Girls Who Stray

Anisha Lalvani

I have been wandering these streets all day. Driving around Delta, through sectors Alpha, Beta, Block A to J, in circles. Biding my time, rolling up the tinted windows against the white sun.

Driving past his construction sites, past the white apartment complexes, their foundations obscured by billboards. Svelte blondes in yoga wear meditating in serene forests, gleeful gap-toothed children. Corporate types shaking hands. One by one by one, I drive past them all. ‘Casablanca: A World Apart’, I read once again at the entrance. He may be inside right now on a site visit, approving raw material, doing any one of those unnameable things that is making all this happen, or he may be in the corporate office in Gurgaon.

And on the other side of the highway – there it is as always, the entrance to the village. I screech to a stop in the middle of the highway, echoing the gruff volley of abuse in my head. Look back at the men driving past, plaster the sweetest smile I can at heads that poke out of windows. Crazy fucking bitch – I let them pass, one by one. Let them all pass. Let it all pass. Then, before the next car can overtake, I make a hair pin U and turn off the tarmac into the village. Relieved for no reason, I bump along the open drains of plastic and sludge. Past, once more, the kirana stores of paan packets, ladoos and kachoris leeching oil and flies, advertisements on crumbling walls – ointments to increase the sex drive, astrologers to revive your business, an unused post box with a dozen fluorescent bills saying ‘PG for girls’, ‘English Tushuns’, ‘Repair Electronix Items’ . . .

Today as well, I take it all in – the women in their pallus and bangles, boys in acid-washed jeans, children sucking jellied lollipops. The Wah Ji Wah restaurant in slumber now; it will blink alive tonight, blasting Haryanvi pop from the speakers.

And the nouveau millionaires – the once land-rich farmers sitting cross-legged on charpoys, shadowed by their mansions. They flick channa into their mouths, look around listlessly, watch their sons race each other in their Lamborghinis, their Maseratis that bump off the dirt tracks to the silken highway.

Suddenly I swerve, missing the jagged rump of a cow, its face buried in plastic.

I catch my breath, tell myself to focus, focus, please just focus, damn it.

Two weeks since that night. Two weeks of aimless wandering, cruising the highway and thoroughfares of Noida, inching through the afternoons. Driving past his construction sites, and come evening, back to the frenzy of the village again. Driving up and down the gallis for hours. Watching everything, everyone – the same families, women cutting vegetables, the poorest sitting on their haunches on top of garbage mounds as high as the neighbouring mansions. Keeping myself busy scrutinising, conjuring back stories – who inherited which property from which grandparent, who secretly hates their husband? Who is plotting to kill their sister-in-law tonight?

Anything to keep the mounting dread at bay.

I feel somewhat comforted here, at watchful ease amid the chaos of everyday life. Far more than in the township that is my new home.

And today too, I buy the Loksatta clipped to the line outside the pharmacy. Go back to my car, bang the door shut. Sit back and scan every page, run my finger across every headline, inside and out, for any hint of that Friday night, two weeks ago.

***

Night now and close to the mall, I spot the wings of the angel glow against the sky. On the bench outside with outstretched arms sits Ronald McDonald, the eternal joker with a few tricks up his sleeve. And sitting beside Ronald, he is waiting for me. In a sharp black suit, the top buttons undone, the jacket folded on Ronald’s outstretched arm. Right leg bent on top of the left, the gleaming leather shoe ticking like an alarm.

He holds a burger in one hand that drops mayonnaise on his pants. Holds a toy in the other – a tiny wide-eyed doll with a thick ponytail. I can’t see it from here of course, but by the swish of its hair I can tell what it is. He always teased me saying he would get it for me.

Our weekly date night and he has bought me a Happy Meal.

I park the car a little beyond sight, switch off all the lights. Watch him search these streets, scan every car for me. And even though I am the one lurking at a distance, I can feel his eyes poring over me, my body, inside it. And even though I am the one watching him sitting in this parking lot, so alone, just a man after all, I know he knows everything I have done all day, everywhere I have gone and wished further to go.

I wait. And watch him wait. And wait and watch him wait for me. Take off the ticking watch, shove it in the glove compartment. Prick my ears at the hum of the dead engine.

He’s looking this way now, shuffling, rising to stand.

Our eyes lock on to each other’s. I slide the sweaty key into the ignition, slipping, sliding back in, acting out a well rehearsed script. Not looking down, back, not even shifting my eyes to the rear-view mirror, I reverse straight through, straight out the open gates and onto the highway, a deer in retreat, eyes locked on his the whole time.

Now he is at some distance and I breathe a sigh of relief.

But wait – he’s walking towards me now, ambling along, hands in his pockets.

He’s smiling knowingly, widely.

I am sickened by him. Sickened by his arrogance, his knowing that I will fail, again and again, that again and again I will return to him, and again and again I prove him right, and I am sickened by this, by him and by myself.

I look at the road ahead that stretches empty for miles, only lit by my headlights. Now is the chance I must take. I step on the accelerator as his ambling turns to a jog, as he calls out my name.

Back on the road now, I am already speeding down the highway.

But he’s running behind, shouting, gasping for air, so pathetic, so sad I almost stop. From the rear-view mirror, I see him now stop, bend over, catch his breath. Flail at me with those all-seeing eyes even as he diminishes in the distance, moving further and further away, the lord and master left coughing up the fumes in my wake.

Sliding past the automated gates, descending into the parking lot, I slither past the pillars, past a few cars, past a family approaching their car. The fourth-floor A-Wing family – the kids shouting, hitting each other, the girl whining, the father on the phone . . . Chup kar! chup abhi!

Past all this, weightless, I drive to our designated yellow box at the very end.

Turn off the engine, look at the white wall ahead. Slowly inch to look around. The family in their car now. Radio on, they take a lifetime, but finally they drive off. I inch my eyes back to the white wall in front of me. Wait. Clasp my palms to my mouth, grab the air pillow and scream. Weightless, exhausted, like the Happy Meal marionette he thinks he can make me, I collapse on the steering wheel as another day seeps away, as the horn blares a warning that echoes through the parking lot across the night.

Three nights later, a notification drop-down and the passport photo of a missing schoolgirl flashes on my phone. Her eyes frozen, already witness to her future. Thankfully, just a WordPress blog of a citizen-journalist type, I realise, and put the phone away. A week later, a small report in the bottom right of Navbharat Times, third page under the city beat, three children missing on their way back from school.

The son of a dhobi and two sisters – daughters of a peon from a nearby warehouse.

But there’s nothing major yet, nothing out in a big way. Still, I keep my eyes peeled, my ears to the ground, trail the gossip of maids and watchmen, the conversations of aunties and uncles on their evening rounds discussing rising oil prices or the scams of the newly elected MLA. Picking up every hint, stitching it all together. Making mental notes every minute. And he knows I am doing this, I know, his antenna always alert, although he pretends not to, continues with his calculated aloofness, always business as usual, a satellite in a distant orbit.

And he is letting me do this right under his nose too, granting me these little liberties, allowing me my imagined victories. Calls me his doll. Tries to make a fool of me. But I am picking up his ways – does he know this? Playing the ingénue – clueless, dripping with honey. Secrets buried beneath more as we scrutinise the other in secret. I can be good at this game too, he must have realised, enjoying it as much as he is, relishing it, conjuring up new tactics with every manoeuvre. How I love a good game. Hidden chambers of the mind, everything open to speculation – every conversation, every smile, every wink, a gentle caress, groove marks encircling the neck, a faint wound on the flesh – could this be a sign?

But sometimes I become weary of all this; don’t you tire too, old man? Sometimes I want to just plead with him to stop, to let our guard down with each other, to expose my game and his, to let go once and for all, to finally tell him that I know what all this means, what he is trying so hard to do – the sideways glances, his lingering gaze, the sudden concern, fast-food date nights, electric-blue bowling nights on the weeknights in lonely malls.

I know what all this means, I want to tell him. I know. But I don’t. I play along. I go to him, despite that night and what I saw, what I did.

Old man, sick man, dead man. I kiss his eye, his eye, and hungrily his mouth.

This morning too, I watch him chant at the doorway of the bedroom, and as he leaves for work I make my way home. Rising in the elevator of my building, I fix my eyes on the CCTV, knowing I am making eye contact with him right this very moment as he sits in his office, tie askew, legs dangling from the table as he puts out one cigarette, lights another, glances at something on the iPhone, but inside, invisible to all but me, there is a definite tension, the nerve that throbs at the corner of his eye. And maybe, as he looks at my grey-and-white projection, maybe for a moment, he is overcome by tenderness. This tenderness that laces our affair like a threat – it comes from nowhere and wraps itself around him, and maybe, just this once, he lets go of his vigil, granting himself this one indulgence.

His finger touches my face on the screen, traces down my body, and I can feel it here and now as I exit the elevator on the seventeenth floor, Kenny G’s saxophone lending to this moment a forced insouciance, and I get back home to the newscaster announcing the Nifty has closed at an all-time high yesterday as my father flicks the channels and my grandfather drifts to who knows where inside his room.

Down the passage, straight through the door on the left into my room. I draw back the curtains the maid opens every morning, striking the sun on my face. Now it is dark again. I collapse on my bed, yell through the closed door to my father that the school friend I spent the night with at the other end of the city, in Dwarka, is just fine, as I am.

Everyone is just great.

Then shut my eyes.

Still chilled by that night. It won’t go away, even now, a whole month later. Not the click and reel, although I hope it will get better with time, that even if the pictures remain,

the fear will pass.

But it hasn’t. And when I close my eyes, I can see everything that happened that night. Him, with those men, in that house, with those children. Creeping at the back of the house, shovelling, smoking, looking tense. I could see it all from the window. At first I had doubted myself, wondered if I was too high, too drunk, too drugged, too something, but they kept coming back, over and over again, those images, like a click and reel. On my morning and evening walks; as I half-heartedly applied to, readily rejected, job offers in the middle of online interviews; at the dining table, in the middle of conversations about nothing with my father; and through those aimless afternoons driving through the neighbourhood, always his construction sites in the foreground.

And finally, I faced the fact that they were too real, I could not have made them up, even if half-deranged. There they were again, those images, speeding through my mind with full force, each sharper, clearer, more vivid than the one before.

So mouth firmly shut, too scared to change anything, any one thing that might cause any kind of disruption, the tiniest disequilibrium, to the perfect universal order of things, I continue as though nothing has changed. During the day, I saunter through the malls, the highway cafes – to buy time, procrastinate, postpone, defer. I concern myself with the task at hand – the mall rats to observe for hours, the infinite entrapments on my phone, the right perfume to suit my mood, my personality type, the right body mist to match my sun sign. The right topping for my cappuccino, the right pickles for my Sub sandwich.

And as I wander I construct elaborate plans in thin air – when to give my testimony to the cops, what I will say, the specifics of the night, the images in my head finally exposed to another, the fear finally shared. I imagine what will eventually happen to him – no sentence or incarceration perhaps, but the media will hound him for sure, and he will be left with a ruined public image for a long, long time.

But at night I still go to see him in places where we have always met – the bowling alley, the parking lot of McDonald’s, his property sites of the future, his penthouse in his unfinished apartment complex, racing in his silver Jaguar on the highway to keep the game going, a barrage of sweet nothings to one another. Or driving in his BMW through the gates fitted with hoardings of even more svelte women in white tights meditating against the hills. The gates open for us and he parks before the giant pits fitted with foundation slabs. We walk up the fifteen–sixteen flights of stairs of his tower block still wet with cement. We reach the top floor, and then . . . only a staircase jutting out into the sky.

I look at this staircase. I look at the night sky beyond.

Turn around to him, fear up my spine like a thousand mice let loose. Wait. Has he brought me here to push me off? To finish me off once and for all, his only witness to that night?

Unsure of what I would do, of who I was?

He’s a thick mask to me since that night, one month and three days ago. I once thought I knew him, for a brief window of time. But he’s inscrutable to me again. And I’m the same to him.

So I come to see him at night, fearing him, wanting him, unsure if he will in fact finish me off. 

And as I drive home every morning, relieved to be alive, back to another day of wandering, I know there is no other way for now. And the fear swells as I drive home – what if instead I am eventually found out? Witness to, accomplice, co-conspirator. But then I placate myself, tell myself not to worry, we are cocooned by the web of his networks and his money, will always be. There is always somebody that can be paid off, hushed up, even permanently if needed. This is child’s play compared with what he faces every day.

But still, I scan the newspapers, cover to cover. Look online frantically, search for children, murder, filthy, depraved rich, again and again, but very little, almost nothing shows up, even now.

A few more poor dead children mean nothing to this city.

I am a coward, I know this of course. This should have stopped a long time ago. I have enough evidence now to put him in the white glare of the world’s radar. But I don’t, and I don’t even try, don’t wrestle with myself even once.

Instead, I continue to play these mind games with him, as he does with me, gripping tight the rope, making sure it never slackens. And so, as the days drag on, the months, we carry on in this strange tautened limbo that we keep testing, like pigeons pacing gingerly on livewire, cooing to ourselves in respite.

But for how long can we go on like this with suspicious minds, I wonder, as I walk to the kitchen for a mug of black coffee, as I nod in passing to my father, as I overhear my grandfather snoring, as I firmly shut and then lock the door of my room behind.

And it comes back of course, it does, this morning, as it could any morning, any evening – after my avoiding it for days, roaming the city in firm denial. Me crouching next to her on the ground, them digging frantically. Then me lifting her up with them, even though there was no need. The two men would have managed fine.

Me throwing her into the pit with them. Then turning around and scraping dirt from the inside of my nails as I heap the mud on top of her, bit by bit, layer by layer, burying the dead girl in the backyard of the brigadier’s house.

***

This is an excerpt from Girls Who Stray, out now from Bloomsbury India and available to buy here. 

About the Author

Anisha Lalvani has lived in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and London. She has a Master’s of Arts degree in English Literature (Honours) from Mumbai University. She has worked in publishing and on various literary projects including the literary television programme Kitaabnama: Books and Beyond, and the Jaipur Literature Festival. She currently works in communications at a leading think tank that engages with the nexus of environment, economic opportunity and human well-being. Girls Who Stray is her first novel. You can find her on Instagram @anisha.lalvani.54 or on X @AnishaL_Writer.