Garden of Dreams, page 23
All of them – the Singhs, the children, the ‘inspector’, Gupta himself – were looking at the factory when it exploded into flames, red-orange demons licking out the windows, black smoke curling into the sky. The children were silent en masse for a few seconds. Then they burst into wild applause, clapping and cheering as though their little hearts would pop. Kids jumping, twirling, hugging each other, doing somersaults. Even the little boy who’d been crying had a smile on his face.
The Singhs, still standing with the ‘inspector’ and facing the inferno, were indescribable. Gobsmacked. That was a good one, Gupta thought, gobsmacked. Shock and awe. The mission had been a risky one, but so brilliant! Now it had to be completed with equal finesse – and speed. Gupta stepped out of the car and, on cue, the ‘firemen’ pulled guns on the Singhs, who looked at each other helplessly, before they turned their stares at him, fast approaching. When the brothers raised their hands in the air in defeat, the young mob went wild. As he navigated through the children to get in the gate, they looked at him adoringly (he was sure it was adoration); some even grabbed his arm and one cheeky bugger slapped him on the butt.
‘Fast acting by the fire department, don’t you think?’ he smiled as he clamped the cuffs on one Singh then the other. Their eyes looked like deep pools of poison, but they were harmless now. He turned around and saw it all – the flaming factory, the captured brothers, the satisfied ‘actors’, even the ancient elevator operator, who’d slipped out unnoticed. The ecstatic children, now free. Though heavens knew what he was going to do with them all.
It gave him great pleasure to state the obvious: ‘Looks like your fire drill was long overdue.’
Chapter 32
When she heard the news about the Singhs, Lakshmi was painting her toenails purple. Sri knocked on her door and came in with the bulletin, dour-faced, severe. Police got them, Auntie-ji. Factory went up in flames. Children free.
‘And what bloody police are we talking about?’ she asked, blotting a stray blob of polish from her big toe. ‘Don’t tell me. It was that chut Gupta, wasn’t it?’
‘Apparently so, Auntie-ji.’ Sri stood at attention like a butler. Sleek and silent, unlike the gum-chewing buffoon she’d had before. Poor Anand.
‘It’s not working, Sri,’ she said, wiggling her painted toes on both feet, admiring them. ‘Gupta’s too clever. And doesn’t seem to mind losing a few men here and there.’
‘You’re right, Auntie-ji.’
‘Of course Auntie-ji is right,’ she said, rising and swooping over to the window in her black dressing gown. It was early morning and the street had yet to get busy, just a few cycle rickshaws on the move. ‘But also bloody stupid to have ever trusted that pair of morons. Now they’re in jail and you can count on me not to bail them out. And why not?’
Sri looked like a sad puppy, not knowing what it had done wrong.
‘They’ve bloody well lost the boy, that’s why. I’m sure of it. They would have brought him here by now if they still had him. Bloody buggers.’
‘Very sad, Auntie-ji.’ Obsequious, annoying.
‘You can go now, Sri —’
‘But your breakfast, madam …?’
‘I’m not hungry.’ She felt slightly nauseous, in fact. ‘You can bring some chai only.’
He left and closed her door politely, as though not wanting to wake the rest of the house. Pointless, as the girls were all sleeping soundly after a night’s work or drugged into a coma. She returned to the sofa – she’d chosen a pure white linen this time – and settled into its plump cushions with the latest copy of Filmfare.
There she was again, a double spread on pages five and six, that bitch moving on to Auntie’s turf. Looking like a glamour queen in a slinky satin dress, elevated on some little makeshift stage among a crowd of beggars on the Varanasi ghats; you could see the Ganga in the background. Screen Queen Bianca Adored by the Poor read the headline.
Enough, she’d had enough. Totally fed up with all the useless people in the world, people who thought they were something and were nothing. People you thought you could rely on, repeatedly disappointing. Without looking in the mirror – her make-up had been applied, first thing – she threw on one of her more innocuous saris, beige printed with blue peacocks, and wrapped the scarf around her head and face like a terrorist.
Praise the gods the rains had finally stopped. They’d come in torrents, as they always did, flushing out all the junk from the roadside gutters. But that was at least a week ago, and now the street was full of trash again, plastic soft drink bottles, little cardboard plates, empty Gold Flake packs. Dodging the trash and the swelling crowd of men, avoiding the eyes of workers staring out from the toilet and machine shops, she walked down the Road towards the Ajmeri Gate and the old city, headed for her favourite temple. She needed some divine intervention.
The square in front of the temple, less than a kilometre off G.B., was alive with ‘acts’ – that’s how she thought of them, like a circus. Monkeys were everywhere, in the background, charging down from trees, fences and rooftops to steal guavas or mangoes from the fruit carts. There were the henna women, sitting with their open books full of swirly designs to be painted on hands and feet for a special occasion. Beyond them, the little stalls of religious paraphernalia – thousands of tiny bronze or wooden statues of Ganesh, prayer beads, small framed postcards of the gods and goddesses. Of course Lakshmi was the most popular, showering gold from her palms. There were several astrologers, leaning across tables, telling their customers wondrous or terrible portents. If one displeased you, you chose another.
There was one she hadn’t tried yet, a large man in a white pathan suit, looking as if he needed a chef’s hat to complete the outfit. He was busy with two men, middle-aged, perhaps brothers, looking at him with great alarm from their side of the table. One of the customers stood up suddenly, slammed his fist on the table and stormed off. The one remaining handed over some rupees and followed him.
She sat down in one of the vacated chairs, wobbly on the rough pavement. Spread her ringed fingers on the table and stared the astrologer in the eye. ‘So what can you tell me?’ she asked.
‘You must tell me your day of birth,’ the astrologer said, looking rather like a huge vanilla cupcake. His black eyes were intense, though, as if fronting a vast store of knowledge and mysticism. He kept scrunching up his nose as though it itched.
‘Sorry, mister,’ she said, fluttering the fingers on both hands, ‘you must tell me.’
He peered at her intently, gazing into her soul or at least giving that effect. ‘Aries,’ he said finally, ‘somewhere near the beginning.’
‘Seventh of April,’ she said, gaining faith in him. The Ram. Adventurous, pioneering, quick-witted, confident. And on the downside, selfish, impulsive, quick-tempered, impatient and foolhardy. ‘What do you see?’ she asked, turning over her hands, palms up.
His huge hands supported hers from beneath; they were warm, sweaty.
‘This coming-up year will be very good for you,’ he began. ‘You will be travelling north, from the known to the unknown, for unforeseen purposes which only you will know. But I can tell you they have to do with children. I cannot see exactly what you will be doing with these children, but they will bring you much prosperity and will think of you as one of their own family.
‘Your health will be greatly enhanced, and any lingering maladies will be flying out the window.’ He smiled at the image, then studied her palms again. ‘You will get back something you have lost …’
‘What?’
‘This I cannot say, but you will get it back. And you will find a new partner in life, in work …’
‘And love?’ She couldn’t believe she was asking this.
‘No, not love. I am sorry. Not love.’
Leave it. ‘That’s it?’
‘Nearly – but here I see an interruption,’ the astrologer said, holding up her left palm and tracing a short line crossing a longer one. ‘It’s not sickness, it’s – I think what it is, is a person.’
‘What kind of person?’ Her mind was racing.
‘I cannot say. A person who will interrupt you in some way. I can’t see further.’
The astrologer leaned back in his chair, away from the table, and folded his arms over his belly. A sign that the session was over. She reached inside her bra and pulled out a wad of rupees, pushing them towards him.
‘Enough?’ she said as she stood and pushed her chair forward. Presumably. He was grinning like a madman, and still counting.
She decided to try a different temple. For a change. For luck. Just a kilometre away, the Hanuman Mandir was one of the city’s biggest temples and most popular. Sort of a tourist trap and yes, she conceded, it looked a bit like Disneyland with the giant orange monkey god rearing up in the middle of downtown traffic. But Hanuman was the god of strength and perseverance, and she needed his blessing.
Leaving her gold slippers outside with the dozens of other shoes, she walked in through the street-level entrance carved like his screaming, sharp-toothed mouth; his tongue was the walkway. He had another mouth at the top of the fifty-foot statue towering overhead, as well as all the mouths on the Hanumans inside.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t so crowded, just little clumps of people drifting around the course of puja niches, draped with orange, pink and white marigold chains, clanging the heavy brass bells to alert the gods to their presence. She inhaled the air thick with incense, jasmine and sandalwood, and rang the nearest bell, sending its music forth into the dank recesses of the temple.
Passing the silver cobras and black lingams, she found his most holy image, the half-hidden monkey face with one eye protruding, and bought a candle, a marigold chain and a few chapattis to offer him. People around her, peasants as well as those in Western dress, chanted the hymn to Hanuman. From a corner came the rhythmic taps of a tabla and the crystal ching-chings of tiny cymbals.
She started chanting, not the same hymn but a prayer of her own, to Hanuman, and to herself:
Oh, most courageous protector, venerable Hanuman, smile on your poor servant Lakshmi and help her in what must come to pass, the bringing down of all the other madams and malkins in Delhi, or their submission; the annihilation of other traffickers, except those in Auntie-ji’s employ; the miraculous appearance of a new first-class partner for Auntie (and maybe not only for business); the sucking-in of V.J. Gupta, that diabolical policeman who will onedayIvow work with me; and the return to me of what is rightfully mine, as you know most omniscient Hanuman, the boy named Eli.
She touched the red tika on the monkey’s stone face, then her own, linking them.
One couldn’t leave everything to fate – one had to ask favours from the gods. Very specific favours. Leaving everything to fate was just letting oneself off the hook. So for the rest of that afternoon, lying on the white sofa staring at the ceiling, she continued praying to Hanuman, throwing in a few prayers to Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, and continued her scheming.
She could handle Gupta; she would drag him into collusion with her to bring down the other rings in the city. But, now that the Singhs were gone, she needed to find a new partner in the north, in Kathmandu, the ‘city of sin’. It wouldn’t be hard. She’d heard of a gangster now ruling Thamel, the tourist area, with his hand in all the dance halls there, raking in protection money, an ongoing source of new girls. He was her man. The man to find the boy again, too, because she had no doubt that was where he was now. Or would soon be.
The next morning, before the dealers had opened their shops, just as the night was vanishing, she stood at the window, trying to work out due south. Invoking a charm in case the new partner – and Hanuman – didn’t deliver.
Early in the morning, the totka prescribed, the moment you get up, stand facing southwards and call thirty-one times the name of the kidnapped person. There will be chances of his or her returning back soon. The person will come back to you.
Eli, she cried once, and then thirty more times, louder and louder.
Chapter 33
Sanjana lived on the far side of the jungle, that’s what she told him. Somewhere to the north of Chitwan, in a village whose name he couldn’t pronounce. Now here they were, on the edge of this vast overgreen, overgrown tangle of trees and vines and bush where snakes and tigers and thousands of other creatures awaited them. Which they had to get across, or around. They’d skirt the jungle perimeter, but sometimes would have to enter its lush shadows to disappear from view – of the local villagers, and anyone coming after them.
The bus from the border had left them in the brassy light of midday at the foot of the Churia Hills, Chitwan’s southern boundary. There was a crossroads and a village of thatched ochre houses to one side, emerald fields in the other directions. The monsoons had passed; it was clearly harvest-time. Villagers, mainly middle-aged women and men in traditional dress – trousers or skirts, full shirts and scarves – stooped to pluck the rice stalks and throw them into piles on the ground. From the distance came a line of girls dressed in jewel colours, balancing on their backs long stalks of elephant grass. No one seemed to notice their little gang appearing out of nowhere.
‘Who are these people?’ Eli stared at the workers bent in the fields, at the girls coming closer like a herd of strange animals with long, sharp horns, at a pair of small boys in a red hammock strung from the roof of the house nearest them.
‘Tharu people,’ Sanjana said. ‘Not my Tharu people, forest people.’
‘Are they friendly?’ As foreign to Shanti as to him.
‘They look friendly,’ Deevyah said.
‘Would they give us food?’ His stomach was clenching; his last real meal had been a few days ago, only stolen apples, chai and a few dry biscuits since then.
‘We can ask,’ Shanti said hopefully.
Looking at her now, really seeing her, he was shocked at how thin she was – horribly gaunt, and dirty. Deevyah, the same: she’d shed most of her curves, and her hair hung in limp strings. Both had lost their scarves and wore only their sari tops and skirts, with battered sneakers, too big. Like the red high-tops he’d stolen outside a temple just before they’d left Sunauli.
‘Why not wait till next village?’ Sanjana suggested. She was hungry, too, he knew it, but her desperation to get home overrode the hunger pangs. Shanti and Deevyah, too, evidently; they came from a village not far from Sanjana’s. Three days’ walk, she’d told him, and I be there.
Of course he had an idea of a jungle – from Tarzan and The Jungle Book – but he’d never been in one before. His mother had read those stories to him over and over when he was small, curled in the crook of her arm and hiding his face in her breasts when they turned the page to one of the villains. Especially, in Kipling’s tales, Shere Khan, the evil tiger, and Kaa, the giant python. In Tarzan the wicked ones were human – the hunters who destroyed the apes.
Yet as they walked through the moist, warm, shockingly green bush, under the canopies of towering sal trees, escorted by the shrieks and cries of rhesus monkeys who periodically swung into view, a growing alarm made him tingle all over. It was the invisible he feared most – a hidden rhino, or snake, or some sort of wild cat, God forbid a tiger.
‘They all asleep now,’ Sanjana said, reading his mind, bashing ahead with a big stick and holding the lead with Shanti and Deevyah. ‘All off in the bushes.’
But she was wrong. Ahead in a small clearing where the light filtered through like a spotlight was an old stump, and coiled around its top was Kaa himself – a huge black and bronze snake that could eat a person whole. The younger girls held back but Sanjana walked towards the snake like an old friend, on tiptoe. Then she touched it, again and again, until the snake awoke and quickly slithered into the rotten stump, only its tail protruding.
‘He sleep after eating,’ she said. ‘He won’t eat you now.’
She yanked his arm playfully, pulling him in another direction. ‘If we see more animal,’ she added, ‘climb tree.’
Yes. Of course. That’s what they did in those old jungle movies where people ended up in a pot.
He put his trust in Sanjana, not in any God or gods; she was what he could see. As they walked on silently, pushing giant leaves and scratchy brush aside, he followed her, moving with a cat’s grace through the undergrowth, swinging her stick in a rhythm that kept time, kept them together. It was sticky, not too hot but humid enough to make sweat slip down his body; he was sure there were insects crawling all over him. He checked down his trousers and up his sleeves. There weren’t, just an occasional mosquito humming past, or a little cloud of midges materialising, then vanishing. The girls didn’t seem to be sweating at all.
Just before dusk they saw a grey mass looming up ahead. ‘Rhino!’ Sanjana whispered, waving them to stop. He looked at the nearest tree, a sal rising up to nearly thirty metres. No low branches.
Like an armoured car in low gear, the rhino shifted forward slowly, browsing off the jungle floor. He was different from the African ones – only one horn, shorter, and with distinctive plates, like a triceratops. Prehistoric. This beast barely seemed to notice them, as if they were all part of the jungle. They kept their distance, walking a wide arc around him and, at Sanjana’s command, back towards the jungle rim. As Eli passed the beast he glanced warily at him, meeting his beady eyes, like two little bullets lodged in his head. Don’t step back, Eli whispered. What rhinos did right before they charged.
The rhino let them go, and before long they emerged from the bush, arriving at the edge of a field of tall yellow grass. No village, no road, nothing else in sight, just the hills in the distance and a few tall lala palms ringing the field. The sun had just set and its purple glow hovered above the horizon. You’re not out of the woods yet – the saying floated into his head. No, but we’re out of the jungle.
