Everywhere Guruji went that morning, he was surrounded by followers who picked pinches of dust from the ground he had stepped on, and sprinkled it on their heads. We could see columns of people walking towards the hall. Although there were many people, there was no shouting or pushing, only the buzz of low voices and the shuffle of bare feet. We were taken in through a back entrance. We had been told we were to stay together, and to listen, not talk.
Guruji sat on a high stage on a velvet-covered throne with golden armrests. Behind him, all over the back wall of the stage, were oil paintings of the kind I had seen in his room, but much bigger, of birds in trees, among leaves and fruits. I saw a huge one with many parakeets, each of which looked like the bird I had seen in a cage during my first punishment.
A satin cushion kept Guruji’s feet off the floor. Some favoured devotees sat at the edges of the stage. They came one by one, stretched themselves full length and touched their foreheads to the floor in front of his feet. Dazzling lights shone on Guruji, changing from gold to orange. His skin gleamed under the lights. The people in the hall craned their necks for a glimpse and chanted his name. Only I knew he had a stump between his legs oozing slime.
Guruji began his discourse and everyone went quiet. He spoke from the books of all religions and as he did in our own assembly every day, he said that all religions were paths to the same God. He spoke of how the Buddha left home in search of truth. He spoke of Sufi saints and Jain monks. He recited a sacred Hindu poem and then quoted from the Bible to show how the love for God sounded similar everywhere. He spoke of how true mystics, such as he was, had been thought of as madmen by ordinary people. Nobody understood where the mystic’s strangeness came from. Would people not behave strangely if unseen by all, a star dropped into their hearts from the sky and lived on there, pulsing, burning? The things mystics did, or demanded of the people around them, these often seemed to make no sense, but this was only because ordinary people could not see the workings of God.
At times he referred to no books at all but spoke of daily things — problems between children and parents, husbands and wives, the price of vegetables — and at the end of each story he had a moral or a teaching that some of the people there wrote down in notebooks.
Every now and then Guruji paused in his sermon and went into a trance while his audience sang hymns. He would come out of the trance after a few hymns and look directly into the eyes of someone in the audience and say: “They say there are windows from one heart to another. How can there be windows where there are no walls?” Or, “How can we claim to know God when we cannot know our closest friends? Every other being is a mystery to us and God is the greatest enigma of all.” He spoke to the person he had pinned with his eyes as if he were seeing right into them. Then he closed his eyes and was transported back into his trance.
At the end some people were in tears while others sat as if they had been turned to stone. I noticed a tall white-haired monk standing by the stage, looking at the twelve of us one by one. It was long ago, but I was sure he was the man who had spotted us when Piku and I had crept to the barbed wire fence that separated our part of the ashram from the other and Bhola had caught us.
When Guruji had left the stage after his discourse, the twelve of us were brought onto it. We had been told to smile and stand in a row holding the next girl’s hand. We could not see the people in the audience because there were bright spotlights on us. Piku stumbled as we went up onto the stage. After that she clutched my hand throughout with her own clammy one. Her head only came to my shoulders. I had grown taller, but she was still a tadpole.
Padma Devi told the audience that we were a few of the destitute children that Guruji had adopted as his own. She said we were fed, clothed, and went to school at the ashram alongside paying students. Padma Devi’s yellow hair and blue eyes looked brighter under the lights against her pink sari. Her lips twisted to one side when she spoke so her flat, shiny face went out of shape. She thanked the audience for their generous support and gifts of old clothes and books. The audience clapped and cheered, but I saw that all of us were looking at our toes. I wanted to run out and throw away my clothes and books and pens and pencils. I plucked at my frock with my nails. I hated the pink flowers on it and the green polka dots between the flowers. I hated my round-toed shoes and the ribbons in my hair. When I grew up I would run away from here and have so many new clothes that ten cupboards would not be enough to hold them.
The Fourth Day
By the next morning Vidya was well enough for toast and tea. But when she and Latika went to fetch Gouri for breakfast, she could not be found in her room: they knocked and waited, knocked and waited, then got the receptionist to open the room with a duplicate key. Gouri’s handbag lay on the coffee table. When they went through it they saw her purse was missing, as were her prayer beads in their cloth bag. Nothing else that they could see was missing.
“Those address cards!” Latika said. “She’s left them in her bag.”
She must not appear over-anxious. She had not told Vidya about finding Gouri utterly muddled, packed and ready to go to the station the day after they had arrived in Jarmuli. Now she was too scared to confess it. What if Gouri had actually left the hotel this time, thinking she had to catch a train? She said, “She must be in the hotel somewhere. She didn’t like her room, maybe she’s still nagging them to change it.”
Vidya replied, “I do all I can, what more could I have done? Look, two cards missing. What do you think that means?”
She sank down onto the bed. Perhaps she hadn’t quite recovered after all and her head was swimming because of her stomach trouble yesterday.
“Oh, what will we say to her son!” Latika said. “He didn’t want her travelling in the first place. He said so over and over, ‘She can’t be trusted alone any more, she forgets everything!’” What if Gouri became one of the missing whose grim, grainy faces one saw in black-outlined police advertisements in newspapers? And this wasn’t even the worst of the possible calamities.
“We ought to phone her son. .” Latika could see his bald, pompous face in her mind’s eye. His thin moustache and his jowls. The way he said, “I’ll try and make time, but I can’t promise,” whenever you asked if he could drop Gouri over on his way to work. The way he pursed his lips when called upon to smile.
“If that fellow had his way, Gouri would never leave the house at all. Remember what he said to me at the station?” Vidya put on a baritone. “So, Vidya Aunty, what mischief will you girls get up to on your wicked weekend, hmm?” She seemed to gather energy and resolve at the memory of his voice. “We’ll find her, wait and see.” She had dealt with many kinds of problems during her time in the bureaucracy, including an absconding typist.
They walked through their hotel describing Gouri to anyone they saw. They went into a satin-cushioned room they had never seen before which was called the Mumtaz Bar; they crossed the dining hall, the lobby, the corridors, the row of chairs around the bathtub-sized swimming pool, the strip of land in front with its evenly-spaced columns of coconut trees — Gouri was nowhere. Vidya interrogated the chowkidar at the gate, who in turn asked the ragged bunch of rickshaw-wallas parked there if any of them had ferried an old, stout, white-haired woman that morning. They even tried going through a set of latched doors to the kitchen, but they were stopped by an agitated waiter.