The weather is pleasant in October, cool by Indian standards, but Rudyard was perspiring as we climbed. The whitewashed steps were dirty, the wall splotchy with red stains from the paan juice that the building’s inhabitants casually spat on their way up, as Kadambari proceeded to do. Back in the ’70s, when I first came across those stains in Delhi, I assumed they were blood, and wondered whether the homicide rate was greater than reported or, worse, whether tubercular Indians were coughing up blood all over the city. The discovery that it was merely a combination of a national addiction and poor hygiene had come as a relief. But today, the red stains made me think again of blood, Priscilla’s blood, spilled by an unknown rioter with a knife, and I stumbled, suddenly blinded.
We reached a landing, two floors up, and entered the interior of the building. The corridor was dingy, lit by a single naked bulb dangling from a wire cord. Four identical wooden doors led off it to the apartments within; they were painted a garish blue, though the garishness was dimmed by dirt and assorted scratches visible even in the poor light. Two of the blue doors were closed but not bolted; one was open and a small child, milk dribbling down his chin, stared out at us round-eyed from the doorway until his sari-clad mother swished up from within and dragged him away. The fourth door, bolted and padlocked, was Priscilla’s. Kadambari pulled out a large key and let us in.
It was a small room, sparsely furnished, with a stone floor on which my daughter had placed a small throw-rug, and a single bed. It wasn’t really a bed in the American sense of the word, but a string-cot, a charpoy, its white strings sagging noticeably in the middle, with a thin cotton mattress on top. The bed was neatly made, with a stiff white cotton sheet, and a gaily colored Indian bedspread on top. I sat down heavily on it, imagining the impress of my daughter’s body, and ran a hand over the bedspread, resting it on the lumpy pillow, feeling the lump in my own throat.
Rudyard marched right in and took in the room — the bed, the rudimentary table that served as her desk, the Indian cupboard, or almirah, the solitary chair, the Grateful Dead poster nailed to the wall, the two pieces of luggage on the floor. She lived simply, my daughter, as we had expected. Half a dozen books were stacked on the table. There was a shortwave radio against the sole window, its antenna extended as far as it would go, straining, I imagined, for news and music from home. It was her only luxury: there was no television set, no telephone. A pedestal fan, signs of rust beginning to show on its casing, stood unplugged in a corner; it was all that Priscilla had to keep off the heat whenever Zalilgarh’s erratic electricity supply allowed her to run it. The bathroom was tiny, with an Indian-style squatting toilet, and a tap and a bucket on the floor to bathe at. How had she coped, my baby? Never once had she complained about her living conditions.
Rudyard’s eyes alighted on the two framed photos on the desk. One was of me, alone, taken a year previously in New York, by her. The other was a much older picture, taken at the Red Fort in Delhi back in 1978, of the five of us as a family. The children are grinning and squinting at the camera and Rudyard has his arm around me. An innocent tourist moment, but I could imagine Priscilla looking at it over the years, seeing it as an icon of what she had cherished and lost.
Rudyard averted his eyes from the photos and walked to the almirah. Once again, Kadambari produced a key and opened the door. Rudyard almost recoiled from the sight of himself, red-eyed and perspiring, in the mirror on the inside of the door. A few cotton dresses hung limply from wooden hangers. Rudyard pulled open a drawer and found himself holding Priscilla’s underthings. He withdrew his hands as if scalded.
A fly buzzed around the room. The sounds of the street were fainter here, filtered by the stillness in our hearts.
I got up from the bed and began to look at everything in the room, touching each of her dresses, searching the pockets, emptying the drawers. I didn’t know what I was looking for. Clues, perhaps, but to what? The Zalilgarh authorities weren’t looking for anything; they knew she’d been killed in a riot, like seven other people, and that was good enough for them. Clues to her life, perhaps, were what I needed, rather than to her death. Something that would help me understand what she was experiencing here in Zalilgarh, something that would help me hear the stories she would never be able to tell me again.
Rudyard, still perspiring, looked numbly at our daughter’s personal possessions, the final legacy of her short life. I could see him struggling to contain something within himself, something he had never felt and did not know how to express. It was there in his strained and sweating face, in the way his brow seemed knit in perplexity and pain. He was staring at each book, each garment, as if unable to comprehend what it was doing there, what he was doing with it. We had to pack, of course, take her things away. Where would we take them? For what purpose? Her clothes, in particular, would be pointless to carry to America. Better to give most of them away here, where others would be glad to have them.
But packing gave us something concrete to do. When I supplanted him at the almirah Rudyard sat silently in the chair, staring vacantly at the wall, and Kadambari stood at the door chewing her paan and watching us. As I struggled with Priscilla’s suitcase, though, Rudyard got up and heaved it onto the bed. It was half full of papers, research notes, and a few souvenirs she was no doubt planning to bring to America — a decorative brass plate, a hand-carved wooden box, two embroidered cushion covers. These were simple things, pleasing to the eye, bought cheaply at the local bazaar. They would, I decided, travel back with us as Priscilla had intended them to.
We worked in silence. Neither Rudyard nor I could say a word, at this time, in this place, to each other. I did not trust myself to speak and, as always, tried to find strength in focusing on the practical. Housework and relocation had saved my sanity when my marriage ended; packing and sorting would see me through my pain today.
I looked through the contents of Priscilla’s drawers before putting them away, and found nothing unusual. I took the bedspread, with its distinctively Indian paisley pattern, but left the coarse white sheet. The clothes Priscilla would never wear I folded into the second piece of luggage. I might have offered them to Kadambari except that she showed not the slightest interest in what I was doing, and I could not imagine her in a dress anyway. I would ask the kind Mr. Das of HELP-US whether he could think of people to give them to. Fortunately Rudyard paid no attention to Priscilla’s toilet bag, because he would have been horrified by two things inside it. A vibrator. And a partly used strip of birth-control pills.
The latter surprised me more than the former. I had assumed Priscilla would be alone here, and I knew she had broken up with her last boyfriend before coming to India. I could not imagine why she would need to use birth control in Zalilgarh.
I found no clues among her papers, though I knew I would need to go through them carefully again. There were two letters from me, but none from any of her friends. A couple of sheets of half-done drawings, some scribbled lines of verse: that was all. Everything else was related to her work for HELP-US or her thesis research. I was sure there was more, somewhere. Priscilla would have made jottings, sketched, kept a diary, written poetry. I knew my daughter well enough to be sure there was something else.
Kadambari took the smaller bag and left the room. Rudyard moved to close the suitcase on the bed. I picked up the old photograph on the desk, intending to put it in my handbag along with the picture of myself that had kept my daughter company for the last ten months. But before I could put it away, Rudyard’s hand, oddly unfamiliar, fell upon mine.