Anuradha Roy: Sleeping On Jupiter

She stopped. She turned my face towards the left and said, “Keep still, don’t shout so much, or it will hurt more.”

Again that terrible pinprick, then a burning pain. She looked at my ears and I heard her exclaim, “Jaah! They are up and down from each other. The things I do!” She picked something out of her pouch and prised it into my bleeding ear lobe. “Never mind, there it is. Up down or not.”

My ears were still oozing blood when I looked at myself. Two loops of wire went through them now. One of them was higher than the other. The woman stood behind me, dark as a hill in the mirror that held us both. With the earrings on, I was different: I looked dressed up. I looked like a girl. The woman stroked my face and my hair and she kept saying, “Chuni, my Chuni, see how pretty they look, your rings.” Another of the house’s women came in at that moment and peered into the mirror. “That’s gold! You gave her your gold rings?”

The fat woman said, “Better that a girl wears them.”

Later, when we were alone and she was dabbing my earlobes with a stinging solution she said, “They are my daughter’s. They are gold. I saved for many months to get them made. Chuni wore them all the time. You look after them. Keep them safe. Never take them off.”

That night my ears swelled up and pus oozed from the holes. By morning the rings were stuck in the drying pus. The pain and later the itch made me want to tear the rings off my ears. It was worse the day after. Still, I looked at myself in the mirror and said in a whisper, “Chuni, Chuni, I’m wearing your rings. I will never take them off.” The woman cleaned the wounds with her solution. “They really look as if they were made for your face, my child. They do. You are my girl reborn.” She tapped the rings with her fingers to make them swing back and forth. The other women in the house gaped at her.

I stayed in that house a few weeks, maybe a few months, until more men came with cloth wrapped around their faces. One of them stood holding a gun. He shouted, “This is for your own good, this is for our motherland, this is for our mother tongue.” A second man clapped his hands and told us to hold each other’s shoulders and chug out of the house in a line as if we were a train. Outside, we had to keep chugging and whistling around the courtyard. It felt like a game. The man making us play seemed to be smiling under the cloth wrapped around his face. He was lanky and loose-limbed like my brother. He had that same kind of hair, scruffy and short. My brother. I broke the line to run towards him. The man stopped smiling and lifted his rifle butt towards me. I went back to the line of girls, but I no longer felt like a coach in a train.

The two other men took pots and pans, chairs, blankets and stoves from the house and loaded them into their jeep. The women stood by. Then the men sprinkled something all over the rooms and threw lit torches into the house. Flames leaped from the windows.

We spent that night in the open. We were twelve girls and the four women who looked after us. There was nowhere to go. In the morning we were put in another van and we left the buildings behind, we went through rough countryside, on and on, until the trees were behind us as well, the sky opened up, the sand stretched hot and bare, and there again was the sea. Again there was a boat. This time it was in the water. I ran towards it — my mother — I thought my mother would be there. All twelve of us were made to climb in. One of the women got in as well, but it was not the fat one. She stayed on the shore. The motor thudded to a start. Two men climbed into it and the boat rocked and swayed. Then it moved out into the ocean.

Until the sun whited out my eyes I kept them on the fat woman. The shore went further and further away from us and then there was nothing but water and sky. One of the girls vomited all over and the men threatened to throw the next one who did that into the sea. I touched my earrings.

At four in the afternoon, the sleeper train to Jarmuli shuddered to life and wheezed out of the station. Passengers locked into companionship for the next fourteen hours eyed each other sidelong, wondering how it would be. In Coach A2, three women were exchanging glances. “You ask her,” Gouri’s imploring look said to Latika and Vidya. Their eyes refused to meet hers.

The three of them, friends, were going on their first outing together. They were in a compartment, all grey and blue, with two large plate-glass windows and four berths. To climb to one of the upper berths you needed to be agile. Gouri, whose ticket number pointed her upwards, could just about manage stairs these days if she placed her weight on the right knee instead of the left. She turned to the fourth person in their compartment and said, “Excuse me, if you don’t mind. .”

The girl was bent over a travel guide, pen in hand. She turned a page and scribbled in the book’s margin. Gouri waited. The girl did not look up. Gouri looked at Vidya for confirmation, murmured an excuse me again, then stepped closer and brushed the girl’s shoulder with a finger.

At this the girl jerked to life and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh! I didn’t want to. . I mean. .” Gouri stepped back. You’d think she was a two-headed ogre and not a round-faced old woman.

The girl shook her head, as if to clear it. Her hair was a bird’s nest, streaked brown and black, some of it braided with coloured threads. She reached under the braids and a pair of earphones emerged from ears spiral-bound with rings, silver or copper but for two tiny circles of gold at the lobes.

Gouri had not wanted to ask this intimidating young creature for a favour, but old bones left her little choice. She collected her breath and said, “My ticket is for the upper berth and you see, I no longer have the knees to be able to climb up — do you mind — you must sit at the window of course, as long as you like. Only at night, to sleep, if you could exchange. .”

The girl wore a turquoise T-shirt over which the words “Been There Done That Binned It” undulated as though travelling over hills and valleys. Her pants were cut off at the calves and the fabric was held together with a dozen zips that traversed the legs. The women glimpsed tattoos and could not be sure if the glint at her eyebrows came from a stud. Vidya was longing to say, “Have you seen how young girls dress these days? And then they complain if men bother them!”

The girl shrugged. “No problem.” Her face broke into a smile of unexpected sweetness. “I like the upper berth.” She reached for her earphones again.

Huge black eyes in a pointed face, like a deer’s, and she seems as jumpy as one too, Latika observed. She turned away and busied herself with her phone so that she would not stare.

Encouraged by the smile, Gouri beamed at the girl. “My friend Latika can still manage to climb to those upper berths, not me. Not many years left, you know, that we’ll be able to travel! We said to each other, we’ve been friends all our lives and never been anywhere together. I said, Jarmuli! I’ve always wanted to go back to the Vishnu temple. And Latika, that’s Latika, she just wants to sit by the sea and drink coconut water — so we left our children and grandchildren and here we are! My name’s Gouri, by the way, and this is Vidya. And you?”

“Nomi,” the girl said, her smile fading at Gouri’s cascade of information. “Pleased to meet you.” She fiddled with her earphones.

“Are you going on a holiday to Jarmuli?” This time the question came from Vidya, who looked at the girl over the rim of her glasses. “Where are you from?”