‘Do you let your children play outside on the road, Pinto?’
‘In Jammu? Yes, ma’am, all the childrens play on the road. The house is too small for them to play in there, ma’am.’
‘But don’t you worry about them getting run over by a truck?’
‘No, ma’am, because the driver of the truck will have his childrens playing on a road somewhere, too, and he will not want them to get run over, so he will not run over anyone else’s childrens.’
This was karma working as it was supposed to, Annie guessed.
‘You worry about other people’s children and your own children,’ Heavenly said, although her eyes were closed and Annie had assumed she was sleeping. ‘This is a lot of worry.’
But worry was part of being a parent. It simply had never occurred to Annie during all her years of child-rearing that terrible things would not happen to her children just because she would not do terrible things to anyone else’s. Where Annie came from, one assumed the worst and worked backwards from there.
Watching those fat beaded ankles out the window of the car, she had to wonder if maybe the Indian way was better. Maybe the baby’s mother never so much as dreamed that any ill would befall her darling, just left it to destiny. That way, what would be would still be, and she had just saved herself the worry of it.
Annie didn’t think she had been more protective of her babies than any other mother she knew, yet Daisy — for all those withering pronouncements about other people being pathetic — had grown into a chronic germaphobe. Annie had asked their doctor about it when her daughter was only ten, because she was so insistent on not touching door knobs or escalator rails, shopping-trolley handles, other girls’ hands — she would even make Annie remove the straw from a soda at McDonald’s and throw it away in case it had been touched by someone else on the way to her cup.
The doctor had rolled his eyes and said it was no surprise kids were paranoid because they were taught to be at school, and sometimes, he said, looking over the top of his bifocals in a way that only a certain sort of doctor seemed to manage, at home.
Annie had handwash in the bathrooms and by the kitchen sink, and she had not been able to watch her kids’ noses run for even a second without snatching a tissue and wiping them, but she was not herself overly afraid of germs.
Daisy remained cautious on that front, and a few others. She didn’t like unfamiliar food or sleeping in a bed other than her own or using public restrooms, although she was better about most things than she had been during those awful dark teenage months when Annie had feared so greatly for her survival.
Now she might use the end of her sleeve to open a door, but she could walk into a room full of strangers and charm them without even thinking about it. Germs aside, she wasn’t generally afraid.
And neither was Ben, although Annie worried even more over the physical risks he took now. Maybe her over-protectiveness was why he took the risks. Maybe it was why he answered Hugh’s emails but not hers. Maybe he didn’t want to tell her things because he thought she would try and stop him or nag him, which she didn’t think she would, though she might express her worry.
She pursed her lips to push away the thought of her son avoiding her (and abseiling), and concentrated instead on Mumbai, stretching out along the side of the freeway, one identical suburb blending into the next.
If she closed her eyes for ten minutes, she was sure when she woke up the scene outside the window would be exactly the same — exactly the same as the one on the drive in from the city the day she first arrived. Mile after mile after dusty, dirty mile.
She had forgotten on her regular route that took her from Bandra to South Mumbai that this city had twenty-four million people in it and most of them didn’t live down there: they lived in these grimy high-rises stretching back into the haze, or in the patchwork of slum buildings that spread like weeds across the ground in front of them.
Annie looked over at Heavenly, who still seemed to be sleeping. She looked older in repose. Her hands were very wrinkled, and she was tiny beneath her orange tunic; her legs like little sticks almost disappearing into the grey upholstery.
Annie leaned back and thought of her mother, how frail she had become in the past few years, how that tin in the corner shop had dropped and ripped open her skin, how hard it was to see strength of spirit trumped by weakness of flesh. Awake, Heavenly Hirani had the air of a wise, mysterious warrior. Asleep, she was a little old lady. Still, that seemed comforting more than anything else, and on thinking that, Annie closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep herself.
When she woke up she had a crick in her neck and the landscape had changed.
They were no longer on the freeway but on a four-lane road filled mostly with the colourful trucks she kept seeing everywhere with their Horn Please OK (India is Great) signs painted on to them.
The high-rises were gone, as were the slums, and instead they were driving through a shonky mixture of rural and industrial wasteland. A pipe factory sat in the middle of a string of green fields, fat cows grazing nearby, then a couple of miles later, in the middle of a vast expanse of dirt, a Mercedes dealership sprouted.
Nothing quite made sense, like in a dream. It seemed reasonable to have a yard of broken-down trucks in the middle of nowhere, but not a mile down the road — with nothing in between — to have an enormous Thai restaurant, tattered prayer flags sagging in the heat, the CLOSED sign slumped against the boarded-up door like a drunken customer. Where enough people desperate for a laksa would come from to fill such a vast eatery Annie could not imagine.
As she was trying to, Pinto slowed down and turned off the main road onto a dirt track leading towards a distant mountain.
Away from the traffic, the landscape brightened. The sky ahead was blue — the hazy layer of pollution clinging to the metropolis they had left behind — and although the track was orange with dust, along the sides of it brave trees bloomed green and gutsy, their spindly trunks out of tune with their lush foliage.
The road curved and a wide clean river emerged beside them. With the sapphire sky, the distant mountains, and the serene beauty of the gently-bowed brick bridge across the glassy river, it was starting to look like the sort of travel destination that Annie had seen in the pages of glossy travel magazines: nothing short of spectacular.
‘This is very good bridge,’ Pinto said. ‘I never come to this bridge before.’
‘This is a five-star bridge,’ Heavenly agreed, grinning at Annie. ‘My own designation.’
As they reached the middle of it, Annie looked north, where the river widened and a smattering of fishing boats were moored on water, so still and inviting that she couldn’t believe this was the same country where stagnant brown puddles grew plastic shopping bags like lily pads.
Pinto drove slowly across the bridge, then turned down another dusty road, still heading towards the mountain. Now the landscape changed again: strange flat-topped pyramid-like structures rose out of the dry mud in the bare fields beside the road.
‘What are these?’
‘These are bricks, ma’am,’ said Pinto. ‘I see bricks like these before. You see each field is big and square with trees around the outside? In the monsoons, these fields are rice paddies. But now, the peoples make bricks from the mud on the ground because when the monsoon comes, the mud is staying mud.’
‘So they’re stacking the bricks to dry in the sun? Will that do it?’
‘No, ma’am,’ Pinto slowed down at the side of one of the fields. ‘See this stack close to us is uncooked brick? But behind, ma’am, is cooked brick.’
On closer scrutiny, in the same-shaped stack further away the bricks were a darker colour. As Pinto explained it, the uncooked bricks were stacked around a central open fire with air gaps at regular intervals, then a final layer of cooked bricks was added around the outside, creating — to all intents and purposes — an open-topped kiln.
‘You have these in your village?’ Heavenly asked Pinto.
br /> ‘Yes, auntie. In Jammu. I build my house with these bricks.’
As they continued down the dusty road, she soon saw how the cooked bricks were used when they passed a particularly dark woman walking along the road carrying a pile of them — on her head.
Annie wound down the window. It must have been forty degrees outside, yet the woman, in a light-green top and sari skirt, was walking with the grace of a gazelle. The muscles in her stomach would have put anyone lifting weights and sweating through spin classes in a Western gym to shame.
As they rounded the next corner, Annie saw where the woman was heading.
Right beside the road a house was being built, by hand, by what looked like one single family.
‘Can we slow down, Pinto? I want to watch this,’ Annie said.
As they cruised by she saw another woman, very similar — a sister perhaps — to the one they’d passed, walking around the side of the house with another stack of bricks on her head.
Annie calculated she must have been carrying twenty at least. No wonder she was so thin! Nothing more than muscle and sinew.
‘The women in this village do not need yoga,’ Heavenly said. ‘But they do need laughing.’
On this side of the house, a third woman was standing on a rickety bamboo scaffold and, as Annie watched, the brick carrier reached up and took two bricks off her head, then passed them up to the one on the scaffold, who spread a layer of mortar from a bucket at her feet on the wall she was building, and added the two bricks, then reached for two more.
In the shade of the building, two men were asleep next to a tethered goat. Next to them, a little boy was playing with a baby, rolling a ball towards it and laughing as its fat little hands reached in front but failed to get a grip on the toy.
‘Why aren’t the men helping?’ Annie asked.
Pinto shrugged. ‘Sleeping,’ he said, as if that were enough of an excuse.
Heavenly shrugged, too, but managed to get an eye-roll in with it.
‘So that’s their own house?’ Annie asked.
Heavenly squinted to get a better look. ‘I think so.’
‘And if the moneys run out, they stop building it for a while. This is so, auntie?’
‘This is usually so.’
‘But where would they get the money from in the first place?’
Pinto shuffled in his seat. ‘These peoples is not your family, auntie?’
‘Not these ones,’ Heavenly said.
‘So I think these peoples come to Mumbai and work for the moneys and save their investments to come home and make bricks from the fields for their house.’
‘Do you mean they’re beggars?’ Annie asked.
‘I cannot know this, ma’am,’ he said.
‘Would they be, Heavenly?’
‘I cannot know this either,’ Heavenly said.
‘Is a very nice house,’ Pinto said.
‘Maybe the men make dresses for African ladies at Dharavi?’
‘Maybe,’ said Heavenly.
It was hard for Annie so see how such a small square made of lumps of mud from the surrounding field could ever be seen as a ‘nice house’, but it became clearer when they arrived at the village proper.
At its entrance was an archway swathed with fabric in peach, dark red and white silks.
‘Must be for some wedding,’ Pinto said, pulling the car over to the side of the road, manoeuvring it so it got as much shade as possible. ‘We walk from here I think.’
The heat hit her like a ton of bricks, the ones she had just seen been baked. It was much hotter than Mumbai, and so dry she could feel her lips instantly start to crack.
She grabbed her bottle of water and followed Heavenly through the archway into a scene of most unexpected delight.
The little squares of mud did not stay that muddy for long.
The village wasn’t chocolate-box pretty in the manicured window-box way of rural England or fairy-tale Tuscany, but in terms of sheer joyful colour it was the brightest neighbourhood she had ever seen.
The first house on their left was small, boxy and pale blue, with an artistically rusted iron roof and an outside well at which a group of women were doing their laundry.
Opposite this was a pale green house with crazy paving on the ground in front and salmon-coloured woodwork around the windows. The door was orange, as was a pile of fabric sitting beside an old treadle sewing machine, one length of the tangerine material still beneath the needle, the rest of it coiled like whipped cream on the paving.
From this house to a nearby tree was strung a rope from which two bedspreads hung; and going from the same tree to another house opposite were strings of multi-coloured bunting, fluttering in what little breeze there was.
Behind the single row of houses, Annie could see another dry field that was criss-crossed with well-worn paths, and it was soon obvious why when she came to a gap from which emerged a tall, slim woman carrying a stack of two silver water urns on her head.
She was followed soon after by another, and another.
‘No water for drinking in the houses,’ Pinto said. ‘The womens get the water from the wells outside the village.’
‘But they’re all coming from different directions!’
‘Some different families have some different wells.’
The next house was the most brilliant shade of purple. On its front porch sat one single chartreuse chair, and from the iron awning hung a string of white shirts.
If someone had told her she was in the middle of a movie set Annie would have believed them. Despite the dusty ground, the piles of rubbish that she was becoming so accustomed to, the odd roving dog and the satellite dishes everywhere, there was no denying its beauty.
It made the suburbs of home seem impossibly dull. She might have running water and electricity around the clock, but what had she been thinking with room after room decorated in similar shades of what was basically, when it came down to it, white? Her decorator could call it Spanish Pearl or Afternoon Whisper, but compared to these colours it was lifeless.
The next part of the village was made up of bigger houses, all two-storeyed, and most of them painted a similar shade of pink, although one had blue and yellow window treatments, another turquoise, a third a darker shade of pink.
A fourth house had some of everything: it was painted turquoise; the front posts that supported the second storey were pink and purple stripes; the windows were yellow; and the porch railings a speckled green and grey.
Spread out in front of the house on a square of plaid matting was a sea of drying red peppers currently being pecked at by a baby chicken, while Heavenly looked on and laughed.
Immediately opposite this fiesta of colour was a faded brown wooden building that looked like it had been abandoned by cowboys a hundred years before. A stable-like door swung open and out of it walked a single rooster. If he had pulled a gun out of a holster and shot her, Annie wouldn’t have been surprised, but instead the rooster just stood still and watched her for a while, then stalked over to the shade of a wooden cart that appeared to have been left in the street when the bullock pulling it ran away — or died.
She looked up so see a group of women walking beneath a flame tree up ahead. There were about eight of them across three or four generations, and no two were wearing the same colour.
It was an explosion, a feast, a smorgasbord of turquoise and pink and red and yellow. Annie stood in awe and watched as the women passed by, their scarves and saris fluttering silently behind them.
Heavenly said hello, but Pinto just stood in the shade, hands in his pockets, kicking the dust.
‘Is this the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?’ she asked him.
‘No,’ he said quietly enough for Heavenly not to hear. ‘You should come to my village in Jammu. Is nicer.’
‘How do you bear leaving it, Pinto?’
‘I am always leaving. And I am always going back, so this is good.’
‘To me this just seems r
idiculously beautiful. Ridiculously. I mean look at that!’ She pointed to the next house, which was grand-looking, quite Moorish in design, probably brick but rendered smooth with arches cut in above two square windows either side of a single door.
The render or paint, once a peppermint shade, had faded and was peeling, the posts in front of the house were a dreamy grey, the window frames and shutters a faded rusty red. In front of one of them was a dog the exact same colour of the concrete on which he sat, sphinx-like and panting, his pointed ears sticking straight up, his gaze on a distant cat.
‘It’s perfect,’ Annie said. ‘Like a postcard.’
‘My village is also like a postcard,’ said Pinto, a trifle sulkily. ‘We have mountains in my village.’
‘Next time I come to India I will come to your village,’ Annie said, although it was the first time she had considered that there might be a next time.
What a strange place it was in which there could be no running water, no dishwasher, no computer, no telephone, no supermarket, none of the things she took for granted, other than the ubiquitous TV aerial, yet the houses were painted to look like jewellery boxes and the people in them clothed themselves to look like jewels.
Heavenly had stopped outside one of the smaller houses on the far side of the village. It gleamed just as brightly as the other emeralds and sapphires, albeit with more of a ruby glow, painted as it was a dusky dark pink with a sea-green tin roof sheltering the small front porch.
There was no door on this house, just a beaded fringe tacked up above the doorframe. On the walls on either side of the doorway someone had drawn pictures of matching terracotta urns filled with spiky blue flowers.
‘This is the house of my niece,’ Heavenly said, leaning towards the door. ‘Hello! Hello!’
A large chicken came running out as if its tail had been set on fire, and ran right between Pinto’s legs, causing him to leap in the air. ‘Scary chicken,’ he cried. ‘Scary chicken!’