Suraj agreed with the driver — she must have misunderstood and taken a bus. Why else was she taking so long? The car slid out from its slot in the parking lot, the air conditioner came back on, and its first cool currents made Suraj sigh with relief. He opened the laptop, this time with no sense of urgency or stealth. He tapped the trackpad.
*
Latika seemed to be in the grip of a curious exhilaration for hours after her visit to the ruins at the Sun Temple. She swatted away Vidya’s questions about Suraj. “You know how confused Gouri is about faces! She thought she saw him, but it was someone else entirely. Who was it, Gouri?” She insisted she would sit in the front seat on the way back because she had felt squashed between Vidya and Gouri during the drive from the hotel. She ignored Vidya’s troubled glances and chattered on, even with the driver who was really the hotel’s manager. He was no longer the taciturn man who had driven them out, and Vidya caught snatches of their conversation from the back, the two of them sounding as comfortable as old friends. At times they heard Latika humming “Are you lonesome tonight” in her husky voice which an admirer had once described as sand and smoke. When they stopped midway to look at a confluence of river and sea, Latika walked into the mirror-still water, unconcerned about wetting clothes and sandals. She would not come out of there until Vidya said, “Really, Latika, be reasonable, it’s getting dark.”
The rest of the drive down the highway was suffused with a sense of things ending. Vidya was already tense about her electricity bill. She was sure it had come by now and if the bill wasn’t paid on time she might lose her connection. And then? In a few minutes her mind felt as if it were an undone skein of wooclass="underline" impossible to find the beginning or end of the problem of the unpaid bill. The car speeded down the last of the twilit roads and secretive trees. “At day’s end, like the hush of dew comes evening,” Gouri murmured to herself. “The kite wipes the scent of sunlight from its wings.” She could not remember the next few lines or where she had read the poem. Perhaps at college. After a moment some snatches came back to her and she whispered, “All birds come home, all rivers, all of life’s tasks finished, only darkness remains.” Looking out of the window she said sadly, “It’s over so soon.” They were approaching street lights, cars, buildings, Jarmuli’s market.
“It’s not! Let’s get off at the bazaar! I don’t feel like the hotel yet.” Latika twisted herself back to look at them. “Come on now, you two, let’s have some fun.”
“Aren’t you tired?” Vidya said. “We can go tomorrow. We were there just yesterday.” The sense of misgiving which had taken root in her after hearing that Gouri had caught sight of her son weighed her down, and tired her out. First her ill health, then that molten sun pouring down on her head all afternoon, then Suraj. She tried reminding herself of the many times Gouri had confused one person with another. But the same thought went around her brain in concentric circles that tightened into an aching noose. Why had her son followed her to Jarmuli? Did he need to speak to her about something? But then they had spoken the morning she left, when she had phoned him. Had she imagined his unease, his attempt to hang up minutes after she called? He had been sounding evasive and abrupt for many months — one had to be grateful he answered his phone at all, which was more than she could say of her daughter-in-law, Ayesha.
Latika was still urging them to stop the car and get off at the bazaar. “Let’s, please!” she begged them like a child. “We can take rickshaws back to the hotel, it’s only ten minutes away. It’s such a lovely evening.” Vidya drew breath to snap at her, then counted, as she had taught herself, a slow fifteen. “Fine,” she said after her pause. “Fine, we’ll do as you want.”
They were in a dilemma about the driver’s tip and held urgent whispered consultations. How did one deal with a tip when he was not really a driver but the manager of the hotel? It was difficult conferring when he was inches away, listening. Ultimately, Latika whispered, “Gift, gift,” and they got off. Now that there was a purpose to the market trip, Vidya did not feel as irascible, and after a long cold gulp of a fizzy drink her anxieties over Suraj and the electricity bill receded.
*
After leaving his uncle’s house for the last time, Badal drove out of town towards the Sun Temple, down Marine Road, shaded by the casuarina trees that flanked it. It was a lonely stretch, close neither to Jarmuli nor to the huddles of earth and straw that made up the dismal villages which lived off the temple. At one point, where he sighted an opening in the foliage and a pale stretch of sand, he abandoned his scooter and walked down to the shore. White-topped rollers came crashing in, a wind had risen in the orange sky.
Why had Raghu shown not a sign — not the tiniest flicker — that their afternoon by the boat had meant something to him as well? The cruelty of his indifference opened an abyss inside him. It wasn’t indifference alone, there was ridicule as well. He could not stop himself thinking about it. He reworked every second of their togetherness into separate images, as in a slide show, as though this would keep him from losing them. He wanted to throw himself into a thorn bush, cut himself with a razor, smash his toes with a stone — anything to fight pain with pain. He stood by the sea and the song Johnny Toppo had been droning that morning played in his head:
Where is my mud-brown hut?
My young guava tree?
Where’s the black cow that came
When I called her to me?
Where is that pretty stream
As blue as the pure blue skies?
The only streams I know now
Flow from my two sad eyes.
He sat on the sand, head in his hands, clutching his hair, trying to drive the song and his headache away. Once he had asked Johnny Toppo, “Can’t you sing a happy song? Why are all your songs so gloomy?” And Johnny Toppo had said, “They aren’t sad for me. They’re all I have left of my world. I’ve no cameras like these tourists — clicking all the time. Smile, smile! Click!” He had tapped his forehead. “I keep it all here. It makes me happy to remember.”
“So what was your world?” Badal had asked him. “Tell me, why don’t you?” Johnny Toppo had turned away. After a while he had said, “I sell tea, I was born ten years after the great earthquake in Bihar, I live in a tarpaulin shack, I have nobody, nothing to worry about, nothing to lose. I’m happy I’m above the water and below the sky and I’ve got beeris to smoke and a half-bottle to drink. I know from the songs in my head that I used to have another life long ago. That’s all there is to say about me, Babu.”
In the far distance, across the water, a line of lights glimmered. Fishing trawlers, living their secret lives. The lights dipped, disappeared, came back. Their nets went deep down to the floor of the sea. They would be at work all night, trapping and killing thousands of gasping creatures.
Badal had had a trick since childhood, of sitting by the sea with his back to it. He would position himself close enough for the waves to wet him with spray, knowing that if a big breaker came it might sweep him out to sea. He knew all about waves and currents, about riptides formed by winds hundreds of miles away that sucked swimmers under or sluiced away people standing on the shore. If you fought the current and tried swimming back against it, you would drown. The thing to do was not to oppose it but to fool it and swim away from it, in a diagonal. Badal had seen the washed up corpses of those who had battled the currents and lost. But he still sat with his back to the water, as if at the edge of a cliff, playing with death.