The first time Renu traveled as a man was while on her way to Ahmedabad. It happened like this: she had changed trains in Phulera, and was forced to buy a second-class ticket to Ahmedabad, in the women’s compartment, because the third class was full. She seated herself in the corner of the berth, next to the window, and watched as the other passengers loaded their suitcases and bags bursting with food and thick winter blankets for the overnight journey. Renu had nothing to put away. She wore everything she owned in the world, including both her sweater and her shawl. Her remaining money, eight anna in all, was tucked into her pocket, and she had no need of toiletries: her hair was hardly an inch long, and whenever she passed a pump, she rinsed out her mouth and washed her hands and feet.
Across from her settled two young women. They looked about Renu’s age, but they were clearly educated. One was reading a book and the other was looking over her friend’s shoulder and then out of the window and then at Renu. Renu looked away. Beside her sat two little girls, one about five and the other eight or nine. Their father, a middle-aged man with thinning hair and a fat, boyish face, adjusted and readjusted their luggage. He looked sadly at the little girls, as if from sheer longing he could turn them into boys, and said, “Don’t put your hands out of the window, do you hear? And listen to your mother.”
They both nodded.
At this, the mother entered the berth. She was a wide woman, her breasts pendulous, even while obscured beneath her knit shawl, and her hair hennaed and pulled tight into a braid, a few strands aglow like copper in the fading light, framing her round face. Her eyes passed over her family and paused only when they reached the two young women. She seemed to approve. Then they stopped at Renu.
“You,” she said. “What are you doing here? Do you see that, ji, there’s a man in our berth.”
It took a moment for Renu to realize she was talking about her. That she had mistaken her for a man. She opened her mouth to speak, but the woman continued, “Nakaam, creep, get out, or I’ll call the police.” She turned to her husband, who was staring at his wife. The young women were staring at Renu. “Ji,” she told her husband. “Go call the conductor.” She plopped down next to Renu, crossed her arms, and rested them on her round stomach.
The husband left the berth. Renu could no longer see the woman’s daughters; her body blocked them completely. Only her face, now so close she could see the thin eyelashes, the plucked chin, the voluminous chest heaving with effort. She might’ve been beautiful once, Renu thought, before she had her daughters, before the husband’s disappointments had colored her own, before life had been cruel, nearly meticulous, in its onslaughts, but now she was simply a fat, well-fed woman. It would never occur to her—once she’d decided on the matter—that Renu could be anything but a man.
Renu was intrigued. It made her feel somehow lighter. Then it gave her an idea.
She walked through to the men’s compartment and settled into a slim space, in a seat facing the lavatory. All the men around her were smoking and playing cards and eating roasted peanuts and paid her no attention. She watched them for a while, careful not to bring attention to herself, and then fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Renu was nineteen when she left the refugee camp and traveled to Ahmedabad. It was the winter of 1949. She’d been there two years, just long enough to understand that she, along with the eight hundred other widows stationed at the camp, had absolutely no future ahead of them. Certainly, the government of India had been a passable guardian: they’d been fed, most days, and if they chose, the residents could enroll in vocational training programs to teach them various skills, such as how to be a seamstress. A darajin. Even the sound of the word was a dead end. Some of the younger and more beautiful widows, Renu noticed, had been pitied by a guard or a camp administrator and were married to them. Could pity combined with lust make a marriage? Renu didn’t know, but what she did know was that she had no desire—none whatsoever, not even in the face of a bleak and empty future—to be a darajin.
The other thing Renu refused to do was let her hair grow out. All of the other widows at the camp were delighted when their bald heads began to sprout. The slightest fuzz and they’d scramble to affix an artless ribbon to the top of their heads, or vie for the one cracked mirror in the camp, admiring their woolly scalps, as if the hair were falling halfway down their backs. But Renu was mortified. What she loved—beyond even her own understanding—was the feel of the wind on her scalp. It reminded her of standing with her husband, Gopichand, who’d been killed by a Muslim mob two years ago, on their three scrubby acres of land, and gazing toward the blue and distant Shivalik Hills. She’d gazed like that, with his arms around her, and imagined that they would remain that way forever. Not literally, of course, but that the Shivaliks would stand like they always stood against the morning sky, whipped and creamy like clotted ghee, and that the dandelions would bend like baby’s heads in the northeasterly wind, and that she would be a farmer’s wife, with its days of toil and earth and anguish, measuring the rains as one measures sugar into a teacup, with care and constancy, and by the spoonful. And she assumed something further: that her destiny was like the small stream that ran at the edge of their property. That it would flow—diverted at times by a fallen branch or a pile of rock, true, and thinned in the dryness of summer while abundant in spring, undoubtedly—but that essentially and always, it would flow, and be tied, deeply and incontrovertibly, to the destiny of the man to whom she clung.
Renu couldn’t have been more wrong.
She understood this, in a terrible, twisted way, on the evening she watched the mob torch their hut, slaughter their goats, and decimate their three meager acres of wheat. She had run and jumped into the stream, hidden as it was by a slight ravine, and watched as the figures of the men danced in the flames. Then she looked to her left and her right. Her husband wasn’t there. She thought he was behind her and maybe he had been, but he wasn’t any longer. Renu arched her neck, but she still couldn’t see him. So she crawled on her stomach to the top of the ravine. Her mouth filled with dust, her arms pushed against the crumbling dirt, her eyes lifted over the crest, and that was when she saw him. In the firelight. His head tilted back, the gleam of a knife against his throat, then a gesture that was unmistakable. And in that moment Renu understood one last thing: that nothing she’d imagined of her life, of her destiny, would ever come to pass. Not one thing remained. Not one, except—and these she saw as angry open mouths gnawing at the tender twilit sky—the Shivaliks still stood.
* * *
When she left the camp she was given twenty rupees and a pair of chappals. She tucked the money into an inside pocket of her shalwar—which she’d asked one of the darajins to sew for that express purpose—and then she put the chappals on her bare feet. It was almost as if the Indian government, in providing these last gifts, was saying, If money and a long walk won’t get you there, nothing will. Renu stood at the entrance gate to the camp, wrapped in a wool shawl over her thick sweater, a man’s—passed down to her after a resident who’d saved it as a memento of her late husband had herself died—and turned toward Mrs. Kaur, the camp director. She was staring at Renu’s head.
“Where will you go?” she asked.
Renu shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as the money will take me.”
They stood silently. Renu thought of the life of the camp. Of all the women she’d never see again. She thought especially of Neela.
“You could’ve married again, you know,” Mrs. Kaur said. “You were one of the prettiest ones. If only you’d let it grow out.”
Renu pulled the shawl over her head. “But then I wouldn’t have gotten the twenty rupees and the chappals, Mrs. Kaur.”
“You’re insolent. That’s your other problem. Besides, a husband’s worth far more than that.”
“Is he?” Renu smiled.
Mrs. Kaur shook her head and called a rickshaw that was passing by the camp.
When Renu arrived at the train station, a few miles away, it was midday, and the next train was leaving for Chandigarh in twenty minutes. The train after that wasn’t until eight o’clock in the evening, so Chandigarh, though not very far from Amritsar, was where she decided to go. She bought a third-class ticket, in the women’s compartment, and arrived in Chandigarh that evening. She slept in a corner of the train station, her shawl spread on the stone floor, then took the morning train to Delhi. In Delhi she counted her money; she had fifteen rupees left. Now, from Delhi and with the fifteen rupees tucked into her shalwar, she had a number of choices: she could go to Bhopal, via Jhansi, she could travel to Mathura and then on to Varanasi, or she could go west, through Phulera and ending in Ahmedabad. Renu stood under the timetable of train departures. She breathed, hugging the sweater and shawl close against her body. South, east, or west?
She hailed a passing puri wallah and bought a packet of three puris with potato curry. She took the packet, stepping gingerly over the mass of sleeping bodies on the railway platform, through the main concourse and then outside, into the cold morning air. The sky was the color of kheer. A horde of rickshaws, bicycles, a few cars, and even an old horse-drawn brougham idled in the roundabout that fronted the railway station. A few men stood in groups, drinking chai and smoking beedies. She heard the wail of an approaching train and once it had subsided there descended from the Gothic arches and down the bloodred pillars of the station’s facade a sudden silence. It was disturbing, lovely, and perfectly befit the first morning in two years that she had not woken to the harsh clang and peal of the bell at the camp. It was invariably followed by the rush of eight hundred women and children to the toilets, a fight for a cup of water from the three drums set next to the supply tent, and then came exactly what had come for the past two years: a long, listless day of waiting. For what? Renu never quite grasped for what. Food, certainly, that meager daily helping of roti and curry, but something else too. Something whose lack she’d felt but could never name. Neela, if she’d asked her, would’ve wrapped her arms around Renu in the dark, played her fingers against the hollow of Renu’s neck, and whispered, “They’re waiting for a guard to marry them, or for some lost family member to come and find them, they’re waiting for their hair to grow out. But we, we aren’t waiting for anything.” And though it was true—Renu had been content, even after Neela had left—there was still a sense that there was something, something that was missing.
She threw her empty packet of puris into the gutter. A slight breeze blew in the scent of cardamom and woodsmoke, the pods of a semal tree were strewn on the ground, and next to the brougham was a coal brazier where an old man sat on his haunches, brewing coffee. She looked at him, and then she looked at the horse that was tied to the brougham. It was a dark velvety brown, rich as the coffee the old man was pouring into terra-cotta mugs, and though she and Gopichand had never owned a horse, she could sense in its presence something of their three acres: the swaying wheat, the undulant hills, the light of a small and welcoming fire. Just then the horse raised its head, from where it had been nibbling along the ground, and, gazing between its blinders, looked straight at Renu. They both blinked. Then the horse went back to its nibbling but Renu continued watching it. Its regal head, the tuft of hair between its ears, its wet nostrils, the blinders on the sides of each of its eyes. She wiped her hands against her shawl and wondered about the blinders. Why did they even put such things on a horse? No other animals were made to wear them, not that she could think of. So why a horse?
The driver of the brougham—chewing betel nut, a curling mustache bouncing above his blue uniform kurta as he did so—came out of the station and raised himself onto the seat. He pulled on the reins and the horse came to attention. Then he flicked them and the horse started up, clopping past Renu as it rounded away toward the exit. And then she saw it: the blinders were to focus the horse so it wouldn’t be distracted, to keep it from looking sideways, to give it a straight course, a goal, to give the horse—and at this Renu smiled—purpose. And that, she realized, was what she’d been missing at the camp, what she’d been waiting for all along: purpose. Because once you had purpose, Renu understood, standing in the dim winter’s morning light outside the Delhi train station, you had everything. You were a river knifing your way through a gorge of sheer rock and red cliff; everything you needed was inside of you. And not hunger, not fatigue, not the lack of money or means or even success, could sway the truly purposed. That too she understood.
By now the horse had nearly reached the end of the esplanade leading away from the train station. Renu watched it go. When it reached the main road, she wondered, would it continue south, or would it turn and go east, or would it go west? The horse paused, and she saw the driver’s arm reach out to adjust the reins, swat them against the horse’s back, and then she saw it make its turn. West. Renu walked back under the Gothic arches of the train station and proceeded to the ticket counters.
* * *
She reached Ahmedabad the next morning. She wanted a bath so she walked from the railway station to the Sabarmati and, concealing her sweater and shawl under a thicket, waded into the river. The water was cold, silken, and when she dipped her head under it, it passed over her scalp with the thickness and the strength of a hand. Renu reemerged and saw a group of laundresses on the banks, beating piles of damp saris against the rocks. She waved to them but they only stared at her. She dripped a trail of water behind her as she approached them, her shalwar kameez soaked and clinging to her body. One of the laundresses, a young girl, bright with sunlight gleaming on her wet face, pointed at Renu’s chest and laughed. “So you’re a girl.”
Renu laughed too, and asked them if she could help them in exchange for food. They laughed again, and said, “These saris are heavier than you are,” and gave her a tin of chapati and rajma and curd. She ate every last morsel in the tin without stopping, licked it clean, and said, “Not anymore.”
The girl who’d first spoken to her walked over to Renu and sat down next to her. She smelled of the freshness of soap, river silt, and sweat. Her skin was as dark as the horse’s had been. “What else can you do?” she asked.
“Anything,” Renu said. “Cook, clean, raise goats.”
The young laundress giggled. “Did you hear that, Sindhu, goats!” One of the other girls looked over and shook her head. Renu and the young laundress turned back to the river. It was swifter now; the wind had picked up, and from the west rushed a bank of gray clouds. “I’ve heard the memsahib needs a new maid. When can you start?” the laundress asked.
“Now,” Renu said.
* * *
The memsahib was the beautiful, young wife of a diamond merchant. That evening, when Renu met her, she was sitting on her divan with so many glittering jewels covering her neck and face that she drowned out the light of the oil lamps that surrounded her. Renu stared at her with open curiosity and awe.
The memsahib smiled luxuriously and said, “You’ve never seen this many jewels, have you?”
“I’ve never seen a jewel,” Renu said.
“What do you think of them?”
“I think you’d be more beautiful without them.”
There was silence. Renu looked at her and sensed the kind of sadness she had sensed in Neela. But why should a destitute girl in a refugee camp and the wealthy wife of a diamond merchant have the same kind of sadness? “Well,” the memsahib said after a few moments, “are you just going to stand there or are you going to fetch me my slippers?”
That was the only indication Renu was to ever get that she was hired. She worked steadily and satisfactorily for the memsahib. In the mornings, her duties were to bring the memsahib’s breakfast, massage her hair with oils, draw her bath, and then help her to dress. In the afternoons all her maids gathered and they either played games or one sang and played the flute while the memsahib, whose name was Savitri, napped or practiced her sitar. The evenings were busiest, and always tense. Renu rushed to draw the memsahib another bath, and helped her to prepare for the merchant’s attentions: her hair was plaited with flowers, jewelry was selected with great care, scents and oils were applied. Only once, after her bath, did the memsahib sigh and whisper, “What does it even matter?”
Renu paused in stringing a garland of flowers. “How do you mean, memsahib?” she asked.
“He’s always in an opium haze, anyway.”
And so there was the reason for the sadness, Renu realized. And maybe it was because of this sadness, or maybe because of the way Renu looked at her—without lowering her eyes like the other maids—that she, within a month of arriving in Ahmedabad, became the memsahib’s lover.
* * *
This went on for two years. The memsahib would go to her husband’s bedroom and when she returned late into the night, she stripped off her jewels and left a trail of them leading from the door to the bed, where Renu waited for her. And it was true, what she had said: the memsahib was far more beautiful without her jewels. Sometimes, before she had even finished undressing, Renu would pull her into the bed and kiss her deeply, she would take the chunni that drifted from her shoulders and tie up her hands. Then she would tickle the loose ends of the chunni over her body until Savitri squealed with delight before wrapping it tightly around her slender neck. It was only then that Renu lowered herself between her legs. Savitri would gasp for breath, but then she would also smile. Renu once loosened the chunni and asked, “What if your husband finds out?”
Savitri lolled her head to the side and sighed and said, “Then you’ll be led to the Sabarmati, if you’re lucky.”
Renu retightened the cloth and a tingle went down her spine. She wondered at it—at the coldness of the memsahib’s words—and knew the end was inevitable. That the end would come. And if it were to catch her unawares then no one—not the memsahib, not her wits, nothing—would save her.
* * *
It was around this time, during the third year that Renu was in the diamond merchant’s employ, that she actually spoke to him for the first time. She was walking past the veranda one evening, on her way to the memsahib’s quarters, when she heard two men talking. One, the much older of the two, was hunched over a thick ledger while the other, whom she’d never seen before but was clearly the diamond merchant—with his silk kurta embroidered in gold, polished hands, and air of gentility—was looking out toward the vast gardens that surrounded the house.
“It’s always two, never more than two,” the man with the ledger was saying.
The diamond merchant looked at the old man, seemed to consider the statement, and said, “Then it can’t be him. It must be a counting mistake. He could steal any number if he wanted to. Why always two?”
Renu stopped on the marble steps leading up the veranda and said, “Two what?”
Both men turned to stare. The old man might’ve even gasped. Renu stood absolutely still. She held her breath. The words had simply come out of her, and she braced for whatever would come next. “The impudence!” the old man shouted, his lips quivering. “How dare you speak to the sahib.” But the diamond merchant only looked at her curiously. “Diamonds,” he said, smiling. “Two diamonds.”
“He, whoever he is, will never steal more,” Renu said, ascending a step, braver. “That’s what he’ll always steal: two.”
“And how is it that you know that?” the merchant asked. The old man, by now, seemed in a state of shock. He was practically torpid.
“Because we had a woman in our camp, nice woman, with two small sons. She was in charge of making the morning roti. And every afternoon we would always come up eight short. Always eight. Not seven, not nine. Eight. When we asked her about it she said they were being stolen by a colony of monkeys that lived nearby, in the trees surrounding the camp. But that couldn’t be true, could it? Monkeys don’t count out eight. So we realized it had to be her, because that’s how people are: they like order, they tend toward it. She was, of course, taking the same number every day to feed her sons. And this man, whoever is stealing the diamonds, only takes two. He always will.”
Both men were silent for a moment. Then the diamond merchant laughed out loud. He turned to the old man. “Who is she?” he asked.
“One of the memsahib’s maids,” he replied.
The diamond merchant seemed to consider this for a moment then he leaned over and whispered something in the old man’s ears. The old man’s expression soured, but he nodded. And that is how Renu came to be summoned to the diamond merchant’s quarters the following afternoon.
* * *
The diamond merchant’s quarters were even more opulent than the memsahib’s. Renu was led into the main room through a series of long stone and marble hallways; there were exquisite temple sculptures along the walls, and lush carpets on the floors. She heard the tinkle of water as they neared the main room and realized, when she entered it, that it was coming from a pink marble fountain in the center of the room. Four maidens rose out of the water, offering lotuses and with eyes that Renu could only assume were rubies. Beyond was a bed covered in sheets of shimmering silk and gold and beyond even that was a row of sculpted pillars that led into a private garden that Renu had never seen. And there, leaning against one of the pillars and looking out over the garden, stood the diamond merchant.
The servant who had shown her here had left, Renu noticed with dismay. She raised her chunni over her bald head and wondered whether to address the diamond merchant or wait for him to address her. She waited. After some minutes passed—during which Renu studied the women in the fountain—the merchant, without once turning around, said, “How long do you plan on standing there?”
Renu picked up her lehenga and hurried toward him. She stopped just before she reached him. He turned to face her. His face was still smooth, but his hair was thinning, she noticed. He had the same air of richness, of wealth, as the memsahib, but unlike her, whose expression was alert and sometimes anxious, he seemed bored. Bored in a way that Renu couldn’t possibly understand, not while standing in the most beautiful room she’d ever seen, not with a private garden, and a fountain, and a bed so richly made.
He brushed her chunni from her head and smiled sadly and said, “You look like the boy I always wanted to be.”
Then he looked at her, for so long that Renu didn’t think it possible without blinking. She wondered if that was her cue to do something but she couldn’t imagine what that might be. She raised her eyes to his and saw that he was hardly there; that his eyes had such a faraway look in them, a look of such forlornness that she wondered if it was best to simply leave. But then he took her hand. He gripped it, really, and it seemed to Renu that now he was pleading with her. Not pleading, no, but searching. Searching for something he had lost. As if she might know where it was. As if she might help him find it. Renu started to say she hadn’t the slightest clue, how could she, without even knowing what it was, but as soon as she opened her mouth he covered it with his, and kissed her.
* * *
And so that was how Renu came to be a lover to both the diamond merchant and the diamond merchant’s wife. Her days were divided between them. In the late afternoons she visited the merchant. They made love, then she filled his opium pipe and talked to him while he smoked—about her life, about the camp, once even about Neela—until he fell into a deep fog. Then he would wave her away. The evenings were the same as they had been: she helped the memsahib prepare for her evening with the diamond merchant, and then waited for her in her bed. The arrangement, if either was aware of it, didn’t seem to bother them. Besides, as Renu soon came to realize, the wealthy had only one rule: anything was allowed, or at least considered, as long as it didn’t diminish their wealth.
During one of her afternoons with the diamond merchant, after he’d begun to smoke, he asked her to tell him a story.
“What kind of story?” Renu asked.
“One that you heard a long time ago,” he said.
“A long time ago?”
She thought for a moment and then she began. “Once upon a time,” she said, “there lived a king with three sons. Now this king was old, and he knew he was going to die soon, but he wanted to leave his kingdom to his most worthy son. The one who would preserve it, be frugal with it. And so he decided to test them. He gave each of his sons a hundred rupees and an empty room. He told them that whoever could fill the room—fill it completely, without a single empty pocket of space—for the least amount of money would inherit his kingdom.
“He returned the following week and went to the eldest son’s room. The eldest son gave him eighty rupees back and the king saw that he’d filled the room with discarded paper. Old newspapers, really. And that he’d stuffed them into every corner of the room. The king nodded approvingly and went to the second son’s room. This son gave him ninety rupees back. The king was pleased, and saw that he’d filled the room with garbage. Lots and lots of garbage. But it was ingenious, and he’d only spent ten rupees. So then the king went to his youngest son’s room. Now when he reached this room, his son gave him ninety-nine rupees back. The king, as you can imagine, was astonished. ‘But how,’ he cried, ‘how could you possibly fill a room with one rupee?’
“The youngest son smiled. He opened the door and in the middle of it was a lit candle. The room was filled with light. ‘I spent seventy-five paisa on the candle,’ the son said, ‘and twenty-five paisa for a box of matches.’ The king was overjoyed, and so the youngest son, to great fanfare, was crowned king.”
At the end of the story Renu looked over at the diamond merchant, but he was asleep. Or at least his eyes were closed. Renu studied his face, in the dim of late afternoon, with the sweetness of the opium smoke drifting around her. All trace of boredom and pleading and searching were gone, his face was as simple and as incorruptible as a child’s. She wondered if that was an effect of the opium, or if that was his true self. Beyond that she wondered at how fond she’d grown of him. She wondered that she might even be in love with him.
* * *
The end came. The end did come. It was during one of Renu’s afternoons with the diamond merchant. She was packing his pipe, and he was watching her. “I’m sailing for Durban next week,” he said casually. “I’ll be back in three months.”
Renu looked up. “Durban? Where is that?”
“It’s in South Africa.”
“Where’s that?”
The diamond merchant rose from his divan and went to a teakwood cabinet in the corner of the room. He took a key from the inside of his silk kurta and opened it. Inside Renu saw a stack of bills, and boxes, and sheets rolled and tied with ribbon. It was one of these that the diamond merchant extracted and placed before Renu. She looked at him and then she untied it. It was a map, and though Renu had never seen one, she understood what it was immediately. It took her breath away. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen: the thick creamy paper, the countries strung together like jewels, the sprawling blue of all the seas she’d never seen.
“Where is it?” she asked again.
He pointed to Durban.
“And where are we?”
He pointed to Ahmedabad. Renu gasped. “So far away,” she said, breathing.
That night she lay in bed and thought about the map. Not so much about the map as what it meant. And she thought about the events of her life, none of them very interesting, she had to admit, but each of them a stepping-stone across a strange and lonely place. The diamond merchant would leave, and then he would return. Their triangle would continue, and then they would all grow old, old, old. In the end the diamond merchant and Savitri would have their money, and each other, but what would Renu have?
The thought of what she must do made her sad but Renu knew that every moment from when she’d stood outside the Delhi train station—every single one—had led to this one.
* * *
On the afternoon before the diamond merchant was due to depart, Renu came to him as usual. She wore her most beautiful lehenga, a deep turquoise with silver threading. When she entered he took her to his bed without a word and made love to her. Afterward she smiled at him, she took his face in her hands and placed it over her bare chest. He said, sleepily, “You know what, Renu? You’re the candle and the match.” Renu let out a cry. His words, his hot breath against her breasts seemed to her the truest effluence of love, and she thought for a moment—the briefest moment—that she would not do as she had planned.
In the end she sat beside him while he lay on his divan, and packed his opium pipe. He was talking about the mines he was to visit in South Africa. He had been there many times, and he told her about the people there, how dark and different they looked, how mysterious and bold and so black they were almost purple. He told her about the endless plains, reaching to a distant and knifelike horizon. He paid her no attention. And Renu, listening attentively, continued to pack his pipe. It was more than was necessary, but she could take no chances.
She waited while he smoked it. She leaned against his divan and watched. He closed his eyes. She continued to wait. She waited until the moon came up over his garden. The silver light creeping like hands across the grass and over the marble floor. She decided, Until it reaches my feet, that’s how long I’ll wait. And so she waited. And only when the moonlight touched the very tip of her heel did she rise and press her head against the diamond merchant’s chest, making certain it was still.
She took the key from under his kurta, opened the teak cabinet, and took out the stack of bills. But she had to open all the boxes to find what she was actually looking for. When she did she emptied the contents of the pouch onto her palm. And even in the moonlight they glistened, and they reminded her of the Shivaliks, their summits so pure, covered in snow and crystalline and shining, treacherous, and as deadly as diamonds.
* * *
The ship’s manifest recorded the diamond merchant as having boarded. Renu was shown, by no other than the ship’s captain, to her cabin. She had practiced deepening her voice so that when the captain said, “Does it suit your needs, sir?” Renu paused, settled the air deep in her throat, and said, “It’ll do.”
And it would: it was three large rooms, furnished handsomely, and she was provided with a personal servant. She waited for the captain to leave, and then she readjusted the pouch in the inside of her kurta, straightened her cap in the mirror, and realized the hardest part was over. She breathed, she let out a smile; she sat on the bed and thought not about the country she was leaving but about the people she’d already left. She thought about Gopichand, and the naïve, young love she had felt for him. She thought about Neela, sweet, scarred Neela, and how their love had defied everything—the hunger in the camp, the loneliness, the deprivation—until her husband had reappeared one day and taken her away. And she thought about the diamond merchant, the one who—in her own way—she had loved the most. She wondered first how long it would take them to notice the newly turned earth on the edge of his private garden. Then she wondered if she would ever love another as much as she had the diamond merchant, but it didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem possible that the heart could hold so much love, that it could hold so much and still keep itself from breaking.
One morning, at the end of the third week on the ship, the lookout sighted land. He yelled down from the crow’s nest and all the passengers scampered onto the deck to have a look. Renu saw it from the starboard side. At first it was only a thin line at the edge of the horizon. And for hours that’s all it was: a thin line. But even after all the other passengers had drifted away Renu remained on deck. She watched that thin line until evening then she went to sleep and woke up and watched it again. By now the coastline of Africa was clearly visible. She saw a cluster of outcroppings that looked like rocks; she realized they were buildings. The water became even bluer. It turned the turquoise of the lehenga she had left behind when she’d stolen the diamond merchant’s clothes. And then the wind shifted. It turned warm. And Durban came into view. She looked at it with pleasure, with such delight that her heart seemed to swell. And the warmth of the wind carried with it the scent of Africa. The scent of its soft green endlessness, its cracked roads and flat-topped trees, its red and lonely cliffs that baked under the hot sun. It smelled of its teeming cities and dusty bush, its antique shores pounded by so many seas, its breathless summer nights. She felt like she had been lifted from a previous life and placed here, on this ship, on the cusp of this vast and unknowable continent, the interior beckoning her like a moonlit road. But those roads would all come later. For now Renu let the warmth sweep through her and for the fourth and final time, she fell in love.