Choice, page 19
Now, in the boat, he had a similar sensation: the constant motion of the water, and of the boat bobbing on it, had brought a different kind of dizziness, but he felt he was again close to that falling, drowning feeling. It was a sensation low down in him, somewhere in the need to tighten his sphincter muscles. He knew the name of the one other Eritrean in the dinghy – Gebreysus, an older man, with the thin body of one who could have been a guerrilla fighter, or perhaps someone who was familiar with periodic bouts of starvation. He was shouting in Arabic, to no one in particular, to hold down the legs of the boy – no more than thirteen or fourteen – who was retching into the sea, half his body out of the edge of the dinghy. Several people had observed, while the boy was being sick, that the motion of the boat was causing it, but the motor had died last night, and the boy had not taken a rest from vomiting, although by the look and sound of it, there wasn’t even the thinnest string of bile inside him to pull out. Salim now thought perhaps the boy had tried to bargain with fate, thinking, ‘I’ll settle with a stalled boat in the middle of the sea if only this agony will stop’, but fate, miserly as always, had blindly granted one thing and not the other, so now not only the boy but also everyone else on the boat with him was in peril. Salim wondered if any of the women were thinking of this unequal exchange.
But now his turn in the queue arrived; he had to go to the other end of the dinghy, grab one of the empty plastic bottles, each with its top two or three inches cut off so that it had a much bigger mouth, and use it to scoop up the sea water that had begun to enter the boat last night from a hole in the bottom. All the men, arranged in a loose line, took turns, bailing water night and day, returning to the sea what was the sea’s, until they drowned or were, somehow, saved. They had been given a pack of twenty-four two-litre bottles of drinking water by the men who had set them off to sea. The women on board barely touched it, Salim noticed, but even with rationing, they were down to eight or nine bottles now. The rest had been drunk, the empty containers put to use as a bailing implement. Salim thought of the absurdity of siphoning bottles of water into the sea . . . if the sea wanted to get in, it would; human effort was a pitiful thing. After the last ten years of trying to find a toehold somewhere, anywhere, it had come to this: drowning, any hour now, in the middle of an unknown sea. The boy was still retching. Salim, like many of them, he suspected, had silently pissed in his trousers. Earlier, a Libyan man had prevailed upon a few of the men to stand as a kind of wall in front of him as he balanced on the edge of the boat to shit into the sea. One of those men held down his legs, another pulled the Libyan’s hands towards him, so that he didn’t topple over. Even in the situation they were in, a roll of disgusted merriment went up. Perhaps people liked to laugh when faced with being extinguished. There was a brief stench, then nothing.
Salim bailed water and was reminded, yet again, of the trick Medhanie had used to get out of combat: shooting himself in the hand. The trick was to position a water bottle between the gun and his hand so that the burn marks from a close-up self-inflicted wound, so easily identifiable, could not be detected. Medhanie had asked Salim to follow him, but his nerves had failed him. Now, faced with the open sea and a boat letting in water, Salim thought that hope was the thing that caused all the undoing. What hope of discharge from the army had made him avoid putting himself through a little bit of pain only to be ultimately confronted by this?
She knows how the conversation is going to go even before she has picked up the phone, when the only information she has is his name showing up on her screen. Her chest feels, oddly, both constricted and expanding.
‘Hi,’ she says.
‘Hi,’ Rohan says, and adds, ‘What news?’, as if this were any old inconsequential conversation, as if she were still the old she.
‘Not much. Still recovering from surgery.’
‘Surgery? What surgery? My god, are you all right?’ That old Rohan again.
‘Nothing serious. I donated one of my kidneys. It’s a routine surgery. You know, you need, one needs, I mean, only one. Did you know that?’
‘I think I knew that.’ Emily can hear him trying to recover. ‘Is that why you went AWOL?’
No, he isn’t going to ask. She debates whether to tell him, but in the time that she takes to consider it, a quantum segment of a second, it’s as if her head has become clear glass and he, even separated by miles, can see her thoughts inside it moving like a line of insects, for he asks, ‘So you donated it through the organ donation scheme, you know the one I mean, the NHS one, wait, is there an NHS one, or to anyone in particular?’ Then carries on innocently, ‘Like responding to an ad or, or I don’t know how these things happen, did someone contact you or what?’
Emily interrupts him in his floundering. She understands his polite emphasis on the trivial, or trivial to him since he thinks he has more pressing, more awkward business to get over with on this call, and this chit-chat – in another person, she would have called it nervousness – buys them both time. She says, ‘No, I donated to someone particular.’
‘Oh. Someone you know or “particular” meaning not to a kidney bank? Are there kidney banks?’
‘I donated to Karim, Salim’s elder brother.’
‘Who is Karim? Who is Salim?’
She takes a deep breath. ‘Salim is . . . is the guy who was, who is, was the guy driving the car that night.’
‘Which night?’ And then it coheres into meaning for him. Instead of the Rohan-like tumble-and-cascade of words and swearing expressing surprise, even shock, there is an odd, reticent formality to his tone when he says, ‘I see. That night.’ Then silence falls and Emily again has the image – wrong, she knows – of it filling the line, traversing the geographical, physical distance between Homerton and Pimlico. Who will blink first?
‘Do you’ – pause – ‘know him’ – pause – ‘well now?’ he asks, his voice controlled to the extreme.
‘No, I don’t. Not at all, in fact. But there are many people in that family, all dependent on Karim, on the elder brother’s income, I mean, and he is . . . was out of action for three to four days a week for dialysis. And Salim doesn’t have any papers, you know, he’s illegal, so it’s difficult for him to get a job to help out, I mean, be another earning member, if you see what I mean –’
‘I do see what you mean.’ His words are a switchblade. ‘So, you’ve made friends with him in the last however many months.’
‘I wouldn’t say friends, exactly . . .’
‘Are you fucking him? Is that what this is all about?’ Tonally still absolutely controlled, as if he has mentioned an empirical fact, ‘Petrarch was born in 1304 in Arezzo’, to a class of students.
‘That’s a bit below the belt.’ She feels too deflated and tired to take offence. She knows that in the past Rohan would have made a ribald joke of that idiom. She also knows that he will not do it now.
‘I’m sorry you think that. What about the boy and his dog you ran over’ – pause – ‘that night?’
She can smell his fury in the choice of pronoun, in that pause, in that ‘I’m sorry’ – using good manners as a weapon, like any well-brought-up English person. She cannot answer the question he has posed; not only is it unanswerable, but whatever she says is going to be wrong.
‘I don’t know how to answer that question,’ she says simply.
‘No, you don’t. Do you know how close I came to calling the police? Do you? But every time I was on the brink of calling them, I thought of Forster’s trade-off between friend and country and decided in your favour. I feel soiled by my choice now. But we’re not here to talk about that, in any case. I’m sorry I brought it up.’ Pause. ‘I read the pages you sent me. I was going to ask why you decided to tell this particular story, I mean, what was the compulsion behind it, but I think I know the answer now.’
She doesn’t feel the usual dread one feels when a reader is about to give comments on your work; and not just any reader, but a successful writer to boot. Maybe it’s a defence mechanism, maybe a deferred reaction to his earlier animus, controlled no sooner than it had begun or transmuted, by a sheer act of will, to something else, but she feels unreceptive, hidden tight in an armour of indifference.
‘You haven’t changed his name. Are you going to write it as fiction?’ Rohan asks.
‘Yes. Yes, I think I am,’ she forces herself to respond.
‘All right. I guess you’ve already thought about how to give him a back story – I mean, where he is, what his life is, and the world he inhabits, before the event that sparks off everything begins. I mean the illegal conscription that stretches on and on and eats his life. Because these few pages I have are only part of the story.’
‘Yes, yes, that’s right. We talked about this, remember?’
‘I do, yes, but I did not know then whose story you were writing. You asked about it in very general terms. So, in chronological order: his past in Eritrea, then the years in the army, followed by being trafficked, et cetera, until he arrives as a stowaway in England. What happens from that point onward?’
‘I . . . I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far. Is it necessary to know it from the very outset?’
‘No, not necessary, but maybe useful. Or desirable. And you want to write the whole thing from his point of view?’
She suddenly understands that he is hedging, buying time, trying to find a way to pull on his gloves before he punches: it is clear that he didn’t like the fifty-odd pages she sent him and is now leading up to the coup de grâce via this mealymouthed sub-prac-crit comments.
‘You can be brutal, you know,’ she says. ‘I can take it.’
There’s a very long silence before he speaks. When he does, what he says takes her by surprise; this was not the criticism she was expecting.
‘Well, my first reaction,’ he says, ‘was, is: this is not your story to write.’
Something in her wakes up, something that could not be roused when he had asked about the boy and the dog. She says, ‘No. No, it’s mine. It’s my story too.’
III
Data, n., pl. of datum, that which is given.
The truth is always concrete.
– V.I. Lenin (ish)
I
She is to arrive in a tempo on an early afternoon in spring, when the weather has already turned too hot, but it is still a good while from the sowing of aus paddy. Mira and Sahadeb have been sitting since dawn in a patch of shade that keeps moving with the sun – they know she is going to come in a tempo today, and they are more curious about the tempo because they have never seen a motor car in their short lives. There are no roads in Nonapani. There are no roads anywhere near Nonapani, you’d have to go nearly twenty miles east, near the border village of Dhopabari, to see a tar-and-crushed-stone-chips road. How the tempo is going to come to the children’s hut is a big question, but it doesn’t occur to them. It evidently doesn’t cross their mother Sabita’s mind either, for she comes out of the hut frequently and, under the guise of chivvying the children, lingers outside on each occasion and looks into the distance, the way she does when she is expecting the children’s father to return. In a way, she is looking for him, for he too is expected to arrive in the tempo. That’s what he had said when he had left yesterday: ‘We will return riding in a motor car, a big one, maybe a tempo, or even lorry, because a motor car would be too small.’ He knows all these things because he works in cities and towns. He is gone for months and months, then comes back for a few days, occasionally for a few weeks, when he is in between jobs, then ups and leaves again. The children call him Baba, of course, and are happy when he arrives, largely because of the presents he brings – lawjens wrapped in shiny cellophane or plastic; little painted tin boxes that once must have held something, they do not know what; shirts and short pants for Sahadeb, frocks for Mira, clothes for both children too loose and big on them (‘You’ll grow into them,’ he would say, ‘better to have something ready for the future than clothes you no longer fit into and will have to discard in a few months; what a waste of money’); plastic balls, and plastic dolls with pale pink-orange skin and red-painted lips; once even a wind-up tin rooster that stopped working after one day. These things brought excitement and novelty to the children’s unvarying days, but they were formal and aloof with their father, shy, as they would be with a distant relative or a stranger. Their mother would have to say to them sometimes, ‘Go, sit with your baba’, or ‘Go talk to Baba, he’s here for only a few days, you won’t see him for a long time after he leaves.’ Mira and Sahadeb would try to get out of these directives, but when they couldn’t, a sense of stilted dutifulness marked their actions, not easy affection.
Now they await Baba’s arrival, but only as an effect: he will be arriving in the tempo with the gift that is meant for the whole family, but it is really the sighting of a motor car that the children are waiting for. They move to the outskirts of their hamlet. ‘Outskirts’ makes it sound grand; in reality it’s only four dispersed huts away. From this point there are only flat fields and earth, nothing to obstruct their view. It is well after the sun has begun its climb down from the highest point in the sky that the children spy movement on the horizon. Mira starts to count, ‘One, two, three, four’, leaving out the cow in the midst of the advancing silhouetted figures. There is no tempo. Sahadeb runs home. ‘They are coming, they are coming,’ he announces to his mother, spinning around, ‘but they are walking, there’s no motor car.’
‘You silly boy, how can they come in a motor car? There are no roads here.’
II
She is the colour of milk, except around her budding horns where the skin looks as if someone has tried to rub off a spill of rust. She still wears the vermillion smear that Sabita had put on the creature’s forehead when she had arrived and the now-withering orange marigold garland around her neck. She has enormous eyes that don’t seem to be looking at anything in particular yet give the impression that she has seen and absorbed and understood everything around her, as if rapidly shifting and darting vision, the very notion of alertness, is a sign of lower creatures.
‘What beautiful, deep eyes,’ Sabita had said on the first day, ‘just like the sea.’
‘When have you ever seen the sea?’ her husband, Pulak, had said.
‘Oi aar ki, just saying, it’s what people say.’
The children are mesmerized by the creature. They stand outside in their compacted earth yard and stare at her all day. Sabita says, ‘If you look at her for so long, she’ll put you under her spell and you’ll become cows too.’ Even this cannot deter them. Truth be told, they are all, including Sabita and Pulak, a little afraid of the cow: What if she charges at them? What if she kicks? Tries to gore them with her horns, small as they are? Stories of recalcitrant cows are all too common, although how they have come by these tales no one can be sure, since none of them has ever come in contact with a cow. Maybe it’s a rural myth, cows and their dangerous horns and their propensity to kick.
When they were naming her, Sahadeb had piped up, ‘Bilu! Mahadeb!’, but he had been vetoed by everyone – ‘These are all boys’ names,’ Mira had pointed out, ‘and this cow is a girl.’ So they had ultimately settled on Gauri.
And here Gauri is, placid as a pond’s surface, lying on the earth, near the post to which she is tethered, looking at nothing, her mouth churning away, foam spilling out of it.
‘It’s as if she’s eaten soap,’ Sahadeb observes.
‘No, no, silly,’ Mira says, ‘don’t you remember, the people who gave us the cow said that they do this? They eat hay or grass then spend all day chewing it.’
A shed has been built for her: four bamboo posts supporting a straw roof. It won’t keep her safe from the rains in the monsoon, but it can provide a little bit of shade during the summer. Straw has been spread on one corner of the earth to serve as a bed, but Gauri has already eaten most of it. They don’t have any cloth to spare to bundle up and make it a nominal bed. In fact, there is no bed for anyone: when Pulak comes back from his construction work in far-flung towns, he gets the old, oily, filthy quilt to spread on the earth floor of the hut under him. The rest all sleep on madur that are coming apart. When the people who had decided they should be given a cow had totted up their belongings, the very short list had included that quilt, a low wooden stool, an iron sharanshi that was loose at the fulcrum, one dented haandi, a bonti whose blade, it felt to Sabita, had to be forever sharpened. The list-makers had not considered the family’s very few clothes, their floor mats, the broom, and a few other utensils and odds and ends worthy of inclusion under ‘assets’, not even the red plastic comb so beloved of Mira. When Sabita had said, ‘How can Gauri lie on the bare earth? I’ll make her a bed with straw,’ Pulak had responded with derision, ‘Let be, no need for a bed for Gauri. No skin on your bum, yet your name is Hare Krishna! She’s a cow, they don’t have beds in the fields and in the open, do they?’ The shed is behind their hut, not strictly on land that belongs to them, but in these distant outskirts of Nonapani, it’s not as if anyone is going to check. There are a couple of fallow fields behind the shed, then a copse. After that, the paddies begin – irregular parcels of land, some as small as ten steps by ten steps, some larger. During planting season, Sabita works on some of these plots, standing calf-deep in flooded paddies, transplanting seedlings all day long. If Pulak is around during harvest time, he will also work there for a day or two when more hired hands are needed. For most of the year, Sabita works as a domestic help – cleaning, doing laundry, cooking, grinding spices, fetching water, and other odds and ends – in three of the bigger houses in Majharsharif, the town nearest to Nonapani, a two-hour walk away. She leaves the hut at six in the morning every day and returns around six in the evening. Sometimes, in the blood-drying heat of the summer months, she feels like she is not going to make it back home, or she is, but while vomiting blood, and she’ll expire before one of her children can give her some water to drink. In the monsoon, the opposite problem: there are days when she cannot leave home because the sky is sending down sheets and sheets of water. The force of the water feels like it can perforate holes in your head. It is in the monsoon that she is sometimes fired from one or two of her jobs because of absenteeism; not persistent absenteeism, of course, but not being able to show up a couple of times a week for a month, or on three consecutive days, is enough. Then, in the rotting heat after the monsoons have passed, she has to walk around Majharsharif looking for other houses that’ll take her, because being without her wages, albeit meagre, is unthinkable, especially when the timing of the money that Pulak sends home is so random, so unreliable – three hundred rupees one month, then nothing for another four or five or six.
