She turned on her side again. An alarm clock by the bedside lamp counted the seconds. She had set it to 4.00, for a brief siesta to recover her energies. In the evening they were to go to the temple. It was their second day in Jarmuli. That morning, she had gone for a long walk on the beach, all by herself, and her ankles and calves still ached from the unaccustomed ploughing through sand. Vidya had predicted this would happen, and would tell her she had told her so. How was she going to survive the walking they would have to do this evening? She had heard the temple was enormous — a perfectly preserved medieval town — and that was the only reason she was going. She was not religious, not like Gouri in her sanctuary of gods and goddesses, meditating and chanting all the time. At times she wished she had her friend’s faith — it must account for Gouri’s tranquillity, she thought, her way of saying, “Oh well, whatever will be. . What’s the point of worrying?” Latika wasn’t made like that. Her husband called her a high-tension wire, humming with faint vibrations, even when apparently still. Her flaming-red hair matched how she was inside, she thought, even if the red came from a bottle.
She stretched her legs, trying to rid them of the pain, then got up from her bed.
The three of them had rooms connected by a verandah that ran the length of the side that faced the sea. Latika opened the door to the verandah and a gust of wind plastered her hair to her face. Walking on the beach that morning, she had seen that their hotel was one among many set along the seafront. Next door was an opulently unobtrusive five-star, half hidden in foliage. On their other side was a shiny glass and stone building shaped like a boat with a vertical red sign going down its front saying, Pure Veg Meals, No Onion, No Garlic. Further along, the beach was fenced away by more hotels, and between the hotels now and then, like tiny rowboats stranded among cruise liners, were shuttered old houses whose owners must have refused to sell. She could hear the faint cries of children from the beach now. She smelled fish, and a spicy scent she could not place. Perhaps the blossoms on the tree that was on the other side of the verandah.
She walked past the windows to Vidya’s room and then Gouri’s. Vidya’s curtains were drawn close. The curtains to the next room were open and she could see Gouri sitting in her bed surrounded by the contents of her handbag. Latika knocked on the glass and Gouri looked up with a start. She came to the window, wide-eyed with fright. Latika realised she had forgotten to put on her glasses and could not recognise her, so she called out, “It’s me.”
Gouri retrieved her glasses and opened the verandah door. “Is everything alright?” she said. “What’s the matter?” And then, not waiting for an answer, “Do you know, I found my pearl studs. I hunted for them all over. . and all the time, I had them in my handbag.”
Gouri’s bags, packed and locked, were by the door. She had strapped her sandals on securely. Her hair was tied in the two girlish plaits she always made at night, because it made sleeping easier. She was in her travel sari, an indestructible georgette.
Latika drew her back into the room and sat her down on the bed. She said in a gentle voice, “Didn’t you say you would wear your orange sari for the temple? Did you change your mind? Why have you packed your things again?”
“But aren’t we leaving in a bit? On the train? We are going to Jarmuli, aren’t we? We’re getting late. We need to reach the station in time.”
*
That afternoon, Nomi stood by Johnny Toppo’s stall drinking tea. There were no other customers yet, it was too early. They would come when the sun turned the waves into that molten copper he could not take his eyes off though he saw it every day.
Nomi asked him in halting Hindi, “What is that song you were just singing? It made me feel so sad.”
Johnny Toppo looked the girl up and down — young, thin, with coloured threads in her hair, rings in her ears: to look at, like one of those starving hippies who reeked of old sweat, but this one smelled fresh and clean. One of her arms was covered in fine, shiny sand and she had a big camera hanging from her neck.
“You feel sad at a song if you are already sad, your eyes get wet if there are already tears. What’s a girl like you got to be sad about?” He grinned at her, and his mouth looked like a piano’s keyboard, black gaps alternating with white teeth. “Look at me, teeth gone, knees creaking, back bent. I’m the fellow who should be sad. But I feel like singing all day.”
“I’m looking for my mother. She’s here somewhere. I lost her by the sea. This sea, I think. This sea.”
“What? Louder. I’m old, my ears are full of water.”
“I said, I was looking for one more tea. One more like the last one, with ginger and cloves.”
She sat on the sand and began to fiddle with the lens of her camera. She focused it on people paddling in the foam. She scanned their faces through her telephoto lens. She did not know who or what she hoped to find. Since arriving the day before, everything seemed so familiar and so alien that she could not tell the remembered from the imagined. Like the time she got lost in a birch forest in Norway, trying to find her way back, starting up paths that looked right, realising they were wrong after she had walked a long way. Turning back again.
Johnny Toppo poured water into his aluminium pan, then crushed a piece of ginger and half a clove in a stone pestle. He could no longer afford to put in a whole clove. He scraped the contents of the pestle into the pan. When the tea was ready he came up to where she was sitting and handed it to her. “The sun is still strong. If you want an umbrella to sit under I can give you one, only five rupees,” he said. She wondered where she had heard that voice before. Could it be — no it couldn’t, of course.
The beach grew more crowded as the heat dwindled. Suraj appeared, faceless behind sunglasses, wandering in search of the right spot, choosing an upturned boat. He sat on it and took something out of his pocket — a piece of wood, she saw through her camera lens — and began to scrape at it with a knife. She observed him for a while. The piece was quite small and his movements with the knife precise and controlled. He gazed for long moments into the horizon, then went back to his work. His scowl, his dragon-black T-shirt, his stubble, made him daunting to vendors of sea shells and beads. They left him alone, instead attaching themselves with the persistence of bluebottles to the girl with braids in her hair. Nomi ignored her clamorous followers and began strolling along the beach, lifting her camera occasionally for photographs, pausing at times with an assessing look that arced over the shoreline. She came back to the tea stall as if it were her new home, following the scent of cloves and ginger and kerosene, and the sound of the old man’s gravelly voice. He was deep in his work now, noticing nothing but potential customers. She sat straight-backed in the shade of her newly-acquired umbrella, to listen.
My little mud house as old as time,
Is on a hill with pomegranate trees,
Sweet lime grew there in the valley,
And fields of tender green peas.
He pumped his stove, he smiled, at times he interrupted his song to call out “Cha! Chaaii!”
Nomi closed her eyes tight when he sang. It was unbearable. She wanted him to stop singing. At the same time she wanted him to sing this very same song forever. They would live in a hut and have hens and pigs and grow yam and bananas and play in the stream nearby, she had promised. Piku used to light up whenever she started talking about the hut, so Nomi had added more and more detail each day: new plants, new animals, new things they would do. That was the game, dreaming together. After the lights were put out Piku crept across the dormitory and snuggled up to her in her narrow bunk. Nomi would sleep comforted by the sense of her breathing, her movements in the night. By dawn she was always gone.