Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

A television voice started off in the next room. Not Suraj’s room, the one on the other side. What was Suraj doing in his room? Carving his boat? An asinine thing to do, making all those boats just to float them away. What a fucking romantic. She could bet he put messages into bottles too, and threw them in the sea.

She put a pillow over her head to block out the sound from the television in the next room. Her thoughts went back to the morning, to the temple guide’s strictures about her clothes. The bloody nerve. She had been on the brink of hitting someone, she had been so furious. It had taken all her self-control not to snap with those two men ogling her under the guise of judging the temple-worthiness of her cargo pants and shirt.

Her clothes always turned out to be wrong. The orphanage had sent her with a carefully-packed duffel bag to her foster mother, who lived at the time in Reading in England. The bag contained a pink comb, a matching toothbrush, a tube of translucent green toothpaste, shiny hairclips, undergarments, and four cotton frocks, each one a different colour. They were the first new clothes she had ever owned. She could not stop touching them, but her new mother had taken them out of the duffel bag and tossed them aside with barely a look, saying that they wouldn’t do. She made a list of clothes Nomi had never heard of: tights, anorak, thermals. She was taken to a shop. It was huge, Nomi had never seen so many things in one place. She wandered from aisle to aisle, seeing nothing, hating the woman who had discarded her new frocks. She wanted to run away. She managed to slip off to a different section of the store, lurked among the merchandise. Now she was flanked by rows and rows of earrings, necklaces, hairclips, bracelets. Wonderstruck, she picked up a string of multicoloured beads. And before anyone saw, she put the necklace into her pocket. She could never explain why she stole the necklace, but it had given her a gloating sense of revenge. When she was leaving the shop, high-pitched beeps of piercing intensity began ringing around her. She knew nothing of burglar alarms and was taken aback when men in uniforms surrounded her. She hardly even reached their hips, she recalled, they were so tall. And she remembered her vicious satisfaction when her new mother, checking her pockets, pulled out the beads, gasping, “It’s just a mistake, I assure you! She’s not a thief, it’s just that she came two days ago from a different country!” One of the security guards had said, “Which country is it where they don’t know stealing from buying?”

Despite the pillow over her head, the television voices rose, and over it she could hear men: loud talk, then guffawing laughter. It was always so quiet in her foster mother’s house. Silent enough to hear leaves fall and rain drip from the roof, silent enough to make it hard for her to cry at night without being noticed. She tried to lie as motionless here as she had trained herself to do there. There was a wall between her and the television men. Thin, if it let through so much sound. But it was a wall.

A moment later, she sprang out of bed. She checked again if her cupboard was not in fact a door, looked under her bed. Ran her hands through the red curtains. Flung open the bathroom door for a look. No intruders. She fell back into bed.

She had to sleep. She shut her eyes. There was a way to sleep, it was always the same way. She made herself go back to the woods and the lake: cycling through the Norwegian countryside one midsummer — it is about one in the morning. She is with five other girls, they are straight out of school, sixteen, and she is on her first trip with girls her age. They are used to it, but to her it is new and strange. She is not saying much, just struggling to keep up, pedalling hard. She is smaller and thinner than they are, not able to cycle as fast, she gets out of breath. Around two, when they reach the woods, it is not dark and not light, it is a phosphorescent dusk, a mad light in which anything is possible. They put up two tents, she is inside one of them. The rest have not paused, they have run out to swim in the lake. She sits in the tent, not daring to come out of it. She can hear herself breathe: she breathes in the smell of the tent’s nylon, her own sweat, the spilled shampoo in someone’s backpack. Then she hears a bird. It doesn’t call, it sings. A brief, ethereal song. Another bird sings back, then the first one sings again. On and on the birds sing to each other. She crawls out of the tent, sees a sheet of silver ahead, mirroring the unearthly midsummer night, the black trees, the glowing sky. Her friends’ clothes are heaped on the bank. They are far off in the water, their voices ring out joyfully. She can glimpse flashes of gold — their hair. None of them are looking at her. She looks behind: there is nobody. She fiddles with a button. Her heart hammers her ribs. She has never done this before, not in changing rooms, or doctors’ clinics, or dorms. Never before people. Tonight she unbuttons her shirt, shrugs it off. Unzips her jeans and peels them away, and then, very quickly before she has time to reconsider, she takes off every scrap of underclothing. She feels the warm midsummer air on her skin. There is nobody looking. Nobody to gape at her scraggy, stubby, knock-kneed body striped with welts and pockmarked with burns. She steps into the water. It is chilly and she gasps. As she slides in, it begins to feel warmer. It covers her. There is nothing between herself and the water. The water flows into her and out, soft and cool. The birds are still singing to each other, she can hear them over her splashes and her friends’ cries of delight. She is charged with a wild abandon, flips over, doesn’t care who sees her breasts. Above her, the sky is opal.

By the time Nomi’s eyelids dropped, all Jarmuli was asleep. At the great temple, the priests and guides and pilgrims had gone. Watchmen sat dozing outside the shrines. The temple idols gazed into oil lamps burning gold and red. Far out at sea, a fishing boat’s solitary lantern bobbed on the dark water. The fish underneath swam in shoals towards its nets, eager to the end.

When I opened my eyes it was raining in the room, I could not see through the sheets of falling blood. I thought I was going blind, I thought I was losing my mind. As a child I had taught myself a game: whenever I was afraid, I pretended I was dead, the life in me had gone, nothing could happen to me again, there would be no pain, never again, and this is what I did now, I kept myself still, I willed myself hardly to breathe at all. I was a ragdoll, I was held together with thread, there was not a shred of flesh and blood in me, nothing that could hurt. When I opened my eyes again, everything was covered in a film of oil, rainbows shifted and melted and changed, my head felt undone, rearranged. A blazing skewer went through it, its pain made my stomach boil. But I could see again. I did not move a finger, only opened and shut my eyes until I was sure. The sheet below me was white and soft and pure, the ceiling above me was white and the doors were painted white as well. The red had gone, everything felt pale and damp, there were tuberoses in a vase by a lemon-coloured lamp.

My room was new, I had not seen it before, a hotel room — where was it, which city? It would not come back to me right then and I looked beyond the ceiling and the doors to the window to get a sense of where — and then I saw scarlet curtains against the sun, shifting and swelling as if they were alive, as if deciding what was to be done. Beyond the curtains through the window I could see the flesh-thick petals of crimson flowers on a leafless tree and then my heart thudded as if it would burst, the iron rod in my head was on fire, but that wasn’t the worst of it, the rod twisted and turned, there was a burning wire around my skull, and I tore off all my clothes and ran to the door, I turned on the shower, I slid to the bathroom’s polished floor. Over my head, my shoulders, my breasts, the water poured, I was sodden, I was sobbing, I scoured myself with my nails, my nails were thick and pitted and dirty and hard, they scratched my skin, but I could not stop. I don’t know how many hours I passed inside, or maybe they were minutes, I was cold, my skin felt raw as just-flayed hide, I tried, but I could not go back into the room.