Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

A slow red trickle appeared from somewhere behind her ears. It edged across the beige stone of the bathroom floor towards the drain below the sink. There was a creamy bathtub with a fresh white towel draped over it. He wanted to put the towel on the blood stain to stub the red out. He would have to step over her to reach the towel.

He was soaked. Cold, canned air streamed through the bathroom. He shivered.

She was not shivering. She wasn’t moving.

Now that she was flat on the floor, much of her kurta gone, he saw her breasts were no more than flattened pancakes topped by chocolate buttons. They were small. Not big enough to fill half his palm.

He found himself looking at his hands. His hands were shaking. He was shaking all over.

Not a sound but for the air conditioner shuddering.

He had to do something. What? He staggered into his bedroom towards the phone — he should call reception for a doctor. But then they would ask what had happened. He had no idea what had happened.

He heard a knock on a door down the corridor followed by a voice saying, “Turn down your bed, Sir?” They arrived every evening, drew the curtains, lit scented candles in the rooms, patted the pillows as if they were babies. In a few minutes the housekeeping service footsteps would close in. He needed time to think. He locked the door. Turned the lever twice to double-lock it.

A sound told him someone else was in the bedroom. He swivelled around. Nomi, in the shreds of her kurta, bleeding from her head, dripping water onto the floor. He wanted to shout with relief. She wasn’t dead. He hadn’t killed her.

She held her wet clothes closer. Her teeth were chattering in the cold. He could hear them, like soft castanets.

“I’m going to tell them everything,” she said. She was looking straight at him. No, not exactly at him, past him, at the door. She was holding something in one hand, he couldn’t quite see what.

He would sort it out with her if only he didn’t alarm her. It was all a stupid misunderstanding, couldn’t she see that? They were fooling around and it got out of hand. He needed to make her see that. He inched towards her. “Listen, it was an accident, I was drunk, it was bloody awful, but. .”

The housekeeper’s footsteps were coming closer. He could hear them on the flagstones. If there was no privacy sign on the door they usually knocked twice, then let themselves in after a pause. Could they do that even when rooms were double locked?

“Listen. .” he began again.

“You don’t scare me,” she said. She was still looking past him as if her eyes were seeing something else. That look made him feel more afraid than he had ever been. He was trapped with a psycho.

“I don’t believe your bullshit,” she said. “I’m through.” She lifted her hands as if holding a gun. She pressed. His hands flew to his eyes, but it was too late. He felt something in one of his eyes, was blinded by a fiery pain. He covered it with his palm. The pain shot through the eye into the back of his head. He could smell his anti-mosquito spray. The can in the bathroom. The bitch. His eye streamed tears, he could barely see anything. It felt as if it had burnt away.

“You don’t scare me. I don’t believe your bullshit.” The words came from Nomi in a low monotone that was not her voice.

Suraj felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his forearm. One eye open, he could see the white sheet had splashes of red on it. He looked down at himself — his arm had a gash. The blood was spreading warm and scarlet, all over his arm, his hand, the bed. And she was coming at him again with a knife. His own carving knife from the toolkit on the bedside table.

She lunged for his eyes, he ducked, and this time the knife ripped open the skin on his cheek. He could taste the salt of his own blood as it streamed down his face. His shirt was soaking red. He tried to move away and she threw the whetstone from the tool kit at him, splitting the skin on his forehead. He fell to his knees, but she would not stop, she flung all his gouges and chisels at him, one by one, as if he were a dartboard. He cowered, trying to shield himself with his arms and she aimed a vicious kick at his side. He doubled up with a howl as her foot slammed into his crotch.

Suraj managed to get to his feet despite the agonising pain. He struggled with the glass doors to the private garden at the back, stumbled out of them into the lawn. Hauled himself up over the wall that separated the lawn from the waste lot at the back, where the eternal buffalo was lowing. He was wheezing for breath, he was staggering away as fast as he could. His arm bled, his face bled, his stomach hurt, he could barely see. He had no sense of where he was going, except forward. He pushed through the undergrowth, between trees, bushes, bulrushes, tearing his clothes, feeling his skin rip.

The grassy ground turned to sand, the darkness lightened. He was on the beach. It was the grubby part of the seafront, smelling of sewage, strewn with the detritus of many meals: discarded water bottles, plastic spoons, foil plates, plastic bags. He slipped on something, trod glass shards and puddles. Then the sea was before him. He ran to its edge. His slippers floated away in the water — or had he run out barefoot? Dogs barked somewhere nearby, a stray pack. The waves crashed towards him. The barking came closer. “What did I do!” his brain sobbed, “What did I do?” The beach was lit sickly green by a strip of fluorescent lighting. He ran without looking, collided into a man watering a twig pushed into the sand. The man shoved him out of his way, went on watering the twig.

Suraj wanted to tear his eye out, he needed to stop it burning. He ran, fell, picked himself up, cursed, ran again. He came to a stop where the waves tugged at his feet. He held his head in his hands and collapsed on his knees in the water, choking on brine, throwing up.

Something emerged from the churning green water. A pillar was moving towards him. In the eerie glow of the green light it was an apparition from a nightmare. When it came closer it became a man. Yellow robes slid off the man’s powerful shoulders as he moved. White hair fell to his shoulders. In spite of the darkness, he wore sunglasses. Suraj kneeled in the surf, transfixed, as the man came closer.

Piku, I promised I would come back for you.

I tried to explain then, I couldn’t. I’ll try again.

They had locked me up with the dogs for trying to untie you. Every feature of the days that followed has been playing in a loop in my head these past thirteen years. When I came out I walked into a thick silence. It was as if fear had become a real living monster panting one step behind. I had eaten very little for those three days. My eyes were crusted with dirt, my clothes were sticky with sweat and grime. I did not see you anywhere. Instead, there was Champa. She was waiting for me when I came out of the bathroom. She looked around us to see if anyone was listening, then she asked me if I knew what Guruji had done when I was locked up.

She spat on the floor and I wondered what made her brave enough to do that. Some months ago she had disappeared for a fortnight and come back thinner, her eyes dark and sunken. The girls had whispered she had been sent away because she was pregnant and her baby had to be killed and removed from inside her. Some said she had gone with the driver of the school van. Others that it was with one of the guards. Nobody had done anything to help her. Champa had a recklessness about her ever since.

“He came into the dining room and went straight to Minoti,” she said. “He smashed her head against the wall. She bled and he laughed.”

“I don’t want to hear any more. Leave me alone.”

“That’s not all,” she went on in a breathless whisper. “He threw her down to the dining room floor, in front of all of us. He pulled her skirt up and pulled her knickers down — why are you blocking your ears? You’re only hearing this, you didn’t go through it. And you didn’t see it. Think of Minoti. She was screaming her lungs out and he was still cracking up. Then he pushed a big spoon into her. All of us saw it. The girls were crying. She was bleeding. There was food everywhere because the plates fell and the serving dishes fell.”