by Tim Ewins
It was OK.
Fishton didn’t quite have the excitement she’d experienced in Russia. The food was similar to Swedish food (everyone ate fish) and she didn’t laugh even half as much as she had done in Poland. There was one thing in particular missing from Ladyjan’s recent trip to Fishton, and that was Manjan.
She was certain that people in Fishton would be as interesting as Manjan had said they were but she hadn’t spoken to many of them. She’d stolen from them instead. She’d liked the idea of continuing to travel but she was beginning to give up. If she could take enough money from enough people she could fly back to Sweden and live how she used to. Life had been exciting for a little while, but she had been right when she’d told Manjan that life wasn’t like it was in the movies.
‘Check-in for the A1056 flight to Delhi will open in 30 minutes.’ Ladyjan looked up from her latest spot in the airport. She’d found it relatively easy to hitchhike the forty miles from Fishton to the nearest international, and the people in the airport had more to steal than those in Fishton.
It’s surprising how little people notice each other in an airport. Ladyjan had been living on different chairs in different rooms for three weeks and no one had batted an eyelid. Absentmindedly, she pulled some foam from the chair she was currently sitting on and watched the screen. She’d paid attention every time the announcer had mentioned Delhi. It had only happened three times in three weeks but it always made her smile. Delhi was in India. India was where Manjan was. Somehow, the planes connected them.
She reached into her deceivingly deep pockets. Rummaging past several passports and a great deal of cash, which she kept in a stranger’s leather wallet, she felt for the passport with two bent corners. She often felt for this passport; there was something comforting and familiar about the man in the picture’s face.
She didn’t know what.
‘Do you live here or something?’ a large man in a security uniform boomed. Ladyjan looked up at him, surprised.
‘I’m waiting for my flight,’ she stuttered, preparing to run. The security guard laughed and frowned at the same time.
‘Look,’ he said with a fake smile plastered over his wide, stubbled face, ‘you’ve been waiting a long time.’ He paused for effect. ‘You’re not waiting for a flight. You want to know what I think?’
Ladyjan ran.
She ran past two large unattended suitcases and a small unattended suitcase, she ran past a queue of people waiting to check-in to fly to Delhi and as she clocked the doors, she ran past Manjan and his father. She only noticed the doors.
‘Something’s kicking off, lad,’ Manjan’s father smiled at him but Manjan hadn’t noticed. He was folding a page back in his new High-Tide Travel Guide to India. He was determined to enjoy India this time, Ladyjan or no Ladyjan, for his mother. No. He was determined to enjoy himself for his father.
Ladyjan ran out of the airport doors as Manjan looked up at his father. ‘I’ll ring,’ he said, ‘I promise.’
Outside, Ladyjan was certain she’d got away from Mr wide-stubble-face. She rested her hands on her knees and breathed deeply. In and then out. In and then out. In and then...
‘Don’t run,’ came the man’s gruff voice as he put a heavy hand on Ladyjan’s shoulder and hardened his grip. She couldn’t have run if she’d tried. ‘Why,’ the man heaved out a lengthy wheeze and then coughed, ‘why have you been in the airport for so long? You need money?’ It was a nice question but it was asked in a terrifying way. Ladyjan doubted very much that he was about to offer her money. She didn’t reply. ‘Somewhere to live? Look, I can help you.’ Still, Ladyjan didn’t reply. In her experience, people in uniforms rarely wanted to help her.
The man coughed again, a loud, phlegmy cough and then lowered his voice to a whisper.
‘I’m going to pretend to take you to the security office, but I have a job for you. It’ll make you money and take you...’ he wobbled his head, thinking of the right word, ‘...places.’
His grip implied that this wasn’t an offer.
‘You ever worked in a fish factory before?’ he whispered, before looking up and shouting, ‘OK lass, you’re coming with me,’ and jolting her back into the airport.
23
An Indian seagull
Delhi, India. 1977.
Manjan hung up the phone. He had stuck to his word and rung his father every week for the past two years from different parts of India. One week, when he had joined a group of travellers on a desert excursion far away from a phone line, he had even asked Kalem to call on his behalf. His father had been confused, but grateful. One way or another, Manjan had been in contact every seven days, religiously.
In a week, he would be going home. He wasn’t sure what he would do when he got there but he fancied work as a box-packaging specialist and technician. He had experience, and after seeing Kalem’s pride at his job he thought it might be quite rewarding.
Manjan was ready to stop travelling again. After landing in Delhi he had travelled back east to Varanasi and met with an excited Kalem who had feared the worst for Manjan when he had left. Kalem was certain that Manjan’s return was another of god’s miracles. He was also sure without doubt that Manjan’s shaven face and clean feet were two more of them.
From Varanasi, Manjan had travelled north to the mountains, where he had lived with an old married couple for a while. The couple liked the way Manjan made weekly phone calls to his father and they appreciated his help growing tea leaves on the plantation. They also enjoyed watching as Manjan completed his twice-daily ritual of standing at the highest point of the plantation and looking right, then looking left, then right and then left again. They didn’t know why he did this, but it was oddly endearing.
In the west of India, Manjan had enjoyed all the ‘pur’ towns and cities, before one last stop in Varanasi to say goodbye to Kalem (who assured Manjan that it was not goodbye – people had a tendency to do that). Now he found himself back in Delhi hanging up the phone for the last time and wiping his sweating face with the bottom of a luminous t-shirt.
On his way back to the hotel Manjan browsed the market. He needed to get a present, something that would show how much he appreciated his father’s insistence on sending him back to India. The market made it hard. It seemed unlikely that he would manage to get spices through customs at the airport and most of the home furnishings on offer were too big to travel with. A lot of the ornaments depicted obscure sexual positions and his father never wore a suit, let alone a tie.
‘Hey, man, what you after – a lamp?’ shouted a man with a trolley full of lamps. Manjan instinctively waved his hand, no. ‘Expensive lamps man, but a good price,’ the man went on undeterred, as Manjan received an accidental elbow to the chest from the dense crowd in front of him. Maybe looking at lamps would be better than continuing to fight through the rabble.
‘What kind of lamp you want man?’ the seller asked, forcefully handing Manjan a red glass lamp with a picture of a bird that looked like a seagull on it.
‘We have lamps that look like these in a shop where I’m from,’ Manjan said. ‘What type of bird is that? Ours have seagulls on them.’
‘Seagulls? No. My man, these are Indian birds. Very unique. You want green?’ He thrust a green lamp into Manjan’s free hand.
‘How much?’ Manjan asked, waving the red lamp. His father might quite like an Indian version of a classic Fishton lamp.
After a short haggle, Manjan agreed to purchase the lamp at less than a tenth of what people paid for one of the seagull lamps in Fishton.
‘Very good price,’ the man nodded.
‘Very good price,’ Manjan agreed, but the man already looked distracted, peering over Manjan’s shoulder into the crowd.
Manjan followed his stare and froze. Not to the right of him and not to the left of him, but standing right behind him, waiting to talk to the man selling lamps, was
a dark-eyed, pale-skinned girl with bits of hair stuck to her face from the heat.
‘Um, hello?’ she said in a soft Swedish accent.
* * *
‘Hello, yes, how are you?’ replied the man who had just sold Manjan a lamp.
‘You’ve not bought that lamp, have you?’ asked Ladyjan, with an emphasis on the word ‘bought’, but Manjan couldn’t reply. He couldn’t say anything, in fact.
‘Yes, you too,’ the lamp-seller continued, ‘same place tonight, I can meet you at eight.’
Ladyjan giggled. ‘You did buy that lamp didn’t you?’ A man from the crowd bumped into her and she held onto Manjan’s wrist to stop herself from falling. She didn’t let go. ‘You do know where else you can get those lamps?’
‘You got the...’ the lamp-seller started. Ladyjan raised her dark brown eyes to meet his. Her smile disappeared as an idea swept across her face.
‘Jan,’ she said, looking back to him, ‘you trust me?’ Manjan still hadn’t said a word but his face said that he did. ‘Eight,’ she said to the man, ‘at eight,’ and the man frowned hard at her.
When Manjan had finally regained the ability to speak, he stuttered.
‘It wasn’t a carton of milk,’ he said, ‘it was yoghurt.’ Ladyjan held onto his arm tight and they both ran together through the crowd.
* * *
In shock and wanting to say something less stupid than his only sentence to Ladyjan so far, Manjan kept trying to pull her to a halt. Ladyjan would not stop. There was something of a panic in her run, and that, along with the density of the crowd, meant they crashed into strangers regularly.
‘Where are we going?’ Manjan asked loudly over the noise of the market.
‘Goa,’ Ladyjan replied. Manjan panted. He wasn’t as fit as Ladyjan and they’d been running for over ten minutes.
‘I can’t run to Goa,’ he said. ‘It’s too far.’ At this remark, Ladyjan stopped running and instead fell into a side alley laughing. Manjan followed, half-laughing at his own comment and half-panting. He was aware that he was not looking his best, but Ladyjan wouldn’t have agreed with him. To her, he looked like the best thing she’d seen since the day she hadn’t left Russia.
She rested her sweaty forehead on his chest and felt every heavy rise and fall as he re-caught his breath. She lifted her head to face him.
‘Why…’ Manjan started and then took another deep breath, ‘are we running?’ He smiled. ‘You don’t have to buy a lamp.’ Ladyjan laughed and took the red lamp out of Manjan’s hand.
‘You bought a lamp,’ she said. ‘You came all the way to India and bought this lamp.’ She raised the lamp to his face. ‘It has a seagull on it.’
‘It’s an Indian bird.’
Ladyjan pulled at a string in her pocket and a leather pouch came out. It didn’t really look like something she would normally keep on her.
‘He wanted me to give him this,’ she said with a fading smile. ‘Now he expects me to give it to him at eight. At eight, I will be in Goa and I hope, maybe...’ She didn’t say it but Manjan understood this was an invitation. He didn’t reply.
‘You can get this lamp in Fishton,’ Ladyjan said quietly, and Manjan’s eyes narrowed. What had Ladyjan been doing in Fishton? Equally quietly, almost inaudible over the market noise, he told her that he was going to Fishton in a week and Ladyjan replied mysteriously that she can’t go back. ‘Not now,’ she said, at the same time as gesturing to the leather pouch with her eyes. ‘Poxy fish factory,’ she muttered in her soft Swedish voice, and Manjan felt such a strong surge of love that he kissed her.
For the rest of the day they talked, and laughed, and kissed. Neither of them noticed the person on a bicycle who knocked a man right into Ladyjan’s back. They didn’t feel the jolt of the impact or hear the lamp smash below them. They didn’t notice the man apologise in a different language or the person on a bicycle shouting at all three of them in good, if a little abusive, English. They didn’t notice the market quieten and they didn’t notice a stray dog lie down next to them, fall asleep, wake up and leave. At eight fifteen, they didn’t even think about the lamp-seller as he paced his room on the other side of town cursing Ladyjan with each step. They just talked, and laughed, and kissed. They didn’t even notice the sun setting (which is of course the best time to experience a Delhi market).
‘Goa?’ Manjan smiled.
24
A donkey
Fishton to Delhi. 1975-1977.
‘We want you to be our regional sales manager,’ the man paused to think of how to phrase it, ‘for a rather far-off region.’ He was much smaller than the wide-faced security guard from the airport, but he had the same menacing and imposing demeanour. The fish factory, back in Fishton, where Ladyjan had now spent the night, was equally imposing – a large warehouse full of industrial machinery and buttons she was scared to touch. The floor (her bed) was made of cement and she hadn’t been offered a pillow. The airport security guard had watched her sleep, which meant of course that she hadn’t slept at all.
Before the workers had come in the morning after, the security guard had moved Ladyjan into an office and left, locking the door behind him. Ladyjan waited there for three hours.
She watched through the large office window as the workers arrived and tried to get their attention, but they all seemed to actively ignore her. They had definitely seen her. One lady caught eye contact with Ladyjan and looked at her sadly while putting on her white cap and overalls, before quickly looking away again and starting to work.
‘Of course you’ll report back to Fishton,’ the smaller man said, now pacing the office. Ladyjan looked right towards the window but without moving her head. The workers were still there. The man followed her eyes. ‘You’re not in danger,’ he said. ‘They don’t respond to you because the window is soundproof. They just can’t hear you.’ Then he picked up his chair and slammed it hard on the ground. ‘Work!’ he shouted. Ladyjan looked out the window, this time turning her whole head to see the workers pick up the pace. Those at conveyor belts moved their hands quicker and those walking across the room broke into a jog. Soundproof indeed.
Ladyjan wasn’t one to show fear, but at that moment she felt it.
‘India,’ the man said quietly. The workers were already beginning to slow down to a normal pace again. I need you to pick some things up for me from a city in India. I notice that you carry many passports. None with your face on though, no?’ He picked up one of the many passports sprawled across his desk and pretended to study it. It was the passport that Ladyjan had used to get from Poland to Ukraine, from Ukraine to Russia and then finally from Russia to here. ‘You’re not…Alaina,’ he stated, not asked. She shook her head. ‘Who would notice if you disappeared?’ Ladyjan didn’t say anything but swallowed a lump in her dry throat. ‘Oh no,’ the man said, ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ and then he laughed. ‘I just meant if you were to go on holiday for a while.’ He waved his hand dismissively and then drew his eyelids close together and said, ‘although’, implying something non-specific but specifically not very nice.
Ladyjan was yet to say anything to the man. He didn’t know what she sounded like and he didn’t really know anything about her. All he did know was what he had been told by his wide-faced security friend. He knew that she’d lived in an airport for three weeks stealing from strangers and he knew that she wasn’t English. From that, he’d deduced that no one important would look for her and that she probably needed money.
‘We’ve been working on something quite lucrative at the Fish Factory, and we want you to be a part of it. Let me let you in on a little secret,’ he said, and then he let her in on his little secret.
His little secret:
‘You see, our last regional sales manager, poor sod, she fell very ill. Terribly ill. She was working out in the field and she was seen, um, applying for a different job, shall we say.
That’s the thing with this job, by the way, you’re always seen. There’s always someone who knows you nearby. When our last regional sales manager was seen doing the job correctly, she was rewarded. When she was seen doing the job...incorrectly, unfortunately she fell very ill. Terribly ill. So now there’s a position which has opened up. I think you would be perfect. Here’s how it works.
‘I will give you an inordinate amount of money and you will take it to the airport. The security guard – you’ve already met him – he can give you a lift, it’s not close you see, but you know that. He’ll also let you into departures and you can skip security if you’d like. I’d recommend it with this kind of cash. He’ll be able to see you when you’re in departures. He’s a lovely man, but a violent sod and an erratic driver, so be careful what you do.
‘You’ll board the plane to Delhi. Now, I’ve got a mate who flies to Delhi every so often and he’ll be on the same plane – big fella, you want to watch out for that one. Anyway, he probably won’t introduce himself so you won’t know who he is. When you land – and when you do land, be careful of Harry who hangs out in the airport – you need to take the money to a bloke who sells lamps. I’ll give you an address. It is a lot of money for some lamps I know, but they’re very good lamps. This bloke who sells them, he’s a close friend of mine. It was him who, unfortunately, witnessed our last regional sales manager get very, very ill.
‘I want those lamps on every third lorry travelling down to Surat port. You can join the lamps on one of the lorries. I know the lorry drivers – great guys – but you should be careful of them – fiercely loyal. At Surat, you’ll see a man fishing in the port. He will be the only man fishing in the port. He never catches anything. He will get you on a boat and that boat will land in Fishton. When you’re back, we’ll chat and I’ll make sure you get paid. Any questions?’
Ladyjan couldn’t help but notice that the man’s little secret wasn’t actually very little at all, but she wasn’t sure what questions she could ask that wouldn’t make her ill. Terribly ill.
