The Blue Notebook (6 page)

Puneet always used to laugh at me when I called what a man did “making sweet-cake.” He would throw open his mouth and laugh out loud. He would taunt me, “So what’s in the oven, princess?”

The expression was born two days after Father left me at Master Gahil’s house. The moment I arrived there was the moment I left Father’s. The old woman, Kumud, put me in what she called “my room” and started to close the door. She leaned into the room and spoke so quietly that I had to stop weeping to hear her. “When you have control, I will feed you.” I knew that this moment was a break point between my past and my future; my screams and sobs were rather like a full stop ending one sentence at the same time it starts another. I had begun to adapt to my abandonment the moment I left the village, and by the time I reached this room, I was in some way prepared to be left there. Even now, I recognize that the young adapt fast. Inexperience
or purity is a blessing, since a virgin-white picture has never had shapes, shade, or color painted on it. It is far easier to paint on a blank canvas than on one that has already been painted on.

I became transformed as I lay on that bed, which was the most luxurious I had ever felt. When clay dries in an oven, it is changed from a soft, malleable form to a solid, defined one; once baked, the hardened clay can never be molded again, only broken. A few hours earlier I had entered Gahil’s house as a soft glob of warm clay. I would leave there a hardened, useful vessel.

After I had channeled enough energy into crying and screaming, I was hungry and so I stopped crying. In my silence, I looked around me; the bed was large enough for all my brothers and sisters to sleep on, and it was so high off the ground that to reach the floor, I had to jump. Covering it was a blanket sewn with flowers. It remained light outside but two electric lamps were switched on, both of which had ornate, pale pink lampshades, so the room’s light had a tinge of gentility. Bolted to the ceiling was a slow-turning fan with five large white sails, and I could feel the soft breeze on my cheeks. If you stared at it for long enough, the fan could hypnotize you. There were several pieces of wooden furniture in the room: two chairs, a chest of drawers, and two bedside tables. All the furniture was so well polished that it shone and reflected the light beams. The window was open and I could hear the sounds of the street outside: the cars, the cries, and the barks. It was the first time I had ever seen bars across a window.

I heard the lock in the door click, and the door gradually opened. In shuffled the old woman. Were it not for the fact that
she moved forward with excruciating slowness
(pshhh, pshhh, pshhh)
, I would have taken her for dead. She did not blink, she did not say anything, and her face was stiff like the leather of a worn saddle. When she did eventually speak, I could have sworn that her lips did not move and her voice sounded like the speaking dead. Dead or not, she carried a tray of food.

She placed the tray on top of the chest of drawers. I pretended to be uninterested but could not stop myself from peering at it. There was fruit, a tan curry, a bowl of dahl, and sweet-cakes like you have never seen. The sweet-cakes were green, blue, and red, oval, flat, and cone-shaped. I inhaled the entire plate of sweet-cakes and with a little less self-control I would have eaten the plate as well. I did not touch the curry or dahl until all the sweet-cakes were gone, and then I ate those too. While I fulfilled my hunger, the old woman disappeared (or had I eaten her?).

Pshhh, pshhh, pshhh—
she returned a few minutes later with a white towel. “Come with me,” she croaked. Then I did, in retrospect, what any nine-year-old would do: I threw a bolt of defiance. I sat down on the floor,
plump
, brought my knees to my chin, and gave the old woman a look of absolute resolve. “No,” I said, “I will not move until you bring me more sweet-cakes.” She did not engage my gaze, or appear to have heard my demand. Her only response was to kick me.

Part of getting old is that you become scrawny, which must be why when they kill a goat at the last moment before its natural death, it tastes like wood. The old woman did not have a single ounce of flesh on her leg. It felt as though I were being kicked by a human table leg. What is more, Table Leg kicked with venom and it hurt like hell.

She bade me follow her for a second time, and this time I obeyed. We shuffled along the corridor and entered a room, in the middle of which was a large white container filled with steaming hot water. When she told me to get into it, I assumed she was going to cook me. I had never been immersed in hot water before, having always cleaned myself in the river. The heat was scalding but it was a different heat from lying on the rocks by the river. My fears were heightened when she started to pour fragrant oil into the water—I immediately started looking for the rice. She pushed her sari off her arms and grasped, in her thin, talonlike hands, the hugest tablet of soap I have ever seen. She leaned over the steaming tub of water and started to clean me.

Of course I had been cleaned by my mother or an aunt, but never like this. The old woman had remarkable strength in her bony hands. With the soap and a scratchy yellow cloth, she scraped a layer of skin off every part of my body. Each time I screamed, she scrubbed harder, until I realized the folly of crying out. I think she was quite disappointed not to find any lice in my hair, because she inspected my head twice. When she was satisfied she told me to climb out of the tub. I stood naked before her, expecting her to offer me the towel she held in her hands. She did not do so immediately, though, but allowed me to drip on the floor. Under her folded eyelids I saw her gaze move. Her eyes were small and dark blue; the whites of her eyes had yellowed like milk aged into cheese. She looked me over from hair to hand, from breast to knee, and from groin to foot. Her eyes covered every inch of me. At that moment, with no understanding of what was to befall me, I felt connected with this decrepit sadist. We were equally trapped in our roles;
I as a victim and she as the oppressor. Neither of us had chosen our paths and in another life our current roles might be reversed. Nonetheless, we had both gravitated to this moment together.

I walked back into the room draped in a towel. The door behind me locked. I went to bed naked, my hair only half dry. I was clean.

Last night I had my dream again. I rarely dream but when I do, the dream is often the same one. It is about a hat vendor. I can never work out why some nights I dream and some nights I do not. I always eat the same food, work the same work, live in the same space, but sometimes I dream.

In my dream I am walking through a roofed market, along a corridor of pale yellow stone that extends downward as far as I can see. On both sides of the corridor are stalls that sell everything you would expect: vegetables, dresses, toys, spices, and devotional carvings. However, there are other stalls that sell strange items, such as pieces of people’s bodies desiccated by the sun, the carcass of our old cow somehow miniaturized and preserved (nothing else is sold in that stall), severed but moving hands and feet, and clothes that speak. The market is crowded with people of all different sizes pushing against one another. Along the entire length of the rooftop, descending down into the market, is my hair.

I enter the market from the top and walk down the middle of the path. As I walk, my hair falls from the ceiling and curls
on my head like a growing, shining black turban. The people divide as I walk through the market and everybody touches me as I pass them. Some hold out their hands to brush against me; others strain just to touch me with their fingertips. Still others grope my breasts, my belly, and my legs. No one touches my face, and I feel that as I breathe out, they inhale as one giant being. My breath becomes the finest mist of rain, and by inhaling it they fill themselves with me.

As I walk down through the market, at first I feel brilliant. As I walk further, though, I feel increasingly weakened and thirsty. My throat sometimes feels so parched that I have to resist waking up. Then, on my right, I see a hat stall. The hat stall sells only the straw hats of the field that the men wear all day long to farm. They are neatly stacked in many piles to form a wall from the floor to the ceiling. The hat vendor is behind the wall of hats and cannot be seen. Although I am thirsty, I cry out, almost as if I am singing, “Honored sir, can I please buy a hat from you?” He replies from behind the wall, “But they are not for ladies of your station.” I beg, “Please, please, my lord, sell me a hat.”

Suddenly, the wall of hats is pushed out at me and the piles of hats flood over me. “Help!” I cry. The hats are falling everywhere. They are tumbling down the market street. The other people keep walking downward through the market and stomp over them. I cry out in panic and scurry on the floor, desperately trying to pick up all the hats. The hat vendor starts to laugh, a deep-pitched, joyous laugh. He calls out to me, “Run, Batuk, gather them up. Oh look, another one has fallen—grab it.” My arms are constantly full of hats, but as I reach down to pick one up, two spill out of my arms back onto the floor. I bend over to
pick up the fallen hats, but then more fall still. I fear the wrath of the hat vendor. But he is laughing; what is more, his laughter is taking on a musicality and is gaining a rhythm. Finally, I have all the hats balanced in my arms and I turn carefully so as not to let them fall. Just as I come face-to-face with the vendor, I awaken.

This morning I woke up with the early light pushing through my nest’s curtain. It is cloudy overhead and the light is a diffused orange and the air is cool. I lie on my throne listening to the tumbling of the barrows going to the market and to the rumbling of cars and trains starting the day’s traffic. I think of the brother and five sisters with whom I share my life here. I think of how unfair I have been to Meera, for she is so new to the family and very young. I think a lot about Puneet and know that he is forever of the street and that hope has been cut from his body. My mind drifts to my fantasy that one day a cook will want me to bake sweet-cake with him alone and forever. I pray to whoever listens that he will bring a leash to my neck and that I will be led from here to serve him. I pray that he will let me take my pen and my book with me. I am not sure why I write but in my mind I shudder that it may be so that one day I can look back and read how I have melted into my ink and become nothing—become his. You can never fully straighten bent metal; you can only make it less bent.

All of us on the Common Street remember our induction, which gave us the right to call ourselves “a taken one.” When I woke up the first morning after I was left with Master Gahil, I was disoriented, but only for a couple of seconds. I immediately remembered where I was. The old woman had scrubbed my skin so hard that I felt raw lying naked on the soft sheet. I can still remember the softness of those sheets.

I could also hear the activity of the street below. I jumped out of bed and ran across the room naked. I dragged a chair over to the window, stood on it, and stared out. It was early in the day; the gray of the night was being burned away by the morning sun. Cars and trucks drove past, people were milling on the streets, and store owners were preparing their shops for the day. The bakery was already open. My hands held the cool iron bars of the open window; I did not think to cry out. I looked for Father and he was not there.