Badal lay on his string cot in his stuffy room alternately opening and shutting the mobile he had bought for Raghu. Each time he flipped it open the blue glow of its screen lit up his face and his eyes glistened in the light. His nose was still smeared with blood. Grains of sand had got into the phone. He blew on it to tease them out.
Night smudged away the hovels, the hotels, the temples, the shuttered roadside stalls, the abandoned boats on the beach. The old woman Badal met every morning slept under the neem tree, the sweet jaggery in her dream making the drool trickle from her mouth.
On the dull grey sand of the beach a madman dug a hole and tenderly planted a twig. He dipped a clay cup into the sea, scampered back to water his twig, then lay down beside it, sighing at the coolness of its shade.
At the Swirling Sea Hotel, Latika slept, tense with anxiety, dreaming of herself tongue-tied on a spotlit stage. She had forgotten the song she was meant to sing or the reason for being on that stage. Down the corridor, Gouri lay awake holding a photograph of her dead husband, as she did every night, telling him all the things she could not share with anyone else.
Between their rooms and the luxury hotel next door was a shallow creek choked with rubbish, covered in reeds and gloom. Nomi lay in a large double bed in the hotel across the creek. She had fenced herself in on every side with pillows, her backpack, her travel guide, extra blankets rolled into barrels. The portion of the bed left for her was a small rectangle into which she just about fitted if she folded her knees into her chest. She clutched a pillow close. She was trying not to think of the monk on the beach. He was out there somewhere. Had he seen her? Had he recognised her? He must have, if she recognised him.
For years she had done nothing but gather information and courage. Bit by bit she had pieced together the details, waited for a chance to come back, to see for herself. Then this assignment. It had worked out. But now? She had spent much of last night sitting under the shower shivering in the cold but not able to turn off the water. She was a coward. That was what her foster mother used to say when she came back home bloodied from fist fights: she got into fights because she was in fact a coward.
A television voice started off in the next room. Not Suraj’s room, the one on the other side. What was Suraj doing in his room? Carving his boat? An asinine thing to do, making all those boats just to float them away. What a fucking romantic. She could bet he put messages into bottles too, and threw them in the sea.
She put a pillow over her head to block out the sound from the television in the next room. Her thoughts went back to the morning, to the temple guide’s strictures about her clothes. The bloody nerve. She had been on the brink of hitting someone, she had been so furious. It had taken all her self-control not to snap with those two men ogling her under the guise of judging the temple-worthiness of her cargo pants and shirt.
Her clothes always turned out to be wrong. The orphanage had sent her with a carefully-packed duffel bag to her foster mother, who lived at the time in Reading in England. The bag contained a pink comb, a matching toothbrush, a tube of translucent green toothpaste, shiny hairclips, undergarments, and four cotton frocks, each one a different colour. They were the first new clothes she had ever owned. She could not stop touching them, but her new mother had taken them out of the duffel bag and tossed them aside with barely a look, saying that they wouldn’t do. She made a list of clothes Nomi had never heard of: tights, anorak, thermals. She was taken to a shop. It was huge, Nomi had never seen so many things in one place. She wandered from aisle to aisle, seeing nothing, hating the woman who had discarded her new frocks. She wanted to run away. She managed to slip off to a different section of the store, lurked among the merchandise. Now she was flanked by rows and rows of earrings, necklaces, hairclips, bracelets. Wonderstruck, she picked up a string of multicoloured beads. And before anyone saw, she put the necklace into her pocket. She could never explain why she stole the necklace, but it had given her a gloating sense of revenge. When she was leaving the shop, high-pitched beeps of piercing intensity began ringing around her. She knew nothing of burglar alarms and was taken aback when men in uniforms surrounded her. She hardly even reached their hips, she recalled, they were so tall. And she remembered her vicious satisfaction when her new mother, checking her pockets, pulled out the beads, gasping, “It’s just a mistake, I assure you! She’s not a thief, it’s just that she came two days ago from a different country!” One of the security guards had said, “Which country is it where they don’t know stealing from buying?”
Despite the pillow over her head, the television voices rose, and over it she could hear men: loud talk, then guffawing laughter. It was always so quiet in her foster mother’s house. Silent enough to hear leaves fall and rain drip from the roof, silent enough to make it hard for her to cry at night without being noticed. She tried to lie as motionless here as she had trained herself to do there. There was a wall between her and the television men. Thin, if it let through so much sound. But it was a wall.
A moment later, she sprang out of bed. She checked again if her cupboard was not in fact a door, looked under her bed. Ran her hands through the red curtains. Flung open the bathroom door for a look. No intruders. She fell back into bed.
She had to sleep. She shut her eyes. There was a way to sleep, it was always the same way. She made herself go back to the woods and the lake: cycling through the Norwegian countryside one midsummer — it is about one in the morning. She is with five other girls, they are straight out of school, sixteen, and she is on her first trip with girls her age. They are used to it, but to her it is new and strange. She is not saying much, just struggling to keep up, pedalling hard. She is smaller and thinner than they are, not able to cycle as fast, she gets out of breath. Around two, when they reach the woods, it is not dark and not light, it is a phosphorescent dusk, a mad light in which anything is possible. They put up two tents, she is inside one of them. The rest have not paused, they have run out to swim in the lake. She sits in the tent, not daring to come out of it. She can hear herself breathe: she breathes in the smell of the tent’s nylon, her own sweat, the spilled shampoo in someone’s backpack. Then she hears a bird. It doesn’t call, it sings. A brief, ethereal song. Another bird sings back, then the first one sings again. On and on the birds sing to each other. She crawls out of the tent, sees a sheet of silver ahead, mirroring the unearthly midsummer night, the black trees, the glowing sky. Her friends’ clothes are heaped on the bank. They are far off in the water, their voices ring out joyfully. She can glimpse flashes of gold — their hair. None of them are looking at her. She looks behind: there is nobody. She fiddles with a button. Her heart hammers her ribs. She has never done this before, not in changing rooms, or doctors’ clinics, or dorms. Never before people. Tonight she unbuttons her shirt, shrugs it off. Unzips her jeans and peels them away, and then, very quickly before she has time to reconsider, she takes off every scrap of underclothing. She feels the warm midsummer air on her skin. There is nobody looking. Nobody to gape at her scraggy, stubby, knock-kneed body striped with welts and pockmarked with burns. She steps into the water. It is chilly and she gasps. As she slides in, it begins to feel warmer. It covers her. There is nothing between herself and the water. The water flows into her and out, soft and cool. The birds are still singing to each other, she can hear them over her splashes and her friends’ cries of delight. She is charged with a wild abandon, flips over, doesn’t care who sees her breasts. Above her, the sky is opal.