Small Days and Nights Read online

  I’ve stayed away from Madras and Vik for a month. I see on Facebook that he’s busy with boozy Sunday brunches at five-star hotels. There was a photograph of him with a group of people, none of whom I know. And there was a girl – in white, looking at him and laughing. I cannot explain, but I know there’s something there. She is copper-skinned with thick eyebrows. One of those women who does not dwell on her beauty but knows how to use it.

  I carry this picture of her around in me for days, making myself sick. I’d known from the start that the world he was so dismissive of was one he needed. He might read Schopenhauer, take Vipassana courses, befriend older women and generally do things no other men of his group might, but eventually, the indoctrination was strong. There was a string that pulled him back to the centre of family, to the allegiance of school friends, to the making of money. At some point he would have to give me up.

  Lucia and I are watching David Attenborough’s Planet Earth series every evening. It seems an apt prelude to what lies ahead. The circle of life, et cetera. The more I watch, the more I believe Hinduism has captured the essence of life as a philosophy. Everything hinges on the circumstances of your birth, after all – the kind of life you have, the kind of death. Will you be a measly krill? Or will you be a turtle who makes the journey back and forth from its birthplace for eighty years. Or will you be truly amazing? A wondrous octopus, a dugong, a rhizome?

  ‘That man has come,’ Mallika says, standing at the door.

  When I lean over the banister I see that it’s Vik, with a bottle of wine and Chinese takeaway.

  ‘You’re here.’

  ‘Isn’t it about time?’ he calls back.

  He comes upstairs, hovers uneasily at Lucia’s bedroom door.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, looking at her. ‘Hey,’ he says again. ‘She’s not big on saying hello, huh?’

  ‘She doesn’t really know you. Besides, when you come over, I basically dump her, so what do you expect?’

  We eat dinner together. This is a first. Bringing It All Back Home on the stereo, fancy bone-china plates on the table. Vik heats the takeaway on the stove with a kitchen towel flung over his left shoulder, sticking his finger in the Szechuan chicken to test if it’s hot enough. Lucia is in her usual chair, picking her nose determinedly. She’s flapping a tatty blue sock back and forth.

  ‘Stop it, Lucy,’ I say. But she ignores me, continues to flap and pick.

  Dinner is stilted. There’s no mention of the girl with copper skin and bushy eyebrows. No explanation for why there’s been such a long silence.

  ‘How long are you going to live out here for anyway?’ Vik asks. ‘Do you even have the number of the local cop?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Villagers can be dangerous pricks.’

  ‘We haven’t had any trouble.’

  ‘You could sell this place, you know? The land prices are insane. Find a place in the city. You could get a job, find a vocational centre for your sister.’

  ‘But we like it here.’

  ‘Okay. Sure. I’m just saying. It’s no place for a woman alone. Sorry, this is India. This is just how it is. You want to go all Little House on the Prairie or whatever, but that doesn’t work here. You want a garden, put it on the terrace of your city flat. You want a dog, get a Lhasa Apso.’

  The sex that night is different. Something has been dismantled. Afterwards, he holds me in the usual way, arms enfolding, stomach to back. ‘What’s wrong?’ he whispers. I pretend to be asleep.

  11

  This morning, incessant cries from the brush. I shrug on a housecoat and go downstairs. The French doors are open. Lucia and Mallika are standing all the way down by the brick compound wall.

  I find my slippers and a straw hat and walk over to them. They are examining Bagheera, who is lying on her side in the shade of a neem bush with six puppies suckling at her. Six splotches of black and white. Mallika and Lucia crouch beside her, grinning.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘See how many, Grace,’ Lucia points.

  Mallika yanks the pups one by one off Bagheera’s teats to check their sex. ‘Boy!’ she announces proudly when she sees a sliver of penis. The girls, of which there are three, she tosses aside, and they blindly grope their way back to their mother.

  ‘Good girl,’ I say to Bagheera, who looks as though she can’t wait to sequester herself from all these demanding tongues.

  ‘Do you hear?’ I say, pointing backwards. ‘There’s a sound coming from there?’

  The three of us walk towards the house, trying not to get our legs caught in the bramble and thorn.

  ‘Why haven’t you worn your slippers?’ I scold Mallika, who’s bending over to disengage her leg from a creeper.

  ‘It’s time to do the weeding,’ she says, cutting across the brush, following the noise. She stoops, lifts up a stack of palmyra leaves, and underneath there’s a puppy sitting in the sand, crying violently. It’s mostly white, with two black patches around its eyes like a panda and a twirly black line above its mouth. There’s a piece of twine caught around its neck. Pink paws, bluish eyes, a mouth full of mud.

  ‘Pick it up!’ Lucia shrieks.

  Mallika unties the twine from around the puppy’s neck, revealing a raw pink gash in the fur. It’s a fat thing, looks almost like a kitten.

  ‘How’d you get all the way out here? Let’s get you back to Mama.’

  We trudge back to Bagheera and put the puppy down in the sand. She tries to lift herself but her hind legs give way, collapse under her weight. She sits there spread out like a miniature exotic rug, crying.

  ‘What’s wrong, girl? Too fat to stand up? There there,’ I say, picking her up and placing her directly on one of Bagheera’s teats.

  The sight of all those puppies jostling and feeding is startling.

  Bagheera suddenly stands and shakes the pups off her, scratches violently at a halo of fleas and walks in the direction of the house.

  ‘She doesn’t want her,’ Mallika says.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You saw the puppy’s back legs? She can’t stand up. I think the mother left her there to die.’

  ‘Take the puppy back to the house with Lucia. Try giving it some water. I’m going to the beach.’

  *

  There’s a scattering of geckos when I lift the latch of the gate. Ten a.m. The beach is a desert. I sit in the sand burning my backside, feeling the hot wind lash at my ankles. Everything gleams and blurs in this harsh light. The dogs have found their way through the holes in the brick wall. It isn’t beach time, but they’re happy to be out. Raja, Hunter, Thompson, Flopsy – skidding their bums across the sand.

  To my right is the village of Paramankeni. From this distance you cannot see the rivers of plastic clogging up the sewers. Only coconut trees that arch gracefully towards the sea, a clutter of brightly coloured fishing boats, a jumble of nets. There’s something in all this stillness that expands time, pulls it up and around you. It’s terrifying to be alone in it.

  I’ve been thinking of Blake. Wondering whether it has all been a mistake. If life isn’t about what’s raw or necessary, but merely what you can endure. Perhaps it was not so difficult, the things I found monotonous, the facile conversations, the dead-dead sex. Perhaps I should have seen it as a comfort rather than a danger.

  I roll up my pyjama bottoms and walk into the sea. The water is cooler than I expected, refreshing. I wish I could take everything off and swim out to where the waves are breaking. But I just stand there, holding my hitched-up pants, peering at the horizon through my glasses.

  Two figures are walking towards me from the village. Boys. Men. Seventeen, eighteen, hard to say. They’re in short-sleeved shirts and lungis. Spry, wiry, walnut-coloured. They park themselves on a ridge of sand a little away from where my slippers are. They smoke and stare. The dogs have emerged from the shade of bushes and are making soft snarly noises, just to say, ‘We’re here.’ I feel afraid and I’m not even sure why
. But there’s something about these boys. The way they’re leering at me. I’ve seen it in some of the migrant men, who always seem to be playing in the movie version of their lives – but this is not that. This is real and unsettling. It’s desire and hate, and I feel stripped away.

  I walk towards them and slide my feet into my slippers. They are still staring at me. ‘What?’ I bark. ‘What are you looking at? What do you want? Not enough beach for you, you have to come and sit right here?’

  I know they don’t understand what I’m saying, but I can only say it in English because the few Tamil words I know have disappeared. It’s a fear that’s jerking around inside me. I’m telling myself it’s only the stories I’ve been reading in the news lately – all those girls and women raped and dumped and hanging from trees. It’s Mallika’s penis-worshipping the puppies that’s bothering me, the bloody propagation of patriarchy by women in this country. I’m telling myself that I’m strong. I’m standing outside my own house, the dogs are here, it’s fucking daylight! Nothing is going to happen. But I’m a quivering mess by the time I get to the gate. The dogs whisk through, shaking the sand off their coats, all gambol and play. I latch the gate, and I run up the stone path to the house, and by the time I get to my room and lock the door, I’m weeping.

  12

  The headman Valluvan’s house is not the largest in the village, but the land around it sprawls with coconut and mango trees, and his wife, Nila, who’s constantly hunched over a broom, keeps it as clean as a shrine.

  When I get there, he’s sitting in his usual place – on the thinnai, reading a newspaper. He’s wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and blue checked lungi, and his gold watch glints in the sun when he waves.

  ‘Didn’t bring your sister?’

  ‘She’s too busy taking care of a new puppy,’ I say, standing in his yard and looking around.

  The clothes line sags with children’s clothes and a row of plastic pots filled with water sit in the baking sand. ‘Something’s different? You put on a new roof?’

  ‘Yes,’ Valluvan says. ‘We got rid of the thatch and put tiles.’

  ‘Looks nice and pukkah.’

  ‘Hot today, isn’t it?’ he says.

  We always exchange pleasantries about the weather, even though it’s only ever too hot, too rainy or too dry. There is never not enough heat.

  I leave my slippers beside a cluster of others lined up outside the house and follow Valluvan inside. He flicks on three glaring tube lights and motions to one of the squat jute stools in the room.

  Most times I visit we talk about village politics and the state of Valluvan’s crops. Today he wants to talk about safety. ‘There was a death in Mugaiyur,’ he says. ‘Near here. A fellow called Perumal. He was a lorry driver but had some kind of land-brokering business on the side. Yesterday afternoon a group of thugs dragged him out of his house and beat him to death with sticks.’

  I stare at the teal-painted wall ahead. There’s a calendar, which is still stuck on the month of July, and a photograph of a smiling woman saint they call Amma, who gives benediction to her devotees by hugging them.

  ‘Some of us think that these brokers will be coming for our land next. There is a coal-plant project they want to build near here and all these government goons are involved. There’s little we can do. You should join us. Find a city lawyer to help us.’

  Valluvan narrows his eyes and pinches his forehead. He has the brightest cuticles I’ve ever seen. There are strands of grey creeping into his moustache and the sides of his hair.

  ‘We have to be quick. There are so many of these fellows hanging around, asking questions. It would be better to be prepared.’

  Nila appears at the doorway all of a sudden in a strange kind of get-up – a gaudy, shapeless kaftan with a thin cotton towel thrown across the frilly front of it.

  ‘Tea?’ she asks.

  ‘No, no. I’m going now. I just came to check in.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask one of your man friends?’ Valluvan says, as I stand. ‘Maybe they can help.’

  Was that a sneer? I can’t tell. But when I look back at them from the road, I see that it’s not judgement in their eyes but fear.

  I walk back through the village – the houses all a mix of exposed brick, thatch, cow dung and mud. There’s obviously some kind of caste hierarchy here, but I don’t know exactly how it works. Some have motorbikes, some have cows and chickens and goats. All of them are poorer than they’d like to be.

  There’s an empty plot of land at the corner of the village, and the road that leads to my house. It’s protected by a massive concrete wall, but when I pass the gate and look inside, I see there’s a man squatting in the scrub, shitting. Alongside this road runs what remains of the Buckingham Canal. Not so long ago the city of Madras was navigable only through its water canals. Now this canal is a murky green strip where women sometimes stand knee-deep in water, bent over looking for clams, while battalions of lorries on the highway charge by with their horns.

  The whole day feels threadbare and alone. I’m thinking of the video Lucia and I saw last night of a young scientist who has figured out a way to dredge the ocean of its 5 trillion tonnes of plastic. In a few years 99 per cent of seabirds will have bits of plastic inside them. I dreamed of those five gigantic garbage patches in the ocean, big twirling gyres of crap. Ours might be the last generation to see big animals in the wild. Imagine. A world without the rhinoceros, elephant, tiger. And still we go, in this country, lurching wildly into the future with our incomparable biological imperatives. One point two billion people and still fucking. We should put that on a bumper sticker.

  When I get home I call Vik. ‘I need to see you,’ I say. ‘And I need the name of a really good lawyer.’

  13

  Lucia wakes later and later. The new puppy sleeps in a basket on the floor beside her. She is still having trouble with her hind legs. We have named her Golly, shortened for Good Golly Miss Molly.

  At nights Lucia is up several times, in and out of the loo to splash water on her face, opening and slamming the bathroom door. In the morning I look into her room and she is sleeping like a turtle, awash in the middle of her bed, stomach to mattress, legs and arms tucked under her, chin to one side. The puppy has shat on the newspapers spread on the floor and is crying. I pick her up and take her downstairs to Bagheera, who is lying under a frangipani with the rest of the pups tugging at her. I shove one of the other pups aside and plonk Golly on a teat.

  I go out on the beach with the rest of the dogs. Catamarans are being steered onto shore and fishermen are hauling in their nets. I think of walking and walking and never turning back.

  I turn around and walk back. I shave my legs. I set up the mirror in the sunlight and tweeze the extra hairs from around my eyebrows and above my lip.

  At breakfast I say to Lucy, ‘I’m going to Madras for two nights. You’re going to stay here with Mallika. Better be a good girl, okay? If you’re good, I’ll bring you some mutton biryani. Okay?’

  Lucia looks away, flipping her blue sock back and forth.

  After a while she says, ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘Mummy’s gone to God, Lucy. Remember? Mummy used to look after you and now I do.’

  Sometimes Lucia’s eyes fill up with tears, but as far as I can tell this is not connected to any kind of sadness. She will be sitting at the table, or on the couch with one leg hitched up to her ear, tapping and swishing, and she’ll be somewhere else, far away from anywhere. The tears never spill. They just stay there, and then vanish.

  As I’m stacking the breakfast dishes in the sink, the dogs set to barking. ‘Who is it, Lucy? Go see!’

  When I come out of the pantry, Lucia hasn’t moved.

  At the door I see the Sneha Centre van parked at the shed and Teacher hobbling out.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I say, walking towards her. Normally Teacher doesn’t come without calling first. ‘Did you do something to your leg?’

  ‘Oh, it’s n
othing,’ Teacher says, hobbling with increased determination. ‘I fell.’

  There is another woman walking behind her – pyramid-shaped with thinning hair. She shuffles respectfully behind Teacher.

  ‘Lucy, kanna,’ Teacher shouts as she enters the house. She leaves her slippers at the door and steps over the wooden threshold with care.

  There is a quality of exaggeration about Teacher that I have come to hate. Even when she speaks, it is as if she has been holding in all her thoughts, waiting for the moment you ask a question, and then she bombards you until you have to cut her off.

  Lucia is smiling. After a brief glance at Teacher to establish her identity, she has now looked away, eyes twinkling, tossing the sock back and forth with renewed vigour.

  ‘Ey,’ Teacher says. ‘Where are you looking off to? I’m here. Lucy, look at me.’

  She parks herself next to Lucia on the cushion and wrests away the sock.

  Lucia turns to her and starts pulling Teacher’s hair out of her bun.

  Teacher giggles. ‘She doesn’t like my hair tied up. Funny girl. I always had to keep my hair in a plait when Lucy stayed with us. I can’t believe I forgot about that. Ey, Lucy, say, “Good morning, Teacher.”’

  Lucia repeats mechanically, ‘Good morning, Teacher.’

  The other woman has inched into the house. She sits beside Teacher and announces, ‘She looks depressed.’

  ‘Sorry, who are you?’ I say.

  ‘Mrs Subhalakshmi is a psychoanalyst. She works with special-needs children.’

  ‘Sorry to ask,’ Mrs Subhalakshmi says, ‘but do you think this has been the right move for her? Do you have daily activities planned? Are you engaging enough? She seems much more withdrawn than when I saw her last.’