The Fifth House of the Heart (14 page)

5

Mumbai

Nilu felt unwell long after she was released from hospital. The sickness went beyond the trauma of the assault following Mallammanavar Jagadish's dinner party, and beyond the minor injuries she'd received during the bloody conflict in her hospital room. Her neck remained stiff, but she could turn it without discomfort. However, she was altogether too weak to return to dancing. She'd been forced to cancel her next engagement, a minor speaking role in an action movie starring Shahrukh Khan—a wrenching professional setback. No word of what happened to her had reached the tabloids, for which she was grateful to God, but she had not heard anything from Mr. Jagadish, either. He was aware, Nilu had heard through an intermediary, that she'd left his house under unusual circumstances but apparently thought she had merely become drunk, and his Russian acquaintance, Andronov, had escorted her to a taxi.

Through the intermediary, she had requested a further conversation with Mr. Jagadish. On this point, there was some confusion: they seemed to think Nilu wanted to discuss her career, when in fact she
wanted to learn what the omniscient Jag knew about the Russian. He would be dead; she knew that much. A man didn't survive being shot several times through the head and body, then stabbed, then precipitated out a third-level window. Had she been connected to the incident in any way other than as a bystander? Had anyone identified the assailant as Andronov? She did not know. In fact the man's body had never been found.

He wasn't admitted to the hospital while she remained there. Of that she was quite certain. If a huge, curd-white man full of bullet holes had been found on the street beneath her window, she would have heard about it. So the Russian had, against all odds, gotten away. His corpse must have been rotting within a few hundred meters of the hospital. But it had not yet been discovered.

As to Nilu's career, she was rethinking her ambitions. What difference did it make if she was famous and wealthy and adored? Had she the right sort of character for that kind of notoriety? She was attractive and fit and still had her good manners. She could find a fine husband with plenty of his own resources and be happy with her children and her spacious home with a refrigerator that dispensed cool filtered water from the door. Her husband would say with indulgence,
This is my wife, who used to be an item girl
, and she would blush appropriately, and his friends would be envious, and she could eat ghee and grow plump. Then again, every time she saw a film poster up on one of the innumerable hoardings of Mumbai, she would experience the needle of envy for even the artistes with the least impressive billing.
Their
faces were up there, however small in comparison to the major stars. Nilu herself was nobody, and had been terribly used—if she quit, it was all for nothing.

In addition to the malaise she couldn't seem to shake, there had been a strange side effect from Andronov's savage abuse of her body. She now found herself obsessed with sex. It was the very opposite
of what she would have expected. Desire would lance into her belly at any time, unbidden, and rankle there like a stain that couldn't be scrubbed out. It was a kind of lingering itch that tickled and drove her mad.

Before now, she was prey to the ordinary flashes of love and lust. She had always craved intimacy, too, in the usual way; the thought of a good man in her life, in the bedroom as elsewhere, was appealing. Now she cared nothing for intimacy—Nilu just wanted to feel hot fingers crawling over her skin, a strong body pressed against her, and the mindless beating rhythm of animal coupling. It made her mouth water. She remembered the paroxysms of physical ecstasy that had nearly consumed her, and she wanted more, afraid as she was of what it might do to her. The madman had made an addict of her.

Nilu was nine days in the hospital, and the doctors at first could not determine why she was fading rather than getting better. There was nothing outwardly wrong, once the bruising went down. Her stiff neck was a complete mystery. But her vital signs were growing weaker. She hadn't been able to speak and remained unidentified.

After six days, when the administrators of the hospital were becoming concerned that she might die before she was known, her condition abruptly improved. The fluttering eyelids that showed crescents of white beneath them, the constant sweats, and the thin, fast pulse relaxed. Nilu slept, her heart beating strongly.

That same day, Ghauri, a fellow dancer, saw Nilu's photograph on a message board in the hospital's emergency admissions department, where Ghauri had gone for a broken toe. She got her visitor's pass and limped upstairs. She was not surprised when Nilu begged her to remain silent about her condition, and when Ghauri returned to the studio where they worked, she said nothing except to explain Nilu had been called away suddenly and would be back soon.

Three days later, Nilu was out in the street wearing some clothes a friend had gathered from her digs in the south part of the city.

She went home and slept some more. Her flat, in a 1930s-era
chawl
, was in the crowded Chira Bazar area, which had once been considered middle-class, populated mostly by Maharashtrians; now it was all jewelry shops and Gujarati immigrants. The landlords were always talking about redeveloping the building, but it never happened, and because they were always about to redevelop the building, no improvements were ever made. Nilu shared a single room with a very tall, thin teacher of mathematics, Sangeeta, known as “Geet,” who worked at the tutoring school next door. When Geet saw the bit of gauze taped to Nilu's inner elbow and the dim bruises on her face, her hands flew to her mouth with horror.

“I thought you were dead!” she cried in her very high voice.

“I fell,” Nilu replied.

She spent two more days sleeping, stirring mostly at night when it was a little bit cooler and the noise in the street was less. She would let herself out quietly, easing past snoring Geet with her long, bamboo-­knobbed limbs drooping over the sides of her cot and her mouth open in a breathy O. Then Nilu would go out down the corridor past the quiet rooms with their lumber of humanity locked inside, restless babies and clattering fans, stepping around the rows of cheap sandals and milk bottles by the doors. Outside in the acrid night she would walk, feeling the soreness in every muscle of her body, but also filled with a need to prowl, to keep moving.

She didn't fear bandits or lonely men. She feared nothing, it seemed. Nilu's anxieties were all focused on something she couldn't even identify, something that seemed to lie on the other side of that strange, bright universe she'd encountered that night at Jag's mansion. What was beyond that place had seemed like heaven but was only a sparkling curtain of golden bells between this world and another.
There was someone there. People were moving through that glowing place, through the color.

They were waiting for her. She decided to find them.

M
in Hee-Jin still could not believe the squalor here in India. Even in the hospital, of all places, it had been that way. She remembered lying in wait beneath the bed of the girl and under there were dead flies and dirt and a surgical glove, rumpled up like a used condom. The locals seemed immune to it all. Everything was coated in grime and thick with fine, poisonous dust that stung the sinuses. Nothing was permanent, and nothing was worth saving; no surface met another with a clean strong joint, but was shoved together to keep the rain out for one more day. Weeds sprang up in improbable places, growing from windowsills and rooftops and the ever-present piles of obscene rubbish heaped up against everything. Only the filth seemed immune to decay. It grew every day, and spread, and the lean bony cows that wandered the streets would eat the garbage and shit it out again in yellow-green streams and from the shit it appeared more garbage would spring up overnight.

And what nights they were. Whole families huddled asleep on pavements that Min wouldn't touch with her bare foot, let alone allow children to sprawl upon. Those children—skeletal brown waifs with huge tragic eyes like pools of rusty water and their hair wild and tawny from a lifetime spent in the sun. Their hands were always reaching. Their faces were always filthy. The young ones carried the infants. The infants had noses crusted like the condiment bottles in a cheap café.

It was repugnant to Min, but she knew it was not India that was at fault for all this, but herself. She came from South Korea, where there was a tremendous sense of collective responsibility for everything. In Korea, a person without a home, a child in the street, constituted a
rebuke to everyone. There
were
such people, as everywhere; Korea had more than its share of helpless drunks, for example. But they were not invisible. Here in India, with more than a billion people, it was necessary that hundreds of millions should starve, and sleep exposed to the dogs. In Korea, there were only fifty million people. It froze in the long winter. Things had to be built well and maintained properly. There were entire shopping districts constructed underground. Most people in the cities lived in high-rise apartment buildings, big uniform blocks with spacious, functional flats surrounded by mountains and forests and rivers. In contrast, she saw Mumbai as a dried-up sewer filled with human refuse.

These thoughts revolved in Min's mind. But they did so beneath the level of her awareness. On the conscious plane, she was watching. She stood in the deep shadow cast in an alley by a buzzing yellow streetlamp. The lamp splashed acid light across a wide dirt road with rumpled sidewalks and low mud-brick industrial shops where tires were retreaded and engines and electric motors rebuilt. Many of the employees of these places slept in the narrow yards in front, propped against a wall; there were a few of the tiny bumblebee three-wheeled taxis there as well, their owner/operators sleeping with knees drawn up inside. Probably a hundred people on the street within fifty meters, Min thought, but so dirty and shrunken that she appeared at first glance to be alone. And it was three in the morning. Nobody in their right mind was walking the street, let alone watching and waiting for someone to go by.

Then the young woman approached.

Min heard nothing, because the woman did not always bother with shoes, like many people in India. But Min saw a shadow roll across a distant wall and pressed herself deeper into the darkness, and a minute later, the young woman walked past, hurrying along as if to get somewhere quickly. But she wasn't going anywhere. Min had been follow
ing her ever since she was released from the hospital. Nilu was like a vision with her graceful, perfectly proportioned body and shining hair that flowed to her elbows. She was dark-skinned, darker than some Africans, but her features were Aryan, slender, the bones of her face arched in delicate bows. Min allowed her to pass, then stepped out of the alley, moving slowly.

Min was dressed in a sari of orange cotton, chosen without a glance from a pile of them that rose to the ceiling in the little shop she had stepped into when she arrived in Mumbai. She had paid five or six times the Indian price without attempting to bargain, handing over a fistful of grubby rupee-denominated bills; later she attempted to determine how to wrap one of the garments around herself. She got it all wrong. A local woman working at the hostel she was bunked in took pity on her and showed her the technique.

This was, although a typical Indian gesture of generosity, extremely difficult for Min to tolerate with good grace: she was always so impatient, straining at the leash of time, desperate to lunge into the next task. Perhaps that was why she spent 90 percent of her hours these days motionless, lying in wait for someone to come along. It was a lesson in patience. In any case, she was swift to learn the wrapping and tucking required to turn a six-meter strip of cloth into an entire costume. The woman had explained it as a
nivi
drape, the most common style. Min later modified it so it would better suit her fighting technique, but the fact that the cloth was loose around the legs and left the arms relatively free to move was an excellent place to begin. The pleats at the waist could also be made to hide a variety of weapons without showing a bulge. The length of the garment, extending to the ground, helped conceal her French canvas commando boots.

To make herself further invisible, she'd taken to wearing a rose-­colored shawl thrown over her head. The color combination was
hideous, but Min had very little interest in aesthetic matters. Her practicality started at the bone.

There was nothing in her life except what served her goals.

When the monster had destroyed her family, she had thought she'd lost everything that was precious to her; now she had come to understand she'd lost everything that was superfluous to her purpose. The monster had given her that purpose. It was not a fair trade, but fairness was a concept that had vanished in one bloody night from Min's universe.

She would hunt down and destroy every one of those creatures that raised its head from the darkness. Even if she had to wear a sari.

Min followed Nilu along the buckled pavement at the distance it would take her to run in ten seconds. This was a good interval to maintain because it would take that long to release the silver hammer from its holster at the small of her back and get the fiberglass handle—hung from a belt at her waist beneath the sari—locked through the eye. The sawed-off shotgun could be deployed in half the time, but it had a tendency to dispatch the victims as often as the villains, in her experience.

Nilu was striding along oblivious, as she was every night, to her surroundings. She moved very swiftly for a Mumbaikar, but nowhere near the kind of speed at which Min habitually moved.

Nilu sailed amongst the dogs as thin as hair combs, the dirt-dulled sleeping urchins and cardboard shelters and drifts of flyblown rubbish, without taking notice of any of it. Not that a local
would
notice, but she didn't even glance around her. This suited Min. She wasn't observed. And it was precisely according to the pattern of behavior Min expected to see.