Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

The curly-haired man tipped the beer bottle into Raghu’s mouth. Badal felt the hard glass edge of the bottle hit Raghu’s teeth, involuntarily clenched his own. The man kept forcing in the beer until Raghu gagged and choked and his knees buckled. The white-haired one drawled through his cigarette, “Take it easy, Jacko. You’ll break his teeth.” He passed his cigarette to a lanky boy only a bit taller than Raghu. The second boy did not look in Raghu’s direction. He took a drag and gave the cigarette back to the white-haired man.

Badal wanted to turn his scooter around so that he would not have to drive past them. But he carried on inexorably, until he was next to the group, until Raghu turned and saw him, until the white-haired man was staring at him, his gaze idle. Without his sunglasses and his yellow robes he looked different, but it was the monk who meditated waist-deep in the sea, Badal was sure of it.

Stationed in the sea every morning. Watching Raghu.

Badal speeded past the group and looped back through another set of alleys towards the empty beach. He drove into the sand until the scooter skidded and came to a stop. He threw it aside and ran to the beach. He flung himself at the sand. The hard oblong of the new mobile in his pocket slammed into his ribs, knocking his breath out.

The ocean was inside him, the impersonal immensity of it. It had frozen solid, it had exploded into a thousand icy pieces and each individual shard pierced him, made him cry out aloud.

The water was too far away to wet him, but the earth began to darken around his face. His nose was bleeding. He let it flow, he wanted it to bleed, he wanted the blood in his body to drain away.

*

The stubble that was a mark of slovenliness for Badal was achieved by Suraj with the help of a beard trimmer that could be set with millimetric precision. The stubble wasn’t merely about cultivating an image, it was part of his strategy of attack and concealment, his daily war against the secret self he loathed but could not quell. He could not bear people to know how, in truth, he needed everything just so, had to struggle not to set right a book upside down on a shelf or straighten a crooked carpet.

Having left the temple and shaken off Badal that afternoon, Suraj had eaten his crab curry and rice, then fallen asleep immediately afterwards in a heat and hangover-induced daze. By the time he woke it was dark. He had not met Nomi after she had driven off, leaving him stranded at the temple gates. He had not looked for her in her room, nor had she knocked on his door. Just as well. He did not like people in his hotel room. He did not want them to see the beard trimmer ready by the plug point on the bathroom counter beside all the other oddments that, over long years of travel, he had grown accustomed to having with him. Bug spray in case of mosquitoes. Antiseptic. Antacids. His own towel because hotel towels disgusted him. Plus his bottles of whisky, his carton of cigarettes. His photography equipment was in its own bag and inside his backpack was his stash of dope. On the table next to the bed were his wood-carving tools. There were four kinds of gouges. Three carving knives with short, sharp blades, each one differently shaped, and with broad handles that sat comfortably in his palm. The knife he used most had a lethal point that he took the greatest care never to blunt. The toolbox had slots for each instrument, including those for whetstones to sharpen the tools. When he felt in any way troubled, Suraj only had to open the box and look at the tools securely in their own niches for the universe to regain some semblance of order.

The last thing he did when checking into a hotel was to open the toolbox and put it on the bedside table. Until five months ago, he would have completed the ritual by placing a weathered little panda next to his toolbox: only then would the room have become his own. Ayesha had given him that bear before they were married, after a long-ago trip to China, and it had travelled everywhere with him since then. It was now a grimy black and white ball of nylon fur crushed into the depths of his rucksack. He could no longer bring himself to look at it, but neither could he throw it away.

Suraj tossed his rucksack to a corner and fell back into the mound of pillows on his bed. That last terrible evening of his marriage with Ayesha. It was five months to the day — an anniversary of sorts! The recollection sent a stab of pain to his chest. Was this how heart attacks began? His father had died of one when he was just about this age, mid-forties. Suraj lay inert, hardly daring to breathe, trying to take his mind off that evening five months ago. He had relived it almost every hour. The minute he allowed his mind to wander he was back in their rented house in Delhi, its enclosed courtyard lined with dessicated potted palms and straggly jasmine. For all the dust on them, he used to like the companionable way they rustled if there was a breeze. That evening there wasn’t the whisper of a breeze, and the hot, dry air made noses bleed. He had not had much to drink, he had only been consumed by a black, bottomless despair, a sense of things ending, of hurtling into an abyss towards destruction. A dog had come into the yard after dark, looking for food. Suraj saw it ferreting around, sniffing the corners. A scrawny body and a tail that described a perfect circle. A cur. It tilted over the plastic garbage bin, clattering it to the concrete floor, spilling its foetid waste. Suraj had been sitting by himself, sweating quietly, holding his rum and coke. He did not know what got into him, but the glass fell through his fingers, he heard it shatter, and in a moment he was up, snatching his cricket bat. The dog cowered by the bin, everything else had blurred. Suraj knew only that he wanted to kill, smash the world into fragments. The dog looked for a way out, but it was too frightened to find the gap in the fencing through which it had come in. Suraj slammed the bat into its side, once, then again and again. He could not stop, his arms did not belong to him any more. The high-pitched yelps of the dog stoked his frenzy. He hit it harder and harder as if he needed to grind the animal into bonemeal. At some point, he became aware of his wife screaming. She threw herself against him and he pushed her away so savagely that she fell. That made him drop the bat. And then the only sounds were his panting, his wife sobbing, and low whimpers from the dog, a mess of broken bones held together by bloodied fur.

Ayesha had left the next day. They had been through partings before, when she had gone, her body a porcupine’s, fending off touch, her silence the threat that she would never come back. This time too, after she left, he had told himself it would pass.

It would pass, he repeated to himself now, and meanwhile there was Johnnie Walker. Before he could think another black thought, Suraj swung himself up from the bed, washed one of the glasses in the minibar, dried it and poured himself a drink. He took a sip, placed the glass by his lamp, listened to the ice cubes clink. For a while he sat staring at the squat glass. He could hear the hum of the air conditioning, the fridge vibrating. It felt unbearable, the quiet. Alone he would plunge into deeper and deeper gloom; he needed company. It was about eight-thirty, purpled darkness, just the right time. He held his glass and bottle and stood up.

His room had French windows that opened onto a strip of garden shared by all the rooms on that section of the ground floor. The strip was divided by tall hedges and shrubs into sections, each with two chairs and a stone table so that you had the impression of owning a private garden. So private, that when Suraj stepped into the patch next to Nomi’s room, he found her clothes drying on a bush. He smiled. She was saving money not giving her clothes to the hotel laundry. Or, like him, she knew laundries were hothouses for germs. It felt strangely intimate knowing this, to be with her drying clothes. His bottle-free hand went out towards them: a soft, damp, white scrap that must be the shirt she had been wearing in the morning. A pair of white knickers with lacy edges. A dark blue brassiere. He had just touched its strap when he sprang back. She was standing there in the half light, hunched, wrapped in a sheet as if it were cold — although stepping out of the air-conditioning of his room, the briny air of the outdoors had felt to Suraj like a warm, moist slap.