An Unrestored Woman (16 page)

“What can she do?”

“She can tell your future,” he said.

Alok laughed. “My future then,” he said.

“First the money,” the boy said.

Alok dug into his pocket and all he had was an eight-anna coin, the rest were rupee notes. The coin clanged when he put it into the pan. The monkey, at the sound of the clang, sprang into action as if she were a windup toy. She danced a little jig, ran to and fro, then she took the coin Alok had placed in the pan and put it in her mouth. “She's swallowed it.” He chuckled.

“No she hasn't,” the boy said, “she's telling your future.”

“Well, what is it?”

“You'll soon see death,” the boy said.

Alok's heart buckled. Sarojini! “You lie,” he screamed back as he ran. “You and that damned monkey.” The boy looked away but the monkey stood still, watching him, and seemed to smile.

*   *   *

Benares was dark by the time Alok Debnath found himself in Nadesar Park. He continued wandering down Raja Bazar Road and then onto the grounds of the Sanskrit University. He sat on the edge of the fountain with the stone swans and began to cry. He felt as lost and as afraid as a child. He thought of his mother. When he was six years old she had taken him shopping with her one evening. She had bought vegetables for dinner, eggplant and potatoes and ginger, a few sprigs of cilantro, and when he had tugged at her sari and asked her to buy him a pomegranate, she'd said, “No, not today, I don't have time to take out all those seeds for you.” They had squabbled for a moment and finally she had given in and said, “If I buy it for you you'll have to take them out yourself.”

He'd stood defiant—all six years of him—and said, “I will.”

“You will,” she said.

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” he said.

She had bought the pomegranate and as they walked home Alok had let go of her hand to watch a snake charmer on the side of the road, and as the snake had emerged from the basket a landaulet turned the corner and one of the horses reared in fright and the other horse swung to the side and caught his mother's rib, and by the time Alok understood enough to run to her she was dead. A crowd had gathered. Two British women who had gotten down from the landaulet were shielding their faces, sobbing, and repeating, Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. All the other people around his mother were Indians, peasants, and they looked on silently. Alok turned from them to his mother and saw that the pomegranate had rolled and been crushed, and was lying at the tip of his mother's outstretched hand. It looked to him like she was taking out the seeds for him, after all. He walked to the middle of the circle of onlookers, bent down, picked up the pomegranate and began to eat it. A man standing beside him slapped him. “How dare you,” he said. What could Alok say? Not even he understood. It took him many years, more than twenty, to finally figure out the reasons he had picked up the pomegranate and eaten it in the moment of his mother's death: he had wanted to make her proud, to show her that he could, that he knew, he
sensed
, even at the age of six, that he would never again be a child, and that nothing, not even her death, could keep him from continuing, from living—which is what she would have wanted—and that, most important of all, he, Alok Debnath, her son, would always, always keep his promises.

Alok Debnath looked up from his tears but the swans stared back without a sound. “What's wrong with you?” he shouted at them. And then he said to himself, Why couldn't I be made of stone. A gust of cold wind whipped past him and he tugged his coat closer. He turned around. Behind him was the main university building—red and Gothic and leaping into the dark night like a tongue of flame. Its portico was protected from the wind and he crawled into one of its far corners and drifted to sleep. He dreamed that somebody was tugging at his sixth finger and he mumbled, “Bunny, stop it.”

*   *   *

He ran and ran and ran. All of Calcutta, all of India, every little boy and every little monkey, filled him with rage. They would not take another woman from him. He wouldn't let them; he forbade it. He returned to Lansdowne Road, looked wildly about him, and decided Sarojini had gone to the Victoria Memorial. They liked to go to the building site on Sundays to see what had been added. It was like watching the Taj Mahal being built. Then they'd sit on the banks of the Hooghly and eat roasted peanuts. All this whizzed through his mind—the peanuts, the river, the Taj Mahal—as he raced up Lansdowne, across Elgin Road, and then north on Chowringhee Road in a hired rickshaw.

It was dark by the time the rickshaw wallah pulled onto Queen's Way. The Victoria Memorial glowed like a white hot candle against the warm night sky. He raced to their usual spot: a sort of pier that was built along the reflecting pool. The wooden boards clattered and shook as he raced up and down the viewing area, but she wasn't there. She wasn't there. Alok crumpled onto the pier, the water in the reflecting pool lapping gently at his hunched body. He cried out, “Sarojini!” The few people taking their after-dinner walks looked at him, and then moved away. One or two children hid behind their father's legs. The memorial seemed to flare with laughter, with its white and awful and treacherous teeth, as if it had conspired to hide her. Alok closed his eyes. The only thing left to do was to go home. But he couldn't face the empty rooms, not yet. He glanced at the reflecting pool and saw in the dim light that there was something at the bottom of the pool. A dark form. It couldn't be! He jumped in, stretched out his arms and tugged at the water. When he reached it he plunged deeper into the pool and lifted it tenderly with both hands, but it was only seaweed. Floating without a care on an enclosed body of water that was not at all connected to the sea. So how did it get there? Alok dropped it back into the water with a splash and let out a cry. It was a question that he too asked himself. So how did I get here? The answer, if there was one, seeming dizzyingly simple or dizzyingly complex. He turned back toward the pier and under the thin light of the stars the white marble of the moon and the white marble of the Victoria Memorial were the same, as if one had been chiseled from the other, and they bathed his dripping body in a pearl-like luminescence.

“Hey, hey, get out of there.” It was a chowkidar, standing on the edge of the pier.

Alok stopped.

“Hey, you, I'm talking to you. What are you? Deaf?”

He recognized him. He had a paunch, and a handlebar mustache. He patrolled on Sundays.

“I know you! Have you seen my wife?” Alok yelled back.

“Your what? I said get out of there.”

“My wife.” Alok took long strides toward the pier. When he reached it he stayed in the pool and looked up at the chowkidar. “My wife,” he said. “We come here sometimes on Sundays.”

“Get out of there, I say.” He looked up. “Pagal! You'd think it was a full moon tonight.”

They were silent.

“How did that seaweed get there?” Alok asked.

“Seaweed? What seaweed?”

Alok pointed to it. The chowkidar arched his neck to have a look. “That's seaweed?” he asked. “Looks like a crocodile.”

“It's not. It's seaweed.”

The chowkidar shrugged. “Who cares,” he said. “Get out of there before I have to come in after you.”

*   *   *

Alok Debnath left the grounds of the Sanskrit University. He guessed it was between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. It was a moonless night. Most of the streetlights were burned out. Why are the streetlights burned out? he asked himself. What is the year, what is my name? “My name is Alok Debnath,” he said into the dark. “I am eighty-four years old, the year is 1976, the year of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, and that's why the streetlights are burned out.” This series of thoughts, instead of making him less anxious, made him more anxious: What am I doing out here in the middle of the night? He could practically taste the river now. Such a mighty river, the mightiest. He'd mapped it so many times—it and its tributaries—that he could lay down against its twists and turns as if it were the body of a woman. That's it, that's why I'm out here: I'm looking for Rekha! His sense of purpose was renewed and he increased his pace, roughly following St. Kabir Road. By the time he got to the Durga Mandir he was exhausted. He sat on the steps of the orange and ochre temple and wondered which direction Pancha Ganga Ghat was in. He couldn't possibly know. He decided instead to head straight for the river and to then look for the ghat.

As he neared the river the alleyways narrowed. They cut into one another, some ended abruptly; the smell of incense was thick in the passages, most no wider than he was. Holes were cut into several of the walls along the corridors, and when he ducked into one he saw that it was a temple, small and dank and flooded with red and golden light. A young Brahmin was in the interior, chanting prayers, petals drifting down the deity's jewels and silks and landing at the priest's feet. Alok Debnath folded his hands and said a prayer. “May I find her,” he whispered, and edged out of the tiny opening. He stepped back into the passageway. He passed a niche cut into a stone wall with a seated Ganesh, his belly rubbed bright red with kumkum, and then another temple, with an old sadhu sleeping under its eaves, and then the horizon seemed to lighten but no, it was the river. Alok Debnath looked out at the Ganga. There were a few small white swells on its surface but mostly it was gray, with a sandbar peeping above the water in the distance. He heard the water lapping against the stone steps. People were huddled and sleeping, and not wanting to wake them, he stepped around them gingerly. He noticed with dismay that all the slums—where Rekha most likely had lived—had been razed. Gandhi had taken care of them as well as the streetlights, but it no longer mattered, he felt lucid. He felt more lucid than he had in years.

It was as he was standing on the Brahma Ghat that Alok Debnath was approached by a young man. He could tell he was young by his voice. He could also tell he was thin. It was still too dark to see him clearly, though when the man struck a match to light his beedi, Alok Debnath saw his betel nut–stained lips, the dark hollows of his eyes, and the flash of greed in them. Remember them, he told himself, remember his greedy eyes.

“Where are you off to, grandpa? A little early for bathing, isn't it?”

“I'm not bathing,” Alok Debnath said.

“Oh?”

What was it he was supposed to remember? He scratched his head. “I'm looking for someone,” he finally said.

The young man slapped his shoulder. He took a drag of his beedi. “I'm your man,” he said. “I know everyone from here to Sarnath. Who is it?”

“Her name is Rekha.”

“Rekha! I know hundreds of Rekhas. Give me a little more, grandpa.”

The red glow from the man's beedi pulsed like a warning. Alok Debnath hesitated. He could describe her, sure, but it would be a description of her ass. The tiny dimples, the downy hairs, and oh, the exquisite roundness of it. “She's a young woman,” he said.

The young man laughed. “Compared to you everyone is young.”

“She said she lived in Pancha Ganga Ghat, on the western edge of the mosque.”

“Servant?”

“No.”

“Whore?”

The young man let out a puff of smoke. Even in the dark Alok Debnath could see his smirk. “Pancha Ganga, you say?”

“Near the mosque.”

He thought for a moment. His voice lifted. “What is her pimp's name? Naagi?” He didn't wait for a response. “Follow me,” he said. They plunged back into the labyrinth of alleyways. They walked away from the river. Deeper and deeper into the incense-choked passages. The alleys grew narrower, more breathless in the looming dark. Shouldn't it be morning by now? Alok Debnath struggled to keep up. His feet ached. His lungs burned. He wanted to tell this strange man to stop, to tell him he wanted to go home, to tell him he had never felt so lonely. “What's the matter, grandpa? Can't keep up?” The man laughed and pulled him along. A rat scurried past. Alok Debnath stopped. “No, no, no,” he heard the young man saying. “You can't turn back now. We're almost there.” The close alleyway was still dark, doors and windows were shuttered on either side, but when he looked up, Alok Debnath noticed that the sky had lightened. Just a little. Just enough. It's morning, he thought with relief, it's almost over.

*   *   *

Alok left the Victoria Memorial, dripping wet, and walked along Cathedral Road back down to Chowringhee. He stopped in Elgin Park. It was near their flat, and he was exhausted, and the night was cool. There were no benches in the park—just a strip of grass and some trees. He walked to its center and sat cross-legged on the grass. A goat walked toward him. There was a high iron fence around the park, and Alok wondered how the goat had gotten in. Through the gates, like anybody else, he guessed. Maybe it had jumped over the fence. It seemed miraculous to him: that a ridiculous-looking creature like a goat could sail gracefully over such a high fence. It ambled over to him and stared at him with a forlorn look in its eyes, as if Alok were sitting on the juiciest patch of grass in all of India. “Come now,” Alok said to the goat, “you can't want
this
exact patch, can you?” The goat blinked and continued with its sad stare. “Fine,” he said, giving in and getting up. He was dusting off his pants—their dampness had collected every dry blade of grass and dirt in the vicinity—when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Sarojini.

“My God,” he cried, and took her in his arms and pressed her close to him. He had never done so in public, had never so much as touched her, but what did it matter? She was here, in his arms. He wanted to ask her a million questions, but the goat was still watching them. He took her hand and said, “Come, he'll start crying if we don't leave this patch of grass.” She laughed, and it seemed to him that he'd never really heard her laugh before. They settled themselves under a neighboring chalta tree. “Look here,” he began, “Where—”