“That isn’t Ayesha, is it?” Gouri adjusted her glasses. “I’m sure Ayesha has short hair. But maybe I’m mistaken. I have a bad memory for faces.”
“Of course it isn’t Ayesha, can’t you see?” Ayesha, Vidya’s daughter-in-law, was at least ten years older and ten kilos heavier than this chit of a girl who was now fingering the shells on the necklace.
“Can’t you see, Gouri! It’s the girl who was with us in the train!”
“In the train? What train?”
“God, Gouri! In our compartment! The train in which we came from Calcutta. That girl — you even spoke to her, you exchanged seats — the girl in our compartment who got off and never came back. Remember?”
Suraj and the girl began to stroll towards the tea stall and the women started away from it in a confused hurry. Johnny Toppo ran after them, scolding, “My money, my money!”
“We were going to have one more cup,” Latika said to him. “We weren’t leaving.” She searched her bag with an urgent hand for the right amount of money, keeping an eye on Suraj, telling Gouri to carry on ahead, placating the vendor as he eyed a wavering pair of customers at his stall and complained, “Quickly. My boy hasn’t come today, I’m managing alone.”
On their way back to the hotel the two women didn’t speak, too full of things to say. When they reached the hotel’s gate they looked at each other and Latika said, “Not a word about this. We can’t spoil the holiday for Vidya.”
“But Latika, maybe the girl’s just a friend of his. I thought she smiled politely, nothing more. You know how friendly children are with each other these days. Why the other day when —”
“Friendly! What’s she doing walking on the beach with a married man, making him buy her necklaces? Didn’t you see how come-hither she looked?”
“No, she didn’t. Really, Latika, you’re making too much of it.” Gouri said in a soothing voice. “Just because your —”
She stopped herself, but it was too late. Latika’s lips had tightened, her face had crumpled as if someone had let the air out of her. She straightened her back, said, “Never mind me.” She took a breath to steady herself. “Vidya doesn’t need to know about this right now. Forget that this ever happened.”
But would she? There was something perverse about Gouri’s amnesia, it had an unfailing way of making her blab about the wrong things. This time Latika wished she could put cards into Gouri’s handbag to remind her to forget: not just Suraj and the girl, but also her own husband’s escapade with his student. Such a wretchedly stupid thing to have confided in Gouri of all people! She had of course counselled refuge in God and told her that every misfortune hid a blessing. And ever since, brought up the topic when Latika least expected it. It was thirty-one years ago. Yet the merest mention of those two months in her life turned the lights off inside her.
The good humour in Gouri’s plump face had evaporated and she nodded at Latika solemnly. “You’re right. What mothers have to put up with! There’s no need for her to know about this now. First that boy married a girl Vidya didn’t like. Remember how upset she was when he said Ayesha was years older than him? And now he’s romancing another one half his age.” If they let slip what they had seen, Vidya would be thrown into an immediate turmoil of shame and anxiety. She had never cared for her son’s wife, she had often wished her away, true. But to chance upon her son with a lover on their own beach! For all they knew the fellow might be at the next hotel. What if he was in the same hotel, doing god-knows-what down the corridor?
Latika pushed her glasses up her nose and shook her head as if to reorder her mind. She would not allow herself to dwell upon long-ago things. She must live in the present. Suraj. Yes, she must focus on Suraj. She had known him from when he was a toddler, she had shared Vidya’s jittery delight when he first climbed the steep stairs of her old house. Through his boyhood Latika had taught him how to recite lines from poems. When he first began to act in school plays, she had gone to all of them, clapped hard. They had thought he would be a famous actor. She had given him singing lessons. Suraj and her daughter, the same age, would stand next to each other, singing by her piano, both slightly off-key but persevering. He used to shut his eyes when he sang and frown until his little-boy forehead puckered like an old man’s. As a boy he was irresistible, the most popular in school, the one the girls followed around. He had a beautiful face, and she remembered how, in the light of the sunset that came in through the window by the piano, his cheeks turned orange, his light-brown hair on fire as if he had become the sun he was named after. Once, she had her husband photograph him like that and gave the picture to Vidya, framed. She had wanted to caption it, “Suraj in the Sun,” but it would have seemed too pat. The picture still stood on Vidya’s bedside table, its black and white turning to sepia.
Nothing in that photograph predicted the Suraj she had seen today, dopey-eyed, degenerate, flirting with a virtual teenager. The girl from their train. She had looked such a child. How deceptive appearances could be. “It’s true,” she murmured, “what they say. They grow up quicker in the West.”
“Best? Yes, that tea was the best. Why don’t we go and have some more? Why did we leave in such a hurry?” Gouri was beaming up at Latika through her round glasses, her voice bubbling with enthusiasm.
When I landed after my first flight ever, my new mother was waiting inside the airport. I had a label on a string around my neck with my name and other details because I was travelling as an unaccompanied child. I was a parcel being sent from one country to another.
She came towards me with an eager smile. She had straw-yellow hair and grey eyes. She wore a frock. Nobody that old ever wore frocks where I came from. Her frock came to her knees, below which her legs were wax-white, with green veins running down the length of the calves. She had a necklace made of pink seashells in her hand. When she reached me she garlanded me with it and gave me a bright smile. She squeezed my hand, took my duffel bag from me, said, “How light this is! Is this all you’ve brought?” Later, in the taxi, she said she got me the necklace because she had found out that it was the custom in my country to welcome people with garlands — only she had not made it a flower garland because she wanted me to have something I could keep for always, something that would remind me of today, that would mark my passage across many seas.
I don’t know why I took my rage out on that necklace the day I overheard her telling her sister on the phone that it was too much, maybe it had been a mistake. She meant me, I was the mistake, although I had been with her three years already. The necklace was hard to break because the string was nylon, but I was angry enough, I did tear it apart, and have loathed shell necklaces ever since. I hadn’t asked to come to her either, to this lonely country where it was night all day and I had no friends. I flung the shells from my window into her garden where she would be sure to step on them. Later I saw her treading gingerly, picking shells from the grass.
Before the necklace I had had few presents. The gold earrings that had belonged to Chuni and oddments from Jugnu. He was the only person at the ashram who gave me things: flowers, fruits, oddly-coloured dry leaves, dead butterflies, flattened frogs, striped stones: these were his notion of presents for a girl. One day, he put together sheets of thin metal into a weathervane and said it would belong to both of us. He clambered to the top of his shed and fixed it there. He said when the wind pointed it northward, it would be time. Time for what, I asked him. Time to leave for a new country, he said. The weathervane screeched and squeaked on its spindle if it moved at all, but I was thrilled each time it shifted in the breeze and Jugnu said, “Look, it’s going north. It’ll be there soon. And then. .” I would chorus, “And then we will leave.” Sometimes at night I lay awake thinking of the weathervane, wondering which direction the wind was blowing it. What if it chose to turn northward when we were asleep? What if it had turned north already and we had missed seeing it? Each time I passed Jugnu’s shed during the day I stared hard at the roof, willing that weathervane to turn. I made up all sorts of charms for it: if I saw seven green parakeets together, it was a sign that soon the weathervane would turn north. If a yellow butterfly sat on a blue flower, it would turn north.