Another Country (17 page)

Chapter 22

‘Ah, you're here? No,' Sathya raised his eyebrows, ‘that crazy bitch was asking. Between you and me, she's a bit of a stickler for timekeeping.' He threw his head back and laughed. His voice was deep and musical, but also slightly hysterical. ‘Silly cow,' he said. ‘Don't worry about her. I told her you were in the bathroom. Cigarette? I'm going to the gulag for one.'

Leela grinned. ‘Maybe a bit early for me. Give me half an hour.'

‘Not a problem. If that cretin comes with the coffee, could you grab me one? Assuming he's bothered to put any coffee in it today.'

Leela nodded. She hung her bag on her chair and turned on her computer. The processor began to whirr and gurgle; the screen thrummed into life.

Tipu Sultan, the tea boy, came in. He was shortly followed by Joan, the third person who sat in the office, which was a room in the solid mock-Gothic building.

‘Ah! Leela!' said Joan. ‘I was looking for you. Sathya said you'd –' The pause was dramatic and indicated doubt.

‘Yes,' said Leela. She picked up papers from her desk, and moved them in front of her. They included the ten grant applications remaining from yesterday, which had to be logged in the new database, and some post addressed to her predecessor, who'd gone to England to work in an auction house. Every time Leela saw her name, Radha Gupta, on an envelope, she felt a frisson of connection, and nostalgic envy.

‘Right, well, there are a lot of things piling up. I think perhaps you and I should have a meeting,' Joan said.

She had already done this three times in the fortnight Leela had been there. Each time she made Leela sit on a rickety, uncomfortable stool near her desk. Joan had the air conditioner near her turned up high. Leela sympathised in principle, but the cold made her soporific. ‘Hot flushes. Think about it, explains why she's so fucking crazy,' Sathya had said over a shared Gold Flake in the gulag a couple of days earlier.

‘Could I clear my pending workload first?' Leela asked. ‘I don't want to let things pile up. The database records the difference between the date we receive an application and when we log it in the system.'

Joan's face darkened. She went to her desk and began to type. She hated and feared the database; Leela had been hired partly in order to keep its malevolence under control.

‘Chai, kaapi?' said Tipu Sultan patiently. His name was not Tipu Sultan but Chhotu. It can't have been Chhotu either, but that is what everyone other than Sathya called him. Sathya, in his friendly, offensive way, had decided the boy, an ageing perpetual adolescent, looked like Tipu Sultan because of his twirly moustache. He could be jocularly rude to the tea boy but also, Leela found out much later, paid his fees to go to an evening class and get a diploma in basic computer studies, one of the many kindnesses he concealed from general view.

‘Coffee, do, strong,' Leela said. He held out the wire tray; she chose two darker looking glasses. When Sathya returned he would take out the tin of Nescafé from his desk, and offer Leela a supplementary spoon, murmuring, ‘Bilge … look at us, like addicts.'

The ancient standing fan turned her way. A strong breath hit her shoulders and neck, and blew her hair aside. She sighed, enjoying it, hung onto her papers. When it had passed she looked down again.

Application for grant. Name of body making application: Nritya Dance Trust. Date of application: 2nd February 2004.

She heard Sathya exhale. In the background, Joan was quarrelling on the telephone.

Leela opened a new record in the database. She hated its interface, ugly and grey, and the clunky buttons on screen. She continually had to pay attention to it, which she disliked, yet there was no way of shining at her work.

A bird sang outside; a crow cawed. At twelve, she would be starving. Tipu Sultan would come around again, with tea. She'd drink it, and turn her stomach.

At one thirty, Joan went to the canteen to meet a friend. Leela had tried but failed to imagine her having actual conversation with anyone. Perhaps instead she and her friend simply complained at each other.

Sathya would sigh, and get out his paper and the tiffin his mother sent for him. He was in his forties, grizzled and plump, and lived with his parents. They periodically tried, he said, to marry him off. ‘Who the hell would want to marry me?' he enquired of Leela, who said, ‘Er, there must be people …'

‘I'm happy,' said Sathya. ‘I have companionship, I have my interests.' Leela envied him.

She picked up her bag when Joan had left for lunch. ‘Go,' Sathya said with a wink. He said he told Joan, whenever she returned, that Leela had just left. But Leela was often back within half an hour, for she had little purpose. She began by hurrying down the stairs, with their red-earth spittle stains and stencilled notices (Do Not Spit), and emerged below into the short lane where yellow school buses were parked.

Bougainvillea, hot pink and orange, hung over the school walls. Expensive cars and their drivers waited; some drivers held tiffins. The lane was dusty and hot. She hurried through the waiting people.

Sometimes, she wandered into the Khadi Bhavan. It remained a temple to the Gandhian nation that seemed never quite to have come into being. Its dark wood counters still held rolls of khadi, some fine and soft as voile; there were displays of ahimsak chappals made from the hide of cows that had died a natural death. Upstairs, the gifts: puppets from Rajasthan, bags from Gujarat, rosewood and ivory elephants, things made of sandalwood. She knew, thanks to her father, that kantha saris were beautiful, and could tell in which ones the work was good; she could admire bedspreads of kalamkari or blockprint. She moved through the sections with a borrowed expression of knowledge tinged with cynicism.

Today she stopped at a counter of wooden toys and picked up a painted cup with a handle, attached by string to a wooden ball. She and her sister had once been given a pair of these, the sort of handcrafted toys one's parents' friends thought were charming. Leela had carried hers around for a while, pretending to play with it; Neeti had broken hers at once and looked happy.

‘Where are these from?' she asked the salesman.

He eyed her. ‘Madhya Pradesh.'

‘Can I see that?' She pointed at a pink Ganpati.

He brought it down. Gingerly, she turned two of its rounded arms, one ending in a hand bearing a laddoo, the other upraised, palm flat in benediction. They moved cheerfully.

‘Here.' The salesman took the idol from her and turned the arms more vigorously. There was another pair behind them, one carrying a mace, one a snare.

‘These ones don't move?'

‘No,' he said. He gave her back the statue. The god sat on a dark pink base, where a tiny mouse was painted.

‘How much is it?'

He turned it over. ‘Hundred fifteen.'

At the hostel she removed the stapled paper bag. The pink Ganpati came out. She dusted him, put him on top of the small bookshelf, and after her bath said her prayer in front of him; he afterwards looked quite as pleased as before.

Chapter 23

Chitra and her roommate finished listening to Leela complain after dinner. She was sick of men bumping into her on purpose, or punching her in the breast when she walked home. She couldn't understand why everyone was so unfriendly. Everything was complicated. Going to the bank took ages.

‘Why did you come back? I don't understand,' Chitra said. She started to laugh; she had a big laugh.

‘I thought Bombay was some kind of lost home. I thought I'd find that missing sense of belonging here. It sounds insane,' Leela admitted. She heard herself say it and giggled; it was so boring. ‘I can't remember. But how did we get here, of all places?' All three looked at the fluorescent-lit dining hall, the formica tables, the shutter to the kitchen, which Datta, the handsome, Byronic cook, was now shutting with a great clatter. He began to wipe it energetically.

‘We should go,' Shobha said. She laughed. ‘I think he wants us to.'

‘Come to our room,' Chitra said.

Leela's heart leapt. ‘Aren't you busy?'

‘With what?'

They shared a room on the same floor as hers, larger than her room and with two single beds. ‘This is nice,' she said, wondering if she would have been able to bear sharing. Shobha was very sweet. Yet how would Leela have managed without being able to shut the door of her room, and silently rage about the world and its failure to welcome her? ‘Did you know each other before?' she asked.

‘No, we just met a few months ago,' Chitra said. ‘I've only been back a few months.'

‘Oh?'

‘You know how you get three years, then you have to move out?'

‘Yeah.'

‘But if it's been more than three years since you left you can do another term.'

‘Oh.'

‘I didn't complete my last term. It was just a few months.' Chitra looked angry now. Leela was confused. ‘I was at home for a while.'

‘Then you came back?'

‘Then I came back.'

‘And she became my roomie!' Shobha, who was smaller and thinner, came to wrap her arms around Chitra and hug her. The two of them beamed at a startled Leela. Chitra said later, resigned, and when they were alone, ‘I wanted to live in a single. I begged them. And my income was the right level. But they decided to put me with a roommate. Shobha's a sweetie, it's not that.' Her face darkened. ‘My father had just died when I came back, and I was engaged but it fell through. There were some weekends I didn't get out of bed at all. I think Pawar wanted to make sure I wasn't alone.'

Shobha brought out some chocolate. They pressed it on Leela, who didn't want to cut into the precious supply.

‘Go on,' said Chitra. ‘You don't have to worry about your weight.'

‘I'm trying to put on weight,' said Shobha.

Leela was amused. ‘Well, I think I have been putting on weight. I keep buying myself little bags of Gems after dinner. I don't even know why.'

‘You're lonely,' said Chitra.

Leela was embarrassed. ‘Maybe.'

‘What do you do, Leela?' Shobha asked.

Leela told them how she'd applied for jobs, and put up her CV on a website for the non-profit sector. ‘It's terribly paid, it's for the Sohrab Trust.'

‘I've heard of them, of course.'

‘I look after the grant applications, write some stuff for the website, that sort of thing.'

Shobha worked in a corporate law firm. ‘The hours are crazy,' she said.

‘She's out of hostel at seven sometimes,' Chitra said. ‘Not back till after ten.'

They carried on talking, about their lives and families, making jokes. Leela sat straight-backed on Shobha's bed and waited for the inevitable slackening of conversation.

‘I'm exhausted,' Chitra said.

‘It might be bedtime,' Shobha said. She smiled at Leela.

‘Of course. Good night!' She hurried to the door. In the corridor, and in her room, checking the time – a quarter past ten – she was warm with embarrassment. She should have left earlier; no wonder she wasn't making friends.

She took to going home every other weekend. She left the hostel when it was just becoming light, and took the bus on empty roads to the station. In the ladies compartment, she'd watch the scenery for ten minutes as they rolled out of the city, slum upon well-established slum. Then she'd fall into a deep swoon, neck jolting this way and that. Near Pune, she'd reawaken, often as the train passed Shivajinagar. She'd rub her eyes and roll her neck as they pulled into the city.

For a while those trips kept her sane amid her anxiety about conforming to a world whose rules she didn't understand, either because there weren't any, or because they were too multi-layered, a cascading interdependent set of priorities.

Her parents were misfits too, she recalled. In their home, faced with her mother's angst about the availability of broccoli, or sprouts that could be trusted (‘but think of the water they must've used'), or tofu, or wheat-free biscuits, and her father's gently irrelevant conversation, and both of their lack of engagement with the world around them – her father would drift over to turn on the World Service television channel, rather than watch the news on a local channel – she could bask in their collective strangeness, their being, as a family, out of joint with the times.

She'd arrive, blasted with tiredness, eyes rubbed with sleep, in the morning, say hello to her parents and the bai and the cook and sit in the living room talking to her father or alone with the papers till the cook finished in a flurry of cleaning the kitchen and putting saucepans away and she and the bai smiled and left together.

There would be relative silence, and peace. They'd have lunch, and elliptically discuss their states of mind, though never in the thorough way she'd observed in other people's families: how have you been, or how did this or that go? When she was younger, she had resented the apparent lack of interest. She would go home then and try to follow her mother around, telling her what had happened in college and the events of her and her friends' lives. Mrs Ghosh would listen for a while but respond by asking not ‘How did you feel?' or ‘What happened then?' but, ‘Have you thought about an internship, darling?' or ‘What are your plans for when you graduate?' Her father, when Leela directed her conversation at him, would also listen for a while then, so mildly that it was hard to be openly angry about it, his hand would find itself reaching for a magazine or the book in which he was presently immersed. His face, if Leela complained, was a mix of sympathy (ostensibly for her but really, she knew, for himself) and wheedling apology. ‘You're not listening, Baba!' she'd point out, and he, still clutching the book or magazine, would say plaintively, ‘But Leela, I've been listening to you for
twenty minutes
now.'

Some months after the first monsoon, when she was beginning to accept her life, and looked less than once a week at the unused portion of her return air ticket, there was a week when she lost her appetite. She felt feverish, bright with energy, and raced around at work. Every time she sat down to eat, a wave of nausea rose in her.

‘I feel sick,' she confessed to Sathya when they went out for a dosa, as they now did every few weeks. ‘Some sort of bug.'

He looked at her attentively. ‘Pull your lower eyelid down. Look up. Hmm. How's your pee?'

‘What?'

‘Is it brown?'

‘No!'

He shook his head. ‘Better go see a doctor first thing.'

She went to the sardonic, expensive GP everyone in the hostel saw. ‘Get a urine test if you want,' he said, ‘but I'm telling you it's jaundice.'

The next day, with the test results, she called Sathya. ‘Poor bastard,' he said. ‘Better call Joan.'

Leela called Joan. ‘Oh
no
,' said Joan.

‘Four to six weeks,' said Leela, not without satisfaction.