The Refuge

This continuous heat, the sights zipping past the window of this tram and, if I’m honest with myself, sitting this close to Janu, is making my head spin. At least I’ve been able to talk to him today and, now and again, even look him in the eye. I snap away at the street scenes, but I’m not thinking about what I’m seeing. I know it’s sad of me, but as well as becoming a bit obsessed with trying to capture everything this camera is coming in useful to hide behind. I’m still trying to find a moment to tell Janu about Jidé. So far we’ve sort of had polite conversation; he’s asked me how I liked the flower market and now we’re on to Priya and her dancing.

‘Bharatanatyam,’ he says, ‘is Priya’s best dance. It is funny, because all the time she’s trying to be so . . . modern, but already she is one of the best young classical dancers in Kolkata.’

I’ve been so fixed on talking to Janu that I’ve hardly noticed the dust, sweat and bustle of the rest of the journey to the refuge. Maybe I’m learning, like Manu said, to close my eyes and my ears to the road. And I think he was right, because even in this heat I’m starting to feel more at home.

The tram grinds to a halt and Janu stands up, gesturing for me to follow him.

‘This area is called Chowringee,’ Janu says as we step off the tram.

We walk down a street bustling with traders selling cloth, handbags, children’s clothes, sizzling food . . . Some jalebi are being thrown into sizzling fat, the sweet batter spirals round and round, spitting and spluttering up into coiled sweets. My mouth instantly waters as I inhale the sugary smell. An image of Grandad eating these for breakfast fills my head and makes me smile. Now I know what he meant when he used to talk about ‘memory food’.

‘Want to try?’ Janu asks, stopping to buy a packet and offering me one. I’ve had these cold at home, but never fresh from the pan. This hot, treacly sweet must be just about the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten.

‘Don’t tell Anjali. She thinks eating from the street will make you ill. But it is the best food you can find anywhere. The most delicious is when you don’t expect it. It’s there in front of you and you just have to try it.’

‘Do you eat these every day?! I ask, wiping my mouth.

‘No! Only for special occasions –’ he smiles at me – ‘or I would be getting fat!’ He taps his flat, muscly stomach.

‘How did the refuge start?’ I ask, trying to change the subject. I already know some of this but I want to hear it from Janu.

‘Anjali and Dinesh opened it about sixteen years ago. It started in one room and now the whole building belongs to them. Your uncle and aunt are good people,’ says Janu. ‘Dinesh is campaigning for new businesses to make partnerships, sharing the wealth and paying more for education and health of the poor. This is the only way to move forward.’

Janu speaks with the same passion Grandad Bimal used, when he would say that people in Britain don’t realize how lucky they are that they have the right to go to a doctor or to school no matter how little money they have.

As we walk through the tall turquoise door of the refuge I stop to look at a plaque and take a photo. A Bengali inscription is written on it, as well as a picture of a basket overflowing with flowers.

‘Translation is “House of Garlands”,’ Janu explains. ‘Anjali wanted to teach the children some trade as well as schooling, so they can sell what they make from here to tourists. The number-one most popular thing tourists buy is garlands of flowers.’

‘Priya told me that Chameli and Ajoy teach them,’ I say.

‘Not so much now – some of the older children have learned,’ Janu explains, but he looks a bit taken aback. ‘Oh yes, I am forgetting that you met them at the flower market.’ He smiles at me as we walk into a simple, clean reception room. There is a man wearing an orange turban sitting behind the front desk. He immediately stands up and greets Janu warmly. Janu takes me around the building, giving me a guided tour.

‘You don’t mind if I take photos, do you? I promised my school—’

‘Of course!’ he says, waving my question away. ‘Here is where we teach lessons. Basic literacy and mathematics,’ he says, pointing into a classroom where children are sitting cross-legged on floor mats and reciting times tables in their sing-song voices. Some of them smile and wave at Janu and he waves back, before indicating that they should turn round and concentrate. Janu seems so at home here that it feels almost as if this place belongs to him.

‘Blue rooms are for learning and orange rooms for painting, drawing, garland-making and carpentry. The green room is for sewing, yellow room for eating,’ says Janu. We walk along a beautiful corridor, its walls are lined with hundreds of brightly coloured floor mats rolled up and neatly tucked into deep wooden shelves. The different coloured scrolled ends make the walls look so pretty. Jidé notices me looking at them.

‘Since I made this I don’t understand why everybody loves it so much.’ Janu shrugs. ‘I call it my wall of beds.’

‘Where do the children sleep?’ I ask.

‘In all the rooms!’ We stop at a window that looks down on to a communal courtyard. There are pots of flowers scattered among the water troughs, where children are soaping themselves, washing and playing happily. Janu laughs as a little boy takes a great mouthful of water and spurts it all over his friend, and his friend splashes him back. Janu opens the window and shouts something that makes the boys laugh before they go back to washing.

‘What did you say to them?’ I ask.

‘I told them if they want to play with water there is always washing pots to do in the kitchen!’ Janu looks out of the window again. ‘Don’t look so worried! We try to lighten their hearts.’ I smile nervously, not realizing I’m covering my mouth with my hand, which has been a habit since I started wearing my brace, even though it’s not there any more.

‘You should not cover this smile,’ Janu tells me, taking my hand and leading me along the corridor to another room, where girls and boys are sewing on old-fashioned black and gold machines or by hand. I’ve noticed people here are much more relaxed about physical contact, so Janu holding my hand probably means nothing at all to him, but my heart is thudding as I feel the rough patches on his palm.

‘We offer only basics, but we are always looking for scholarship funds.’ He says, letting go of my hand and then steering me up a staircase that has a white door at the top.

‘White is for medicine. Often our children need medical attention.’ Janu explains as he taps on the door and then quietly opens it. Inside a doctor is examining the encrusted eyes of a boy who must be about my age. Many other children are in the room too. I can see that most of them have eyes in a similar condition to those of the boy in the doctor’s chair.

‘OK, Lal?’ asks Janu.

‘Not really, Janu! I could do with some more help here,’ replies the young doctor, with a cheery voice. I wasn’t expecting that. ‘If you could bathe their eyes and put in some antibiotic drops that would be great.’

Janu walks over to a glass cabinet, takes out some disposable gloves and hands a packet to me. Then he takes out cotton-wool pads and a stack of tiny metal bowls, the size of egg cups, and hands me half of them. Taking one from the top of the stack, he pours into it a tiny amount of boiling water from an urn.

‘Watch closely,’ he says. He sits down on the floor cross-legged and asks me to do the same. The boy gets up out of the doctor’s chair and comes over to us. He forces one of his gunked-up eyes to open into a tiny slit so that he can just about make his way to Janu, who takes the boy’s hand and eases him to the floor. The boy’s head rests on Janu’s lap. Janu dips the cotton wool in the warm water before wiping from the inside to the outside of the eye. After each wipe he throws the cotton pad into a plastic bin. He does the same, again and again, until the yellow crust that’s gluing the boy’s eyes together starts to flake away.

‘Clean the eye, then pull the lid up and squeeze three drops. Fresh pad for each wipe, then throw cotton wool away. Put new pair of gloves for each child. OK?’ Janu gives me a piercing look as if to ask, ‘Are you up to this?’

I nod, because I don’t want him to know that I’ve never done anything that matters like this before. Occasionally I’ll help Mum look after Laila, and I used to change her nappies, but that’s about it.

‘Many children go blind because simple infections are not dealt with,’ Janu tells me. ‘You know it takes only a few days of a little care to get better, but if not treated . . .’

A young woman wearing small black-rimmed glasses, a bright yellow kurti and trainers enters the room in a rush. She nods at the doctor a little shyly and he smiles back before she goes over and talks to Janu. She places a hand on his arm and I notice how delicate her hands are. One of the things that happens to you when you can’t really speak a language is that you get better at watching . . . at reading people’s body language and the looks on their faces. So I know even before he tells me that, whatever it is she’s asking him, it’s something urgent he’s got to do.

‘I must go. Lal will instruct you,’ says Janu, getting up and telling the other children in the room in English and then in Bengali to wait nicely to have their eyes cleaned by me. By me!

I count at least thirty children waiting to be treated. I take a deep breath and steady my nerves. I clean the boy’s other eye and then call the next child over. I can’t believe how quiet and patient they all are, even the youngest child. When Laila once had to have drops in her eyes she screamed like she was being murdered, but not even the toddler being held by her big sister, who can’t be more than five years old herself, cries when I lift her practically sealed eyelid. It feels so weird to take these strangers’ heads on to my knee and wipe the infection out of their eyes. They all have wet hair from bathing outside and smell of the same slightly herbal antiseptic soap and shampoo. I notice that their clothes, a combination of T-shirts and shorts with different logos all over them, all smell of the same washing powder.

Grandad Bimal often used to ask if I wanted to be a doctor, and it seemed so far away from anything I like to do, like art and writing. But now I’m here, helping these children, I can understand why he loved being a doctor so much.

The boy whose eyes we treated first goes to sit next to Lal and, even though he can only half see through his sore eyes, it’s clear he’s desperate to help.

‘This young man is interested in training in medicine!’ says Lal when he notices me watching him. The boy looks my way through heavy lids and nods. ‘Are you training too?’ Lal asks, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

‘Oh, no! I’m just visiting, from London. Anjali’s my aunt. I’m Mira!’

I can’t picture myself choosing a profession. I’m not even sure what I’ll do after secondary school – I’ll stay on at sixth form and then maybe go to art college or university, but then what? . . . Janu’s only two years older than me, but he’s already got so much responsibility it seems like he’s practically running this place.

‘Are you training to be a doctor?’ I ask Lal.

‘I’m in my third year! I chose to come here for my volunteering job. It’s where my family’s from.’ He smiles.

‘My grandad too,’ I tell him.

‘The children keep laughing at me for huffing and puffing away in the heat. They think I should be used to this temperature.’ Lal chatters on as I carefully clean eye after eye.

Finally I treat the last child. I have no idea how long I’ve been sitting here, but one of my legs has gone to sleep under me.

‘Great work!’ Lal says. ‘Want some food?’ He goes over to the sink and scrubs his hands, and I do the same.

We sit down at a table in the yellow – eating – room. There are children scattered over little mats on the floor, eating dhal and rice from bowls. Some I recognize from this morning. They wave and I wave back and they nudge each other and giggle.

‘How did you get on?’ asks Janu, striding over to us and taking a seat.

‘She was a star!’ says Lal.

‘I knew she would be!’ Janu beams at me.

Here it comes again, my ridiculous blush. I’m saved from speaking as the man who was sitting in Reception enters the room and speaks to Janu.

‘Sorry!’ says Janu. ‘A fundraising company is in today and I must show them around quickly.’ He looks apologetically at me and then walks out of the room.

I suddenly feel hungry. I take a huge spoon of rice and dhal, but as I watch some of the children ladle food into their mouths I realize that I don’t really know what hungry feels like.

I chat to Lal and enjoy the delicious food. I find myself drinking glass after glass of water. The heat today is intense. My clothes are drenched in sweat, but I’m starting to get used to that, and now Janu’s walking back towards me, mobile phone in one hand. He pats Lal on the back and asks if I’m ready to leave. I say my goodbyes and we stroll back down the ‘wall of beds’ corridor, then through another door, which takes us into a shop that faces out on to the main road.

In the shop there are lots of tourists milling around a huge carved wooden tree in the middle that almost touches the ceiling. Garlands of flowers hang from its branches. That’s why it smells so sweet in here. As I get closer I see there are lots of little hollows and shelves carved out of the trunk and the branches, and inside these hollows are things that the children have made, like table napkins and coasters, hand-made sandals in every size, little carved animals and paintings on silk, all on display in this beautiful carved tree. I look at the faces of the people as they move around the trunk, and they all look as enchanted as I am. Every wall of the shop is covered in quilts made of tiny scraps of saris like the one on Priya’s bed. Little tags hang off the quilts. ‘Not for Sale. Commission only’ they say, and some of them have ‘Sold – display only’. I’ve never been into a shop like this before; it’s more like an art exhibition. I touch the great leaves of the carved wooden branches.

‘Is this the Kadamba tree, the one outside Anjali’s house?’

Janu nods.

I can’t believe the skill that’s gone into making this. People are pointing at the incredible carving and all the different objects in the tree, taking things off shelves and out of hollows to inspect them before buying. Then I see that nestling in the largest hollow in the trunk is a wide-rimmed basket lined with roses and jasmine. I peer into it and there among the flowers is a hand-carved, life-sized sculpture of a newborn baby, legs and arms all curled in on themselves, eyes closed. I take a photo of the tree and the baby, though I don’t suppose it will really capture how amazing this is.

‘Can I pick it up?’ I whisper to Janu.

He smiles and nods.

I lift the baby carefully off its pillow of flowers, because it looks so real it almost feels like I don’t want to wake it. A few other people peer over my shoulder to look at it as I cradle it in my arms.

A man with a red face and drips of sweat pouring from his forehead asks Janu how much he wants for the baby carving.

‘Sorry! Not for sale,’ says Janu in a sharp voice I haven’t heard him use before. The man shrugs and then walks away grumbling, ‘It shouldn’t be on display then, should it?’

Janu ignores him.

‘Is this your work?’ I ask, pointing from the tree, that I notice is concreted into the ground, to the lifelike baby I’m holding in my arms.

Janu nods. ‘Actually the tree is crude – needs more decoration. I’m still working on it, but people are always trying to buy the baby. Once an artist from America offered me three thousand dollars. He said he would put it in his New York gallery. It was so much money I told Anjali to sell it, but she swears she never will. I tell her we should secure it, so no one tries to pick it up, but she says when people hold it in their arms it pulls their hearts out. She’s so sentimental!’

I’m running my hands over the smooth wooden surface of the baby’s cheeks, but a high-pitched cry punctures the air, almost making me drop it! Janu touches my arm and points to the lank-haired woman who’s carrying her tiny baby in a carrier on her front.

‘It’s not real!’ he laughs, taking the carving off me and placing it back on its garland pillow.

On the way back to the flat I close my eyes and rest my head against the worn black leather of the tram seat. Janu places his hand on my arm. I open my eyes and sit up.

‘Thanks for helping today.’ He looks at me with so much kindness in his eyes. I feel – how did he say it? – as if ‘my heart’s being pulled out.’

‘I enjoyed it,’ I tell him, very aware of his hand still resting on my arm. ‘Well, not exactly enjoyed, but . . .’

‘I know, working with the children brings complicated feelings. Now, tell me something of life in London.’

So I describe my family and then . . . Jidé. I tell Janu how I love hanging out with Jidé and that he’s clever and funny. As I’m talking Janu pulls his hand away from my arm and moves away from me so that there’s space between us on the seat.

‘He sounds like a fine boy,’ Janu says, staring out of the window.

We’re quiet together for the rest of the journey, but it’s a deafening silence.

The worst thing is, I should feel better because I’ve told him early enough so that neither of us needs to feel embarrassed. This is exactly what I planned; it’s the right thing to do, so why is it that I feel so miserable now?