Free Sleeping On Jupiter by Anuradha Roy Page B

Vidya’s curtains were drawn close. The curtains to the next room were open and she could see Gouri sitting in her bed surrounded by the contents of her handbag. Latika knocked on the glass and Gouri looked up with a start. She came to the window, wide-eyed with fright. Latika realised she had forgotten to put on her glasses and could not recognise her, so she called out, “It’s me.”
    Gouri retrieved her glasses and opened the verandah door. “Is everything alright?” she said. “What’s the matter?” And then, not waiting for an answer, “Do you know, I found my pearl studs. I hunted for them all over . . . and all the time, I had them in my handbag.”
    Gouri’s bags, packed and locked, were by the door. She had strapped her sandals on securely. Her hair was tied in the two girlish plaits she always made at night, because it made sleeping easier. She was in her travel sari, an indestructible georgette.
    Latika drew her back into the room and sat her down on the bed. She said in a gentle voice, “Didn’t you say you would wear your orange sari for the temple? Did you change your mind? Why have you packed your things again?”
    “But aren’t we leaving in a bit? On the train? We are going to Jarmuli, aren’t we? We’re getting late. We need to reach the station in time.”
    *
    That afternoon, Nomi stood by Johnny Toppo’s stall drinking tea. There were no other customers yet, it was too early. They would come when the sun turned the waves into that molten copper he could not take his eyes off though he saw it every day.
    Nomi asked him in halting Hindi, “What is that song you were just singing? It made me feel so sad.”
    Johnny Toppo looked the girl up and down – young, thin, with coloured threads in her hair, rings in her ears: to look at, like one of those starving hippies who reeked of old sweat, but this one smelled fresh and clean. One of her arms was covered in fine, shiny sand and she had a big camera hanging from her neck.
    “You feel sad at a song if you are already sad, your eyes get wet if there are already tears. What’s a girl like you got to be sad about?” He grinned at her, and his mouth looked like a piano’s keyboard, black gaps alternating with white teeth. “Look at me, teeth gone, knees creaking, back bent. I’m the fellow who should be sad. But I feel like singing all day.”
    “I’m looking for my mother. She’s here somewhere. I lost her by the sea. This sea, I think. This sea.”
    “What? Louder. I’m old, my ears are full of water.”
    “I said, I was looking for one more tea. One more like the last one, with ginger and cloves.”
    She sat on the sand and began to fiddle with the lens of her camera. She focused it on people paddling in the foam. She scanned their faces through her telephoto lens. She did not know who or what she hoped to find. Since arriving the day before, everything seemed so familiar and so alien that she could not tell the remembered from the imagined. Like the time she got lost in a birch forest in Norway, trying to find her way back, starting up paths that looked right, realising they were wrong after she had walked a long way. Turning back again.
    Johnny Toppo poured water into his aluminium pan, then crushed a piece of ginger and half a clove in a stone pestle. He could no longer afford to put in a whole clove. He scraped the contents of the pestle into the pan. When the tea was ready he came up to where she was sitting and handed it to her. “The sun is still strong. If you want an umbrella to sit under I can give you one, only five rupees,” he said. She wondered where she had heard that voice before. Could it be – no it couldn’t, of course.
    The beach grew more crowded as the heat dwindled. Suraj appeared, faceless behind sunglasses, wandering in search of the right spot, choosing an upturned boat. He sat on it and took something out of his pocket – a piece of wood, she saw through her camera lens – and began to scrape at it