted at the thought, everything paused. And then he heard Raghu’s coaxing voice again: “Just a sip.”
The curly-haired man tipped the beer bottle into Raghu’s mouth. Badal felt the hard glass edge of the bottle hit Raghu’s teeth, involuntarily clenched his own. The man kept forcing in the beer until Raghu gagged and choked and his knees buckled. The white-haired one drawled through his cigarette, “Take it easy, Jacko. You’ll break his teeth.” He passed his cigarette to a lanky boy only a bit taller than Raghu. The second boy did not look in Raghu’s direction. He took a drag and gave the cigarette back to the white-haired man.
Badal wanted to turn his scooter around so that he would not have to drive past them. But he carried on inexorably, until he was next to the group, until Raghu turned and saw him, until the white-haired man was staring at him, his gaze idle. Without his sunglasses and his yellow robes he looked different, but it was the monk who meditated waist-deep in the sea, Badal was sure of it.
Stationed in the sea every morning. Watching Raghu.
Badal speeded past the group and looped back through another set of alleys towards the empty beach. He drove into the sand until the scooter skidded and came to a stop. He threw it aside and ran to the beach. He flung himself at the sand. The hard oblong of the new mobile in his pocket slammed into his ribs, knocking his breath out.
The ocean was inside him, the impersonal immensity of it. It had frozen solid, it had exploded into a thousand icy pieces and each individual shard pierced him, made him cry out aloud.
The water was too far away to wet him, but the earth began to darken around his face. His nose was bleeding. He let it flow, he wanted it to bleed, he wanted the blood in his body to drain away.
*
The stubble that was a mark of slovenliness for Badal was achieved by Suraj with the help of a beard trimmer that could be set with millimetric precision. The stubble wasn’t merely about cultivating an image, it was part of his strategy of attack and concealment, his daily war against the secret self he loathed but could not quell. He could not bear people to know how, in truth, he needed everything just so, had to struggle not to set right a book upside down on a shelf or straighten a crooked carpet.
Having left the temple and shaken off Badal that afternoon, Suraj had eaten his crab curry and rice, then fallen asleep immediately afterwards in a heat and hangover-induced daze. By the time he woke it was dark. He had not met Nomi after she had driven off, leaving him stranded at the temple gates. He had not looked for her in her room, nor had she knocked on his door. Just as well. He did not like people in his hotel room. He did not want them to see the beard trimmer ready by the plug point on the bathroom counter beside all the other oddments that, over long years of travel, he had grown accustomed to having with him. Bug spray in case of mosquitoes. Antiseptic. Antacids. His own towel because hotel towels disgusted him. Plus his bottles of whisky, his carton of cigarettes. His photography equipment was in its own bag and inside his backpack was his stash of dope. On the table next to the bed were his wood-carving tools. There were four kinds of gouges. Three carving knives with short, sharp blades, each one differently shaped, and
with broad handles that sat comfortably in his palm. The knife he used most had a lethal point that he took the greatest care never to blunt. The toolbox had slots for each instrument, including those for whetstones to sharpen the tools. When he felt in any way troubled, Suraj only had to open the box and look at the tools securely in their own niches for the universe to regain some semblance of order.
The last thing he did when checking into a hotel was to open the toolbox and put it on the bedside table. Until five months ago, he would have completed the ritual by placing a weathered little panda next to his toolbox: only then would the room have become his own. Ayesha had given him that bear before they were married, after a long-ago trip to China, and it had travelled everywhere with him since then. It was now a grimy black and white ball of nylon fur crushed into the depths of his rucksack. He could no longer bring himself to look at it, but neither could he throw it away.
Suraj tossed his rucksack to a corner and fell back into the mound of pillows on his bed. That last terrible evening of his marriage with Ayesha. It was five months to the day – an anniversary of sorts! The recollection sent a stab of pain to his chest. Was this how heart attacks began? His father had died of one when he was just about this age, mid-forties. Suraj lay inert, hardly daring to breathe, trying to take his mind off that evening five months ago. He had relived it almost every hour. The minute he allowed his mind to wander he was back in their rented house in Delhi, its enclosed courtyard lined with dessicated potted palms and straggly jasmine. For all the dust on them, he used to like the companionable way they rustled if there was a breeze. That evening there wasn’t the whisper of a breeze, and the hot, dry air made noses bleed. He had not had much to drink, he had only been consumed by a black, bottomless despair, a sense of things ending, of hurtling into an abyss towards destruction. A dog had come into the yard after dark, looking for food. Suraj saw it ferreting around, sniffing the corners. A scrawny body and a tail that described a perfect circle. A cur. It tilted over the plastic garbage bin, clattering it to the concrete floor, spilling its foetid waste. Suraj had been sitting by himself, sweating quietly, holding his rum and coke. He did not know what got into him, but the glass fell through his fingers, he heard it shatter, and in a moment he was up, snatching his cricket bat. The dog cowered by the bin, everything else had blurred. Suraj knew only that he wanted to kill, smash the world into fragments. The dog looked for a way out, but it was too frightened to find the gap in the fencing through which it had come in. Suraj slammed the bat into its side, once, then again and again. He could not stop, his arms did not belong to him any more. The high-pitched yelps of the dog stoked his frenzy. He hit it harder and harder as if he needed to grind the animal into bonemeal. At some point, he became aware of his wife screaming. She threw herself against him and he pushed her away so savagely that she fell. That made him drop the bat. And then the only sounds were his panting, his wife sobbing, and low whimpers from the dog, a mess of broken bones held together by bloodied fur.
Ayesha had left the next day. They had been through partings before, when she had gone, her body a porcupine’s, fending off touch, her silence the threat that she would never come back. This time too, after she left, he had told himself it would pass.
It would pass, he repeated to himself now, and meanwhile there was Johnnie Walker. Before he could think another black thought, Suraj swung himself up from the bed, washed one of the glasses in the minibar, dried it and poured himself a drink. He took a sip, placed the glass by his lamp, listened to the ice cubes clink. For a while he sat staring at the squat glass. He could hear the hum of the air conditioning, the fridge vibrating. It felt unbearable, the quiet. Alone he would plunge into deeper and deeper gloom; he needed company. It was about eight-thirty, purpled darkness, just the right time. He held his glass and bottle and stood up.
His room had French windows that opened onto a strip of garden shared by all the rooms on that section of the ground floor. The strip was divided by tall hedges and shrubs into sections, each with two chairs and a stone table so that you had the impression of owning a private garden. So private, that when Suraj stepped into the patch next to Nomi’s room, he found her clothes drying on a bush. He smiled. She was saving money not giving her clothes to the hotel laundry. Or, like him, she knew laundries were hothouses for germs. It felt strangely intimate knowing this, to be with her drying clothes. His bottle-free hand went out towards them: a soft, damp, white scrap that must be the shirt she had been wearing in the morning. A pair of white knickers with lacy edges. A dark blue brassiere. He had just touched its strap when he sprang back. She was standing there in the half light, hunched, wrapped in a sheet as if it were cold – although stepping out of the air-conditioning of his room, the briny air of the outdoors had felt to Suraj like a warm, moist slap.
He shuffled through his head for an explanation he could give her. Stepping closer to attempt an apology he saw that she was staring outward, mumuring to herself. She was glassy-eyed, and as he watched, a tremor shook her.
He spoke in a voice soft enough to be a whisper. “Hey? What’s up?” Was she on coke? Did she have some on her? That would be interesting.
He heard her gasp of surprise and saw her eyes come back into focus. It took a few seconds before she said, “Nothing, just listening to the sea.” And then, “Did you hear that strange sound? Such a hollow, scary, groaning sound.”
Although their hotel faced the sea, it was at a distance from the water. A stretch of grassy wasteland that was now a mass of shadows stood between them and the pale sky over the sea. The sound came from that direction.
“Probably a buffalo.” Suraj gestured at the expanse of the wasteland. “Someone must have left it tied there. I heard it too, there’s nothing scary about it.” He had already settled on a pretext for seeking her out. “Look, I’m sorry I was a bit . . . you know, rude this morning when you left the temple. Didn’t want to . . . Anyway, I’ve a peace offering here. You want to get a glass from your room?”
Nomi went in and fetched a glass, then tucked herself into one of the two garden chairs. She drew her sheet closer, like a shawl, and nestled in it. Her head popped out about above the cloth, making her look like an anxious child at the barber’s. Suraj said nothing. If she wanted to wear a bed sheet, who was he to ask her why. He set his bottle and glass on the table, and his mobile. Then a lighter and a packet of cigarettes. He poured whisky into the glass she had brought for herself and pushed it towards her. A tea light in the centre of the table cast a golden pool between them.
Nomi finished her first drink in two gulps. Suraj was surprised because he thought he had poured her a stiff one, but he filled her glass again without comment. Her eyes were on the candle’s light as she spoke. “I should say sorry too – but I don’t know what got into me . . . Can you believe it, I spent ages convincing them Jarmuli was the place to film – because of that temple? I plotted and planned . . . The fact is I’ve been wanting to come here for years, never had the money.” She took a long sip. “I think I might have been born here. I’m adopted. And you know how it is, adopted kids have this well-known need to go back to their roots!” She shrugged, waggled her head as if she was not entirely serious.
She had a high voice and bright, very black eyes. She still wore her big beads around her neck – she was a jingling mass of beads, bangles, braids, and threads. He thought of the tattoo at her navel, felt a surprisingly violent need to examine all the others.
“Where did you grow up?” He looked only at his glass. “When did you leave here?”
“Oh, years ago. Years and years ago. And growing up – all over the place – mostly Oslo, I guess, but zillions of countries and trillions of airports. This is the first time I’ve come back. And guess what? On the train, I got down at one station and it left without me! Just slid off. Didn’t whistle, nothing. One minute it was standing and the next minute it was moving off. I travel all the time and I’ve never done this kind of thing: I ran like hell after it and
managed to climb back on. Thought my heart would explode.”
Suraj looked up from his glass towards the shadowed trees. “Yeah, that happened to me once, and you know what, I didn’t run or anything. I just let the train go. I saw it leaving and I thought, What the hell, let it go, I don’t give a damn. I spent the night on a bench on the platform.”
The hardness of that bench, the black gloom just beyond the dim-lit platform, the dark huddles nearby of postal bundles and sleeping tramps: he remembered it well. He was expected home that evening from a work trip. Ayesha was waiting up for him. Later she told him she had been sleepless all night trying to reach him and failing, phoning friends to ask if they had news of him, dreading the thought of the calls she might need to make next: police stations, hospitals. Morgues. “Such a simple thing to call! Why the fuck didn’t you call?” She was so angry she had asked the question again and again, each time punching him in the ribs. “Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you?” But he hadn’t. He couldn’t. He had kept his phone switched off. He had dropped off the map for the night. The next day, back home, he sat out the raging storms of her anxiety and anger without a word. He would not tell her what had happened, nor explain why he had not called. He had no explanation for it himself.
To Nomi he said, “I hadn’t a clue what station it was until I woke up. All my luggage was gone. Camera too. I didn’t care.”
“Didn’t it feel good? Didn’t it feel great?” Nomi was half out of chair with delight, sheet falling off, revealing the thinnest of noodle straps underneath, over a bare shoulder. It appeared and disappeared under her mass of hair. The shoulder was smooth and shiny, the brown of dark honey. If you dipped in a finger for a taste it would be sweet. The brown shrimp. She did not look such a shrimp in candlelight.
Sleeping On Jupiter Page 9
