Small Days and Nights Read online

  ‘She done found her place,’ Ms Betty would have said.

  I think about that now. Misrak’s busy American life. Some of the Amharic still clinging to the throat, but the rest of the accent hammered out into something steady and recognisable. I think of the trips she must make with her family to beachside towns, and wonder if anything about the large migration of humans on holiday depresses her.

  I think of my father, out in the Adriatic Sea, away from the din of the world – a small, unrecognisable blip. And I know it’s really me I’m seeing. Standing behind glass.

  PART TWO

  8

  Mornings at the beach can arrive like a whore in a jangly, too-tight dress at the end of a long and sleepless night. Lucia and I lie with our toes pointing east under mosquito nets in second-floor bedrooms with the doors flung open and the fans whizzing over our heads like helicopters. By six, when the sun is crawling its way out of the sea’s belly and forcing its way through the blinds, I have already been up for hours, distracted by music from the temple in the village, which judders to life at 4 a.m. – Brahma Muhurta – God’s hour, although there is nothing devotional that I can ascertain about this music. Tinny, Tamil film songs that pulsate across the air with no high-rise buildings to block their trajectory.

  It isn’t always that way, of course. Sometimes I sleep like a person lost to the world, buried and dead, my eyes caked shut with goop, deep ridges in my face from the sheets. There is no freshness in those mornings, no cool tingle of dawn. I wake in a bucket of heat. Lucia standing by the bed, poking at me, ‘I’m hungry, Grace. Gimme cornflakes.’

  Breakfast is a grand affair served in multiple courses. Freshly squeezed orange juice, diced papaya, multiple helpings of cornflakes drenched with sugar, a soft-boiled egg with a piece of soft, white, buttered bread cut up into soldiers.

  Teacher says I’ve spoiled her. Tells me that when Lucia was at the Sneha Centre, she used to eat idlis for breakfast like the rest of the kids without complaint. ‘You’ve given her new tastes,’ she said. ‘Once these children change their routines, it’s very hard to change back.’

  Teacher can sometimes be a sanctimonious bitch, but I try to keep things cordial.

  It’s strange to be unemployed. To have no project in life other than this. I spend time in the garden, trying to coax vegetables out of the ground, learning the names of shrubs and trees. There’s so much beauty here, but always, the reminder of decay. Salt eating into the parliament hinges, washers in taps disintegrating, coats of rust thickening the lips of every mechanical appliance. It could drive you mad. This rushing about to preserve the doorjambs.

  We measure the seasons by insects. Mosquitoes, black ants, mayflies, bees, wasps, moths, dragonflies, red beetles, and mosquitoes again.

  We are in the middle of January now and the sea is settling into a hushed simmer. Fishermen go out in their catamarans early in the morning – their engines rattling like machine guns, low and wide across the water. The beach is a war zone, littered with carcases of olive ridley turtles caught in nets and discarded on the shore. They look like prehistoric sculptures in the sand. Dürer etchings. Crows pick at the flesh of their small, wise turtle heads. Our legion of dogs push their noses deep into the eroding carapaces, coming back home with the stink of death on them.

  When Lucia first moved in I couldn’t sleep at all. Teacher stayed a few nights to guide me through her routines, but after she left, when it was just the two of us, I used to lie awake, my mind popping and buzzing with fears. It was madness in a way. To live so far from everything.

  Auntie Kavitha had assured me that whatever I chose to do, she could be relied upon to help. ‘You don’t have to do this, Grace. Your mother never expected it. All she wanted was for you to be able to see Lucy from time to time, to know her in a way. But you don’t need to give up your life.’

  I had wanted to give up my life, though. I was desperate for it.

  With Lucia the patterns of cohabitation were different. Nothing like it had been with Blake. No snagged conversations. No pull and tug about the future. No talk of babies. Only puppy babies.

  In the beginning we overcame our shyness for each other by fussing over Raja. He surprised me – the way he stuck to Lucia on the beach, the manner in which he curled himself by her feet when we sat outside for meals, shifting his attentions in order to welcome her.

  A month later he disappeared. I tried reassuring Lucia that he would be okay, that he had other friends to visit along this stretch of ocean. But she wouldn’t be placated.

  Every few minutes she’d ask, ‘Where’s Raja?’ Her right hand flung out, jabbing at the air, her left hand softly beating her thigh. ‘Where’s Raja? Where’s Raja?’ And when this produced no results, she screamed in frustration, rocking backwards and forwards on her feet, hands still jabbing, finally flinging herself on the floor in desperation. ‘Where’s Raja? Where’s Raja?’ Until she wasn’t listening to anything I was saying, just repeating his name over my voice like an incantation. Raja. Raja. Raja.

  Only after she had tired herself and gone off into a corner, subdued and hoarse, did the shouting stop. But all through the day she kept her eye hawked to the horizon for a sign of gold. After four nights even I began to worry. There were packs of dogs along this beach who could demolish and drown him in minutes. There were people who could be just as cruel for the sport of it. He had never stayed away so long.

  On the fifth day, when he finally appeared, strutting up the garden path from the beach, Lucia ran towards him shouting, ‘Raja, Raja.’ Shadowing behind him was a black bitch – sleek and gorgeous, with a tikka of white in the fur of her forehead. This was Bagheera, Raja’s great love. And between the two of them they spun kingdoms.

  9

  Vik comes over when it’s dark and we fuck in the bedroom with the lights out and the door locked. We smoke a joint afterwards, our bodies slick and beautiful, and because he is young, we often go again.

  The nights he’s here, Lucia is restless, pacing the corridor, switching the lights on and off. The dogs are restless too – setting off with their orchestra of howling every time some poor creature gets too close to the walls. Vik and I laugh at the madness of it, but he doesn’t stay long enough to really see it.

  In the morning we rush to the sea in our bathing suits. The dogs chase after us. We ignore the shitters squatting further along the beach where the new constructions are rising up. All along the coast they are committed to cloning claustrophobic, ugly holiday homes, which will sit empty most of the year. Men have been hauled in from different parts of the country to work in this wasteland. Some have never seen the ocean. Some may even be terrified of it, although they don’t show it. There’s something dangerous about these men, the way they don’t avert their eyes.

  ‘What will you do?’ Vik often says, usually when he’s pulling up his shorts and reaching for his car keys.

  ‘We’ll have to see how things turn out,’ I say. But I’m as scared of the future as anyone.

  The longing I have for Vik is unlike any I’ve ever had. I first saw him at a Christmas party in someone’s ancestral house. Ochre walls, marble floors. There were chairs in the garden and women in bandage dresses complaining that their heels were getting stuck in the mud. Everyone coked out of their heads – all swagger and crazy-eyed. I sat, trying not to look alarmed by the scene, which didn’t correspond to any idea of Madras I had in my head. Vik slipped into the chair beside me in cargo shorts and T-shirt. Short, lean, bearded. A mouth full of teeth. ‘This is all such bullshit, right?’ he said. ‘But it’s part of what we live.’

  He comes and goes. Every time he’s gone too long I tell myself I won’t let him back in. Lies. He knows he only has to send a sign and I will set about preparing myself, preparing the house.

  The first time we do it is in my car. I pick him up at his parents’ apartment building with a flask of red wine at my feet. It’s late in Madras, and I have been driving around the streets, staring at people, t
rying to make eye contact. But people are resilient. They stare away from me at some point ahead in the darkness.

  ‘There you are,’ Vik says, sliding into the passenger seat.

  We drive around and drink. I park outside the first house I ever lived in. The dead-end house on Gilchrist Avenue with its patio and ring of ashoka trees. It looks smaller now, ramshackle. Eventually, it will be torn down to make way for an apartment building, like Moses Paulraj’s house next door.

  ‘I had a bedroom with mustard paisley wallpaper,’ I say. ‘And I used to play with Fisher-Price toys. I made whole townships with those toys. But you probably don’t even know what a fucking Fisher-Price toy is, right?’

  ‘I fucking know,’ he says, smiling. There is nothing to trust about this man. Still, I want to crawl inside him.

  ‘I was a fat kid,’ he says, as if to offer something of his own childhood.

  ‘And did that traumatise you?’

  ‘I used to beat the shit out of anyone in my class if they called me fatso.’

  ‘A bully, then.’

  ‘And you, convent girl? What were you like?’

  I’m trying to imagine the kind of girl he normally goes with. One of those bandage-dress women at the party. Newfangled modern Indian woman. Smoker, drinker, drug-user, moneyed, gym fiend.

  ‘I used to clean the shit in other people’s toilet bowls when I was in America. I babysat, I worked in the cafeteria and the graveyard shift in the library. And you don’t ever want to play pool with me because I will skin your ass.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  After the deadness of Blake this is an awakening. I clamber on top of him and we are in a hurry to put our hands on one another. I feel like a teenager hiding out in the forest. There are dogs at the end of the street barking. The sex is brief and exhilarating. I sit there, legs crushed, breathing in the smell of him.

  There is a rap on the roof of the car. A cop at the window. He presses his face against the glass. He looks at us, mean and leering. I slide off, rearrange my skirt.

  ‘Hang on,’ Vik says. He zips up, gets out, guides the cop back to his patrol car up the road. Fifteen minutes later, he’s back. ‘I love this country,’ he says. ‘Everyone has a price.’

  *

  It’s easy to fall into brutishness here. For days I wander about in a tatty sarong, legs unshaven, hair anarchic. The wind eats into your face. No amount of coconut oil will salvage it. Everything corrodes. The rusted hooks, the locks crumbling on the latches of the gate, the sea beyond – breathing. Pointless to fight it. No swaddle of air-conditioned city life here. No sparkly dresses or expensive moisturisers to delude you into thinking you can stall the clocks. How I long for it.

  ‘Don’t you have a full-length mirror?’ Auntie Kavitha asks when she comes to visit. ‘You’ll forget what you look like.’

  Like mother like daughter, she’s probably thinking.

  We sit on the veranda smoking while Lucia naps.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asks. ‘Really. Do you get out much?’

  ‘Once or twice a month,’ I say. ‘I stay with my friends Samir and Rohini in Madras. I leave Lucia behind with Mallika, who always looks at me as if to say, What’s so important that you must leave your sister behind? Teacher would be happy to have her stay, but Lucy will not go. She won’t return to the room of her old life. But I leave her anyway, because I know if I can’t be with people it will erode me. Who can I speak to, after all?’

  ‘You didn’t have to do this, you know.’

  ‘You keep saying that.’

  When I was a teenager I used to think that my mother and Auntie Kavitha were lovers. I’d imagine them on their Thursday jaunts – laughing, doing girly things like lunching and shopping, then retreating to one of the rooms in Auntie Kavitha’s palatial house. Disrobing each other on a mirrored double bed. Being soft in the way women are.

  Knowing doesn’t change the way you remember things. Auntie Kavitha and I have talked about this before. The way memory is always dancing around our imaginary truths.

  Lucia walks down the staircase with fistfuls of socks and handkerchiefs.

  ‘Hi Lucy,’ Auntie Kavitha says.

  Lucia pauses at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Gimme biscuits,’ she says.

  ‘Say hello to Auntie first!’

  ‘Hello Auntie.’

  I settle Lucia at the table inside with a glass of milk and a plate of bourbons split in half so all the chocolate is on one side of the biscuit. She will take half an hour to eat them, swinging her socks as she slowly chews.

  ‘It isn’t difficult,’ I say. ‘It’s just the repetitiveness of it.’

  After Auntie Kavitha leaves, Lucia and I go out on the beach with the dogs. We have five of them now. Raja, our golden one. Bagheera, our Nubian queen, and their three black-and-white daughters – Hunter, Thompson and Flopsy. They rush out of the gate and put their snouts in the air, sniffing to see if enemy packs are nearby. We charge after them, Lucia and I, flinging our rubber slippers in the sand, feeling the scrub between our toes. The dogs run in and out of the waves, wetting their paws, except for Raja, who is afraid of water. We walk past the newly constructed ashram, where white-robed foreigners sometimes drift out to do yoga by the reclining stone Buddha. Past the derelict beach resort with its dead date palms and sagging volleyball net, where on weekends groups of city men gather to drink beer.

  We pass the scattering of half-built houses constructed too close to the sea. Muslim fishermen from the neighbouring village are out with their lines. They look like office clerks with long-sleeved shirts and trousers. They must have jobs they can hurry away from, because at four they are standing in the sand with their skullcaps and their small cloth bags of tackle – casting and reeling, casting and reeling. When they see us approach, they lift their lines high so we can crouch under, or they press them close to the sand for us to jump over. They do not like the dogs, and sometimes raise their hands to shoo them away. But they always smile at Lucia. ‘Sister?’ they ask as I pass. I do what I always do when any of the locals try to speak with me. I pretend I am not from this place. I smile benignly with no sense that I have understood their question. I wave at them instead, and Lucia, because she is happy, waves too.

  We keep walking till there is nothing but beach and casuarina, shell and flotsam. The dogs are manic. They bite and play, and I imagine because joy is tearing out of them, they turn to us and howl. Lucia and I do it too: raise our heads to the sky and howl as if the sea was a window and we were climbing out of it.

  10

  A death in the village. All night there are drums. I close the shutters and windows along the west-facing wall, but the pounding-thumping sounds roll through. Mallika tells me that the man who died was an important man – a school headmaster, which means there will be drums all week.

  In the morning I find Lucia awake in bed, legs stretched out, her collection of new friends – a ragtag group of napkins, handkerchiefs and socks – lined up meticulously on either side of her. She has given up on her stuffed animals and jigsaw puzzles. All the old toys sit mildewing in the corner. These new friends go everywhere with her. She spends hours picking each one up, gently flipping it forwards and backwards, flick flick flick with her wrists, proceeding to go down the entire marching order, only to start again. Sometimes she sings as she does this, rocking her body forwards and backwards. If one of these friends goes missing, or if I try to put them in the washing machine, she hollers at me, ‘Gimme back blue, Grace … gimme blue.’

  ‘You look tired, Lucy. Didn’t you sleep?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Too much noise, right? I know. Shall we have a bath, then? Get going for the day?’

  I run the water in the bucket and nudge the plastic stool over with my feet. Lucia’s bathroom is open to the sky, so when I look up I can see part of a new construction next door, black-shouldered kites swooping and darting, clouds in the shape of a dancing bear.

  ‘C’mo
n,’ I rally. ‘C’mon, c’mon.’

  She stands in front of me, waiting for me to strip her down to panties and brassiere. She has lost a little weight thanks to our daily walks, although she’s still a hearty girl – arms and legs, bum and breasts and face.

  She lowers herself carefully onto the stool and I pour mugs of warm water over her. I squeeze a glob of body wash into the bath sponge and hand it to her so she can scrub under her arms and between her toes. There are faint strings of hair along her arms and legs. I refill the bucket three times.

  ‘More,’ she says, when she sees me about to fetch the towel.

  ‘Just one more, then.’

  I fill the bucket and I do what my grandmother used to do to me. It’s the one fond memory I have of Grandma Loretta. When we used to visit them in Tranquebar, she would make us girl cousins line up in the bathroom, and for each of us, she’d pour a bucket of water over our heads like a waterfall, saying, ‘Karuvi, karuvi, karuvi,’ slowly first, and then whoosh, the final splash, which took your breath away.

  I do this to Lucia – ‘Karuvi, karuvi, karuvi’ – and when the water’s finished, she stands, and I wrap the towel around her while I help to remove her wet underwear. Such care to modesty. This is the way Teacher taught me to bathe her. And when she’s dry, on goes the talcum powder, a storm of it. She does this cheerfully, dousing her armpits with talc, then putting out her palm and patting splodges of powder on her face and in the ridges of her neck.

  We are having golden days at the beach. The sea is flat, the horizon white. Boats shimmer in the distance, the noise of their motors faint and far. Everything is held in a sun-bleached March lull.

  Bagheera was on the lawn with a dead chicken this morning. She had her puppies a few weeks ago, but she still won’t allow us to follow her to them. Mallika thinks she must have had a big litter because of the way she’s skulking around the house, perpetually hungry, her teats swollen and pink. Her three daughters are pregnant too. Lucia is delirious at the idea of so many puppies. ‘After this, we’re bringing the Blue Cross in to fix them,’ I warn her. ‘That’s the end of the puppies. How are we going to look after so many dogs?’