BLOOD RED SARI (2 page)

The temple bells began to toll as I stood there, steel thali in hand, the heavy Bengali silk sari feeling awkward on my jeans-and-shirt-accustomed body in the sweltering sunshine. Before, they had always sounded to my angry ears like a lost goddess raging to an unjust world. Now, they sounded sad rather than angry, like a dirge, a toll, a commemoration of lost friends, and an ending.

I climbed the steps of the temple, the ancient stone cool beneath my bare soles, its surface worn smooth by the footfalls of countless devotees over the centuries, seeking solace, appeasement, virility, wealth and the thousand other things people prayed for. I had sought only one thing when I came here last, and somehow, impossibly, I had received it. I had looked into the hot eyes of Kali and demanded, cried out for justice.

Or was it vengeance?

Sometimes, it is hard to tell the difference.

Karkidakam

Day of the Dead

One

1.1

EVER SINCE SHE WAS
a little girl yay high, she had loved Karkidakam.

Ever since she was a little girl yay high, she had hated Karkidakam.

She hated it for being the death knell of summer vacations, the months when they could be as lazy as fat flies. When mangoes were in season and they could have their fill, just wander into the kitchen reading a dog-eared copy of a favourite book, pick up a mango from the crate – the top layer had the ripe ones – bite into it, skin and all, and feel the sticky juices spill down their chins. When they could tumble out of bed and race the dogs down to the beach, toothbrushes and Colgate clutched in their fists, and brush their teeth in the surf while jumping sideways like crazy crabs every time the tide roared in. Afternoons they might spend collecting coral or reading and dozing and talking or all three together in the shade of the palms on the cliff, while the dogs lay upside down for their tummies to be scratched. Sometimes, they caught a ride out on Achchan’s boat to fish. Once, Lalima brought a karachemmeen one-and-a-half times as long as herself; and then they ate karachemmeen for breakfast, lunch and dinner the next three days. Evenings they ate sukhiyan at Mathews’s and watched the sunset. It was an unspoken rule; they never missed a sunset and never ate sukhiyan anywhere except at Mathews’s, don’t ask why.

But then came Karkidakam and amavasi, and Varkala was overrun by hordes of the Undead. That was what Lalima called those who had not made it to the other realm one summer and the name just stuck. Ezhu had returned from one of his trips from Do-Buy with one of those shiny new bissyaars – a National Panasonic with
remote!
(he always said it that way, italicised and with the exclamation at the end) – and one of the tapes he brought back was
Night of the Living Dead
. They watched it one breathless night without Atta or Acchi knowing, and for weeks afterwards, ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara!’ became a permanent fixture in their vocabulary. So when the hordes of pilgrims began falling off the buses and rolling through their backyard on amavasi, their lives came to a standstill. The beach,
their
beach, was gone, taken over by an army of the Undead, lurking around, praying, offering vavu bali, indulging in papanasam, eating
their
sukhiyan at Mathews’s, stealing
their
sunset. The horror, the horror. And afterwards, even though the invasion lasted for barely a day or two, the beach and its environs were always so filthy with the refuse and leftovers that it just wasn’t the same. There were neat mundu-sets left everywhere, ostensibly for departed relatives, and while they understood the reason why people did it, it was irritating to keep tripping over little piles of cloth everywhere in their backyard, not to mention the fact that none of these mundu neriyathu could actually be used by any living person because that would be inauspicious.

So Anita also hated Karkidakam, though hated is probably too strong a word. It was just that it marked the end of the summer fun. The fact that it was on an amavasi day in Karkidakam that Lalima’s parents left for the UAE, with her in tow, only served to permanently etch the day in her memory as a really sucky one.

So of course, it had to be on vavu bali day that she got the news that Lalima had passed away. Philip called. He didn’t have her cell phone number so he called the old landline. She stood by the telephone in the living room, still holding the instrument in her hand as the dial tone droned sonorously into her ear. Finally Mrs Matondkar stopped rocking, turned to look at her, and barked, ‘What, you’re having silent conversation?’

She put down the phone which rattled on the cradle before settling in. Mrs Matondkar saw the news written on Anita’s face like a creepy crawly on a business news channel. ‘Who died?’

How to describe Lalima? How to sum up a relationship, a person, a lifetime of memories – even if most of that lifetime had been spent apart? How to put it all into one concise word, neatly embossed on a plaque or a tombstone? Best friend? First love? The sister she had never had? All of the above? How could she convey what Lalima had meant to this old flatulent landlady who regarded same-sex relationships as an abomination in the eyes of God?

‘My best friend.’

Anita sat down on the little cane stool she kept by the telephone stand. For some reason, it was a foot high while the telephone itself was placed on a jutting wooden stand four feet high. It left her sitting with the telephone above her head, like a hovering bird. The stool and the telephone were in the main passageway of the flat, just inside the front door, and as she sat there, a package slid through the mail slot and fell with a heavy thud to the floor. It was a yellow manila document envelope with her name written on it with a black marker. She ignored it and buried her face in her hands and stayed that way for a while. She didn’t hear Mrs Matondkar wrestling herself out of her rocking chair, but at some point the old lady appeared beside her and placed a heavy hand that smelt of roasted channa on Anita’s head.

She said nothing; just kept her hand there.

After a moment or two, she turned and shuffled back to the rocking chair. She farted as she lowered her not inconsiderable bulk into its welcoming embrace. The squeaking began again. That was Mrs Matondkar’s way of consoling her. It was more affection or sympathy than she had shown Anita since she had come to stay at her place as a paying guest seven years ago.

Finally, Anita rose from the stool, somehow avoided hitting her head against the telephone stand, picked up the envelope from the doormat, and turned towards her room. She would call the airlines to book a flight to Thiruvananthapuram, or maybe just pack a small bag and head straight to the airport. It being late evening on a weekday, Mumbai traffic would be horrendous as always, and the sooner she got going, the sooner she could be on a plane heading home. It would be the first time in thirteen years that she was going home. It felt like a lifetime.

The Undead would have left by the time she reached, although the piles of cloth would still be choking the beaches.

Somewhere in there, perhaps, was a pile for Lalima.

1.2

THE SECURITY GUARD OF
the building was waiting when she pulled into her parking spot. He salaamed her as she shifted herself from the driving seat of the car to her wheelchair. He knew better than to offer to help and stood by watching with sympathy till she had completed the transfer, locked the car door, and started rolling towards the entrance of the building. It was early yet, and though some idiot was accelerating too fast and honking too much as he roared past, Sector A Pocket C was one of the quietest, most peaceful parts of Vasant Kunj. Most of the residents of the old Lutyen’s era building were high court lawyers who operated out of their chambers at the court premises. She was the only one who ‘worked from home’ even though she lived on the Gurgaon–Mehrauli highway. She used this apartment as an office. It was against regulations to operate a business practice and she had experienced some grief over it from a few of her less tolerant neighbours at first, but her physical condition and history helped ameliorate their attitude; the fact that she only saw clients at the chambers and used this place more for research and as a kind of back office pacified them. Now, she got a few glares from time to time, but those were mostly for the dogs.

She recognized the security guard as the one who usually worked the night shift, a tall Jat who was more polite than most of his brethren.

‘Madam, kisi ne aap ke darwaazey pe pishaab kiya hai.’

She frowned, pausing to look up at him. Was he serious? Even with his heavy Haryanvi accent, she had had no difficulty understanding him at all – despite her Gujarati primary schooling, English-medium secondary schooling and college education, she had picked up Hindi and most of the north-Indian dialects quite well in the past few years. With the kind of clients and cases she got, it was a necessity. But why on earth would someone piss on her front door?

He saw her expression and mistook her lack of response as stemming from the language barrier. This was the first time he had actually spoken to her, since he was mostly off duty by the time she came to work. ‘Man come to madam office in night time, trying make piss on office door.’

She resisted the urge to cover her mouth. However polite he may be for a Jat, she didn’t think he would appreciate being laughed at openly. She managed to turn the action into a touch of her forehead.

‘Where is the man now?’ she asked.

He flapped his hand, imitating a bird flying away rather than a man running away. ‘Not here. Gone. I wait for you to come. You want make police complaint?’

‘Nahi, ji,’ she said. ‘There is no need. Thank you, Shri …?’

‘Rajendra Powar. Most welcome, madam. It is my job.’

She nodded and started rolling towards the entrance. He followed her a few steps, still speaking.

He grinned widely, displaying paan fragments stuck in his front upper teeth. ‘I am matric pass, madam. Wanted graduate. But having to do job. Came Dilli.’ He spread his arms, indicating the world, the city, his uniform, the universal condition of humanity.

She felt uncomfortable at his following her and spilling uncalled-for personal information, but didn’t want to seem impolite. She mustered a polite smile. ‘Thank you, Rajendraji,’ she said, and rolled into the foyer.

The power was out, of course; after all, this was Delhi. The lift cage and stairway was in darkness, only a glimmer coming down through the stairwell, but she knew the place like the back of her hand. She turned the wheelchair right, then left again around the generously curving passageway. The old-worldly spaciousness and accessibility were a blessing. No new office building in the heart of Delhi could ever provide her with this much space on a ground floor, apart from the quiet and peace. She turned again into near-pitch darkness and slowed the chair. There was only this last stretch of the corridor and all the three doorways lined up in a row belonged to her ‘office’ apartment.

The strays had smelt her and came forward eagerly out of the darkness to greet her, ragged tails wagging, the tapetum in their eyes glowing in the darkness. Her eyes were still adjusting to the gloom and she didn’t want to run over any of the pups, so she paused to pat and cuddle them. They were all gets from the same middle-aged bitch she called Justice. As in,
Justice is a bitch
, her patent line, delivered so many times over the years that it had become her trademark, her calling card, and at times even an insult yelled at her across crowded smoky bars.
Justicebitch!