Seven

Kneeling in front of the wall on her side of the room, Reema places her hands on the rug the way she’s seen the others do on the yoga mats, palms flat, shoulder-distance apart. She lowers the top of her head to the floor and puts her weight on it, lifting her bottom in the air, straightening her legs. She did this as a child.

She kicks up one foot then the other, and both crash back down. She tries again. And again. A brief moment of inversion is all she wants. Things will revert to normal. Upside down is right side up now. Backwards is forwards. She kicks up both legs and her feet hit the wall; the top of her head feels like it will crack open and her neck strains.

The door opens.

‘How’s it going?’ Monica says.

Reema drops her feet to the floor and sits up.

‘Yeah, great,’ she says.

Monica doesn’t miss a beat — nothing to see here — as she puts her bag on the bed and kicks off her shoes. She turns to her suitcase on the floor, taking out a few items. She unfolds them, folds them back up carefully again.

Reema gets up and busies herself, tidying. Monica’s side of the room is ordered, while Reema has spilled the contents of her backpack out onto the floor and the bed, and scattered her toiletries and underwear around the bathroom. Sprawling, expanding, layers and layers of herself. Monica is Canadian, the kind of Indian cousin unused to chaos, the one for whom Delhi is a shock.

‘I like toilet paper in my washrooms,’ Monica told her the first night they were together in this room, going into detail about some of the pit stops she’d made to get here and the toilets she’d been in, struggling with faucets, hoses, and the absence of paper. As Reema listened, marking Monica’s wide Canadian vowels, she imagined the woman’s arrival in Delhi, the taxi from the airport, the constant honking of horns, the diffuse Delhi light. Monica, an amateur photographer, had guided Reema’s attention to the difference in the light in India, along with the vehicles, the disordered weaving of scooters, autorickshaws, and rickshaws through the streets lined with rubbish and sleeping cows.

‘I live near the lake,’ Monica said, and she described how she walked to work and to her workouts at the gym along Toronto streets that followed straight lines. Monica is a marker of lines of light, angles, and gaps in order, her ancestors’ caste long-dissolved in her education and dreams to succeed. Reema understood how this kind of cousin could be at once enchanted and yet disgusted by the sight of Delhi. Reema was born in India, but when Monica told her about the shops she’d been to in Delhi, the forts, the tombs and the gardens, Reema felt outdone.

‘I bought something in Delhi that I’m going to wear for the performance,’ Monica says, unfolding a bag from her suitcase.

Still, if Reema had known that Monica was taking the same train to Pathankot, she would have been happy for the company. She herself had arrived at the station in Delhi early, suddenly aware of her clothes, her hair, the way she moved, and that it was mostly only the men in the station who took note of her. She covered her head with her shawl and stood near the toilets where a few children slept. A man relieved himself just outside the doors, not bothering with a urinal, while families sat on the floor near the trickling urine and unwrapped steaming food from delicate foil parcels.

She’d decided she should wait in the café on the first floor. She pushed past people coming towards her on the platform, a crush of women with cloth-wrapped bundles on their backs, boxes on their heads, heavy suitcases, men sharing the weight of a trunk, stray children threading their way among the hundreds of legs. As she walked towards the stairs, she felt a tug at the base of her backpack, like a mouse gnawing at the nylon. The feeling was distinctly eerie. When she reached the café and took off her backpack, she saw the slit in the front compartment. She had worn a money belt for her passport and cash, and her phone had been buried deep within her clothes, but the slit from the knife had released her iPod into the hands of a thief, and now she had none of her music. Being a target for a Delhi thief had shamed her. She was a rich foreigner now, not a local, and could not be at home in the city of her birth.

She watches Monica carefully lift more items from her suitcase. Would Monica have had her pack slit at the train station? She’s a New World Indian who walks around with a camera strung around her neck like the most obvious of American tourists.

Reema shoves the dirty clothes from her railway journey into the bottom of her pack. She will need to do laundry. The nine hours overnight from Delhi to Pathankot were sleepless. The air conditioning in the first-class cars of the Dhauladhar Express seemed to have long-ago broken down, and there were stains along the seats and compartment walls that only heat, dirt and body oils could have produced. The stains gave her an odd, familiar comfort; she was in the right place, in this women-only compartment. But across from her on the upper berth was a middle-aged man, with his wife and teenage daughter cuddled together on the berth below him.

‘What are you doing here?’ she barked at the man in Hindi. When he shrugged and wrapped the brown woollen Indian Railways issue blanket around his bare feet, the daughter let loose a tirade of who-do-you-think-you-are, among other insults Reema didn’t have enough language to understand, let alone retaliate with. The woman on the bunk below Reema’s was a Swedish backpacker who said nothing to any of them. Where was Monica on that train? Would she have spoken up and asked the man to leave?

The man snored throughout the night, keeping Reema awake. In the blackness and the sawing of breath that smelled like rotten eggs, she crept from her bunk, put a shawl over her head, and, carrying her backpack with her, went into the corridor. Near one of the doors between compartments she set her pack on the floor, sat down and leaned against it, resting her head. Lights went on and off, doors opened, men walked past her in the darkness. Some tried to talk to her; others cursed her; a few seemed to pity her. Of course, she had made a mistake being in the corridor in the middle of the night. Then the yellowed clipping about the murdered Keralan woman on a train, sent by her father, came to her mind. Reema took herself back to the compartment and endured the snorts and grunts more easily, like one of the family. When she was picked up at the Pathankot station the next morning by Jyoti’s college friend, who had volunteered to meet her and Monica, her clothes smelled of urine.

On the floor beside her bed now, she spots a small piece of lined paper with neat handwriting. At the top centre of the paper there is a black and orange illustration of a clock. She picks it up. Names of tourist attractions in Northern India and their approximate distance from Delhi; a list of phone numbers next to names and descriptions of relations (‘Dad’s second cousin’; ‘Mom met their father in Montreal’); a list of yoga styles and associated teachers. Reema cannot fathom why people need to do so much, see so much, buy so much.

‘Is this yours?’ she asks and holds it up.

Monica turns. ‘Oh there it is,’ she says, taking it from Reema, sheepishly. ‘I’m lost without lists.’ She folds up the paper, opens the top drawer of the rosewood dresser, lifts out a magenta pashmina still in its clear plastic wrapping and places the list beneath it. She takes her choice of clothing into the bathroom.

When Monica emerges a few minutes later, she is wearing shalwar, not with a kameez but with a tank top. Reema tries not to look too carefully at the awkward combination, because, after all, who is she to say what’s the right way to wear Indian clothes.

‘A different look for me,’ Monica says. Reema knows that Monica is a banker. She pictures the financial sector uniforms — the tights and smart heels, a delicate string of pearls to set the look off — that Monica is probably used to. Wearing shalwar would feel daring.

‘You look great,’ Reema says.

Monica looks down at the folded layers of fabric falling to her ankles and then back at Reema. She shrugs.

‘I was fired from my job,’ she says.

There’s a long pause between them as the news lingers in the air for interpretation. Reema waits.

‘My company had a ninety per cent profit drop during the fourth quarter last year.’ More of a pause as the insects sing. ‘They gave me a box for my things.’ Monica throws up her hands in an oh well, then pulls the tank top down, over the waist of the shalwar, and ties the strings tighter. She leaves the room.

Reema sits on the bed. An office job would make her want to set fire to something. If she had to work in an office, she is sure she would smoke, ruin her voice, her skin, her teeth. Her brother is a lawyer who works with bankers. In the last few months he has phoned her with stories of events in the States. ‘One inelegant rogue French trader,’ he said, ‘and the banking industry is in crisis.’ She is only beginning to understand the economics of it, through names like Lehman Brothers twinned with the alarm in her brother’s voice. He told her about his close friend who received her notice to leave in the first days of the crisis but wouldn’t come out of her office. Reema imagined this woman her own age lying down on a grey carpet that smelled like vomit, curling up over her handbag, kicking off her court heels and letting the hole in her tights spread down her thigh as she lifted her knees to her chest. Reema has seen television clips of men in suits walking out of an office with their heads hung, carrying boxes of their belongings. But that image — of a woman in the foetal position on a carpet, with a wide tear in her stocking lengthening imperceptibly with each sob — makes her sad, and yet secretly triumphant over everything she and her brother ever argued about.

She looks out of the window of her room. Lemon trees, amaryllis blossoms. She thinks about the bulbul that perches on the railing of the veranda at breakfast waiting for scraps.

Anchor butter — that was the best, from New Zealand; we even had Anchor butter in Venezuela before the war, but after the war the Brits stopped subsidising New Zealand and the company nearly went bust. I was a man when the war ended, saved pennies to eat meals off campus, never found Anchor butter, and my best friend had to go back to live with his folks. After the war everyone was bust.