Read Online Sleeping On Jupiter by Anuradha Roy - Free Book Online Page B

trying not to run. He must have left the key hanging in the ignition, an invitation to any passing thief. He walked as if he had to reach somewhere, although he had no idea where he was going. Go home and tell his uncle the scooter had been stolen? What then? Scooter-less, how would he get to places in time for all his waiting clients? He was all of a sudden back where he had been after his father’s death: a blubbering boy cringing from his uncle’s blows. Grow up, Badal said to himself, what can he do to you? You’re stronger than he is now. He needs you more than you need him.
    He walked fast. He was alone on the road. He had not imagined a daytime street could be as eerie as this. It looked different. There was a powerful smell of rotting fish he had never noticed before. The doors of the houses on either side of the street were closed against the afternoon sun. The heat had made a shimmering ribbon of the road, the sky pressed low upon it, and far down its length squares of water hardened into tarmac just when they came close enough to wet his feet. There were no shops. There were no people: not one person, not a dog or cat or cow – what street was he on? When he heard a scraping behind him and sensed rough feet dragging on the dirt, his heart thudded. Only an empty cardboard carton pummelled into imbecility by the late afternoon breeze. He walked on, faster. The sliding door of a van roared on its castors inches from him. The van’s windows were covered with black sun-film and gave nothing away. But he could see in them the dark windblown reflection of his own high cheekbones and jutting chin. His hands went up to his chin, then his hair, and he smoothed it down before he remembered there must be someone inside the van looking at him – the person who had just slammed the door shut.
    He turned and fled. He could not tell what unnerved him. Directionless he ran and it took him a few minutes to work out where he was and find the street going homeward. He dashed past the tiny shrine near his house. He did not notice the old woman in the thick glasses still sitting beside it. She beamed with anticipation as she saw him and called out: “The bananas and gur? Did you bring me the bananas and gur? I haven’teaten all day.” He hurried on to his house, hearing nothing.
    He stepped through the outer door into the half light of the courtyard, where saris, pyjamas, shirts, and underpants grey beyond the powers of detergent were strung on lines from end to end. Crows perched on the lines dribbling creamy droppings on the washed clothes. They rose in a cawing cloud as he went to the tap and poured a can of water on his head and shoulders. He flung himself into a rope-strung cot in a corner of his ground-floor room, too numb to throw off his wet shirt. He tried to stay awake, to push aside his anxiety about the scooter and relive instead the earlier part of the afternoon.
    But in a minute he was asleep, and in a vivid dream: his shiuli sapling has grown to a tree with so many flowers that the courtyard is waist deep in the tiny blossoms. He is wading through them, in a white and fragrant sea, when his uncle waddles out in his wet towel and pours jug after jug of water over the yard to wash the flowers away. Their sweet scent fills the courtyard long after his uncle has destroyed every last flower.
    Waking, he realised that his dream had been perfumed by the incense his aunt lit for her prayers at sunset. He looked at the screen of his mobile and sprang out of his cot. He was going to be late for the old hags from Calcutta. But for his aunt’s determined blowing on the conch for her prayers, he would have kept them waiting half the evening, and then it would have been futile going to the temple at all.
    When he stepped outside the house he saw it was twilight. The harsh magenta of the building across the road had mellowed to a soft pink. A breeze was blowing in from the east, and children were screaming at a hopscotch game