Varanasi looks like the scene of a plane crash in my sleep. Small fires are scattered about, seen from above, scattered on the banks where the debris still burns, where homes have been wiped out without warning, where bodies are strewn. Night falls in Varanasi and pockets of fire still rage from the blackness, their flames reach up to diminish the stars, spewing sparks into deep space, souls orbiting the terror of this world.
There are lingams everywhere in the Varanasi of my dreams. On top of every step, at every ancient corner turned. It’s a virile city, teetering on the brink. And on the other bank it is barren like the afterlife.
The Ganga is a river that flows backwards in time.
In Agra, in our crumbling ancestral home, six years old. I’m the same person I was when I was six years old. The same fear, the same watchfulness, the same cowardice too, the same sense of doom. The same desire to jump over the edge.
I sleep next to my mother when Father isn’t here. We sleep in that same big bed in the silent house, silent as soon as the fans are off, eerie beyond belief. She pulls me towards her, murmurs in her sleep, twitches like a cat dreaming, whiskers in the hunt on some imaginary breeze, stalking the grass over the hill when the sun goes down. She bares her teeth at the squirrels in the eaves, and then she cries, so sadly that I lie with my breath held, listening to her moan.
Sleep, the only time she’s really awake, the only time she truly cries. I love her. She never cries like this in the day. Never pities herself or bemoans her fate, never knows what has become of her.
She liked to bathe me in the old days, took great care with it, and one day she sat me down on the cold metal stool, opened my legs, and pointed between them, then said, If a man ever tries to touch you there, an uncle or a servant or a cousin, anyone at all, you fight him off and you scream. You run. You don’t let anybody touch you down there. That is the worst place in the world.
I’m still in pigtails.
I’m running through the fields in my tartan dress, the one brought back from Singapore, which he said was Scottish.
And the thunder breaks inside the sky, like the crack of an old record player. Skips across the surface, clicks. Follows a pause by the peal, rumbles between clouds the way the belly sky rumbles, mourns and quakes. Belly sky of tectonic plate. Rupture and rent.
Rent the blackness, billow the sail, on a ship of ocean ink.
The rain pours down on to the fields.
From thunderous chest of sky, on to the page.
On to childhood, my love.
A cadaver.
A labourer dead in the long grass. The sack of a cat from the side of a well, a rat killed by dogs in the short grass.
And in the house down the street they had a son.
So they lit fireworks.
They lit rockets and crackers and bombs.
Smoke on the ground blowing into our yard, because they had a son.
In the bedroom he puts his fingers between my legs. But in the café he tells me he’s been living in New York, that he’s only just come home, back to Delhi for good.
And do I like Chinese food? Yes, I do.
And do I have a car?
I have that too. Yes, I have a car.
Perfect, he smiles, drumming his fingers on the table, Then let’s go, you and me right now. I’ll buy you dinner, I know the place.
He looks me in the eye. This is how it starts.
In school we practise kissing one another. Take turns, giggle, watch in the bathroom mirrors, in the mirrors we make ourselves cry, cry and hold one another like our sons have died.
We walk home in our uniforms at the end of the day, and I dread walking home, I dread walking to school. I’m never good enough anywhere. I’m awkward. I carry it along with me into adulthood.
When I get my marks in class, I’m asked by the family where the other marks have gone — I’m compared unfavourably to the cousins with higher ones, the ones pegged for success, for government jobs, set to become doctors, lawyers and accountants. Only my English teacher believes in me. She tells me I have it in me to go all the way: to college, abroad, to be anything I want. To be a modern woman. That’s what she says. Our headmistress says it too; in assembly she tells us we’re what the country needs. You’re the future of India, she says.
I look back on this childhood as if standing on the far bank of a fast-flowing river, impossible to bridge. And he is cutting through it, a drowning man in the dark waters of the monsoon.
The sun has gone down completely now. The noise of the city rises as it falls, she can’t separate it from the heartbeat in her throat, the chattering of her teeth, because something is finally happening to her.
The guard at the door salutes him and they share a word. They’re friends already it seems. He has a habit of this, she’ll discover — of making poor people love him; he could raise an army of them if he wanted to, they think he’s one of them in disguise. He offers her a cigarette and she declines, so he lights it for himself and asks her if she knows how beautiful she is, asks as if he’s wondering what to do with it, as if it’s a quality he might apply to a task. Then he laughs to himself and moves on, changes the subject, tells her that his car is over there and that they can meet across the lights towards Lodhi. He’ll be waiting on the side of the road, he’s got a red Maruti Zen with a sticker saying PRESS on the rear window in big letters. You can’t miss it.
It’s in the car away from his eyes that she thinks this might be madness, that it could be a trap. That this could lead to something untoward. The coward in her rises up and says that she should drive out the other way and go home, away from this strange man, never to come back, never to see him again, to keep living the life that Aunty preserves. But then she remembers home, Aunty and all of that, and she thinks how long she’s been waiting for something to happen to her, how long she’s been motionless inside herself. And now here it is, here’s her chance. It might never come again.
Like my mother, I’m a loner. I’m sitting by the river near the banyan tree in Agra, she is calling out to me from the house at dusk, my father’s ancestral home on the edge of town. He’s still out working in Singapore but he’ll return, he hasn’t abandoned us quite yet. I hear my mother calling but I don’t reply. She’s fearful, imagining all the terrible things that can happen in the dark.
When he comes back he holds me in his arms. He smells of cigarettes. Of Old Spice aftershave and whisky. When he comes home he acts like nothing’s changed.
My mother, she’s suddenly awake, she’s been nervous for days, cleaning the house, getting everything into shape for his arrival. She fixes her hair and puts on her best sari and thinks everything will be OK. When he turns up he brings gifts, all the latest electronic goods, kitchen things. They put on a big party for him — the family lays out all kinds of food on a long folding table, they put out the drinks in plastic cups, they blow up balloons, and everyone comes to meet him. He likes the crowds, my father, he likes the parties, he’s a natural showman — handsome, a charmer. He shows off some magic tricks. I stand in the room watching him, watching my mother waiting. Now and then he passes by and runs his fingers through my hair, and when he puts me on his shoulders I hold him tightly, smell the Brylcreem with my eyes closed.