Garden of Dreams, page 15
The Minister stood, setting his glass down on the coffee table, looking uncomfortable and probably not up to anything. ‘Consider it done, Auntie-ji.’
That afternoon Lakshmi woke from a nap, fitful sleep with the AC chilling her to the bone, still in her pyjamas on the red organza bedspread, stupid sequins biting into her like bedbugs. The phone was ringing, again. As she stumbled out of the bedroom, in a stupor induced by sleep, heat and too much Johnny Walker, she cursed Rakesh’s insistence. At that moment she hated everybody. She had dreamed of the wretched Singhs, of them giving her back the boy instead of the leopard, doing what she’d asked. Get him for me, she’d said.
But they hadn’t, not yet. The leopard was lying in another corner of the room, finding a patch of late sun. She picked up the phone and Rakesh’s voice, scratchy, came down the wire. ‘You won’t believe who’s here, Auntie-ji.’
‘Try me, Rakesh.’ Lakshmi ran her fingers through her hair and quickly unbraided it. She was a mess.
‘Miss Bianca, the Bollywood Queen!’ Rakesh could barely contain himself. ‘And she is asking for you!’
What were the gods up to? She quickly gathered up the Tarot cards from the dining table, ran back to her bedroom, shoved them in a drawer and sat down in front of the mirrored dresser. Art Deco, red shellac and a round mirror, made her feel like a thirties movie star. But not today. More like something the cat dragged in, she thought.
She neatened the kohl around her eyes, smeared on another layer of lipstick, rebraided her dyed pitch-black hair and tucked the coiled braid up with a richly enamelled peacock hairpin, its prongs sharp and long enough to hold her mane in place. Didn’t Kate Winslet wear something like this in Titanic? Never mind.
The leopard was snoring lightly when she buzzed in the Bollywood Queen. Miss Bianca was on the up-and-up, she’d just been reading in the magazine. Barely thirty, rich, famous, the fantasy of most men in India and a lot of the women, too. Now here she was – in a jewelled blue-and-orange sari and matching slippers, waves of hair flowing, an over-the-top nose ring (how could she breathe?) and earrings reaching nearly to her bare shoulders – about to deliver an embrace.
‘I have a leopard,’ Lakshmi said, surprising even herself. ‘He gets jealous of Auntie-ji’s friends.’
Bianca seemed unfazed by the cat, swishing in past him and surveying the room. ‘You certainly know how to live, Lakshmi.’
‘You’re not here for my interior decorating tips, are you?’
Bianca laughed, an exaggerated laugh for an audience. But not even the leopard was looking. ‘I’ve got my own decorators, Auntie-ji. You must have seen the photos in the latest Filmfare.’
Bloody well did. ‘Then why are you here?’
‘Oh, Auntie-ji, don’t be cross. I didn’t think you’d mind. I don’t know anyone with more experience …’
‘Experience in what?’
‘On the Road, Auntie, of course. Because why? I’ll tell you. Because I am going to open my own kotha.’
That was something for Filmfare. ‘Who knows about this?’ was Lakshmi’s next question.
‘You’re the first – well, besides my other connections.’ Bianca was now sitting on the sofa, like a tropical flower fallen on a field of snow. Lakshmi thought of all the man-eating flowers she’d seen in jungle movies. ‘I decided to use these connections … I know a lot of people …’
‘You mean you know a lot of beautiful young girls …’
‘Exactly! And not everyone is making it in the film industry these days, Auntie-ji.’
What had happened to the world? Now even a gorgeous young actress, her star on the rise, was entering the business. Should she warn her? Tell her that once you get in, you cannot get out? Say that she should not dirty her hands and ruin the lives of other young women? But would it make any difference – what Lakshmi said?
‘How can I help you?’ She sat down in an armchair, regretfully. She didn’t want Bianca to think she was welcome to stay.
‘Nepali girls,’ Bianca said, tossing her hair off her shoulders. ‘I’ve got lots of local girls lined up, but need access to the Nepalis. I’ve heard men go wild for them – those eyes, their shyness. How tiny they are. Can you help me find some?’
Go look in Nepal, bitch. Lakshmi’s blood was beginning to boil. The nerve – this interloper thinking she could just waltz on to G.B. Road and start a thriving business. What did she know about it? Naturally all the sleazebags, ‘the connections’, would knock themselves out to help her, prostrate themselves, compete to be of service. But not Auntie-ji. She would give this ingénue nothing, only the illusion of warmth, of congeniality. ‘Let me see what I can do, Bianca,’ she said. ‘If you’ll leave me to it, I’ll make some inquiries this afternoon.’
She buzzed the golden doors open again and Bianca obediently swept through them. As the doors banged shut, Lakshmi contemplated how to tell Filmfare about the star’s latest adventures.
She’d call the Singhs, not on that bitch’s behalf but on her own. She’d make sure that they turned India inside out looking for him, Eli, the South African-American boy. He hadn’t died in the fire, she knew that; she’d got her people to find out who the victims were – three young girls from a recent shipment, replaceable. Hadn’t worked off much yet, bloody hell, that was the problem. But nothing she couldn’t find more of up north. She was more worried about the boy.
The whisky overflowed as she poured herself another drink, trickling over the crystal glass; Lakshmi slurped some from the top and lay down on the velvet sofa. The sun was sinking fast, casting stark shadows across the room. Where was the leopard? He had slunk off somewhere with Bianca’s departure. Lakshmi closed her eyes and relished the solitude.
The boy was in her head, though – his golden hair, his lithe young body on its way to manhood, his foreignness. He’d become something of an obsession. She felt like a young girl in love, which was strange because she never had been. She’d grown up in a kotha and the only men she’d known had been the paying kind. Unlovable. Mostly abusive.
Eli was something different, and she wanted him back. Partly because he was probably going to contact the authorities, if he hadn’t already; mostly because she just wanted him in her life. It was longing she felt – not sexual, exactly, but certainly physical, as if something had been severed from her body with his escape. She longed for his youth, his beauty and his innocence, something rare in her world. An innocence she coveted, for herself.
The phone, again, intruded. Five rings before she picked it up. ‘An old friend is here,’ was all Rakesh said, hanging up. Little fucker, he was playing with her. But she trusted him, just enough, so buzzed the golden doors open, for the last time that day, god willing.
From the sofa, sitting up, she immediately recognised the slinking man in the pale grey pathan suit and reflector sunglasses, stringy dark hair flopping around his shoulders. They hadn’t been in touch since the fire; she’d assumed he’d gone into hiding. For some reason.
Bagh ja, chutiya, was the phrase that came into her head – Go away, fucker. But she wanted to talk to him. Still, she stayed seated. Let him come to her.
‘My apologies, Auntie-ji,’ Anand said, bowing like the gentleman he’d never be. ‘I know I should have been here sooner.’ He still chewed gum.
‘Where have you been, exactly?’ She didn’t invite him to sit down but he did anyway, on the other end of the sofa.
‘Fucking busy, Auntie. And the cops are chasing me …’
‘Did you start that fire?’ Lakshmi eyed her empty whisky glass sadly. She really wasn’t in the mood for Anand; he looked especially slimy and had taken too long to report to her.
‘You insult me, Auntie! What makes you think I’d do such mischief?’
‘Then why are they after you? A new reason?’
‘I killed someone.’
‘That’s not new …’
‘Someone the cops are, were, very chummy with. An informant. The bitch was giving them lots of juicy details about the Road, about us, about you …’
‘Which bitch?’
‘Ojal, the hijra.’
Lakshmi tried to take it all in, connect the dots. ‘How do they know you did it? And by the way, which “they” are we talking about?’
‘Inspector Gupta and his people. He’s been up my arse for quite a while. And now he’s getting …’
‘Up my arse …’
‘At least closer, and hotter on the trail.’ Anand massaged his knees as he spoke. ‘I think you’re his actual target, Auntie – if I may say so.’
Lakshmi decided it was time for another Scotch. She rose and walked to the sideboard, swirled the liquor around in the decanter for Anand to see, and poured a drink. One drink. For herself. ‘So if you’ve got the police right on your heels, why do you come to me?’
‘To share some good news, for one thing.’ She was silent. ‘You don’t want to know?’
‘Tell me anyway.’ Lakshmi circled behind Anand’s chair and started rubbing his neck and shoulders, painfully tight. He relaxed slightly.
‘Your boy – I’ve put up his photograph on some posters around the city. Missing, reward, that sort of thing. Put up on the Road, near the Red Fort, round New Delhi. Gave a cell number to call – recorded the numbers of any callers. Thought you’d be pleased.’
Anand was even stupider than she’d thought. He had waved not only one but two flags for the police to nail her now – those police, the ones she didn’t have under her thumb, in her pocket. The dauntless Gupta. She’d never met the man, but had heard of his talent for flushing out scum and cleaning up the city; most of the force was more than willing to let it choke on its own filth. Again the question arose, directed at Gupta and at Anand too: what was she going to do with him?
She patted him on the shoulder and made it clear it was time for him to leave, walking towards the golden doors. ‘You’re asking for my protection, isn’t it?’ She was smiling.
Like a little boy who has been forgiven by his mother, Anand walked slowly up to her and took her hand, kissed it. He still had on his mirrored sunglasses and she saw herself, warped in them. Two of her.
She even saw herself for the split second that her arms reached up, unleashing her dark hair like a black avalanche, the move a seductress might make before leading her lover to the bedroom. But in this case the woman – she – grabbed the peacock hairpin, omen of ill-fortune, and thrust it into Anand’s neck, the jugular spouting a bright spray of blood.
His fallen body twitched for a few seconds as the blood pooled on the stone floor. The leopard must have heard the thump, or smelled the blood, because he returned and started licking it.
In the spirit of honouring the dead, she now knew what to call him.
Chapter 21
Follow the corpses to the river. A shopkeeper had told them that as they’d entered the city. Looking, sounding, smelling like any other Indian city with its hot, polluted haze and traffic of people, cows, rickshaws, motorbikes, buses, cars, all weaving in and out of each other’s way with startling grace.
Or they could follow Sanjit Baba, the holy man they had been following east to Varanasi for the last week, on the road, part of his pilgrimage. Countless other sadhus were converging on the banks of the Ganges, colouring the stream of human, animal and vehicular traffic with their ochre turbans and robes, like mobile flames. Jeeps, vans and pick-ups laden with corpses garlanded in marigolds hooted past, the bereaved families jostling along with the departed. Eli and the girls could get lost in these hordes; no one would ever find them.
In a cotton satchel Eli carried the tiny sandalwood box with Ojal’s ashes, to scatter on the river, the most sacred river in India. His mother had told him about this place, but they hadn’t made it here. Now, more than ever, he wished she were here to guide him in the face of death.
We live to die, Sanjit Baba kept saying. Fine for him, a walking skeleton with rotten teeth and little need to eat or drink. His tin begging cup bounced on his string belt as he walked, tapping his stick like a blind man and shouldering his little bundle of worldly goods quite contentedly. They had found that if they kept close to him on the road, people would dole out food to them as well, looking at him, Eli, quizzically but giving alms all the same. He was no longer the blonde American; last time he saw himself in a window he barely recognised himself. Stringy, unwashed dyed-black hair, a grimy face and even grimier clothes, stained with sweat. At least they had shoes now; his were an ill-fitting, smelly pair of Adidas. But they had little money left, even after hitching and then walking most of the way. They would have to stay in Varanasi for a while, and earn money to move on.
‘Here is not so far from Nepal,’ Sanjit Baba had said after they’d told him where they were going. ‘Less than a week’s walk. But then there is the border.’
First there was Varanasi, requiring serious navigation.
Eli watched the sadhu walk with great patience, and Sanjana and the younger girls, though exhausted, following Sanjit Baba devotedly. He felt relieved to see them following someone else, relieved that he had someone else to follow, if only briefly. They would have to leave Sanjit Baba and head north, crossing the border with Nepal without getting caught or showing their faces to the authorities. He no longer trusted anyone in authority, he probably never had. Except his mother, once.
You could smell the river before you could see it. He’d heard about people bathing in the Ganges with buffalo corpses floating past or even bits of human offal, but the smell now, as they surged toward the river in the great flood of pilgrims, was indescribable, something coming up from inside – inside the cold, dank earth, inside the dead, inside all of them.
Behind them, on the other side of the city, the sun was setting, giving the river and its banks a pink glow. They’d come out on Assi Ghat, the southernmost ghat, along with hundreds of other pilgrims. Sanjit Baba beckoned them towards a small grove of dusty neem trees to the side of the road lined with beggars, tin plates thrust forward for donations of rice. Women and children, mostly, though there was one man with no hands and a monkey who was begging for him. Under the trees was a small temple, not much bigger than a phone booth, which women in multicoloured saris were circling. Families camped on blankets under the trees. Eli’s group had to step over them to get to a space not yet claimed.
‘It is good if you rest here,’ Sanjit Baba said, wiggling his head. ‘I will go down to the ghats.’
With the girls’ help, Eli spread the four blankets the hijras had given them in Agra, blocking out just enough space for the five of them; Sanjit Baba would return for the night. Shanti and Deevyah lay down immediately and sought sleep in each other’s arms, but Sanjana sat cross-legged, staring at him.
‘What now?’
‘You don’t want to sleep?’ He could feel drowsiness seducing him.
‘It’s too too hot. Rather we go to the river.’
‘I’m not going in.’ What a cesspool.
‘You choose.’ Sanjana was up on her feet, striding towards the water.
‘Wait! What about these?’ He held up the sandalwood box containing Ojal’s ashes.
‘I’m not doing it. Forbidden.’
‘I’ll do it then.’ He put them back in the satchel.
‘So bring them – and guard with your life.’
They walked up the ghats together, dodging various kinds of shit, starved dogs splayed out on the pavement. Above them to the left rose countless steps, some pink, some chequered, and the rim of ornate walls and towers, mostly rust-coloured with a splash of blue, that formed the perimeter of the old city. Sanjana scouted the lower steps where dozens of men and boys stood in various states of undress, some only in loincloths. Eli was amused.
‘What are you doing?’
‘What you mean?’
‘The way you’re looking at the men, the boys …’
‘I not looking at them, stupid, I looking for girls, ladies – so I can bathe there. Go now!’ She waved her hand as a farmwife waves at chickens. ‘You go with other boys and I find girls. I meet you by the trees again.’
He followed the steps down to the river, stopping a few steps from the bottom where the cement ended and the muddy riverbanks began. Boys and men squatted at the river’s edge, washing their bodies and their hair. Thin brown bodies, black hair. Pieces of cotton not much bigger than handkerchiefs hiding their privates. The boys were his age, some of them. They eyed him for a moment, but then continued washing, apparently unfazed by this dishevelled foreigner in a grubby pathan suit and tennis shoes. Carrying all that was left of a hijra in a box. About to defile their river with her ashes.
He couldn’t sit down, there was too much shit, spit and god knows what else on the steps. The heat was insistent, not suffocating but lingering, making him sweat. He felt disgusting. Down a few steps there was an abandoned bar of soap, pale green, clean and cool-looking. On impulse, Eli grabbed it and descended to the river. Removed his shoes and shirt. Covered the satchel with it. Jumped in.
When he surfaced, soap gripped tightly in one hand, he was up to his chest in the water. Soft, slow-flowing water, the colour of tea with just a bit of milk. It smelled like earth, damp earth; the air, though, increasingly smelled like smoke, and in the twilight he saw specks of ash flying past him. He scrubbed the soap all over, his face and head first, under his arms, his belly, a quick dip to his groin and out again before anything strange could swim into his trousers.
On shore he washed his shirt and rinsed it in the river. As if anything could get clean in this. He squeezed his trousers as far as he could, around the knees, rear and ankles, and counted on the presiding heat to dry them, his shirt, him. A slight breeze had come up, probably from the far side of the river, across the farmers’ fields, a strange, lunar landscape. Deserted except for the few long wooden boats going ashore.
He returned the soap to the spot where he’d found it and walked down the ghats to find Sanjana. The smoke was getting thicker now and he knew it came from the burning ghats, where they cremated the bodies. In the near-dark, you could just see the shapes of people in the river. A group of women, older ones, were arranging their saris after a bath, preening. There was still someone out in the water, rising up and down as if drowning, and he ran to the river’s edge, breathless. It was Sanjana. He was about to plunge into the water when she waved to him.
