Jasmine Skies (4 page)

‘A great way of finding out who someone is, listening to their iPod! Let me guess . . . with that big laugh, you’re really a quiet one, storing it all up! A bit romantic, retro,
arty, on the hippy side, the lyrics get you every time! Am I right?’

‘Pretty much!’ I laugh again.

‘Smile!’ I say, holding up my camera to take a photo of her. I haven’t got used to using it yet, and it takes me a few seconds to switch it back to photo mode. By the time I
do, Priya has managed to produce a great big green bubble!

‘My first photo in India!’

‘Now it’s your turn! What does my iPod say about me?’ Priya asks, slumping back on the seat and waiting for my answer.

‘You’re into dance music, bass, dubstep, fusion . . . a bit radical. I don’t really know how else to describe this!’ I say, plugging an earphone back in.

‘And that’s just the music!’ She winks at me.

She’s the kind of person who makes time fly. Whatever happens on this trip, it’s definitely not going to be boring. We’ve already been sitting in this queue for over an hour,
but it feels like only ten minutes have passed.

As I look out of the window at the city skyscape, I wonder what Kolkata will be like. I’ve got a guidebook and I looked some stuff up online, but the pictures that have stuck in my head
are all from Grandad’s stories. He brought the place alive for me – telling me about the streets around where he grew up, the food he ate and the people and places that were important
to him. The strange thing is that Grandad’s memories have become the most real things about Kolkata for me, if that makes any sense at all, but his memories of Kolkata were of how it was over
thirty years ago. So now that I’m actually here, looking out of the window at these high-rise flats and swanky new office blocks, it’s a bit of a shock, because it doesn’t look
anything like how I imagined it through Grandad’s eyes.

One of the skyscrapers is for a huge telephone company. It makes me think of Nana Kath. If she suspects she’s being called by someone in India she always wants to chat. They’ll be
ringing to ask some marketing question and she starts by proudly telling them that her name’s Chatterjee and then they make the mistake of commenting on the name and she tells them all about
how she and Grandad were married and that he was from Kolkata . . . she just launches into one . . . and after a while you can always sense them desperately trying to find a way of ending the call.
It makes me laugh, because Nana Kath always has the last word. ‘Well, actually I think you’ll find that
you
called
me
. What was it you wanted to ask me, anyway?’

Me and Nana Kath watched a programme once where a girl from a village just outside Delhi was being trained to work for one of those call centres. She had to learn to speak in a Yorkshire accent,
just like Iris’s. It showed the girl walking to work alongside some cows and cramming on to a crowded train heading for the city. She had a screen in front of her telling her what the weather
in Matlock was like. She had to learn ‘local knowledge’ about what cricket matches were on and even what a Yorkshire pudding was (though neither of us could work out how that would ever
come in handy).

‘I’m never fooled,’ Nana Kath said after the programme finished, ‘because if you listen, there’s always a little delay at the beginning of the call that gives the
game away – a tiny pause that says, “This is pretend.” And pretending’s not a real connection.’

I think she was right. It seems like the weirdest way of being connected, people pretending to be who they’re not and where they’re not, in order to make someone trust them more.

When I look out of the window at the land around the airport I get the same feeling of things not being joined up, like one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles my brother Krish insists on
buying from jumble sales. He spends hours making them, only to find that there’re always swathes of the jigsaw missing – whole chunks that don’t piece together. This landscape is
like that too. There are no proper pathways or pavements leading from the road to the grand entrances of the high-rise blocks. I wonder how people actually get into work. They must have to walk
across the scrubland, past all the slum dwellings that line the roads, to get to their brand-new sparkly offices. To me the new buildings are like giant glass flowers and the slum dwellings look
like weeds, with heads of blue tarpaulin . . . but they’re both growing out of the same scrubland. Under the flimsy plastic roofs I see makeshift kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms. It feels
wrong that these slums are reflected in the new mirrored surfaces of the swanky high-rises, like a really old jigsaw and a really new one have been flung together. These two worlds shouldn’t
exist side by side. It feels like the old world should become extinct before the other is allowed to grow. Or maybe that’s what will happen eventually. Grandad was right, he said ‘when
you go to India Mira your eyes will pop out of your head, and I know
you
don’t miss a thing.’

In one corrugated iron shack, a mother is plaiting her daughter’s hair. The girl wears a clean white shirt and a pleated bottle-green skirt. Priya catches me staring at her.

‘Uniform!
Such
oppression. I don’t suppose you have to wear those in your school,’ she says.

‘Actually, we do.’

She looks a bit disappointed. I think of all the times I’ve complained about the boring black skirt and white shirt we have to wear for school. But looking at this girl wearing her clean,
crisp uniform makes me see it differently somehow. You wouldn’t be able to tell, when she’s at school anyway, whether she’s rich or poor, at least not by the way she looks. So I
suppose in that way the uniform gives her a sort of freedom.

As the girl stands up, her mother inspects her nails and rubs a cloth over her shoes, smiling her approval at her daughter before the girl heads off down the road lined with giant glass
buildings, away from the weeds and the dirt shack that’s her home.

‘
Work hard at school, Mira. The greatest freedom is
the freedom to be educated.
’ Grandad used to say that all the time and, looking at this little girl, I think I
understand what he meant.

Huge advertising hoardings tower over us. Four men arrive wearing nothing but thin lungi cloths wrapped around their bottom halves, like Grandad sometimes wore when he was relaxing. Between them
they carry a giant scroll of paper rolled around long bamboo sticks. Toddling next to them is a little boy. He has huge eyes, a mop of black hair and the sweetest dimply smile. He catches me
watching him and waves excitedly. I wave back, but Priya grabs hold of my arm and lowers it.

‘
Don’t
encourage him!’ she says sharply.

‘OK, sorry,’ I mumble, not really knowing why.

The boy walks barefoot among the rubble and the dust of the road. He’s only wearing a dirty piece of cloth around his bottom. He climbs on to the bamboo poles and the men shout at him.
When he refuses to get off he’s shaken and unceremoniously dumped on the ground, covered in a coat of white building dust. For a few minutes he stands and watches as the men unpack their
bundle of poles, construct some makeshift scaffolding and begin to climb, barefoot, up towards the Bollywood beauty whose ice-white smile, silken locks and glinting eyes are beaming down at all of
us. Climbing on each other’s shoulders, like circus artists, the men pull down the superstar and replace her with another poster, this time of a glitzy-looking couple dancing together. The
men sing as they paste up the new billboard stars, and the little boy beneath starts to dance along to a song he seems to recognize, moving his hips this way and that, making the exaggerated curvy
movements of a Bollywood diva.

Priya laughs. The boy senses her moment of weakness and turns to her; his outstretched hands open and waiting. As soon as he’s at the window Priya’s smile fades and she fixes her
gaze straight ahead, as if the boy has suddenly become invisible. When he can’t get her attention he runs around to my side of the car, almost colliding with a moped; horn blaring, as it
weaves its way through the stationary traffic.

‘Look forward,’ orders Priya.

I do as she says and ignore the
tap, tap, tap
of the dusty little hand at my window; the same-size hand as my little sister Laila’s. ‘Ma’am, ma’am, little money,
ma’am,’ I hear him say, his voice muffled by the glass.

The traffic whirrs slowly back into motion around us. Dust Boy is gone from my window, but when I close my eyes I can still see his pleading face.

The car stops again almost as quickly as it started up. I’m beginning to think we’ll never get to Priya’s flat!

I look out of the windscreen and see that a naked man is lying in the island junction of a crossroads, alongside a thin dog. A policeman wearing a khaki uniform directs the traffic around
him.

Anjali turns around, smiles at me and follows my gaze towards the naked man and dog.

‘Is he sleeping?’ I ask.

‘Impossible to tell,’ Anjali answers sadly. ‘These people live on the streets and sometimes it happens that they die on the streets. That’s why we take in only children
at the refuge. When they’re still young there is a chance that we can help them get off the street . . . to try to escape this kind of fate. You’ll see.’ Anjali sighs, looking
away from the naked man.

‘But how long will he be left there?’

‘He’ll be moved on, eventually,’ says Anjali. ‘Anyway, you’ll be coming to the refuge soon enough to help out and meet some of our wonderful children and
staff.’

For the moment I’d completely forgotten about the refuge, even though I know that going to work there is the only reason my school gave me permission to take time off. Anjali sent them all
this information about the children’s refuge and now I’m supposed to be out here as some sort of ambassador, writing a report on how my school and Anjali’s refuge could become
partners. Everyone else in my year is off on a Geography trip to France looking at glacial scenery, and I would have been sitting on the top of a mountain in the Alps with Jidé too, but I
managed to persuade my teachers that this was a one-off opportunity. I said I’d be teaching art at the refuge. I even said that when I get back I’d do some sort of presentation about my
time working there, just so I could get an extra week off school. What was I thinking? It’s so easy to promise stuff like that, but then reality hits and the truth is, now I’m actually
here, I’m wondering what can
I
actually do to help children like Dust Boy? I can’t even speak his language.

‘Ma! Give her a break. She’s only just arrived. Typical! There’s no escape, Mira – she makes
everyone
do something for her beloved refuge! Look! Look!
There’s the new mall I’ll take you to tomorrow.’ Priya sits up and points at a huge glass building in the distance. ‘I’ll call my friends and we can hang out for a
while. You’ll find everything you need in there.’

But when I think about Dust Boy and that little schoolgirl, and the man lying in the street, I wonder what I actually do
need
, compared to them. This all makes me feel guilty and pathetic
that I care so much about losing my suitcase, but I just do.

We sit in silence for a while as I take in the ‘hotchpotch’ (that was a Grandad Bimal word) of buildings, modern and old together. Even the pavements are jam-packed, with stalls
selling things, people drinking tea, huge cauldrons of food being cooked up.
Mmmmmm
– delicious samosas are being dropped into bubbling-hot oil. I open my window and the tempting
smells hit my nostrils and travel down to my belly, which rumbles greedily. I realize I haven’t eaten for hours, because I couldn’t bring myself to eat the mush that was the so-called
‘vegetarian option’ on the plane. I’d like to ask Manu to stop the car so I can jump out and grab a packet of spicy samosas. Grandad always used to say that one of his strongest
memories when he was a little boy was eating bubbling hot puri from street-side stalls. Sometimes he said he used to dream of the time he walked along a beach on holiday in Digha and had hot sticky
jalebi sweets cooked up for him for breakfast. He used to make me laugh, the way he licked his lips when he told that story as if he could actually taste the memory. I think I know what he meant. I
love being here in this street. It’s not like any street I’ve ever seen. I think I’ve probably inherited Grandad’s love of food, because tasting all the street food is one
of the things I’ve been looking forward to the most.

‘Hungry?’ Anjali asks.

I nod, feeling a bit embarrassed that my tummy is gurgling.

‘Promise me not to eat off the street! You won’t have the stomach for it,’ Anjali says, as if she’s reading my mind.

‘Stop fussing, Ma! I’ll look after her.’ Priya rolls her eyes at me.

‘That’s what I’m worried about!’ jokes Anjali.

‘But you like spicy food?’ Priya asks.

‘Yes! Grandad used to think it was hilarious to pretend that chillies were a kind of fruit and watch me bite into them and then go running for the tap. After a while I got used to the
taste and now I love them!’

‘He sounds fun. I wish I’d met him.’ Priya wraps a comforting arm around my shoulder.

‘He was a great man.’ Anjali says, turning around and smiling sadly at me.

We pull into a dirt road, with a bony-bottomed cow ambling down the middle. In a really weird way its slow, steady walk makes me think of Grandad’s! I don’t think I can ever remember
him hurrying anywhere. We always used to groan when we went anywhere with him, because even just a trip to the post office could take hours while he stopped every few minutes to talk to his
patients. He always had time to talk to people about their worries. It’s a bit strange how Grandad is so in my thoughts. I suppose it’s inevitable I’ll be thinking about him lots,
now I’m finally here, in India, but somehow I can’t shift the feeling that it’s more than that . . . maybe it’s because of bumping into his old friends at the airport.

Manu beeps his horn, and the cow slowly turns its head and blinks at him with its big brown eyes and long lashes, as if to say, ‘WHAT is your problem?!’ I swear that cow’s got
attitude. It doesn’t move an inch, so Manu has to slowly manoeuvre around it, narrowly missing the precariously stacked fruit seller’s cart on the corner. The mangoes look
delicious.