6

In the twenty minutes that I waited for Arati at one of the outside tables at Dolly’s, my phone filled up with missed calls and chat messages. It was recess at school, and my friends were avid to reach me. After rejecting the first caller, I put the phone on silent and watched others come and go on the screen (there were a few unknown numbers too, which might have been more journalists). Although I had a contingency plan to call my friend Moushumi about staying at her place tonight in case the TV people didn’t take the hint to buzz off, now was not the time to be either explainer or hero. All my focus had to be on the conversation with Arati. She was going to be my first confidante!

(Yes, you’re right, with everything that implied, including a plan of going over to the sweet shop on Vivekananda Road to spend some quality time inside Ramesh’s mind. I wouldn’t even be incognito. In fact, to get the clearest pictures of all he knew, I’d pin him with the most direct questions, sit back and focus through the lies. This was the proposal I would place before Arati.)

For the same reason, you’ll understand why I’m not sharing any more glimpses into random passersby. There came a moment that morning when I actively stopped trying to hold on to details and decided to stare at my phone as a way of blocking them out. Being transported to a football match being played on a lush, round field surrounded by tin-roofed huts was magical, with misted green hills in the distance, but what about the man, probably my age, who made himself picture every woman’s pussy he passed? I stayed with him much longer than I should have out of sheer amazement as it happened two, three times, until he looked directly at me and did it again.

This was the flipside of my gift, my new background noise, and distraction came as easily as annoyance. Except I was already thinking I couldn’t afford either, not if I wanted to achieve something with my powers before they were taken away.

(By the way, what was the deal with that? How long did we have these gifts for? Question One to ponder with Arati.)

So I opened a memo on my phone and started writing, beginning with everything I wanted to ask her.

‘Why did I ask Nasir if he had a worst enemy?’ I then typed. ‘What did that question mean for me? After bullying him with my power, did I want to put things right by taking out the one baddie in his life? Is that how immature this power has made me??

‘Why was I picked for it anyway, this particular ability?

‘Why not go to either police inspector right now and put myself at their service for the duration of my gift? Isn’t that the most direct way of being useful? Just put me in a room and interrogate anybody you suspect of lying or holding back. I’ll be virtually invisible. Afterwards, your case is solved, and I am … a genuine superhero!’

But then I added: ‘Did Shivani learn the answer about the powers being taken away? Was it out of disappointment, or a refusal to accept this, that she jumped? Or, even more tragically, did she never know? Did she believe when she jumped that she was magical, invulnerable? Perhaps she never had a chance to understand before the moment of impact …’

I looked up, and Arati was approaching. She was about fifteen metres away when a wave hit me, similar to the one Nasir had emitted in the cab. I was startled, and wondered if a stranger had passed by, fuming.

Then I saw Arati holding her bag above her head inside a packed train. I saw her placing in it folded salwar kameezes that needed work, later rushing along an unpaved road towards the station. I saw myself summoning her without a thought for any of this, and then changing our meeting place with another call (although this was closer to Dhakuria Station, where she would have arrived). I looked at my empty glass of iced tea, and at myself, through her eyes, sitting at this tea-room table at half-eleven on a working day.

I began by apologising for costing her a morning’s work, and said I would explain why we weren’t meeting at home. I recommended the iced tea and she agreed to try one. I said we would have lunch as well.

‘Why aren’t you at school today?’

‘Arati, I have a huge amount to tell you, and I promise there are good reasons for this disruption of your day. But first I need to hear in detail exactly what happened from the night Manasa appeared before you. Take your time and please tell me everything.’

I hesitated and then made a huge, reckless promise.

‘Perhaps she has found a way for your second wish to come true.’

Everything was just as extraordinary in Arati’s head as she was claiming to me. Bear in mind at this point she had no idea of my gift.

Apparently the latest development was that Manasa, or some diabolical entity posing as Manasa (an ‘asura’, or demon, was Arati’s word for it), who herself could never make such a claim of a devotee, was demanding a steep fee in return for granting Arati’s second wish.

Arati hadn’t believed for a moment that the police would be her way of reaching Tuntuni. She had only tried them out of desperation when, night after night, the evil impostor was all she could see. And now it was thwarting even this attempt to learn the truth: Ramesh was free once more, and might even disappear, while the police would have their attention on her!

So absolute was the match between Arati’s words and the images that passed through her mind, I felt ashamed to ever have doubted her. Worse: trivialised, dismissed, quietly ignored her account of events as a childish fantasy.

‘He won’t let me go past him, Jaya,’ she wept. ‘And he won’t let Manasa come to me. Not unless I pay his price.’

Arati had already told me the ‘price’. She would have to sacrifice a stranger. For two nights in a row, while sleeping and awake, she had received the same message: that in order to reach her long-lost daughter, in order to learn from Manasa where she needed to look, she had to agree to murder someone unknown.

People were looking at us, other customers as well as passersby. Perhaps they suspected the end of an affair. I took Arati’s hands in mine and said the following, which, at that moment, I think I truly believed: ‘Manasa has found a way to reach you. She has found a way past this demon.

‘She is going to help you through me.’

It’s hard to describe my feelings just then. I was about to share my biggest secret for the first time. I reminded myself I had now seen and confirmed that Arati believed everything she’d told me, and also that she had trusted me time and again with secrets of even greater significance. This was literally the most transparent person I had yet encountered.

Nevertheless, after a good look around to check that no one was sitting too close, I began by telling Arati about Shivani, as if meaning to test her reaction. This girl in Ballygunge who became aware of her new power perhaps days before Manasa first appeared to you, and she demonstrated it to me as well, but then tragically didn’t recognise when it was suddenly taken away, or else she overestimated its strength. Or, the other possibility is that she did notice when it disappeared but couldn’t accept the fact, and has recently died as a result of trying to prove the opposite to herself.

‘I have seen the story on TV,’ Arati said. ‘It happened a couple of days ago, right? Was that the reason?’

‘I think it was, and that’s why I had to see you. I think both of you have experienced something similar. I should also tell you that the reason we’re not meeting at home just now is related to Shivani.’

I told Arati about the TV vans, and about my resignation from school (she’d known I wrote the column). And then, still putting off talking about my own incredible discovery of the morning, I brought up again the possibility of powers disappearing, as they might have done with Shivani.

‘Arati, it could be that Manasa made herself visible just that one time, and will not return. But I sincerely believe that she might have planted the seeds for Tuntuni’s whereabouts to be revealed to you.’

Arati began shaking her head even as I spoke. ‘No, you’re not considering the alternative: that the same thing happened to this girl as well. That she too was asked to pay a price, and perhaps refused.’

I was stunned by what Arati was suggesting, and looked around again before I confirmed it.

‘What are you saying, that she was asked to kill?’

Tears were forming in her eyes as she nodded.

‘That’s not possible, because one thing I’m sure of, having met her, is that Shivani didn’t mention any appearance of either a deity or a demon. One day she just had her power.’

‘Have you asked her parents about what she shared with them?’

It was while telling Arati about Shivani’s feelings towards her parents that I remembered her penultimate, strange email, the one with the seemingly random link to rioting in Bardhaman, a far-flung sectarian incident she then claimed was ‘her fault’. I had assumed she’d forwarded me the wrong article, but what if those were the strangers she had been commanded to kill?

Which, if this utterly impossible-seeming thing were true, might mean that Shivani’s powers had in fact been ‘renewed’, or left intact, and their failure was not the cause of her death.

Her guilt was.

‘Walk with me,’ I said to Arati in the steadiest voice I could manage. ‘Just around the place.’

I asked her to tell me more about the price the ‘demon’ had sought. Had it named a particular person?

She shook her head (and again had nothing to hide inside), but as we took the stairs to the main terrace on the first floor, things began to build from amongst the little I knew.

Was the dreadful experiment that Shivani was so ashamed of trying out on the housemaid’s daughter truly of her own reckless will, or was this a ‘victim’ she had been ordered to sacrifice? And at the last moment she couldn’t go through with it — she dropped the girl all the way to the ground but then brought her up again? If I’d been the person she was expecting to meet, Chandra Sir, she would have told me the full story that evening itself.

But then what? Did she, or did she not, visit the village in Bardhaman district to somehow play a role in the violence there? When it came to faraway strangers, Shivani was more easily tempted, but soon was devastated by shame and couldn’t live with herself after the four deaths (according to the article) she saw herself as causing? Was that what had happened?

It was too hot to sit down here, so I suggested crossing the terrace and heading down again to get some lunch from one of the snack joints at the back. Then I admitted to Arati that, from the little I knew about Shivani’s story, her hypothesis might well be true. Perhaps Shivani too had been approached with a ‘price’ and couldn’t bear the pain of paying it.

Already full of sorrow at this thought, I was very moved to glimpse Arati’s head suddenly filling with Tuntuni. In fact, tiny Tuntuni was asleep in what looked like a hospital cot, with a drip attached to her hand. A man who looked like Ramesh was sitting on a chair near her.

Despite the heat of the noonday sun, I shivered. At any time a similar price might be asked of me. Why would I be exempt if it had been demanded of the only others I knew who had received an impossible gift?

Of whom one was now dead, and the other had lost her goddess when she needed her most because of her refusal to pay up?

Broken if you do; haunted if you don’t.

What will you do, Jaya, when the price is asked of you? Which state will you choose?