When I was eight I was given duties in the ashram, like the other boat girls. My new work was to help in the gardens. I knew nothing about plants and I was born clumsy. I would step on one plant when trying to reach another. I would uproot freshly-planted seedlings when weeding. Gradually I became better at it and in time it would become the only bond between me and my foster mother. I don’t know why I became a sullen, monosyllabic lump around her. She persisted in being friendly, but her efforts only oppressed me. I felt trapped and restless, I would try to put up with her talk, try and try, then before I could stop myself I would leave her in mid-sentence and walk out through the door. One day, three long, fraught years after I had started living with her, I saw her looking out of the window at me. I was kneeling over the hard, cold earth planting bulbs for the spring. The fat promise of those bulbs: I had loved them even at the ashram, where we planted tuberoses and lilies. A bulb was a secret between the soil and me until the green tips of leaves poked out months later and gave it away. That day I was planting the crocuses, snowdrops, tulips, and daffodils my foster mother liked. When she saw me she came out and began to plant them too, some distance away. As we progressed along our patches, we moved closer and closer. Above us, the slate grey sky was low. There were powdery drops of rain on our anoraks. I said nothing, but I may have smiled at her. I saw her pale pink lips tremble, and when her glasses misted over she said it was the rain.
In the ashram’s gardens I had to work with a man who had recently arrived. He once told me he had been a refugee like us, and from the same place, but he had spent a few years hiding in the forests between our old country and this one. Nobody knew what had happened to him in those years and nobody asked. We never spoke about that part of our lives.
The new man’s name was Jugnu. He had a thin face and long arms and he walked like a monkey, with his shoulders drooping. His nose was twisted to one side. His neck had a scar that looked like wrinkled pink satin. He too had come by boat and his hair stood on end as if the sea breeze had never gone out of it. He lived in a corner of the garden shed that he had made his own, with a mat to sleep on and a stove on which he brewed sweet tea. He was known to be very devout. He sang hymns and was often found sitting in the ashram’s puja hall as if in a trance. Usually, though, he was hunched over plants. His hands were scaly and big, the fingers looked like knots in a tree trunk, but when they went into soil they were so careful that he never broke the frailest, finest hair from the roots. After he came, the ashram started to look prettier and smelled sweet everywhere, especially in the evenings when the night flowers bloomed. He was devoted to Guruji and planted beautiful flowers all around his cottage.
During the morning the ashram was such a busy, bright place that I don’t think anyone looking around would have known that there were twelve girls in it who had nobody. Everyone came to hear Guruji’s discourses at the big audience hall. Holy men came from other ashrams to listen to him. I saw so many monks I could not tell one from the other. They all looked the same: long hair and yellow robes. Then there were our teachers, a cook, and Jugnu. In the afternoon the visitors left. The students who came from outside went off in their buses. The boys in our school went back in a van to their dormitory, which was in another building, far away. The teachers who did not belong to the ashram went home. The monks from the visitors’ side of the ashram returned to their cottages across the fence. We were by ourselves then.
When school was over and everyone was gone, I had to work in the garden for two hours. I don’t remember much about what I did for those two hours, but one such afternoon was so strange I can’t forget it. Jugnu had told me to fork the earth below Guruji’s window. I was doing that when I heard sounds from inside: grunting sounds, whimpering sounds, screaming, which stopped abruptly, the sound of something banging and thumping. Suddenly Champa shot out of the house. I dropped down behind the bush. I heard a man’s voice: “You wait and see. See what happens.” I could not tell whose voice it was, but it frightened me so I stayed behind the bush for a long while, being bitten by insects.
Champa was a favourite of Guruji’s. She had her own room like all the older girls. Her bed had a striped bedspread and she had a vase for flowers and a picture of Guruji on the wall. The other older girls had none of these things. She used to worship the picture and light incense in front of it. I thought when I grew older I would have a room like that.
Champa was the only one among the boat girls who had a few things from long ago and these were never taken away from her. She kept her things in a brick-sized aluminium box with a clasp. A little lock went through the clasp. Nobody had ever seen the box unlocked. We did not know what was in it. In the evening of the day I overheard her screaming, Bhola made a fire in the quadrangle outside our dormitory. He was one of Guruji’s trusted helpers and he had been at the ashram right from when the war started. Guruji had found him half dead and brought him back to life: it was one of the miracles he was famous for.
Bhola broke open the lock on Champa’s box with a sharp rap of a stone. He picked something out and held it between two fingertips as if it were filthy. “A duster? A hanky?” he said. “Whose? Your father’s?” Champa did not answer.
The heat from the fire in that warm evening made sweat pour down Bhola’s pitted face. A bomb had left one side of him maimed. He hobbled to Champa with the rag. “What is this cloth? Give me an answer and nothing will happen to it,” he hissed at her. Now I know he must have relished every second of being a villain who bared his fangs and growled to scare little girls, but at that time there was nobody more terrifying or cruel even in our nightmares.
I do not remember the exact sequence of the things that happened next — that evening is a series of dark images in my head. I think Champa mumbled something and Bhola tossed the cloth into the fire. He picked up a photograph from the box. “What an ugly fat woman,” he said. After the photograph had sizzled to ashes he picked out a tiny doll. Its head lolled and its arms were limp and it wore a printed rag as a sari. When she saw that doll, something happened to Champa. She made a choking sound as if she would vomit and she turned away to run into the dormitory. Savita-di, our matron, held her back by her arm. “You can leave when Guruji tells you to, not before,” she said.
It was only then that I noticed him in the shadows, watching everything. Guruji stood as expressionless as when he had caught me on the pomegranate tree. Champa was crying, “I won’t run away again, I will never run away again.” He said nothing. We did not know Champa had tried running away. We had been told never to leave the ashram. We knew if any of us was caught outside, every other boat girl would be in danger. We thought: if she ran away she deserves punishment. How just Guruji is, he punishes even his favourite.
After all the things in the box were burned, we were told to go back to our rooms and dormitories while Champa was led away to Guruji’s cottage for an audience with him.
Not many days after that it was my turn. I had been hiding between the bushes and trees in a complicated game with Piku, and before we knew it we had drifted to the outer boundary of the grounds. There was high barbed-wire fencing. Beyond the fences were rows of cottages and parks. It was the visitors’ part of the ashram. I had only glimpsed it before from high up in the pomegranate tree. Now we could see men and women sitting at meditation. Many were just like us and some were foreigners with light hair.