by Tim Ewins
‘It is exciting,’ he said, ‘but I can’t tell whether the lamp-seller is standing around that corner.’ He pointed to a street corner at the far end of the market, half a mile away. ‘If you could have a…’ – before Manjan finished his sentence, Jason had started putting his shoes on – ‘…look.’
Seven hours later, much longer than Manjan could have hoped for, Jason returned to the room with Melissa. Melissa was a traveller whom Jason had met around the corner, half a mile away from the window. He’d explained how he’d spent the last three days fighting illegal lamp-trafficking in the pursuit of someone else’s true love (he’d also flexed his bicep slightly) and Melissa had been impressed. Together, they’d spent the afternoon drinking masala chai, getting to know each other and forgetting to return to the room to let Manjan know that there was not a lamp-seller around the corner half a mile away. That was the night that Manjan, Hylad and Michael found somewhere else to sleep, so that Jason and Melissa could…well…they could… Shucks, I’m no good at talking about these things.
Eighteen years later, at a silent disco holding a plastic cup of white wine, Shakey held a hand up to a much older Manjan.
‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Whoa. What a coincidence. My parents are called Jason and Melissa.’
* * *
Manjan was barely watching when the lamp-seller started flinching. The four-year stint was coming to an end, Hylad and Michael had returned home to be part of a movement fighting discrimination laws in Sweden, and Manjan was tired of watching the same muscular, confident teenage boy buy the same lamp from the same seller every month. In a few months he would meet up with Hylad and Michael again, for the last part of their search tour, in Goa. Ladyjan wouldn’t be there. Of course, Ladyjan wouldn’t be there.
There was a break in the market crowd. Something was creating a moving hole through the masses of people. A bull, maybe? Manjan didn’t know what it was but it was making a direct route to the lamp-seller, who was now looking around him in a panic as if he intended running somewhere.
A young boy in tattered shorts fell to the floor, smashing the lamp he was looking at as a small man, not much bigger than the boy, emerged from the hole in the crowd, flailing his arms to clear his path. The lamp-seller stood tall and faced forward like a soldier as the small man started to shout an onslaught of abuse at him. The young boy picked up the lamp and ran.
From his window, Manjan couldn’t hear what the small man was saying but he watched as his small body became increasingly animated, and grew more menacing and imposing until the lamp-seller was reduced to phlegmy tears (made to look even more disgusting by the heat). He began begging and then dropped to the same height as the small man and held onto his clothes, but the small man hit the lamp-seller’s head and pointed into a building. Slowly, the lamp-seller moved on his knees, across the filth of the market floor, in floods of his own bodily fluids – sweat, tears, phlegm. Every few metres the small man kicked him until, eventually they disappeared into the building.
Manjan scanned the market and saw that people were either oblivious to what had happened, or they were pretending it hadn’t. There was no gap in the crowd and there was no one at the stall to serve the lady patiently waiting, holding a decorative green lamp while several children stole the rest of them.
‘What are the…?’ Manjan said to himself, before he put on his sandals and ran down the stairs, out of the door, through the crowds and up to the lamp stall (now fresh out of lamps). ‘Saga?’ he asked. ‘Why do I always seem to find people here?!’
* * *
‘You thought I’d leave him, didn’t you?’ Saga asked. ‘Everyone assumes we’re going to break up even though we’ve been together for nearly twenty years. I never liked him for his money.’
‘Honestly, no, Saga, I just asked how he is,’ Manjan smiled. He’d missed Saga.
‘No, you didn’t. You asked how he is, but you asked with a tone that actually said “are you still together?”. And we are.’
They had already gone through small talk on the way to Old Delhi and while ordering two masala chais.
‘I’m glad you’re still together. I like Valter! How is he? Is he here?’
Saga explained how she’d fallen in love with India when they had visited the first time and how she had missed it when they’d returned to Sweden. India had brought out the worst in Valter, though. He didn’t like the attention Saga had got from other men and he became insanely jealous. After their second child arrived, Saga decided she would visit India alone every year, and Valter hadn’t argued. He loved Saga’s sense of adventure and he also loved time for just him and the children. The mention of children made something inside Manjan hurt.
Every year Saga flew to Delhi and then visited a different city or town.
‘Last year I visited Varanasi again,’ she told Manjan. ‘It made me think of you.’
‘The last place I saw you,’ Manjan responded thoughtfully. ‘I was in a bad way then.’ There was an uncomfortable silence as this sank in.
‘Well,’ Saga continued, ‘I met this fascinating man in Varanasi who spoke incredibly good English. I could tell he was good at English anyway, but he also made a point of telling me quite a lot. He was so grateful for everything, he thanked god for most things, but nothing was taken for granted. It was because of him that I actually swam in the Ganges! You could have taken some tips from him back then.’
Manjan confirmed that he probably had.
After another chai, Saga finally asked Manjan what he was doing in Delhi and Manjan told her.
‘You’re still looking for Jan?’
‘No, I’m looking for Jan, again.’
‘Oh. She’s in Goa. At least, she was last month.’
Manjan’s eyes opened wide and stared at Saga. His heart pounded at his ribcage and the streets of Old Delhi stood quiet around them. He heard his own voice, several octaves lower and in slow motion.
‘Shee’s iinn Gooaa?’
And then he heard Saga’s voice, in the same fashion, say something about Palolem and giving up stealing. Manjan’s heart was louder than the next thing Saga said, but when it calmed down again, he made out the words ‘one’, ‘last’ and ‘job’.
38
One last job
Goa, India. 2016.
‘She was here,’ Shakey said, sat up straight and with his eyes wide open. All of a sudden, he felt like he might turn around and see Ladyjan right behind him, but, as I’m sure you know by now, Shakey wasn’t that clever.
‘I don’t see her,’ Manjan said sarcastically, looking around the silent disco. His belief that Ladyjan would turn up at Palolem had never really wavered over the past thirty years, but he was fairly certain that when she did return, she wouldn’t be at a silent disco.
‘I carried on searching. I spent the rest of my life searching.’ Manjan looked at his empty plastic cup and tilted it. ‘I travelled all over Europe, Australasia, Asia, the Americas, each time coming back to Palolem. Just making myself available to fate, really. Five years ago, I decided to stay here and let the universe take over.’
Shakey looked right and then he looked left. Ladyjan probably wasn’t there.
‘So, you never saw her again?’ he asked.
‘The last I knew of her whereabouts was from Saga. She was here thirty years ago, and she’d given up stealing.’ The crowd behind them cheered, but for a different reason. ‘Oh, and something about one last job, but I don’t know what that was.’
One last job. Fishton. 1986.
Since the day she’d left Manjan in their tiny Stockholm apartment in 1978, Ladyjan had become somewhat settled. She’d remained in Sollefteå, a small riverside town in the middle of Sweden, and lived with the same friend who had picked her up eight years ago and taken her there.
Ladyjan had spent her first few evenings in Sollefteå down at the river, taking what she could from
unsuspecting strangers’ back-pockets, but the town was small and most of the population knew most of the population. It wasn’t long before she knew the people she was stealing from, and that made it harder to not get caught.
It was Ladyjan’s friend who told her about the job going at the local fishing school, boxing up the fish that the students had caught so they could take them home to cook. A steady income, a sociable job and an all-round pleasant way to live. You’d be surprised at the number of people who enjoy living as a box-packaging specialist and technician.
Something was missing though.
‘He’ll never find you in Sollefteå,’ Ladyjan’s friend said quietly over dinner. ‘If you love him, you need to look for him.’ Ladyjan didn’t respond, so her friend continued. She told Ladyjan a story about a girl called Olivia who had moved to Sollefteå years ago because people thought she was mentally ill. The girl had lived in Sollefteå most of her life, seemingly happy, but there was a part of her that was missing – a girlfriend whom she’d left in Stockholm. I know that you know the rest of this story, but it was the first time Ladyjan had heard it and the ending, along with a profound emptiness somewhere near her heart, made her cry.
‘But I don’t even know where he is,’ she said.
* * *
Fishton in 1986 was the same as the Fishton that Manjan knew when he was a child back in 1965. It was also very similar to Fishton today. Fishton rarely changes.
As Ladyjan drove, in full disguise, down the only road in and out of Fishton, she began to shake. She didn’t know the exact reason for the shaking. Fear? Sadness? Anger? Whatever the reason, she would use it.
She parked outside the house where Manjan had grown up, tied up a stranger and ultimately lost a child. For Ladyjan this house held only bad memories, but if Manjan was in Fishton, this was where he would be.
At 3.30 pm she watched two children run into the house, pushing each other and laughing. At 4.07 pm she watched the same children come back outside again and kick a ball to each other in the freshly cut, no-longer-overgrown front garden. At 4.11 pm she watched one of them fall over and bleed from the knee and at 5.16 pm she watched a man in a stained t-shirt step outside the front door and kiss a woman walking in through the garden with a briefcase. The children followed.
Ladyjan daydreamed about living like the people who were living in Manjan’s old house long after that day, but on that particular day she didn’t. Instead, at 5.49 pm, she started up her car and drove down to the harbour.
* * *
The doors to the factory were wide open and the noise of manual workers and machinery poured into the car park, over the bank of grass and to the spot in the trees where Ladyjan was hiding. If it were nice weather the sun would be setting, but it wasn’t, and instead the rain just grew darker. Eventually the workers started leaving, none of them dressed for the weather and several holding their hands over their heads for shelter.
The doors remained open. After an hour of waiting, a soaking Ladyjan considered crossing the car park and entering the building, but as soon as she’d plucked up the courage, a muscular teenager and a short man (who made Ladyjan shudder) walked out, sheltered under an umbrella. The short repugnant man locked the doors with a large chain as the muscular teenager took an inordinate amount of money out of his raincoat pocket and laughed. They stood together discussing something by the doors before they both got into a sports car and left.
Ladyjan waited shivering for one more hour before she cranked open a window with a car jack and slipped inside. The fish factory, like Fishton itself, hadn’t changed, except for one thing; it used to be a large warehouse full of industrial machinery and buttons that Ladyjan was scared to touch, but now it was a large warehouse full of industrial machinery and buttons that Ladyjan was not scared to touch. She planned to touch the hell out of them, in fact.
As soon as she pressed the first button (the one on the forklift truck that she’d just climbed up on) an alarm sounded through the factory.
Determined and cool, Ladyjan drove across the factory floor and through the short man’s office door, smashing it down as she did. The short man’s desk fell to pieces as the truck slowly reversed out of the office which had once served as a prison to Ladyjan and many others. Hurried but focused, she jumped out of the forklift, found a key in the rubble and then reversed the forklift again, back through the factory to the garage door (which crumpled under the force of two iron forks).
The rain felt even heavier now but the wind cooled her down from the frantic adrenaline. As she drove away from the factory and closer to the water, the alarm grew quieter.
She fumbled as she crammed the key into each of the soulless cement prefab lock-ups which stood along the waterfront, to find the right one, repeatedly looking back to the factory, knowing that she was on a deadline.
After the fourth unopenable lock-up she started to shout expletives into the rain. She looked back to the factory. A light went on. Another expletive.
The fifth lock-up, a green door, KEEP OUT painted on the top. Ladyjan recognised the paint. She pushed the key in and turned it while whispering a thank you to no one. A man’s voice shouted something from the factory, although what he was shouting didn’t seem directed at anyone in particular.
‘He hasn’t seen me,’ Ladyjan repeated to herself, ‘he hasn’t seen me.’
When she turned the forklift back on, he saw her. She drove the forklift into the green lock-up, picked up ten crates, reversed, moved the handle forward, jumped off the moving truck and ran.
‘#$@&%!’ the man shouted angrily as he pushed her to the wet, concrete harbour floor. ‘Who are you?’ he screamed, towering above her. It was the muscular teenager from the car park.
Ladyjan managed to utter the name of the lamp-seller in Delhi, but she didn’t know why. Then she said something about Manjan’s father. People say some strange things under pressure. The teenager wasn’t listening anyway. Ladyjan looked up for a second, expecting to see the last thing she would ever see, but instead she saw the boy holding his head with both hands and noiselessly screaming into the sea. The forklift and its ten crates rolled into the sea.
It wasn’t until the sound of it sinking had subsided that Ladyjan could hear the teenager’s muted scream break into an agonising cry.
‘Lamps! He’s going to kill me!’
Luckily, by the time Ladyjan did hear this, she was hidden by the trees.
* * *
‘What do you think it was?’ Shakey asked Manjan loudly over the cheering ‘silent’ disco.
‘Probably nothing,’ Manjan replied equally loudly, and then as the cheering died down, he shouted, ‘stealing cash, maybe someone’s passport,’ and the two people next to him at the bar moved to a different chair.
39
A crab, a cow, a puppy, a moustache and a vest
Goa, India. 2016.
The earth shook. The beach became full of commotion as it moved this way and that. People came running out of their beach huts, all with questions but none with answers. The waves in the sea had started hitting each other and breaking both towards the sea and towards the land simultaneously, and occasionally, one of the beach huts that had been badly built on top of stilts, fell to the ground.
The crabs stopped rolling their tiny balls of sand and disappeared below the cracks in the beach, the puppy whined a high-pitched whine and the cow attempted to wobble towards it to offer protection.
Eventually, after two tremors, the earth stood still again. The lady who sold melons said something to the man who worked at one of the bars, who in turn opened the hatch on his drinks cabinet. Those who could return to their huts, did, and those who couldn’t, settled their nerves with a drink. Many slept on the beach.
Manjan snored through the earthquake. At one point he muttered something to the moving earth about leaving him alone, and during the second tremor he turned ove
r with a low grunt.
Shakey also slept through the earthquake, his head bobbing along to the bed’s movement with his mouth slightly open, completely unaware of how vigorously his body was being thrust about the room.
If Shakey didn’t notice the earthquake, there was no chance that he would notice his top lip as it quivered and pushed through a single ginger hair.
Part 6
40
A fly
Goa, India. 2016.
Manjan stepped outside, holding his head in one of his hands. It pounded, but it often pounded.
The people who had slept on the beach had moved out of the way for the sunbathers. Manjan looked to his right. A French couple were rolling out their towels and unpacking various beach objects from an oversized floral bag while a cow looked out to sea.
Then Manjan looked to his left. He could see the rocks where the beach ended. The COCK-tail sign had fallen to the floor and had been buried slightly by the sand. Manjan couldn’t help but show a little smile. A bit further down the beach an Indian family were playing in the water – the adults fully clothed, and the children fully not.
There was no sign of Ladyjan.
He looked right again. There was a pile of wood behind the French couple that wasn’t normally there, and the cow was jolting her head down and then up again, seemingly distressed. Something wasn’t right. A puppy ran in circles excitedly next to the cow.
Manjan looked to his left. He strained his eyes as hard as he could, but still he couldn’t see her. It was no good. She wasn’t there. Just like she hadn’t been there the day before, or the day before that. He always looked anyway, just in case, because probably, one day, Ladyjan would be there, and he’d hate to miss it.
