Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

I thought I had torn the thing out, it would never come back. Nobody would cow me down, I would attack. I could slam my fist into a brick, not feel the pain, lick the blood away, hit the brick again. I would kick a ball hard and cry with joy. The boys sniggered, but it made me feel whole, it made me weep because that ball wasn’t a ball, it was a man’s head, it was that man I was kicking dead. This was the way I broke it, the thing was half-killed, I thought it had lost the will to fight but then I came to this hotel. It is by the sea, I had chosen that deliberately, to stare it down, to say you can’t do anything more to me, but then at breakfast by the pool there was a man with a knife that he plunged into a melon not once but twice, thrice, and then again, and when he was done he prised the slices apart, and the juice inside poured out in red spurts. I told myself it was just fruit. A woman came around with glasses on a tray. Her eyelids were blue, her hair was gold, sapphires sparkled in her ears and I told myself it was just fruit, but my breath stuck in my throat, I thought I would choke, yet I picked up a glass, said thank you. It was all about willpower, I told myself, it was just a fruit and I would not look at it, but I did and there was the melon, cut in pieces on a flat white plate, red against white, just like the grapefruit we picked, my brother and I, that my mother sliced in half.

Vidya threw up in the early hours and lay in bed till late morning. Her head was spinning, her temples ached, her neck hurt. Quavering, she refused breakfast, even dry toast, and urged the other two to go out without her. “I’ll be alright.” She tried to sound brave. “It must be my B.P. Or the food I ate at that roadside stall yesterday.” She had her zipper bag of medicine beside her and was dosing herself with Nux Vomica 30. “I’ll be fit enough to play football by tomorrow, just wait and see.”

Latika handed her some iced water. “Sip slowly. This has salt and sugar. You mustn’t dehydrate. Really, Vidya, what a thing to do — it looked poisonous, all that prawn floating in oil and chillies. Whatever possessed you? The sea air?”

She clucked partly to mask her resentment. They had only two more days in Jarmuli. Could they afford a whole morning commiserating with Vidya? Latika longed to spend the day on the beach, feeling the waves lapping her ankles. It was many years since she had been to the sea: the last time, a decade ago, it was with her husband, in Goa. He stood on dry land shouting, “You are too rash, Latika! You’ll float away and not know until you’re miles out and can’t swim back.” Later they had eaten grilled salmon and drunk sweet Goan port wine sitting in a rush-covered shack, looking at the moonlit sea while in the distance someone sang slow Portuguese fados. Her insides melted with certain kinds of music. She felt herself twisted and wrung; tears poked at her eyes. Forgotten things from years ago had come back to her under that shack — doves in the next-door house, the tamarind tree she climbed to pick its stick-like fruit, stone images in a garden, the long grey Buick — until she realised her husband was speaking to her, waiting for a response, annoyed at her farawayness. It was their first holiday alone in decades, soon after their daughter had gone off to university in Montreal.

In the early evening, only an hour left before sunset, Latika stroked Vidya’s sweat-dampened hair and told her, “We are going for a walk on the beach. You must phone me the minute you want us.” Vidya shut her eyes. “All I do is doze off, there’s no need for the two of you to waste a whole day as well.”

Latika and Gouri left the hotel in a rickshaw that took them towards the promenade. “Shouldn’t we have told someone at the hotel that she’s alone?” Gouri said anxiously as the rickshaw started to move. “What if she feels dizzy and falls? I did that once and. .”

“She’s better now,” Latika said, “all that a stomach upset needs is rest and fluids.” Their rickshaw rattled along, the breeze carried salt and sea and as the distance between them and the hotel increased, Vidya and her troubles receded.

It was a Sunday. Walking away from their rickshaw, Latika and Gouri approached the crowded part of the beach. Here an open market tumbled over the sands, with makeshift stalls selling everything from conch shells to cowries and fried prawns. Children made gleeful sorties into the waves, then scampered back to land. Boys tugged at their saris, holding out sea-shell key rings and bead necklaces, proclaiming unbelievable prices. The air smelled of drying fish, frying fish, old fish, fresh fish, but in the wind that gusted in from the sea none of it smelled bad.

Gouri held Latika’s arm for balance and sloshed the water at the edge of the beach with her feet, dreamy in the heaving murmur of waves which snatched away the voices of people around them. The wind twisted their saris around their ankles. They laughed into it, pressed down blowaway hair. Abandoned their slippers to walk barefoot. Sidestepped tiny, translucent crabs which dug themselves out of the sand and skittered towards the water, disappearing again.

Looking at Gouri smiling, Latika thought their freedom from care was no more than a pause in time, a postponement of the inevitable even as the predator inside Gouri’s mind rested, gathering strength, never letting her out of sight. Gouri appeared to have no recollection of the way Latika had found her in her room the afternoon before, packed and in her mind waiting to leave for Jarmuli — when they had scarcely arrived. How had she confused her hotel room with her home in Calcutta? And if she could not remember which city she was in, could she ever be left alone? What future was in store for her now? A prisoner in her son’s care? Or would he put her into a nursing home?

Her life was on the brink of catastrophe and yet she haggled over the price of a sea shell, serenely ignorant. She bought a plaster model of the great temple. Then she noticed a man selling tea and the musky smell of rain-wet earth in tea served in clay cups came back to her. She could not remember when she had last had tea smelling of rain. She told herself she would get atleast three cups right away, to make up. Where, back home in Calcutta, would she find terracotta tea? No, it could be many years; she was certain she wanted to drink three cups.

Or should it be two? She had a tiny sugar problem. Not yet diabetes, but she needed to be careful: her father had had diabetes.

As she dithered, Latika said, “Look, isn’t that the guide who was showing us around the temple yesterday?”

“What? Oh yes, you’re right, it is! Yes, Badal,” Gouri said happily. “Let’s go and —”

“He’s a strange fellow — so silent and contemptuous — if he smiled a little he wouldn’t look bad.”

“He’s not strange, Latika. He’s not silent. On the scooter, when we were going to the temple, he told me all about himself. We had such a lovely chat. His father died when he was a child and his uncle stole everything he should have inherited and now he makes him do the work and takes away his money.”

“How did you find all that out?” Latika began, but Gouri had started off towards the tea stall with a smile ready on her face to greet Badal. Midway, she stopped. From a distance she could overhear an altercation between him and the vendor. Latika caught up with her and grabbed her arm. “Don’t rush off like that into the crowd, I’ll lose you.”

“I’m not his mother or father,” the stall man was saying. “He can go to hell.”

“But where could he have gone? What if something’s happened to him? He’s just a boy.” Badal’s voice was anguished.