Caroline turned back to Asha, to complete her embrace; but Asha, it seemed, had had a change of heart since the door slammed shut and now, instead of coming forward, shrank away, back to the charpai, folding her limbs into a huddle.
‘Honey, oh honey! Don’t be scared – I’m here, and I’ll never leave you again. Never. I’m so happy I’ve found you. You’re happy too, aren’t you?’
Janiki waited for Asha to nod, but the girl did not react. She simply sat there, staring straight ahead as before.
‘Oh honey, say you’re happy I found you! I love you so much. I’m sorry, so sorry, you’re here and I’ll do my very best to get us out. I promise. I really promise.’
But Asha continued to cower and, far from showing happiness, the spark of animation she had shown on hearing her name, on calling out to her mother, her expression now reflected trepidation and distrust. Caroline noticed a tightening of the grasp that held her legs hugged tightly to her body.
Watching her, for the first time Caroline took in Asha’s physical appearance. And for the first time she acknowledged Asha’s almost ethereal beauty, which managed to shine through in spite of the veneer of abject misery that coated her both physically and mentally. The girl was the personification of distress, and yet instead of distorting her features that distress itself seemed somehow uplifted by resting on this girl; it glowed with a pain so exquisite and poignant Caroline could feel it almost physically, echoed in her own heart. Asha’s eyes were amber, like her own, but opaque; saying nothing, yet eloquent in their very lifelessness. Her features had a symmetrical swing; her skin, so fair for an Indian, was translucent; her cheekbones too prominent. Her clothing was ragged and dirty; her hair unkempt. Yet all of this seemed to accentuate her beauty rather than diminish it.
‘That hag!’ said Caroline. ‘The awful woman! Listen, Asha! I came here to rescue you, and I will. We’ve all been looking for you. Not just me: your daddy too, and Janiki. We’ve been looking for you for ages and now I’ve found you I won’t let you go again.’ Caroline couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a flicker of something in the staring eyes at the name ‘Janiki’. Certainly, Asha was closest to Janiki, and the fact that Janiki was also nearby must have given her… Hope? Longing? Or simply the absence of terror, a drawing back of shadows? Whatever it was, Caroline was encouraged, and continued.
‘Oh, Asha!’ she sighed. ‘Maybe you think I abandoned you. Maybe you think I didn’t love you, and that’s why I left you behind. It’s not true, my darling. I always loved you. There hasn’t been a day, a minute, a second, that I haven’t thought of you in all these years. I left you because – because…’
Because what? Caroline thought. What reason can I give, that she would understand? She stumbled on. ‘Because I was ill, Asha. I was lost, just like you are now, just not in a physical sense. I was lost in my mind, lost in a darkness I could not banish. I wish it wasn’t so. I wish it had been different, that we could have been together, that I could have been your mom all your life. But I can’t turn back the clock. I can’t change the past. But I can change the future, Asha, and I will. I promise. I will be a proper mom from now on.’
She talked. She talked to Asha as the shadows lengthened and the noises outside the room grew louder: female chattering and buckets clanging. She talked when the door opened about six inches, and a blackened aluminium pot was pushed through the opening at floor level – Caroline got a glimpse of a tiny hand, the hand of a child, pushing it in, the fingers flicking it forward, and then quickly jerking back to safety. The door was slammed shut again, the latch rasped, the lock snapped.
The pot contained rice soaked in a yellowish liquid. There were neither plates nor cutlery. By now Caroline was ravenous, and she supposed Asha was too. She forced herself to take three mouthfuls – scooping up the rice with her fingers – before giving up and turning away in disgust. Asha ate even less. No wonder she was so thin. So Caroline continued to talk.
Asha meanwhile huddled in her corner; now and again she fell asleep, her head lolling to one side, her body leaning abjectly against the wall. Even in her sleep she shifted several times, as if unable to find a comfortable position
Caroline kept on talking, in a voice that she hoped was calm and soothing and trust-evoking. She spoke about her life before coming to India, about her family, her dreams, her plans for Asha. Asha seemed not to be listening, but still Caroline talked, because she knew that somewhere, at some level of her consciousness, Asha heard and understood.
While talking Caroline tried to stay calm, but that calmness was filtering away with every passing minute. The endless waiting with no sign that it would ever end. Her ramblings for Asha’s benefit now seemed more banal even than the silences they broke; her ears constantly strained to pick up noises from beyond the door. Occasionally she heard voices or footsteps from the bowels of the house but they never came up to this floor. Her sense of frustration was like a rising tide of boiling water within her; she wanted to get up, move around, stretch her limbs, aching from so much sitting. Occasionally she did; but the cubicle was too small to bring any relief and every time she simply flung herself back onto the mattress. Only Asha seemed resigned to this infinity of waiting; or rather, she didn’t wait at all, but simply existed, as if her mind had lost the capacity to measure time, to even conceive of a better future, to hope for change. As if she had given up.
Near the door was a rusty pail, which obviously served as a toilet and also had obviously not been changed for a day or two. Caroline had grown used to the stench by now; occasionally she stood up and walked to the opening that served as a window to sniff the fresh air that seeped in through the wooden slats. She looked through the windowpane, but it was so smudged that not much could be seen except the vague outline of the opposite building, an almost black tenement with barred windows just like this one. Caroline inspected the window more closely, to see if there was any chance of opening it, but it was nailed securely shut, and the bars outside it were obviously solid, so that even if she broke a pane of the glass there could be no escape that way; nor would shouting down to the street be of any use, for who would hear them? And who would care?
Asha was asleep again, huddled against the wall, and Caroline took the liberty of touching her again, helping her down into a lying position and covering her with one of the torn sheets. Asha did not wake. Caroline longed to partly undress her, to check her for wounds; she longed to stroke her hair. If there was one thought that made this predicament bearable it was the thought of Asha. She may have been impulsive, reckless, headstrong, giddy – but she had been right. She was with Asha. Better that she should be with Asha, than that Asha should be alone.
The night seemed even more endless than the day; the sounds filtering in from the street, muffled though they were, helped keep Caroline awake. The street had been quiet during the day; now, at night, it seemed to wake up and the melange of loudspeaker music, raucous laughter, shouting and a thousand other noises conspired to ensure she could not escape from her carousel of thoughts for even half an hour at a time.
She hugged Asha to her, kissed the top of her head. She smelt; she had obviously not had a bath or washed her hair for days. Caroline pulled her closer yet, and closed her eyes, and somehow, perhaps through sheer exhaustion, dozed off.
It seemed only seconds had passed when she was abruptly shaken out of her restless nap. The light bulb glared overhead; there were voices in the cubicle, loud male voices, and, as she saw on rubbing the sleep from her eyes, the men to go with them. Beefy Indian men, clones of each other, and of every Bollywood villain who ever scowled on an oversized hoarding on a Bombay street corner: the thick moustaches, the slicked-back greasy hair, the sideburns, the puffy jowls, the hooded long-lashed eyes. Caroline would have laughed at the cliché if she did not feel more like crying.
The woman was there too, chattering loudly and coarsely, pointing and glaring at her. She bent over and snatched Caroline’s handbag, which was lying on the floor. She opened it, found the purse and took out the knife and the rest of the paper money. She threw the bag back onto the floor, counted and folded the hundred-rupee notes and stuck the wad into the neckline of her blouse.
‘Don’t try any trick, we got knife! We got gun!’ said one of the men, and ‘Who are you?’ said the other. ‘Why you come here?’
‘I’m her mother,’ said Caroline, ‘and I’m staying with her.’
At that moment, Asha woke up. Rubbing her eyes, she squeaked, ‘Mom? Mom? I’m scared!’
‘Don’t be scared, honey. I’m with you.’
‘She talking?’ said the first man.
‘Of course she’s talking. She’s my daughter.’
‘You going. We not needing you here. She is ours.’
‘She’s not. She’s my daughter and I’m not leaving her anywhere.’
‘Mom, Mom!’ Asha kept crying, clinging to Caroline.
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. I won’t let them take you away.’
There followed a conversation in Hindi, of which Caroline understood not a word; except, now and then, the word ‘foreigner’, and ‘English’ and, occasionally, the name Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri, that rang a bell. Wasn’t it the name that Janiki had found on one of her Internet searches? The name they’d all grasped like drowning people grasped at a lifebuoy, only to discard as useless?
One of the men pulled out a black brick-like gadget, which Caroline recognised as a mobile phone. He pulled out an antenna, punched one of the keys and spoke some sharp words in Hindi, eyes fixed on her all the time. Caroline could only recognise the word ‘Kamini’ every now and then. The man listened, nodded, then put away the phone. He spoke to his companion who, abruptly, spat on the floor and, with quick shooing gestures towards the door, said in English:
‘You can go. We don’t want you. Only girl. You free.’
‘No! You’re not taking her anywhere!’
Asha clung to Caroline.
‘Mom! Mom! Stay with me!’ she cried.
‘I’m staying with you, honey. They’re not taking you away.’ To the men, she repeated: ‘I’m staying with her. You can’t take her away.’
One of the men tried to pull Asha away, but she screamed and clung to Caroline. ‘Mom! Mom! I’m scared!’
There was a struggle; Caroline holding onto Asha and pulling her away, Asha screaming and clinging. The other man pulled out the phone again and made another quick call.
Putting the phone away, he spoke sharply to his friend, who let go of Asha.
‘OK OK. You can come. Both of you can come. You come with girl. But you come quietly otherwise I shoot you. I got gun.’ He tapped his pocket, where indeed a gun-shaped bulge was visible.
‘Where are you taking us to?’
‘You will see. Better place than this, to be sure. We take her, with or without you. But better with you.’
The man strode over to the charpai and made as if to grab Asha again, but she shrieked and clung to her mother. Caroline laid a protective arm around her, hugged Asha against her.
‘Don’t touch her. We’ll come. We can talk. I can pay for her, buy her off you. We are wealthy foreigners. Take me to whoever is your boss and I’ll talk to him.’