Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

I remember I saw Guruji poking Jugnu with his feet in the end. I remember Guruji’s face in the firelight. It had no expression, as if his feet were nudging a sack of mud.

They carried Jugnu away. Maybe he was struggling still, or maybe he had become a dead weight at which the men were spitting out filthy curses. Did I really hear them? Did I dream it or see it? I cannot have seen it all, someone must have told me of the men grey and white in the moonlight, rushing down the sand towards a stormy sea. The sea from which Jugnu had come and all the rest of us had come, hidden in boat-holds. Nobody knew he had ever been here. Nobody would know he was gone again, forever.

On the seventh day of my confinement I was made to wash my hair with shampoo and bathe with a new bar of soap. The soap was pink and round. Padma Devi lined my eyes with kajal saying, “Can you see colours with black eyes? Or is everything black?” She gave me a set of new clothes. A long blue skirt with silver sequins and a blouse of darker blue printed with scarlet flowers.

I waited as I had been told, for Guruji to arrive and perform his rituals. The prayer bells rang at the puja hall. Midday. The conch shells. The end of prayers. The school bells. Lunchtime.

My hands were icy and my knees shook, I remember, counting the bells. I did not know why.

I remember how Guruji came in, locked the door, sat down and patted his thighs. How he stroked my legs as he spoke. How he told me I was a nun in the service of God. I was the chosen one. How he had always known there was something special about me and so, from the time I was seven, he had been training me for this day. He said again that he was God on earth and I would be purified by serving him. He held my face between his hands and stuck his greasy lips on my lips, pushed his tongue in. It felt like a wet snake. I remember the way he kept stroking my body at first over my clothes, then his hands went under them. I remember breaking away, trying to run, reaching the door, pulling a stool to it to unlatch it, and that when he stood up, he looked large enough to smash me against the wall.

My body felt as if it would tear into two when he forced my legs apart, then wider apart. He stuffed cloth into my mouth to stop me shouting for help. I remember my screams made no sound. There was blood. A burning between my legs. The sense that my body was being split open.

I remember how night after night I would run to a tap and sit under it, clothes and all, to wash it away: the smells, the touch, the bad taste in my mouth after Guruji summoned me to his room.

I remember how Piku was punished for not going to Guruji. They tied a big bag of dung to one of her ankles and she had to drag it with her wherever she went. She wasn’t allowed into the school or the dining hall. She ate outside, tied to that smelly sack, flies buzzing around. I remember how I was punished for trying to untie her: three days in the kennel shed, no food. The kennels had six dogs and their smell was close and sharp. The dogs growled at first. They came to me to sniff me with flattened ears and snarling lips. Later I slept among them, ate scraps from their bowls and when they licked my face their tongues were rough and their breath was hot. One of the dogs was called Pinto. He was red like a fox, with a pointy nose. He slept against me in the afternoons, his rear wedged into my stomach.

Sometimes, journalists would come to interview Guruji. They printed articles about the ashram which were pinned up on the walls of our school. My picture was in the paper once. We were a line of girls standing in front of a tree in the square between the classrooms and our dormitories. I was third from the right. I had two pigtails tied with ribbons. My face was sulky, my eyes were screwed up, I was knock-kneed. Guruji stood behind me. He was smiling his fatherly smile. I remember I could feel his flabby belly and his stump pushing against me between my shoulderblades. But you couldn’t tell that from looking at the picture.

Suraj woke at dawn and decided to go for a swim. There were only two days left for the work in Jarmuli to be finished and he had not swum once. Swimming in every new sea he encountered was one of his life’s unbreakable rituals, like making a boat every year or adding a dash of water to a malt whisky or taking the first drag from a cigarette only after a sip of coffee.

From his room he had to walk for ten minutes down brickbound hotel paths to reach the sea. He swivelled his shoulders and stretched his arms, drinking in the early morning’s grey-blue. After he had flung aside his slippers and torn off his T-shirt he realised his mobile was in a pocket of his swimming trunks. He couldn’t go back to his room to put it there: the perfect air and light would last no more than another half hour. He scanned the beach for a safe spot to hide it. It was too expensive to risk leaving on the sand.

He saw Nomi’s favourite tea stall being set up. The bent old baldhead was placing blue benches along its front and had busied himself with kettles, pans, jars. A boy was walking towards the tea stall bent sideways by a heavy looking iron pail and further down, a monk was meditating in the water. There was nobody else. Making his way to the tea stall he asked the man if he would look after his things. He left his shirt and slippers in a heap on the bench, covering his mobile with them.

Suraj lay at first at the edge of the sand, fingers trailing in the white, lacy spume. Then he moved further in, lying on his stomach in the water, feeling the sand being sucked away from under him in the backwash, each time a little more, sending him further and further out. It had been four days of hard work — that girl was a workaholic, dogged beyond the call of duty. She had dragged him over every inch of Jarmuli. They had mapped out the whole town, walking every street to make notes about possible locations for shoots; they had visited shrines, big and small, and almhouses for indigent pilgrims; they had done bits of video recording in the kitchens of roadside shacks; they had gone out with fishermen in a boat, photographing as they cast their nets; they had taken night-time pictures in the red-light area and, dreaming of photography awards, Suraj had gone into a brothel to take more photographs on the sly. He was thrown out, and they were chased down the street by a pair of foul-mouthed pimps as they ran. He certainly needed a swim. Now there was only a sun temple left, and that would be their last assignment together this time.

Thoughts streamed in and out of him as he swam. He went back to the evening before, he and Nomi drinking again in their private garden at the hotel, she telling him about her visit to a village sculptor’s and he telling her about his afternoon with government babus sorting out permissions to film. He had sat with her sipping his whisky, smoking his cigarette, fiddling with his half-finished boat, thinking how pleasant it was to spend evenings this way, rather than alone as he was trying to get used to now. Nomi had turned out fun to be with after working hours. She changed. She cracked jokes, chattered about nothing in particular, and laughed at his stories until she had tears in her eyes. He liked that. It was sexy when she laughed that way, throwing her head back, helpless, showing a beautiful long neck. But now there were only a couple of days left. And after that? More internet searches?

By degrees, the swell of the waves was below him, and he was swimming with long strokes. There were no big waves, the water was gentle against his skin. A long distance from the shore he found the absolute solitude he had been hungering for at dawn. It was as if he had become a shark slicing through water unnoticed, no connection with human life. Across an infinite stretch of aquamarine was the arc of the horizon holding in the sea. Last night, after leaving Nomi in her garden, he had idled in bed, typing a text message to her which said, “The bottle’s finished, but the night is not.” He had neither sent it nor deleted it, and was now relieved he had not been drunk enough to send her such corny drivel. The future was obvious. She would go home to some Nordic hulk of a boyfriend and he would go back to divorce papers from Ayesha.