10

Apparently I keep summoning her because I cannot accept she is gone, and perhaps because I associate her most of all with these gifts. These so-called ‘Shaktis’.

That’s a hypothesis of Shivani’s, by the way. With which I cannot disagree, except I fail to see how they can add up to a power to ‘summon’.

And who summoned whom earlier — me or the ‘Prime Minister’?

Shivani replies that if I can date a period when I recall being happiest in Bombay, her guess would be that we’re presently in the middle of it, ‘because that’s where you’d want to return. And you can stay here as long as you like, Aunty, you have no obligation to be in the present. That is one of the gifts of the Shakti. Everyone can remain in their happiest place.’

‘Oh okay, and when they wake up in the morning — my mother, my Didi and six-year-old me — they’ll just accept this strange person who broke into their flat and also sounds completely mad.’

‘Aunty, I want to see what will happen. You must give that a try!’ Again she peals, relaxed and cheerful in a way I never had a chance to see while she lived. I briefly wonder if, and how, this condition could be her happiest place.

‘But I should clarify,’ she adds, ‘they’ll probably return you quite soon. Actually you won’t be able to remain here as long as you like, at least not yet.’

‘Who’ll return me?’

‘Those who have given you the Shakti. Don’t you remember what the Prime Minister said? The more you do for them, the more of your power you’ll enjoy. That bodyguard Guddu put it quite nicely: this is what you get on level one, just a taster, and then more and more the higher you go.’

I remind myself Shivani led me to that meeting. Will she tell me what level of clearance she’s earned through all these tasks? I cannot, for one second, lower my guard. These forces have successfully turned Arati against me. Shivani never cared for me to begin with.

This return to Bombay is my carrot, I now see. The dead woman on my bedroom floor, and Arati’s attack, were sticks.

‘Shivani, what has Arati been ordered to do?’

She claims not to know, ‘because there could be many tasks. But whenever they are satisfied, Arati will be naturally led to her daughter if that’s what she wants the most.’

I reel when I hear that. ‘You mean Tuntuni now? Does she know already if Tuntuni is still alive? Or will she be restored to her baby back in 2001, just as I’m here?’

Shivani offers me the answer I already ‘know’: Arati will find the Tuntuni she most wants to see. It comes to me that she might well choose to be reunited with her infant, and to pick up the thread exactly where it had been lost. Meeting a grown-up Tuntuni, despite the boundless joy of knowing she is alive, would also be unimaginably painful.

I find myself crying, out of joy for Arati but also at the sudden thought that we might never be friends again. If she chose not to return to the present, for example, or if she was ordered to make another attempt on my life. The night is clear: there are even visible stars. Based on Shivani’s suggestion, I feel sure when this is — sometime in late 1990, when I first began to feel settled at school in Bombay and amongst my new compound friends, and when Didi and I had started to believe that Ma might come through for us after all. This move might be permanent: Baba had already made two trips full of threats and bluster, much enraged hitting and even some cajoling and downright pleading, but Ma had held out.

‘Was it really Manasa who was guiding Arati, or a demon pretending to be, as she also suspected?’

‘To your friend, everything good will always come from Manasa. When she is ordered to pay a price, she’ll believe it’s a demon.’

‘When in reality it’s neither. It’s the Prime Minister, or someone working for him.’

My own words sound ridiculous the moment they’re out, especially the term ‘reality’ to describe my midnight meeting with the ‘Prime Minister’ on a footpath in Jodhpur Park, who had turned up solely for this purpose! Yes, that’s much more plausible than encountering a serpent goddess at the bottom of a pond.

The arrogance of the ‘educated’ in a nutshell: the PM in my neighbourhood I definitely saw. Arati, get over the superstition that your favourite deity turned up in yours!

I touch the boundary wall of the terrace to see if it feels gritty: have the animators working on my illusion bothered with details like that? I remember I’m eight floors high. What would happen if I test their virtual reality by taking it one step further?

And Shivani would witness it, she who had herself done the same thing.

The wall’s texture is exactly right. I ask Shivani why she jumped, without really expecting an answer.

‘What they asked of me, I couldn’t do anymore. What I had already done was impossible to live with.’ A pause. ‘What they would take away, I couldn’t live without.’

‘And is that what I believe, Shivani, or is that how you truly felt?’

She says she wants to show me something on the way down if I’ll take the stairs instead of the lift.

On the fifth floor, in the flat directly above ours (501), lived two boys, Naveen and Pavan Srivastava (I mean, back in 1990). Shivani leads me to their door.

‘You remember them, don’t you?’

I nod, thinking also of their father, a man who walked with a characteristic loping gait, and had strong, rounded shoulders. Didi called him ‘the missing link’.

Which is why Shivani startles me with her next words. ‘You recognised their father right away. You knew exactly how their home was.’

It had been an open secret. All their immediate neighbours could hear the cries and the shouting. Sometimes at ten in the evening one of the brothers, or indeed both, would be sent downstairs to the lawn, and their father would continue to yell at them from their balcony. Once, while I was watching, four floors below him, he even hurled down a bottle that landed on the roof of the green Ambassador. Luckily, Mr Srivastava was a sales rep who covered areas outside Bombay, which was when the boys were allowed to play. Other people had given up trying to talk to him because, drunk or not, he often turned arguments into a brawl. He also knocked on people’s doors in the compound and accused men of having designs on his wife.

We didn’t play together much, but the four of us, Naveen, Pavan, Didi and I, did leave home at around the same time every morning to walk down S S Wagh Road to catch our respective school buses opposite Chitra cinema. It was a fifteen-minute walk, and we greeted each other and often walked side by side, and of course we would have chatted, but I’m certain we never asked about their father or the atmosphere in their house. Because this was the logic Didi had burned into my brain: ‘If we say anything about Mr Srivastava and it gets back to him, and he comes downstairs and starts to yell abuse at Ma, especially when he’s drunk, she’ll think about moving away. Do you want to move away, Jaya?’

The thought of a careless word about someone else’s father causing us to lose our new life and be forced to return to our own had been so terrifying to me that I could have forgone speaking to Naveen and Pavan ever again. Standing outside their door, in front of which is an elaborate rangoli, and stickers of Lakshmi and Ganesh beneath the nameplate, I recall this vivid reaction with shame.

Shivani’s voice returns me to the ‘present’: ‘If you like, you can go in and end all that right now. Change Naveen’s and Pavan’s future; free them from their father. Then simply disappear to Calcutta, 2017.’