Small Days and Nights Read online

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said. ‘Come here and help. I can’t move.’

  Mallika managed to sit me up in bed. ‘You have a fever,’ she said worriedly, pressing her palm against my forehead. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Help me to stand and walk me to the bathroom,’ I said.

  We shuffled over. Each step a mutilation. ‘You’ll have to take me all the way in.’

  I lifted my nightie and sat on the pot. ‘Stay here, Mallika, otherwise I might fall over.’ I pissed with relief, feeling none of the humiliation I thought I would. ‘Lift me up now,’ I said. ‘That’s it. Wait, let me wash my face.’

  Lucia followed, looking at us. ‘Cornflakes, cornflakes,’ she was saying, hand jabbing the air.

  ‘Wait, idiot,’ Mallika snapped. ‘Can’t you see your sister’s not well? I’ll feed you after.’

  Hours later I looked up to see Auntie Kavitha in my reading chair. ‘Do you want me to close the blinds?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, staring out at the wrought-iron bars of the balcony grille, the sea framed between the curlicues. I was content with my sickness the way all guilty people feel when they are struck down. It felt deserving.

  Auntie Kavitha was wearing a man’s shirt and a long cotton skirt with mirrors sewn into the hem. Her short grey hair stood like bristle on her head. ‘You’ve gone and got this vile chikungunya thing that’s going around,’ she said, allowing the blinds to hurtle down. ‘Bloody mosquitoes.’

  ‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.

  ‘Not hungry,’ she said, standing with her feet apart as if to steady herself.

  I could see the outline of her breasts in the half-light. Slight, elfin.

  ‘I’ve stopped wearing underwear,’ she’d told me the last time we were together. I can’t think how the topic came up, but she’d said, ‘What’s the point? I don’t need it any more.’ I told her I felt the same, living out here, giving in to primitivism. Why not wear mismatched clothes, why bother with all the harnessing and holstering? ‘I’ve never liked my breasts in any case,’ I’d said. ‘Ponderous fleshy things.’ She laughed. ‘Name me a woman who’s satisfied with her breasts.’

  Now she walked towards the bed and crept on to it with hands and knees. ‘You’re going to need help,’ she said, lying beside me, hand on my forehead, fingertips soft and cool. ‘I’ve brought my things.’

  We live so close to death here. To lose all those puppies. And how? They hadn’t even been named, they were still so small. Rolls of black-and-white fur, nails and tongue. After their mothers had been poisoned they moved from the bushes to the patio, ate mushed-up dog food softened with broth. They slept around the legs of the table, yelped in unison when I opened the doors in the morning. Mallika complained because there was always piss and shit on the patio floors. ‘Can’t you teach them to do their business in the garden?’

  ‘Thirteen puppies,’ I said. ‘They’ll have to learn themselves.’

  One morning the runt of the lot vomited after feeding. Its body convulsed, pissing and quivering. It lasted a minute. When it was over it returned to the other dogs, legs slightly bowed. Lucia scooped it up and tenderly rubbed the goopy discharge from its eyes. ‘Poor baby,’ she cooed.

  Throughout the day the pup had seizures. At night I brought it inside and stayed up with it in the sitting room. Lucia kept coming downstairs to turn the lights off, and Golly followed her, wagging her tail, sniffing the air. ‘Go to bed,’ I kept shouting. ‘For fucksake go to sleep.’ She ignored me and sat on the couch with her socks and handkerchiefs, rocking and singing. ‘Golly needs to be away from the pup, Lucy,’ I said. ‘Understand? She needs to be away from her.’ I dragged the dog upstairs and closed the bedroom door, and she howled a while before settling down. Bagheera, Raja and Dimple paced up and down the patio, pressing their noses to the window grilles.

  Lucia stayed on the couch till she tired and fell asleep. I lay on the floor cushions with the pup in my lap. The pup kept running off to pee, shit, then circle around her mess, as if not understanding why her body was doing this. I got up and cleaned the crap with paper towels, then lured the pup back to me. She would sit in the folds of my dress for a short while, heart pounding madly, then off again. All night this macabre dance – silence and frenzy. That small black-and-white beast looking up in confusion as if to say, What is this, what is this coming for me?

  At dawn the pup started foaming at the mouth. Her movements became more erratic, the circles she ran in wider and wider. Finally she ran upstairs and hid under my bed. I left her there, shaking and foaming, body damp with sweat. She no longer responded to me. It was as if she couldn’t see or hear me. At six I went to get the crate from the garage. I made a cup of tea and woke Lucy. ‘I’m taking the puppy to the doctor, okay? You’ll have to be good and stay here with Mallika and look after the other dogs.’

  On the phone with the vet he said to bring in all the puppies. ‘They haven’t finished their vaccination course but we’ll see what we can do.’

  Mallika helped gather the rest of the pups and put them in the crate. The infected pup I wrapped in a towel and laid on the seat beside me. I kept turning to see whether she was moving or not, but she lay rigid as a doll.

  In a week they were all dead. We could not even put their bodies in the garden. They ended up in an animal hospital in Vepery. Because the symptoms of canine distemper and rabies were so similar, they’d have to be tested postmortem to make sure. The vet explained how the virus was in the nerves, not the blood, so they’d have to examine the brain tissue. I thought of a young student piercing a long needle into the fur of those soft puppy heads. The cadavers incinerated afterwards. What ritual could we perform for them? How to explain to Lucia that all this might be more terrible than what it already was? We needed to know for our own protection. I touched its piss, shit, saliva.

  The rest of the dogs got booster shots, except for Raja, of course. He always knew when the vet was coming, running off through the holes in the brick wall, reappearing only when things were safe.

  For weeks I dreamed terrible dreams. Of rabid dogs and lacerated tongues. Whatever sheath lay between us and the wild out-there had thinned to the point of vanishing. I could not sleep without clenching my fingers and hands, lacing the bones of my jaw.

  The vet, who’d lost a colleague recently, had gone from being expansive about street dogs to suspicious. ‘You can’t be too careful,’ he said, examining his gloved hands. ‘I don’t want to scare you unnecessarily, but my friend …’ He trailed off. ‘He was treating these dogs and one of them barked and the spit flew in his eye. He just wiped it off, carried on. He was not a paranoid type. But he died such a horrible death.’

  I thought there needed to be an aperture for rabies, that it necessarily involved teeth. But it can travel through spit and mucus and open wounds. I began washing my hands obsessively every time Raja licked me. I made Lucia do it too. ‘You and your sister should take deworming tablets,’ the vet said when he left. ‘I hope you don’t plan on getting any more dogs.’

  We planted gardenia bushes, thirteen of them, all along the front lawn. A floral requiem.

  I asked Mallika to hire some villagers to do the weeding. For a week, three women and two men ambled up the driveway with their shoddy equipment – a couple of shovels and a prehistoric pan-shaped thing that I’d seen women use on building sites to carry gravel on their heads. They started at nine and were gone by five. Between twelve-thirty and two, the hottest hours of the day, they rested for lunch in the shade of Mallika’s small house. The remainder of the time they sat on their haunches in the dirt, yanking things from the ground with their bare hands.

  ‘I want to pay the women the same rate,’ I told Mallika. ‘They’re doing the same work, after all.’

  ‘No, no,’ Mallika said. ‘The men do all the hard work, they clear all the thorny parts. If we don’t give them more it will create tensions.’

  At four I brewed a big vessel of tea. I made it milky and
sweet. I called to Mallika, who had wrapped a towel around her head and squatted with the other women in the garden. ‘Come and get the tea,’ I shouted. She walked up the path, her skin polished with sweat.

  Later, I called Praveen and told him I felt like a plantation owner.

  ‘Why’s it like this here?’ I asked. ‘In America, every job is a service. You do the job, you get paid, you fuck off. It’s transactional. But even when I was babysitting and cleaning people’s houses, there was still some interaction. They asked me to sit with them for dinner. They dropped me home because I didn’t have a car. I don’t want to use the word dignity, but it’s what I’m reaching for. How am I supposed to treat these people breaking their backs in my garden for less than five hundred bucks a day? Why is it making me so angry to look at them? Why don’t they fucking run into the house and smash the shit out of everything?’

  ‘It’s the biggest mindfuck of this country. Only way to keep sane is to get the hell out once in a while. And so,’ he pressed. ‘It’s really over with your man, is it? I saw him the other day, Ms G. He’s feeling it.’

  21

  This is a scene from a long time ago. How many evenings have I spent on this railway platform, sitting on an overstuffed suitcase, slapping mosquitoes from my ankles?

  Vendors are pacing the platforms with carts of badam milk and bananas, bottled water and magazines. It’s as if they’ve been shouting forever, their voices billowing out from somewhere deep in their bodies. I keep craning my neck towards the direction of the train, but it does not come. The air is still and I am fatigued by the pointlessness of all the moving around. All the dirty, ravaged stray dogs.

  I think of Papi. Of his betrayals. How he used to walk up and down this platform with me, pointing out the constellations. The Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt, the Dog Star, Sirius. And me, pretending I could see those shapes in the sky, when really it was just night, vast and flamboyant, seeking to diminish us.

  Ma used to closet herself in the upper-class waiting room on a bench, legs folded under her, book against her knees. ‘It’s smelly in here,’ I’d complain, because the bathroom doors were always kept open, and the lavatories – little pits in the ground – emanated an odour that terrified me. It blanketed everything, that smell. Piss and chrome and blood – gamy and menstrual. The rotten, overripe smell of bodies in transit – bodies unwashed, all cloyingly masked by a bouquet of naphthalene balls and phenol. ‘It smells outside too, darling,’ Ma would say, her own scent something languid and animal. ‘Go keep your father company. You know how anxious he gets.’

  They’ve been ghosts this entire trip. Forcing themselves into frames, tripping us up, as if to remind us that the only reason we’re here is because of them. I have been wondering where they found the courage to try again? To begin with a child they discarded and think maybe they could give it another go.

  I had been prepared for ugliness because that’s what grows in India, sprouts and flourishes like the hair on a dead person. But the space in which you go from adult to child, that leaf-thin whiplash, that I had not expected.

  We drove through kilometres of shola forest, the taxi careening dangerously around corkscrew bends. Lucia was at the window, pushing her glasses up the snub of her nose. One knee flat on the seat, the other jammed into her armpit. Out of her mouth a song, or a kind of song.

  ‘Look, Lucia,’ I said, as we passed the Silver Cascades – that sad, depleted waterfall running crookedly down the rock face, overwhelmed by the many vanloads of people who had come to pose beside it over the years. And the monkeys manning the walls – they were still there, even though they looked more sore-assed and disgruntled than before. Above them skeletons of new constructions thrust out of the forest, and crowded around these were two-storeyed houses painted bright pink and purple, buildings made of such shoddy materials they seemed to sway slightly in the breeze.

  Centuries before, Indian tribes had lived in these hills in megalithic dolmens, collecting honey. Later, botanists and enthusiastic American missionaries who dreamed of large congregations came and built churches and elegant bungalows. Couples took perambulations around Coaker’s Walk and paused at the cliff’s edge to give thanks to their own intelligence for having escaped the heat of down there. Now Kodai is a place that bursts in summer. Its inhabitants complain about the invaders from the plains with their pallid cheeks and fat hearts. They complain constantly, as I imagine descendants of a failed royal family do, aware that their ancestors lived in a time of greater beauty, that these reduced living conditions were a kind of poverty.

  I had made plans to meet Uncle Sundar for dinner at the club. ‘That old fox will pull out all the stops,’ Auntie Kavitha had said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come?’

  Looking at him now, after all these years, I see how obvious it was. His eyebrows were radiant black arches, his hair a cathedral of black, even the way his jaws worked systematically through the club’s stringy roast chicken, displaying slabs of strong ivory tooth now and again, showed a man of conscientiousness. I imagined him going through his weekly toilette. The bottle of hair dye, the tweezers, the huge concentration in his sleek, morose face as he brushed and scalpelled his way to perfection.

  ‘What a tremendous thing you’re doing,’ he said, for the second time.

  ‘Do you think,’ I said, after serving Lucia another helping, cutting the chicken and vegetables into small pieces so she’d be able to scoop them into her spoon, ‘that you could tell me about your relationship with my mother? I know most of it, but there are so many gaps. I’d be interested to hear your side of it.’

  ‘Why?’ he cried out, sudden shots of colour in his cheeks. ‘Why would you want to know such things?’

  ‘There’s no one else I can really go to.’

  ‘I think your mother was sick,’ he said, ‘literally, heartsick for this girl.’ He looked meaningfully at Lucia and stroked her forearm. ‘Our relationship, whatever you want to call it, was really a friendship. She felt so alienated by your father.’

  ‘But he’s the one who was alienated. He’s the one who agreed to stay in India, even though they were meant to travel around the world with his job.’

  ‘And leave this girl here?’

  He kept touching Lucia every time he referred to her, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was transfixed by the deer heads on the club walls, their dead, glazed eyes.

  ‘My mother could have done what I’m doing now. She could have left my father earlier.’

  ‘And what would have happened to you?’

  ‘What’s happened to me anyway?’

  It’s an energetic week. We’ve been walking everywhere and Lucia looks better for it. Her face is tinged pink from the sun. Every morning she sits for an hour on the wall outside the room, warming her back before dressing for breakfast. The waiters at the club all know her by name and habit. In the morning they bring the box of cornflakes to the table as soon as they see us walking in. At seven in the evening, when I’m having my gin and tonic at the bar, they bring her a Coca-Cola and a plate of wafers without us having to ask. Uncle Sundar joins us most nights, and it is a relief to have someone to relay the day’s adventures to.

  We call Mallika regularly to check on the dogs. I put her on speaker so Lucy can hear her too. ‘The dogs are fine,’ she says, her voice phantom-like, disconnected. Lucia makes her say their names. ‘Golly, Bagheera, Raja, Dimple. Yes, yes, all are fine.’

  Valluvan phones one morning to tell me that he’s going to stand for the Cheyyur district elections. His competitor is a man called K. Alexander. ‘I need some funds,’ he says. ‘Otherwise that fellow and his goons will win.’ I am tired of taking financial requests – Mallika, Valluvan, Teacher – all of them see me as some kind of never-ending ATM. And to what end? I am still alone in all this. I tell Valluvan I’ll have to think about it. I had only just made a Rs 40,000 contribution towards the new village temple, and now he wants Rs 200,000 more. ‘Have a good holiday,’ he says. ‘
Good that you and your sister are able to enjoy some cool air. It is so hot here already.’

  Everything in the town of Kodaikanal is as it has always been, except it has grown more dishevelled and pitiful, like an elderly relative who wanders about with stained shirt fronts. Lucia enjoys walking the flat path around the starfish-shaped lake, to charge downhill in the bazaar and at 7 Roads, but every time we arrive at the base of an incline, she flops down on the ground and shakes her head. I squat next to her and say, ‘Come on, it’s easy. You can do it.’ And when nothing works, I say, ‘Do you want a fresh lime soda?’ For a while, it seems I can bribe her to do anything with the promise of a fresh lime soda.

  People stare. Wherever we go someone is looking at us – gazing unabatedly, not with malice or curiosity, but some kind of stupidity. Families travelling with other families, honeymooning couples, busloads of day trippers from Kerala, mostly men. In them all I find something to despise. I see only smallness in their lives. Who am I to say? It could simply be that they don’t know how to look. That, like the waiters at the club, they only need time to familiarise themselves. But I see only the imprint of failure. Those newly-wed women leaning into their husbands’ chests – hennaed arms, bangles up to their elbows, incongruous in their jeans and T-shirts. Being steered around by men, who look like children really, overgrown children who have never been denied anything. They lead with their stomachs and hairy forearms, and the women follow to what surely must be a drowning. I want to believe otherwise, that in all the hordes there is beauty and potential, but mostly what I see is a beating down. The men and the women, and even the poor children, dragged around in their silly monkey caps and fluorescent sunglasses. What chance do any of them have?

  ‘So you only see beauty in the singularity of self?’ Uncle Sundar asks.