“Well, we can have someone take a look at it later.” Soraya smiles over at Miyole. “Did you get enough to eat?”
Miyole slurps the last of her drink and grins. “Yup.”
Miyole. I’m not doing this for me. If I have to sell the sloop to keep her safe, so be it.
The sun has sunk below the rooftops by the time we leave the tapri. Even though I’m still some angry with Rushil, I mean to tell him what’s happened, where we’re going. But he and Pala aren’t in his trailer when we go to collect our things. Even the shipyard cats are hiding. A patchwork of plastic and metal cover the gaping hole in the fence. Soraya stands awkwardly inside the gate, clutching her shoulder bag and darting her eyes at every dog barking or shout from the street while I stuff our few possessions in a rice sack and seal up the ship.
“Aren’t we going to say bye to Rushil?” Miyole asks as I turn the hand crank to close the loading ramp. Rushil and I haven’t finished replacing the burned-out power couplings to the door motor yet. We had planned to fix the coolant conduits first, but now I don’t know if that will ever happen. I had gotten used to spending my off days and evenings with him, tearing out the old lines and scraping crusty coolant residue from the ship’s inner hull, but the Wailers put an end to all that.
“No,” I say, glancing at Soraya. “We can’t wait.”
“But I was making a present for him,” Miyole says. She clanks through the rice sack and pulls out the dragonfly she was making the first day I found her up and about. “He won’t know where we went.”
“You can leave it for him,” I say. “We’ll write him a note so he won’t worry.”
I scribble out a few lines on a scrap of cardboard—found my mowdri. leaving. will send pament for ship dokking. miyole wants you to hav this—and leave it and the creature on his doorstep. My eyes prickle as I stand. If it hadn’t been for him, Miyole might still be curled up in the dark, wasting away. I didn’t want it to come to this. I want nights singing the coffee and tea song by the bay and Miyole playing with Pala and the dignity of earning my own keep. I want to bring Perpétue’s ship back to life. I want Rushil to make me laugh. But I make myself walk away anyhow.
This is all his fault, I remind myself, wiping furiously at my eyes. If he hadn’t coaxed me away from the shipyard, if he hadn’t convinced me to leave Miyole alone, if he hadn’t ever taken up with the Wailers. . . .
The train that carries us up to Soraya’s house is smaller and less crowded than the ones I ride most days, all clean white steel and unscratched windows. We pass quiet houses, some with deep-shaded porches and an old look to them, others new and round, with gardens on their roofs. My modrie must be rich someways, I figure, living on higher ground in the north city. I doubt the lines ever flood here.
Miyole holds my hand tight as we leave the train and walk to Soraya’s place. Her house is one of the older-looking ones, narrow and long, made of brick and wood. A covered porch full of potted ferns peeks out from the second story. A single rosewood tree stands in the narrow strip of dirt between her house and the road.
The lights quietly turn themselves on as Soraya lets us through the front door. The air wafts cool on my skin, and the walls swallow all the city’s sound. We walk through a low-sunk sitting room with cushioned chairs, gleaming wood floors, and shelves for paper books built into the wall. The back end of the room is all glass, looking out on a brick-walled garden. A tree with star-shaped leaves, so purple they’re near black, shades the corner of the yard.
“You’ll want to wash, maybe.” Soraya twists her hands. “Unless . . . are you still hungry?”
I am, but Miyole’s eyes are heavy and she’s swaying on her feet. “Thank you, missus,” I say. “But maybe, if you had a place she could sleep . . .”
“Of course,” Soraya says.
I pick up Miyole, and she lays her head on my shoulder. Soraya leads the way up a flight of waxed wood stairs to a hallway splitting off into five rooms, each with its own sliding door, rugs cushioning the floors, and thick windows of double-paned glass.
Soraya stops at the last room on the right. A quilt in soft rose, green, and blue covers the bed, and a long desk rests against the near wall. A brass telescope on a stand stares blindly up at the shuttered window, and an empty birdcage peeks out from one corner.
“This was my room when I was a girl,” Soraya says, swiping a thin coat of dust from the desk. “This is my family’s house. I mean our. Our family’s. I really should hire someone to dust in here.”
The room smells musty but clean. I settle Miyole on the bed and fold the blankets over her, then follow Soraya out into the hall.
“The bathroom’s there.” She points to the door across from Miyole’s. “Take as long as you want. You can sleep in the next room down. It was my mother’s study when we all lived here. It’s the guest room now.”
She says it sad, and I can’t think but Soraya’s mother must be gone now, too.
Soraya smiles tightly. “Make yourself at home. I’ll be downstairs if you need me. My room is on the bottom floor. First on the right.”
And then I’m alone in the quiet, cavernous house. Soraya’s cleanroom has its own tile compartment where the water spigot lives, closed off by heavy glass doors. When I step inside to investigate, hot water shoots down from overhead and I scramble back to the tiled corner, clothes dripping. Rushil didn’t have running water on his lot, so whenever we wanted to bathe, we went down to the river.
I work at the spigot’s handles until I think I have the trick of it, and a stream of water patters down around my feet like warm rain. I undress and stand under the flow. I thought I understood luxury before, but this is beyond anything I could have imagined. Sweet-smelling soaps and creams in pump bottles rest on a ledge inside the tiled room. I lift each of them to my nose and smell, letting the warm water slough the dust and sweat from my hair and skin. I feel some sick thinking what the expense of all this water must be, what precious stuff is swirling around the drain at my feet. I turn off the water, lather soap over myself, then turn the spigot again and quickly rinse off.
Afterward, I wrap myself in a thick, downy towel and pad across the hall to the room Soraya said could be mine. The porch I saw from the street extends from this room, and through its open glass wall, the harsh orange and purple of the Mumbai sunset breaks in. A wide, pillowed bed heaped with midnight-blue blankets soft as fluffy rice takes up most of the room. A sleeping gown and a matching robe wait folded at the food of the bed. Soraya must have left them. The faint scent of her perfume hovers in the cloth.
I change and sit on the bed, sunk deep in the silence of the house. Soraya must have some sort of shield against the noise, for even in this plush place, we’re still in the city, more or less. I stand. The glass wall to the porch slides open for me, and I push out into the warmer air. The brilliant lights of south Mumbai shine beyond the rooftops. I can just see the trains crawling in a curve where the towering seawall meets the water. The luminous buildings reflect one another, until the city hazes over with its own brilliance. Rushil is out there somewhere. Did he find the note? Is he wondering what happened to us?