She pulled a cigarette out after some moments of struggle with the packet. She reached for his lighter. Her lips circled the cigarette in a pout. She had tucked her feet under herself as always, and turned the chair into a shell in which she fitted securely.
He lay with his arms cradling his head. “I’m going to enjoy this,” he said. She looked so unlike herself with that cigarette, he could not take his eyes off her. He relaxed into his pillows, as if lying back to watch a movie. So what if he normally didn’t like people in his room. This was worth the price.
She exhaled through her nostrils. “I’m fagged out. So hot. And it took forever coming back. Do you know whom I met? The fat old lady from my train. I dropped her off at the big temple. She was hell-bent on dragging me in too, but I managed to give her the slip.”
His throat felt very dry. His skin had a crawling itchy feeling. He recited, “When Nomi has a smoke, It is a fucking joke,” as if to himself. “A pome.” It wasn’t such a bad rhyme, he thought, it did actually rhyme. He opened his mouth to repeat it, but his poem had set something off in her again. “Do you know how dangerous it was to leave me out there? Even that temple guide said so. An albino monk with long hair was following me half the time. I thought he was going to attack me.”
“An albino monk. An albino. .” He began laughing, first a giggle, then another, then a helpless guffaw. “You’re wild, you know that? I bet you’re writing a novel. ‘The Gooroo and his Slave Girls’. Who’s Piku, tell me that? Raunchy stuff on your laptop, man!” There was something unbelievably erotic about her indignation, that cigarette in her mouth, kurta slipping off her shoulder again.
She got up, looking for a place to stub her cigarette. He pointed through his laughter. “The ashtray’s right there, in front of you. See? On the table?”
“You’ve been snooping around my computer,” she said, crushing the cigarette. She was stammering, her voice had a tremor. “You abandon me in the middle of nowhere, you don’t give a shit how I’ll get back, you don’t answer your phone, and now you’re being a smart ass.”
Her words turned his blood to acid. He sprang up off the bed. “I’m not your fucking bodyguard. I’ve had enough too.” A vein in his forehead throbbed. His face was hot. His ears rang. He lunged for her before she could move and grabbed one of her arms. It was thin and bony. He could break it in two as if it were one of his cigarettes, a limp tube of paper filled with shreds of leaves. He gripped her arm harder, pulling her towards the door. He’d fling her out of his room and never see her again.
“Hey, let go! That hurts!”
Her voice was far too loud. He needed to stop that voice.
She shook her arm, trying to free herself and her kurta started slipping further off her shoulders. Something caught his eye. He loosened his grip, his voice dropped abruptly to a whisper. “There is one thing I need to check — about that spot on your right shoulder — that mole — is it —”
“Get some sleep, Suraj.” Her fingers were at work, prising off his. “I’ll see you in the morning. We’re here to work, you’re supposed to do what I need done. I’m out of here. Breakfast at eight tomorrow. Where’s my laptop?” Her voice wasn’t trembling any longer, it was a curt, superior voice. And her unidentifiable accent was starting to get on his nerves. He wanted to chuck her out of his room, not hear that voice any more, but that shoulder — that hacked-off sleeve, he could focus on little else — that sleeve had come off entirely — and now, somehow, his hands had torn most of the other one away too. He did not know how or why her kurta ripped. He hadn’t pulled on it, she had moved away too quickly. And then — how did they end up in the shower? They were both in the cubicle, he had turned the water on full — jets of water. He held her under it, the water made her braids stick to her skull. He was rubbing shower gel all over her, but she was wriggling free, slippery with soap, just would not hold still even when he shook her and slapped her. And then she slipped from his hands — she slipped out of them, fell against the cubicle door, which swung open and she was flung out with it. She slammed down full length on the hard, shining floor. He giggled. “Hey, that is bad, shit, man!” Her legs were splayed, and she was looking upwards at the sink.
A slow red trickle appeared from somewhere behind her ears. It edged across the beige stone of the bathroom floor towards the drain below the sink. There was a creamy bathtub with a fresh white towel draped over it. He wanted to put the towel on the blood stain to stub the red out. He would have to step over her to reach the towel.
He was soaked. Cold, canned air streamed through the bathroom. He shivered.
She was not shivering. She wasn’t moving.
Now that she was flat on the floor, much of her kurta gone, he saw her breasts were no more than flattened pancakes topped by chocolate buttons. They were small. Not big enough to fill half his palm.
He found himself looking at his hands. His hands were shaking. He was shaking all over.
Not a sound but for the air conditioner shuddering.
He had to do something. What? He staggered into his bedroom towards the phone — he should call reception for a doctor. But then they would ask what had happened. He had no idea what had happened.
He heard a knock on a door down the corridor followed by a voice saying, “Turn down your bed, Sir?” They arrived every evening, drew the curtains, lit scented candles in the rooms, patted the pillows as if they were babies. In a few minutes the housekeeping service footsteps would close in. He needed time to think. He locked the door. Turned the lever twice to double-lock it.
A sound told him someone else was in the bedroom. He swivelled around. Nomi, in the shreds of her kurta, bleeding from her head, dripping water onto the floor. He wanted to shout with relief. She wasn’t dead. He hadn’t killed her.
She held her wet clothes closer. Her teeth were chattering in the cold. He could hear them, like soft castanets.
“I’m going to tell them everything,” she said. She was looking straight at him. No, not exactly at him, past him, at the door. She was holding something in one hand, he couldn’t quite see what.
He would sort it out with her if only he didn’t alarm her. It was all a stupid misunderstanding, couldn’t she see that? They were fooling around and it got out of hand. He needed to make her see that. He inched towards her. “Listen, it was an accident, I was drunk, it was bloody awful, but. .”
The housekeeper’s footsteps were coming closer. He could hear them on the flagstones. If there was no privacy sign on the door they usually knocked twice, then let themselves in after a pause. Could they do that even when rooms were double locked?
“Listen. .” he began again.
“You don’t scare me,” she said. She was still looking past him as if her eyes were seeing something else. That look made him feel more afraid than he had ever been. He was trapped with a psycho.
“I don’t believe your bullshit,” she said. “I’m through.” She lifted her hands as if holding a gun. She pressed. His hands flew to his eyes, but it was too late. He felt something in one of his eyes, was blinded by a fiery pain. He covered it with his palm. The pain shot through the eye into the back of his head. He could smell his anti-mosquito spray. The can in the bathroom. The bitch. His eye streamed tears, he could barely see anything. It felt as if it had burnt away.
“You don’t scare me. I don’t believe your bullshit.” The words came from Nomi in a low monotone that was not her voice.
Suraj felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his forearm. One eye open, he could see the white sheet had splashes of red on it. He looked down at himself — his arm had a gash. The blood was spreading warm and scarlet, all over his arm, his hand, the bed. And she was coming at him again with a knife. His own carving knife from the toolkit on the bedside table.