Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

The silence was sudden. Nothing seemed to move, the air humid and heavy. The driver felt as if he was having to push the heat outward to make room for the door when he opened it. He got out, stretched and looked into the car. The girl was still sitting there, making no move.

He went to her window. “What, madam? This place is shut. Nobody here. Is it the right place?” He wiped the nape of his neck, making a face. Only moments away from the air-conditioning of the car and his shirt was damp.

She sat without moving. Like water’s flooded her limbs, he thought. Or did she expect him to hold open the door for her? She was looking towards the gates, scabby with rust. One of them hung askew, as if it had broken a bone. A sign on it said: SITE FOR PEACOCK AYURVEDIC SPA. He said, “This place has been a ruin for years. If you had told me before where you wanted to go, I would have told you. Even the builders abandoned it. It’s a godforsaken place. They say bad things happened here long ago.”

His words seemed to bring the girl to a decision. She got out of the car, saying only, “Wait here.” The earthen pathway leading from the gate to the grounds inside was covered with dry leaves. The driver watched her trudge forward as if she were ill. When she reached the gates she peeped through them as a child might, frightened of encountering ghosts.

He locked the car and followed her. It wasn’t safe out here on the empty highway, wandering in a derelict estate. What would he do if she disappeared in there?

He walked a short distance in, his feet crunching the dry leaves. She had stopped at a shed-like house beside the path. A pelt of moss covered its walls. The windows she was looking into were broken, the door missing. Inside, it was a brutal concrete cube. There were platforms shaped like beds along the wall and tiny cell-like windows with bars on them. When they walked further in they found more ruined cottages of the same kind, surrounded by warped iron railings, fallen masonry and broken tiles. A few of the cottages had been demolished and turned into piles of bricks, hairy now with grass and weeds. A grey old tree trunk lay on the ground in a ruffled skirt of frilly toadstools.

They walked through groves of old trees, twisted, chopped, vandalised. Pomegranate trees hung with what looked like organs cut in half: shrivelled fruit opened by age. Some of the trees had red flowers. The girl hunched before the trees, her arms wrapped around herself, holding her own body in an embrace.

They came into what appeared to be a central courtyard which had the remnants of a large structure, the pile of bricks and construction material was almost as high as a building. Beyond it was the outer boundary wall of the place. She walked back in the opposite direction, almost colliding with the driver. “Can you see a jamun tree anywhere?” she asked him. “Would you recognise one?”

Swatting early evening mosquitoes the driver said, “Half the trees are chopped down, Madam, can’t you see?”

She went back to the outer edge of the compound and ran her finger tips over sections of the boundary wall that had fallen to the ground. It was tipped with shards of broken glass and upturned nails.

“It looked big from outside, but inside it’s not so big,” the driver ventured. “I think there’s no more to see.” The girl was unstable, he was sure, and the oddness of her interest in the ruin was unnerving him now.

She murmured, “It isn’t. I always told Piku it was too far for her to walk to the gates. It wasn’t.”

They walked to where the frame for another gate stood, a smaller one, entirely off its hinges. At its edge, where the wall curved into an inlet, a giant banyan tree shaded the clearing. Tarnished brass bells hung from its aerial roots and were strewn around its trunk. Fragments of cloth, ribbons, pieces of tin, evidence of long-ago worship, now dead, were visible in the dust. The girl bent and prised out from the ground something barely visible to the driver — a rusted metal cross, he saw, once she had rubbed the earth away from it with her fingers, with an arrow on one of its arms. It was rubbish, yet she held on to it, swivelled the arms this way and that.

“Madam, we must go now,” the driver said, his voice insistent. He did not like driving in the dark. The tree formed a canopy under which a few grass-thatched huts nestled in even greater darkness than the road beyond it. All around the courtyard were shapeless forms like corpses wrapped in sheets.

The girl turned to follow him, then appeared to take fright. She scurried closer to him. “Did you see something? Isn’t there a man — behind those bushes? There, look. In robes?”

The driver squinted. “I didn’t see anyone.”

“I’m sure I saw someone. A tall man in robes? We should leave.”

“That’s what have I been saying. . all along,” the driver panted, trying to keep up with her. She was moving too quickly for him. Then he noticed it wasn’t dark any more. There was lamplight, dancing among the trees, giving their bodies long, irregular shadows. A man had materialised behind them, and was now blocking their way. A tall, hunched form shrouded in yards of cloth — a lungi below, a cloth over his head and shoulders. An arm as thin as a bamboo cane stuck out from the folds of his clothes, holding a hurricane lantern. He was shining it in the girl’s face, lighting up the coloured threads in her hair and all the gold and silver in her ears. He swung it towards the driver, saying, “Come. This way.”

As their eyes adjusted to the new brightness of the light, Nomi saw that there was a congregation of stone figures in the courtyard, some quite small, some so large their faces were too high to make out. Gryphons, elephants, Buddha figures, apsaras. Most appeared fully finished, a few were still struggling out from the stone. The man shone the light close on one of the statues. A woman made of flowing lines and blind eyes, nearly ready for a temple niche.

The man shuffled forward, swung the lantern on another piece of sculpture, this one a winged horse. Then a dancing girl. A lion with moustaches and potbelly. He would not hold the lantern still long enough for them to look properly at the pieces.

“My family has been sculptors to the emperors of this land since the time of the Buddha,” the man said. His voice was reedy and he sucked his gums between words. “They were sculptors when the great old temples came up — and let me tell you truthfully, my family has a chisel hidden away in a place so secret nobody else knows about it — a chisel that carved the walls of temples then, eight hundred years ago.”

The man stopped and swung his lantern on to a gargoyle. “That one’s no good.” He coughed between his words. “The eyes aren’t right. I will always tell you if something isn’t right.”

“Have you been here many years? Were you always here?” Nomi said.

“Always. For generations. If you came here a hundred years ago, you would still have heard the sound of a hammer on a chisel in these parts. Why, it was a flourishing village then, of people from our caste. Now we’re only a few left, all dying of hunger. Who wants these statues? Everyone wants things made in a factory. Of plastic.”

She hesitated, drew a breath. “This ruined place next door to you — what was it before?”

“What was it before?” The man brought his lamp down. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything but my own work. I kept to myself, never went in there.”

He moved ahead. “Will you buy something? Look around, a gift for a friend, all the way from the Bay of Bengal? There are smaller ones too, easy to pack.” He went from statue to statue, shining the light on them. “That one is made from sandstone. . that is pure marble. . that is black granite, the Buddha, you can see. Foreign people like Buddha statues. Elephants too, all sizes, look.”