Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (27 page)

‘Why did you do it?’ she’d asked over and over, until the words were ragged and sore, and dripped from her mouth like open wounds.

He couldn’t come up with an answer, at first, for why he’d cheated on her less than a year after they were married. Before they’d even celebrated their first wedding anniversary.

Then he tried to patch together an explanation. He’d been newly transferred, she wasn’t around, he was lost and alone in a new and strange city, they’d gone out for drinks after work, and had too many tequila shots and danced together, and everything after was a hot, boozy blur.

‘Such a blur that you went out with her again and again to clarify how good it was?’

After that, all he did was apologize.

Lily meant nothing. He’d stopped seeing her months ago. He was so glad, he added, to have her back.

She would have liked to believe him. Perhaps she would have if she didn’t feel as though she were drowning in a pool of deep, cold water.

A light breeze brushed her face; she was surprised to find her cheeks wet. The cellphone in her pocket beeped, it was a text from a friend in Delhi, asking how she was. ‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘Speak soon.’

She couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone. Not yet.

She felt shame stamped all over her body. As though somehow she was the one who’d failed. At her convent school, the nuns punished her once by making her clean the blackboards in all the classrooms—after that, humiliation always smelled of chalk. That dry, dusty, calcium-white odour that clung to her clothes, and hair and fingers. She was glad it had rained most of today in this grey city. The air carried a sharp, uncontaminated freshness.

Last night, after they’d run out of things to say, she stood at the window, watching the lights of an unfamiliar city flicker against an unfamiliar sky. Somewhere far away stood a tall cylindrical tower burning scarlet; otherwise London was low and discreet—waves of roofs and chimneys rising and falling endlessly. He was sitting at a table, laden with two cups of untouched coffee and a vase of flowers, slightly wilting.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked. ‘Before I made my way here?’

‘Because,’ he replied simply, ‘you wouldn’t have come.’

It was a trap, he’d set it up as a careful illusionist sets up his tricks.

At least he could have given me that choice.

In the park today, there was hardly anyone around—a couple of children played on the open green and a man in a heavy grey overcoat stood smoking nearby under a tree. It was soothing, she decided, to sit on a bench, in a park and be anonymous to the world. She’d stayed away from the river. It was where he’d taken her first, the day after she’d landed. For her, that was the moment when life had dropped into her hands like a perfectly polished shell. It lay there, bright and shining, this new world that they’d been allowed to enter—the sparkling shops and restaurants, the brisk locals and thronging tourists, the embankment lamp posts, looping around in dark, elegant coils. They had broken away from the crowd back in Delhi with its mess and fury, where they’d met, and their respective hometowns, with their sometimes single-minded regression. Here they were, together, in a city where everything could only be better. Although she’d laughed when she first saw the river.

‘All those poems about the mighty Thames seem a bit silly now.’

He’d smiled and said the English poets weren’t lucky enough to have lived near a river in Assam. Where they were wide and deep as the ocean.

Perhaps that’s where she’d choose to travel back to, the place where she’d grown up. A tea estate in Assam named after an Italian princess—Margherita. Nicer than ‘Lily’, the word so much more complex and rich on the tongue. The plantation sprawled over low-lying hills that edged the ragged mountains of Arunachal Pradesh. She’d lived there until she was old enough to be sent to convent school in Shillong, after which she returned for long, lazy winter holidays. Lost amid the pink and white bougainvillea that lined one side of the lawn, the colours so bright they hurt her eyes. While they faded, the spring would wake the guayacan into bloom and the entrance to the bungalow would drown in a sea of yellow blossoms, falling like snow that never melted. In the summer, the breeze, delirious with the scent of jasmine and gulmohur, swept into her room through an open window and settled on the sheets. Now, as she exhaled, her breath appeared as a cloud of transparent white. The London air carried no such intoxication.

Across the park, the children squatted on the ground with their father—it looked like he was shooting marbles. They glinted in the light. Marbles! She hadn’t played with them in years. How could she have forgotten what it felt like to be a child? Yet slowly it crept back, how they felt against her palm, cool and clear like large frozen raindrops freshly fallen from the sky. And then the smell of dust, of dung and cow feed—a brown husk called bhoosa that she’d help churn in large, black cauldrons in a dark and shadowy shed filled with the gentle lowing of animals. That was where she used to play marbles, behind the cowshed, scuffling around in the dry red mud along with the bungalow servants’ children. She’d forgotten their names…Pinky perhaps, a small girl with a coconut tree ponytail on top of her head, Son Son, the eldest boy with a strange white patch on his cheek, and Shambu, the one in the middle, with large black eyes and a gentle smile. They were all better than her; their little hands tough and skilful, and they’d gleefully pocket the marbles she lost. Hers were the prettiest, bought by her father from Dibrugarh, the nearest town, an hour away. They weren’t unkind, the rules of the game were fair and simple, but at the end of the day she’d walk back dejected, past the grazing field, behind the garage, humbled by their talent.

One evening she came across a tall man carrying a plank, with a cotton gamucha slung across his shoulder.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, barely reaching his waist.

‘Sharma mistri,’ he replied, ‘the new carpenter for the bungalow.’

‘Oh.’ She followed him to the garage where he’d set up a workshop. In the centre of the room was a long wooden table laid out with tools of all shapes and sizes, glinting in shafts of fading sunlight.

‘What can you make?’ she asked.

‘Anything you can imagine.’

She would check on him on her way back from the cowshed, after she’d helped feed the cattle or lost a game of marbles. It was getting tiring, this habit of losing. After one particularly profitless session, she’d made up her mind, she announced to Sharma mistri, that she’d stick to dolls.

‘And why is that?’ he’d asked, sawing a plank of wood in half. It came away clean and neat under his hands.

‘It’s a stupid game.’

‘Maybe you don’t know how to play it.’

‘I do, but…not very well.’

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’

When he finished, he wiped his face with the gamucha and squatted next to her, digging holes into the mud, drawing lines in the dust. When she had managed to hit a marble squarely on its side, Sharma mistri smiled.

Her husband’s smile was startlingly the same. A wide, embracing smile. He was kind. That’s what she’d found compelling—his kindness. She remembered an evening when they were taking a walk in their neighbourhood, Shahpurjat—the monsoons had cooled the Delhi summer. The narrow streets were crowded, bustling with shoppers and people returning home from work. A small dog, no more than a puppy, had wandered onto the road.

‘Watch out,’ she’d shouted, but the scooter ran it over, not bothering to stop. It lay there, twitching, its eyes wide with fear.

‘We have to do something,’ she’d cried.

He lifted the puppy, cradling it in his shirt and stopped an autorickshaw.

‘Friendicoes,’ he shouted. ‘Jaldi.’

By the time they reached the animal shelter, the dog had died, but he still rushed in to show the veterinarian, to see if, by some miracle, the little creature could be saved. They walked home that evening, not saying much, holding hands, knitted together by the grief of a small tragedy.

And now, he’s been kind enough to tell me.

She stood up and walked up the path leading to the hillside. There was a damp-dog smell in the air, and a cool freshness stung her face. She’d barely unpacked her things; would she need to put everything away again? Quietly folding up her life into boxes. Would she leave? London? Him?

She thought of him lying asleep on the sofa. The slightly open mouth, the dark circles under his eyes. His ruffled hair and creased, stained clothing. The shawl had slipped off and fallen to the floor, but she hadn’t picked it up and placed it over him. She’d stood a moment at the door, looking back, and all time seemed to tunnel towards her like a train racing down the track.

In front of her strolled the man in the grey overcoat. She wondered why he was there, on a Tuesday afternoon. What he’d done, who he’d lost. As they approached the hilltop, he walked straight on while she slipped into a side gate that led to the Greenwich meridian. It was just a line, she thought, an invisible line that divided the world, and gave it time. If there was some way she could take it away, she would, so she’d find herself back at their bungalow lawn that ended where the river began. A gentle slope eroded every July, when the monsoon lashed out like an angry monster. The evenings were her favourite, when she waited for her father to return home from work. The river would change to liquid gold pouring into the sky. Silhouetted fishermen rowed across to the line of huts close by the water’s edge, the ones that looked like fallen stars at night. Once her father, a man of not many words, had come up behind her and said, ‘It looks like the world has just begun.’

The man and his two children, who were earlier playing marbles, also entered through the gate. A little girl, of about five, stared up, thumb in mouth. She moved out of their way, deciding to walk on.

She eventually did get better at marbles, only with Sharma mistri patiently showing her how to place the glass ball under a crooked finger and take proper, careful aim. To work on lines and angles. Before long, the lessons stopped and instead she’d watch him magically put together shelves, sideboards and peg tables for her mother to place indoors. She’d wait for him to come strolling in through the back gate, running alongside as his long legs took wide, easy strides to the garage. His workplace was filled with sawdust, shavings and odd bits of wood, and it smelled of a forest after rain.

One humid afternoon, too hot even for the hens to come pecking at their feet, Sharma mistri sat on a stool sipping water from a steel tumbler while she drew patterns in the sawdust with a stick.

Suddenly he asked, ‘What would you like me to make for you? Tables and chairs for your dolls? Or a little bed? I can make them.’

She looked up, excited. ‘Wait,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you.’ She ran inside the cool, dark interior of the bungalow, almost bumping into Angad, the old bearer who was on tea duty.

‘Help me, Angad bearer,’ she cried.

‘Ji, baby.’

He followed her to the children’s room, the one filled with toys, a rocking horse, a cot for her dolls, a stack of board games with most of the essential pieces missing and in the corner—what she was looking for. They dragged it across the back garden, the chickens scattering in fright, and into the garage.

‘Can you make me this, Sharma mistri?’ She pointed to the heap at her feet.

It was an old doll’s house, one that had belonged to her mother, made of tough cardboard that had withstood many childhoods but was now on the verge of giving up. Its bright brick-red exterior had faded to a dull pink, the roof which could be lifted off had torn in a corner, and the chimney clung on lopsided. Sharma mistri walked around it in silence, inspected its doors and windows, the little flight of stairs.

‘Sometimes I wish I could fit in there,’ she said, ‘it’s no fun moving everything from the top.’

That was the way life felt like at the moment. A puppeteer tugging her into the wrong place at the wrong time. She rounded the corner and the red-brick Royal Observatory building came into view. The entrance was unguarded, and the path took her through a neatly trimmed back garden. On one patch of grass stood a sundial, and further down, an enormous telescope, completed, the information plaque announced, in 1893 and used for research into double star systems thousands of light years away.

We can look at individual stars, and not into each other’s souls.

Then she chided herself for being melodramatic and ducked into a room lined with shelves filled with old clocks and compasses. The air hummed with the quiet click of pendulums as they swung solemnly from side to side.

I’m in a room filled with compasses and I’m directionless.

She looked at the elegant old machinery and smiled. But, at least I know which way is north.

She made her way to the hilltop viewpoint where a small crowd milled around like movie extras. The man and his children were there, as well as the gentleman in the overcoat. The sky had darkened, and London lay in front of her like a fine pencil drawing, smudged into infinite shades of grey. All the walls and buildings and rooftops shivered in the rising mist, twisting and turning like a wretched thing inside her. It rose and howled, and grabbed at smoking chimneys, it tore the hearts of people on the street until it turned and looked her in the face, and left her alone. A cool wind rose up from the river. Where would she go? she asked. And in an instant, she knew.

Life stands still here.

She hadn’t seen Sharma mistri after that afternoon until her birthday. She’d waited by the gate every day, routinely checked the garage, and even took walks around the chicken coop and cowshed, but for weeks he was nowhere to be found. At her birthday party, though, after she blew out nine candles on a cake shaped like a butterfly, she caught sight of him standing by the lichee tree at the end of the driveway. She cut the cake, handed the knife to her mother, and ran down the veranda steps, ignoring the calls of her parents and guests. Her patent leather shoes crunched on the gravel, the pink satin sash from her dress fluttered behind her. When she reached him, he bent low and smiled, and before she could ask why he’d vanished for so long, why he hadn’t told her he’d be away, he asked her to follow him. Down the leaf-littered path that swerved gently to the left, past the heap of sand and abandoned gunnysacks until the garage came into view. He made her wait by the door, peered inside as though looking for a secret and then flung it open. The sawdust had been cleared, the planks and tools out of sight. In the middle of the room stood a doll’s house. The wood, still smelling freshly cut, had been varnished to a deep honey-brown, the windows were open; their frames neatly divided like bars of chocolate, a chimney decked one corner of the sloping roof. She walked around it in silence. Peering in she could see a little flight of stairs that led up to four miniature rooms. On the ground inside there was enough space for her to move and stand and sit. The door was tall enough for her to enter. She stepped in and closed it behind her.