‘Ah, you went travelling? Where all?’
‘Round the coast, Varkala, Kanyakumari, Madurai. I had the best coffee there, on the street. You know the way they pour it.’ She mimed the gesture of two vessels, a yard apart.
The other girl, Chitra, smiled. She was tall and fair, with a soft face. They continued to sit in the dining room, at a corner table under the fluorescent tube lights.
Leela was divided between the pressure to be entertaining and the pleasure of a moment in which someone was listening; this was her first prolonged conversation in the hostel. ‘Lots of temple towns,’ she went on.
‘I’ve been to Kanchipuram and Chidambaram,’ Chitra said.
No one else was left in the room. Leela moved congealed daal around her plate. Half a leathery chapati also remained.
‘I didn’t go to either,’ she said. ‘But I did go to Rameswaram.’
‘Ooh! Was it beautiful?’
‘Really beautiful. The sea was incredibly blue, and calm. It made me nervous. I went on a boat trip, with this family from Indore. The boat guy said the sea is always like that at that time of year. He said in June it’s flat, like glass.’
‘Wow,’ Chitra said. She smiled, and gathered her pots of ghee and pickle, condiments every hostel girl seemed to own.
‘I went to Dhanushkodi as well. They say you can see Lanka on a clear day – but I didn’t.’ Her mind became blank and wondering as that day, stepping out of a rickshaw to go down to the beach. The ocean had boomed, dark blue. There had been huge breakers, and what looked like a steep shelf. She had sat on the beach for a while in her swimming costume, and a t-shirt; fishermen had pulled in their boats and thrown out ropes so that their wives could draw in the nets. The men had looked at her and the women had narrowed their eyes, telegraphing that when she began to drown, they wouldn’t save her.
After some thought she had put on her trousers again. ‘I didn’t swim,’ she told the baffled rickshaw driver.
At the end of the land was a salty promontory, fish bones and quartz, a few boats and coir huts. You looked out into space, wind, and ocean.
Chitra got up and went to the fridge to put away her stuff. Each of her bottles was labelled with her name, as per regulations. Leela followed her, already depressed by the moment when they would part for the evening. There were firm unspoken rules about new girls, who were ignored for exactly as long as making friends mattered to them. There was one girl who’d smiled at Leela and introduced herself when she moved into the corridor. But they had never spoken at length, merely exchanged ‘How’s it going?’ and smiles en route to the communal bathroom, each clutching her plastic bucket.
She and Chitra headed into the foyer.
‘Late finishing today,’ remarked Mrs Pawar, one of the hostel wardens. She sat at the desk, self-consciously upright in her bright pink sari and matching, daringly low-backed blouse. Sometimes she even wore sleeveless blouses. She had recently bobbed her hair. It was an improbable crow-black.
Chitra dimpled at her. ‘You know what it’s like, ma’am. We were talking.’ She drifted over to the pigeonholes to check her mail. Leela headed to the lift. The requirement to address the wardens as ‘ma’am’ so horrified her that she avoided talking to them.
‘Leela Ghosh!’ Pawar liked to apostrophise using the full name.
Leela turned.
‘Come here.’
Leela approached. She showed her teeth. Pawar took on a reproachful look. She was a kind woman, though she would nag.
‘Lee-la,’ said Pawar, at length and querulously.
‘Yes?’
‘“Yes ma’am”,’ explained Pawar.
Leela remained silent.
‘Your room is very untidy.’
‘Where?’ said Leela. She had almost no things with her – she had moved in with a suitcase. Her possessions were in the steel cupboard, or on the small shelf. Moreover, she made her bed every day.
‘Your room was inspected by the committee today. Your table is very untidy.’
‘Two books and a piece of paper?’
‘Neat your table. And please,’ said Pawar with finality and some distaste, ‘try to be sincere.’
Leela gawped and moved towards the lift, which had just arrived. Chitra held open the doors, then closed the outer, then inner door. The lift stopped playing a piercing rendition of the ‘Für Elise’, and jerked upwards.
‘“Be sincere?”’ said Leela.
Chitra giggled. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s one of her things. “Be sincere.”’
‘She said my room is untidy because there are a couple of books on the desk. What the fuck?’
Chitra nodded. ‘They get anal about things. It’s a power trip.’
‘And why was the committee in my room?’
The other girl shrugged. They had arrived at their floor. ‘Don’t take it all so seriously.’
‘See you,’ said Leela, sad that Chitra hadn’t invited her to her room to chat. She moved down the corridor, and let herself into room 703. Her cell was clean and peaceful. She turned on the light and fan, shut the door, listened to the sounds of the corridor – other girls talking – and stretched out on the bed. The small fan turned crankily. The window was open onto the balcony, and the sea breeze came in clear. You could stand there in the daytime, or sit on the slightly dirty tiles, and watch a few inches of ocean shimmer not far away; the view belonged to the millionaires of Cuffe Parade, but the hostel girls had somehow appropriated it.
In the morning she lay blank after waking. The breeze came in, wilful, then went. It was too hot. A patch of sun lay across the floor: the curtains she’d bought a week earlier were slightly too short.
How did I get here? Small matters arose more urgently. The fan, turning fast in the early morning voltage, made her shiver. She pulled the sheet around her. The corridor was quiet. This would be a good time to bathe, before the bathroom became busy.
Crows quarrelled on the balcony, harsh and repetitive. She laughed, got up, went outside. The sun was already hot, almost wet in its intensity. ‘Shut up!’
Two large crows, one a little younger than the other, looked round. They made clockwork noises of reproof and moved further away.
She sat cross-legged and looked down. To her left, the gardens with their large trees, then the sea, then Cuffe Parade’s high-rises sparkling in the sun. On the right, the road spread out like a diagram. Buses from the depot swung out of the gate, illustrating how to manoeuvre a parallelogram around a corner.
She closed her eyes. Through the lids, orange.
For a moment there was contentment. Then she thought of a similar moment, in Roger’s flat. He had without remark left a cup of coffee on the bedside table next to her, then gone to take a shower. She had half sat in bed, drinking the coffee, her mind nearly empty. From the bathroom she had heard water, Roger’s beard trimmer, a snatch of song. She had been liberated in that instant from the world: she might have been said to be taking part in it, yet there was enough room for her to stand back. She hadn’t considered whether she was happy, and she had been.
Revisiting the moment didn’t bring the same peace. She twitched, thought of Roger – perhaps she should write to him? – and cringed, for he was bound up with her ego and meant pain and humiliation. When she dreamed of him, he appeared with a cruel face.
Inside she convulsed away from the thought. No, I’m strong and capable of … whatever. The tiles were rough under her. Would she miss breakfast, and her cup of weak coffee? That would be annoying – but there was time – but she must get to the bathroom before it became busy. She moved. Her ankle hurt against the floor. And Roger and the … but she would meet someone; something would happen. She was without faith but debilitated by hope.
She would focus on her breathing. In, the lungs were tight, then a pause; then out, slowly, the relief of having breath giving way to the urge to be rid of it. A moment’s quiet, then thought started again. She sighed and opened her eyes. Below, another bus pulled into the lane. She scrambled up for her bucket, soap, and towel.
When she went to work, sitting on the top deck of the number 124 towards Worli Aagar, it would strike her, surprising her, that she was somewhere she knew – Colaba, where her aunt and uncle had lived, and the familiar road, on which many of the shops still looked the same. When she saw them, she felt she had known them even during the time she’d forgotten their existence, and the earlier life that had taken place in this small world. She remembered the thwack of thin branches on the bus’s upper windows as it trundled down the Causeway past the market and the docks.
As she looked out of the window, her mind, which was always chattering underneath whatever happened, said something about the mornings, and the trip to work, and was shocked. It expected west London, rushing to the tube, privet hedges, red-brick walls, the Metropolitan line, the quiet misery of sodden concrete. She looked out instead on sunshine, banyan trees, and the Causeway, and wondered.