Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

Raghu stood up saying, “Take it easy, Uncle, I’m just entertaining one of your customers. That’s work, or isn’t that work?”

He threw another half smile towards Badal before going back to the stove. The scent of the tea came out from the pan in a cloud when he pushed aside the lid: thick, brown, boiling, sweet, gingery tea. He poured a cupful, imitating Johnny Toppo’s technique of filling half the cup with froth, then held it out to Badal. There was something malicious in the way he held it just out of reach over the boiling pan for a second or two before handing it over. The cup felt too hot and Badal could not understand why he had been given it. He never drank this kind of tea and Raghu knew that. He had known it all these months when he had served Badal unsweetened lemon tea, unasked. He stared at the boy through the cloud of steam. He wanted no kind of tea. When Raghu did not look at him again, he walked away from the stall and tilted the cup over a grey crab that looked as prehistoric and lifeless as a stone, watching it skitter for cover under the sand which drank up the tea.

He crushed the cup underfoot. Sharp-edged waves puckered the surface of the granite sea as far as his eyes could reach. He thought he could walk into its measureless sweep until he became a barely visible speck going further and further away. Holiday-makers milled around him, everyone with friends or relatives, shopping, laughing, chatting, finding things, running into the water. Nearby were a young man and woman. Badal could see they were in a world that contained nothing but themselves — no work, no family, no yesterday or tomorrow. They did not look at each other or speak or hold hands, but they stood very close, their bodies touching at the hips and at the shoulders, as if a moment’s break in contact might snap a fragile spell.

It took Badal no more than ten minutes to get home on his scooter. Nobody expected him at that hour. They knew him to stay out as long as he possibly could. He heard his uncle’s hoarse shout from the balcony, “Who’s that downstairs? Jadu? Jadua!” Badal didn’t answer, nor did he go to the tap to wash his face. He went to his room and fell into his string cot. His bones ached with fatigue, a pain that filled the room and drained him with every breath.

He tried to sleep. After a while he realised he was staring at a nail in the wall above the door. It was an iron nail of the largest possible size. A deep, cold shudder shook him. His head hurt as if that nail were going through the centre of his forehead, the way it had hurt watching a relative hammer it into the wall after his father’s cremation. He could not remember the relative’s face, but he had a hazy memory of another man, shrunken and stooped, who had come for the funeral. “It’s what people do,” the man had explained, stroking Badal’s nine-year-old head as the nail was being banged in. “To protect the room against evil spirits when someone dies in it.” Badal did not know who that man was, but after he had held the ritual flaming torch to his father’s head on the funeral pyre, he and the man had stood together, a child and a wizened ancient, watching the body burn. The man had held his shoulder and tried to console him saying the body that turns into a handful of ashes is nothing but meaningless flesh. The soul is eternal, he had said, you have not lost him, he will always be with you, only you can’t see him.

A dry sob burst from Badal like a gasp. The solid, reassuring bulk of a body. The body that we embrace, hold, stroke — what is left when the body is gone? Nobody else would sleep in the room where his father had been found dead. Badal would sleep nowhere else.

He thought of his only friend at the time — a boy who lived down the alley. They walked together to school, studied and played together. Once, crawling through an unused sewer pipe by the road for fun, they had come face to face with the head of a just-slaughtered goat that someone was holding at the other end. Its teeth were big. Its eyes bulged. Its pelt was lathered to its neck with blood. The head shook because the person holding it was laughing so hard he couldn’t keep it still. When the two boys had tried crawling away from it, backward through the pipe, fright had made them do all the wrong things and they had got stuck inside. He no longer remembered how they came unstuck, how they got out. But he remembered how gently his friend’s mother had washed his face that afternoon, then sat him on her lap and fed him soft, warm parathas and sugar before sending him home.

He felt starved thinking of those parathas. He had not eaten since morning. He hauled himself out of his cot and went to the kitchen on the other side of the courtyard. He opened the latch on the kitchen door and saw a row of shin ing, upturned pots. In the basket where his aunt stored vegetables were three potatoes and an onion. The room smelled of overripe guava. He tracked down the smell to a single fruit, soft as a banana now, and blackened in patches. He swallowed it in two bites before its putrid smell could invade him. He looked around the kitchen. Through the mesh on the cupboard in a corner he could see three covered bowls of food. The cupboard was locked. He yanked the lock to check if it would give. That hammer began driving the burning nail through his forehead again. The lock would not budge. He went to the line of tins on the kitchen shelf and opened them one by one — rice, flour, dal — weevils crawling among the grains of rice. A bottle of oil.

He saw his hand pour the oil onto the floor, then empty out the rice and flour and sweep through the line of washed pots. They fell with a deafening series of clangs. He turned on his heels as his uncle began screaming, “Jadua, the cat! It can’t be the cat! Thief! Stop the thief!” Badal knew that if he had found a box of matches, he would have thrown the kerosene stove to the floor and put a flame to it.

He went to his room only to pick up his scooter keys and the tin box where he had, years ago, hidden away his father’s spectacles and rosary, a Swiss army knife, and a pocket-sized glass model of the Taj Mahal. An afterthought propelled him to his cupboard and he collected a few clothes and the papers and chequebook for the bank account his uncle knew nothing about.

On his way out he uprooted what remained of the shiuli he had planted.

He burst out of the door, slammed it behind him, stuffed everything he had taken into the basket of the scooter and kicked it alive. The roar of its rackety old engine made his muscles jangle to his fingertips.

He had gone only a few hundred yards when he had second thoughts and skidded to a halt.

The scooter’s wheels scooped up some more dust as he turned and made his way back down the road, retracing his journey, slower this time. He came to a halt near the old woman’s shrine. A wisp of smoke trailed from the incense the woman had lit. Badal touched his head to the floor before the tiny idols inside the shrine and saw that the images were decorated with red roses today.

The woman who tended the shrine was balled up in her usual place on the pavement, in the shadow of the neem tree. Her spectacles were askew, she had fallen asleep without taking them off. A thread of drool shone in the trench that went from her lips to her chin and it had collected in a damp patch on the bundle she had placed under her head as a pillow. Three thick white hairs sprouted from a spot on her chin like the roots on an onion. Her steel plate lay beside her, in its usual place on the pavement. It held five rose petals and a rupee coin.

Badal took his wallet from its usual place in the left pocket of his kurta. It had a hundred and fifty rupees. Keeping no more than a few tens and twenties for himself, he emptied the rest of his money onto her plate. Then the thought struck him that the money might be stolen while she slept. He had a sudden irrational urge to wake her, bundle her onto his scooter, take her with him. Instead, he picked up the plate and edged it into the shrine for her to find when she woke.