Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

He turned away from the tea stall and started towards his hotel, but his knees buckled, his stomach cramped, and his feet kept sinking into the sand.

*

Vidya and Gouri were still troubled that they had forgotten to fast yesterday on Shivaratri. A day which their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers before them, had spent without food or a drop of water till their prayers at sundown, fasting first for a good husband; then for the health of that husband; and after his death for their children’s well-being. “Instead we were eating heaped plates of food! At a restaurant full of pilgrims,” Vidya exclaimed. “Of all places.”

How could they have forgotten the faith of a lifetime?

“Oh, the breeze from the sea blew away all of that. You’re allowed to break rules on a holiday!” Latika sounded impatient when the discussion showed no signs of ending. They were being driven to the Sun Temple in a car from the hotel. The driver was a handsome man, who looked “not a bit like a driver” — Latika had whispered this almost as soon as she entered the car. The man was in his mid-forties, his clothes were not inexpensive, and he did not have the slightest hint of subservience. He was courteous but not ingratiating, obliging without appearing servile. A prince in disguise, not a driver on hire. When the thought crossed Latika’s mind she hid her mouth behind her hand and smiled to herself. She had always been self-conscious about her prominent teeth.

They drove for two or three hours down tree-shaded roads, with the ocean sometimes on their right, sometimes obscured by trees, then filling the horizon with its miraculous blue. By mid-afternoon they were at the Sun Temple. They looked at each other for confirmation. Vidya, mustering the appropriate tone of voice — neither too eager nor too peremptory — said to the driver, “Would you like to see the Sun Temple too?” This temple was a ruin, a tourist sight and not a religious place, so it seemed correct to offer. The man agreed with a smile, and she felt she had got it right, her tone and how the words had come out. They bought him a ticket and a green coconut to drink before starting the walk to the ruins.

The sun was furiously close here, its white heat wanted to burn and destroy. Walking down the corridor formed by tourist stalls that bordered the road on each side, Vidya and Gouri bought themselves straw hats and looked questioningly at Latika, who shook her head. “You’re bound to regret it,” Vidya said. “The sun will give you a headache in two minutes.” They put their hats on, settled the elastic bands into the folds of their chins. Some way down the road to the ruins, Latika turned back and started off at a brisk pace to the stalls they had just left behind. “Don’t wait,” she cried, “I’ll catch up.” She disappeared into the throng of tourists and shops.

Vidya gave an exasperated shrug. Given Gouri’s stately pace, she thought, it would not be that hard for anyone to catch up. She and Gouri walked ahead. The driver followed at just the right distance, telling them he was there, but he was not going to intrude.

Past the shops came an open area fenced in by railings that held the cliff back from the sea that flung itself at rocks hundreds of feet below. Looking down over the edge, Gouri was visited for a moment by the sense she had had of flying into the sky on the wings of a kite — was that years ago or just days ago? Among eternity-old ruins, it was hard to tell.

The temple’s central shrine rose straight from the cliff like a monumental rock. They had paused to look up at the tower when Latika came back to them holding a red parasol with a yellow frill. “Isn’t it pretty? So Japanese!” she exclaimed, twirling it this way and that, holding it over her shoulder, making them feel foolish in their clumsy straw hats. “She’s acting eighteen,” Vidya said in an undertone to Gouri when Latika was out of earshot. “She always does when there’s a good-looking man around. The way she repeats stories of her college conquests. And keeps mentioning how people say she looks half her age.”

“At almost seventy!” Gouri said. “Really!”

Their misgivings were confirmed halfway through their tour of the ruins. At each shrine they had to climb rock-cut steps to look at the sculptures. And all the while, the blazing, blinding, ever fiercer sun radiating off the stones. Confronted by the tallest of the shrines with the steepest stairs, Gouri dropped onto a bench below a tree and said, “Oh no, that really is too high, the sun is too strong. My head feels as if it’ll split open.”

“No escape from the sun at the Sun Temple,” their driver said, his first contribution to the afternoon’s conversation.

“You go ahead and have a look,” Vidya said to him, sitting down beside Gouri. “We’ll rest here and wait for you.”

“I don’t want to rest,” Latika said, spinning the handle of her parasol. “I’m not going to leave without exploring the whole place!”

Vidya heaved a tired sigh, and said, “Latika. .” She started to get up from the bench, holding a knee with one hand. Was that twinge her back pain coming back?

“Why are you getting up?”

“Well, you can’t go alone, can you? What if you fall?”

“Nonsense, I won’t fall. If it makes you feel better, I’ll go with. . him.” Latika darted a quick look at the driver. “You stay here with Gouri.”

Before Vidya could say anything more, Latika had begun following the driver towards the tallest shrine. They watched her walking rapidly away. From the back she seemed no more than forty, slim and quick-footed, in a bright salwar kameez and sensible shoes. Her parasol bobbed near the driver’s shoulder. She looked up at him and said something; he was much taller and he had to bend towards her to reply.

Vidya sighed. “Did you notice how many age-defying creams and serums she has on her bedside table? And foundation! All these years she claimed she used nothing on her face at all.”

“I visited her once the day her daughter arrived from abroad,” Gouri said. “You should have seen the mountain of moisturiser bottles she’d brought for her.” She smiled. “Those of us who weren’t pretty to begin with don’t get into a tizzy about wrinkles and fat.” She contemplated her words, then said, “I am happy to spend my last days with my grandchildren and prayers. But good tea is important. I have to have good tea, that’s all.”

“And a bit of cold cream,” Vidya said, and they both laughed. Gouri’s grandchildren loved pinching her cheeks and the loose skin of her upper arms. Soft as soufflé, her granddaughter called them.

Latika and the driver had begun climbing the steps to the main shrine, the one with the rearing horses and the chariots of the sun god. The day before the first ceremony at the temple centuries ago, a mason had toppled to his death from the tower; not long after, the king had been struck by leprosy. Because of the bad omens, the temple had never been used for worship and even now had a menacing, secretive look. The steps became forbiddingly vertical as they went higher. The people at the top looked ant-like in the distance, they appeared and disappeared behind pillars and corners. Vidya saw the driver offer Latika his hand at the steepest part and pointed this out to Gouri. They both saw her take his hand, then she and the driver vanished from view, into the shrine.

Vidya gave a sigh of resignation. “Now they’ll be gone for God knows how long, and we’ll have to wait here in this heat while he explains all those sculptures of a hundred different Kama Sutra positions to her.” They giggled at the thought and it dissolved their irritation. Vidya told Gouri of the time she had come to the temple decades ago with her husband and various other relatives. Deadpan they had walked from edge to edge, exclaiming only at the artistic brilliance of the great carved wheels and the stone lions or the otherworldly expression on the Sun God’s face. Uncles, nephews, aunts, and cousins, all had pretended not to notice that the stone couples on the temple walls had for thousands of years been entwined in complicated variations of coitus. One of her vulgar uncles had paused for long minutes before a particular panel. Vidya had a vivid memory of it: the sculpture of a man caressing the breasts of a woman who held his penis, which was as ponderous as a bottle-gourd, even as another woman sat playing at his feet with his over-sized testicles. The uncle had remarked in a loud voice on the yogic and gymnastic powers of Indians in earlier times, their free-spiritedness, but the rest of the group had walked ahead as if they had gone mysteriously deaf.