Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [32]
"Thank you for the ginger biscuits," she murmured to Ali.
Ali went to the pantry and came back with a bottle of water and two bruised apples. In elaborate Urdu she could barely follow, he asked Peter for directions to the bus station. Peter instructed Ali to take enough money with him to buy the bus ticket to Patna for her, so she wouldn't have to take out her cookie tin in the crowded station.
IN HER PERSONAL dire-straits scenario, she'd always planned on escaping to Bangalore by train. She'd never anticipated taking the intercity bus. Buses were for laborers and farmers, the very poor. Intrastate buses ran every few hours, daily, west to Patna. From Patna, she could continue to Varanasi and Allahabad. Given the elasticity of space on the roof and floor, there was always room for last-minute boarders to squeeze in. People who ride by bus are humble, she'd been told, and respectful to their economic betters. Space could always be cleared for a young college girl in a T-shirt and jeans.
But going all the way across India by local buses—anything beyond Varanasi—was like voluntarily entering a black hole, especially the black hole of central India called Madhya Pradesh, with its jungles and tribals, and hoping to come out the other end somehow intact. A distant relative of her mother's, the family's lone adventurer, had once made it all the way to Jabalpur, the equivalent of the place where ancient mariners assumed they would fall off the edge of the world. Central Madhya Pradesh still had places where even the police were afraid to go. And Jabalpur was not even a third of the way to Bangalore.
On the four-hour trip to Patna, she could still smell the mud and the decayed mangoes, the taste and rubbery feel of something terrible in her mouth, the searing pain, and even more, the transformation of a handsome boy, dimples and all, into a monster. Walking out of her house as a confident, desirable bride-to-be in a flashy sari, in a red Suzuki, wondering, Coffee or a sandwich? And running back sick, her sari wet with blood and men's stuff she never knew about. Jism. On the bus, an old man who boarded late and could have sat anywhere took the aisle seat next to her and almost immediately put his hand over her breast, as though he owned it, as though it was something he'd bought along with his ticket and paan, even as the outskirts of Gauripur were passing by. He was looking straight ahead, and she stared at his unshaven white stubble, his dirty white kurta, and his jaws working mightily on his betel leaf. Then she stared down until he removed his hand. He got up and chose another seat.
SONALI'S TWO ROOMS were not far from the bus station. s.Das, the buzzer panel read.
"I couldn't call, Sonali-di," Anjali apologized as soon as Sonali unlocked her front door. They spoke in Hindi, as was their custom. "It was all so sudden."
"Do they know you're here?" Sonali asked that with a smile. "Anyway, come in." She eased the knapsack off Anjali's shoulder and carried it indoors. "It isn't much, but we aren't complaining."
Sonali and her little girl slept in the back room, much in the way Anjali and her mother shared a bed in Gauripur. Sonali had gained ten kilos since the divorce. At twenty-four she looked more like a younger aunt than an older sister.
It wasn't late, barely past seven o'clock, but little Piyali was already asleep on the chowki in the bedroom, a bony leg nestling a bolster and an elbow shading her eyes from the ceiling light. In a way, Piyali was lucky. Her father had dropped out of her life. No visits, no checks, no harassments, no disappointments. Anjali reached out and stroked the child's hair.
In the tiny kitchen alcove, Sonali put the kettle on the gas stove and spread salty crackers on a chipped plate. "So, what now, Anjali?"
"I had to, didi," Anjali said, "I had to leave." Anjali longed to talk woman-to-woman, for the first time in her life. As Sonali slurped down tea, Anjali recounted the assault by Subodh Mitra.