Sleeping On Jupiter Read online

  Sleeping On Jupiter

  Anuradha Roy

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Anuradha Roy

  Dedication

  Before the First Day

  The First Day

  The Second Day

  The Third Day

  The Fourth Day

  The Fifth Day

  The Eighteenth Day

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  Copyright © 2015 by Anuradha Roy

  The moral right of Anuradha Roy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 84866 689 4

  Print ISBN 978 0 85705 346 6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Anuradha Roy

  An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008)

  The Folded Earth (2011)

  “Would a circling surface vulture

  know such depths of sky

  as the moon would know?”

  AKKA MAHADEVI, 12th century

  for three beloved tyrants

  Biscoot

  Rukun

  Christopher

  Before the First Day

  The year the war came closer I was six or seven and it did not matter to me. I lived with my brother, father and mother and our hut had two rooms with mats on the floor and a line of wooden pegs from which our clothes hung and in the evening we sat in the yard outside, watching our mother cook on the fire by the grapefruit tree. When the tree flowered I opened my mouth wide to swallow the scent. Little green beads of fruit appeared when the flowers fell off. One day, when some of the fruit had turned as round and yellow as full moons, my brother climbed the tree. He looked tall and strong clambering from branch to branch, my older brother. I stood holding the trunk, waiting for the fruit to come down. He snapped them off the stem, the branch shook hard, and I was showered with dust and dry leaves.

  The grapefruits were pale yellow outside, with stippled skin. They were as big as melons and heavy with juice. My mother slid a knife into one and cut it in half and the flesh was pink and the smell of its juice was tart and fresh.

  Our hut was all we knew, the four of us. I remember a fence around it, made of branches my father cut and brought home on his shoulders a few at a time, every day. The jungle was thick, the leaves of the tall trees were broad and green. I have tried to remember which trees they were, but I can only bring back the ones that gave me things to eat: mangoes, grapefruit, jackfruit and lime. We had hens that went mad cackling and crowing when they were laying eggs. Their eggs were brown. We had a cow, a few goats, and three pigs.

  When the pigs were slaughtered for their meat they shrieked with a sound that made my teeth fall off and this was the sound I heard soon after my mother cut the grapefruit, and the men came in with axes. Their faces were wrapped in cloth. They shoved my brother outside, they pushed my mother and me to a corner of the room and then they flung my father at a wall. They slammed his face at the wall again and again. The whitewashed wall streamed red, they threw him to the floor and kicked him with their booted feet. Each time the boots hit him it was as if a limp bundle of clothes was being tossed this way and that. One of the men lifted an axe and brought it down on my father’s forehead.

  When they left they wrote something on the wall in his blood. They did not look at us.

  In my sleep I hear the sound of pigs at slaughter, the sound my father made.

  The next thing was a clump of bushes by a ditch. My mother was hiding me in the bushes. Smoke rose from the place our village was – not the smoke of cooking fires but a kind I had never seen before. It made the blue sky black and stilled the birds. There was not a sound. I started to shout for my brother, but my mother put her palm over my mouth. If only she hadn’t stopped me. He always came when I called and he always knew what to do.

  I was walking after that, as fast as I could, but still my mother kept pulling at my hand and dragging me, saying, “Faster, faster.” Then she picked me up and I was on her back and my arms were wrapped around her. She ran through the jungle. My legs straddled her waist, my head reached her shoulders, but I could not look beyond. Her hair pricked my eyes, it was sticky with sweat and dirt. Her feet were bare. She stopped to pluck thorns from them and once she stopped to tear off a strip from her sari and wrap it around her foot when a stone gashed it. If I asked for my brother she said, “Quiet, not a word.”

  My mother’s face was fierce. She had thick, straight eyebrows and she wore a nose pin that sparkled like a star. Her palm felt rough and hard when it slapped my cheek and when it rubbed oil into me before a bath. Although I scrape and scrape at my mind, there is not much else I can bring back.

  We rested, we slept once or twice, then she hoisted me onto her back and walked again. It was for a day or maybe it was for two, and all of a sudden the leaves fell away, the ground grew soft, everything opened out and the ocean was before us. I had never seen the sea or sand. I ran towards the water. My mother came after me and held me back, but she let me paddle at the edge of the water. Then I saw a man. He came up to her and said something. My mother drew me away from the water and made me sit in the shadow of a boat. Her sari was wet to her knees. She bent down and wrung it out at the bottom. They moved away from me, they spoke softly to each other. She came back. “Wait here,” she said, “don’t move.” She returned to the man. Her voice thinned and flew in the breeze. And then she was gone.

  The sun hung over the sea, looking as if it would fall into it anytime. The water was high, there was too much of it. Waves came like white-toothed monsters and bit off the sand. They came closer and closer. I kept looking at the place where my mother had stood with the man. I was hungry. I called for her. My stomach ached with hunger. I stood up and opened my mouth as wide as I could and I shouted for my brother. Nobody.

  When it was almost dark, two women appeared. They tried to take me away from the boat. I kept telling them my mother had told me to wait. One woman tugged at me. I shouted and struggled, my feet dragged in the sand, and she said, “Quiet!” She picked me up. The other woman forced water from a bottle into my mouth. They were taking me to my mother, she said. It would not be long.

  I think it was the next morning that they put me into a van. There were other girls in the van, some smaller than me, some bigger. The van drove until it reached a town. There was a house in the town, painted pink and blue. It had a room with straw mats on the floor where we slept. We were given boiled rice to eat. The rice was red in colour instead of white. The grains were fat and chewy. I had never eaten rice like that. There was one girl who would not eat and she cried all the time. After a few days the women who fed us put that girl and her bedding out in the verandah for the night. Her wailing could still be heard in
side, but not so loud, and we could all sleep. The next morning when the women went to get her from the verandah she was no longer there.

  After that we were very quiet.

  One of the women looked fat and kind and she held me tight every time I asked her when I could go back home. Her chest was as soft as a pillow. She rocked me back and forth saying, “My child, my child.”

  “I want my mother. I want my brother.”

  She said, “Your mother and your father and your brother have become stars. Whenever you want to be with them, look up at the sky and there they are.” I thought of my mother’s nose pin. The woman pointed upward and I followed her finger with my eyes. But although it was night, the sky was red from distant fires, and there was not a glimmer in it. “The stars are there,” she said. “You can’t see them, but they are there.”

  Then she held me close and wept. I had never seen a grown-up weep. My mother scolded us all the time, but when she was not scolding she joked and sang songs. This woman groaned and sighed. Each time she got up or sat down the woman held her knee and said, “Chuni, if only you would rub that oil in again.” There was nobody called Chuni in that place.

  One afternoon when I was sitting with the fat woman on the steps to the house, looking at the dust clouds in the street, she pulled out a pouch from inside her blouse. She had a needle that she held to a lit match until it went blue and black. She looked at my face as if she had not seen it before, and with a pen she made marks on both my ears. Before I knew what she was doing, she was pulling at one of my ears and I felt a sharp pain. Her face looked huge and ugly when it was so close. Her skin shone with sweat. Her nose had tiny pin-sized holes and black hair sprouted from some of them. I could smell her rotting breath. I tried to push her away, but she held me by the ear and kept pushing the burnt needle into the place that hurt.

  She stopped. She turned my face towards the left and said, “Keep still, don’t shout so much, or it will hurt more.”

  Again that terrible pinprick, then a burning pain. She looked at my ears and I heard her exclaim, “Jaah! They are up and down from each other. The things I do!” She picked something out of her pouch and prised it into my bleeding ear lobe. “Never mind, there it is. Up down or not.”

  My ears were still oozing blood when I looked at myself. Two loops of wire went through them now. One of them was higher than the other. The woman stood behind me, dark as a hill in the mirror that held us both. With the earrings on, I was different: I looked dressed up. I looked like a girl. The woman stroked my face and my hair and she kept saying, “Chuni, my Chuni, see how pretty they look, your rings.” Another of the house’s women came in at that moment and peered into the mirror. “That’s gold! You gave her your gold rings?”

  The fat woman said, “Better that a girl wears them.”

  Later, when we were alone and she was dabbing my earlobes with a stinging solution she said, “They are my daughter’s. They are gold. I saved for many months to get them made. Chuni wore them all the time. You look after them. Keep them safe. Never take them off.”

  That night my ears swelled up and pus oozed from the holes. By morning the rings were stuck in the drying pus. The pain and later the itch made me want to tear the rings off my ears. It was worse the day after. Still, I looked at myself in the mirror and said in a whisper, “Chuni, Chuni, I’m wearing your rings. I will never take them off.” The woman cleaned the wounds with her solution. “They really look as if they were made for your face, my child. They do. You are my girl reborn.” She tapped the rings with her fingers to make them swing back and forth. The other women in the house gaped at her.

  I stayed in that house a few weeks, maybe a few months, until more men came with cloth wrapped around their faces. One of them stood holding a gun. He shouted, “This is for your own good, this is for our motherland, this is for our mother tongue.” A second man clapped his hands and told us to hold each other’s shoulders and chug out of the house in a line as if we were a train. Outside, we had to keep chugging and whistling around the courtyard. It felt like a game. The man making us play seemed to be smiling under the cloth wrapped around his face. He was lanky and loose-limbed like my brother. He had that same kind of hair, scruffy and short. My brother. I broke the line to run towards him. The man stopped smiling and lifted his rifle butt towards me. I went back to the line of girls, but I no longer felt like a coach in a train.

  The two other men took pots and pans, chairs, blankets and stoves from the house and loaded them into their jeep. The women stood by. Then the men sprinkled something all over the rooms and threw lit torches into the house. Flames leaped from the windows.

  We spent that night in the open. We were twelve girls and the four women who looked after us. There was nowhere to go. In the morning we were put in another van and we left the buildings behind, we went through rough countryside, on and on, until the trees were behind us as well, the sky opened up, the sand stretched hot and bare, and there again was the sea. Again there was a boat. This time it was in the water. I ran towards it – my mother – I thought my mother would be there. All twelve of us were made to climb in. One of the women got in as well, but it was not the fat one. She stayed on the shore. The motor thudded to a start. Two men climbed into it and the boat rocked and swayed. Then it moved out into the ocean.

  Until the sun whited out my eyes I kept them on the fat woman. The shore went further and further away from us and then there was nothing but water and sky. One of the girls vomited all over and the men threatened to throw the next one who did that into the sea. I touched my earrings.

  The First Day

  At four in the afternoon, the sleeper train to Jarmuli shuddered to life and wheezed out of the station. Passengers locked into companionship for the next fourteen hours eyed each other sidelong, wondering how it would be. In Coach A2, three women were exchanging glances. “You ask her,” Gouri’s imploring look said to Latika and Vidya. Their eyes refused to meet hers.

  The three of them, friends, were going on their first outing together. They were in a compartment, all grey and blue, with two large plate-glass windows and four berths. To climb to one of the upper berths you needed to be agile. Gouri, whose ticket number pointed her upwards, could just about manage stairs these days if she placed her weight on the right knee instead of the left. She turned to the fourth person in their compartment and said, “Excuse me, if you don’t mind . . .”

  The girl was bent over a travel guide, pen in hand. She turned a page and scribbled in the book’s margin. Gouri waited. The girl did not look up. Gouri looked at Vidya for confirmation, murmured an excuse me again, then stepped closer and brushed the girl’s shoulder with a finger.

  At this the girl jerked to life and her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh! I didn’t want to . . . I mean . . .” Gouri stepped back. You’d think she was a two-headed ogre and not a round-faced old woman.

  The girl shook her head, as if to clear it. Her hair was a bird’s nest, streaked brown and black, some of it braided with coloured threads. She reached under the braids and a pair of earphones emerged from ears spiral-bound with rings, silver or copper but for two tiny circles of gold at the lobes.

  Gouri had not wanted to ask this intimidating young creature for a favour, but old bones left her little choice. She collected her breath and said, “My ticket is for the upper berth and you see, I no longer have the knees to be able to climb up – do you mind – you must sit at the window of course, as long as you like. Only at night, to sleep, if you could exchange . . .”

  The girl wore a turquoise T-shirt over which the words “Been There Done That Binned It” undulated as though travelling over hills and valleys. Her pants were cut off at the calves and the fabric was held together with a dozen zips that traversed the legs. The women glimpsed tattoos and could not be sure if the glint at her eyebrows came from a stud. Vidya was longing to say, “Have you seen how young girls dress these days? And then they complain if men bother them!”

  The girl
shrugged. “No problem.” Her face broke into a smile of unexpected sweetness. “I like the upper berth.” She reached for her earphones again.

  Huge black eyes in a pointed face, like a deer’s, and she seems as jumpy as one too, Latika observed. She turned away and busied herself with her phone so that she would not stare.

  Encouraged by the smile, Gouri beamed at the girl. “My friend Latika can still manage to climb to those upper berths, not me. Not many years left, you know, that we’ll be able to travel! We said to each other, we’ve been friends all our lives and never been anywhere together. I said, Jarmuli! I’ve always wanted to go back to the Vishnu temple. And Latika, that’s Latika, she just wants to sit by the sea and drink coconut water – so we left our children and grandchildren and here we are! My name’s Gouri, by the way, and this is Vidya. And you?”

  “Nomi,” the girl said, her smile fading at Gouri’s cascade of information. “Pleased to meet you.” She fiddled with her earphones.

  “Are you going on a holiday to Jarmuli?” This time the question came from Vidya, who looked at the girl over the rim of her glasses. “Where are you from?”

  “From . . . I’m from lots of places. Mostly Oslo, I guess,” the girl said. “Not a holiday. I’m here to . . . to research a documentary.” Even as Vidya started saying, documentary about what, she added, “On religious tourism, temple towns, all of that. My boss wanted the Kumbh. Took some doing, but I persuaded her Jarmuli might work.”

  The girl took up her book, replugged her ears, and tried to find her page. In the corridor, a bullet-shaped child in red shorts narrowed his eyes, revved an imaginary motorbike, then hurtled up the aisle. From somewhere in the train came a woman’s voice tight with anger: “No, you control him.”

  “Film! How interesting! My son, he does the same kind of work.” Vidya smiled, delighted by the coincidence. She leaned forward to tell her story and the girl removed her earphones again, this time with obvious reluctance.