Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

The sea he had been thrown into.

Champa had told me what to say when we reached the girls’ home. We were cousins. We had no parents. Our uncle used to beat us and so we had run away. We had enough scars and bruises and cigarette burns for this to be convincing. “Not a word about the ashram,” Champa said. “Everyone rich and famous is his disciple, they all think he’s a god. They’ll never believe anything bad about him. They’ll take us straight back there and then we’ll be dead, like Jugnu.”

“What about Piku? What about the other girls? We can’t just leave them there. We should tell the truth.”

“Just stop being such a saint,” Champa snarled. “I’ll throw you out of this auto right now.”

I spoke to you in my head then. I speak to you in my head all the time. Do you know the taste of betrayal? How would you know it? It’s as if your clothes are full of sand, so full of sand that the grains bite you and pierce you and scratch you. You shake out your clothes, you wash them, you wash yourself, but even then, days later, years later, in the crevices of your toes, in the lining of the pockets, the grains pierce you. They’re unbearable, those grains that don’t go away whatever you do. You no longer know the real from the nightmare. Your heart, mind, mouth, everything is filled with sand.

For a month, maybe three or six months, I stayed at the girls’ home. They put Champa somewhere else soon after we got there. I don’t know where she went — to another home or to a family. The home never told anyone where its children were being sent. I did not see her again. They had told me that they would soon send me off as well. They were hoping to find foster parents for me. Nobody would know about me either. Not even you, Piku.

I did not talk about the ashram to them, but I wrote. All day I wrote. Half the evening I wrote. I used an exercise book with many pages. I wore out pencils. I started with the day my father was killed and wrote everything I could remember. I wrote especially about you. I wrote about how you would die if you were left in the ashram because of the way you were.

When I had finished writing, I kept the book safe until it was time. I was to be sent off to my new home: first to Delhi, then to some other country. A happy future, they told me, with a woman who had waited a long time to adopt a child.

I stole out of the home the day before I was to be sent to Delhi. I had taken down a newspaper’s address from the copy of it that came to the home every day. It was the same newspaper that had written about us once — the article which had a picture of me and some of the other girls with Guruji. I had pasted together sheets from the exercise book to make an envelope and written the newspaper’s name on it, then put in my exercise book and stuck my envelope fast with glue. I walked more than an hour, asking every second person on the road for directions, and found my way to the newspaper office. After a moment’s panic that I would lose the book if I let go, I dropped it into the big letter box at the gates of the office. It fell in with a hard thump.

I wrote that for you, Piku, so they would read it and get you out of there, and get the others out of there. They would come to know what went on in the ashram, then they would go and see for themselves.

*

Out there, far away, years later, I found a picture of Guruji on the internet and glued it to a wall. I looked him in the eye every day, I stuck pins into his face. He will not scare me again, not from a distance, nor when I stand face to face in the same room with him and say I was there: I was there from the start, I know everything. In my dreams I tell everyone the truth, I leave nothing out, even if it makes me sick to the stomach.

You are standing beside me. You haven’t changed at all. You cannot speak, but you still smile the same way.

*

It was when Latika had worked through half the vodka that a radio somewhere began to play an old Geeta Dutt song. “ Piya aiso jiya mein samae gayo re, ki main tun-mun ke sudh-budh gawa baithee, ” the voice from years ago sang. “My lover has so dissolved into my being / That I have lost all control over my mind and body.”

She was sitting alone in the hotel verandah. Below the verandah were the tops of young palm trees and beyond, the sea, which heaved and sighed. The fronds of the coconut palms were tossed in the rising wind. After the heat of the day, the mild night air spread a gentle languor through her limbs. Her head felt as if someone was slowly, very slowly, stuffing it with clouds. The whoosh of the sea became a roar in her ears.

They had come back from the market without Gouri. The day had ended in calamity. Latika tried to digest what had happened, but her thoughts kept wandering and Vidya’s voice, when it came, came from far away. What was she saying? Something about getting things under control, organising a search party. The hotel manager had gone with a few other men, driving around to look for Gouri. Jarmuli was a small town, they were sure they would find her, after all she had only gone missing in the market and it had been just a few hours. Of course the darkness made it difficult, but they would not give up. If they did not find her by midnight they would go to the police. Vidya approved of this plan. She had found her runaway secretary long years ago, and that was in a big city. This was almost a one-street town. They would cover every possible angle.

“I’m so desperate I even looked in her room, Latika. On the off chance. . she wasn’t there of course. I told the manager to search the Vishnu temple. Remember how she kept saying she wanted to go back there? If there’s anywhere she’d be. . but it’s such a maze. . how will they ever find her even if she is in there? I phoned that guide for help — Badal — he knows the place inside out. But he was so rude. Just said he was too far away and could not come! Latika? Latika! Are you listening?”

Vidya sat down beside Latika and looked at the third chair in the row. Empty. How perfect and peaceful it had been until yesterday: the evenings in that verandah, the three of them chatting late into night, the sea, this trip, the hotel, life itself. Everything had been in place. It was as if, overnight, a tornado had ripped things apart. Suraj was probably in Jarmuli, maybe in trouble, and they had lost Gouri. She would have to phone that pompous son of Gouri’s to tell him if they did not find her. Because Latika was too tipsy — could that be possible? — certainly too tipsy to make a difficult phone call. Really, she was no help at all. Latika drunk . What could be more unreal?

“Oh Latika, what are we to tell her son!” It was a despairing cry.

Latika opened her eyes with an effort. “The manager will find her. He’ll do it. He is a. . most capable man.”

“But he isn’t God. Latika, how can you be this way when there is such a crisis?”

Latika had another sip of the vodka. She took off her glasses, closed her eyes, and rested her head against the wall. When she spoke her voice was so soft that Vidya had to lean forward to catch her words before the wind threw them away.

“I was in college when I fell in love with a man who lived at the other end of my street. He was from a religious, traditional Konkani family. Handsome, green-eyed, tall, Greek-looking, as Konkanis can be. His family had a beautiful house with ancient tamarind trees, sculptures in the garden, tame doves. They were very rich. We met because he would come every day in a grey car to pick up his daughter from the junior school next to my college. One day he gave me a ride home along with the girl. Over some weeks it became a habit and nobody thought anything of it because he was married and a neighbour and of course his daughter was in the car with us. Then we started meeting each other in secret — I would skip a class and he would come earlier to the college so that we had an hour in the car without the child. I knew it was mad, but there was nothing I could do to fight it. We loved each other. It didn’t feel wrong or bad. But of course nothing was possible and then bits of gossip began floating around. . someone saw me getting into the car alone, someone else saw me with him far away from home. My brother was ragged about it in his school. . so that was it. I was packed off to Bhopal to live with an aunt. It was an overnight train I had to take and my brother was sent with me to guard my chastity. Those old second-class coaches. The bunks on top were divided with such a low partition you could touch someone on the other side through it if you tried. My Konkani had somehow managed to get the next bunk. All night, we held hands through that jolting partition. I could hear him crying. Not sobs, but ragged breaths, sniffing sounds, as if he had a cold. My wrist ached, it got a bruise from being twisted through the partition. I felt as if I could hear my heart break. I was very young, you see. My brother was sleeping just a few feet below me in the lower bunk, and he had no idea.”