The line was very bad, but I sensed instantly that this was not a call to wish me Happy Birthday. It was a cry for help.
Ma was imploring me to return immediately to Azamgarh. 'There has been a big tragedy,' she said. 'Your father is in hospital, fighting for his life. I cannot say anything on the phone. Just come, my daughter. Just come.'
'Yes, Ma,' I said, fighting back the tears. 'I am coming.'
21 March
I have returned to Azamgarh, the town of my birth. I flew from Mumbai to Varanasi and then hired a taxi to take me the final ninety kilometres. Lest I be recognized and mobbed, I put on a burqa over my jeans.
Lucknow changed a lot in three years, but Azamgarh has remained unchanged even after seven. It is the same congested cesspool dotted with dilapidated houses and decaying slums. The roads are full of potholes. Rubbish lies piled up at every street corner. Roadside drains overflow with sewer water. Cows roam the roads freely. Posters of politicians with plastic smiles and folded hands decorate every empty space.
Kurmitola, where our ancestral house stands, has become a claustrophobic monstrosity. Its narrow streets used to teem with rickshaws and cycles, but now they buzz with the sounds of car horns, three-wheeler klaxons and screeching tyres. Pigeons flutter from the balconies of spectacularly ruined houses. Battered hoardings display garish film posters and advertisements for sex clinics. Dexterous craftsmen in tatty clothes work in decrepit shops. Wrinkled men smoke ancient hookahs on filthy pavements, looking like derelict reminders of a forgotten past.
I had no difficulty in locating my house, at the edge of a field used by children for games of cricket and gulli danda. I knocked on the weather-beaten door and Ma opened it. She looked older and greyer than I had ever seen her. We embraced, shed a few tears, then she made me sit on a creaky charpoy in the octagonal courtyard where Sapna and I used to play hopscotch and told me the reason for calling me to Azamgarh.
Two days ago, Sapna was abducted while returning from college. She was taken to a small house in Sarai Meer, a notorious locality just outside the city, known for its gangsters. There her abductor tried to rape her, but Sapna somehow managed to get hold of the gangster's gun and shot him dead.
She returned home within hours of her abduction, but Babuji had a heart attack on receiving the news. Now he is in hospital and Sapna is hiding in the house, terrified that the police might come any minute to take her away for murder. In desperation, Ma has turned to me as a last resort.
I gripped Ma's hand as she narrated these events, her voice breaking.
'Your sister came back trembling like a leaf,' she continued. 'I couldn't look into her eyes, so full of pain. Lawlessness has increased so much in this city that no girl is safe. Well, what can you expect when the Home Minister of the State is himself a known criminal? Your Babuji will still not admit it, but I say to you, beti, you did the right thing by going away to Bombay. I only wish you had taken your little sister with you. Then we wouldn't have had to see this day.'
'Between right and wrong there is accident, Ma, which is neither right nor wrong, over which we have no control.'
'You are right, beti. Whatever is destined will come to pass.'
'Where is Sapna?' I asked.
'She is hiding in the luggage room and refuses to come out. The poor girl has not eaten in forty-eight hours. Perhaps you can make her listen.'
I remembered the luggage room was the gloomiest room in the house. It was windowless and the air inside was dark and lifeless, radiating the musty smell of dust and mouldy wood. It was the perfect hiding spot when Sapna and I used to play hide and seek, but neither of us could bear staying in that creepy room longer than ten minutes. Now Sapna had been holed up there for two full days.
I ran up the steps to the luggage room and knocked on the battered wooden door, its paint peeling in strips away from the wood. 'It is me, Sapna. Open up.'
There was a brief silence, and then Sapna opened the door and fell into my embrace. She looked haggard and gaunt, with dark circles under her eyes. She draped her arms around me and hugged me tightly, her fingers digging into my spine, searching for the familiar indentations of childhood in the terrain of my back. Then she broke down and cried, her frail body racked by sobs. Her tears flowed freely till she had none left. I stroked her head and silently shared her grief.
At my urging, Sapna finally ate a meal. Then we left for the hospital to see Babuji, Sapna also dressed in a black burqa like me.
The room in the ICU was dim and quiet. My elder sister Sarita was there, sitting on a chair with the same harassed look on her face as when I had last seen her, the look of an unhappily married woman with three unruly children. She embraced me more warmly than I expected. We were never that close, but perhaps my fame had bridged the gap.
Babuji lay on a metal bed with a green sheet, breathing through a tube. He has shrunk since I last saw him. Old age has defined the furrows on his face and the veins on his hands; illness has deepened them. His hair has thinned out, leaving bald patches on the scalp. He groaned occasionally in his sleep.
I have done many such scenes in movies – the dutiful daughter at the father's deathbed – but I had almost forgotten the antiseptic smell of a real hospital. The steady blip of the heart monitor resonated in the room like a radio signal in outer space. I listened to the pneumatic hiss and whoosh of the ventilator, saw the green digital surge of the EKG and felt a tiny wave of relief.
A bespectacled doctor in a white coat entered the room and checked the chart attached to the bed.
'Is he making progress, Doc?' I asked him.
The doctor was clearly surprised at being asked a question in English by a woman in a burqa. 'Yes. He is making a good recovery. But we need to monitor him closely for the next three days.'
'Please give him the best care possible. Money is no object.'
I felt funny saying this, because money clearly is an object. I am neck deep in debt without a penny in the bank. But when you are grappling with something as elemental as murder, concerns about money begin to seem inconsequential.
As soon as the doctor left, I caught hold of Sapna's hand. 'Babuji will be fine. Now take me to Sarai Meer. To the house where that man took you.'
She wrenched her hand away. 'No, didi. I cannot bear to return to that place.'
'But you have to, Sapna,' I implored her. 'I have to remove all evidence of your visit to that house.'
'I cannot see that man again, not even his dead body.'
'I promise you, I will take just ten minutes.'
After much cajoling, Sapna agreed to take me to Sarai Meer. As our auto-rickshaw passed the familiar landmarks of my childhood and youth, memories of another age came flooding back to me. I remembered stolen afternoons spent sucking sweetened crushed ice from the hawker in front of the Inter College, bunking from school to see Hum Aapke Hain Kaun at the Delight Cinema, window-shopping expeditions to Asif Ganj, the spicy chaat of Nathu Sweets on MG Road.
Sapna asked the driver to stop outside the main market in Sarai Meer. From there we proceeded to our destination on foot.
This was a predominantly Muslim area, but there weren't many burqa-clad women walking about. Most of the houses were run-down shanties. Clothes fluttered from rickety balconies and cable-TV wires looped from every roof. I peered into the cavernous grocery shops and the bright pharmacies, the tiny video-rental shops and the PCOs that had sprouted in the locality like a crop of mushrooms. The aroma of freshly cooked meat drifted from smoky food stalls.
Sapna clung to me like a drowning girl holding on to a wooden plank. I could sense her desperation from the way her nails gouged my skin and I knew that my little sister had lost her innocence. For her, the familiar world of Azamgarh had suddenly become foreign and evil, and I was her only refuge.