As their eyes adjusted to the new brightness of the light, Nomi saw that there was a congregation of stone figures in the courtyard, some quite small, some so large their faces were too high to make out. Gryphons, elephants, Buddha figures, apsaras. Most appeared fully finished, a few were still struggling out from the stone. The man shone the light close on one of the statues. A woman made of flowing lines and blind eyes, nearly ready for a temple niche.
The man shuffled forward, swung the lantern on another piece of sculpture, this one a winged horse. Then a dancing girl. A lion with moustaches and potbelly. He would not hold the lantern still long enough for them to look properly at the pieces.
“My family has been sculptors to the emperors of this land since the time of the Buddha,” the man said. His voice was reedy and he sucked his gums between words. “They were sculptors when the great old temples came up — and let me tell you truthfully, my family has a chisel hidden away in a place so secret nobody else knows about it — a chisel that carved the walls of temples then, eight hundred years ago.”
The man stopped and swung his lantern on to a gargoyle. “That one’s no good.” He coughed between his words. “The eyes aren’t right. I will always tell you if something isn’t right.”
“Have you been here many years? Were you always here?” Nomi said.
“Always. For generations. If you came here a hundred years ago, you would still have heard the sound of a hammer on a chisel in these parts. Why, it was a flourishing village then, of people from our caste. Now we’re only a few left, all dying of hunger. Who wants these statues? Everyone wants things made in a factory. Of plastic.”
She hesitated, drew a breath. “This ruined place next door to you — what was it before?”
“What was it before?” The man brought his lamp down. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything but my own work. I kept to myself, never went in there.”
He moved ahead. “Will you buy something? Look around, a gift for a friend, all the way from the Bay of Bengal? There are smaller ones too, easy to pack.” He went from statue to statue, shining the light on them. “That one is made from sandstone. . that is pure marble. . that is black granite, the Buddha, you can see. Foreign people like Buddha statues. Elephants too, all sizes, look.”
“All I want to know is. . Do you know what happened to the people who lived next door? The children?”
“This one, see? It’s a replica of the chariot in the Sun Temple. Been to the Sun Temple?”
The driver said, “Madam, we should leave now.”
Something caught the girl’s eye. “There, I want to see that one.”
The man brought the lamp across and shone it to where she was pointing, at a statue that sat in a corner of a verandah, as if cast aside. There was a tulsi plant next to it in a terracotta pot and a plate of stone-carved food lay before it as an offering. This one was different from the gryphons and apsaras and Buddhas they had been looking at. Only about a foot high, carved in black marble, soft folds of clothing shaping the form beneath, the sculpture showed a young girl squatting on the ground with her elbows resting on her knees, her palms cradling her chin. Her ears stuck out saucer-like from a large head, her hair fell in two plaits on either side of her face. She had a squat nose and her stone eyes had been given a slight squint. The eyebrows were bunched together in a frown as if she had been too impatient to sit still while being sculpted, she wanted to run off and play instead.
The man swung the lamp away from that statue and it went back into the cover of darkness. “That one is not for sale,” he said.
I remember the sculptor who once came to the ashram and sat there chiselling an idol. It was going to be huge. Slowly the rock yielded some parts of a face, then a neck, then the shape of an arm. He didn’t finish making it. He went away one day and we never saw him again. We wondered for a day or two, but we never asked. So many things happened around us that we did not ask about — and whom would we have asked? The half-made idol lay under a tree saying nothing either, unfinished, half a head, a blind eye, an arm and the curve of a shoulder, the rest a block of mouldy grey stone.
I remember many other things that happened, things we could not talk about. How Piku lay in bed and whimpered all night. When she was beaten she didn’t understand why, when she was left alone she had no idea why. The older girls bullied her too. Sometimes they would pin her frock to the bed so she would tear it trying to get up. They would steal her food and the oddments she collected and hid. They would hold those things out as if to give them back to her and when she ran towards them looking delighted, they would fling them far away, out of reach, and guffaw at her tears. I was always getting into fights because of her. I could never fight with words, I didn’t know the right ones, so I would fling myself at girls much bigger and older. I might be bleeding and screaming, but I wouldn’t let go, I tore out clumps of hair from the other girls’ heads if they did anything to Piku. She stuck to me, she trusted only me. I was her protector.
I remember a cat. Its face was in the stomach of a pigeon. When the cat noticed me it lifted its head out of the bird. It was gluey with blood and feathers. Its eyes were shining amber.
I remember how Jugnu would stand in the quadrangle at dawn, screaming, “Evil sucks you in. It’s sucked everyone in! Wake up, you fools! Look around you! Wake up!” He would groan, “Weep, little children, weep that you didn’t die.”
Jugnu would tell me the sea was nearby, pointing at the horizon, saying softly, “Listen and you’ll hear it.” I tried, but I couldn’t hear it. His weathervane had rusted now and hardly moved at all. Still I thought I would wake one morning to find the arrow had turned northward and we were setting off, sailing away.
I remember the boat that had brought us to the ashram, an open motorboat with an oil-tarred hold in which we were hidden, stacked against each other because there was no space. The boat rocking, then steadying itself for long hours, then rocking again. The creamy yellow of the vomit flowing into the pools of black grease all over the floor of the hold. Its stench. Girls crying “Ma-go, Ma-go”, as if moaning would bring our mothers back.
I remember once we got mutton stew to eat for lunch. Why? We did not ask. Its gravy was dark brown and thick. There was a bone in my helping which I saved till the last. I sucked the marrow out of the bone. It slipped into my mouth and down my throat before I had tasted it properly. We never got meat again so I forgot the taste.
I remember the time when Champa was brought back by the police. She had gone to them when she ran away the second time and they brought her back because she was a ward of the ashram. She was dragged in by her plaits and locked up in a cottage. I remember the thorny rose branch which Bhola cut and took with him into the cottage. How he grinned at us standing outside and then went in and locked the door. We stood there with our eyes fixed on the cottage. There were banging and thumping sounds. Shouts, and then the screams for help so loud it was as if there was no sound in the world but Champa’s frenzy.
I remember the silences in between that only made her cries more terrible. When Bhola came out of the cottage his white lungi was flecked red. The rose branch was bloodied and bent.
I remember when Jugnu was locked up for a week with hardly any food. He could not stand up, he crawled on the ground when he was let out. He tried protecting his head with his hands. Bhola was kicking him. When he saw us he shouted, “Come on, you all, come and play football with this bastard.” We stood there in our coffee and cream school skirts and blouses and neat braids, rooted to the ground as Jugnu moaned in pain. Bhola screeched again, “Come on, I’m ordering you!” He kicked him again to show what he meant. I remember how Minoti, a girl with a deformed leg, prodded Jugnu in his stomach with her crutch. How Jui hit him with her geometry box, how the instruments inside the metal box rattled as she raised it and brought it down. How the box made a sound like stone hitting wood when she banged it on his head. How one girl stamped on his palm with her foot again and again with her teeth bared. I remember the way Bhola kept saying, “That’s the way! One more time! Break the fucker’s bones.”