By the time Nomi’s eyelids dropped, all Jarmuli was asleep. At the great temple, the priests and guides and pilgrims had gone. Watchmen sat dozing outside the shrines. The temple idols gazed into oil lamps burning gold and red. Far out at sea, a fishing boat’s solitary lantern bobbed on the dark water. The fish underneath swam in shoals towards its nets, eager to the end.
When I opened my eyes it was raining in the room, I could not see through the sheets of falling blood. I thought I was going blind, I thought I was losing my mind. As a child I had taught myself a game: whenever I was afraid, I pretended I was dead, the life in me had gone, nothing could happen to me again, there would be no pain, never again, and this is what I did now, I kept myself still, I willed myself hardly to breathe at all. I was a ragdoll, I was held together with thread, there was not a shred of flesh and blood in me, nothing that could hurt. When I opened my eyes again, everything was covered in a film of oil, rainbows shifted and melted and changed, my head felt undone, rearranged. A blazing skewer went through it, its pain made my stomach boil. But I could see again. I did not move a finger, only opened and shut my eyes until I was sure. The sheet below me was white and soft and pure, the ceiling above me was white and the doors were painted white as well. The red had gone, everything felt pale and damp, there were tuberoses in a vase by a lemon-coloured lamp.
My room was new, I had not seen it before, a hotel room — where was it, which city? It would not come back to me right then and I looked beyond the ceiling and the doors to the window to get a sense of where — and then I saw scarlet curtains against the sun, shifting and swelling as if they were alive, as if deciding what was to be done. Beyond the curtains through the window I could see the flesh-thick petals of crimson flowers on a leafless tree and then my heart thudded as if it would burst, the iron rod in my head was on fire, but that wasn’t the worst of it, the rod twisted and turned, there was a burning wire around my skull, and I tore off all my clothes and ran to the door, I turned on the shower, I slid to the bathroom’s polished floor. Over my head, my shoulders, my breasts, the water poured, I was sodden, I was sobbing, I scoured myself with my nails, my nails were thick and pitted and dirty and hard, they scratched my skin, but I could not stop. I don’t know how many hours I passed inside, or maybe they were minutes, I was cold, my skin felt raw as just-flayed hide, I tried, but I could not go back into the room.
I thought I had torn the thing out, it would never come back. Nobody would cow me down, I would attack. I could slam my fist into a brick, not feel the pain, lick the blood away, hit the brick again. I would kick a ball hard and cry with joy. The boys sniggered, but it made me feel whole, it made me weep because that ball wasn’t a ball, it was a man’s head, it was that man I was kicking dead. This was the way I broke it, the thing was half-killed, I thought it had lost the will to fight but then I came to this hotel. It is by the sea, I had chosen that deliberately, to stare it down, to say you can’t do anything more to me, but then at breakfast by the pool there was a man with a knife that he plunged into a melon not once but twice, thrice, and then again, and when he was done he prised the slices apart, and the juice inside poured out in red spurts. I told myself it was just fruit. A woman came around with glasses on a tray. Her eyelids were blue, her hair was gold, sapphires sparkled in her ears and I told myself it was just fruit, but my breath stuck in my throat, I thought I would choke, yet I picked up a glass, said thank you. It was all about willpower, I told myself, it was just a fruit and I would not look at it, but I did and there was the melon, cut in pieces on a flat white plate, red against white, just like the grapefruit we picked, my brother and I, that my mother sliced in half.
The Third Day
Vidya threw up in the early hours and lay in bed till late morning. Her head was spinning, her temples ached, her neck hurt. Quavering, she refused breakfast, even dry toast, and urged the other two to go out without her. “I’ll be alright.” She tried to sound brave. “It must be my B.P. Or the food I ate at that roadside stall yesterday.” She had her zipper bag of medicine beside her and was dosing herself with Nux Vomica 30. “I’ll be fit enough to play football by tomorrow, just wait and see.”
Latika handed her some iced water. “Sip slowly. This has salt and sugar. You mustn’t dehydrate. Really, Vidya, what a thing to do — it looked poisonous, all that prawn floating in oil and chillies. Whatever possessed you? The sea air?”
She clucked partly to mask her resentment. They had only two more days in Jarmuli. Could they afford a whole morning commiserating with Vidya? Latika longed to spend the day on the beach, feeling the waves lapping her ankles. It was many years since she had been to the sea: the last time, a decade ago, it was with her husband, in Goa. He stood on dry land shouting, “You are too rash, Latika! You’ll float away and not know until you’re miles out and can’t swim back.” Later they had eaten grilled salmon and drunk sweet Goan port wine sitting in a rush-covered shack, looking at the moonlit sea while in the distance someone sang slow Portuguese fados. Her insides melted with certain kinds of music. She felt herself twisted and wrung; tears poked at her eyes. Forgotten things from years ago had come back to her under that shack — doves in the next-door house, the tamarind tree she climbed to pick its stick-like fruit, stone images in a garden, the long grey Buick — until she realised her husband was speaking to her, waiting for a response, annoyed at her farawayness. It was their first holiday alone in decades, soon after their daughter had gone off to university in Montreal.
In the early evening, only an hour left before sunset, Latika stroked Vidya’s sweat-dampened hair and told her, “We are going for a walk on the beach. You must phone me the minute you want us.” Vidya shut her eyes. “All I do is doze off, there’s no need for the two of you to waste a whole day as well.”
Latika and Gouri left the hotel in a rickshaw that took them towards the promenade. “Shouldn’t we have told someone at the hotel that she’s alone?” Gouri said anxiously as the rickshaw started to move. “What if she feels dizzy and falls? I did that once and. .”
“She’s better now,” Latika said, “all that a stomach upset needs is rest and fluids.” Their rickshaw rattled along, the breeze carried salt and sea and as the distance between them and the hotel increased, Vidya and her troubles receded.
It was a Sunday. Walking away from their rickshaw, Latika and Gouri approached the crowded part of the beach. Here an open market tumbled over the sands, with makeshift stalls selling everything from conch shells to cowries and fried prawns. Children made gleeful sorties into the waves, then scampered back to land. Boys tugged at their saris, holding out sea-shell key rings and bead necklaces, proclaiming unbelievable prices. The air smelled of drying fish, frying fish, old fish, fresh fish, but in the wind that gusted in from the sea none of it smelled bad.
Gouri held Latika’s arm for balance and sloshed the water at the edge of the beach with her feet, dreamy in the heaving murmur of waves which snatched away the voices of people around them. The wind twisted their saris around their ankles. They laughed into it, pressed down blowaway hair. Abandoned their slippers to walk barefoot. Sidestepped tiny, translucent crabs which dug themselves out of the sand and skittered towards the water, disappearing again.