Kalpana's Dream (4 page)

Kate and Neema saw a single messy paragraph, with more crossings-out than words. Jessaline had scrunched it into a ball and tossed it on the library floor. ‘I can’t believe I did that, ’ she’d said, shaking her plaits again. ‘I normally don’t litter.’

‘Who am I?’ was turning out to be so tricky you could almost believe it
had
been thought up by Count Dracula. Neema had a room all to herself, the kind of peaceful private place that Kate longed for – and she had no little sister to hang about her neck – but like Jessaline O’Harris, she was having difficulty. Because when you started thinking about who you were, really were, it
was
somehow hard to get a grip. Neema only had to think about that first day at Wentworth High, when she and Kate had felt little again, and then back to Grade Six at Short Street, where they’d felt quite grown up: which one was real? And if neither was really you, then what was?

‘Think at strange times, ’ Ms Dallimore had told them. ‘When you wake in the middle of the night . . .’

But these past few weeks, when Neema woke, all she thought of was the boy with the skateboard, who’d brought that odd little picture of sheep and shepherds tumbling into her mind. Sheep and shepherds, little new lambs . . . Why? Why did the boy make her think of that? She’d wake up and lie there in the dark, puzzling it over, trying to find a clue.

And she never could. She’d seen him again only this afternoon, skating so fast down Lawrence Road he’d looked like a flying boy. That was a good name for him, decided Neema: the flying boy. He hadn’t noticed her. Why should he? Why did
she
notice
him
?

Neema looked down at the almost empty page. She’d been sitting at her desk for ages, and all she’d done was write the title and her name, and the name was sort of wrong. Her real one, the name Mum and Dad had given her when she was born, was Nirmolini.

‘Nermo, Nermi – what?’ Miss Lilibet had floundered, on Neema’s first day at crèche.

‘Nirmolini.’

‘What a mouthful! We’ll call you Lena, eh?’

‘But I’m
Nirmolini
!’

‘Sounds like an ointment!’ shouted a stocky little boy in a football jumper, a quiff of rough black hair standing in spikes from his wedge-shaped head. His own name was Brian Stevenson, but later on at the place Miss Lilibet called Big School, the kids would start calling him Blocky. ‘Nermolene!’ he’d gone on shouting, ‘That icky gooey stuff you put on when you’ve got a rash!’

‘Don’t be rude, Brian, ’ Miss Lilibet had chided. ‘And it’s Germolene, not Nermolene.’ She’d turned back to Neema. ‘But you see what I mean, dear. Nirmolini’s too difficult, too hard for people to get their tongues around, especially little people. And you might get teased when you go to Big School. You wouldn’t like that now, would you?’

Neema had shaken her head.

‘Right then.’Miss Lilibet clapped her hands. ‘Hands up who likes “Lena”!’

Everyone had put their hands up, except for Blocky, who’d muttered, ‘I like Nirmolene.’

Priya, Neema’s mum, hadn’t liked the new name either. ‘Lena! Ugh! It’s horrid. What’s wrong with your proper name?’

‘Miss Lilibet says it’s too hard. For little tongues.’

‘Hard!’ scoffed Priya.

‘She says I might get teased. At Big School.’

‘Ah!’ sighed Priya. ‘Oh, well. But not “Lena”, “Neema”.’

So Neema she’d become, and everyone had forgotten ‘Nirmolini’, except for Mum and Dad. Dad had chosen the name himself, an Indian name, even though Dad was just an ordinary Australian. ‘It means “beyond price”, ’ he’d told her, and then he’d gone on dreamily, ‘Beyond rubies, beyond pearls . . .’

Her dad often talked this way, like poetry, or the Bible. He knew a lot of stuff from the Bible, because of Sister Josephine and the other nuns at the Children’s Home. It was Sister Josephine who’d given him his own name, Ignatius, after the saint on whose birthday he’d been left at their back door. ‘Lucky it wasn’t Valencia, ’ Dad liked to joke, because the box he’d come in had once held oranges, and ‘Valencia, Premium Quality’ was printed on the sides.

The nuns had also given him his second name: Grace. Because it was by God’s grace they’d found him that night, Sister Josephine believed, before the heavy rain began; God’s grace she’d opened the kitchen door at midnight, to bring her gumboots inside. ‘Ignatius’, surely, was even more difficult for little people to get their tongues around, yet Dad had never been teased at school and he was proud of his difficult name. ‘Ignatius Grace MD’ was inscribed proudly on the shiny brass plaque outside his surgery.

‘Nirmolini, ’ Neema whispered, trying her real name out loud. It didn’t sound so peculiar now, as it had, quite suddenly, on that first day at Miss Lilibet’s crèche. Though it didn’t sound like
her
; it suggested another girl altogether; someone older and more serious, a graceful girl who didn’t have knobbly knees. Neema pushed the sheet of paper to the back of her desk and went down to her dad.

‘Dad?’

‘Yup?’

‘Dad, what would you answer, if I asked you, “Who am I?”’

His head bobbed up from the book. ‘That’s easy.’ He grinned at her. ‘You’re my precious daughter, my enchanting Nirmolini, who, ’ he pondered for a moment, and then went on, ‘who looks out like the dawn, beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun, majestic as the starry heavens . . .’

Which was lovely, but obviously, for Ms Dallimore’s essay, simply wouldn’t do.

Neema walked down the hall to her mum’s study. She paused outside it, hearing the soft flutter of the computer from inside. She opened the door a crack and peered into the room. Her mum sat gazing at a row of symbols flickering on the screen: she was a maths professor and she was in love with maths. She’d fallen in love in her first year at college in Delhi, where she’d had a very tiny, very old teacher called Miss Dabke. Mum often dreamed of little Miss Dabke. She dreamed the old teacher stood by her bedside and whispered, ‘Heavenly! Ah, heavenly, Priya! The mathematical music of the spheres!’Watching the tender, rapt expression on her mother’s face – it really was the expression of someone listening to heavenly music – Neema felt it was a pity to disturb her. Softly, she closed the door.

As she passed the living room, her father called out, ‘Shulamite maiden, come back, that we may gaze upon you!’

Shulamite maiden! It sounded so beautiful, like that older, graceful girl her real name conjured up in Neema’s mind.

‘Hey, Nirmolini! Neema!’ Dad called in his ordinary voice. ‘Neem! Come and hear this joke old Mr Flannery told me in the surgery today! He said it was a special one, for you! And after you’ve heard it, let’s be devils and have a long long game of Monopoly!’

A very small battle went on in Neema’s breast, between Ms Dallimore’s essay and Dad’s devils: the devils won easily. She’d start her essay another day; handing it in was weeks and weeks away.

In a house on the other side of the park, Gull Oliver lay staring at the ceiling of his room. His skateboard sat propped against the bedside table, very close to him. ‘’Night, mate, ’ he said to it, and then switched out the light.

He couldn’t get to sleep though; he kept thinking of Nirmolini. Because it
was
her, that Year Seven girl he’d seen outside the library with Katie Sullivan on the first day of term, the girl with the gold-flecked eyes who’d sent that shiver of recognition tingling down his spine. When he first knew her, seven years ago, those eyes had often been red and swollen with tears.

Well, who didn’t cry on their very first day at primary school, or
feel
like crying? Funny how he’d met her on her first day at Short Street, and then at Wentworth on another first day. Sort of – magical. He’d spent ages trying to remember who she was because who could have imagined that funny little weepy red-faced kid would have turned into this slender, graceful, dark-haired girl? He could have asked her name at school, but somehow he’d wanted to find out in some other, more special way. A more enchanted way, he thought: either to remember by himself, or to hear the name spoken, out of the air, like luck or fate.

And it had come: two weeks ago in the playground he’d heard someone call out to her, ‘Neema!’ and then he’d known for sure. Neema had been the name everyone had called her, even back at Short Street – only Gull had known her real name was Nirmolini. Mrs Flannery had told him. Mrs Flannery had been headmistress at Short Street in that year before he and his family had gone to live in Germany; she was the one who’d begun the ‘shepherd’ programme for the little kids starting school.

‘Now, Gull, ’ she’d said to him on the day before the new Preps arrived, ‘your new lamb is called’, she’d glanced down at her file, ‘Nirmolini. Isn’t that a beautiful name? Nirmolini Grace.’

It was beautiful, Gull thought. It sounded like a tiny little song, all by itself. It was the most perfect name in the world.

‘Nirmolini, ’ he whispered softly to the skateboard. ‘Her name’s Nirmolini, mate.’

6
Boss! Boss! Boss!

Half a world away, Neema’s great-grandmother Kalpana had begun her packing. There wasn’t much of it: seven white saris, underwear, a spare pair of sandals, a single soft embroidered shawl.

Kalpana’s daughter Usha stood watching; she’d rushed down from Delhi the minute she’d heard the news.

‘You’re not taking
those
?’ Usha’s gaze fixed on a shabby old bedroll and battered water-carrier leaning against the wall.

‘Of course not, ’ replied Kalpana, calmly folding the shawl.

‘They are for my own journey, ’ said Sumati. ‘To my sister’s place. Do you think your mother would take such things on a plane?’

Usha looked embarrassed; indeed she’d thought just that.

‘Do you think we are feeble-minded and know nothing of the world? Do you think we do not know there is water on planes, and little blankets, light as air? Perhaps you think she is taking her chickens along, and the neighbour’s goat, also?’

‘No, of course not, ’ said Usha, flushing. ‘But–’ ‘Always “buts” with you, ’ cried Sumati. ‘Buts and fuss and boss!’

There
were
‘buts’, though, reflected Usha. Lots of them. A ticket and passport, for a start, not to mention the visa. Mention it she did.

‘You’ll need a visitor’s visa, ’ she told her mother, ‘and that can take a very long time.’ Perhaps the long wait would put her mother off the whole idea . . .

‘Passport, ticket, visa – everything is done!’ crowed Sumati, pointing to a shiny folder on the bureau. ‘See?’

Usha picked up the folder and leafed through its contents. Sumati was right; everything was done, even to the visa stamped firmly into the brand-new passport. Usha was astonished: how had two old country ladies managed all of this?

‘We have been to Ahmedabad!’ said Sumati proudly. ‘We have been to Bharat Travel, and also visited your father’s friend.’

‘My father’s friend?’

‘Kanti Shah, ’ said Sumati.

‘You would not remember him, ’ said Kalpana, a little sadly. ‘You were only a baby when last he was here.’

‘Kanti Shah has a son who works in the Embassy, ’ explained Sumati, ‘very high up.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Two weeks and it was done. He is quick, that one.’

‘Even as a child he was quick, ’ smiled Kalpana.

Sumati chuckled at the memory. ‘
Bapre
! See his mother run!’

Usha studied the ticket. There was a three-hour transit stop in Hong Kong. Her mother would have to change planes! For her age, she was very fit and healthy, but she’d never travelled out of the country or even flown on a plane, and the only language she spoke was Hindi. Terrible visions began to rise in Usha’s mind: was it possible, these days, to actually get onto the wrong plane? To fly somewhere else, without knowing you were doing so? She pictured her mother arriving in Moscow, believing it was Sydney, waiting at the arrival gate with her shabby little suitcase, wondering why Priya and her family hadn’t come to meet her. Or Reykjavik, thought Usha wildly. Or Addis Ababa!

‘Why go on your own, Ma?’ she said. ‘You could have come with me when I visited Priya last summer.’

‘I had not decided then.’

‘You could come with me next year.’

‘I want to go now.’

‘I’ll come with you then! I – I can take time off from school!’

Kalpana shook her head.

‘Well, what about your nephews? Your brothers’ sons? I’m sure one of them could go with you–’

‘Those!’ The word burst from Sumati’s lips. ‘What would your mother want with them? Boss! boss! boss! All the time – worse even than you! Your mother would put one little foot out, to take a step, and they would shout, “Not there! That is wrong! Here, here, Kalpana, put your foot here! Here is proper place!” ’

Kalpana smiled. ‘Exactly so.’

‘But, Ma, you need someone with you!’

‘I want to go on my own, ’ repeated Kalpana, narrowing her eyes and drawing her soft old lips into a thin determined line.

Her daughter had seen that expression on her mother’s face only once before – long ago when Usha had won the scholarship to Delhi University and her uncles had said they would not allow her to go. A young girl in a big city, all alone! What would become of her? And who would marry such a girl, a girl who’d been to university, who’d been living on her own?