The Girl

SONIA FALEIRO

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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2006 Published in Penguin Books 2008 Copyright © Sonia Faleiro 2006 All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 9780143063445 This edition is for sale in the Indian Subcontinent only Typeset in Sabon by Mantra Virtual Services, New Delhi

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. www.penguin.co.in

For Milly

Prelude

A Fu n e r a l Our Lady of Eternal Benevolence, Salgado 8 November, 6.45 p.m. A large clod of lumpy grey earth was being shovelled on top of her casket as we arrived. We heard the flat, grimy thud and watched as it spilt down the sides of the smooth, nut-brown teak, crumbling in deathly slow motion, encrusting the casket like pastry bubbling into hardness until it was firmly covered and could be seen no more. A man in faded trousers and an old blue cap pulled over his ragged hair began levelling the earth, taking pleasure in his grim vocation. He bent low, moving steadily the tools of his trade that had seen so much they had jaded to the colour of rust. Then he stepped away and, grasping his shovel behind his back, stared quietly at the ground. Father Santana nodded at the gathering and in a single motion three fists uncurled. The air was thick with rose petals. Sweet, fleshy skins, red, yellow, pink, orange, waltzed with the wind before falling gently to earth. Her grave was a bed of roses. The sweet perfume of that deathly resting place rose higher and higher until it stole past the thick green leaves that shrouded me, past my knees and past my elbows, pausing thoughtfully near my

face before rushing through my nose and exploding in my head. The fragrance of red rose and pink rose and fresh rose and dead rose. Pretty flowers whose thorns would slit your skin and cover your hands with blood so thick you could draw finger pictures on a wall. Sweetness everywhere. The honey scent of the dead covering the dead. Then suddenly, I could see through the layers of stifling earth and freshly carved wood. She was unchanged, the Girl. Her lids scrubbed of kohl, her cheeks glowing bronze, expression serene. Her black eyes searched the cloistered casket with interest as a smile curled the edges of her mouth. For a moment I thought I must be dreaming. Not because I saw her—that is simple enough to explain—but because she smiled so contentedly. For she was not one to enter a room unless she had tried the exit, or learn a language without a word for ‘exit’, and she was found yesterday, sleeping in the sea, her hair entwined with coral, her heart unravelled by a school of fish resurrected by the goodness within her. But this is what I saw through eyes rich with love and longing. So if you told me instead that she lay writhing miserably, cranky in her need to escape, I would believe you and not wonder at your words. I would leave immediately, my limbs weighed down with the incomprehensible tiredness that sometimes accompanies unexpected delight and, when I was home, after two hours in a crowded Kadamba bus tilted sideways with the crush of overworked mortals, I would wait for her as patiently as she twice did for me. I would listen for the swelling sound of her sizefour footsteps as they neared the door and then paused, resting their weight, as her fingers treaded the wall towards the doorbell and pressed it. Then, only then, after the sound of that ring, her particular ring, had juddered through the veins of my sad, silent 2

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home would it be time for the fever in my bones to abate. Perhaps it will happen one empty hour when I can take no more. When I have scalded my throat with acid tears. Then she will appear by my side and gently stroke my hair. Curl down beside me, her chin softly eating into my shoulder, her hands walking slowly down my arm, the soft tickle of her troubled fingers instantly making the seconds of the minutes in the hours of this interminable life worth living again. But I saw her. And she looked happier than when we had last looked at each other with truthful eyes. Above us the sky groaned with horror. Waves of blue cloud swam heavy with rain, desperate, it seemed to me, to burst at their seams and pour down upon us. The wind was whipping the coconut trees into a frenzy. They bent low in elastic motion, twisting their leaves in a strange, sad dance to the warning whispers of a gathering gale. The priest said a prayer, and another, and a benediction: ‘In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our sister, and we commit her body to the ground. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord make His face to shine upon her and be gracious unto her and give her peace. Amen.’ We were a sight. Two grown men crouching behind an overgrown banyan tree whose roots swung morosely around us like snakes in slumber. The wind began to shriek. Father Santana’s surplice was flapping high before his face, ruffling the withering pages of his Bible. He licked his thumb and used it to separate the texts, pin down the prayers he had not had the time to memorize. Then he crossed his forehead, lips and chest with a long nail that glowed THE GIRL

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pink in the approaching night light. Finally, with a last, empty look towards the body he had bequeathed to God, he walked across the lemon-yellow grass to the cemetery gates. We watched as Father Santana approached, staring straight ahead, never once pausing to beckon his meagre flock to follow. When we meet priests, particularly young ones, we invariably compare them to Father Costa. He had been the parish priest of St Jude’s Church in Azul, the Village of the Dead. Miguel Costa had the beseeching eyes of a Hindi movie star and the bedside manner of a maudlin marquee mother. He had grated on our nerves as a crying infant does on a cramped bus discordant with noise and nausea. When they met him on the street his parishioners swiftly assumed a self-absorbed air and, nodding cursorily, hurried away in the opposite direction. Mama Lola, in particular, could not abide him. I believe she often told him so. Yet, after the good Father’s disappearance two days ago, Azul was stunned into an inexplicable gnawing grief. For, although the Village of the Dead is intimately acquainted with tragedy (so much so, policemen inveigled from the neighbouring village of Adolna are investigating the case with as much interest as they might the kidnapping of a pi dog), Father Costa’s disappearance leached of mystery and misfortune, the stench of which lingered stiffly in the salt air long after parents forbade their children to look for his body in the woods behind the chapel. Walking beside Father Santana was the Girl’s uncle. He was a small, pale man with soft grey eyes and a fleshy chin that suggested overindulgence and sloth. He seemed irritatingly harmless in his shiny shoes and the new suit which tried unsuccessfully to drape his yellowing corpulence. His air of apparent patience reminded me of my former piano teacher, a man who had subsequently revealed himself to be a high-risk 4

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gambler and kleptomaniac. In fact, he feigned such malleability, this uncle of hers, that it took me a minute to recall the fearful stories of his legendary temper. They said he was a sober, quiet man, a generous Catholic. Except when angered. Then his booming baritone froze humidity into shards of razor ice. It raced, like an overwrought monsoon, through Salgado, affecting malevolently all who stood in its path— languid cows, frantic lost dogs with their frayed collars unravelling with worry, old ladies who prayed silently as they walked, sellers of pão navigating the jigsaw of roads, waiting patiently for their luck to change. ‘I know how menacing he can be,’ I whispered to Simon. But he told me to stop being a fool. He said the man was in mourning. ‘But only because it’s protocol,’ he added thoughtfully. Anyone who had lain to rest an entire family could not truthfully mourn the death of a child, Simon explained. Especially if she was only the daughter of a sister he had never cared to know or wanted to love. ‘He is a monster,’ I replied. Then I turned my eyes to the two other mourners, a woman and a boy, friends or family, I knew not which, but for sure they were not beloved to the Girl for they shed no tears, and their parched eyes flickered from graves to sky with boredom. The thin sheath of lace that covered the woman’s face fluttered gracefully in the wind like a hand bidding goodbye to a family of favourites after lunch. She stood with the boy by her side as though in step to a funeral march she wished would end in time for tea. When the sacristan opened the gates, the group exhaled in unison. It was a small sound, an invisible sound. But in the hollow disquiet of the Salgado cemetery it echoed obscenely, bouncing its distaste off crumbling headstones, seeping deep into the moss THE GIRL

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that shrouded the walls of the inner sanctum, infesting the air like the stench of festering jackfruit. Later that evening, after too many glasses of beer had passed our lips, Simon and I agreed that a bereaved cupid on a spectacular tombstone had shivered at the intrusion, his marble bow gently melting under the weight of a stifling summer wind and an incomprehension of the human heart. The sacristan, whom Father Santana called Leon, locked the gates behind them. He pulled the chains tightly as though to test their strength and then followed the party of four down the pathway, past the imposing cream façade of the church, its sharpening shadow falling like a mirage on the football field opposite, and finally up the road towards the Girl’s uncle’s house. The house lies at the bottom of a verdant hill whose peaks spread like twin palms across the village. Had we been so inclined we could have walked all the way to the very top, where, amidst a flat green field studded with custard apple trees and carpeted with jasmine, sleeps a deserted temple inlaid with gold. As the quintet walked, their footsteps made hushed murmurs upon the concrete. Their bent bodies continued a slow fade, gradually appearing smaller as they trudged under an endless, open sky beside an explosion of giant mango trees shrinking, sighing, bending over backwards in their refusal to proffer shelter from the pinpricks of the gradual drizzle, to this party of fraudulent lamenters. We watched unblinking, afraid to miss a moment of the macabre charade. Then we spied the still, silent silhouette of the house as its turrets scraped the silver-grey sky. There it stood, imposing and impervious, challenging the rains to lash against it. We could hear the silent dignity with which the house awaited the funeral party, its endless front porch rippling like mercury; blink and it 6

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would disappear and take away with it our collective misfortunes. And more, harsher than anything we had felt before her death, we could feel the unspoken injustice of its stately peace being disturbed by the vulgarity of a suicide. The skies broke then, and the house was shrouded. We were soaked. Our clothes stuck to our skin, our eyes were blinded by the assault. Yet we did not, could not, move away from her grave for we knew it was the last time we would visit. Minutes later, with a bravado we did not feel, Simon and I, her friend and her lover, jumped over the cemetery gates. We stumbled in the stifling darkness until our eyes found her resting place. We waited as the flowers lost their colour and melted, petal, thorn, leaf, as the mud drowned limply. We stared silently, numb with cold, as the water nudged an elaborate wreath of sugar-pink roses into the mud, following it with our eyes and the tilt of our heads, the inclination of our bodies, as it floated gently away to another grave. Then the sky turned black and we could see no more.

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BOOK I

 LUKE

Cover photograph by Monica Cipriano Cover design by Nitesh Mohanty

ISBN 978-0-14-306344-5

MRP `150 ` (incl. 175of all taxes)

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