by Tim Ewins
As Hylad drove away, Ebba noticed that the soldier was crying. She rubbed his shoulder.
‘Sensitive soul,’ she muttered, and one side of the unhappy man’s mouth smiled.
* * *
‘If Ladyjan is in Russia, she’s somewhere here,’ Manjan said when they awoke the next morning, and for that reason alone, they stayed in Moscow for four months.
Here is a list of the places in Moscow that Ladyjan wasn’t:
St Basil’s Cathedral
Gorky Central Park
The airport
Any of the streets
Any of the parks
Any of the museums
Anywhere.
Manjan visited St Basil’s Cathedral every day. It didn’t look like it should have been built on a cloud any more, as it had done when he had first visited. The green and yellow, the blue and white, the red and gold – they all looked grey to Manjan now.
Ebba and the soldier had stopped searching with Manjan, Hylad and Michael by the second month. Ebba was feeling frailer each day and the soldier had made it his duty to look after her. The five of them rented a flat on the black market under Ebba’s name (which for the purposes of the rental, was Vladlena) and the soldier and Ebba stayed inside while the other three searched (Hylad in the soldier’s uniform).
The flat itself was actually rather lovely and it turned out that the soldier had something of a talent for interior design. He moved the furniture around to make more space (which was ideal for the four of them sleeping on the floor) and he bought and looked after some flowers that he arranged around the flat to give it a homely feel.
Ebba, who had everyday missed Olivia for most of her life, began to feel a little less lonely.
The soldier, who everyday missed his ex-wife and her sister, also began to feel a little less lonely.
After four months had passed Ebba told Hylad, Michael and Manjan that she wouldn’t be joining them on their flight to India. She wanted to stay in Russia with the soldier.
‘You’re not–?’ Michael started to ask, but Ebba laughed and told him that no, they were not. They just found each other to be good company.
‘I don’t know how long I have,’ she said. ‘I need to slow down.’
The goodbyes were more than a little emotional. Ebba didn’t know if she would see Hylad or Michael again and they didn’t know if they would see her.
The soldier told them how, in his experience, people were like coils and that they always sprang back to each other, eventually.
Through their tears, everyone smiled politely.
* * *
Every other day the soldier queued for half a day to provide Ebba and himself with a small amount of food and every time Ebba left the flat she felt very closely watched by someone – she wasn’t sure who, but someone. Repression filled the faces of the people they passed in the streets, and as far as the government was concerned, neither the soldier (presumed dead) nor Ebba (presumed Vladlena) existed, but finally the unhappy, happy, unhappy, then happy again, then unhappy eight years later before being happy again, then unhappy, happy, less happy, then mainly happy before being unhappy but with a smile soldier felt consistently happy with Ebba, and Ebba felt happy with him.
Neither Ebba nor the soldier’s coils ever sprang back to the soldier’s ex-wife, the soldier’s ex-wife’s sister, Manjan, Hylad or Michael again.
But that didn’t make either of them unhappy.
35
An insignificant dog
Goa, India. 2016.
The puppy, having been largely ignored by Prisha the cow for most of the evening, was pushing closer into her side and whimpering. It was getting cold next to the sea and he wanted comfort. An older dog might have pulled the puppy into its fur with a paw or rested its chin on the puppy’s head to keep it warm but Prisha did neither of these things. Cow’s legs don’t lend themselves to sticking out sideways and her head was too far up from the puppy’s tiny body for her to reach him, so she sat motionless.
* * *
Manjan held onto the bar with both hands to steady himself as Shakey stood up and gestured towards the toilet.
‘I’m going to the toilet,’ he half-shouted, and Manjan gave a slow nod of agreement as if agreement were needed.
Shakey wasn’t steady on his feet and the toilet was the other side of the dance floor. He slightly opened his mouth and started bending his knees, half in time to one group of silent disco singers and half in time to a different group of silent disco singers, but not completely in time to either. His neck attempted to bob along too but seemed to take on a completely different rhythm.
Under the influence of alcohol, Shakey tended to adopt the same technique when in transit. He focused on his destination (in this case, the toilet) and he’d blank out everything else. This, he found, was the best way to walk straight.
He ignored the group of vests to the right of him, who were all bent down low singing ‘I’m so low, low, low. I need you, you, you,’ with headphones in their ears.
He ignored the large group of vests to the left of him who were facing one of the DJs with their hands in the air and singing ‘I’ve been dreaming, of a feeling, for so long that I can’t remember starting’. They didn’t know that the DJ they were facing was playing a song that went ‘I’m so low, low, low. I need you, you, you’.
About five metres from the toilet (a wooden door with a picture of a male looking into a female toilet on it), Shakey turned his head right.
She was in a group of vests, many of which were deep into the mating ritual, and she was dancing, seemingly in slow motion – the girl from the fishing trip.
Shakey moved his left leg in the direction of his gaze and flexed his biceps. He would tell her that fishing wasn’t really his thing. His right foot did not follow his left and continued walking towards the toilet, undercutting his left foot as it did.
He could tell her about the old-timer he was now friends with; that would impress her. He was a vegetarian. He could tell her that. He wouldn’t tell her that he sometimes ate burgers.
His left knee buckled as his right shin hit it and his out-of-time nodding head jolted backwards, as his elbow, and then his shoulder, hit the floor.
For a couple of seconds everything seemed blurry, and when he stood up he heard the girl saying something to him, but, embarrassed, he focused again on the toilet door and allowed his feet to lead him through it without replying.
* * *
The wind hit the puppy in the face and the wet in both of his eyes and on his nose chilled him further. His whimpers grew louder and louder until they crescendoed into a series of yelps.
Prisha picked up the bulk of her weight and, without standing, re-positioned her hips and stomach, leaning towards the sea in an attempt to warm the puppy.
Prisha had ignored the puppy for most of the evening. Despite his constant jumping and barking she hadn’t even looked down at him (which was a shame, because the puppy had a lot to say). Even now, as the wind picked up she didn’t move her head towards him, but her small shift in weight was enough. At the same time, the puppy pushed back into Prisha, turned his head and nuzzled under the crevice between her body and the sand, and slowly the puppy’s body warmed up.
* * *
In the toilet, Shakey sat on an inappropriately painted toilet seat and swore at himself.
He called himself stupid and an idiot.
He hit his leg with a clenched fist and then held his leg with his other hand because it hurt more than he expected.
He dropped his head and looked at the floor. He couldn’t believe he’d fallen in front of her. Why on earth had he ignored her? He’d essentially run away, and now, to make things worse, he’d been in the toilet far too long for this to be a wee.
He stood up, re-fastened his trousers and walked out, confidently shutting the doo
r behind him. He didn’t look at the girl from the fishing trip. Instead, he focused on Manjan at the bar, blanked out everything else, and let his feet do the rest.
Later in Shakey’s life, he would hear about how he had blanked the girl the second time he’d met her regularly and he would be told how arrogant that made him, but for now, he was just saving grace.
Manjan picked his hands up from the sticky bar with slightly more force than he thought would be necessary and smiled at Shakey. He didn’t know who the girl was, but he’d seen the fall and he could see the embarrassment on Shakey’s face.
‘Shakey,’ Manjan said when Shakey had reached him. Shakey just looked at him.
Manjan held onto one of Shakey’s hands and shook it lightly, as a parent might do to a baby.
36
A moth and a light, and a light, and a light
India. 1981 – 1982.
Hylad and Michael looked at the old rusty door of ‘The New Sunshine Hostel’. Still overlooked by four taller buildings, it didn’t look like sunshine at all. Behind them, Manjan was beaming.
‘It’s been done up,’ he told them excitedly, pushing between his two companions to open the door. The first thing Manjan noticed were the showers. They were still in the same place, but there was a clouded glass door covering them and from what he could see over the door, the showers were clean, shiny and new.
The first thing that Hylad and Michael noticed was that the desk had no one behind it and that it was covered in what appeared to be soot. The second thing they noticed was the kitchen, which was the other side of the desk to the showers, and consisted of a kettle with no lid and a toaster that had its wires hanging out. Finally, they noticed that the phone was so out of date, they both doubted it would work.
Manjan walked up to the phone and lifted the receiver.
‘It’s clean!’ he told them happily.
‘You lived…here?’ Hylad asked, looking a little disgusted and Manjan nodded.
A man in a pink polo shirt and jeans walked down the stairs.
‘A room?’ he asked.
‘God no,’ Michael answered far too quickly, and then looked embarrassed.
‘We’re looking for Kalem,’ Manjan said, ‘does he still live here?’ The man walked over to the desk and pulled out a large red book, flipped through the pages to a list of people beginning with K and stroked his index finger down the page.
‘Kalem,’ he said. ‘Kalem… Nope. No Kalem here, sir.’
Manjan, Hylad, Michael and the man behind the desk were quiet for a while. Manjan felt deflated. There was no way Ladyjan would be here, and if Kalem wasn’t here either, there was no need for the three of them to be in Varanasi at all.
Eventually, the man in pink broke the silence.
‘I’ll ask the owner if he knows a Kalem living here, sir,’ he said, ‘I think he would remember, he is called Kalem too!’
* * *
The group drank in the same place where Kalem and Manjan used to drink every night. Nothing had changed. There was still no front wall between the bar and the alleyway, the man behind the bar was older, but the same guy, and he was selling the same beer that he kept safe in the same box using the same rusty padlock.
‘I am humbled, Jan, I am truly humbled that you would come back just to see me. You will find your Jan, I know you will. It is god’s will.’ Kalem still had his hand on Hylad’s leg from his previous monologue about how grateful he was to Hylad and Michael for looking after Manjan.
‘It’s great to see you so well,’ Manjan said before Kalem interrupted.
‘The phone,’ he urged excitedly, ‘did you see the phone in Sunshine?’ Manjan opened his mouth before Kalem continued, ‘It’s not sticky. You can pick it up now without getting sticky on your hands.’
‘I saw the showers,’ Manjan laughed, and Kalem explained how the showers had been his first triumph when he’d taken over the hostel.
‘But my wife,’ he said, ‘I love her with every inch of me, but she will not bathe in the Great Mother any more. She showers in the showers now, and she washes away the dirt, yes, but does she wash away her sins? I wash in the Ganges alone every morning.’ Manjan knew Kalem and he knew that this wouldn’t be true. Kalem would talk to everyone within earshot at the river bank and the river bank is a busy place.
No one slept that night. No one even tried. Together, Manjan, Hylad and Michael told Kalem about their journey and the search for Ladyjan. Kalem was less than impressed to hear that Manjan was still looking for the girl who had, as far as he knew, left him in the ’70s, but wished them luck nonetheless.
Kalem explained to Manjan, Hylad and Michael how he had started helping out at the desk at the Sunshine Hostel, using his fine English to stop travellers from complaining (although most stopped complaining due to his hugely friendly smile rather than his language skills). The hostel manager died two years ago. No one claimed the building and there was no will, so it was agreed that Kalem and his family could take it over.
When the sun rose at 5 am and morning prayer was called, they stood up, all a little tipsy.
‘Come with me to the river,’ Kalem offered, after performing a wobbly prayer, but the three of them declined.
‘We need to get to Delhi,’ Manjan explained. ‘I want to ring a place down there first though. Can I use the phone at the Sunshine Hostel?’ Kalem shook his head.
‘You can pick it up,’ he said smiling, ‘and your hands will not get sticky on them, but it will not ring or call people. That’s my next job.’
* * *
Hylad stepped onto the train, followed by Michael, followed by a moth, followed by Manjan. All but one knew they were going to Delhi and all but one were nervous about it.
Hylad and Michael had heard about Alastor, the wide-stubble-faced man who had killed Manjan’s father. Hylad liked Manjan’s father and he felt responsible for his fate. Had he not lost Manjan all those years ago in Sweden, Manjan would not have met Ladyjan and persuaded her to travel with him. Ladyjan wouldn’t have ended up alone in Fishton, nor would she have been tangled up in the illegal lamp-transporting game (another thing that Hylad felt guilty about) and Alastor would not have come looking for a ‘Jan’. But now they were travelling to Delhi and he would see, albeit from afar, the man who sold the lamps to Ladyjan to transport back to England. The thought of seeing anyone involved in Ladyjan’s enslavement or Manjan’s father’s death made Hylad shake with anger. He just hoped he didn’t do anything stupid.
Michael was nervous because he knew that Hylad blamed himself for, well, for nearly everything. Whatever happened in Delhi, Michael knew that Hylad would find it hard and a loved one’s burden is also the burden of the lover.
The moth had boarded the train by following the light that someone else had installed onto the train’s carriage. It did not know it was on a train, and because of that, it was not nervous.
Neither Hylad nor Michael’s nerves compared to Manjan’s. For thirteen hours, the entire journey from Varanasi to Delhi, Manjan tried to stop himself from shaking. They planned to watch the lamp-seller for seven weeks from a nearby building’s fourth-floor window, which meant that for the next seven weeks, Manjan would dread seeing Ladyjan, and if he did see her, his whole world would fall apart. They should have gone to Delhi first.
There was no announcement that the train was pulling into Delhi and there was no warning that it would only settle there for six minutes. Many of the passengers missed their stop, but Manjan hadn’t slept and had seen the sign. He woke up the other two and stepped off the train, followed by a moth, followed by Michael, followed by Hylad.
‘We start tomorrow?’ asked Michael, stretching his arms in a yawn. They were all only just recovering from a night spent drinking with Kalem.
‘We start tonight,’ both Hylad and Manjan said in unison.
Due to its own flawed navigation sy
stem, the moth followed the light and left the station into a crowded street. The sun was nearly down but the city continued to pulse with traffic, market stalls and badly installed neon. Not able to choose its own direction, the moth fluttered towards the largest orb of light, which had been installed by someone else at the top of a pole in the middle of the only dark patch around. There it bumped into lots of other moths, then it bumped into the light, then some more moths and then the light again.
In the morning, when the sun rose, the moth found that it was in a large park surrounded by a feast of nectar. Some moths eat nectar, and that is a little-known fact about moths. It wasn’t just the past two days that the moth had lived like this, it had spent its entire life just following someone else’s directions, but sometimes that’s all you have to do.
37
And another poxy vest
India. 1983-1987.
Seven weeks turned into ten, and ten turned into twenty-six. Twenty-six weeks is half a year, and then that became an actual year. It turned out that the lamp-seller only sold lamps on one day of each month, which made sense to Manjan in hindsight, as he would presumably only need to make one sale (albeit a very specific sale) a month. It took Manjan three months of waiting in a room on the fourth floor of a nearby building to work out the pattern. The group had originally planned to watch the lamp-seller for seven weeks, which is forty-nine days, which was now the equivalent of four years, and so it was. Manjan certainly didn’t want to see Ladyjan meeting with the lamp-seller, but he also wanted to know that she wasn’t.
Manjan, Hylad and Michael were allowed to use the room every day for free provided they cleaned it regularly so that the owner could let it out to travellers at night. They didn’t tell the owner that they would also be sleeping there for the first few weeks. It was in these first few weeks that a fourth person, Jason, started watching the market with the group.
Jason and Melissa
‘It’s just so exciting,’ Jason said on the third day of watching a market without a lamp-seller in it. Manjan, Hylad and Michael didn’t agree, but all politely smiled in an attempt to imply agreement. To Jason, who had only just arrived in India, this was a real-life detective thriller. He thought that by staying in this fourth-floor room with three strangers, he was seeing the world, which Manjan and his moustache found infuriating. After a pause Manjan had an idea.
