Jasmine Skies (18 page)

I stop to take a photo of the pyramid-mountains of spice: oranges, cinnamon brown, reds, turmeric yellows, pistachio, even shocking pink. As soon as I pause, the curly-moustached trader starts
shoving tea-bag size envelopes of spices under my nose, but Janu shakes his head and walks on. Next we pass through a larger hall and the smell changes to something cloying and warm. Hanging on
giant metal hooks are whole sheep carcasses, skinned and bloody. Below them chickens scrambling in nets are being bartered for and carried away clucking on bicycles. I look down and see a gutter of
blood, blackened by flies, streaming and buzzing millimetres away from my feet. The contents of my stomach heaves into my mouth and just in time I swallow it back down again.

‘Careful for your pretty shoes!’ Janu says, pulling me away. ‘Maybe not for vegetarian eyes!’ We walk through the market hall and out on to the narrow back lanes.

I immediately notice that the sounds of the street are different here, quieter. These roads belong to people, carts and rickshaws, not cars – people carrying impossibly high piles of boxes
on their heads or loads of rubbish on their backs, barefoot children screeching as they play their ‘which coconut shell is it under?’ game, families soaping themselves at water troughs
by the roadside. It all feels weirdly like walking into the past, and I can’t imagine that this place has altered very much from how it was when Grandad lived here. A rickshaw boy is
shrieking at me to get out of the way and pointing to an enormous wheel, which is careering towards me. Janu grabs my arm and I turn to see the skeleton-thin rickshaw boy, not much taller than me,
desperately trying to balance his wobbly vehicle on its remaining three wheels. And all this effort is for a giant man sitting motionless on his enormous behind, smoking a fat cigar. I feel like I
should do something right now about the unfairness of this little boy carrying the weight of an overfed man. But not knowing
what
to do makes me feel like screaming.

‘I thought you didn’t have human rickshaws,’ I say to Janu as we walk away.

‘Everywhere else in India it is banned, but unfortunately not in Kolkata.’ He uses the same resigned tone that I’ve heard in Priya’s voice, and even though I’ve
seen real poverty and homelessness in London, it’s not on the same scale. When you see it in pictures you don’t appreciate how extreme the differences can be between the rich and poor,
living side by side. I feel a heaviness in my gut that I can’t shake off. Every day here someone’s tapping on my conscience and saying to me, ‘Mira Levenson, this is not fair.
What are you going to do about it?’ and just like everything else that’s happening to me here, the truth is I don’t know. What can I do to change anything? All I know is that I
want to do something worthwhile for the art project at the refuge – if only I can find an idea soon. The very least I can do is to
try
to find a way to – how did Janu put it?
– to ‘lighten the children’s hearts’.

Janu squeezes my hand. I’m sure he’s only doing this because we’re about to cross a busy road, but I still have a pang of guilt for thinking how good it feels.

‘Now!’ he shouts, walking straight into a road where a red and yellow bus spilling people from doors and windows is heading straight towards us, horn blaring. I can’t believe
that this is supposed to be the
safe
moment to cross, until the policeman blows his whistle and signals for the traffic to move off again. That’s the strangest thing about the traffic
in Kolkata – when you’re in a car it feels like you’re at a standstill all the time, but when you’re on foot it feels as if the traffic never stops. Safely on the other side
now, Janu drops my hand and leads us down the narrowest lanes we’ve walked through yet, where the dust seems to settle and the pace slows. A shocking pink dome of a mosque towers above us,
brightening the sky.

‘I very much like this place,’ says Janu, looking up at the old Victorian shuttered houses that, even in their crumbling state, still manage to look grand.

‘My wish is that they would . . . how do you say?’ I can almost see Janu’s mind hunting for the right word. ‘Make better these old buildings, not only starting new
ones.’

‘Renovate.’

‘Acha! Renovate! Repair.’

I’m taking hundreds of photos, because everywhere I look here I see something I would like to paint: cotton saris being hung out to dry on a rooftop, a shopkeeper sitting on top of his
counter; behind him are hundreds and hundreds of bottles of medicines of every kind.

‘Ayurvedic – natural medicine,’ explains Janu, pointing in the direction of the street-side pharmacy.

A few paces up the road we come across a stall stacked full of Indian sweets of every colour and flavour: pistachio, orange, carrot halwa, sonpapri (Grandad’s favourite), creamy rasamalai
(my favourite), syrupy rosogolla and curds, all protected from the flies and the heat behind sparkling-clean glass. Janu notices me looking.

‘Sweet tooth, na?’ he jokes.

I nod. ‘I’m afraid so.’ I hope I don’t look too greedy.

‘Why afraid?’ asks Janu. ‘Sweet tooth, sweet heart!’ He smiles, sweeping his hand to his chest.

‘You made that up!’ I laugh.

The boy behind the counter greets Janu and hands him a pistachio sweet, which he passes on to me. They both smile at the appreciative noise I make as I taste it. The boy makes up a box, and when
Janu goes to pay he won’t accept it.

‘We helped some of his family once at the refuge,’ explains Janu as we walk away. He stops for a moment to watch a group of children scrabbling in the rubbish, separating bottles,
cans and papers from every other kind of human and animal waste. I watch his face turn from a smile to a scowl.

‘You should take a photo of that,’ he says as I lower my camera. ‘This is the shame of our country, what children have to do to survive.’

One of the boys is dragging his naked little sister alongside him like a rag doll; she can’t be more than two years old. He plonks her down on the rubbish heap while he sorts through it,
and she tries to copy him and starts to rummage too.

Janu yells to the boy, pointing towards his baby sister. The boy throws his arms in the air as if to say, ‘What do you want me to do about it?

‘I’m telling him he should put some clothes on his sister,’ explains Janu.

Just at that moment the naked little girl looks up at me and smiles the sweetest of smiles, like she has nothing in the world to bother her. I take off my cotton chunni, walk over to her and
wrap it around her little body. She’s so tiny that my scarf looks like a sari on her.

Janu doesn’t say anything, but when we walk on, six or seven more children trail behind us with outstretched hands.

‘You are a sweet, soft-hearted person. Problem is, no easy fix!’ Janu says, shooing away the group of children swarming around us. Anjali’s letter echoes back to me.
Isn’t that what she said to my mum? ‘
There’s no easy fix.
’ I feel a bit silly for giving it to her now. The truth is I’m out of my depth in so many ways as I
walk in silence with Janu along this dirt road.

Janu points up to a sign half hidden by hanging electricity wires.

The house is more broken down than I’d imagined. Whole parts of it are covered in blue tarpaulin, the brickwork is crumbling, the pillars are cracked, wooden slats are
rotting in the shutters, and wires hang everywhere, fighting for space with vines that creep through the walls. A washing line with a pair of trousers and a shirt hanging on it is strung amongst
the rubble on a high balcony. Only the door is how I imagined it. Two cracked sandstone pillars, two carved panels with orange flowers and green vines and, just as Anjali wrote in her letter,
it’s as ‘
heavy as a tree
’
.

Perhaps it’s because I know that Anjali really doesn’t want me to come here that my heart’s beating so fast.

‘This was the house of your grandfather and your great-grandparents,’ says Janu. ‘I come here sometimes to look at the carving on the door. The finest example in this area. I
study it and try to make my own carving beautiful like this.’

The tears well up with no warning. To be standing outside the house where Grandad used to live is the weirdest sensation. A bit of me is happy that he never saw the house in this state, so he
could keep his memories just as they were. But, for me, this crumbling house is still holding on to the stories that once happened inside it – like the building is guarding the secrets of the
past.

‘Can we go inside?’ I whisper to Janu.

At first he looks unsure, but then he takes my hand and leads me towards a tall shuttered window to the right of the door. He looks around to see if anyone’s watching, but the narrow
street is quiet, except for a cow meandering along. Janu pulls the shutter towards him and it opens easily. He levers himself up on to the rusting wrought-iron balcony, then offers to help me. I
shake my head and place my hands on the railings to hoist myself up and over. We both step through the window.

The house smells of age and rot and, now that Janu’s standing by my side . . . jasmine. It’s dark except for a soft orange light that creeps in through the slatted windows and
shutters. Dust plays in each light shaft, so that it feels as if this empty house is dancing with life.

‘Be careful where you place your feet,’ warns Janu. ‘There is rotten wood.’

The hairs stand up on the back of my neck as those words echo back to me from my dream, when Grandad called me to climb up to the top of the house. I walk through to the room that, from the
description in Anjali’s letter, must once have been Great-Grandad’s surgery, and after that Shudi’s studio. Janu wanders around, inspecting the remaining pieces of broken
furniture. Then I see him pause and pick something up off one of the shelves. He turns to face me.

‘You’re like a painting in this light,’ he says quietly.

I realize that I’m holding my breath. Everything is silent and still, except for the dust pouring slowly through the cracks in the floor above us, like sifting sand. I look up through the
missing floorboards, searching into the gloom, and when I look back at Janu he is still staring at me. I don’t know how much time passes or how much dust falls, as I stare back. Time stands
still.

I nearly jump out of my skin as somewhere above my head there is a huge clatter, like something falling through rotten wood. I glance up. Two huge eyes are peering down at me. I scream, and Janu
steps close in beside me, looking upward, but the eyes are gone.

‘There was a b-boy, up there,’ I stutter, my whole body shaking with shock. Acid rises up into my throat, so that I think I’m going to puke. Janu sinks to the ground, pulling
me with him, and wraps his arms around me firmly until my breathing goes back to normal and my stomach settles. I feel better, but I don’t want to speak because . . . no matter how much I
want to deny it . . . being held this close by Janu is so good. Anjali said in her letter that ‘
The dark shrinks the whole city into one room.
’ And, in this moment, that’s
exactly how it feels. ‘Probably this boy lives here in this house, better than living in the streets,’ explains Janu. ‘We must go now. This place is not safe. Soon they will come
to knock it down, and next time you visit it will be all new glass and concrete.’

‘That’s why I need to see the rest of it, before it disappears.’ I hear the wobble in my voice and will myself not to cry.

Janu shakes his head firmly and we both stand up. For a moment I think he’s going to kiss me, but then he takes my hand and leads me back through the shuttered window. This time I let him
help me through.

The heat and brightness of the sun are blinding after the dimness inside, and my eyes are blurred by a film of sun fire. I stare up through the orange light and the heat haze, towards the top of
the house, where Anjali described her grandmother sitting on her bed. My eyes are still dancing with too much light after darkness. As my vision shimmers I watch a boy on the top balcony of the
house take the shirt from the washing line, put it on and button it up. When he sees me looking at him he stuffs food into his mouth, leans over the balcony and waves.

‘Hah! Cheeky boy!’ Janu laughs, following my gaze. ‘He’s stealing our sweets! Janu looks at the grand door, Do you want me to take a photo of you here?’ he asks,
holding his hand out for my camera.

I’ve been so caught up in being here I’d completely forgotten to capture it.

When he’s taken the picture, Janu hands back my camera and shows me the photo. ‘Maybe better not to mention to Anjali we went inside.’ He looks a bit guilty.

I nod in agreement – this is definitely our secret.

As we walk down the street I try to push away my own guilt and the strange feeling I can’t throw off that Janu and I have always been wandering around Kolkata together. I look down at my
feet and I love the idea that my shoes are walking the same streets that Grandad walked when he was growing up.

‘What did you take from the house?’ I ask as we enter a park and the road turns to grass. After the dust-filled streets, the ancient trees are like a great breathing lung in the
heart of the city. Janu stops, feels around in his pocket and pulls out a tiny piece of carved wood, painted in faded orange, green and golden colours.