East of the Sun (27 page)

While Talika slept, the other children ran off again, laughing and trailing their colored kites behind them. Higher and higher the kites flew, shimmering and swooping. “
Kaaayyypoooche,
” the cry went up. “We’re best, we’re the best.”

Viva ran down the beach with them. There’d been days since she’d been back in Bombay when she’d positively hated it—too hot, too crowded, too smelly, too hard—but today, how
could you not love it? This beautiful beach; the sun pouring out of the sky; the madcap bravery of these children forgetting so easily that they were orphaned and poor in one of the hardest cities on earth.

A pie dog had joined them on the beach and was darting after Suday and Neeta’s kites, making them squeal and dance.

“Careful, children,” she called; rabies was always a fear with the packs of dogs that roamed the cities.

When Talika woke, her eyelashes flickered with surprise at the beach, the sky, the children playing. She fitted her hand inside Viva’s and went back to sleep again.

Viva, still holding Talika’s sticky little hand in hers, was trying to remember something. How many times had she swum at Chowpatty Beach as a child? Once, twice, half a dozen times?

Chowpatty had been a family tradition. The place they’d come to on the last day of their holidays before leaving Bombay for the convent. Days of mourning disguised as days of fun. Or maybe not.
Children,
she thought, watching Suday in the distance, totally engrossed now in skimming a stone over the waves,
are so much better at mixing pleasure with pain than adults are.
It was perfectly possible that during those days she’d leaped over the waves, too, felt nothing but joy in the shining water. Perhaps this accounted for the numbness, the blankness felt when she thought about them now. She had sealed herself off too well.

She was almost asleep when another memory darted into her mind. Her mother on this beach. She was wearing dark sunglasses; she had a scarf wrapped around her face as though she’d had all her teeth out at once. Tears were dripping down underneath her mother’s sunglasses like marrowfat peas. Mother was angry, Viva wasn’t meant to see them. Viva was angry, too; mothers shouldn’t cry like this.

Viva sat up so quickly that Talika’s eyes shot open. Yes, that
was
the last time, not the other last time she’d substituted. Josie wasn’t there. She’d gone. Daddy wasn’t there either, she was almost certain of it: just Mother and herself, sitting on their own on a beach on the edge of India, before she went back to school. And she was frightened and very, very angry, so angry that she felt like striking her mother, and that was wrong.
And if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there’d be two green bottles standing on the wall.
That song still frightened her.

When the children came running up the beach again, she was relieved to see them. Each child sat now with a kite on his or her knee. “The string represents the soul’s flight toward heaven,” Daisy had told her earlier. “The person holding the string is the Almighty.” Neeta was glaring at Suday because he was boasting he had won.

“Was it fun?” Talika asked Suday.

“
Burra
fun, Missie Queen,” said Suday, who was jealous of her lying next to Miss Wiwa.

When the bus arrived at five, nobody wanted to go home except Viva, who was tired now and hoped to do some writing that night. A group of fishermen had arrived to take the salt fish off the racks where they had been laid out to dry, and the children were engrossed. They drove back to Tamarind Street through streets that the setting sun had turned red. By the time they got to the gates, all of the children were asleep with their kites beside them.

Viva was glad to hand them over to Mrs. Bowden, a plump, down-to-earth soldier’s wife from Yorkshire, who worked two days a week as a volunteer. Mrs. Bowden had lost two of her own children in India and said she did this to make herself feel better.

“Well, you lot look dirty,” she told the children. “But no bath, I’m afraid. The bleeding plumbing’s on the blink again,” she explained to Viva.

“And what about you, poppet?” Mrs. Bowden said to Talika, who still looked pale. “You look moldy. I expect you ate too much.”

Mrs. B. didn’t hold with mollycoddling, they were used to children feeling moldy here.

Half an hour later, Viva, walking down the streets toward her own home, felt full of sun and fresh air. Too tired to feel hungry, she’d picked up a mango from a street stall; she would eat it at her desk while she wrote up her notes.

On nights like this, when her feet ached and her mind felt woolly from the heat, the writing was a slog, but it was also a necessity now, like cleaning her teeth, or getting up in the morning; it was what she had to do to feel like herself.

Darkness fell with its usual suddenness. Fragile strings of fairy lights appeared around the street stalls that sold fruits and cheap clothes, palm juice and papier-mâché gods. When all the rows of lights suddenly went out, she could hear soft laughter from one of the stallholders—having electricity in Byculla was still the big surprise, not when it failed.

Opening the door of her flat, she saw that Mr. Jamshed had lit an oil lamp and put it in the stairwell. As she walked upstairs, her shadow flickered and bounced off the walls like a living thing.

Her embroidered bag was full of books and heavy. She stopped for a few seconds on the landing to put it down. As she looked up the four steps that led to her rooms, a shadow passed behind the frosted glass in her door.

“Mr. Jamshed,” she called, “is that you?”

He’d mentioned that morning he might come up later to
look at her broken tap. She heard the sound of running water from down below. A slash of sizzling oil and then the smell of spices.

“Mr. Jamshed? It’s Viva,” she called more softly.

She picked up her bag and opened the door.

She saw the soft outlines of a body lying down on her bed in the shadows in the corner of the room.

The shadow stood up. It was Guy Glover. He was wearing his black coat. He was waiting for her.

“Shush, shush, shush, shush,” he said in a gentle scolding voice when she called out in alarm. “It’s only me.”

In the half-light all she could see was the outline of her window lit up with a greenish light and a tangle of clothes on her chair—she’d left in a hurry that morning. There was a surge of music from the street outside, a wild caterwauling sound.

“What on earth are you doing here, Guy?” she said. “Who let you in?”

Her eyes had adjusted to the light; she could see that he was wearing no shirt under his coat, and that his white bony chest was sweating.

“No one. I told your landlady you were my big sister—we all look the same to them, you know.”

When he smiled, she remembered everything she disliked about him: the thin adolescent voice that could never decide between being a baby and a bully, his weak smile. Even the smell of him, sweet and stale.

She lit a candle and looked quickly around the room to see if he’d moved anything; there was an empty hollow on her parents’ bedspread where he’d been lying.

“Look, Guy,” it felt important not to show how close she was to screaming at him, “I don’t know why you’re here, but
we’ve nothing to say to each other anymore, so I want you to go away right now, before I call the police.”

“Calm down, Viva,” he said. “I’ve brought your money back, that’s all.”

He sounded so hurt she remembered how good he was at wrong-footing her.

When the lights came on again, they seemed brighter than usual. One of his acne spots had started to bleed.

“Aren’t you boiling in that coat?” she said.

“Absolutely boiling.” He smiled sheepishly. “But I can’t take it off.”

As she stared at him, her mind was split, too. Was this yet another of his adolescent attempts to seem interesting, or was he completely barking mad?

“Why not?”

“Because my present for you is in it.”

He fumbled inside his coat and pulled out a scarlet and yellow cloth doll with staring eyes and fanglike teeth—the kind of gaudy thing you could buy in any cheap market stall.

Why does this boy always make me feel as if I’m acting in a really bad play?
Her mood had changed to pure anger.
Why is he never himself?
She could have kicked him.

“Her name is Durga.” He put the doll in her hands. “The goddess of war—she’ll take care of you.”

“I can take care of myself.” She put the doll down on the table.

“Hold her,” he insisted.

“Look, Guy,” her patience suddenly snapped, “I’m not in the mood to play games with you; in fact, I don’t know how you had the nerve to come here like this. You told a pack of lies to your parents about me. I—”

“I’ve got a job now,” he interrupted. “I’m—”

“Guy, I don’t care. I had no money at all when I came here, thanks to you.”

“You’re lucky to have lost your parents,” he interrupted her. “I have nothing in common with mine.”

“Look, I talked a lot of rot on the ship.” She felt a wave of revulsion at herself. “And I’m tired. Take your doll and go.”

“Don’t you even want to know where I’m staying?”

“No, Guy, I don’t. I couldn’t care less. My responsibility for you ended when the ship got to Bombay.”

There was a silence in the room. She could hear her own wristwatch ticking, and then, from downstairs, the
whoosh
of water going down Mr. Jamshed’s drain.

“That’s not what the police think.” He said it so softly she almost didn’t hear him. “They’re bastards, but you could be in a lot of trouble if you don’t pay up.”

“For goodness’s sake, Guy, stop playacting,” she cried.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m frightened. There’s a man after me.” He sat down on her bed, put his head in his hands and then looked at her through his fingers. He swallowed and looked at the floor. “He says I hurt his brother on the ship, but he hurt me, too.”

“What does he say you did to his brother?”

Guy’s voice became soft, almost babyish in its complaints. “He says I hurt his ear and now he can’t hear, but he did hit me first. That’s why I think you need this.”

He bent the doll over his knee and carefully undid a row of buttons at the back of its embroidered waistcoat. He rummaged around inside.

“Take it.” He handed over a stained bundle of rupees in an elastic band. “You may need it when they come. You can’t be too careful on the streets around here.”

“When who comes?”

“The police—you see, in law, I’m your baby.”

She turned the notes over in the palm of her hand, her mind working furiously.

Was this what Frank had tried to warn her of: the dreadful,
unthinkable possibility that, in the eyes of the law, he belonged to her?

She snapped the elastic band. She could feel without counting one hundred, maybe two hundred rupees: enough at least to offer something to the police if they came around for bribes, but she suspected it wouldn’t cover the amount she had lost chaperoning Guy to India.

“I think you should apologize to me for being so rude,” he said prissily. “I suppose you can see now that I was only trying to help you.”

“Guy,” she said, “I don’t think I need to apologize for what is mine.”

He gave a sudden radiant smile. “So, I am yours?”

“No, no, no…I didn’t mean that. I mean this,” she held up the notes, “the money was owed to me.”

She saw the light die in his eyes, but didn’t care at all.

“Who told you I lived here?” she asked.

“It took me ages to find you.” He was like a sullen schoolboy again. “So I rang Tor and she told me.”

“I see.”

His foot had started tapping on the floor again.

“Didn’t I hear you have a job? Where are you working now?” she asked him as casually as she could.

“Nowhere,” he mumbled. “Actually, I’ve lost my job. I was taking film photographs. The men who were running the company were clots.”

“So you’re going home now?” Even the thought brought some relief.

“No.” He shook his head. “I live here now: on Main Street behind the fruit market.” He stopped tapping his foot and looked at her. “Oh, and there’s one more thing. Stop telling everyone I’m sixteen when I’m actually nineteen.”

“I’m not going to fight about that, Guy. What difference does it make when you take no responsibility for yourself?”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t, you’re spineless,” she glared at him, still furious at this invasion of her privacy, and the loss of her evening, “and you tell lies to get yourself out of trouble.”

He stepped back. “That’s a really beastly thing to say,” he said. “I was always going to pay you back. I’ve been waiting for the right time.”

“Oh really?” She didn’t even pretend to believe him. “Well, next time, do it in the right way: ring the doorbell and wait for me to let you in.”

As she showed him toward the door, she could feel a blister on her heel break and the sticky liquid run down into her shoe.