Hidden Life
When Nidhi was fourteen, her mother became pregnant again. People were understandably surprised, no one more so, it seemed, than her own parents. They made their usual jokes, both about the pregnancy and about the deed that had produced it.
Her mother: “If we’d known, we’d have put some drama into the sex, yaar. Now this poor kid will grow up and become a banker or some other boring thing.”
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Her father, all innocent astonishment: “I woke up to go the bathroom, that’s it. Must have made a wrong turn on the way back.”
They made these jokes in front of Nidhi, who was unembarrassed by them. Her parents had always spoken like this. It was not that they were crass, exactly. They just didn’t see the use in shielding her from things. Like the man who sold vegetables from a handcart when Nidhi was six. His produce looked fresh, as far as Nidhi could tell, but her mother nevertheless waved him on. One day, she said, “Watch. He’s going to touch his testicles now.” Nidhi saw the man’s hand slide down into his trousers, saw the furtive fondling. When he reached their house, he picked up a tomato with the same hand and held it out to them, a glossy enticement.
•
Other parents, Nidhi was aware, did not say “testicles” to their children. Other parents had special words for such things, pert and whimsical. Urine was “soo-soo” or “chi-chi.” Feces were “caca.” Vaginas were usually “flowers” or “buds.” (What penises were called, Nidhi wasn’t sure.) Having sex was “getting close” or, confusingly, “friendship.” Nidhi’s neighbor Payal had a cocker spaniel named Lucy, who regularly dripped spots of blood onto the driveway. Payal’s family called this, and all menstruation, “Lucy’s problem.”
But Nidhi did not resent her parents’ frankness. It was an unremarkable fact, like her father’s lazy eye, or the aerobics classes for local women that her mother, a former Bharatanatyam dancer, taught on their terrace—and continued to teach even as her pregnancy progressed. Each morning, while Nidhi ate breakfast, these women would troop cheerfully into the house in socked feet, Keds hooked to their fingers, calling out, “Good morning, big sister!” and laughing as they climbed the stairs to the terrace, where Nidhi’s mother was already laying out their steps and dumbbells.
•
Then, on a Tuesday, sixteen weeks into her term, Nidhi’s mother phoned her students to ask them not to come; she was feeling tired. Nidhi’s father drove her to a clinic. By the time Nidhi got home from school, her mother had locked herself into her bedroom, and Nidhi was an only child again.
“Give her a few days,” her father said.
But a few days did not help. Nidhi’s mother stayed in her bedroom, and, for once, her father would not reveal what went on inside that place, from which only unfathomable sounds now emerged: low booms; yipping cries; vast, tomblike silences.
What her father did say, eventually, was that it might be best if Nidhi stayed somewhere else for a while. With whom? A friend? Nidhi could not imagine spending more than a night or two at her friends’ houses. The idea of looking so deeply into their lives, or having them look into hers, disturbed her.
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No, not a friend, her father said. Not even in Bangalore. His maternal aunt—Nidhi’s great-aunt—lived in Madras (or Chennai, as it had become only a few years ago). Her name was Jaya. She was the oldest of his mother’s five siblings, and she had a house with a huge garden, perfect for exploring. And the best part? The house was chock-full of books. He’d stayed there himself for a week, in fact, when he was fifteen and his brother had fallen ill with chicken pox. He remembered that week being pure heaven. He was sure that Nidhi would feel the same.
So sure, it turned out, that he’d already called Jaya Aunty, who had said that Nidhi was welcome to stay as long as needed.
“And how long will that be?” Nidhi asked.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Her father sighed. “Trust me. You don’t want to see her this way.”
•
Three days later, he and Nidhi waited on the platform at Cantonment Station for the Brindavan Express. Nidhi was wearing her favorite denim shorts, the ones with the patch pockets. Once the train arrived in Madras, she was expected to catch an auto to Jaya Aunty’s house, in a neighborhood called Adyar. (Apparently, there was no question of being met at the station.) A family nearby, on hearing that she was travelling alone, offered to keep an eye on her.
Her father thanked them. Then he turned to Nidhi. “By the way, you should know about Padmini,” he said. “She’s Jaya’s daughter-in-law. She’s retarded.”
He spoke in his old, easy manner. Even the word “retarded,” which Nidhi would soon learn to expunge from her vocabulary, he made free of shadows. “She’ll be in her mid-forties now. But, mentally, you’ll find her closer to ten or eleven, I’d say.”
“She’s married?”
“She’s a widow. Jaya’s son—Shankar, my cousin—died before he was thirty. From what I’ve heard, he married Padmini without knowing about her. Her condition, I mean. Her family kept it secret. Nobody realized until after the wedding, but, before anything could be done, Shankar died. He died somewhere in Africa, if I recall. Mozambique, maybe? Anyway, my family always said that Shankar was a genius. The kind of fellow who could read a book once and memorize it.”
“What about her?” Nidhi persisted. “She stayed? Even after he died?”
“Padmini?” Her father sounded surprised. “Well, yes. Jaya could’ve sent her back to her family, I suppose, but they’d pulled a pretty dirty trick to marry her off. Who knows what they’d have done if they’d gotten her back?”
Nidhi was silent. She and her father watched the dusty old train pull in.
Her father said, “It felt like having a younger sister for a while. Back when I stayed there.” He smiled sadly at Nidhi. “Maybe it’ll be the same for you.”
•
Jaya Aunty did not offer to help with Nidhi’s suitcase. She was also of the opinion that Nidhi had not drunk enough apple juice in her life. She murmured, looking at Nidhi’s legs, “Apple juice is good for the skin. Your father drank lots of apple juice when he stayed here.”
Nidhi glanced at her legs. They appeared fine to her, strong and lithe and chicory brown.
“That’s why your father’s complexion is so nice,” Jaya Aunty went on. “Apple juice. But your mother, I think, is not so fair?”
“She’s fairer than my father,” Nidhi pointed out. She would soon learn not to do this.
“Is that so?” Jaya Aunty was a tall woman with sloping, mannish shoulders. Her sari—royal-purple silk stitched with miniature golden birds—hung straight down without any visible deviation in service to hips or buttocks. Her scant hair was pulled taut across her scalp, like violin strings.
This conversation was taking place in Jaya Aunty’s living room, and Nidhi’s eyes kept darting about. There was something wrong with the room, she thought. With its proportions or its arrangement. At the far end, which seemed miles away, a blocky television sat before a lone white plastic chair. Where she and her great-aunt stood, by the front door, an ornate rosewood sofa hunkered, its ugly orange upholstery embalmed in thick plastic. The long middle of the room was completely empty. Looking at it gave Nidhi a queasy feeling, as if the floor there could not be trusted.
“It’s good to be fit,” Jaya Aunty declared. “But fitness comes from doing daily work. If you are not fit, it means you are not doing enough work, and so you touch your toes and kick your legs like a donkey, and things get mixed up inside.”
A moment of bewilderment, and then Nidhi understood. Jaya Aunty was talking about the aerobics classes. She was saying that Nidhi’s mother had lost the baby because of the aerobics classes, because she had kicked her legs like a donkey and things had gotten mixed up.
Nidhi imagined the baby crawling around in her mother’s body, desperately seeking the uterus, and, failing to find it in its proper place, quietly shrivelling up and dying. It was ridiculous, she knew, but she made no effort to suppress the image. It gave her the same feeling as the room’s empty middle, a flash of something dirty and hidden. Suddenly, her parents’ cheerful transparency—their coarse jokes, their eagerness to name things that should not be named—appeared to Nidhi in a faintly embarrassing light.
She said, “Thank you for letting me stay here.”
“Well.” Jaya Aunty shrugged. “Your father made it sound like an emergency.”
•
Nidhi’s room was off the kitchen and, judging by the faint odor of gunnysacks, had once been a storeroom. Tiny and windowless, it reminded her of a room, belonging to a famous artist, that was described in a novel she’d read: a single cot, a chair, a standing fan. She loved it immediately. Jaya Aunty slept in a much larger room on the other side of the house. It had windows lining one wall, cupboards lining the other, and two single cots. And that was when Nidhi remembered Padmini, whom she had still not seen.
Padmini came in about ten minutes later, carrying a net bag bulging with okra and shiny gourds. Her hair was gray—somehow a surprise—and tied in a low bun. She wore a boxy cotton blouse and an ankle-length pavadai-style skirt, the kind that Nidhi had stopped wearing years earlier. Her hips were wide, her shoulders slender and curved. Her face, indisputably middle-aged, had a pensive, startled quality. When she caught sight of Nidhi, who was unpacking in her room, she stopped short.
“Hi,” Nidhi said.
Padmini smiled, though this appeared more reflex than friendliness. Perhaps she’d forgotten about Nidhi’s arrival, or perhaps Jaya Aunty had not bothered to warn her about it. (Having now met her great-aunt, Nidhi felt that this was entirely possible.) Padmini did not respond to the greeting and vanished into the kitchen. Only then did it occur to Nidhi that she might be mute.
•
It took Nidhi a few days to piece together her new situation. Padmini, she discovered, did not only the shopping and the cooking but everything else, too. She washed clothes and hung them on the clothesline in the overgrown garden behind the house. She pounded spices in a mortar the size of Nidhi’s head. She scoured copper vessels with lime halves dipped in salt. She shelled peas, kneaded dough, picked stones from dal. The only things she did not do were sweep and mop. A young woman named Ambika came in daily to do these, and she did them with so much grumbling and ill will that Nidhi guiltily wished that Padmini would just take care of them herself.
For Padmini did not seem to mind all the work she had to do. It would be an exaggeration to say that she enjoyed it, but it left no mark upon her. For days, Nidhi observed her for signs of secret despair but could detect none. While she was carrying out a task, Padmini was unflagging, methodical, focussed, capable. She was not, however, mute. As she grew used to Nidhi, she became fairly talkative in her presence. Her conversation consisted primarily of declarations, some more enigmatic than others.
“The ping-ping lady didn’t come today,” she might say, deftly peeling a carrot.
Or: “Give me your half pants. I’ll wash them.”
Or: “I have to put the dirty things into the hot place.”
The first two were easy enough to follow. The ping-ping lady was Ambika, who wore many jangly bangles. “Half pants” were Nidhi’s denim shorts. But the business about dirty things in the hot place remained a mystery. In the beginning, Nidhi tried to decipher Padmini’s more obscure assertions, but, in this one regard, Padmini resembled Jaya Aunty: she did not like being questioned. She would fall into a sulky silence, and Nidhi eventually gave up. Still, Padmini was every bit as kind as her father had promised. She made sure that Nidhi’s clothes were perfectly folded, saved her the cream from the curd, which Nidhi loved to eat sprinkled with sugar, and surprised her with boiled groundnuts, to go with her evening cup of tea.
While Padmini worked, Jaya Aunty sat in the plastic chair in the living room and watched TV. It was all she appeared to do. She was a restless viewer, changing channels a dozen times within minutes. The resulting stream of clips—“Baywatch,” a Hindi soap, the Tamil news, “Baywatch” again—was so disorienting that Nidhi tended to avoid her, preferring Padmini’s company instead.
Padmini, too, was uninterested in TV. She did not linger to watch when she walked through the living room with an armful of clothes, nor did her gaze steal to the screen as she sat on the sofa, trimming green beans with a paring knife. But this, Nidhi conceded, was perhaps the result of a need to concentrate, since any oversight in her work earned Jaya Aunty’s prompt disapproval. Things had to be done a certain way in that house. Once, when the curd did not set, Jaya Aunty did not do what Nidhi’s mother would have done—namely, shrug her shoulders and nip out to the store for a couple of squishy packets. Instead, she sniffed at the sour, runny stuff, then ostentatiously poured it over her rice, mixed it with her fingers, and ate it with stiff dignity, like an old emperor in exile.
•
Nidhi was not unhappy in Madras, but she was soon bored. Her boredom was sharpened by the discovery that most of her initial assumptions were wrong. Her room, which had seemed so romantic, became unbearably hot each evening. The garden, so promising and Kipling-like at first glance, was, in fact, a place of grim neglect, filled with long, sharp-edged grass that made Nidhi’s ankles swell; plus, she was sure she’d once seen a small brown snake flashing into a hole. (Padmini showed no fear, going barefoot into the garden each afternoon to hang clothes.) But Nidhi’s worst mistake of all was not having packed a single book. Given what her father had said, she had expected to find a veritable library at Jaya Aunty’s house, but after a week she had not seen anything between two covers except for the Rani magazines that came by post, which she could not read because they were in Tamil. Had her father misremembered? Had the books ever existed? Likely, Nidhi reasoned, they’d belonged not to Jaya Aunty but to her genius son, and, after his death, they’d been given away. This suspicion was strengthened when she asked Padmini about them one day.
“Books?” Padmini echoed. Then she pointed a finger heavenward.
•
Madras was on the coast, yet Nidhi had not laid eyes on the beach. When she mentioned the possibility of an outing, Jaya Aunty murmured, “Ah, the beach. A girl’s body was found on Marina Beach last month. She was . . . exposed.” “Exposed” was spoken with a regretful glance at Nidhi’s shorts.
Consequently, Nidhi found herself moping around the house, sweating, flipping through the unintelligible pages of Rani, listening to Padmini’s pleasant, purling talk. She thought about begging her father to let her return to Bangalore, but he would inevitably ask why, and she did not want to lie and claim that what was merely tedious was unbearable. He called the house every other day, and, when she assured him that she was fine, his relief was palpable. When Nidhi asked after her mother, he just said, “We’ll see.”
•
A week into her visit, something happened. Nidhi was sitting on the plastic-covered sofa, drawing her legs up so that Ambika could sweep underneath, and Padmini was in the kitchen. That was when Jaya Aunty farted in her white chair. A long, terrible, gurgling discharge. She did not turn her head or apologize. On the screen, two men in white shorts were playing tennis. Nidhi and Ambika looked at each other, then looked away.
Until now, Ambika had demonstrated exactly no interest in Nidhi, but she seemed to feel that this incident had united them. Later, when Nidhi was in her room, Ambika sidled up and whispered, “Dirty old camel, isn’t she?”
“Who?” Nidhi asked disingenuously.
“And the other one.” Ambika tutted with lazy, luxurious spite. “I know I shouldn’t speak badly about people like that. God made them, same as you and me. I’m just saying—you can understand why the husband ran off.”
“I thought he died,” Nidhi said.
“All men have the feeling, you know.” Ambika regarded Nidhi sternly, as if she were being difficult. “If they can’t show it at home, what can they do? They have to go somewhere else, no?”
“Have you finished your work?” Nidhi asked politely.
“Everything but the terrace room.” Ambika flicked a defensive glance at the ceiling. “But it’s not my fault. He locks the door and takes the key. Does he think I can walk through walls?”
This time, Nidhi really had no idea what she was talking about.
“The professor. Oh, right, you don’t know him. He was a friend of her son. Says he’s from Africa, but I’ve heard that everyone in Africa has black skin, and he just looks like a normal Indian to me. He comes here every few months.”
“Does he stay in my room?”
“The storeroom?” Ambika looked offended. “No, he stays upstairs. It’s the only room with A.C. Whenever he’s here, I try to sweep inside as long as possible—it’s so nice and cool—but he always sends me away. Says I disturb his reading.”
“Reading?” Nidhi’s head shot up. “You mean books?”
“What else? He’s got hundreds up there. The maharaja of books, that’s what I call him.”
•
Nidhi had not paid much attention to the little room on the terrace, but now she went up to examine it. Months of dust lined the doorjamb, and the dead bolt was dull, but the padlock hanging from it was new. Nidhi nearly asked Jaya Aunty about the professor, but then she recalled what Ambika had said. He was a friend of her son. The dead son, Shankar, about whom not a word had been breathed since Nidhi arrived.
She did not ask.
A week and a half passed. Padmini went out for vegetables, and, when she came back, she presented Nidhi with a roll of cheap, colorful bangles from the market. Nidhi, who hadn’t worn such bangles in years and considered them babyish, was unaccountably moved. Her father called to say that there was still no improvement in her mother. Ambika sighed and swept. Jaya Aunty watched five minutes of “The Terminator” before switching to a game show set in a crystal maze.
•
Then one morning, Nidhi woke up to find a man at the dining table. He was around fifty, she guessed, with a balding head, a long body, and slim, tapering fingers. He wore yellow pajama bottoms with white stripes, and a white V-necked undershirt. “Hello,” he said. “Sorry if I disturbed you last night. Those flights always come in so bloody late. I’m Sudhir.”
His accent stood just to the side of any that Nidhi recognized. “You didn’t disturb me,” she said, cautiously taking a seat. It was true. She’d managed, despite the heat, to sleep through his arrival.
Padmini brought in idlis, steaming in their many-tiered tower, and a steel bowl of coconut chutney. The professor—it had to be him—leaned forward and sniffed appreciatively.
Then Jaya Aunty sailed in, in a bright-orange silk sari. “Eat, eat!” she called. “Smelling it won’t fill your stomach!” She giggled at her own joke.
Nidhi stared. What was this giggling? And this tone, so purring and coquettish? The professor seemed to be thinking the same thing, for he swivelled his head and looked at Nidhi directly. In his look, Nidhi detected a sad acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of Jaya Aunty’s little performance, but, more than that, she saw—or believed she saw—an entreaty. He was asking Nidhi to go along with it.
“Already pestering me?” the professor asked, turning gravely back to Nidhi’s great-aunt. “You’re regressing, my dear Jaya. Last time, you had the decency to wait until after breakfast.”
“Such a joker.” Jaya Aunty giggled again. “You haven’t changed at all.”
•
The professor, Nidhi learned, was not a professor but a businessman. His name was Sudhir Desai, and he was Kenyan. That is, someone in his family had gone to Kenya from Gujarat a hundred years ago and had settled on the coast there. Sudhir Desai had been born in a town called Mombasa, so he was not Indian in the way that Nidhi was. He explained this to her in so many words, with a kind look that said she probably wouldn’t understand.
“Sort of like Gandhi,” Nidhi said. “The Indians in South Africa.”
He was about to eat his last piece of idli but stopped and looked at her.
“Not bad,” he said. “Sort of. Yes.”
“Are you here on business, Sudhir?” Nidhi asked. She’d already tried calling him Uncle, and he’d told her that he preferred Sudhir, which was how she knew that he was even older than she’d guessed.
“Business?” He laughed. “No. I’m here, well, for a hobby, you could say.”
Padmini came into the dining room and took the idli tower away. Sudhir Desai smiled at her, but she ignored him. She seemed withdrawn and sullen, the way she’d been during Nidhi’s first days. Sudhir Desai turned to Nidhi with a sigh, as if to say, I’m trying.
Nidhi asked, “What kind of hobby?”
•
His room was not unlike hers: a bed, a chair. But, being on the terrace, it was not at all cavelike. It boasted two decent-sized windows, not on the terrace side but on the exterior wall, one of which was fitted with a small A.C. unit. The A.C. was rattling away, and Nidhi’s skin smarted in the artificial cold.
The other difference was that his room was jammed with books. Plywood shelves lined the walls, their planks bowed in the middle. The books weren’t in great condition, either. Many of the spines had peeled off, and Nidhi could see the string and glue that held the pages together. Still, they were books. Sudhir Desai laughed at the look on her face.
“Don’t get too excited. They’re not novels.” He touched his temples in mock divination. “Something tells me you’re the type of girl who’s crazy for novels.”
She was. But hearing him say it made her wish she wasn’t.
“You should have seen them when I first came,” he said, gently brushing a tatty volume. “Jaya had them downstairs. Bang in the middle of the living room. Nobody had looked at them for years. They were falling apart. Pages on the floor, silverfish, mold, you name it. I brought the shelves up here, installed the A.C. It’s not much—a dehumidifier would be better—but at least they’re not rotting away down there anymore.”
So that explained the void in the living room, Nidhi thought. She looked around again.
“Collecting old books,” she said. “That’s your hobby?”
“Not exactly.” He smiled. “The first time I came, it was a condolence visit. Jaya’s son, Shankar—you know about him? He died in Mombasa. I met him there a few times, even helped with the arrangements to send his body home. A few years later, I was in India on some business, and I thought, Why not pay my respects to the grieving mother? You know how it goes.”
Nidhi nodded as though she did.
“I started looking through the books and found an impressive little collection about Theosophy. I’d never even heard of it before. And, long story short, I became hooked. Are you familiar with Theosophy, Nidhi? Helena Blavatsky? Annie Besant?”
“Annie Besant,” Nidhi echoed, pretending to think. “She’s Home Rule, right?”
“Nidhi,” he said slowly. “I am impressed.”
She had to press her lips together to keep from laughing. Annie Besant was pure luck; Nidhi had studied the Home Rule League in school last year. A tiny motor of pleasure had started to hum away inside her, but she was aware, too, of a flash of scorn. How easy it had been to arouse his admiration!
“Well,” Sudhir Desai said, “if you know that, then you must know that the Theosophical Society headquarters are in Adyar, practically next door. Over the years, it’s become a tradition of mine. Fly in every few months, stay with Jaya, read, attend some talks. It keeps me sane.”
“Can I borrow one?” Nidhi asked. “One of the books?”
“By all means. They’re your aunt’s, not mine.”
“So why do you lock the door?” She had not meant to sound so sharp.
Sudhir Desai looked startled. Then he laughed. “Ah,” he said. “You know—force of habit.”
•
She chose “Theosophy and the Theosophical Society,” by Annie Besant, not because it looked enticing but because she felt herself accidentally bound to Besant now. And though it wasn’t a novel, she came to enjoy its old-timey cadences, the ohs! and ahs! that popped up whenever Besant was overcome by the splendor of her ideas. At times, Nidhi even harbored a kindly superiority toward the book’s exhortations, which ranged from the ardently childlike (“Listen to the bird as its whole little being swells in the delight of the sunshine!”) to the simply kooky (“And when the Six jewels are bound upon your forehead, then shall you be seen as ready to enter the Portals of Initiation”).
She did most of her reading on the plastic-covered sofa, or else up in Sudhir Desai’s cool room. Whenever she grew bored, she talked to him about what she had read. He, too, was usually reading but would set his book aside with a wry “All right, let’s hear the latest screed.” In these dialogues, he liked to adopt the role of believer, patiently defending against her attacks the perfection of the human soul, the joyful oneness of all beings. Nidhi noticed that, as a consequence, she tended to make herself out to be even more cynical and quarrelsome than she really felt. If utopia ever came to exist, she argued, human beings would find a way to destroy it within a month. Nonmaterialism was the sort of wishful nonsense preached by those who weren’t in any real danger of going hungry. And what the hell was a Portal of Initiation anyway?
She knew that she was modulating herself for Sudhir Desai’s benefit—it evidently amused him to hear such harshness from someone so young—and she knew, too, that she wasn’t the only one changing in his presence. Jaya Aunty had been watching less TV since his arrival; she found it far more entertaining to watch him. Everything he did made her shriek with laughter. A button came off his shirt one day, and he asked for a needle and thread. “Needle! Thread!” Jaya Aunty cackled. “You bachelors! Manage everything on your own, is it? Chee! Padmini will fix it in one minute flat.”
It was Padmini, however, who was the most altered. Gone was the garrulous woman Nidhi had known for close to three weeks. There were no more sweet, impractical presents. No surprise groundnuts. Padmini became as disgruntled as Ambika, clomping through her work and barely speaking. Ignoring her better instincts, Nidhi cornered Padmini and tried to probe for a reason.
They were standing in the kitchen, and Padmini spun to face Nidhi. Her expression was distorted with anger. She picked up a tomato from the cutting board, held it under Nidhi’s nose, and squeezed. Juice and seeds spurted from between her fingers. Before she could pick up another one, Nidhi backed out of the room.
•
A clue to Padmini’s behavior surfaced. It was after lunch on a Friday, Jaya Aunty was flipping channels, Nidhi was reading Besant, and Padmini came in from the garden, where she’d been hanging clothes. Bits of grass stuck to her heels, and a clothespin dangled from the hem of her blouse. Sudhir Desai was at the Theosophical Society for a talk. It was the second such talk he’d attended, and Nidhi had been vaguely disappointed not to have been invited.
The TV landed on the movie “Titanic.” It was the sex scene, Nidhi noted with dismay, the one in which Jack and Rose steam up the car window. (Nidhi had watched “Titanic” in the theatre with her parents a couple of years before and had glanced at them during this scene. They were both grinning.) Padmini turned her head to look at the TV. Her glance lasted only a few seconds, and she did not visibly react, but this was enough for Nidhi to grope her way to a dim theory.
Sudhir Desai must remind Padmini of her dead husband, whose friend, after all, he had once been. He must remind her of the life she’d so briefly had—as an adult, a married woman—a life that had been cruelly snatched away and replaced with this endless twilit childhood with Jaya Aunty.
Whether Padmini and her husband had ever done any of the things that Jack and Rose did in that car, Nidhi was not brave enough to imagine. But she did believe that this was why Padmini scowled whenever Sudhir Desai was in the house, lounging in his striped pajamas. He was a hated medium; his presence conjured up the ghost of a different man.
•
It was a hot night—every night was hot, but this one felt infected by heat—and Nidhi was tossing in bed. Her lower back had ached during dinner, and, sure enough, there was the tarnished rust of her period in her underwear. She’d been tired all evening and had fallen asleep early, but she was awakened by cramps in the night. She crept to the bathroom and put on a fresh pad. Wrapping the used one in a page torn from an old Rani she’d filched for the purpose, she chucked it into the bin. On her way back to her room, she hesitated, desperate for some air on her face.
She decided to go up to the terrace.
The cement was so hot that it was almost painful to stand on. A bougainvillea growing in the corner threw spiky, quivering shadows. The air felt as thick as smoke. There was not a jot of relief to be found. She turned to go back inside, then paused before Sudhir Desai’s closed door. She pictured him asleep, one long leg dangling off the side of the bed. Did bachelors sleep bare-chested? Maybe even naked? Nidhi laughed to herself, a soft laugh that contained a question, a giddy, half-serious dare. Would she? Just a peek? Easy to pass it off as a joke if he woke up. She placed a palm on the door and pushed.
It was locked from the inside.
Her first reaction was relief. Her second, utter horror. Had he somehow been expecting her to do this? Had he taken precautions? Something tells me you’re the type of girl . . . Then she remembered what he’d said about locking the door—force of habit—and she relaxed, even managing another laugh, this one at her own panic. Nevertheless, as she walked down the stairs toward her stuffy bedroom, her legs trembled slightly, as if she’d made a narrow escape.
•
She bled more than usual that month and had to change pads every few hours. Only once did she allow herself to imagine her mother’s ordeal—nurses running, shouts, the gory extraction—before putting it out of her mind. Her wrapped pads multiplied in the bin. She stared at them uneasily. When would the bin be emptied? If only she knew where to take the pads, she’d get rid of them herself.
She was reading in the living room one afternoon when Padmini appeared. Jaya Aunty had fallen asleep in front of the TV. Nidhi didn’t know where Sudhir Desai was.
“Padmini.” Nidhi smiled, glad for a distraction. Then, stiffening: “What are you doing?”
For Padmini held in her arms every one of Nidhi’s discarded pads. There had to be a dozen of them. One or two, where she had been careless and not used enough paper, were coming undone, their crimped edges unfurling to expose the dark smears inside.
“Padmini!” Nidhi yelped. “Don’t touch those!” She glanced around to see if Jaya Aunty had woken, but her great-aunt was an extraordinarily heavy sleeper and did not move.
“They’re dirty. He shouldn’t see them,” Padmini said calmly. “He” meant Sudhir Desai.
Arms full of Nidhi’s blood, Padmini stepped out into the garden. Nidhi, still pleading with her to drop them, followed, the long grass stinging her ankles. They went past the clothesline, past matted vines and drooping red monkey-tail cactuses, to an enormous, wild lantana bush at the far end. Padmini walked around it, disappearing from view. Nidhi followed.
Padmini had made a fire pit, ringed by dark rocks. There were flakes of gray ash on the rocks, and the choking stink of wet soot. She dropped Nidhi’s pads into the center and stepped back. Nidhi went closer and peered into the pit. It was apparent that Padmini burned the household trash here, but nothing was fully incinerated; the air was too humid for that. Nidhi saw several charred pages of Rani, a few singed potato peels, some scraps of yellow-and-white cloth that looked familiar.
Nidhi squinted, trying to identify the cloth. When she did, she looked up sharply at Padmini, who was holding a match to one of the wrapped pads, which flared limply but didn’t catch fire. Unfazed, Padmini lit another match. After ten minutes, she’d used up an entire box of matches and succeeded in reducing Nidhi’s pads to a nest of shrivelled black eggs. The air stank of burnt plastic.
•
For the rest of the day, Nidhi debated whether to inform Sudhir Desai of the fate of his pajamas. In the end, she didn’t. She couldn’t say why. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed that they’d gone missing. He hadn’t said anything, after all. Plus, she feared that if she broached the subject, he’d want to see the fire pit for himself, and then the whole embarrassing story would come tumbling out: her pads in Padmini’s hands, Jack and Rose in the steamy car, her silly theories about Padmini and ghosts and love.
•
Finally, Sudhir Desai invited Nidhi to a Theosophical Society talk. Jaya Aunty, clearly displeased but unable to criticize him, said, “Psh. What will a child do listening to that?”
He tapped her on the head. “You don’t need it with that big brain, my dear Jaya, but we ordinary people like to expand our minds.” She subsided into contented giggles, and no further objection was raised to Nidhi accompanying him.
The Society was a sprawling campus on the Adyar River, its peaceful walking paths dotted with old buildings and gently unkempt trees. The main building was painted a tranquil yellow, except where eight white plaster elephant heads stared out from a red-accented wall. The lecture, on the subject of clairvoyance, was given by a tall man with gold-rimmed spectacles, and it began with a poem. Nidhi tried to memorize this but retained only the first line, which she recited to herself as the man spoke. Oh, hidden life, vibrant in every atom. Oh, hidden life, vibrant in every atom. Oh, hidden life . . .
Afterward, Sudhir Desai walked her around the campus, pointing out its highlights: the shrines built to every religion on earth, the ancient banyan tree, the accommodations for scholars and volunteers. It was dusk when they started back to the house. Nidhi was quiet. Her bleeding had tapered off, but she felt exhausted. Sudhir Desai, too, seemed subdued. He kept tapping a fountain pen in his breast pocket. Tap, tap, tap.
He said, “I want to tell you something.”
Then, without looking at Nidhi, he began a story. It was about a beautiful German nurse whom he’d met during the war. He did not specify which war, and Nidhi did not ask. He and the nurse had had a passionate affair, and she’d become pregnant. She begged Sudhir Desai to return with her and the baby to Germany, but he couldn’t. Not because he didn’t want to but because he and another man were already making plans to fly a plane into the jungle.
Nidhi listened in silence, not knowing what to make of this extraordinary confession, which became more garbled as it went on. There was mention of a genocide, armed guerrillas, a cache of gemstones, someone named Sparky. And, by the time all that was over (the genocide? the flying?), it had been too late. He could not bring himself to contact the German nurse or the child, who was his child. Why? Because too much time had passed. And also—why lie?—because he was afraid.
They had reached Jaya Aunty’s gate. Nidhi could see lights in the windows.
Sudhir Desai said softly, “I’ve never told anyone this before. I don’t know why I told you. It’s just . . . I sense this incredible wisdom in you, Nidhi. You’re an old soul. I just knew that, if anyone could understand me, it would be you.”
Nidhi didn’t respond. She was seeing herself—so thrilled by her own audaciousness, her daring—standing like a fool, like a child, in the dark before his closed door. She suddenly wanted to weep.
“Nidhi?” he whispered.
“Is that when you met Shankar?” she asked loudly. “While all of this was happening?”
“Shankar?” He frowned in confusion. “Oh, that Shankar. No, that was much later, in Mombasa. Some people introduced us. He wanted to start a business, and they thought I could help him, I guess. But I saw right away that nothing would come of it.”
“Why not?”
“It was a half-baked idea.” Sudhir Desai shrugged. “He wasn’t the smartest fellow.”
“I heard he was a genius.”
He gave a short, grateful laugh, as if Nidhi were being droll on purpose to cheer him up. “Shankar? A genius? Sure. Why not? Let’s call him a genius. A full-fletched genius.”
Later on, she would tell herself that it was a natural thing to say. It had become her role, after all, the one she played with him, the one he himself had encouraged. Nidhi, reader of novels. Argumentative, opinionated, precocious, wise Nidhi. How else could she have responded?
“Full-fledged,” she said.
“What?” There was an uptick in his voice. Of vigilance. Perhaps of alarm.
“Full-fledged,” she repeated. “Not ‘full-fletched.’ ”
He laughed again. “Nice try, but you’re wrong. It refers to an arrow. The feathers at the bottom are called fletching.”
“I know what fletching is,” she said quietly. “And that’s not where the word comes from.”
He looked at her but did not speak. They went into the house. After dinner, Sudhir Desai said good night and retired upstairs. Jaya Aunty and Padmini went to bed soon afterward. Nidhi brushed her teeth and was sitting at the edge of her bed, cooling off in front of her fan, when there was a knock at her door.
“I was wondering,” he said pleasantly, “if you’d like to sleep in my room.”
He had been called away by an emergency, he explained. He was going straight to the airport, where he would camp out until the early plane to Bombay departed. From there, he’d fly to Nairobi, and on to Mombasa. He said that he’d felt guilty sleeping in his air-conditioned quarters while she sweltered down here. He said that there was no reason she shouldn’t take his room, starting tonight. Starting now, in fact. Look, he was all packed and ready to go.
So he was. His suitcase stood by the door in a pool of moonlight.
“What about Jaya Aunty?” Nidhi whispered. “She won’t know what happened to you.”
“Oh, Jaya’s used to me by now. She knows I’ll be back.”
•
The sheets weren’t clean. They smelled of him—of sweat and a soap that Nidhi wasn’t familiar with—but she was too tired to care. The A.C. was noisy but effective, and she had to go downstairs and fetch the sheet from her own room to add to his. The bookshelves loomed; the cold constricted her; light leaked into the room from the street lamps below. For a moment, she thought that she would never be able to fall asleep, but she was wrong.
When the door opened, she didn’t wake up fully. Everything reached her from far away; her sensations were ghostly. If she did have a thought, it was: He’s here. Strangely, this did not provoke panic. While she was in this half-asleep state, nothing felt dangerous, and nothing menaced her. She possessed a calm, inexplicable authority over her surroundings. She was the dreamer, the puppet master, and so all of this—the dip of the mattress; the tiny sigh; the soft human bulk pressing down on her; the back-and-forth rocking, erratic and timid at first, then gaining in momentum; the long strands of hair tickling her bare arm—all of it was happening because she, in some distant part of her mind, had willed it so.
She could not say exactly when she understood. But, even then, she did not move. She did not fling Padmini off. She did not scream. The reason was that she had caught sight of Padmini’s expression.
Padmini’s eyes were closed. She wore a funny look of urgency, of impatient longing, as if she were waiting for something to happen, something that had been promised to her long ago. Surely, Nidhi thought, any minute, Padmini would recognize her, but she only let out a small, frustrated cry and, burying her head in Nidhi’s shoulder, increased her efforts, dashing her hips hard against Nidhi’s through the two sheets—passionate, determined, and utterly ineffectual. How long it lasted, Nidhi couldn’t say, but all at once Padmini was rolling off. She was standing up, her back to Nidhi. Her hair hung loose past her shoulders, silvery and very beautiful.
Then she was gone. Nidhi stayed motionless for several minutes. Finally, she got out of bed, crossed the room, closed the door, and, with shaking fingers, latched it.
•
She did not believe now, of course, that he’d had any kind of emergency. Why had she been stupid enough to think so? She imagined him strolling with his suitcase to the Theosophical Society and requesting a bed for the night, or else walking the dark streets of Adyar, past snoring watchmen and vigilant street dogs, feeling serene and self-congratulatory, even fatherly, at having provided her with useful instruction, the lesson he thought she so badly needed to learn: You think you’re smart. You think you know the world. But, little girl, you don’t know a damn thing.
•
Eight days later, she was back in Bangalore. Her father, guilt-ridden, spoiled her for weeks. Her mother was withdrawn at first, a little sheepish, tentative. But jokes slowly reappeared, as did words like “fetus,” “cervical insufficiency,” “evacuation.” Still, things were not the same; there had been a definite blocking off, a shift of terrain that put Nidhi on one side, her parents on the other.
Nidhi found that she did not mind this.
She did not mind because of something that had occurred to her during the train ride home. She had closed her eyes, and the rhythmic rocking of the carriage had brought back the rocking of Padmini, her anguished little cry at the end. And then it was not Nidhi’s body under those sheets but her father’s. Her own father at fifteen years old, lanky and inexperienced, panicking at this turn of events, trying to decide what to do, how to respond.
Naturally, Nidhi did not actually think that what had happened to her had also happened to him—if it had, he would never have sent her there—but, for those few seconds on the train, she gave in and allowed herself to imagine it. Would he have held still, as she had, and waited for it to be over? Would he have fought and screamed?
Or would he have done something else entirely? ♦