Narcopolis

He wanted to stop at Rajasthan Lassi for a chikku milkshake. They sat on the steps of Brilliant Typing & Shorthand Institute and looked at the life on the streets. She was content to watch and listen and Mr Lee, understanding this, said little. The milkshakes came in tall glasses with a pink napkin stuck to the side and she drank half in one go, then realized she was expected to take the napkin off, hold it in one hand and sip at a straw like the other women. She copied them, she took small sips and dabbed her mouth. She watched the people walking home from work or to evening classes at Wilson College, the parents and grandparents and children, the extended joint families who came to the beach from who knew where and never got out of their cars. They ordered meals from the windows of new Ambassadors and Fiats and ate quickly and ordered more. She watched them as if she too were in class, a student of the college carrying out field studies for a course on the Mores and Practices of India’s Middle Class. Or a course in Parental Love, she thought, as the milkshake curdled in her mouth and the image of a woman flashed in her head and was gone. She had very few memories of her mother, but they were vivid and she would carry them with her for the rest of her life. She remembered a tall woman praying in a temple, her sari the exact shade of red as the kumkum in her black hair. But the woman also prayed in a secret church she had made at home. The woman prayed in Hindi and English. The Hindi prayers were said aloud, recited in public, but the English was hidden from the world, whispered to her kitchen cupboard, where her church was. The woman was very poor but she wore starched salvaars and saris, and, every morning, strings of fresh jasmine appeared in her hair. Dimple remembered that the woman’s hair was thick and very long. She loved the woman’s smell, like woodsmoke and milk and old wool, and she remembered that her skin was the colour of milk. But then she remembered the sound of bells, death bells, and the woman’s wails. Afterwards, the woman stopped wearing red; she wore only white and she covered her face with her sari. She stopped speaking, even to Dimple, and then she gave her away. This was the clearest memory of all, her mother’s crushed, fearful face as she handed Dimple to the priest.

They walked towards the beach and passed a beer bar and heard a tinny insistent beat. Men exited the bar at all hours of day and night and stopped at the adjacent paanwallah, whose Bedbreaker Special with its secret hit of uncut cocaine would keep a man going all night, or so some of Dimple’s clients said. Do palang tod, she told the paanwallah, who handed over two Bedbreakers wrapped in newspaper. Then they walked past the wrought-iron railing of Wilson College to the beach, where crowds of men strolled on the sand or lingered in the darkness under the trees. They stood by the water and ate the paan and spat the juice on the sand and laughed or chewed their teeth. The paan was astringent and sweet and it numbed her mouth and put a happy jitter in her eyes. The men looked at her the way they did, their eyes lingering on the freshness of her, her white skin and black eyes and the red leaves of henna that trailed from index finger to wrist. Her hair would come loose and she’d stop to gather it into a bun and her admirers would stop too, watching every move. They saw health and good nature in her roundness, and something more, a calculation, a professional distance in the eyes, a kind of premeditated shine on her teeth and skin. And some heightened awareness, a ripple of interest skimmed above the heads of the strollers on the beach and returned to her from the men.

*

Her breasts were fuller and the space between her legs had healed long ago into a scar, but the ache in her back and elbows was something new. She was always aware of it, a dormant ache even when there was no pain. The tai gave her massages, an hour with the curtains drawn first thing in the morning before the giraks arrived. If anything, the aches got worse. She’d get up stiff, so numb she felt nothing in the tips of her toes. A ghost ache would stay in her bones all through the day. She’d be irritable and preoccupied and the customers would go to someone else. Some of her regulars continued to see her but they did it as if they were duty-bound and paying a conjugal visit.