*
The tree was a peepul, very old, with shreds of fabric caught on its branches, shiny bits of silk and crêpe. It was a common Indian tree, but the ribboned fabric made it look like some rare import. There was a shrine under it, incense bunched around a porcelain plate of oranges, and a box in which squares of coloured paper had been burned. They were in a side lane off Shuklaji Street, a place for refugee families from China and Burma, two or three generations living in small rooms facing a courtyard. They went directly to a room on the far side, the only room with a locked front door. The tai made her stand in front of the peephole so he’d see her easily and then she knocked. Dimple heard a shout on the street, a man’s voice saying an English word. Paper. Or: papa. The tai knocked again and Dimple’s first thought when he opened the door was not a thought exactly but a word, old. He ignored the tai and spoke only to her. ‘Nee ho ah?’ And then a longer sentence she couldn’t follow.
She said, ‘Can you please speak English please?’
‘You not Chinese?’
‘No, my family is from north-east of India.’
‘Okay, north-east, I understand. Very close to China, VERY close.’
‘I don’t know from exactly where. I grew up in Bombay, here, on Shuklaji Street.’
The tai said, ‘Leeji, we have come for your help. She is having pain. Can you give her afeem?’
Inside, they sat on a low bed covered with bamboo matting. He gave them tea without milk or sugar, a rust-coloured liquid with a taste she couldn’t identify, a dusty earth tang like dried flowers or herbs. The room was dim and tidy, all the windows closed except for a skylight set low on the tiled roof. When her eyes adjusted she saw two men, asleep, one to a bunk on adjoining beds, or not asleep exactly; they didn’t move or speak but their eyes were open, seeing nothing. They were all eyes, as if their faces had caved in around their mouths. Mr Lee sat on the floor on a woven bamboo seat and sipped his tea. She’d never seen such a room. Everything in it was floor-level and old and beautiful. She loved the desk’s polished wood, set on a stand made of darker wood. It had a hinged top and no legs. The closet was horizontal with a usable surface. It was a toy room filled with toy furniture. Mr Lee screwed a cigarette into a holder and tapped the ash into a saucer that said cinzano, his eyelids heavy; for a moment he seemed to forget that she and the tai were in the room.
He said: Heat is very much. Drink tea is best thing, better than cold drink if you thirsty. He held the cigarette holder like a paintbrush and waved it around when he asked questions. Had she taken opium before? Did she know the taste was very bitter, strong enough to make her sick? Was it her own idea or did the tai want her to take it? What was her name? Yes, she replied, when she was cut at the age of nine; she knew it tasted bad but the pain was worse; she wanted it, the tai had nothing to do with how much she wanted it; Dimple, like the actress of the hit movie Bobby, who was younger and prettier than she.
*
Mr Lee was on the floor with his legs stretched in front of him. A single lamp burned in the room and its yellow light shone on his bald head and clean undershirt. His actions were slow, economical, planned ahead so there was no wasted movement. He boiled more water on a pump stove and poured it into their cups, reusing the leaves he’d measured out from a tin. In another pan he heated milk. From a tin trunk he drew tiny scales and a bowl. He put a sticky black ball on the scale, weighed it, broke off a bit, weighed it again, and put the ball into her palm. He gave her the warmed milk in a steel glass and told her to place the pellet on the back of her tongue and swallow quickly. She did exactly as he said. The pellet was unbearably bitter and it stuck to her tongue. She panicked and swallowed too much milk, but the pain disappeared in fifteen minutes, to be replaced by its opposite, something enveloping that told her she was loved, no, beloved: she was beloved and not alone.
*
That night she was sick, throwing up quickly and repeatedly, so quickly it was almost pleasure. She had many dreams, separate dreams that seemed to pass through her simultaneously, or was it a single dream that stretched in all directions for most of the night? She dreamed of a house she had never lived in and of a family she did not know. The neighbourhood was unfamiliar, but she knew it was somewhere in Bombay, Malabar Hill maybe, or Breach Candy, or Marine Drive, or Cuffe Parade, some neighbourhood where the rich lived, because everybody in her dream was rich. She had friends with names like Queenie, Devika and Perizaad. She was popular with her teachers because she did well in class and for the same reason she was not popular with her classmates. She was often happy. Even in her dream she knew she was happy because she was a student and reading was her proper occupation. Her favourite book was a slim collection of prophecies by a nun who wrote in Konkani, who wrote every day, who filled up exercise books with her tiny handwriting and threw away most of what she wrote. Only three of the slim books survived her severe self-editing. The nun’s name was Sister Remedios and after her death her writings were published in Konkani by the convent where she had lived and died. Dimple’s edition was an English translation that appeared two decades later. The book was terrifying, not because it contained endless descriptions of civil butchery and mass suicide, but because of the serene accompanying sketches of trees, streams and sunbirds. The drawings were scattered throughout, small drawings the nun had made that were sometimes related, though only cryptically, to the catastrophic visions she described; more often they had no connection to anything at all. In eighty or so pages Sister Remedios described a ruined world shaped by landslides and floods, a world in which ‘fissured cities rose and fell in a cement tide, and trees upended their roots into the air, and birds fell to the ground like stones, and the moon fell into a crack that had appeared on the earth, the old earth that was breaking itself into pieces’. She wrote in the past tense, as if the terrible scenes she described had already happened and had been witnessed by thousands, by hundreds of thousands of doomed souls and only she, Sister Remedios, had returned alive to tell the world of its death. The nun did not record the cause of the cataclysm, she did not say whether it was war or some unnatural planetary upheaval that had caused it; but the scenes of suicide were faithfully rendered. The book ended with two pages about a great pit filled with black blood, its surface pocked with toxic gas bubbles, and the army of ghosts that fought to drink at the pit: whenever one succeeded in clawing his way through, a hooded swordsman decapitated the weeping creature with a single broad stroke. In this way the ghosts were left headless though not extinguished. Only one among them managed to reach the pit and drink its fill. When the ghost lifted its oily black mouth to the moon and howled with joy, Dimple recognized her own blind face and then she saw the face of the hooded swordsman and recognized him too. And though she knew she was dreaming, that Sister Remedios’s book was her own invention and the world was as intact as it had ever been, she whimpered in her sleep at the ferocity of her own visions.
Towards dawn she fell into a deeper sleep and woke up late, unrested, with a taste in her mouth, a sweet-and-sour residue like pani-puri water. She bathed and the tai gave her money for new clothes but a customer arrived as she was leaving, a regular, with two boxes of mithai. He was the seth of a sari shop on the main road and it was what everyone called him, Seth. Lakshmi said even his own family called him Seth. She said he’d answered to it for so long he must have forgotten his real name. The seth wanted to drink a few bottles of beer and toss handfuls of salted cashews in his mouth and brag about how much money he would spend on his daughter’s wedding. It had just been arranged, he said, and he wanted to celebrate. He wanted French, no handshake, and then he wanted to lie back and sip his beer while she danced for him, lip-syncing to the radio. When she sponged him, he cleaned his hands and groin carefully so no trace of her remained. It was the ritual shared by all her married customers. After he left, she slept some more, very deeply, and woke up late in the evening and the next day the pain was back and it was as if she’d never been free of it and would never again be free. She was on outcall. An Arab customer had telephoned the tai. Send Dimple, he said. He wanted her to stay the night at his hotel in Colaba, a new building in one of the alleys behind the Taj. The Arab came to Bombay every year during the monsoon to see the rains that didn’t come to his country. He expected very little by way of service: he wanted her to lie face down on the bed while he rubbed himself against her, both of them fully dressed. He was a big tipper and she couldn’t afford to be unwell. She went back to Mr Lee’s. She began to visit him a few times a week. She kept an emergency hoard of eating opium for the times she couldn’t make it to the khana and it was as easy as that to acquire the habit of opium, for that’s what it was, a habit, like bathing twice a day or eating vegetables.