He turned and fled. He could not tell what unnerved him. Directionless he ran and it took him a few minutes to work out where he was and find the street going homeward. He dashed past the tiny shrine near his house. He did not notice the old woman in the thick glasses still sitting beside it. She beamed with anticipation as she saw him and called out: “The bananas and gur? Did you bring me the bananas and gur? I haven’teaten all day.” He hurried on to his house, hearing nothing.
He stepped through the outer door into the half light of the courtyard, where saris, pyjamas, shirts, and underpants grey beyond the powers of detergent were strung on lines from end to end. Crows perched on the lines dribbling creamy droppings on the washed clothes. They rose in a cawing cloud as he went to the tap and poured a can of water on his head and shoulders. He flung himself into a rope-strung cot in a corner of his ground-floor room, too numb to throw off his wet shirt. He tried to stay awake, to push aside his anxiety about the scooter and relive instead the earlier part of the afternoon.
But in a minute he was asleep, and in a vivid dream: his shiuli sapling has grown to a tree with so many flowers that the courtyard is waist deep in the tiny blossoms. He is wading through them, in a white and fragrant sea, when his uncle waddles out in his wet towel and pours jug after jug of water over the yard to wash the flowers away. Their sweet scent fills the courtyard long after his uncle has destroyed every last flower.
Waking, he realised that his dream had been perfumed by the incense his aunt lit for her prayers at sunset. He looked at the screen of his mobile and sprang out of his cot. He was going to be late for the old hags from Calcutta. But for his aunt’s determined blowing on the conch for her prayers, he would have kept them waiting half the evening, and then it would have been futile going to the temple at all.
When he stepped outside the house he saw it was twilight. The harsh magenta of the building across the road had mellowed to a soft pink. A breeze was blowing in from the east, and children were screaming at a hopscotch game in the alleyway. The evening train hooted from the nearby tracks.
And there, against the wall, was his scooter, the key in the ignition.
Even as he was walking home, Badal’s clients were resting in their hotel, readying themselves for the long evening ahead at the great temple. Gouri, however, could not lie still for thinking she had forgotten something. She turned her three bags inside out. She sat down on her bed, now strewn with her things, and wondered — what was she searching for? She looked around the room with a helpless gaze. The bed was covered with a red-and-blue striped sheet. The pillow was too bulky for her spondylosis so she had put it on the chair, a padded one covered with brown cloth of the kind some hotels favoured to save on cleaning costs. She heaved herself up from the bed to the chair and lifted the pillow to see if the thing she was searching for was underneath. No.
Sometimes it helped to go back to the room where the thing had originally been in order to remember. But where would she go? She opened the cupboard. Stared at the door leading to the verandah. She did not think she had gone out to the verandah yet. Curious, she opened the door, stepped out, lowered herself into a chair. The ocean was on her doorstep. She gazed outward at the slashes of sea and sky that lay beyond the verandah. A kite skimmed the sky, knife-sharp. It flew higher and higher. Her eyes followed it into the limitless emptiness of unblemished blue, not a wisp of cloud. The kite climbed further. It was a speck of sunlit red in the blue air.
Gouri’s lips began to move unprompted through the lines of a sacred hymn she was in the habit of singing. She was a feather on the wings of the kite in that borderless sky. She was airborne. From high above she saw the waves in the sea frozen into white-topped serrations. The coast was a sand-white strip bristling with coconut trees. She could see herself as if from a great distance, as a mound of clothes in a plastic chair in a verandah facing an ocean. She soared higher. She was an immaterial speck, an atom dissolved in the elements. She was helpless to resist. She did not want to resist.
Loud, unfamiliar voices just below her verandah brought her down to earth. She could not move a limb. They felt heavy and alien, as if they didn’t belong to her any longer. She became aware that her back hurt and her legs had pins and needles. Inch by inch, as she tried to move her painful muscles, she remembered why she was out in the verandah — she was meant to be looking for something. She should get up and look for whatever it was.
It was hopeless. She knew her friends were right about her ineptitude. She lost things, she forgot things. In spiritual matters she felt powerful and knowledgeable — but who valued that nowadays? It had long been evident to her that Vidya and Latika had the kind of minds that locked out spirituality. The deaf would not care if Tansen himself sat before them and sang. Nor had her friends the least sense of the ineffable, the God whom she experienced in a manner so real and moving and yet so unfathomable that she could not try communicating it. But she hoped they would admire the legendary Vishnu temple. It was her territory; she had arranged everything for this part of their trip. She wanted it to be perfect: it was after all the reason for coming to Jarmuli.
It began to trouble her again, that thing she had lost. Where else could she look to remind herself? She forced herself to get up from the chair.
Perhaps the solution was in the bathroom. It was a tiny cubicle in which she was finding it difficult to manoeuvre. She pushed open its door and ran her gaze over the white sink, the shower, the toilet bowl.
Then she spotted her face in the mirror and her hands went to her bare ear lobes. She broke into a triumphant smile. Of course. The pearl studs.
She went back to her things to search afresh. She wanted to wear the studs to the Vishnu temple, and the haldi-coloured sari that her husband had given her long years ago when they went on the Badrinath pilgrimage together. “Fire on the mountain,” he had called her, as he photographed her in that sari against the white snow peaks. In the picture she looked daring and shy and delighted all at once.
*
Two doors away from Gouri, Latika lay on her back, staring at the pale, translucent lizard glued to the ceiling by its belly, looking back at her upside down. It moved a fraction, its eyes now fixed on something she could not see. It had a streak of grey going down its back and although it was high above her, she shuddered to think of its skin: rubbery, cold, possibly damp to the touch. She remembered the time her daughter when still a toddler had stumbled towards a lizard before anyone could stop her and poked it with a pencil. It slithered away into hiding behind a cupboard but left a part of its tail on the floor, a fragment of beige flesh that wriggled and twitched before it fell still. Her daughter would not have slept a wink in this room. She would have summoned half the hotel’s staff to drive out the lizard.
Latika turned on her side, wishing she had not complained in the train about her daughter’s need for pasta and wet wipes. Why had she said all that to Gouri and Vidya, what need had she to talk so much? “You have no loyalties,” her husband had said to Latika once in bitterness. “You’ll say anything for a laugh. All you want is popularity.” She could not remember what had brought on this particular caustic jab. He was often that way with her, especially in front of other people, reducing her to long, shamed silences.