Chapter Fifty
I parked outside the slum and made my way to Johnny’s house. He wasn’t there, so I went to the adjoining huts being used by Naveen and Diva. I heard them, as usual, before I saw them.
‘Do you know what a woman has to do to take a shit around here?’ Diva demanded, as I walked into the little clear space in front of their huts.
‘Wow, that was a long conversation,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you on that last time?’
‘Do you know, Mr Kharab Dhandha Shantaram?’ she demanded, using the term for dirty business.
‘I do. I used to live here. And it ain’t right.’
‘Damn right, it’s not right,’ Diva said, turning from me to poke Naveen in the chest. ‘A woman can’t shit in the daytime, for example.’
There were several people in the group. Naveen and Didier were standing in front of Naveen’s hut. Diva was with Johnny’s wife, Sita, and three girls from surrounding houses.
‘I –’ Naveen tried.
‘Imagine if someone told you that you can’t take a shit, all day, because you’re a man, and somebody might see you taking a shit. You’d totally freak out, right?’
‘I –’
‘Well, that’s what we get told, because we’re women. And when we are allowed to take a shit, when the sun goes down, we have to clamber around the rocks, and do it in some miserable fucking place in the total dark, because if we carry a torch, someone might see that we’re taking a shit!’
‘I –’
‘And women get molested, out there in the dark. There’s crazy guys hanging around. Guys who don’t mind that the place is full of shit. Guys who actually prefer it that way. I’m not kidding, and I’m not putting up with it. I waited till dark to take a shit, and I’m not doing that again. I’m the fuck out of here, and that means tonight! I’m leaving.’
Naveen was considering whether to say I again. He looked at Didier. Didier looked at me. I looked at the fascinating knot on the edge of a bamboo support pole.
There was a commotion, and Johnny rushed in from one of the narrower lanes we used for short cuts.
He saw us, and stopped. His mouth was open. His hands were out in front of him, as if he was holding a branch.
‘What is it, Johnny?’ Sita asked, in Marathi.
‘I . . . I can’t . . . ’
‘Johnny, what’s up?’ I asked.
He was stiff, as if he was ready to run somewhere. His face struggled. Sita went to him, and led him away. After a minute she returned, and called Naveen and me to her.
Didier and the girls remained with Diva.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Diva said. ‘I’m leaving! Hello? Did everybody forget that part?’
Johnny was sitting in a plastic armchair, drinking from a bottle of chilled water.
‘They are all dead,’ he said.
‘Who’s dead?’ Naveen asked.
‘Aanu’s father, I mean Diva’s father, and everyone at his house. Everyone. Even the gardeners. Even the pets. It was a horrible massacre.’
‘When?’
‘Just now,’ Johnny said breathlessly. ‘Lin, how can we tell that girl? I can’t do it. I can’t.’
‘Did you check the story?’
‘Yes, Naveen, of course I did. The police and press are going mad. It will be on the news, very soon, and then she will know anyway. Should we just wait? What are we going to do?’
‘Turn on the radio, Johnny,’ I said.
Sita clicked on the local news channel.
Bad words like slaughter and massacre poured from the mouth of the radio. Mukesh Devnani and seven of his household had been killed. The household pets had been killed. Nothing, and no-one, was spared.
Divya Devnani, the words said, again and again, the sole heir to the Devnani fortune, might also have been killed in the slaughter, the massacre, the slaughter.
‘We can’t let her find out by hearing that,’ I said. ‘She’s gotta be told.’
‘I’ll tell her,’ Naveen said, soft light in his eyes.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘It’s tough on you, but it should be you. But not here. Let’s go down to the rocks, and the sea. There’s a quiet place I know.’
She didn’t protest, when we walked through the slum, but as we stepped among the black stones on the shoreline, she tried to walk back into the slum. I think she sensed that bad news had found a place to drown itself.
Naveen held her in his arms, and told her. She broke the hug, walked a few uncertain steps on the rocky shore, and began to stagger away.
Naveen followed her closely, catching her a few times when her bare feet slipped between the rocks.
She stumbled on in a daze, her eyes blind, her legs moving in an instinct to flee suffering and fear.
I’d seen it before, during a prison riot: a man so scared that he walked into a stone wall, again and again, always hoping for a door. Her mind was somewhere else, searching for the vanished world.
Without her realising it, Naveen led her in a wide arc, and back to me. She sat placidly, then, on a boulder, and very slowly came back to herself. When she did, she started crying uncontrollably.
I left her with Naveen, who loved her, and returned to the huts to bring Sita and the girls to help. Sita was gone, but I found Karla and the Zodiac Georges instead.
I looked at Didier. Diva’s hiding place in the slum was a secret.
‘I thought it wise, that she have some support,’ Didier said. ‘Especially since we shall all be spending the night here to support her, in this . . . community facility, is it not so?’
Karla kissed me hello.
‘How is she?’
‘It hit her like an axe handle,’ I said, ‘but she came around okay. She’s a tough girl. Good that you’re here. She’s with Naveen, down by the sea. I’d give them a while yet. She’s pretty cut up, and Naveen knew her father.’
‘Didier is too much of a gentleman to keep a secret,’ Didier said, ‘and leave Diva without friends, on a night of such terrible disaster as this.’
‘And Didier is too scared of ghosts,’ Karla added, ‘to stay here alone.’
‘Ghosts?’
‘Clearly,’ Didier said, ‘the place is haunted. I am sensing presences.’
‘Whatever the reason, I’m glad you’re here.’
‘It’s been a while,’ she said, looking around at the slum huts. ‘Any special attractions this time? Cholera, typhoid?’
There’d been a cholera outbreak years before, while I was living in the slum. Karla had come to help me fight it. She’d accepted the local rats, nursed helpless people, and cleaned diarrhoea from earthen floors on her hands and knees.
‘It sounds crazy, I guess, but that time with you, back then, it’s one of my happiest memories.’
‘Mine, too,’ she said, glancing around. ‘And you’re right. It’s crazy. What are the girls doing to Diva’s place?’
‘They’re sprucing it up. Hoping to raise her spirits, I think.’
‘There are spirits being raised from the dead in this wild city tonight,’ she said. ‘That’s for sure.’
‘Terrible business,’ Scorpio added, joining us.
‘Poor little thing,’ Gemini said. ‘We’ve kept her suite open, at the Mahesh. It’s always there, if she wants it.’
‘Just keep this place to yourselves,’ I said. ‘Johnny and the others are taking a risk. Don’t let anyone know about Diva. Are we good?’
‘Good as gold, mate,’ Gemini replied.
‘Yes . . . ’ Scorpio hedged. ‘Unless . . . ’
‘Unless?’
‘Unless someone is forcing me to tell.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, suppose somebody started hitting me, to get me to tell, then I would tell. So, I can only promise confidentiality up to the point of physical harm.’
I looked at Gemini.
‘It’s one of Scorpio’s rules,’ he shrugged.
‘And a good one,’ Scorpio added. ‘If everyone in the world spilled their guts at the first sign of violence, there’d be no torture any more.’
‘SnitchWorld,’ Karla said. ‘I think you’re on to something, Scorp.’
A man came through the lanes toward us, wheeling a bicycle laden with parcels.
‘Ah!’ Didier cried. ‘The relief supplies!’
The man unloaded a sponge mattress, a suitcase, a folding card table, four folding canvas stools and two sacks of booze from the bicycle. I looked at the booze.
‘It is for Diva,’ Didier said, catching my eye as he was counting the bottles. ‘The girl will need to get very drunk tonight, if on no other night in her life.’
‘Alcohol isn’t the answer to everything, Didier.’
Diva came out of the shadows suddenly.
‘I need to get very drunk,’ she said.
Didier stared his Told you so at me.
‘Will you . . . ’ Diva said, ‘my strange new friends, because none of you are my actual friends, and my actual friends aren’t here, and I may never see them again, like my father, will you help me to get very drunk, and clean me up when I get sick, and put me to bed safely, when I don’t know what’s going on any more?’
There was a pause.
‘Of course!’ Didier said. ‘Come here, sweet injured child. Come here to Didier, and we shall cry into everybody’s beer together, and spit into the eyes of Fate.’
She did cry, of course. She ranted, waved her arms, shouted, paced the little hut, tripped on the patchwork blankets, and called the girls in to dance with her.
When the ululating voices and handclap music reached a peak, she began to fall. Naveen caught her quickly and carried her to the bed of blankets, her arms falling at her sides like broken wings. She slowly curled her knees into her heart, and slept.
Sitting vigil in the next hut, Didier played poker with Naveen and the Zodiac Georges. It wasn’t a pretty game to watch: Scorpio never saw a crooked card, Didier and Gemini never played him a straight one, and Naveen couldn’t take his mind from the sleeping girl in the hut next door.
I looked in on Diva. Several of the neighbour girls were sleeping in the hut to keep Diva company. One girl of eighteen, named Anju, was cuddling the socialite’s shoulders in sleep. Another girl had her arm over Diva’s belly. Three girls snuggled in close to them. Somebody’s little brother was sleeping against their feet.
I trimmed the wick on the kerosene lantern to keep it alight, and lit a mosquito coil and a sandalwood incense stick from the flame. I set the coil and incense on a stand on top of the metal cabinet, and pulled the light plywood door shut on its rope hinges.
Through narrow lanes of sleeping trust I walked back to the rocks and the sea, as black as the sky. I stood watching and listening. In that spot Diva had heard, and realised, that she’d lost everything.
When I stood on the front wall of a prison, between the gun towers, I felt calm. All the terror drained from me, because I knew that if the guards shot me, I’d fall on the right side of the wall.
When I slid down my electric-cord rope to freedom and started running, the calm left me, and the realisation of what I’d lost hit me so hard that I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking for weeks.
But I’d chosen my exile, and Diva had hers forced on her. And it was too cruel: her father killed, and everyone else. It was the kind of too-cruel that makes a survivor fall. I hoped that the young socialite, hiding in the real world, had friends who wouldn’t let that happen, when she returned to the unreal world.
I heard a sound and turned to see Karla, standing on a rocky outcrop at the edge of the slum. She’d come to find me.
She waved to me, and a stray wave broke high against the rocks nearby. White rivulets of water streamed over black boulders to the shore. A second wave garlanded the rocks with surf as I climbed back toward the light, and love, one wet black stone at a time.
I paused with her at the top, and for a while we watched the sea spilling on the shore of Diva’s grief.
We walked back past huts humming and murmuring sleep: fathers sleeping outside to leave more room for the family inside, the silver moon bathing them in soft light.
And we talked softly with Didier, the Georges and Naveen in the hut beside Diva’s, all of us wanting to be close, in case she woke.
Diva’s Bombay would never be the same again: some of the people she’d known before the tragedy would become true friends, and some would become strangers in press paradise. Either way, when she returned to her destiny, everything would be changed. Naveen was a Bombay boy, and maybe he understood that in ways we couldn’t. But in our exile hearts, the Island City was home for all of us. And we waited together, that vigilant night, until the scarlet dawn helped a new exile wake, and struggle to the shore.