by Tim Ewins
‘Drugs?’ she breathed with a slight cough.
‘Nice lamps,’ the man responded.
‘If I do it. After that, I can go?’ The man rubbed his chin as if in thought before responding that, no, she could not. After she had come back, she could fly to Delhi again, with more money.
‘It’s a lifestyle,’ he said, emphasising the word ‘life’.
* * *
There was one perk to Ladyjan’s new ‘job’ and that was that she would visit India. Manjan might be in India. But for this small perk there were many disadvantages. She was presumably being watched all the time, although she couldn’t always tell if this was true or not, and she seemed to constantly be in possession of illegitimate money that she couldn’t spend. She had a wage of her own, but it was very low and she was often in the company of terrifying people. Travelling in the back of a lorry across India was uncomfortable and drawn out and although she never inspected the lamps through fear, she was fairly certain she was travelling with narcotics, internationally.
By the end of her first year working she began to realise that the one perk that she thought she had with the job didn’t feel like a perk at all. She’d made three round trips and hadn’t seen Manjan. India was big, and she wasn’t even sure he was in India.
On her third trip back to Fishton, Ladyjan had been forcibly told to stay on the boat behind a crate of lamps. She had listened as two voices spoke old Fishton to each other and rummaged around the ice crates filled with fish.
‘They never check the lamps,’ a worker at the docks winked at her when the voices had gone, but Ladyjan didn’t care. She’d stopped caring about anything.
By the sixth time Ladyjan visited India she’d resigned herself to being a mule. A donkey with no true home and no true friends. A donkey who barely spoke to anyone in Fishton other than people she worked for and hated, and a donkey who spoke to even fewer people in India. Once, in Fishton, she’d considered talking to a lonely-looking man who was sitting in a café drinking tea by himself. He looked like the man she’d stolen a passport from in the airport a few years ago and he had a friendly face. As Ladyjan had stood up to move to his table a large, balding man had sat next to him, apologised for being late and said he was only in Fishton for a few days. So she continued to walk past the table and out of the café. The large balding man had smiled at her as she passed.
Ladyjan walked off the plane in Delhi for the sixth time, looking respectable and holding an inordinate amount of cash in her clothes but feeling like a donkey. In a few months, after she’d purchased and transported the lamps, she would be treated with hay. A small amount of money to keep her alive. That evening she slept in the same hostel she always did when she was Delhi. It had been specifically picked by the man at the fish factory because it had everything she needed – a mattress, his friend, who could watch her (mental little so-and-so, apparently) and no official check-in procedure.
In the morning, she ate a cereal breakfast at the same café she always ate a cereal breakfast in Delhi, picked by the same donkey owner who picked everything this donkey did. Then she took her inordinate amount of cash to the same market to pass to the same lamp-seller before meeting him later in the same place to pick up the same number of mysteriously illegal lamps.
She stood behind a tourist like she always did. The tourist was purchasing a lamp and she secretly cursed him under her breath. He had no idea how little this sale meant to the lamp-seller or how much the lamp-seller would get from his next international customer.
The man in front of her turned around.
‘Um, hello?’ she said in a soft Swedish accent.
* * *
One of Shakey’s eyes was facing slightly upwards and his other was facing directly at Manjan. His eyelids were moving like they couldn’t stay open or shut and his mouth hung slightly further open than normal. He was clearly quite drunk, but he was listening very intently.
‘She sounds awesome,’ he slurred, ‘like a film.’
‘No, she was forced to run drugs,’ Manjan protested. ‘She was very unhappy. But then we met again, and that was down to fate. The same fate which has bought me to Palolem and the same fate which will lead Ladyjan back to Palolem, back to me.’
Shakey looked at Manjan, impressed. He thought Manjan looked quite on-edge. Maybe it could be the wine, but he wanted to relax him. Shakey took hold of Manjan’s hand and wiggled it up and down like you do to a baby. Manjan looked at their hands moving together.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, but felt surprisingly relaxed at the gentle movement.
‘I’m Shakey,’ answered Shakey. Manjan still wasn’t really sure why Shakey was called Shakey. He went on.
‘The fish factory sent Ladyjan to Delhi over and over again, and I was in Delhi. Fate wanted us to find one another. If she hadn’t found me that day in the market, I’d have travelled back to Fishton and we would have met there. We were magnets, swinging around each other until eventually our gravitational pull brought us to the same spot, in the same market, at the same lamp stall.’
Shakey’s eyes continued to concentrate. They were concentrating hard, but they were also both looking in different directions and they both looked confused.
‘Would you like another drink?’ Manjan asked, and stood up to go to the bar while shakey nodded for a prolonged amount of time.
At the bar, he ordered a small glass of red wine and a small bucket of Red Bull. He did not ask for vodka.
‘Fate will bring Ladyjan back to Palolem,’ Shakey said, again a little slurred. ‘But why back here? Why not Russia or Poland or Sweden or Fishton? Why Goa?’
25
An alive bull
Delhi to Palolem. 1977.
You wouldn’t expect to see a 25-year-old man imitating a bull. But that’s exactly what Ladyjan, and a bull, could see.
Manjan and the bull started eye-to-eye, staring at each other. The bull snorted. Manjan snorted. The bull stepped backwards. Manjan stepped backwards. The bull picked up litter from the dusty street with its mouth. Manjan frowned, thought about it, and then picked up litter from the dusty street with his mouth.
‘No, no,’ shouted a man who was walking on the other side of the street, ‘is bull.’ He made horn signs with his fingers and imitated charging, but Manjan didn’t care. Ladyjan was in fits of giggles and that was what mattered to him. Besides, he was winning.
‘You’re crazy,’ Ladyjan shouted through laughter. The man the other side of the street agreed, waving his finger round his ear with a very serious expression on his face. ‘Yes, crazy,’ he shouted before leaving in disbelief at other people’s stupidity.
The bull snorted again and looked at Manjan, who again copied and looked back. Ladyjan tried to stop laughing to tell Manjan to stop, but her laughter was uncontrollable, and she couldn’t. Manjan saw her struggle though, and emphasised hunching his back like the bull to make her laugh more. He couldn’t help it, Ladyjan’s laughter was like fuel. The bull stomped his back legs hard on the floor, kicking up dust and Manjan jumped hard on the floor too. Ladyjan stopped laughing.
‘Run!’ she shouted and Manjan turned to look at her. Ladyjan started running forward to...what? Tackle the bull? She didn’t know what her plan was and she didn’t need to because before she reached the pair, the bull had bucked forwards and hit Manjan in his side, knocking him against a wall. The bull bucked again but Manjan was slumped at the bottom of the wall and out of the way. He groaned.
Ladyjan kept running, but with more focused purpose – to help Manjan, who, frustratingly, was the other side of the bucking bull. She ran straight into the bull’s backside, stumbled and rolled onto the floor next to Manjan.
‘Wow,’ Manjan grunted.
‘You thought that was intentional?’ Ladyjan asked, dazed, but once again laughing. Manjan let out a breathy laugh as the bull calmed himself, re-picked up the litt
er he had previously dropped, chewed it and swallowed it.
‘I still would have won,’ Manjan muttered.
* * *
Ladyjan and Manjan had taken their time getting to Palolem. They’d left Delhi the night they’d bumped into each other in the market, they’d waited until it was dark and then boarded a small, colourful bus. Delhi’s streets were full of small, colourful buses and, on Manjan’s suggestion, they’d picked the bus that looked the most like all the other buses. Ladyjan laughed at this but Manjan didn’t know why.
On the bus, Ladyjan sat underneath Manjan’s bag with a scarf around her face. Provided no one saw her board the bus, there was no chance anyone would see her on it. They got off the bus three hours later in a city called Rewari.
‘Could they find you here?’ Manjan had asked at 4 am, knowing that neither of them knew where they were.
‘I don’t know,’ Ladyjan answered. ‘On the lorries I travel from Delhi to Surat, and it takes a whole day and night. Where I go in between is...it would be a guess. There were no windows.’ She had apologetic eyes but Manjan refused to let her feel bad.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Shall we get another bus then?’ He smiled an insanely wide smile and Ladyjan laughed.
Thirty-nine hours of the next three days were spent on buses, twenty were spent walking and studying maps to see where they were, four were spent eating and nine were spent sleeping. When they knew they were a safe distance from anywhere Ladyjan had been before, they slept for fifteen hours under a statue in a park.
‘So where are we?’ Ladyjan asked, waking up. Manjan rubbed his eyes.
‘Safety,’ he said calmly, and they kissed. That night, they talked, drank wine, laughed and, um, well…did something rather more intimate, but I won’t go into that here.
* * *
It was in Bombay that Manjan told his father about Ladyjan. He’d rung and apologised for not coming home when he had planned to, and his father had been understanding.
‘You have to stop apologising,’ he’d told Manjan, shouting so his son would hear him over the traffic.
‘I’ve met a girl,’ Manjan shouted back, ‘she’s called Jan too.’ Manjan’s father couldn’t hear his son, so he told him that he was very well and thanked him for asking. ‘No, I’ve met a girl.’ Again, his father told him to stop apologising. Manjan looked at Ladyjan. ‘He can’t hear me,’ he said and Ladyjan took the phone from him.
‘Hello,’ she said. It was Ladyjan’s feminine voice that helped Manjan’s father understand what his son had been trying to tell him and his eyes filled with tears. He welled up and thought about how happy his wife would have been.
‘Oh Jan, lad,’ he said, instantly forgetting it wasn’t his son on the other end, ‘that’s why you stayed in India.’ The doorbell rang. ‘I’ve got to get the door. Stay there, I’ll be right back. I’m so happy for you lad.’
‘I can’t hear him,’ Ladyjan said, ‘but I think he knows what you’re trying to tell him.’ She passed the phone back to Manjan who held it up to his ear to find that his father had gone, so he hung up.
‘Can I help you?’ Manjan’s father said to the wide-faced man at the door. The man looked at a passport in his hand and then at Manjan’s father. He nodded to himself and walked straight into Manjan’s father, pushing him back into his own house and away from the view of the street. The wide-faced man looked behind him and then shut the door.
* * *
Bombay was home to Manjan and Ladyjan for a few weeks. Ladyjan didn’t want to keep moving. She was finally free from her captors and frankly sick of transport. They used some of her newly acquired inordinate amount of money for lavish accommodation and good food and Manjan treated the city how he had treated Fishton when he was younger. He met people and asked them questions about themselves, their lives and the places they had been, although now he was a little older he was more tactful about it. The truth was, he was just trying to impress Ladyjan. That’s all he was ever trying to do and, to that end, it was in Bombay that he started repeatedly imitating different animals to make her laugh. Ladyjan always took over to see if she could keep it up for longer but in her eyes, Manjan had changed her life. She didn’t need impressing.
Everything about Bombay was fascinating to Manjan; the huge white monuments that scattered the city, the wealth that dominated the skyline and the poverty that spread under its bridges. Together, they’d watched a Bollywood movie being filmed from on top of a grassy hill just outside the city and they’d walked along a littered beach lined with fully clothed sunbathers. The beach was depressing, but because they were together, it didn’t matter what they were seeing or doing; everything seemed right.
‘We should visit Nepal,’ Manjan had suggested, while enjoying a walk along the beach and stepping over a crumpled can that had at some point been on fire. He’d hated Nepal, but with Ladyjan he’d probably quite like Pokhara’s huge crystal-clear lake and majestic sun-peaked mountains. He might not mind the jungle’s heat and the wildlife that lived there and, in Kathmandu, he and Ladyjan would probably embrace the bustle and live in the moment. Actually, now he thought about it, Nepal sounded quite fun.
Ladyjan finally felt safe and thought it seemed quite unlikely that she’d end up back in the rear end of a truck hauling fish and lamps across the country again, so she nodded.
‘Nepal sounds good,’ she said, ‘maybe after Goa?’
‘Goa sounds good too,’ Manjan had replied. ‘Everywhere sounds good.’
* * *
Manjan and Ladyjan spent their first night together on Palolem, Goa, the way they’d spent their first night together in Sweden – outside and talking. They talked about how Ladyjan had, once a week, stared at an airport screen wistful of coming to India. They talked about how Manjan had only seen the bad in the places he’d gone after Russia. They spoke about the day Ladyjan had missed their plane, why she had done it and what might have been if she hadn’t. They even spoke about Manjan’s mum’s funeral and how his father had lost his passport. Manjan made a joke about Ladyjan stealing his father’s passport but Ladyjan didn’t laugh. Instead, she looked through the passports she had left in her bag.
‘I don’t have them all any more,’ she said sadly. ‘They took most of them. Maybe I did steal it.’ Manjan just laughed and told her it didn’t matter. Then they spoke about his father and how on the phone earlier he hadn’t seemed himself. He had been more...shifty.
In the dark hours of the morning, Ladyjan told Manjan that life really wasn’t like it was in films. In films, people go out of their way to make things happen; someone offers a romantic gesture or solves a crime. In reality fate offers the gesture and solves the crime. It was fate that Ladyjan had stolen from Manjan that day at the harbour in Sweden and it was his life experience that had taught him that stowing away on a boat was a ‘good idea’. Ladyjan could have missed Manjan at the market a few months ago (just a minute would have made the difference) or she could have been sent to a different country to collect illegal lamps. Fate had bought them together then, too, and if it hadn’t have done this time, it would have done soon enough. Ladyjan held Manjan tight and he held her back...
...For a really long time.
As the sun started to rise, Manjan and Ladyjan paddled in the same water that nearly forty years later Shakey would drop a fishing rod into, and they watched as the beach started to fill with Indian tourists.
During their single week on Palolem they visited a spice farm, learnt to ride motorcycles and tried yoga for the first time. One day they climbed over the rocks at the end of the beach and found another beach with rocks at both ends. Over those rocks they’d found yet another beach which they walked down for about an hour, and then, at the other end of this beach, they’d found more rocks. It was a magical week.
Nepal would have been magical too, had they have gone.
The late afternoon sun was cooling
down and Ladyjan and Manjan had just enjoyed a fruit salad from a health restaurant that had recently opened on Palolem. Manjan sat on the sand and rested on his elbows. Ladyjan joined him.
‘Should we go to Nepal?’ she asked, ‘or should we just live in our little beach bubble?’
‘I don’t think the bubble is the beach,’ Manjan said. ‘Nepal would be a bubble too.’ Ladyjan rested her head on Manjan’s bare stomach. She was feeling tired and hot.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling,’ she said. Then she stopped talking. A few birds communicated in their bird way (‘Cacaa?’ one bird asked and another agreed, ‘cacaa!’) and a crab rolled some sand into a ball (bubbler crabs do that). Manjan stroked Ladyjan’s hair and made a noise that prompted her to go on.
‘Not a bad feeling,’ she continued, before pausing again, ‘but, it depends on what you think.’ Manjan made the same noise but he wasn’t in any rush. Ladyjan could say whatever it was that she wanted to say whenever it was that she wanted to say it. He looked out to the sea and enjoyed its gentle lapping along the soft golden coast while the words ‘I’m pregnant’ washed through him.
* * *
The phone rang in Manjan’s father’s house and Manjan daydreamed about his mother answering. Would she have been happy if he’d been able to tell her his news? She did like babies, but she wouldn’t have liked the fact that neither she nor Manjan’s father had met Ladyjan. He imagined her ordering him to get the next flight home and to bring Ladyjan with him. She was never rational under pressure. Despite this, Manjan would have given anything to speak to his mother now. The phone rang again.
Manjan hadn’t reacted badly. After a long but not uncomfortable silence, he’d told Ladyjan that their bubble would just get bigger and that now it would never pop. Ladyjan had already decided that she would keep the baby regardless of Manjan’s reaction but was nevertheless relieved with his response. They’d slept early that night after buying a melon from a teenage girl who sold them along the beach.
