India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (24 page)

I asked when we could meet again, and she said there were two new roommates in the apartment. She would have to check with them. She said that since Sudha’s death, her uncle and a few elders in the building had stepped in and imposed some rules. “They are very strict with us, especially with boys,” she said. “They don’t want to allow boys in the apartment at all. We’ve changed a lot.”

I said that if she was uncomfortable with seeing me alone, I could come with my wife. “That might be okay,” she said. “I’ll inform you tomorrow.”

I waited a couple days for her call, and then I sent her a text message saying I was coming to Chennai; I asked if I could stop in. She called right away; she told me to come alone. “Are you
sure?” I asked. “Yes, come,” she said, in that direct manner that always made me feel slightly reprimanded.

I took the East Coast Road to Chennai. Almost every time I took
that road, following the jagged shoreline, the ocean outside my window, I thought of that day after Christmas in 2004, when the tsunami had devastated the coast. More than seven thousand people had been killed in my state of Tamil Nadu; tens of thousands lost their homes.

I was at home on that Sunday morning. By the time I got to the ocean, the waters had receded somewhat, but they were still gurgling at the edge of the road, tossing debris—slabs of concrete, shards from motorboats, uprooted coconut trees, thatch paneling from huts—and eating into the sand.

I made my way up the beach. I was excited; I had never seen anything like it before. It was only when I saw the body of a dead boy on the sand, a crowd standing in a circle above him, a coast guard helicopter hovering overhead, that I understood I was witness to a tragedy.

Now when I drove along the East Coast Road, I had two more bodies to think of. It was hard to imagine, really; the waters looked so calm. But people were saying that there was a terrible current these days, like a river running under the ocean. An African tourist had washed up dead in Pondicherry a few days before. A friend told me he had rescued two drowning people at the beach recently. The monsoon had been heavy; the ocean was swollen. I guess
Sudha and her boyfriend picked the wrong time of year to go swimming.

Selvi was friendly when I got to her apartment. She asked if I wanted a cup of tea. We chatted for a while. She asked how my family was, she said she’d like to meet them sometime. I said she looked tired, and she said there had been some complications with the keys the night before. Sudha had drowned with one of the keys to the apartment; it was harder than ever for Selvi to coordinate with her roommates. She said she’d been waiting outside, late into the night. Then, when she finally got in, she stayed up talking to her roommates.

They talked a lot these days, after work. She couldn’t explain it, but she hated to be alone. She was scared of the dark; she was scared of silence. She told me again—again unprompted—that she hadn’t known anything about Sudha’s affair. She said Sudha was a very private person. She’d taken a look at her diary after she died, and she was shocked by some of the things she found. She asked me if I could promise to keep some of the things she had learned about Sudha secret. I said I could. She told me something and I repeated it out loud, in surprise. “Don’t talk so loud,” she said. “My roommates will get upset with me for telling you.”

I started taking notes as she spoke. She got a scared look on her face. “To tell you frankly, my friends told me I shouldn’t do this anymore,” she said.

I said that if she wanted to stop, that would be fine. It was important that she feel comfortable. I knew she’d been through a tough time. Did she want me to leave?

“No, not like that. Not like that at all,” she said. “I told them I
don’t mind, I told them you don’t ask anything funny. For me, it’s fine, but it’s so difficult, Akash. They are my friends, they know me well. They know what’s right for me. And they are all asking me, ‘Selvi, why are you doing this? You’ve just been in so much trouble—why are you doing something like this?’”

She told me that she felt everyone was watching her, judging her. When she walked around her apartment complex, she could feel eyes peering from behind windows, looking at her through metal grilles. She heard them whispering about her and her roommates. She knew people were gossiping about “those call center girls.”

The security guard asked her all kinds of questions. He wanted details about what had happened to Sudha. He wanted to know about Sudha’s life. He asked if any of the other girls had boyfriends, and he asked Selvi about her social life. His questions made her sick.

She had cut all the men out of her life. All her school friends, all her friends from home—they used to chat online, or sometimes on the phone. She had asked them not to call anymore. She missed talking to them; they were old friends. But now she knew: “If you are very free with guys, they take advantage of you.”

She said: “You know, Akash, with all my friends and family, I was always the strong one, I was always the bossy one. At school, I always told everyone what to do. But now everyone is bossing me, and they’re asking me why I’m doing this with you. They say it’s unnecessary. They say, ‘Selvi, you’re always so naughty. You skipped so many classes, you bunked school. Now after you’ve been through such a horrible thing, why do you want to get yourself in a ditch again?’”

“Do you feel that speaking with me is a ditch?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I thought maybe this should be the
last time we speak. I don’t feel it’s a ditch, but that’s what they said. I don’t know what to think. I feel fine with you, but my friends and my family are looking after me, and that’s what they say. My parents brought me up. They know what’s right for me. When they say I shouldn’t do something, I have to listen to them.

“My friends have changed—we’ve all changed. We used to be so young and freaky, we didn’t care about anything. But now all my friends are settled down, some have children. Maybe that’s why they’re giving me this advice. They’re telling me to stop behaving like a child. You know, we’re not so young anymore. We have to be more careful.”

One of Selvi’s roommates walked into the living room. I had met her before. I said hello. I said, “How are you?” She mumbled a reply. She averted her eyes. She left quickly.

Selvi and I talked for more than two hours. It was like an uncomfortable
dance. She wanted to stop talking to me, she had been told she had to stop talking to me. And yet it was clear that she wanted to talk; she needed to talk.

She wanted this to be the last time, she didn’t want it to be the last time. I told her many times I would go home, let her think over things. I said I’d wait for her call. But then, just as I would start packing up, getting ready to go, she’d start talking again. She was agitated; she seemed conflicted.

She told me she’d been home recently. For the first time, her parents started talking about marriage. They had been scouting for boys, but they were having a tough time. It wasn’t easy finding
families in their village who would be comfortable with a girl like her, so independent-minded, who lived in the city and worked at a call center. She could tell her parents were worried.

She’d never really thought much about marriage before; it had always seemed a distant possibility. But now, when she realized the difficulties her parents were having in finding a match, and when she thought about what she had been through, she started wondering: “What if the man they choose comes to know about what happened here? Who knows what kind of man will be my fate? I might get a man who is the jealous and possessive type. Even small things can lead to big things after marriage. I don’t want to ruin my future. If he finds out what happened, he might wonder about me, also. He might think I’m the wrong kind of girl.

“None of this would have bothered me before. I always thought: ‘I am young, I will come to the city, I will have a job, a good career.’ I always thought about my future that way. But now I think: ‘Selvi, what are you doing? You know where you come from. Just finish your work here in the city and get married and go back home. Get married and go back to where you belong. The city isn’t for people like you.’”

She said she realized that the city changed people; it “spoiled” them. Sudha wasn’t “that way” when she first moved to the city. She had been a good girl.

“Do you think Sudha was a bad person?” I asked.

“No, no,” she said. She said a lot of people were saying that now, and it broke her heart. People at work, Sudha’s supervisors and colleagues, people who used to talk in such glowing terms about her—now they said they always knew she was trouble, that she was too free, too wild. “How can they say that? Now I wonder
also what they might say about me. What do they say when I’m not there? What if they come to know about the way you and I talk so freely—maybe they would say the same type of things about me.”

Selvi started to cry; tears ran down her bony face. She said—her voice weak, breaking—that there was one thing she had learned from this whole experience: she knew now that you can never trust anyone.

She’d read some things in Sudha’s diary, and they had shocked her. Sudha had written about a man who betrayed her. She had trusted him, and he had broken that trust. The man had really hurt Sudha.

Selvi said: “When I read that, I thought: ‘This is the world. This is how things are.’ It’s a very important experience for us. I’ve learned so much. You can’t trust anyone, you never know that anyone is telling you the truth. In the future, I’ll know much better about life.”

Selvi finally stopped talking. We sat around for a while, not really
looking at each other, and then I stood up. I said I was sorry if I made her uncomfortable. She said she didn’t feel uncomfortable. She said she was fine with talking to me; she enjoyed it.

But then she said—as she had said so many times that day—that she had to listen to people around her. They knew what was good for her. They knew better than she did. What we had done together so far was fine, but she couldn’t see me again.

At the door, she asked: “You’re not feeling upset with me, are you?”

“No, not at all,” I said. “Are you upset with me?”

“I hope I didn’t ruin your life,” I said, and we both laughed, and she put her hand on my arm. She had never touched me before.

“Good-bye,” she said, and she started closing the door.

“Well, I don’t know if I’ll see you again,” I said, and she smiled and nodded.

“I hope things go well in your life,” I said. “Good luck.”