Garden of Dreams (11 page)

The louvred blinds in her room were still closed, panes of shade against the bright afternoon light. Margo didn’t bother to open them now and lay down on the bed again, on the faded turquoise cotton spread, clutching one of the pillows against her face. She buried herself in it, in her own scent, in the dampness from the sea, always a reminder of its presence. Eyes closed, she willed herself away from there. But to where?

His face rose up in her mind like a dead person from a well. Even as a baby, Eli had scared her. Even in hospital, five days after he was cut from her by Caesarean, she knew it would get her, the blackness, that she would fall into a depression so deep she could never crawl out.

What do I do with you?
she’d wondered, writing down, as a good journalist would, meticulous notes on how to change him, burp him, bathe him. But that hadn’t worked. Every morning after Anton left, before the maid arrived, she’d panicked. Alone with him, all sorts of thoughts ran amuck in her head:
I’ll hurt him, I’ll drop him, I’ll shake him too hard, I’ll kill him.
He’d cry, and nothing would calm him; once or twice she threw him down so hard on the bed that he stopped. She didn’t dare pick him up again – but she had to. She had to survive with him through the day, past the late afternoon when the maid left until her husband came home, an unbearable three hours. She’d put him in his car seat, and they’d watch soapies together, sedated by television.

Once, she’d been taking Eli for a walk in his pram, admiring the roses of late spring in her in-laws’ neighbourhood north of Cape Town. Table Mountain was far in the distance, the city at its feet. When she came to the top of a steep hill, she’d looked at that little blonde head, those tiny fingers gripping the edge of the dinosaur blanket, and for an instant of near-demonic possession thought of pushing the pram and letting it fly down the hill at breakneck speed.

She hadn’t pushed him, of course. She hadn’t even told anyone what she’d imagined herself doing.

Now she tossed the pillow aside and went to open the doors, needing
light. Beyond the glare of the shoreline the sea spilled out breakers, one after the other, over and over, like a repeated question.
What have you done to him?

She had to get up, get out. The children were waiting for her. Other people’s children. Dead people’s children.

The orphans of Vizhinjam, nineteen of them, were waiting for her at their schoolhouse to take them to the aquarium. Local missionaries, American, had recruited her last week at the hotel’s outdoor restaurant; she’d been deep into her third Kingfisher when they’d approached her. A husband-and-wife team, marked by the clean-scrubbed, Midwest earnestness of people bent on converting. Perhaps it was her American accent; she couldn’t think what else would draw them to her. Except that she was a lost soul, she knew it, and they must have too.
Tsunami survivors,
the missionaries had told her.
Parents all gone. They need you
…

Instinctively she had agreed, to go once a week to take the children on an outing somewhere. Today would be her first time with them, the only logic being this:
when your own life is in ruins, fix someone else’s.

Twenty minutes later, after being jostled in a tuk-tuk for several kilometres along the red sand road, passing sleepy cows and arcades of palms, she was there: the village school, a rectangle of unpainted concrete blocks, one large room of tropical air churned up by two precarious ceiling fans. The children waited outside for her, like a flock of drab birds in their beige uniforms, next to a brightly painted bus, gleeful with its images of blue-faced Krishna, oil lamps and peacocks. They waved to her as she came up the walk towards the school.

‘You’re late.’ A nun, a middle-aged local convert, severe in her black habit, emerged from the schoolroom door. ‘Children have been waiting more than half an hour.’

‘It won’t happen again,’ Margo told her. ‘I’m sorry.’

At the nun’s command the children climbed on to the bus, buzzing with Malayalam chatter. Margo boarded last, and at the front of the bus, as the driver ground it into gear, asked: ‘Has anyone ever been to the aquarium?’

Finally, a tentative hand went up in a seat near her. His name was Chittaprasad, he said, and he was fourteen, a year older than Eli. His name meant ‘happiness’, she later learnt, but there wasn’t much joy in this child, with woeful dark eyes, gangly legs and the beginning sprout of a moustache. ‘I went once, before …’

‘Before what?’ Margo stood in the aisle at the front, gripping the backs of the seats, trying to balance as the bus lurched along.

‘You know …’

‘No, what?’ She did know; she wanted them to say the word.

‘Before the wave that took everything away.’

Before and after
. One day you had your life, the next day it was gone, replaced by something new and strange and terrifying. The worst part was, the ‘after’ displaced the ‘before’, day by day, weekly, monthly, yearly. Devoured it, leaving just enough behind to make the longing for it unbearable.

‘The ocean is dangerous,’ Margo told them gently, sitting down next to Chittaprasad and tousling his unkempt hair. ‘But it is also beautiful, full of life. As you will see.’

When the tuk-tuk dropped her off in the parking lot at the top of the beach later that afternoon, she was startled by happiness. The children’s joy –
I want to go swimming
, Chittaprasad had said, staring at a sea turtle in the big tank – was contagious. Barefoot, Margo loped down the white dunes, walking under the palms where the sand was cool. No one was on the front steps of the hotel, and the usual crowd hadn’t yet gathered at the restaurant for sundowners. She wanted to tell Raj about the children, the outing, but no one was at the front desk when she passed through the hotel’s open door.

Music, some kind of rockabilly crooning, came from Raj’s room in the back. It sounded like he was singing along. She hoped he was in a good mood.

When he opened his door, she could see immediately that he wasn’t. His eyes were bloodshot; there were four empty Kingfisher bottles on the floor. As he folded his arms around her neck, he reeked of beer and cigarettes, and she stepped away from him.

‘What are you doing in here?’ she asked, though the bottles, the unmade bed, the drawn shades, clothes on the floor, boom box blaring and line of coke on the night table told her. ‘Three guesses, baby,’ he said, falling back on the bed and turning towards the table, where he started fixing another line. ‘Join me.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t feel like it.’

Raj leaned forward and grabbed her wrist, yanked her towards the bed. She obediently sat down next to him on the stale sheets. She watched him snort a line and felt disgust, though she knew the relief snow could bring, all too well. It was the only way she could take Raj lately: stoned, both of them. But she really didn’t feel like it today, didn’t need it.

‘The children seem to be coming out of their shells,’ she said. ‘Even the most withdrawn. I took them to the aquarium today, they loved it. I think there’s a chance – they might heal.’

Raj looked at her, narrow-eyed, wiping his nose, sniffing hard. As abusive as he was – had become – she wasn’t prepared for what he said next: ‘What the fuck do you know about children?’

The leopard stared at her with eyes like green marbles, slightly predatory. He was young, barely six months, about the size of a goat. The Singhs had given him to her, they said, to keep her company while she waited for the new kotha to get up and running. It needed the rats and spiders cleared out of it and then a coat of paint. Not bloody long now. The cat lay in a spotlight of sun on the stone floor of the lounge, in the posh house they’d found for her ‘retreat’, her hideout in Greater Kailash, home to the worst snobs in Delhi. He alternately watched her, ensconced on the ivory velvet sofa, and licked his paws. Still in her black bra and gold kurta pyjamas, Lakshmi painted her toenails a vicious red.

‘You bloody nuisance,’ she whispered to the cat. ‘Those fuckers knew what they were doing.’

She couldn’t leave the leopard alone – he’d tear up the house. And just imagine if she went out with him, a sure magnet for trouble. So here they were, stuck with each other. She couldn’t go outside to do puja at the Hanuman or any other temple, so had set up a small shrine in the lounge, with incense, bowls, marigolds and an ugly dark Ganesh statue she’d found in a spare bedroom. She’d lay out a few chapattis from time to time but the cat ate them. She saw more of Rakesh, the cook/houseboy/butler, than of anyone else. Except the cat.

She’d thought of poisoning him, with some sort of toilet cleaner or something. But he was too clever for that, and she didn’t yet have the will. Besides, she was curious, she wanted to see how it would play out.
You’ll understand each other
, Sanjay Singh had said when they’d dropped off the leopard. She wanted to see what that meant.

‘You’ll need a name,’ Lakshmi told the cat, pursing her lips, smooching at him, throwing him a bit of breakfast chapatti. ‘I can’t just call you “pussy”, can I?’

She needed to get back to work, that she knew; lolling about like this was adding unwelcome kilos. She was sure there was one more roll around the waist now when she sat down or bent over. Besides, the astrologer
down the road, paid extra for a home visit, had told her the gods were smiling and her greatest destiny lay just round the corner. This sounded awfully patronising, she admitted, but why not believe it? He’d given her a pack of Tarot cards as a ‘bonus’ and told her to deal her own fate. She was unsure how the gods would react, trifling with them and fiddling around with these cards descended from European mystics. Still, she loved flipping them over and seeing the names and the pictures, wondering who she would encounter each day.

She got up to grab a black and gold-embroidered caftan from her voluminous closet, kicking one of dozens of pairs of sandals out of the way. Then, dressed, she returned to the dining table, a huge plate of glass astride two giant pedestals, trees carved in stainless steel. She pulled up one of the armless, high-backed dining chairs cloaked in lavender velvet, tied in bows on the sides, sat down and began to deal the Tarot deck.

High Priestess. Hanged Man. Devil. Fool. Which one was she in that line-up?

The phone rang and she recognised Rakesh’s voice from downstairs. ‘Can I send
him
up, then?’

What a bore, he was one of the last people she wanted to see just now. ‘Fine, fine, but tell him I am feeling poorly and don’t have much time.’

She heard Rakesh mumble something to her visitor and return to the phone. ‘He says he can come back later.’

‘Send him up.’ She was showing more irritation than she intended. ‘Now’s as bad a time as any.’

She dashed into the bathroom and checked herself in the mirror; luckily make-up was high on the day’s agenda and applied just after breakfast, or before, on some days. She added another coat of crimson lipstick and smacked her lips together. The Home Minister didn’t come every day, and even though she thought him an idiot, he had connections.

Lakshmi went back to the ivory velvet sofa in the lounge and, one hand on the remote, pretended to read a magazine.
Filmfare
. She couldn’t get enough of Bollywood. When the buzzer sounded she opened the gilt security doors across the room. There stood the Minister, looking frailer than before, shoulder-length hair greyer and beige pathan suit droopier, his tortoiseshell glasses far too big for his face. As he approached her and bowed, whisking a bouquet of tuberoses from behind his back, she took the creamy flowers and sank her nose into their heady scent, deciding that her guest wore those glasses because he did, in fact, look like a tortoise.

‘You love these, my dear, isn’t it?’ The old man rubbed his palms
together and the long nail on his left pinkie stabbed the air. Behind him, just a few metres away, the leopard had sat up and was twitching its tail.

‘You always bring me flowers, Minister,’ she said, rising to find a vase. ‘But Auntie-ji knows you. What do you want for them this time?’

Bloody bother, she couldn’t find a vase so set the tuberoses in the sink and filled it with a few inches of water. Her guest had boldly made himself at home in a plush matching armchair next to the sofa. He still hadn’t noticed the leopard.

‘G.B. just isn’t the same without you and your girls, Auntie-ji,’ the Minister said, clearing his throat, polluted by too much tobacco. He had taken a wad to chew now and was unwrapping it, when she snatched it from him.

‘We don’t have that here, thank you very much. This isn’t G.B. Road, after all.’

The Minister’s eyes grew even larger behind his thick lenses. He looked suitably chastened.

Lakshmi sat down on the sofa again, wanting to show some semblance of politeness. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the leopard, yawning and fussing with its paws, about to approach them any second. Then, instead of a yawn it let out a growl, of sorts.

‘Sweet Jesus, what is that?’ The Minister was now behind her, clutching the back of the sofa.

‘Have you converted, Minister? That is a present from some mutual friends. I’m not at all sure what to do with him – which I could say about a lot of people.’

‘Where did they get it?’ She could feel the Minister’s belly hovering near the nape of her neck and shifted forward.

‘Stole it from the leopard sanctuary in Ranakpur forest,’ Lakshmi said. ‘The Singh brothers. You know how good they are at stealing things.’

The leopard was standing now and, obviously bored, started prowling around the room, slipping around the corner down the hallway, out of sight. The Minister sighed heavily and sank back into his armchair.

Lakshmi decided to play the game, only so far, and went to the mahogany sideboard and its crystal decanter to pour the Minister a whisky. She managed to smile when she handed it to him. ‘You want an update, isn’t it?’

The Minister’s face was in the Waterford glass, inhaling. He wiggled his head ‘yes’.

She returned to the sideboard and poured herself a whisky too, a double. Bloody bore of a man, she needed to be anaesthetised. She posi
tioned herself on the velvet sofa and re-arranged her caftan top to show just enough cleavage. Smile.

‘The Singhs are setting me up again,’ she said, gulping down half her drink. ‘New, improved … as the Americans say. We should be open for business in two or three weeks. Not far down the road from the old kotha, bigger and more girls. And boys – but that isn’t your taste, is it?’

The Minister pretended to look offended, sneering.

‘Maybe one day you’ll go for the little buggers.’ She clinked her glass against his, hard, to humiliate him. ‘More Nepali girls – and they’re getting younger all the time.’

‘Any police giving you trouble?’ The Minister looked solemn, as though he were being briefed on the latest state budget.

‘Not much. You know most of them enjoy what we have to offer. But there’s one – Gupta, his name is – who’s been snooping around too bloody much. He could stand some reining in – if you feel up to it.’

The Minister stood, setting his glass down on the coffee table, looking uncomfortable and probably not up to anything. ‘Consider it done, Auntie-ji.’

That afternoon Lakshmi woke from a nap, fitful sleep with the AC chilling her to the bone, still in her pyjamas on the red organza bedspread, stupid sequins biting into her like bedbugs. The phone was ringing, again. As she stumbled out of the bedroom, in a stupor induced by sleep, heat and too much Johnny Walker, she cursed Rakesh’s insistence. At that moment she hated everybody. She had dreamed of the wretched Singhs, of them giving her back the boy instead of the leopard, doing what she’d asked.
Get him for me
, she’d said.

But they hadn’t, not yet. The leopard was lying in another corner of the room, finding a patch of late sun. She picked up the phone and Rakesh’s voice, scratchy, came down the wire. ‘You won’t believe who’s here, Auntie-ji.’

‘Try me, Rakesh.’ Lakshmi ran her fingers through her hair and quickly unbraided it. She was a mess.

‘Miss Bianca, the Bollywood Queen!’ Rakesh could barely contain himself. ‘And she is asking for you!’

What were the gods up to? She quickly gathered up the Tarot cards from the dining table, ran back to her bedroom, shoved them in a drawer and sat down in front of the mirrored dresser. Art Deco, red shellac and a round mirror, made her feel like a thirties movie star. But not today. More like something the cat dragged in, she thought.

She neatened the kohl around her eyes, smeared on another layer of lipstick, rebraided her dyed pitch-black hair and tucked the coiled braid up with a richly enamelled peacock hairpin, its prongs sharp and long enough to hold her mane in place. Didn’t Kate Winslet wear something like this in
Titanic
? Never mind.

The leopard was snoring lightly when she buzzed in the Bollywood Queen. Miss Bianca was on the up-and-up, she’d just been reading in the magazine. Barely thirty, rich, famous, the fantasy of most men in India and a lot of the women, too. Now here she was – in a jewelled blue-and-orange sari and matching slippers, waves of hair flowing, an over-the-top nose ring (how could she breathe?) and earrings reaching nearly to her bare shoulders – about to deliver an embrace.

‘I have a leopard,’ Lakshmi said, surprising even herself. ‘He gets jealous of Auntie-ji’s friends.’

Bianca seemed unfazed by the cat, swishing in past him and surveying the room. ‘You certainly know how to live, Lakshmi.’

‘You’re not here for my interior decorating tips, are you?’

Bianca laughed, an exaggerated laugh for an audience. But not even the leopard was looking. ‘I’ve got my own decorators, Auntie-ji. You must have seen the photos in the latest
Filmfare.
’

Bloody well did. ‘Then why are you here?’

‘Oh, Auntie-ji, don’t be cross. I didn’t think you’d mind. I don’t know anyone with more experience …’

‘Experience in what?’

‘On the Road, Auntie, of course. Because why? I’ll tell you. Because I am going to open my own kotha.’

That was something for
Filmfare
. ‘Who knows about this?’ was Lakshmi’s next question.

‘You’re the first – well, besides my other connections.’ Bianca was now sitting on the sofa, like a tropical flower fallen on a field of snow. Lakshmi thought of all the man-eating flowers she’d seen in jungle movies. ‘I decided to use these connections … I know a lot of people …’

‘You mean you know a lot of beautiful young girls …’

‘Exactly! And not everyone is making it in the film industry these days, Auntie-ji.’

What had happened to the world? Now even a gorgeous young actress, her star on the rise, was entering the business. Should she warn her? Tell her that once you get in, you cannot get out? Say that she should not dirty her hands and ruin the lives of other young women? But would it make any difference – what Lakshmi said?

‘How can I help you?’ She sat down in an armchair, regretfully. She didn’t want Bianca to think she was welcome to stay.

‘Nepali girls,’ Bianca said, tossing her hair off her shoulders. ‘I’ve got lots of local girls lined up, but need access to the Nepalis. I’ve heard men go wild for them – those eyes, their shyness. How tiny they are. Can you help me find some?’

Go look in Nepal, bitch. Lakshmi’s blood was beginning to boil. The nerve – this interloper thinking she could just waltz on to G.B. Road and start a thriving business. What did she know about it? Naturally all the sleazebags, ‘the connections’, would knock themselves out to help her, prostrate themselves, compete to be of service. But not Auntie-ji. She would give this ingénue nothing, only the illusion of warmth, of congeniality. ‘Let me see what I can do, Bianca,’ she said. ‘If you’ll leave me to it, I’ll make some inquiries this afternoon.’

She buzzed the golden doors open again and Bianca obediently swept through them. As the doors banged shut, Lakshmi contemplated how to tell
Filmfare
about the star’s latest adventures.

She’d call the Singhs, not on that bitch’s behalf but on her own. She’d make sure that they turned India inside out looking for him, Eli, the South African-American boy. He hadn’t died in the fire, she knew that; she’d got her people to find out who the victims were – three young girls from a recent shipment, replaceable. Hadn’t worked off much yet, bloody hell, that was the problem. But nothing she couldn’t find more of up north. She was more worried about the boy.

The whisky overflowed as she poured herself another drink, trickling over the crystal glass; Lakshmi slurped some from the top and lay down on the velvet sofa. The sun was sinking fast, casting stark shadows across the room. Where was the leopard? He had slunk off somewhere with Bianca’s departure. Lakshmi closed her eyes and relished the solitude.

The boy was in her head, though – his golden hair, his lithe young body on its way to manhood, his foreignness. He’d become something of an obsession. She felt like a young girl in love, which was strange because she never had been. She’d grown up in a kotha and the only men she’d known had been the paying kind. Unlovable. Mostly abusive.

Eli was something different, and she wanted him back. Partly because he was probably going to contact the authorities, if he hadn’t already; mostly because she just wanted him in her life. It was longing she felt – not sexual, exactly, but certainly physical, as if something had been severed from her body with his escape. She longed for his youth, his beauty and his innocence, something rare in her world. An innocence she coveted, for herself.