Free Sleeping On Jupiter by Anuradha Roy

in the alleyway. The evening train hooted from the nearby tracks.
    And there, against the wall, was his scooter, the key in the ignition.

 
    Even as he was walking home, Badal’s clients were resting in their hotel, readying themselves for the long evening ahead at the great temple. Gouri, however, could not lie still for thinking she had forgotten something. She turned her three bags inside out. She sat down on her bed, now strewn with her things, and wondered – what was she searching for? She looked around the room with a helpless gaze. The bed was covered with a red-and-blue striped sheet. The pillow was too bulky for her spondylosis so she had put it on the chair, a padded one covered with brown cloth of the kind some hotels favoured to save on cleaning costs. She heaved herself up from the bed to the chair and lifted the pillow to see if the thing she was searching for was underneath. No.
    Sometimes it helped to go back to the room where the thing had originally been in order to remember. But where would she go? She opened the cupboard. Stared at the door leading to the verandah. She did not think she had gone out to the verandah yet. Curious, she opened the door, stepped out, lowered herself into a chair. The ocean was on her doorstep. She gazed outward at the slashes of sea and sky that lay beyond the verandah. A kite skimmed the sky, knife-sharp. It flew higher and higher. Her eyes followed it into the limitless emptiness of unblemished blue, not a wisp of cloud. The kite climbed further. It was a speck of sunlit red in the blue air.
    Gouri’s lips began to move unprompted through the lines of a sacred hymn she was in the habit of singing. She was a feather on the wings of the kite in that borderless sky. She was airborne. From high above she saw the waves in the sea frozen into white-topped serrations. The coast was a sand-white strip bristling with coconut trees. She could see herself as if from a great distance, as a mound of clothes in a plastic chair in a verandah facing an ocean. She soared higher. She was an immaterial speck, an atom dissolved in the elements. She was helpless to resist. She did not want to resist.
    Loud, unfamiliar voices just below her verandah brought her down to earth. She could not move a limb. They felt heavy and alien, as if they didn’t belong to her any longer. She became aware that her back hurt and her legs had pins and needles. Inch by inch, as she tried to move her painful muscles, she remembered why she was out in the verandah – she was meant to be looking for something. She should get up and look for whatever it was.
    It was hopeless. She knew her friends were right about her ineptitude. She lost things, she forgot things. In spiritual matters she felt powerful and knowledgeable – but who valued that nowadays? It had long been evident to her that Vidya and Latika had the kind of minds that locked out spirituality. The deaf would not care if Tansen himself sat before them and sang. Nor had her friends the least sense of the ineffable, the God whom she experienced in a manner so real and moving and yet so unfathomable that she could not try communicating it. But she hoped they would admire the legendary Vishnu temple. It was her territory; she had arranged everything for this part of their trip. She wanted it to be perfect: it was after all the reason for coming to Jarmuli.
    It began to trouble her again, that thing she had lost. Where else could she look to remind herself? She forced herself to get up from the chair.
    Perhaps the solution was in the bathroom. It was a tiny cubicle in which she was finding it difficult to manoeuvre. She pushed open its door and ran her gaze over the white sink, the shower, the toilet bowl.
    Then she spotted her face in the mirror and her hands went to her bare ear lobes. She broke into a triumphant smile. Of course. The pearl studs.
    She went back to her things to search afresh. She wanted to wear the studs to the Vishnu temple, and the