A Walk Across the Sun (13 page)

The rest of the weekend passed in relative solitude, and Suchir left them alone. Where Shankar had abraded Ahalya's skin, Sumeera applied ointment as a salve. Over and over again she repeated the refrain that Ahalya had to accept what had happened to her. There was no other way out of the tunnel of shame. Ahalya became more active with the rising of each new sun, but her eyes were wells of sorrow.

Early the following week, Suchir came for Ahalya again. Sumeera provided the same red and gold churidaar for her to wear, but she didn't ask Sita to dress. Ahalya closed her eyes and went through the motions in silence. The beshyas lined the walls to watch her, but this time they were not quiet. As she passed, two of them guessed the price Suchir would charge for her.

“Twenty thousand,” one of them said.

“Ten,” said another. “She is already used. The
dhoor
will see no blood.”

Ahalya tried to ignore their words and kept her eyes locked on the ground. She waited at the door until Suchir summoned her and then stood under the lights like a circus spectacle. Two customers sat on the cushions adjacent to Sumeera. One was middle-aged and the other was a boy no older than she. The man spoke excitedly to the youth, and she learned from his words that he was the man's son. It was the boy's birthday. Ahalya was his gift.

The boy stood hesitantly and approached her. He glanced at his father for reassurance, and the man urged him on. The boy touched Ahalya's lips with his fingertips and traced a line down to her chest. She shivered and wondered what the boy would do with her.

The man haggled with Suchir over the price and finally agreed upon fifteen thousand rupees. The boy took her hand and followed Suchir to the first sex room along the hall. An overweight older girl stepped aside and glared at her. The room was tiny, large enough only to accommodate a bed, a sink, and a toilet. Its purpose was entirely functional. This was the lot of all who were awara, Ahalya thought to herself. It was her destiny to live in perpetual shame.

When Suchir closed the door, the boy stood stiffly, unsure how to proceed. In his eyes, Ahalya saw a mixture of awe and apprehension. He moved closer and kissed her mouth. His excitement grew when she didn't resist. She lay back on the bed and submitted to his desires. He wasn't as rough as Shankar, but still he caused her pain.

Afterward, she lay on the thin mattress, staring at the ceiling and feeling profoundly unclean. She got up from the bed and washed herself at the sink. Sitting on the toilet, she realized the brute fact of her existence. A beshya could expect nothing more from life than air in her lungs, food and water in her stomach, a roof over her head, and the affections of her kind. To survive in such a world, she would have to sever her heart from her body. She had no other option. She thought of Sita, waiting for her in the upper room, fearful, wounded, yet somehow still inviolate after a week and a half in Suchir's brothel. Sita needed her to be a bulwark against the terrors that awaited her.

She couldn't allow herself to surrender to despair.

Chapter 6

The Battle of Bombay is the battle of the self against the crowd.
—S
UKETU
M
EHTA

Somewhere over South Asia

When Thomas awoke, he had no idea what time it was. He looked at his watch and realized it was still displaying D.C. time. The cabin of the Boeing 777 was dark, and most of the passengers in business class were asleep. He needed to use the restroom, but the passenger next to him was out cold, his seat fully extended, blocking access to the aisle.

Thomas raised the window shade. The sun was setting over snowcrusted mountains, painting them shades of ochre and henna.
Afghanistan
, he thought. From thirty-five thousand feet, the war-torn land reminded him of Colorado. Its beauty was striking, at once severe and serene.

For the hundredth time, Thomas asked himself why he was doing this. The obvious answer—that he had been railroaded into it by guilt and circumstance—was no longer adequate. He could have been on a flight to Bora Bora, Amsterdam, or Shanghai. As it was, he was two hours away from landing in Bombay, his briefcase stuffed with every government report, academic study, and news clipping on the worldwide crisis of forced prostitution he had been able to get his hands on.

He had planned his departure in a whirlwind; it wasn't in his nature to procrastinate. Lunch on the Hill with Ashley Taliaferro, CASE's director of field operations, between briefings she had scheduled with congressional supporters. An expedited visa appointment, courtesy of Max Junger. A trip to the mall to shop for travel gear. Updating his immunizations. Arranging with Clayton to deposit his pro bono stipend into his bank account to cover his bills. Exchanging e-mails with Dinesh—his roommate at Yale—and accepting his long-standing invitation to visit Bombay. And reading, reading, incessantly reading—on the Metro, waiting in the checkout line, and at home between research sessions on the Internet.

In the trafficking literature, he entered a world as astonishing as it was troubling, a subterranean realm inhabited by pimps and traffickers, corrupt officials, crusading lawyers, and a seemingly endless supply of women and children captured, brutalized, and transformed into slaves. He wondered how Porter was able to cope with it—the faces, the names, the stories of abuse as diverse as human cruelty. And now he was about to enter that world. Of the many cities known for the trade in human flesh, Bombay was among the worst.

“You're going to be doing
what
?” his mother had asked when Thomas had taken a break long enough to make the call. “But that's
dangerous
, Thomas. You could get hurt. I said you should follow
Priya
, not get yourself mixed up with the underworld.”

At that point his father had taken the phone and asked what all the fuss was about. He listened only long enough to learn of Max Junger's ultimatum. “Why didn't you call me, Son?” he had asked. “I would have gotten this cleared up.”

“Clayton needed a fall guy, Dad,” Thomas said, feeling like the not-quite-grownup he had always been in his father's eyes. “Wharton demanded a sacrificial lamb, and Mark Blake wasn't about to put himself on the altar.”

“Mark Blake is an egomaniac and a fool,” the Judge replied angrily. “The man can't argue his way out of a paper bag.” He ranted a while longer and then calmed down. “Did I hear your mother right? You're going to India to work with CASE?”

“That's right.”

His father had been silent for a long moment. “When you get back, you're going to have a lot of catching up to do.”

“I know,” Thomas said. On such matters, the Judge was always right.

Turning his mind back to the present, Thomas watched a flight attendant walk down the aisle toward him. When she noticed he was awake, she asked him in a whisper whether he had any interest in a prearrival meal. He shook his head and asked for a bottle of water.

He looked out the window again. Darkness had fallen over the rugged land, but the crest of clouds was still tinged with light. Again, he pondered the unanswerable question: why?

Tera had been the first to ask it out loud. The morning after her surprise visit, he had awakened on the couch in the living room with a pounding headache and a powerful sense of remorse. After a hot shower, he'd met her in the kitchen, and she had offered to make him breakfast. He had looked at her strangely. She had never stayed overnight before. Yet here she was wielding a whisk, a carton of eggs beside the stove.

“I'm going away for a while,” he said.

“What?” she asked, the whisk suspended in her hand. She blinked. “Where?”

“I'm not sure,” he replied, preferring to lie than to elicit more questions.

She looked wounded. “What about Clayton?”

“I'm taking a leave of absence.”

“For how long?”

“A while, I imagine.”

“Did I do something wrong?” she asked, putting the whisk down on the countertop.

“Of course not,” he responded and then realized how insensitive he sounded. “Look, I know it's abrupt, but it really isn't about you. I'm sorry.”

It was at that point she had spoken the riddle. “Why are you doing this?”

He thought of any number of responses but decided on the simplest. “I don't know.”

She had stared at him for a moment, blue eyes fraught with confusion and pain. Her mouth hung open, but she didn't speak. Instead, she gathered her things and left the house without another word.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the disembodied voice, “we have begun our descent into Bombay. Please make sure your seatbacks and tray tables …”

The voice droned on, but Thomas didn't pay attention. Looking out the window, he saw the sprawling metropolis rise out of the void like a brilliant starburst. The sight reminded him of Los Angeles, but there the comparison ended. Bombay had three times the population in a landmass one third the size.

Thomas's nerves were on edge as the plane made its final descent toward Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. Over the years, Priya had tutored him in the Indian mind and its sensibilities and had tried, with little success, to teach him Hindi. But that education had taken place on Western soil. The city beyond the tarmac was the real India, an alien world defined by a radically different set of cultural expectations. Colonialism and globalization had built bridges across the chasm, but the divide between East and West remained immense.

The aircraft touched down gently and taxied to the gate. The real India greeted him before he got off the plane. From his window, he could see a vast warren of slums, lit only by a network of bare bulbs strung doorway to doorway like Christmas lights. Children played in the streets and people were moving about in the shadows. Thomas watched the slum children with fascination. The West had its ghettos and barrios, but nothing like this.

After collecting his luggage, he met Dinesh at the taxi stand.

“Thomas!” his friend exclaimed in lightly accented English, wrapping him in a bear hug. “Welcome to Bombay!”

Dinesh took the second of Thomas's suitcases and led him through a dense crowd of taxi-wallas and placard-wielding hotel chauffeurs to a black coupe sitting in a dirt parking lot.

“I hope you don't mind being cramped.”

“Not a problem,” Thomas said, piling his luggage in the trunk and climbing in.

The night air was cool and dry, and Dinesh rolled down the windows. “We get two months with no air conditioning,” he said with a laugh. “The rest of the year we sweat.”

Dinesh navigated the car out of the airport and into the chronic congestion of city traffic. For long minutes, they inched through the gridlock, crowded on all sides by vehicles large and small and choked by exhaust fumes. Eventually, Dinesh grew weary of the exercise and nosed his way toward the median. Flooring the accelerator and laying on the horn, he used the opposite lane to dodge around an auto-rickshaw, barely missing a collision with a bus. Thomas gripped the door handle, appalled by the maneuver.

Dinesh laughed. “You'll get used to it. In America, you drive with the steering wheel. In India, you drive with the horn.”

He took a ramp onto an expressway where traffic moved more freely. “This is the Western Express Highway,” he shouted above the wind. “The streets were so crazy the city decided to build the highway above them.”

Ten minutes later they rounded a bend and paralleled a wide bay. The odor of urine and brine hit Thomas like a sledgehammer.

“Mahim Bay,” Dinesh said. “The stink is another thing you'll get used to.”

“Is it always like this?” Thomas asked, struggling to breathe.

“It's bad tonight. In the morning it will be better. The sewers run into the ocean. You don't want to swim anywhere in Bombay.”

The highway did a 180-degree turn and dead-ended in an upscale residential neighborhood. Dinesh drove the car up a hill and took a stonepaved ramp that let them out onto a street lined with tall apartment buildings and lush vegetation.

“This is Mount Mary,” he said. “The ocean is a block to the west.”

Dinesh made a sudden turn into a parking lot at the base of a tenstory stucco building. Two watchmen sat in chairs on either side of the gate, smoking cigarettes.

They parked in a garage and took an old accordion-door elevator to the top floor. From the grime coating the public spaces, the building looked as if it had been built forty years ago and never touched again.

Dinesh's apartment, by contrast, was a marvel of modern style. The fixtures were polished brass, the furnishings wood and leather, the floor was tiled and covered with rugs, and the walls were adorned with tapestries. The best part of the apartment, however, was the view. The windows along the western wall afforded a stunning perspective of the Arabian Sea, and French doors led onto a wraparound balcony.

Dinesh showed Thomas his bedroom and invited him to share a beer on the terrace. They took seats on wooden deck chairs and looked out at the sea sparkling in the moonlight. The lights along the coastline extended far to the north and reached their terminus at a point that seemed to jut out into the sea.