A din of voices and exclamations broke into his thoughts. Commotion everywhere, people pushing each other, stumbling on the slippery floor. Badal realised he had been standing in a dream, his eyes shut tight. The old man he was meant to be looking after had wandered off. He tried to find his way through the crowds in the half light, damp with instant sweat. You must not panic, he told himself. Keep your head, you’ll find him.
The old man’s daughter, who had lost sight of him as well, heard a thin, shaking voice from some corner, turned to look for him, could not see anything in the dimness until she spotted a huddle around a figure on the floor. “Papa!! Papa!” she cried out.
Terror snaked through the crowd. People began to push each other aside to get out of the shrine, thinking something was wrong. A man fell and cried out. A voice shouted, “There must be a fire! Something’s caught fire.” The pushing and shoving grew more urgent.
Badal managed to reach the old man. “There’s no fire. I have him safe,” he called in a raised voice. “He’s not hurt.”
He sat the old man down on the steps at one of the smaller shrines outside. A shrunken widow singing kirtans for alms interrupted herself to bring them water in a small brass pot. “At such a great age,” she said to the daughter, “it’s hard. It’s hard for us old people. The ground slips away.” The old man’s hands were shaking. Badal held the pot to his lips and tipped it a fraction. Most of the water dribbled down the man’s trembling chin to the front of his clothes. Over the man’s head, he exchanged a look of shared relief with the daughter, whose eyes shone with unspilled tears. She dug into her handbag and brought out two hundred-rupee notes which she pressed into the hands of the widow, saying, “Please. For all of you. Sing a kirtan for us. God has been very good, He has seen to it that my father is not hurt.” When they were leaving, she leaned out from the awning of their rickshaw towards Badal. “I don’t know what we would have done without you. I should never have let him come. But he doesn’t listen.” She had a chubby face and a lopsided smile that gave her a rueful expression. The old man, who had recovered his spirits, quavered, “The next time I’ll make sure you show me the whole temple. I want my money’s worth, I’ll be back!”
Badal waited, saw their rickshaw find its space in the crowds of cycles and rickshaws and scooters in the narrow lane. He stayed where he was till he lost sight of it. He met so many people in a year, his head had become a room filled with a faceless crowd. Even so, he knew he would never forget this woman and her father. He felt he had been responsible for the old man’s fall. He should have been taking better care of him. The irony of their gratitude! If the man had come to any harm — he did not want to think about it. He felt reduced by their generosity.
Yet the afternoon filled him with contentment. Usually he had no interest in the pilgrims he had to conduct around the temple. They were work, and when they were gone it was over. But these people — he wanted to show them around Jarmuli now, take care of them, see that father and daughter came to no harm, feed them the special fish and rice at Manoj’s lean-to behind the bazaar, then the warm, succulent sweets at Mahaprabhu. Take them to Johnny Toppo’s tea stall.
That tea stall! The shadows from the night before lifted as if by magic, the mid-afternoon sun dazzled. Badal went off to the lane where he had parked his scooter. He would eat something. Then he would go and look for Raghu. Maybe he was back and waiting. At long last, he would give him the mobile. He sang aloud as he turned the corner. One of Johnny Toppo’s songs, sung every day:
Dark, gleaming gold are my love’s bare legs,
Deep in the emerald paddy.
Red as rose are her bangles that shine,
Bright in the emerald paddy.
Wary as a thief is that watching egret
White in the emerald paddy.
And the rain came again and again that night,
Soaked all the emerald paddy.
Business was slow at the tea stall. Not many people on the beach and so many women fasting because of Shivaratri, it halved the number of customers. Johnny Toppo was by himself, pottering about. White spikes of stubble stuck out from his chin and his bald head shone. Raghu had wanted time off and he had told him to disappear. It was a relief to be rid of that boy. Johnny Toppo was sure the rascal was stealing; he was a sly fox, that one. Just thinking of Raghu today was putting him in a bad temper even though he had woken that morning feeling as light as the froth on his tea. More often than not, he found himself grinning about nothing even when alone, and at times he was gleeful without reason, like a simpleton or a child. The other day he had been gazing at the madman watering his dry twig and then making his daylong sorties into the water when he had abandoned his stall and sprinted off in daft pursuit. He wasn’t thinking, he hadn’t planned it, it was the end of a tiring stint, almost night, and there he was, racing the lunatic into the froth and back again, shouting nonsense, and then the two of them had laughed like hyenas and pissed into the sea side by side. Yet today he could not stand the sight of that filthy, ugly loon. And he wished his customers would disappear as well. But he needed to earn, didn’t he? He had to grin at tourists and brew tea and grin again. Some days he wanted to turn his table into a raft and sail off into the Bay of Bengal. He’d be washed up on an island nobody knew, and live on fresh fish, beeris, and palm toddy. And not one drop of tea.
He was lost in these thoughts when Nomi appeared and said too close to his ears, “One. With ginger and cloves.”
For some reason, whenever he was startled this way, pinpricks of an itch started all over him and took time to subside. He scratched his head, then scratched his shoulders, fought not to scratch his armpits and groin. He tried to summon up a smile and his patter. “Done shopping today? Gone to the temple? Buy a few saris while you’re here. And don’t forget to eat fried prawn by the sea. That’s what Jarmuli’s famous for! That and my tea.” It was what he rolled out for everyone and he forgot that she had heard it all from him twice or three times already. This girl made him uncomfortable, he could not tell why. Maybe the way she kept staring at him with those big, black eyes of hers.
On the beach, the madman scurried around, planting his twig, watering it from the sea, stepping back to admire it, then plucking it out from the ground and planting it in a better place.
Johnny Toppo had not covered the scar on his neck with the cotton square he used sometimes as scarf and sometimes dishcloth. He felt her eyes upon his patch of raw, buckled-up flesh. Quickly, he adjusted the cloth. He straightened, took shelter behind his stove. He stirred his pan with great vigour, he clattered dishes and cups around. His smile was gone, he was not singing.
Nomi strolled down to the water, kicked a dented plastic bottle out of her way. It flew seaward in a shower of sand and the madman rushed out chasing it into the waves. She turned around to look at Johnny Toppo at his stall pounding the ginger and cloves in his mortar as if they were fighting back. He picked up a jar filled with what looked like black dust and tossed some into the water boiling on his stove. When she came back, the mixture was bubbling, dark and frothy like the beers she had drunk in Germany. She took a deep breath of the tea in the pan and said, “Sometimes I feel I’ve seen you before. Don’t you feel sometimes. . as if you’ve seen someone before, been somewhere before?”
“I don’t think too much, or feel too much.” Johnny Toppo poured out her tea. “If you think too hard you just get a headache and lose your hair. And I don’t have any hair to lose, see?”
They stood in silence. She finished the tea in her cup and peered inside it. She said, “Do you know, people tell fortunes from tea leaves?”