Small Days and Nights Read online

  I think of that word, ‘expired’. What does it mean? She ran out of steam? She stopped? She gave up? ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say.

  ‘How can we know what’s going on in their heads?’ Teacher goes on. ‘I feel so bad.’

  ‘You do what you can.’

  ‘You and I must always work together,’ she says, using the end of her sari to dab the corner of her eye.

  I am unable to console her, unable to fill this gap with empathy. I want her to be quiet and take me to Lucia. I have waited long enough. I have done as she asked.

  ‘When I met you at your mother’s funeral I was happy because I thought Lucy has lost a mother, but will find a sister. I could see that you were weak. But still, I thought, Lucy will be saved. Are you ready now?’

  I had sold all Ma’s jewels. There were boxes of the stuff in a bank safe. Treasures collected over decades. When I think of her earlier in her life, it’s as though she were a different woman. In the photographs she reclines on sofas, leans against balconies, wears filigreed gold chokers and emerald peacock earrings, hair swept into dark towering beehives. For a while, she wore only white with long strands of pearls. Her eyes rimmed with kohl, watery, disdainful. Papi is in some of these photographs too. All the wide space of his forehead exposed. The same dark-trim suit.

  I kept a slim ruby necklace with uncut diamonds and Nonna Rosa’s ring, but the rest I sold. ‘Won’t you regret it?’ Rohini asked. ‘You don’t need the money, do you?’

  It is a moment of death to understand you will not continue. Nothing in my life will pass on. I will not have daughters. I will not make Fisher-Price villages with them on bedroom floors or scoop them into the cave of my stomach when they are ill. I imagine these ghost children Blake and I could have had. Flaxen-haired girls with oblong jaws. They would not be weak. They would not be strong. They would not give birth to beautiful lonely creatures of their own.

  There is a line that divides us. Rohini cannot understand what it means to travel lightly. She wants imprints, a kind of eternity. ‘You need it too,’ she says. ‘You’re fooling yourself if you think you’re not after the same thing.’

  I want to tell her that a woman who moves from her parents’ house to her husband’s house is never uncertain. She has not walked through rooms searching for light switches. Someone is always showing her the way.

  It is January in the city. We sit on Rohini and Samir’s balcony, surrounded by towers of concrete. Impossible to think that a sea breathes beyond, that animals and birds make their nests amongst these multitudes. One day all this will collapse. The sea will rise and swallow entire suburbs. Almost as unimaginable to think that this was once all paddy fields. The nights were completely black and all you could hear were nightjars and koels, the long insistent bark of a dog tied to a post.

  ‘You played it right,’ Praveen says. ‘You’ve come out of this stronger.’

  He is methodical, always pushing for extremes within the constraints of his obligations. He tends to the edges like a gardener. This is where friendships are nourished. This is where sex lives. Beyond is the whole territory of travel, where a man can be subsumed, where he can reinvent himself. Then he must return to the centre. The centre is where he sleeps, where his mother lives, the house, the dog. The car that takes him to the office every morning. A joint in his pocket for when the day presses in too hard. He wears floral shirts to prove his ruggedness. He notices a woman’s handbag and shoes.

  ‘It’s better this way,’ he says. ‘You’ll have your space and your sister will have her peers. There’ll be a bit of back and forth, so you should just hire a driver. It’s a good balance. We’ll see more of you.’

  ‘I had this maths professor in Charlotte. Dr Shah. He used to invite all the Indian students to his house for a meal once a semester. There were only ever five or six of us, and we’d sit around his kitchen table eating pakoras and roti, dal, sabji.

  ‘He had young children, but he seemed so old then. One summer his wife had taken the kids back to India. The food wasn’t as good. I said to him, “Dr Shah, you must be glad to have the house to yourself.” He was a sweet man, really. He said, “You know, once you have kids you’ll understand. There’s never any peace. When they’re there, when they’re not there.”

  ‘Men are always telling me what I don’t understand because I don’t have kids. I think he may have been right, though. The house isn’t the same without her. It’s as though I’m either too big for it or too small. It makes no sense to be living out there with the sea and those trees. All those pretty china plates in the crockery cupboard, for what?’

  ‘It’s like some fight against obscurity,’ Samir says. ‘The whole thing. Everything we do. We try to fill it with purpose. We try to find tasks. For some people it’s their kids, for others, their jobs, their art, whatever. Why worry?’

  It’s impossible not to think of time passing. Even in the city. We are all of the age where we turn our hands over repeatedly, examine our faces in mirrors, watch the past recede. We sit on the balcony listening to Lou Reed. We have not said anything of survival. For most people the point is to live.

  That night I write to Lucia, which, in a way, is writing to myself:

  I want to take you to Venice to meet Papi and Marcella. Now that I’ve had the idea, everything is clear. It’s not about living away from the world but living in it. It’s a longer journey than you’re used to making, but I’ll give you the window seat, Lucy, and you can sit with your knee tucked into your arm, and yes, we’ll bring your friends. You have to climb many steps to Papi’s house, though. It’s at the corner of a street where there are cafés and pigeons. We’ll take the vaporettos to the islands, darling, and I’ll show you everything. We can’t take the dogs with us, but Kavitha will look after them. Kavitha is going to stay with us for some time. Everything will be different. You’ll like Venice, I think. There are so many ice-cream shops and whenever you’re tired of walking we can sit on a bench, or get into a gondola. They glide like swans. You look up, Lucy, and you see buildings, old as forests. At night when you close your eyes you hear the soft sounds on the water, and it’ll be like being home, listening to the sea.

  I follow Teacher to the new wing. The two buildings are separated by a concrete courtyard. There’s a poster hanging lopsidedly along the front wall, made especially for the inauguration ceremony. The words Sneha Centre are written in bold English, there is more writing below in Tamil. A portrait of Teacher in a Victorian-style frame dominates the poster. It’s an old photograph. She looks more determined in it than she does in real life.

  ‘I don’t know why they want to waste money on such things.’ Teacher flushes as we walk by. ‘But the staff like to do all this. It’s a way of honouring me, they say.’

  I think of Lucy in her new room. Napkins, socks and an oven mitt arranged like a fan around her. If there’s a window, she’ll be sitting by it, so she can catch the sun. She hums softly. She isn’t waiting.

  I think of the train journey we made to Kodai. The terror of those small railway towns we stopped in, the valiant lives that might be out there. Lucia insisting on the top berth, her feet gingerly placed on the rungs on the wall. Me giving her bum a little shove up. For hours afterwards, she hung her face off the berth looking down at me, switching the lights in the cabin on and off. I kept apologising to the other passengers, an older married couple – the man recently retired from teaching, his wife fat-cheeked and cheery. ‘It’s okay,’ they reassured. How she settled into the sheets eventually and slept. The light flutter of snores. I remember the tin can of a bathroom. The stench of it. Hauling Lucy into it in the morning and holding her while she squatted over the hole in the floor of the train. ‘Weeeee,’ she said. ‘Lucy is doing wee wee.’ The slow bustle of the Kodai Road station. Coolies in blood-red shirts hauling their ancient faces around. Lucia and I treading over the railway tracks with our luggage, taking deep breaths of that sweet balsamic air of the foothills. The haggle with taxi drivers. ‘I want
to go in that car, Grace.’ The two of us in a white Ambassador, one at each back-seat window. ‘Look, Lucy, look at the monkeys.’

  ‘Do you think she feels happiness like you and I do?’ I ask Teacher. We are at the entrance of the new block. The room where the singing and speeches just happened this morning is cluttered with paper plates and cups. Two tree-like women are bent over, sweeping everything into a corner.

  ‘It’s like how I was saying,’ Teacher says. ‘We can’t know what’s in their heads. But we can understand when they are comfortable, when they are happy, when they are upset. We can’t even know what we think ourselves, so how can we know about others?’

  I wanted to tell her that I had seen Lucy excavate a hole in the seashore and fasten herself there like a canon, letting out sounds of rapture as the waves bashed her about. And how, when we walked into enemy territory of pariah dogs and she bent her knees and put her mouth to the sky, howling with Bagheera, it was a song of triumph. There could be no doubt about the force of the emotion. But it was regular life that concerned me – the washing of elbows, the getting in and out of nighties and pyjamas, the chewing of food. Did she ever feel oppressed by it all? Did she ever think of settling herself in a bed, never to move again?

  I knew not to expect anything momentous.

  Teacher opens the door. ‘Look who’s here!’ she says.

  She is as I imagined. Sitting on the single bed, positioned in the ray of light. Shoulders slightly sloped, legs splayed. Her eyes widen when she sees me. She shows me her jagged teeth.

  ‘Hey Lucy,’ I say. I sit on the bed and take her hand. ‘Give me a kiss, will you?’

  ‘Hi Grace,’ she says. She lets me kiss her cheek. She looks at me, not with suspicion or any kind of demand. Her look merely says, here you are.

  ‘Here I am.’

  I open my handbag and take the military-green napkin out of it. ‘See what I found?’

  She snatches it from me and practises feeling it in her fingers. Flip flip. Oh, it’s been so long, hasn’t it? Flip flip.

  She looks paler, somewhat chubbier in the stomach. ‘Are you ready to come home, Lucy?’

  Her bag is already packed in the corner of the room. She becomes something else when she travels. I don’t know how I know this for sure, but when she’s on the move all her idiosyncrasies are suspended. The rooms of her life collapse and open into something larger. ‘Are we going on a choo-choo train?’

  ‘We’re going in the car to see Raja and Golly and Dimple and Bagheera and all the new puppies.’

  ‘What about Hunter and Thompson and Flopsy?’

  ‘They’ve all gone to God, remember?’

  Is she my child, then? My daughter, my sister. There is something pure about her fingers, the misshapen right index finger with the nubby nail, the deep brown lines in her palms. I take her hands and squeeze them between mine.

  ‘You’ll be coming here too, kanna, don’t worry. We’ll be seeing you soon,’ Teacher says, stepping out of the way as I take hold of Lucy’s suitcase.

  We walk down the stairs. All the girls have lined up by the gates to say goodbye. Sugandhi, the albino, stands above them all, almost six feet tall. She’s waving her long arms from side to side. They are nobody’s treasures, these girls. It’s hard to look at them all together.

  ‘Will you be calling us for Lucy’s birthday party, akka?’ It’s Priya, Lucy’s old friend, who waddles up to us and puts her hands on her hips. ‘Will you?’

  ‘Of course she will,’ Teacher says. ‘Why don’t we take a photo?’

  Teacher’s husband faces us, his back to the street. What have they done to you? I want to ask each one of them. Why have they abandoned you, your families, your blood? They are still in their velvet blouses and sequinned skirts. The material sticks to their skins. We welcome the heat, the closeness. We stand together, our decaying bodies. I want to believe in old-fashioned ideas of goodness and evil. There is such a thing as giving shelter. In the days to come there will be children engineered to resemble our ideas of children. They will be born in Petri dishes and every chromosome, every strand of genetic evidence will be tampered into perfection. And still, we will fall short.

  Lucy and I walk to the car, carefully avoiding the stagnant puddles of water. She seems pensive, her limp brown hair touching her shoulders. There are two cows chewing on rotten banana leaves next to a rubbish bin. We steer away from them. It happens in a flash. I open the boot to put the suitcase in and Lucia makes a run for it, sprinting away from me and the Sneha Centre. She stops at the crossroads, bending her knees as though she were going to jump from the pavement into the oncoming traffic. She is smiling wildly. It is only a joke. A game from childhood where she used to run away. She’s moving back and forth on her legs, one hand hitching up her pants. ‘Come back, Lucy,’ I yell. I know what to do this time, I want to shout. I won’t let you down. Motorbikes and cars flash by her like schools of fish. I think of us underwater, the dolphins in the blue, our dogs on the beach. Everything that’s going to save us. ‘That’s enough,’ I say, making towards her.

  Soon we are home and the dogs are scratching at the doors, trying to get in. Kavitha is in the kitchen, making noodles for dinner, the air thick with the smell of burning wood fires. ‘Let’s go put our feet in the sand,’ I say to Lucy. The dogs rush out of the gate before us, scrabbling about to catch crabs. It is a comfort to sit there watching the coconut trees in the distance sway over the village. We count the fishing boats parked up on the ridge. Flocks of white birds that look grey in the twilight make patterns above our heads.

  Kavitha walks out when it’s dark. ‘I know you must be hungry now,’ she says. We walk up the path together, trying not to get thorns in our feet, holding each other up as the breeze blows by. We pause at the edge of the lawn and look at the house with its blue doors flung open. Soft lights gleam from every room. We don’t say it aloud, but we look at each other and know we can keep doing this. We can keep being who we are.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Angela Dorazio for the gift of Canonica where the idea for this novel began. To Jasmine Dellal, Vikrom Mathur, Editta Dal Lago, and Patrick and Fiona Clements for providing salubrious roofs under which parts of it could be written. To Art Omi: Writers for a timely residency equipped with ping-pong table. To Jin Auh and Tracy Bohan at the Wylie Agency. To Faiza Sultan Khan and Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury. Thanks as well to Manu Joseph and Carlo Pizzati for reading early drafts. To Mandira Moddie for all her support, canine and otherwise. And to Eira and Vinod, goes without saying.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Tishani Doshi was born in Chennai. She is an award-winning poet, journalist, essayist and novelist. Doshi has published seven books of fiction and poetry, most recently Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods in 2018. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize and long listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Doshi is also a professional dancer with the Chandralekha Troupe. She lives in Tamil Nadu, India, with her husband and three dogs.

  tishanidoshi.com

  First published in Great Britain 2019

  This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Tishani Doshi, 2019

  Tishani Doshi has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unaut
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  ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-0375-3; TPB: 978-1-5266-0374-6; EBOOK: 978-1-5266-0377-7

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