Garden of Dreams (5 page)

He could barely take her picture, she was moving so much. Anand, too, was definitely having a good time, snapping his fingers, shuffling his feet, grinding his hips. When the beat deepened, Danita began stroking her crotch. Behind the lens Eli grimaced, but kept firing away. He squatted to get a better angle, but more to hide his erection.

‘Beautiful!’ shouted Anand. ‘That’s the way I like it!’

Eli had had enough. ‘Are we done?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, but that was fuckin’ great, isn’t it! We see you later, Danita, OK?’

She nodded and Eli raised his hand farewell. Speechless.

The door to the third room was closed. Anand didn’t knock, just barged in. The room, dark blue, was dim; a striped purple bedspread covered most of the window. Many of the walls’ magazine photos had been ripped off. On the bed, on the grimy sheets, lay a small girl, maybe not even twelve, stark naked, on her back with her arms and legs splayed to the sides. Her eyes were closed, and her skin looked bluish. The insides of her arms looked like they had been stung a hundred times by vicious bees.

‘Is she dead?’ Eli asked.

‘Ha! What do you know?’ said Anand. ‘This one maybe should be, she is so useless. I don’t know why Auntie-ji keeps her, she is not paying off …’

‘Paying off?’

‘Pulling her weight. She’s a lazy little
chut
.’

Eli stared at her and willed her to wake up. Come back to life. But maybe she was better off dead.

Obviously no photos of this one.

Anand grinned as he dragged him out of the room. ‘Get used to it.’

‘Auntie-ji wants you!’ Anand yelled. ‘She’s back and she wants you to herself. Clean up. Five minutes.’

Eli gripped the edges of his bed, the dirty sheets, and raised himself slightly, feeling the room spin around him. He hadn’t spoken to anyone except Anand for a long time, over a week, he guessed – had barely left this room. Filthy now, with a bowl of piss in one corner, a basin of murky water in another. He didn’t have to sniff under his arms to know he stank all over.

‘I need a bath!’ Eli shouted back.

The key turned in the lock and the door swung open. Anand filled the doorway. ‘You’re right, yaar. Better for both of us if Auntie-ji doesn’t see you – or smell you – like this.’

The goonda yanked him by the ear, dragged him down the hallway, eerily quiet.

‘Make yourself pretty.’ Anand shoved him into the cold, dark bathroom with the once-white tiles. ‘Five minutes.’

Eli switched on the tap in the stained ball-and-claw tub, hoped the stain was just rust. Just a sign of age and not all the revolting things happening in this place. There was only one set of underwear hanging on the rail, matching bra and panties, a solitary presence in pink lace. They were Sanjana’s, he realised. The ones she’d rescued, so many days ago. In the beginning.

Eli adjusted the water temperature, stripped and lowered himself into the bath, steam rising against the cold porcelain. He could feel his body becoming purified as he sank deeper, peering across the water surface like a crocodile.

Then the door was flung open and Anand stood there again, a brown pathan suit in his arms. He dropped it on the floor.

‘Auntie-ji has made me her fucking laundry-wallah!’ he said, picking up Eli’s dirty clothes. He looked as if he had a foul taste in his mouth.

Eli surfaced slightly as he left. He still felt woozy, and his head hurt.
He found a sliver of green soap and began washing, arms outstretched. They were bruised, he saw, on the inside, Anand’s signature, violet shading to olive to greenish yellow, like the colour codes on a map for different elevations.

The goonda returned just as Eli was buttoning the last button on his pathan shirt. He came closer and ruffled his hair, hard. ‘I’d like to shave all of this off, pretty-boy,’ he said. ‘Though Auntie-ji seems to like it.’

At Auntie Lakshmi’s door, Anand knocked and then turned to leave. ‘You’re on your own,’ he said, shoving him.

Auntie-ji yelled ‘enter’ in her high-pitched voice, and greeted him from the daybed. She lay on her back, in a silky lavender robe, barefoot, with a damp pink facecloth folded on her forehead. Dusk had arrived, and candles flickered around the room, like a shrine, or a mortuary.

‘
Chutiya
,’ she said, ‘come make Auntie-ji feel better.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Never mind,
chut
, where have you been?’ Auntie-ji said, removing the facecloth, lifting herself up on one elbow as one breast slipped out, quickly retrieved. ‘Come closer, I want to see you. Anand tells me you were naughty and had to stay in your room.’

Eli said nothing.

‘Come here.’ Auntie beckoned him with her plump little hands.

He walked nearer and she grabbed his wrists, rotating his arms and pushing up his shirtsleeves.

‘Tut-tut-tut, that monkey Anand! What has he done to you?’

As much as he wanted to incriminate him, Eli was silent. In Auntie’s absence, Anand had unleashed every sadist impulse, roughing him up, making him piss in a bowl, giving him very little food, and nasty food at that; the rotis looked as if they’d been chewed by rats.

‘I go away, and things go to the dogs, isn’t it?’ Auntie reclined again and reapplied the facecloth to her brow. ‘This is making me feel very, very terrible.’

Eli looked at her body, corpse-still, and wondered what he could do to please her. Remembering the last time he’d seen her, he said, ‘I could take your picture?’

‘What, like this? What a silly idea! What are you thinking, boy? I am not decent.’ She didn’t move.

‘What about the photos I took? Of all the girls.’

‘What about them?’

‘Can I see them?’

‘Not now,
chutiya
, Auntie is feeling too poorly. Later we will look at the photos … because now,’ she said, irritably, ‘you are going to give me a massage. You can start with my feet.’

Eli looked at her feet, twitching at the end of the daybed, small and naked and scaly with scarlet nails and several silver toe rings. He wished he had a rope to tie them together. Then he would drag this woman across the floor and shove her out the window, letting her scream and cry and beg for her life. He would show no mercy.

‘Which foot first?’ he asked instead.

As he took the proffered foot, the left one, Eli stuck his tongue out. Auntie wouldn’t see him, shrouded in the facecloth, just as well. He started rubbing from the toes, thinking how weird feet looked if you really looked at them, especially these feet. Stubby little toes, warped and rough, but his hands were tough from all the guitar playing and could handle them, prodding around the joints and the webs in between, making Auntie scream a little.

Where did you go?
He wanted to ask again but knew he’d never get a true answer. Who did this woman know outside of the kotha? Did she have a life beyond these walls? He guessed she had gone ‘shopping’, looking for other children to kidnap and bring to her prison. How did she decide which ones to take?

You’re going to let me go, bitch
, he said silently in his mind, an incantation,
let me go, let me go
. He rubbed harder and harder and harder until he could really feel her bones. Wished he could break them.

Snarling, ripping off the facecloth and flinging it to the floor, she sat up and asked him if he knew nothing. Hadn’t he ever massaged a woman’s feet before?
No, never, my mom has feet like a rhinoceros
, he thought but wouldn’t say.
No girl has ever asked me to touch her there.

His mother had often asked him to massage her feet, her back, her neck, but he’d refused.
Too tired
,
Mom
, he’d said, but the truth was that he hadn’t wanted to touch her like that, it wasn’t right. He couldn’t believe that he used to nestle against her, feel her heart beating against his spine as she read to him, there in her sheltering arms.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t lain close to her the last time she’d asked – their last night together in that terrible guest house on the edge of the desert.

The boy was doing it all wrong, silly little
chut
, and while the sight of him delighted her, his hands were causing pain.
Have you never massaged a woman’s feet before
, she asked him,
not even your mother’s?
At the mention of his mother, the boy’s face darkened and Auntie felt even more pressure on her big toe, just too much now.

‘Holy Ganesh, Shiva and Hanuman! What are you doing, boy? Trying to rip my bloody toe off?’

Eli stopped massaging and dropped his hands to his sides, grazing the folds of the chocolate pathan suit. Much better than that bloody black American clothing of his. Golden hair flashing around his shoulders, bottomless blue eyes, mouth like a new rose, body flowing out to its limbs, finding its angles. Hands certainly strong enough to give a woman pleasure. She loved looking at him but was growing more and more furious that he didn’t respond to her. Not in the way she wanted. Not in the way men had throughout most of her life. He stood there expressionless, an insipid mask on his face, so still. Waiting. Staring. Outstaring her.

‘You stupid
chut
, must we call Anand to show you how it is done? It seems we must. Anand! Anand!’ She narrowed her eyes and peered up from the purple silk sofa at Eli, still at her feet. ‘Another sorry case if ever there was one.’

Anand wasn’t responding either. Probably somewhere off drinking those hash-laden lassis or smoking the stuff.
No mainlining
,
Anand
, she’d told him,
no heroin. We need you half-straight to deal with the girls and all the other rubbish around here
…

Thanks be to god, the boy was doing it better now, finding the pressure points to both charge and calm the rest of the body. She could almost relax, drift off. With her eyes barely open she could see his outline, looming at the end of her, hands working with purpose.

What would she do with him, ultimately? The Singh brothers, kingpins in the shipments from Nepal, had tried to make up for a blunder, a big screw-up. Several months ago they’d lost seven girls destined for her
kotha at the border, been intercepted by some crusading woman and her posse from Kathmandu whose mission in life was to save girls, and for what? For working themselves to death in the fields, often starving; for marrying men their parents chose for them; for never learning anything, never reading a book or listening to Mozart or anything that made life a little more dignified and tolerable. The handlers had got away, but the girls were gone. Well, thanks god she hadn’t paid for them, strictly COD she was, and of course the girls knew nothing about where they were headed. But she’d needed new stock; though some had their favourites, most of the clients got tired of the same old girls. You could teach them only so much, new ways to entertain the customers.

She’d threatened the Singh brothers with cutting them off as suppliers, but it was an idle threat; besides, there were countless other markets. To placate her they had delivered this boy, Eli, ‘something different on the menu’, they had told her, but she’d decided to keep him for herself. He’d be too easy to identify, to retrieve if people knew about him, if he were one of the client options. So she’d keep him mostly in the shadows, letting him out of his room to take photos, visit and give massages, and sometimes for tea and a chat with the girls. But mostly he’d stay under lock and key, till she could figure out something else.

As his fingers wove in and out of her toes now, she resisted the urge to giggle. Instead, she smiled. He was totally serious, hiding behind a veil of emotion, most certainly anger. And fear? She didn’t see it, but of course it was there, if not hovering on the surface then deep inside the boy, like a wolf or a bear pacing back and forth in a dark cave. They were all afraid when they came here, the children. Of course they were. She’d been terrified arriving at her first kotha years ago, a motherless child. Now she tried to mother them a little, give them sweeties and chai in the beginning (along with all the drugs) and make them quickly forget about the lives they had before.
Lakshmi, the goddess of beneficence
, she’d tell them –
I am your benefactress
. Of course none of them knew what this meant, so she’d have to explain: she’d take care of them. As madam
and
malkin, manager and owner. Totally in charge. Of course she didn’t tell them Lakshmi was also the goddess of profit.

‘You’re getting it,
chut
,’ she told the boy. ‘Just a little firmer now, you’ve gone a bit too soft.’

‘How much longer?’

‘Is Eli getting tired? Auntie Lakshmi thought he was a big, strong boy with lots of energy.’

‘I’m not tired.’ His hands had stopped.

‘What then?’

Silence.

‘Tell Auntie-ji.’

‘When are you letting me out of here?’

‘That depends.’

‘Why? On what?’

‘On you.’ She had no idea why she said that, because it wasn’t true. ‘A little more on the left foot,
chut
…’

‘On me how?’

He was grabbing her ankles hard, as though he could break them. His hands like shackles.

She sat up and pulled her ankles back roughly. ‘You stupid boy, don’t you know you’ll never get out of here unless I say so? And still you treat me like this?’ She could feel the muscles in her face tightening. ‘Anand! Anand! Must I call him in to sort you out, you stupid
chut?
’

Eli shook his head, definitely no. Fear creeping over him.

‘Fine then. Suit yourself. Auntie Lakshmi was trying to have a quiet, relaxing and very pleasant time with you, and you go and spoil it. Next time you might think twice. Anand!’

The door flung open, banging against the wall. Anand nearly fell through it, high on hash, no doubt, and steeped in the fumes of grain alcohol. He stood at attention like a squiffed soldier and turned his mirrored shades towards Eli. ‘What must I do with him?’

‘Whatever you want. I’m going to freshen up.’ She looked at Eli, standing still, quivering, barely breathing, and blew him a kiss.

As she reapplied her lipstick and eyeliner in the bathroom – her private bathroom, screaming pink with full-length mirrors surrounding her – she could hear the shouting and banging down the hall. Anand could beat the life out of anyone, and fast. She thought of intervening, but resisted. The
chut
needed a lesson, there was too much back-talk. She felt the warmth of pity welling up in her breast and had to kill it, immediately. He still had his uses here, and would need to show her a lot more respect. Obey her. Humour her. Entertain her.

Life was getting far too serious. As she drew the black line thicker under her dark eyes and smeared on lipstick again, she saw in the mirror someone she barely recognised. Her face had hardened into a painted mask over the years; she’d learnt to close her eyes with them still open so no one could look in and see her soul. With all the scum she was dealing with these days, traffickers along with gun and drug runners, an endless
web of people making a buck off the misery of others, you had to hide. Retreat, and attack, surprise them before they found your weak spot. Bugger them before they buggered you.

She checked the twists of her thick dark braid and saw that it was unravelling, ready for a wash. The noise from her room had subsided now. As she smoothed the slightly greasy strands on her scalp, she started searching for the bottle of green shampoo among the legions of toiletries on the shelf. But soon she remembered: it was Tuesday, an inauspicious day for washing hair. She’d have to live with herself till tomorrow.

One last glance in the mirror, then, opening the bathroom door, she listened carefully. Silence. She waited for a sign, a sound, of something coming, half-expecting a deadly portent, a dog’s bark or the shrill cry of a peacock. But only silence. Was the boy dead?

Only nothing.