Garden of Dreams (7 page)

He woke up choking. Whirls of black smoke came toward him, bad spirits bent on destruction. He heard screams but couldn’t identify them, man-girl-boy screams, and saw bright orange flames ferociously licking the roof outside, against a dark sky. Eli knew he had to get down, beneath the smoke, and make for the door. He prayed it hadn’t been locked again. The wooden floor was roasting, and the door singed his hand when he tested it, but it opened. He had to go through. For weeks he’d wondered if he’d landed in hell; now he knew he’d arrived.

He made it into the hallway, smoky and dark, but the flames were still at a distance, devouring the main staircase. Crouching low, Eli scrambled down the hall towards the back stairs, going sideways-forwards like a crab, barely seeing. A hot-footed dance, like walking on coals.

Where was everyone? He could still hear screams, moans, like souls doomed to the underworld, but couldn’t tell where they were coming from. Fumbling through the thickening darkness he passed Auntie Lakshmi’s door, closed, smoke seeping in through the bottom crack. Maybe she hadn’t woken up.
Let her choke to death
, he thought –
burn the witch
.

‘Eli!’ They collided before they could see each other. It was Sanjana: he caught a whiff of her jasmine scent through the smoke. She took him by the hand, leading him towards the back staircase.

‘What the hell, Sanjana? Where are the others?’

‘Shanti and Deevyah waiting in downstairs toilet. And Ravi. That’s it.’

‘Lakshmi? Anand? The other girls?’

‘Gone, wayfargone, not coming back.’

‘Dead?’

‘You must run or burn!’ Sanjana shouted at him as she rushed down the stairs, caught in a paroxysm of coughing, as he was.

He ran after her as if the stairs were about to disappear.

The door of the second-floor bathroom was being attacked from inside, fists banging along with high little voices shrieking, Ravi’s the loudest. ‘Save us, most bountiful Ganesh, save us!’

Eli flung open the door and Ravi rushed forward like a bat out of a cave and dug his small claws into him. The two young girls, waifs of twelve at most, seemed glued together.

‘Shanti, come!’ Ravi turned and tugged at the smaller girl, shaven-headed and scrawny, like a ferret – she could have been his sister. ‘Deevyah!’ The larger girl, rounder and hacking away beneath a cascade of styled dark curls, stepped forward.

‘We try that window over there,’ Sanjana said, breathless, pointing down the blackening hallway. ‘Stairs no good now.’

Flames advanced from both directions like an army manoeuvre, invisible soldiers blasting them with giant fire-throwers, face-melting heat. Sanjana led the way over to the window. ‘Now jump, Eli, first you,’ and she pushed him towards the edge.

‘How far down is it?’

‘Not far. Falling into rubbish, you don’t worry.’

‘Don’t worry?’ Eli was peering out the window and could see the maw of a large container, full of smelly stuff.

‘Try be brave. Do it. Now!’

He jumped, feeling as though he were falling through a ring of fire. But he landed softly, slimily, on some old banana and mango peels, cabbage leaves or something. One, two, three, four more bodies fell into the garbage with him, screeching and crying, Ravi more than the rest of them put together.

On the street the five of them backed off from the flaming kotha, holding hands now to stave off all the people running past them in both directions, like players in a mad game. The whole block was burning, not just Lakshmi’s place. The flames leapt higher into the inky sky, setting all of G.B. Road in motion, with no sign or sound of fire trucks to the rescue. Just people yelling and screaming and keening for bodies lost in the fire.

‘Now what?’ Eli said, looking at big-eyed Ravi, Shanti and Deevyah, and then at stoic Sanjana at the end of the chain. All smudged and gasping for breath.

‘Ojal’s. All I can think.’

‘Not the police?’

‘You stupid?’ Sanjana had dropped hands and was charging in front now, down the road, shoving people out of the way with her elbows. People with faces and clothes smeared black, running wild-eyed like a cattle stampede. ‘Police bring us right back to kotha, or put us in jail, me and girls,’ she shouted. ‘Nepalis not meant to be here.’

He remembered the cops he’d seen in the hallways and sliding into
girls’ rooms. Even weird Ojal seemed safer than going to the police. At least she was who she said she was.

As they swerved and dodged down the street, through the crazy throngs, Eli holding up the rear and the young ones in-between, he considered his options. Here he was, charging down a street on fire with a gang of young prostitutes, heading towards a house full of eunuchs, no phone, so no way of reaching his parents, couldn’t go to the cops. He pushed and shoved along with the rest of them and hoped he was as black as they were now, that the smoke had disguised him. He felt covered in blackness – his hands were black and his pathan had turned a sludgy colour. As he ran he realised he was still barefoot, and his black feet, slicked with a bit of banana from the garbage dump, were carrying him somewhere way beyond imagining.

Ojal’s kotha was close, ten minutes, Sanjana said, still running. When they got there the ‘girls’, the hijras in their gauzy pyjamas, were standing on the front steps of the old blue house, craning to see what was burning, chattering, gesticulating, making horror faces. Ojal was not with them, but Sanjana recognised someone.

‘Auntie Jasu, we are lost!’ she said, stopping the troop of kids in front of the steps. ‘Everything go in fire.’

A short, chunky person came down the steps towards them, much less like a girl than the others. She had long dark sideburns and a sparse moustache. A kind, open face, though, and solid arms reaching out from her frilly pink pyjama sleeves to embrace Sanjana. ‘Poor child,’ she said, ‘come in and bring your friends.’

‘Where’s Ojal?’ Eli asked, as the hijras settled them in fat, plush chairs in the lounge, where the lamps burnt low, and set upon them with facecloths.

‘We are in fact looking for Ojal at this very moment.’ It was a stern, oversized hijra speaking, who reclined like an overfed cat on a divan with her feet up and a young hijra seated at her feet. She stroked her fat tummy as she spoke. ‘Girls, remind me who is out looking for her now?’

‘Varuni and Ela, Guru Bhavini,’ Jasu said. ‘But they have been gone too long. Nearly seven hours now.’

The guru, distracted for a moment, kicked the backside of the young hijra sharing the divan. ‘Chai for our guests, Sarika!’ She turned again to her audience. ‘Ojal doesn’t worry me. If anyone knows her way around G.B. Road, it is her. Most probably she is out turning a few tricks or watching the fire. You know how she loves to peep.’

‘Bhavini-ji,’ Jasu said, ‘may I take the children for a wash?’

‘Make it snappy,’ said the guru, ‘chai is coming.’

Jasu nodded to Eli and Ravi to follow him, or her; the girls went off with another hijra in the opposite direction. They stopped at the open door to a bathroom like the inside of an Easter egg, the kind with a magical scene inside. Yellow and pink and blue pastels, pink soaps, pink toilet-seat cover – it all made Eli slightly ill.

Jasu turned on the tap in the old tub and started ripping off Ravi’s soiled clothes. Ravi just stood there.

‘I’ll wait outside,’ Eli said.

‘No, sweetie, you and Ravi will share the bath. Not much hot water to go around.’

Ravi was now stark naked, trembling. Jasu felt the water, barely six inches deep, and shut off the tap. ‘Get in.’

As Jasu left, instructing them to leave their dirty clothes outside the door, Ravi sat in the tub, motionless. Eli decided he was in shock and knelt down next to him. ‘I’ll wash your back, OK?’

Ravi nodded, mute. Eli ran the pink soap lightly over the dainty back, shoulder blades sticking out like small boomerangs, a visible chain of vertebrae. ‘Don’t worry, Ravi,’ he said, ‘you’re going home.’

Finally the small boy spoke, not looking at him. ‘I don’t have home.’

‘Where are your parents?’

‘No parents.’

Eli stopped washing and looked at Ravi’s eyes, trying to catch them. ‘Maybe you just don’t remember them.’

‘No,’ said Ravi, turning towards him with a wounded look, ‘all I remember is Auntie-ji. My whole life with Auntie-ji. Now she’s gone.’

Hell yeah,
Eli wanted to say. ‘Maybe she escaped,’ he said, hoping above all else that she didn’t.

Ravi shrugged his shoulders and started washing himself, feebly. Eli shed his smoky suit and joined him. Maybe he was in shock too, if this was what shock felt like. Nothing to say, just going through the motions of bathing himself, an act he vaguely remembered as comforting.

‘Go back to them,’ Eli told Ravi when they’d finished, only boxers on. ‘I’ll come just now.’ Using the damp pink towel as a cloak, he wandered down the darkened hallway, towards what he imagined was the kitchen; there was an eerie glow and the hum of an old refrigerator as he approached. A solitary bulb cast blue shadows around the room, just a chopping table in the middle, no chairs, and a few gas burners on the counter, no stove. But the room had what he wanted, urgently: a
phone, on the wall. Really old-school, black and grimy. He reached for the receiver and prayed the operator spoke English. Cape Town, he’d say when she asked him about the collect call. I want to speak to my mom.

Silence. No Indian voice, no voice at all on the end of the line. It was dead.

He stared at the black thing in his hand and then replaced it, numbly, on the wall. He’d call his mother, soon, somehow. He didn’t know his father’s numbers; they had disappeared with his cell phone. He didn’t even know where he worked exactly, and couldn’t think of anyone who could tell him. It was as if his father worked for the CIA or something, his life was such a secret.

When he returned to the lounge, Ravi and the girls were there, drinking milky tea, sitting on mattresses that the hijras had dragged in for the children. All of them had been given shiny, slippery robes to wear; Eli’s red one barely covered his torso and had an embarrassing gap he kept trying to close. The big one, the guru, had vanished –
Gone to bed
, Jasu said,
you’ll hear her snoring soon
– but most of the others were fussing over them, all charged up.
No other phone
, Jasu apologised when Eli asked,
but worry later, you must sleep now
. Eli took two sips of tea and lay down on a mattress; Ravi spooned in behind him. Eli was too tired to care. He lay on his side staring at the large, hennaed feet of a hijra lolling in a chair next to him, and traced the flowery designs with his eyes. Voices floated above him as he hovered on the edge of sleep.

Of course they can’t stay here …

But where?

We could send them to our sisters in Agra, or somewhere else …

Lakshmi will be after them if she’s still alive …

There’s money in the kitty left over …

Ha! For certain leave the police out of it, bloody buggers …

What about the American?

He wants to call home …

They all must go and take their chance …

Eli woke some time later, just as the light was crawling through the windows. His friends – could he call them that? – were stirring; across the room the girls shifted gently, and Sanjana rolled on to the floor. Ravi had flung a skinny leg over him in the night and now removed it. Eli felt like staying under the thin blanket indefinitely, retreating like a turtle, hiding from whatever awaited them. At the same time he wanted, more than anything, to get up and get out of there.

‘You must go now.’ Jasu’s firm hand was shaking his right shoulder. ‘Before the sun fully rises.’

Eli sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes. Jasu, who was squatting next to him, handed him his clothes, still with a whiff of smoke. Ravi leaned against him, trancelike.

‘We’ve got some money for you, and some food and drink,’ Jasu said, handing him a gold-embroidered bag with little mirrors all over it. ‘Get out of Delhi as fast as you can. Go to Agra, by bus, by train, whichever, and find our sisters there, at Ojal’s old kotha. Make a plan from there. Here’s the address.’

A ragged strip of paper with a few words and numbers. Meant to lead them to safety – and to whatever was coming to meet them. It was like grabbing a stranger’s hand on the edge of a cliff.

‘And stay away from the police.’ Jasu looked intently in his eyes as she handed him the paper. That same warning. ‘The buggers will arrest the Nepali girls and who knows what they will do to you – depends who’s lining their pockets.’

The children went to change, back into their own clothes, half-cleaned by the hijras during the night, still slightly damp and smoked. Urged on by the hijras, they raced to get ready and soon returned to the lounge, lightening now with the first rays of dawn. They were all on their feet, children and attendant adults, when the front door swung open. Two bedraggled hijras, sooty and sleepless, stepped forward.

‘We can’t find her,’ one of them said, breathless. The other one was weeping.

Eli looked at the hijras, at his friends, still gathered in a semicircle facing the door: the children standing still, mesmerised, the hijras swooning, wringing their hands and wailing. Whatever might have taken Ojal, to wherever she might have disappeared, was out there waiting for them.