I see Sheela coming back to join our group, waving her fan in front of her face. Parvati reaches up to lift damp curls away from the sleeping baby’s forehead. Sheela is looking past her mother-in-law. Suddenly, her face hardens. I follow her gaze to the corner of the cinema house. That’s when I notice Ravi discreetly escorting the younger actress out the side door of the building. Sheela’s eyes narrow as her husband and the starlet disappear in the darkness, away from the throng. I know there’s a loading dock there. It’s also where the drivers for the maharani and the actors are waiting to whisk them away. Perhaps he’s taking her to her car.
We hear the bell announcing that intermission is almost over. The second half of the film is about to begin. I check my watch. It’s now 9:30 p.m. Sheela’s girls should be in bed, but Ravi had insisted that the family be present and seen by the public at his big moment. I’m sure Sheela fought him on it. She prefers to have the ayah look after the girls.
The crowd files back into the lobby and through the open doors of the theater. I hand the empty tea glasses to the chai-wallas making their rounds. Banana leaves on which chaat was sold litter the ground. A fragrance of food served and eaten—not wholly unpleasant—lingers in the air. I lift up Rita, Ravi’s other daughter, whose eyes have started to droop, and hoist her onto my shoulder.
I follow the rest of the group inside the lobby.
Before we make it through the doors, we hear a yawning creak, then a complaining groan, and then suddenly the roar of a thousand pounds of cement, brick, rebar and drywall crashing down. Within seconds, the earsplitting sounds of a building collapsing, screams of agony and howls of pain are coming from inside the theater.
TWO MONTHS BEFORE
THE COLLAPSE
1
NIMMI
March 1969
Shimla, State of Himachal Pradesh, India
I stop walking to look at the mountains rising from their sleep. Winter in Shimla is coming to an end. The men and women wrap themselves in two, sometimes three, pashmina shawls, but the hills are casting off their blankets. I hear the plunk, plunk, plunk of melting snow hitting the hard ground as I make my way carefully to Lakshmi Kumar’s house.
Yesterday, I saw the first pink anemones in the valley below us, brazenly pushing their noses through the thin air. In the distant hills to the north, I imagine my tribe herding their goats and sheep through the Kangra Valley to the village of Bharmour, in the upper Himalayas, as I would be doing were my husband, Dev, still alive. It is hard to believe it’s been a year since he’s been gone. My daughter, Rekha, would be running beside her father, waving her tiny arms in an effort to help him shepherd the goats and sheep, while I carried our baby, Chullu, on my back. We would be accompanied by the other families of our tribe who had wintered in the lower Himalayas to secure food for their herds. As soon as the snows started melting in early spring, we always made our way back up the mountains to start cultivating our fields with the sheep manure that had matured into rich fertilizer over the winter months.
I haven’t seen my family since I left my tribe last spring after Dev’s fatal accident. They don’t come down south as far as Shimla, but not a day goes by that I don’t think about them with fondness.
As we walked, Old Suresh used to tell us jokes. Did you hear the one about the flatulent goat and the shepherd without a nose? No, tell us that one, we would laugh.
Grandmother Sushila, toothless, gray whiskers poking out of the triangular tattoo on her chin, would begin one of the folktales told to her by her grandmother. So the king commanded the queen to weave a blanket for him from the finest wool, which he knew would take her the better part of ten years. We all knew the story by heart and would finish the final sentence for her, at which point she would look at us with a frown. Oh, you know that one already?
Having sold the wool from our sheep in the lower Himalayas, we would be flush with our winter purchases: a factory-made sky-blue sweater, a Philips transistor radio, a squawking chicken bought at a hill-station market. A few families may have picked up a handsome spotted house goat or a young black bull we would all admire. My sister-in-law would be showing off a new winnowing tray; my older brother walking proudly by her side with his sons. We would wag our heads and agree that the tray could separate the husks from the rice grains much more quickly.
I smile now as I think about those treks through the Himalayan mountains. I feel happy, almost. What would make it complete is a letter from Malik, even if I have to share it with someone else, especially if that someone is Lakshmi. If only I could have attended school, I would not be subjected to the humiliation of having his letters to me sent to her to be read to me.
My goatskin boots make a satisfying squelching sound on the mushy gravel as I conjure ways I would like to stomp Lakshmi Kumar out of my life.
The day Lakshmi first came into my life, I was not in my right mind. I had been so delirious with fever and grief that I was not even aware of my son, Chullu, coming into this world, two months before his time. Earlier that same day, my husband Dev had tried to drag a young male goat, drunk on rhododendron leaves, back onto the narrow mountain trail. We’d been on our way to our summer homes in the upper Himalayas. Dev lost his footing, and both he and the goat hurtled hundreds of feet into a ravine. We all saw it happen, but there was nothing any of us could do. We have always known the Himalayas to be the home of the gods—Shiva, Ram and Kamla—all of whom are much more powerful than we are. If they want to take someone from us, that is their right, their privilege. Still, I was not ready to let my husband go. Over and over I cried, Wasn’t the goat we sacrificed at the start of our trip enough to protect us? Or was it an evil nazar? That our sheep had produced so much wool the winter before may have aroused someone’s jealousy.
I grabbed the shoulders of those near me, screeching into their startled faces, Tell me you didn’t give Dev the evil eye! I screamed at Lord Shiva. I beat my fists on my distended belly, promising to give Shivaji the baby if he would just bring Dev back. My father-in-law and my brother had to pull my arms away from my stomach to keep me from hurting the life within. The women rubbed my temples, hands and feet with warm mustard oil until I finally sank into a stupor. Almost a week later, when I awakened as if from a long sleep, I saw little Rekha’s face, pinched with worry, hovering at the edge of my bed and called my daughter to me. She was just three and didn’t understand yet that she might never see her father again. It was then that my father-in-law told me about the doctor and doctrini who had come from Shimla to tend to me; my body had needed medicines stronger than our tribe carried. My husband’s father spoke to me through a curtain that the women had erected to keep nursing mothers isolated for the eleven days after a baby’s birth. I looked down and noticed for the first time a sleeping baby boy in the crook of my arm, his head slung away from my leaking breast, his rose-colored mouth drooling pale blue milk.
How could I ever have wished this baby away? In him Shiva had given me Dev’s fine nostrils and wide forehead, the slight curl in his hair. I asked Rekha to climb onto the blanket with us and say hello to her brother Chullu.
The next time I met Lakshmi Kumar was also the day I met Malik, last June. I was selling flowers along the main walkway in Shimla. Rekha was three, a serious girl, and I had asked her to watch her three-month-old baby brother. That morning in the Shimla woods, I had picked roses, daises and buttercups for tourists and perennial visitors, and for the discerning buyer: peonies, yarrow and foxglove. Living as I had with my tribe, I knew how certain flowers could cure aches and coughs, ease monthly bleeding, lull fretful bodies to sleep.