Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

But would she? There was something perverse about Gouri’s amnesia, it had an unfailing way of making her blab about the wrong things. This time Latika wished she could put cards into Gouri’s handbag to remind her to forget : not just Suraj and the girl, but also her own husband’s escapade with his student. Such a wretchedly stupid thing to have confided in Gouri of all people! She had of course counselled refuge in God and told her that every misfortune hid a blessing. And ever since, brought up the topic when Latika least expected it. It was thirty-one years ago. Yet the merest mention of those two months in her life turned the lights off inside her.

The good humour in Gouri’s plump face had evaporated and she nodded at Latika solemnly. “You’re right. What mothers have to put up with! There’s no need for her to know about this now. First that boy married a girl Vidya didn’t like. Remember how upset she was when he said Ayesha was years older than him? And now he’s romancing another one half his age.” If they let slip what they had seen, Vidya would be thrown into an immediate turmoil of shame and anxiety. She had never cared for her son’s wife, she had often wished her away, true. But to chance upon her son with a lover on their own beach! For all they knew the fellow might be at the next hotel. What if he was in the same hotel, doing god-knows-what down the corridor?

Latika pushed her glasses up her nose and shook her head as if to reorder her mind. She would not allow herself to dwell upon long-ago things. She must live in the present. Suraj. Yes, she must focus on Suraj. She had known him from when he was a toddler, she had shared Vidya’s jittery delight when he first climbed the steep stairs of her old house. Through his boyhood Latika had taught him how to recite lines from poems. When he first began to act in school plays, she had gone to all of them, clapped hard. They had thought he would be a famous actor. She had given him singing lessons. Suraj and her daughter, the same age, would stand next to each other, singing by her piano, both slightly off-key but persevering. He used to shut his eyes when he sang and frown until his little-boy forehead puckered like an old man’s. As a boy he was irresistible, the most popular in school, the one the girls followed around. He had a beautiful face, and she remembered how, in the light of the sunset that came in through the window by the piano, his cheeks turned orange, his light-brown hair on fire as if he had become the sun he was named after. Once, she had her husband photograph him like that and gave the picture to Vidya, framed. She had wanted to caption it, “Suraj in the Sun,” but it would have seemed too pat. The picture still stood on Vidya’s bedside table, its black and white turning to sepia.

Nothing in that photograph predicted the Suraj she had seen today, dopey-eyed, degenerate, flirting with a virtual teenager. The girl from their train. She had looked such a child. How deceptive appearances could be. “It’s true,” she murmured, “what they say. They grow up quicker in the West.”

“Best? Yes, that tea was the best. Why don’t we go and have some more? Why did we leave in such a hurry?” Gouri was beaming up at Latika through her round glasses, her voice bubbling with enthusiasm.

When I landed after my first flight ever, my new mother was waiting inside the airport. I had a label on a string around my neck with my name and other details because I was travelling as an unaccompanied child. I was a parcel being sent from one country to another.

She came towards me with an eager smile. She had straw-yellow hair and grey eyes. She wore a frock. Nobody that old ever wore frocks where I came from. Her frock came to her knees, below which her legs were wax-white, with green veins running down the length of the calves. She had a necklace made of pink seashells in her hand. When she reached me she garlanded me with it and gave me a bright smile. She squeezed my hand, took my duffel bag from me, said, “How light this is! Is this all you’ve brought?” Later, in the taxi, she said she got me the necklace because she had found out that it was the custom in my country to welcome people with garlands — only she had not made it a flower garland because she wanted me to have something I could keep for always, something that would remind me of today, that would mark my passage across many seas.

I don’t know why I took my rage out on that necklace the day I overheard her telling her sister on the phone that it was too much, maybe it had been a mistake. She meant me, I was the mistake, although I had been with her three years already. The necklace was hard to break because the string was nylon, but I was angry enough, I did tear it apart, and have loathed shell necklaces ever since. I hadn’t asked to come to her either, to this lonely country where it was night all day and I had no friends. I flung the shells from my window into her garden where she would be sure to step on them. Later I saw her treading gingerly, picking shells from the grass.

Before the necklace I had had few presents. The gold earrings that had belonged to Chuni and oddments from Jugnu. He was the only person at the ashram who gave me things: flowers, fruits, oddly-coloured dry leaves, dead butterflies, flattened frogs, striped stones: these were his notion of presents for a girl. One day, he put together sheets of thin metal into a weathervane and said it would belong to both of us. He clambered to the top of his shed and fixed it there. He said when the wind pointed it northward, it would be time. Time for what, I asked him. Time to leave for a new country, he said. The weathervane screeched and squeaked on its spindle if it moved at all, but I was thrilled each time it shifted in the breeze and Jugnu said, “Look, it’s going north. It’ll be there soon. And then. .” I would chorus, “And then we will leave.” Sometimes at night I lay awake thinking of the weathervane, wondering which direction the wind was blowing it. What if it chose to turn northward when we were asleep? What if it had turned north already and we had missed seeing it? Each time I passed Jugnu’s shed during the day I stared hard at the roof, willing that weathervane to turn. I made up all sorts of charms for it: if I saw seven green parakeets together, it was a sign that soon the weathervane would turn north. If a yellow butterfly sat on a blue flower, it would turn north.

Jugnu made a big to-do when he brought me something. You’ll never believe what it is, he might say, nobody’s ever had a thing so beautiful: as if he had brought me a pretty doll in a lace frock and not a twig wrapped in a dirty scrap of cloth. His mock ceremony made me giggle. I was wary of the other people at the ashram but never of Jugnu. He talked to me as if we were the same age. He made me feel grown-up and clever. He told me stories. He said that before he became a gardener he used to draw pictures for storybooks. His fingers looked too thick for pencils, though, so I would tell him he was making up a story about himself.

Jugnu would say, “What do you know about me? You don’t know who I am or what I was before the war did this to me.”

As the months passed, he changed. Some days, he would be in a bad temper and mutter to himself as he worked. Some days he would not talk to me at all except to scold me. He stopped going to the ashram’s puja hall and he hardly ever went to serve Guruji. He would sing kirtans, but his singing was almost a whisper, as if he were talking to God and he did not want anyone else to overhear.

One of Jugnu’s jobs was to pick the fruits and flowers to offer at the puja hall every day. He would pick them and I would follow him around with a basket. One day, after picking the fruit, he sat in a tree’s shade and patted a spot beside him. “Come here, I’ll tell you a story. From the Ramayana . It’s about picking fruit for God.”