"From the place to which I am now going." Flashing a quick, tight smile of her own, she swallowed the last of the teacola and reached down with one hand to pick up her shopping bag. Before she could rise, the disappointed smiler had grabbed her other wrist. Not painfully. Just hard enough to restrain her. As her uncle Chamudi had often restrained her. Gently but irresistibly, his grin returning to its full enhanced orthodontic brilliance, the man started to pull her across the table toward him.
Somewhat less gently and just as irresistibly, she raised her left leg, locked it out straight, and pushed the heel of her foot against his crotch underneath the table. "Keep pulling," she suggested encouragingly.
The smile drained away from the man's face. So did some of the color. Letting go of her wrist, he sat back in his chair and affected the air of the unaffected as he looked around to see if anyone else noticed what was happening. In this he had only partial success.
She withdrew her foot. What she wanted to do was ram it into him hard enough so that it came out his asshole, with his balls balanced on her heel. But it would do no good to antagonize this spoiled pair any further. Mall security might take an interest in any more expansive confrontation, and if there was one thing Taneer had impressed on her more than anything else it was a need right now to avoid attracting any kind of official attention.
So she fought off the urge to make a point, drew back her leg, and rose. At least she could enjoy the look on the face of Mr. Smiley's now bewildered companion. As for Mr. Smiley himself, he was looking increasingly unwell.
"So interesting to make your acquaintance. Not seeing you again soon, I think." She sashayed off, lengthening her stride as she reached the boundaries of the food court, deliberately refusing to look back. When she finally did so, her smarmy, self-confident accosters were nowhere to be seen. She started to shake: with anger, not with fear. Getting herself back under control, she began working her way toward the exit that linked the mall to its proprietary subway terminal.
Never again would a man, any man, treat her the way Uncle Chamudi had done. Touch her the way he had. The pop-out ceramic blade that was built into and took the shape of the heel of her shoe remained sheathed. Smiley-face would never know how lucky he had been that she had decided only to make an impression on him.
She did not go straight home. Taneer's instructions as to how she needed to travel had been very explicit. He had only to tell her some thing once and she would remember it. Halfway across the city she got out of the subway, took the escalator up to the street, and began to walk. Baroghly was a border area. As she covered ground, her sur roundings changed very quickly from lower middle-class to poor. Not to abject poor. She did not go as far as the antiquated hovels of Outer Sealadhan. She did not have to. There was enough of a mix in the human crush of Baroghly to suit her needs.
The reek from the public restroom was almost overpowering. No tourists could have stood it for more than a few seconds, and few respectable citizens of the city would have tried. Waiting until the entrance to the women's section was deserted, Depahli did not hesitate, but walked straight toward it and entered. She did not like the stench, but she had no trouble tolerating it. It was more than familiar to her from her childhood as well as from her early years in Sagramanda.
On the third try she found an empty plastic stall that was not over whelmed with the stain of urine, the slickness of vomit, and the smear of human feces. Removing the collapsible, lightweight garment holder from her bag, she undressed as quickly as possible. Every gleam of gold went into a small box. The contents of a can of deodorized antiseptic played over her naked body. From the bottom of the bag she extracted a second, airtight container. The pre-stained, simple cotton sari it held fit her loosely, badly, thoroughly obscuring her figure. Today's veil was beige, with strategic yet unrevealing rips and tears.
She stood thus inside the stall, listening to the comings and goings of poor women and their chattering, bawling, screaming children, before finally emerging. The stink of the restroom clung to her clothing but, thanks to the spray, not to her skin. No one looked in her direction when she stepped outside the overwhelmed public facility. No covetous female or lustful male eyes followed her progress as she limped up the street.
A short stroll through the sultry, steaming early evening would bring her to a bus stop. The creaking fuel-cell bus would carry her to the terminal for an older subway line, one that did not cross the gleaming tracks of the line that ran past Chowringhee Mall. One more change to another line, suffering the disapproving stares of irritated middle-class commuters, would deposit her a few blocks from the innocuous apartment building that was home. That would be followed by another foray into a much cleaner public restroom where she would change again, finally able to walk free and clean back to the temporary home she and Taneer shared.
It was a lot of effort simply to get home from a day of shopping, but she did not mind. She knew what real work was, and having to endure repeated changes of clothing and public transportation was not work. Operating a hand loom until your fingertips bled and your fin gernails fell out in a poorly ventilated, un-air-conditioned sweatshop surrounded by dozens of other vacant-eyed children, that was work. Begging in the streets for the occasional pitiful rupee or two while fighting off the come-ons of fat, leering, sweaty old men, that was work. Complying with Taneer's directives to repeatedly change her clothing and return home by multiple devious routes, that was not work. It was a game. An important game, to be sure. He had impressed that on her. But not work, nonetheless.
There were people who very badly wanted to take what he had, he had explained to her as he had held both her hands in his and stared solemnly into her eyes. People who would do terrible things to both of them to learn the secret he knew. Better to avoid such people until he could make arrangements to sell the valuable knowledge the details of which only he knew. He was in the process of organizing that sale. It would make them rich. Once the sale was an accomplished fact, there would be no point in anyone hunting them any longer. They would be able to go anywhere they wanted, in confidence and safety. To Delhi, per haps, or Mumbai, or Hyderabad, or even overseas. In America, Taneer had a distant cousin on his mother's side. Perhaps they could go there. The cousin had told Taneer's father Anil that there were many people of Indian extraction in America, and that life there was very good indeed.
Of course, they were in hiding from Anil Buthlahee too. Taneer's father had not been shy in expressing his disapproval of their relation ship. But he could not reach them, could not harm them, in America.
Live in America. Depahli had seen America. In movies, on television, on the Net. It was a place of wonders. Violent, yes. Confusing, yes. But she had not seen anything that suggested she would not be able to adapt to it or that was likely to give her problems.
She lived in Sagramanda.
The tiger had come out of the Sundarbans. That was certain. Under cover of night, it had worked its way into the southeastern suburbs of the city. This was not as difficult to do as a visitor from elsewhere might imagine. Sagramanda was full of parks and residential green-belts; a necessary if permanently insufficient counterweight to the burgeoning pressure of its swollen and always growing population. Eternally in need of land, the expanding megalopolis had long ago pushed and shoved its way up against the immense delta complex where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra merged to form the world's largest remaining mangrove swamp. The ever-shifting waterways on the western side of the border with Bangladesh constituted the Indian portion of the Sundarbans Preserve. Traveling only at night, it was possible for large animals to migrate, to work their way into the outskirts of the metropolis itself. Monkeys did so with ease. The chital and sambar deer that populated many of the city's green areas moved freely between parks and the delta of the Sundarbans.