The Smoke is Rising (28 page)

On one of them a young man sat with his back to them.

They both stood still.

At last, Jaydev said: ‘How about the one at the end?’

‘Yes, that’s fine.’

Susheela loosened her shawl and let it hang slackly from her shoulders before sitting down. Jaydev placed the basket between them and smoothed down his hair.

The young man did not look up. He was in his late twenties, the angled planes of his face making him look like he had been hewn out of a single piece of stone. The frames of his glasses were thick and black, widening his long face. He held his hands locked in his lap.

Rather than gazing at the view, in spite of themselves Susheela and Jaydev found themselves studying their neighbour. Every now and then the wind would puff out the front of his papery shirt. The
man remained immobile.

‘There’s an unusually grave young man,’ said Jaydev in a low voice.

‘He looks very sad, no? Like he is caught in a great dilemma. And so thin.’

‘What do you think is bothering him?’

‘God only knows. Maybe he is suffering the pangs of a deep and unrequited love.’

Jaydev laughed.

‘You can do better than that.’

‘Okay, maybe he has lost his job, he has fought with his entire family, he has no idea what to do with the rest of his life and he has not got a single friend in the world. Happy?’

‘
Arre
, why would that make me happy?’

‘You know we should not be sitting here speculating like this on that poor boy’s problems.’

‘Maybe we are wrong and he does not have any problems. Maybe he just looks like that.’

‘Oh my God, do you think he is here to jump?’ asked Susheela.

‘No need for such drama. He is probably just enjoying the view. Mind you, the poor fellow probably will jump if we don’t stop staring at him.’

In the background a line of bush quail let out a series of long whistles, peaking in an alarmed tremolo. Then the low of the wind pressed back in. The young man and the possible reasons for his malaise were forgotten as the sun warmed the backs of their necks. Below them, the valley was totally still, in that moment sealed off from the world’s intervention. The wind hummed on.

‘Why don’t you come for dinner next week?’ Susheela asked.

‘Dinner?’

‘Yes, my place.’

‘At your place?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure?’

Susheela forgot the strictures of politeness and paused to think about whether she was sure.

‘Yes, I am sure. It won’t be anything elaborate of course. Something simple.’

‘Well, then I won’t come.’

‘Fine, don’t come then. You should be happy an old man like you even gets an invitation anywhere.’

‘I should be happy about the insults too?’

‘Yes, that too.’

The silences between them were now rich with contentment, the pleasure that could be gained only through an intimate civility. Susheela no longer spent these pauses reflecting on the nuances of her comportment. As the fancy took it, her mind swooped through flurries, plunged into craters or simply lay motionless in a luminous shoal.

‘I spoke to Priyanka yesterday,’ said Susheela.

‘She is the elder one?’

‘Yes.’

‘How is she?’

‘Fine. But I don’t know how. She seems to lead such a busy life that it makes my head spin just hearing about it.’

‘We also once had those lives.’

‘I never had the kind of life she seems to have, where every hour of every day is audited, planned, disposed of.’

‘And your other daughter?’

‘Well she is the opposite. I won’t hear from her for a while and there will be weeks unaccounted for. But to me that seems more normal.’

‘I think we all have parts of our life which are unaccounted for. They simply don’t appear in our conversations with other people.’

Susheela threw one end of her shawl over her shoulder. The sun had disappeared behind a long boat-shaped cloud. At their feet, silver grasses banded together before beginning their procession over the lip of the hill. There they plunged headlong over the edge, dashing towards the velvet shadows of the jackfruit trees that stood further down. The air itself was contemplation.

‘Is it too early to have a sandwich?’ asked Jaydev.

Susheela smiled.

‘Not at all.’

Mr Tanveer’s printer jolted into action, making a sound like an angry goat. Mala looked across at Shipra who now spelt her name Shiiprraa. She had consulted a numerologist a few weeks ago and had been advised that some minor alterations to the spelling of her name would enhance her destiny number and provide for better numerological vibrations. Shipra became Shiiprraa and an email was duly sent out to inform her family, friends and colleagues.

Mala had made no progress with the figures she had been asked to reconcile. Her head was bent, shoulders rigid, eyes narrowed, body suspended in an arc of concentration. But her efforts were directed at trying to regulate her breathing and dull the panic rising inside. They were due to leave for Colombo in two weeks. She had told Girish that her leave had been approved even though she had not dared bring the subject up with Mr Tanveer. She glanced at him. He was staring anxiously at his screen with what appeared to be chalk marks around his mouth.

Over the course of a couple of evenings, Mala had feigned great interest in the trip. She had followed the itinerary and had asked about clothing, food and history. She had looked over his shoulder as he showed her image after image on his new laptop. But the
efforts had cost her the stupefying enervation of sleepless nights, long hours spent making out shapes behind her eyelids and listening for sounds of morning.

From Mala’s seat she could see what Shiiprraa was working on when there was no glare from the window. Shiiprraa’s screen saver showed a beach, a hammock slung between palm trees, a hummingbird and a sea that was an impossible blue. Would the sea in Sri Lanka look like that? Girish had said five nights at a beach resort. He would take her hand and they would walk along the shore in the early evening, their fingers laced tightly. There would be a hard warmth from his hand and a soft warmth from the breeze. He would point things out to her: a fishing boat, a crab that staggered into a hole in the sand, and across the water, India.

‘Coming along?’ asked Mr Tanveer.

She nodded weakly and reached for a file on her desk.

There were thirteen nights, he had said, filled with jungles, ruins, temples, wildlife, churches, train stations, tea gardens, museums and those walks along the beach. She would wake to his soft snoring in a hotel room with sealed windows and the bedspread neatly folded on the luggage rack, preparing her first words of the day. She would have to anticipate what he thought of someone they met on the tour bus and whether that was an acquaintance that needed to be nurtured. On an afternoon when he had not spoken for over two hours she would anxiously wonder whether or not to suggest something delicate and diverting for the evening, affordable and appropriate. She would need to pay attention and understand and, all the time, listen, judge, gauge, while knots of desperation tightened around her lungs.

The piercing ring of the phone on Mr Tanveer’s desk broke into her thoughts.

‘Accounts. Tanveer here.’

He stood up.

‘Of course, sir. You don’t worry, sir. For what reason am I here? Consider it already done.’

He replaced the receiver and then sat down.

The words and numerals on the paper in front of her shifted in blocks, like a child’s puzzle. Both her colleagues seemed to be engrossed in whatever they were doing but Mala still did not feel it was safe to look up. She worried that if she caught Mr Tanveer’s eye at this point she would simply have to leave the room and never return.

Seconds or perhaps minutes went by and the image of the beach returned to Shiiprraa’s screen.

Another vision flashed through Mala’s head. She and Girish were in the sea, she near the shore, the water rising up around her thighs and he, a distant head, floating away from her, his arms slicing cruelly into the sunless water.

The figures on the page came back into focus. She now inhabited a place where it was impossible to separate the real from the imagined, like the needle pricks that she could feel on her palms and the chunks of ice that rattled around in her heart.

There seemed to her to be only two options. She would have to tell Girish that they could not go on holiday and face the likely consequences. Or she would have to go to Sri Lanka and then return to work, the penalty of her unauthorised absence drawing down dimly over her. Unless the terror engendered by either scenario forced her into a third option.

Uma had just put the last scoop of rice into her mouth when she heard the scrunch of gravel. She saw the
mali
slowly straighten his body, drop the sack he was holding and walk towards the gates. She had a sense that she had seen him perform exactly the same
action half an hour ago, but no one had come to the gates then. The day had been imbued with strange shifts in the progression of events. Susheela had asked her to come to work early and then left as soon as she arrived, wrapped in a new red shawl. She had got into a strange car, the driver’s identity hidden by blades of mist.

After that Uma had been alone in the house. As she swept and dusted, the silence had been heavy and exacting after the early morning turmoil. She had spent the previous night at the Sangam Continental Lodge, at first light rushed back home in a rickshaw for fresh clothes and then arrived at Susheela’s at the agreed hour. There had been a brief argument with Shankar when he had insisted on giving her money for the rickshaw. She had finally accepted it but by then their tight voices seemed to be disagreeing about something else altogether. He had ended the conversation with a joke about her hair, which had been even more riotous than usual that morning. As she got into the rickshaw, she had felt his hand gently press the dip between her shoulder blades.

It was the disorientation of metamorphosis. The entry of kindness, pleasure, subterfuge and uncertainty, where before there had been only a wary monotony. The encounters at the lodge were hardly flecked with the glitter of romance or promises foretold. Yet they carried the weight of fascination. There was the knowledge of a secret, lodged deep within. There was the solicitude of a generous regard. There were flights of fantasy, realised in the harsh light of the Sangam’s first-floor rooms.

Shankar’s single act of sympathy on the day of the floods had brought forth from her the only possible response in gratitude. He had accepted that gratitude with a humility she had never known. The palisade around her had fallen away, stake by stake, as the hours of her days reorganised themselves into new blocks of longing. Until recently, she had warded off new experiences for this very reason. Her encounters with Shankar had deposited a
patchy lamina of expectation over her life that now obscured her vision and made everything that had been familiar seem somehow unsettled.

When she heard the key in the lock, Uma rose at once. She hurriedly rinsed her plate at the back sink, as if trying to erase the shame of sustenance.

‘Uma?’ called Susheela, who had just come in through the front door.

Uma walked back through the house.

‘Had your lunch?’ asked Susheela.

Uma nodded.

‘Here, for washing,’ Susheela said, handing her a basket with a flask and a lunchbox in it.

Uma took the basket and then said: ‘I need to leave a little early.’

‘Yes, that’s fine. You came early.’

Uma nodded again and slipped out of the back door.

Susheela sat down in an armchair and shut her eyes, her face in absolute repose.

A few minutes later, when Uma walked past her to go upstairs, Susheela was fast asleep.