*
It was her first dream in weeks, her first sleep since arriving at Safer. She dreamed of a poster that had been on the wall of Rashid’s for more years than she could remember, a poster of a blonde girl in a sun hat. In the dream she got up from the turkey mattress and went to the window, which gave out on a lawn that was lush and green, the kind of green that hurt the eyes, it was so bright. She watched the blonde girl take off her large, her overlarge hat and place it on the lawn (and here the dream took on a cinematic quality, because she was no longer looking at the scene from a window: the frame became a kind of lens that zoomed in and out with dizzying speed), and she saw that the girl wasn’t alone, that she was in fact surrounded by an army of shadows that moved on the lawn’s periphery, moved as if their claim on the lawn and the colour green, on the sky and the colour blue, on the earth and its thousand unknowable colours, was older than hers, was so old that it could be ignored only at her peril. The girl, who was not more than thirteen or fourteen, removed her hat and placed it carefully on the ground. Then she lifted her dress or shift, a light cottony garment with a flowery pattern, and squatted above the hat and filled it with blood or shit, something, at any rate, that was black and crusted on the hat’s upturned brim. And then the words began to flicker across the bottom of the screen like subtitles and the shadowy figures who crowded around the edge of the frame moved into the centre, towards the girl, whose skin was white and rose. The camera focused on her face, on her petal-like lips that mouthed, very clearly, the word What? But the subtitles that appeared at the bottom of the window or screen said something very different: ‘You were nameless and pagan. I gave you context. For two hundred years I gave you context and how did you reward me?’ Then the girl’s eyebrows took the shape of an inverted V and she mouthed the word No. As soon as the word left her lips she was overrun by the shadows, who, as they came into the light, revealed themselves as ethnic ecclesiastical figures in robes of white or saffron, and others in skullcaps, and still others in conical hats and tattered purple. In minutes, one of the figures in purple lifted his cassock to display a great brown belly and black penis surrounded by grey fuzz. He dipped his hand into the hat and smeared himself and soon the other figures were doing the same. The camera fell to the ground as if the person holding it had been attacked or was taking part in the activities he or she had until then been recording, and when the camera was picked up again there was a close-up of a penis penetrating, very slowly, the girl's anus, and then two words began to slide across the screen, words that were repeated with each stroke, the penis now sliding to half its length in the girl’s small orifice, and there was a close-up of her face, which looked stupid more than pained, and again the words appeared, in quotes, ‘Tradition’ and ‘Values’, and the camera cut to the priest, whose face was glazed with spit and sweat and the words he spoke needed no subtitles because they were synced and perfectly audible, ‘This is India,’ and Dimple woke, her heart beating so fast she thought she might die and the thought of dying was a sudden comfort.
*
On the third day, or it might have been the second, they took him downstairs and put him in a room with a lawyer, a Muslim, who told him his bail had been arranged and they were going to try something new, they were giving him a choice between rehab and jail. Well, now, Mr Advocate, what a wonderful deal you’re offering me, said Rumi, thank you. He took a matchbox from his pocket, opened it and shook out half a beedi. He lit it and took a deep drag and when he exhaled the Muslim flinched because the smell was so strong. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for nothing, Rumi said. Jail or freedom, that’s a choice, rehab or garad, that’s a choice, but rehab or jail? That’s like choosing between death and dying. No, I take it back, it’s like choosing between syphilis and gonorrhoea. I know what I would choose, said the Muslim. I know what you’d choose too, said Rumi, but it’s the wrong choice. You want to know something? When they put me in here I thought it was all over. I thought I’d be fucked up right away, stabbed or strangled, something, for being Hindu. I thought jail would be full of Muslims and I’d be at the bottom of the undertrial hierarchy. Well, I am at the bottom, but not because I’m Hindu. Can you believe it? The Muslim said nothing. I asked myself, what does it mean that a garaduli is lowest on the ladder, lower than a ragpicker or a thief? How can it be? I asked a shooter who was in for the contract killing of a movie producer. Tell me, I said, I want to know. Why would a Hindu trust a Muslim over a garaduli? You’re a Hindu, you tell me. The shooter looked me over, as if he was measuring me for a suit or a coffin, and then he said: Garadulis will do anything. I said: Why single out garadulis? Anybody will do anything. The shooter said: Garadulis turn on their own kind — not even a pocket-maar will do that. Rumi was silent for a while and then he said, What did you bring me? News, said the Muslim, the best news you can hope for. I mean, did you bring me food and cigarettes and money? No, said the Muslim, I brought you something better, we’re getting you out: we’ve worked out a bargain with the court. Rumi said, Just leave me some cash, whatever you have. You can get it back from my father. Look, Ramesh, the Muslim said, you’re getting out, it’s all been arranged and the money’s arranged too, take it cool, don’t take so much tension.
Of course it didn’t go as easily as the Muslim, whose name was Majid, said it would. It took another week of watery daal and uncleaned rice and watching his back, and then, a trip to court, where Majid the Muslim did most of the talking. Afterwards, a constable put him in a jeep and escorted him to a place recommended by the judge, who said it was the first facility of its kind in India, that it was a programme run by former users, that it used both physical and spiritual exercises to help bring about a speedy recovery (which phrase made Rumi smile, because it sounded like the judge was making a paid advertisement, and because if you knew anything at all you knew there was no such thing as a speedy recovery when it came to heroin), and that it was talked about mainly for the sessions, part psychotherapy, part literary criticism, conducted by a former monk and heroin addict named Soporo Onar, who had taken over the running of the centre some months earlier. The judge said the doors of the facility were locked, though only at night and therefore escape was not impossible, but he was of the opinion that it would be wiser for Rumi to stick out the six months of his sentence than dodge the court for the rest of his life.
*
With the dreams came memories, or perhaps they weren’t memories at all but fantasies she imagined were memories. It was as if, by lifting the cloud of garad and chandu that had been her companion for so many years, she had also liberated her recollections of infancy, if they were true recollections at all. It surprised her that she remembered the church her mother had made on the bottom shelf of a steel cupboard, something no one knew about except her mother and she. She remembered the marigolds her mother placed on the shrine, and the framed image of Swayambunath’s painted eye, and a figurine of a woman in a blue veil. She knew now that the woman in blue was Mother Mary and that her mother had worshipped both Hindu and Christian gods. But how could she possibly remember such things when she’d been separated from her parents at the age of seven and at eight had already come to live with the tai, who had named her Dimple, not because she had any, but because there was an actress of that name who had, for the briefest of moments, captured the nation’s excitable imagination? But she did, she remembered with absolute clarity her mother placing her in the hands of the priest. And she remembered too her mother’s fits, when she screamed for no reason and tore her hair, and the fights with her father, whom she didn’t remember at all because he died young, and she remembered the noose her mother was rescued from, a noose made from a dupatta that had been fastened to a nail on the kitchen wall. Or was it Mr Lee’s mother who was rescued from a noose? Had she stolen the memory? Perhaps she had no memories at all; perhaps she was stealing other people’s because she had none of her own.