Anuradha Roy - Sleeping On Jupiter

In the end the van went through high gates made of metal sheets with a line of iron spikes above. The gates closed behind us. The van stopped and we got out. The woman with us led us further in. We walked down earthen pathways, red and pretty, through gardens in which there were small houses. We were taken to a square building. One by one we were put under a tap and bathed. I saw the other girls in their underclothes, wet like birds in rain. They were thin and knock-kneed. They looked like me. Newly washed, in cotton tunics, hand in hand, the twelve of us were shown into a cottage. The cottage was screened by creepers and trees. Inside, in the room where we waited, the sunlight in the windows had gone pale green and yellow.

The room had many pictures of a long-haired man. There was one that covered most of the wall on one side. It was much taller than any of us. I could not look away from it because his eyes in that picture seemed to follow me around. In front of it were incense sticks that smelled as sick-sweet as death. As we waited, the sticks turned into furry stems of ash. There were dark red mattresses and bolsters on the floor. I don’t know if this is exactly how the room was that day or if I am remembering it from all the later times when I went there and had to wait. It was always the same: the pictures, the incense, the red bolsters. Two women stood by the door, their palms full of rose petals. One was the woman who had come with us on the boat, the other had golden hair.

After a while, the man in the pictures walked through the door and both the women stood straighter. The golden-haired woman gestured towards his feet and said “Guruji”. He hardly looked at us. He waved us away as we bowed down and strode past us into the second room, crushing the rose petals the women scattered in his path.

Now, when I think of the time my turn came, and I stood in front of that second door, my mind changes the image. The door stays shut. Before my turn, I slip out of the line and run into the garden outside. There, under a tree, is my brother. He is smiling at me in his gummy way. “Silly donkey! Where did you wander?” he says. He swings me onto his shoulder. “You’ve got no front teeth any more!” he says.

But that is not what happened. I couldn’t have run to the garden because the women would not let us step out of the line. The one with the hair like spun gold and eyes as blue as two drops of sky was taller than anyone I had seen before. She placed a long finger on her lips, she rolled her eyes, shook her head. I could tell she was saying just as my mother used to: “Quiet, not a word.”

The door opened. A square of light. I stepped into it. The door shut behind me. The man who had just walked past us was sitting on a wide chair at the other end of the room. Guruji. He wore yellow robes and he had glossy black hair to his shoulders. He was not like other sadhus I have seen since. His face was clean and smooth like a woman’s, there were no matted locks nor a beard. He looked at me as if he saw nothing else. He sat there observing me for a long time, saying nothing. I thought he could see into me, through the tunic and my skin and bones, right inside. When he held up his hand to beckon me to come closer I saw that his arms had twice the girth of my father’s arms. My father was a skinny man even though he could lift big branches and chop tree trunks with his axe.

Guruji patted his lap to make me climb on to it. Then he held me against him. His chest was warm and bare, and I could hear his heart beat.

“You think you have nobody,” his voice said over my head, and I could feel its vibration enter my body. “That is not true. I am your father and your mother now. I am your country. I am your teacher. I am your God.” He said it like a chant, as if they were words often repeated, and always the same.

His smile was kind. I must have smiled too because he put a finger into my mouth. He stroked the gap in my gums where my milk tooth had been.

“When did that fall out?” His voice was tender, as my father’s used to be when I fell and hurt myself. He shut his eyes and murmured a mantra. “I have prayed for you. Whenever you are frightened, think of my face. I will keep you safe. You have come to my ashram now. This is your refuge. Nobody will harm you. There is food and there are clothes and you have friends to play with and you will go to school.”

He put his hand into a steel box and brought out a laddu that he popped into my mouth. “Don’t tell the other girls I gave you this, I haven’t given it to them,” he said. “Be very quiet, not a word about this to anyone. This is your Initiation. You are born again.”

*

I remember the ashram very well although I cannot remember a single thing about what was around it. Were there mountains or tall buildings? Were there shops or houses nearby? Did a road go past it? Could we hear any traffic sounds when we were inside? In my head the ashram is in the middle of nowhere, it is the only building on earth. Sometimes I wonder how much of what I remember is true. I have read that your memories can be concrete and detailed even about things that never happened to you and places you have never been to. Like fungus that takes birth in warm and wet places, memories ooze from the crevices of your brain: spawned there, living and dying there, unrelated to anything in the world outside, the slime can coat everything until you can’t tell the real from the imagined.

I remember clearly, though, how enormous the ashram was and dark with trees. At night we were scared to be out alone especially because we had heard that five dogs were let loose every night to patrol the place. There were cottages in the grounds that were set at a distance from ours, in which Guruji’s disciples stayed. They came and went. There were many, from everywhere in the world. In our part we had Guruji’s cottage and a few other cottages, our dormitory building, a dining room, a puja hall and our school.

Many years later, my new foster mother would ask, after another long silence at the dinner table: “Tell me about your school there, tell me about your friends, tell me about the building, tell me something .” And I would wonder what to say, where to start. I could tell her my very first school, at the ashram, was in a yellow building — that was easy. It made her look hopeful. She waited for more. I said nothing. We both listened to the sound of a neighbour clipping his hedge. A boy cycling outside shouted to a friend. Still I found nothing to say. Then her sister phoned and my foster mother gave up waiting for me to speak.

Outside, I could see a blue and white bird and the hedge that went around her tiny lawn and, across the road, white houses with red roofs. Each house was exactly like the one next to it. The sun was like a moon in this country, and in its light I felt as if I was looking at everything through a pearl. It was cold and the trees had no leaves. I had never seen a leafless tree before. My foster mother dropped her voice, speaking fast and softly, even though I could not understand what she was saying to her sister.

What else could I tell her?

Of course she knew I had been in orphanages before I came to her, and when I spoke about the ashram I made it sound like yet another orphanage. I told her the school was not far from the dormitory where we slept. We went there after our morning’s milk and banana. I told her the school had a courtyard with a jamun tree. I got stuck trying to explain what a jamun was: was it sour or sweet or bitter? How to explain its strange taste, and the way our tongues went purple and fat after eating them? And wondering how to explain jamuns, I would be distracted remembering how all day we did our lessons or our chores as if we boat girls were like other girls, but at night I would hear one girl grind her teeth fiercely enough to set mine on edge and another girl sob. Only when I felt my pillow wet with tears and spit would I know I had been listening to myself crying. How could I tell my foster mother this? I would begin to tear tiny shreds out from the paper napkin she never forgot to set beside my bowl of cereal. I dipped my spoon into the cereal and tried to count how many raisins there were in it, and how many bits of nut, and this way, by examining the cereal hard enough, I dissolved the lump that had somehow appeared in my throat. My foster mother watched me and waited for a while, then sighed and got up and began to wash dishes at the sink. I hunched over the shreds of tissue, unaware of her, the room, or the cereal I kept stirring around in its bowl uneaten, and in my head the rasping calls of crows grew deafening and I was back in that hot classroom, the bench hard and narrow under me.