Are You Lonely?

She had been following the family for more than an hour now. At first a little desultorily—when they got off the UBahn at Frankfurt's Hauptwache station and took the stairs to the street level—and then with greater care, dodging behind gesticulating East Europeans when it seemed as if the family might suddenly swing around and discover her. One time they did swing around, three bodies swiveling in the same precise arc, heads craning, but only to look at the pigeons bathing in the fountain in the middle of the square. Their gazes collectively slid past her: a woman with oily hair and dead eyes, in scuffed Reeboks and a crumpled sari the color of a weeping sky. The Turkish man hawking his gemstones and geegaws in front of the IMAX theatre did see her. He shook his head imperceptibly before turning away to accost three teenage queens with pierced navels and stringy blond hair.

With a growing sense of dread, she followed the family as they wove a meandering path to the fairground by the river, darting across the Strassenbahn lines, peeping timidly into shop windows displaying anorexic white mannequins draped in sequined jeans, before finally picking their way carefully across the cobblestoned side street to the sounds of merriment in the park by the river. The church bells chimed six o'clock as froth from golden brown beer foamed its way down the sides of the clearcut glass mugs of diners in curbside cafes. The family had five hours to toss away in a breathless frenzy, to sample the delights of pink candyfloss and huge cuddly stuffed toys, and to let the giant Ferris wheel snatch up and sprinkle their high-pitched squeals on the gleaming silver and crystal dinnerware of the floating riverboat restaurants below.

On the train, Lalita had noticed the mother first—looking furtively guilty as her fingers repeatedly grabbed the little boy's feet and dragged them off the seat, where he insisted on sitting cross-legged, swaying to the UBahn's rhythm. Something indefinable, perhaps a subtle difference in hairstyle or the orange check of her trousers, marked her as South Asian but not Indian. The father looked like the Frankfurter Allegemeine's caricatures of a Tamil immigrant—short, swarthy, heavyset, with a golliwog's hairstyle and startling-white teeth beaming out under a thickly curling mustache. The boy looked like all boys did to Lalita: solemn eyes and spindly legs and a blur of movement where his fingers ought to be. She did not want to be caught staring at him too avidly, so she looked pointedly away, all the while comparing his reflection in the window-glass with her mental photographs of Deepu. The mother used a straggly-embroidered pocket handkerchief to wipe the boy's shoe-marks off the seat, looking across nervously at the heavily powdered, corpulent German woman in the window seat every time she did so. The mother's nervousness attracted Lalita, excited her suspicions, coming as it did with its underlying whiff of guilty pleasure and desperate fear. The mother's eyes excited her own fears and clutched at her own desperation.

After just a short while in Germany, Lalita had become well-acquainted with fear in its infinite variety. She had felt the first twitches of fear in the aircraft as it hovered over the foggy airport, when the ice blonde air hostess had glared at Deepu for stuffing the airline's purple sponge earphones inside the Styrofoam cup of tasteless coffee. And stepping down from the airplane onto German soil had given fear enough time to probe the fleshy underside of her mind with its delicate spider-tentacles.

She had felt a clench of fear again when the muscles in the German cop's fat red neck clenched and he suspended his gum chewing for an instant, while he appeared to glare suspiciously at her passport as soon as they were herded off the plane, shuffling their feet in the huge silver sci-fi wormtube leading to the airport's arrival lounge. The cop looked like a space alien to her, in his vomit-green uniform and with his cropped blonde head, assaulting her senses with his unintelligible nasal rasp and his bulgy-froggy, dirty-blue eyes. Deepu had liked the cop's shiny service revolver, and with a seven-year-old's exuberance, had reached out to touch it. She had slapped his hand away, so afraid the cop would clap them both in jail. And there was the gut-wrenching fear when Deepu had slipped away unnoticed while she was circling the luggage carousel, searching for their cheap blue suitcases tied up with the nylon rope from their old fold-away bed. For a heart-stopping moment, she thought someone had kidnapped Deepu the day they landed on alien soil. She found him later by the McDonald's counter, staring at a fat man as he crammed mayonnaise-soggy French fries into his slack mouth. She had slapped Deepu hard, till the tears ran silently down his cheeks and he drew quietly away from her outstretched arms, turning aside to rub the back of his sleeve across the weary tear tracks on his face.

Lured by the fragrance of baked potatoes and sour cream, the family began to move away from the carousels and toward the food stalls. She could see Deepu in the set of the little boy's shoulders; he used to look that way: determined, excited, and timid in equal measure. She had always been able to sense his moods just by looking at the back of his head and the way his hair rose up in three little tufts whenever he was excited. She was almost convinced the little boy with the Sri Lankans was indeed Deepu. Perhaps the family had found him wandering and lost and decided to adopt him. It was possible. Perhaps they had not seen the missing child posters the police had put up in all the post offices and train stations in Frankfurt. Perhaps they did not read German, and Deepu's photo was an unrecognizable blur in the photostat copies of the poster.

Unsure how to approach them, she trembled with an almost unbearable sorrow, clutching a crumpled copy of the poster in her hand. She decided she would be calm and gracious. She would thank the woman for looking after her child, and she would offer the man a 200 Euro reward. As for Deepu, she would not get hysterical or scold him or slap him, she repeatedly told herself. He was only seven years old and couldn't speak German or English very well. Perhaps he had lost his way and couldn't remember his address or his parents' names. It was possible.

And what if he did recognize her but chose not to? What if on that far away spring morning, he had decided to walk away with a seven year old's determination to choose a different set of parents? That too seemed possible.

Later she couldn't remember the exact sequence of events, whether she lunged at the boy first and pulled him away from the mother's arms or whether the mother had screamed first, looking like a madwoman with her hair all awry, clutching her child with desperate, feverish fingers. She couldn't remember exactly, though she did hear the disjointed voices of onlookers, murmuring "Verrückte arme Frau... poor mad woman," before the police came. Verrückte, verrückte, the Germans call those struck by madness, as mad as the boy who used to howl at the moon in their neighborhood back in Bangalore.

Verrückte. That's what the teachers at the school said when she went back there day-in and day-out, waiting outside the school gates or out in the dim hallway when they let her, hoping Deepu would come out of the classroom and see her standing there, waiting for him, clutching her sketchpad tightly to her chest. Her sketches had become a private ritual between the two of them. On his first day at school, Deepu had come back with a large packet of waxy crayons given him by the teacher, and she had discovered that with lightning-fingers she could capture the essence of their landlord's ruddy German face, a turquoise-blue U-Bahn shimmering out of the station, and Deepu's big brown eyes staring back at her, sketching him while he ate his boxed-lunch in his toy-corner, surrounded by scattered Lego blocks.

Every day she gave Deepu his lunch in a neat, red and blue plastic lunchbox, and every day he brought the food back and ate it silently in his corner at home, balancing the box neatly on his knee while he played with his Lego. Once, goaded into impatience by his teacher's comments, she had asked him why he couldn't play with the other children like a "normal" child.

"They are silly children," he scornfully muttered under her prodding. "Can't even say my name properly. Some of them say, 'Hey, Shosshherr' and one fat boy calls me Blackie." He means to say Schwartze, Lalita thought to herself with a gulp of anger, reaching for the few German words she had learned several months ago. German for days of the week, the months, the seasons, the colors...

She had tried speaking to the Principal but was stonewalled into silence by the woman's imperviousness. "I am Mrs. Lalita Murthy, Deepak's mother," she began nervously, in her Tamil-accented English.

"We. have. other. children. here. Frau. Muhaathii," the woman had said, speaking loudly and slowly, drawing out her words in the exaggerated fashion Germans have when speaking to foreigners, the deaf, the mentally challenged. Other children, black-skinned like yours, her face silently added. "They. do. not. seem. to. face. any. problems."

They spent the golden afternoons exploring Frankfurt together, reckless gypsies without a past, refugees without a future. Deepu spent hours beside her on the park bench, playing with imaginary friends, while she tried with increasing frustration to sketch the light as it gleamed on the river or the river gulls' raucous flight across the water. They went to the Hauptbahnhof to look at the train tracks snaking across to forever. They fed all the pigeons they met, even the ones strutting around importantly on the big station clock. They met an old woman on a park bench once; she was faded and drowsy in the sun, but she had been a wheelbarrow-woman during the war, endlessly roaming that bombed rubble of a city to look for bits of brick with which to rebuild her home. They rode the escalators all the way to the top of Eschenheimer Tur, and the river was a ribbon of sunlight, glinting far below. They watched a 3D movie in a darkened IMAX theatre, a film called "New York," about a Russian boy, a stowaway on a ship to that city, looking for his lost immigrant family. Deepu had secretly brought away the green plastic 3D glasses with him instead of dropping them in the box.

They usually slunk home when the church bells chimed for Evensong, just in time to face Murthy's cold rages at coming back to an empty apartment. Once Murthy found a sketch of himself she had made that morning. He relentlessly tore it into shreds tinier than confetti. The pieces looked like a snowstorm around him when he flung them in the air. Sometimes his Indian colleagues at the University came home with him, and she plied them with tea and samosas, silently delaying their departure as much as she could.

When Spring came, they got caught in an unexpected shower and danced in the rain like street urchins celebrating the monsoon in Bombay. They came home drenched, and that evening she caught the flu. The fever burned in her long and fierce; all night her throat remained parched, and she kept tossing and turning, trying to find the elusive cool patch on her pillow. Sometimes she heard the soft keening of a forlorn puppy and was mortified to realize the sound was emerging from her own throat.

She moved to the carpet to avoid disturbing Murthy; it was the period for submitting grant proposals and she dared not risk upsetting his peevish temper. She could not keep anything down, not even tepid orange juice. Murthy grudgingly brought home slices of cold pizza that she heated up for Deepu on the frying pan, having convinced herself radiation from the microwave would give all of them cancer one day. She longed for her mother. Her mother would have made rice gruel for her aching throat, oiled and combed her hair, and wiped the sweat off her forehead with a cool rag. She would have scoured the shops for parboiled rice and managed to find grated coconut to make idli and coconut chutney for the mappulai, as she insisted on calling Murthy)... and for Deepu, her adored grandson.

Sometimes Murthy accompanied Deepu to the gates of his school, and sometimes he dropped him off at the UBahn station. He bought Deepu a weekly ticket and got him a key to the apartment so he could come and go from school by himself. All day, every day, she lay on the carpet, waiting for the fever to burn itself out of her body, waiting for Deepu to turn the key and fling himself pellmell on the bed, pouring out stories of his adventures on the UBahns. He could rattle off all the stations between Leipziger Strasse and Konstablerwache and all the times of all the different routes to the Hauptwache and Bochenheim. One afternoon, he brought home a Kinder Joy chocolate egg, given him as a gift by a child in his class. He watched the afternoon cartoons on TV just the way he used to in India, and she heaved a silent sigh of relief. Perhaps her fever, while weakening her, was making Deepu independent, mobile, and able to finally fit in. Perhaps it helped, not having a mother clad in a sari, waiting for him outside the school gate all by herself in a corner, while the other mothers in slacks or skirts strode purposefully into the classroom and accosted the teachers with eager cries of delight.

The day the fever finally broke, she felt as weak as a newborn kitten and just as wobbly on her feet. If she hurried she would be able to make it in time to Deepu's school to pick him up. She hastily gathered up her sketchbook when leaving the apartment. Outside was a strange world, full of sunlight and shadows. The sunlight reflecting off the sharp edges of blocks of concrete on the construction site next to Deepu's school hurt her eyes, almost blinding her. She stood in her usual corner, waiting with breathless anticipation to see how he would greet her when he came tumbling out with the other children. Perhaps he would rush up to her shouting Amma, amma in his delight, or perhaps he would look at her accusingly, not wanting her to intrude, or perhaps he would pretend to be absorbed in conversation with a friend, nodding at her in casual recognition.

That day Deepu never came out the school door. She waited till all the other children had gone home and the teachers, too, till the pillars of the school building cast long shadows in the fading sunlight. Later they said he had never come to school that day, never made it for the morning assembly or the mid-morning snack break. He had missed school thrice that week already, they said, turning up the next day with no explanation, not even a leave of absence signed by the parents. What can you expect from immigrants, their shrugs seemed to imply. Rootless, nowhere people. How can you expect a child to obey school rules that the parents do not comprehend?

One rainy evening many months later, Murthy did not come back to the apartment at night. She had spent that day in Ludwigstrasse, luring cats with bits of fish taken surreptitiously from the trashcans of the Chinese restaurant in Himmelstrasse. The owner had seen her but pretended to be absorbed in cleaning his cash register with a dishrag, while she ferreted with both hands in the bowels of the bins, scrabbling for a rag of skin dangling from a thighbone, a squelch of spiced fish, anything to tempt the jeweled fragments of cats' eyes, gleaming out at her from the dusky angles of wooden doorways and stone-walled alleys. Feverish with excitement, she rubbed some ochre-colored juice from a dish of noodles into her skin, gulping down some of it in her haste. She wanted to emit a feral scent, attract the cats with her sinuous grace, till they thronged around her and purred and rubbed themselves against her slim ankles. All day she picked up cats, rubbed them in a daze of longing, right below the arches of their backs, tickled their whiskers with delicate twists of her pink tongue till they shivered in delight, and then returned them to their owners, pressing doorbells and calling insistently through the letterbox slits, till they came down the hallway, seduced by the sounds of their own cats' voices.

The cat owners were mostly old women, clad in faded-pink quilted dressing gowns, their skins marked by delicately blotchy sun-freckles. Their milky-blue, suspicious eyes marked her out as a foreigner, with her golden brown luminous eyes and her exotic sari. They had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. "Nein, nein, nein, no, no, no," they muttered. "Jedentag haben wir keinen Kind gesehen, each day have we no child seen."

She had slipped back into the house long past midnight, let in by the jeweler neighbor in the flat below, while his wife audibly sniffed her disapproval. Murthy did not come to the door to let her in when she leaned tiredly against the doorbell and let its jangling disturb the flow of Beethoven's Ninth playing in the apartment above. The door swung open silently when she tentatively gave it a push. His clothes were gone, too, as well as his books, his untidy files with yellowing badly xeroxed copies of papers from the European Journal of Organic Chemistry, their tea kettle, the box of mixed spices, the half-empty packet of Lipton's Red Label tea, the Hawkins pressure cooker as well as the extra safety gasket they had brought along just in case the first one burst, his toothbrush and the new tube of Colgate he had bought the other day. She carefully curled herself up in her corner of the bed, watching all night the flabby Murthy shape he had left imprinted on the bedclothes.

Gradually the Murthy-shape became indistinguishable from the other wrinkles on the dusty sheets; the monkey-faces and grandmother-faces she constructed from blankets and quilts she filched from the closet down the hallway to keep her company at night. The clothes had a rancid smell, like the memories of old people reminiscing about poverty-stricken childhoods, but they made the smell left behind by Murthy, a combination of his scented Brahmi Amla hair oil, sweat, and Pond's dream flower talc, seem less threatening.

She saw Murthy a fortnight later, entering the Irish Pub with two of his colleagues from the university and their demure wives. The wives were decked out in magenta and parrot green silks, their plump pigeon-necks glistening where their French parfums had condensed in droplets. She stood outside in the soft rain for a long time, staring unthinkingly at the comforting blurs of movement thrown up by the thickly curved bottle glass of the pub's windows. They were genteelly tipsy when they came tottering out, the wives bursting into high-pitched giggly fits while the men tried to stuff them into their winter coats. Murthy had looked at her standing there in the soggy rain, a wet lump of smelly clothes, while she looked back at him despairingly. The veins on his bulgy-red forehead resembled railroad markers on a geographical map. One by one, with spluttering gasps, the cars drove off into the night. She stood there till the rain dripped out its despair, till the colors of the night deepened into violet jagged shadows, and the Strassenbahn blew their lonely horns to move her out of their path.

"Go away, go home," the voices in her head clamored. "Go back to your own country. Why do you come here, a dark-skinned 'native' from a foreign land, unless it be to envy us our riches and snatch away our livelihoods, to overrun our land with hordes of your children, to become our nemesis, the Other, the heart of our darkness, the root of our shame."

"Come away, come home," other voices clamored. "Come back to your own land. Accept what happened in that cold, ugly country as the will of the Goddess. Why do you stay there, amongst white-skinned foreigners, unless it be to absorb some of their whiteness, to become the despised Other in their privileged world? Accept your karma, practice your dharma. Look at Murthy: he has found a good position in the USA. He wrote his mother that he is moving there in the new year. They are giving him a computer and a thousand dollar raise. He will buy a sofa bed and a second-hand Japanese car the day he lands there, he wrote his father. He is willing to forget your madness and take you with him to the land of riches and goodness, if you promise to behave yourself." Her mother's green ink wept on the aerogramme, the Tamil alphabet smeared by rain splatters. "Don't think your shameful behavior is hidden from us. Murthy has written to his parents, told them about those old men on park benches and those ragged drug addicts living under bridges that you spend your time with, looking for Deepak. We paid for your college education, we bought the mappulai a watch, a Raymond suiting safari suit, a scooter and a gold ring to marry you. We bought pattu podavais for all his female relatives for the wedding, paid for your your delivery expenses in Ashapurna Nursing Home where you gave birth to Deepak, paid your air ticket to Germany so you could go with the mappulai and and cook for him and look after him. Your father took a loan on his provident fund and your brother goes to work at his chitfund company in a cycle rickshaw, so we could do all this for you. Wasn't Deepak our grandson as well? Do you think suffering a few hours of labor pains elevates you to a different level of grief than ours? You are dancing with Shiva on the edge of a precipice, howling with nurrees deep in the depths of an unknown forest. Come back Daughter, before the Goddess of Madness claims you for herself."

Time twisted itself into a rainbow colored helix. There were strangers in the apartment one evening when she wandered back in. They had made neat heaps of her dirty bedding and pots and pans and were busy vacuuming the carpet and scrubbing the kitchen counter. She drifted around the Turkish food shops on Leipzigerstrasse, hoping they would have disappeared by the time the shops shut for the night. Later, she rooted aimlessly amongst all the stuff they had stacked up outside on the pavement to be picked up by the garbage men. She made a bundle of two of her saris; dirt had turned their borders stiff, much stiffer than with all the starch she used to use when in India. The only other things worth keeping were an old pencil of Deepu's with an empty tinsel end where he had chewed the eraser off, and a raggedy quilt with its stuffing coming out, looking like dirty snow in someone's backyard.

The snow was falling in soft clumps when she found the house, just beyond an old wooden bridge. There was a full moon overhead, and the trees were black, silent, and bare. Shards of glass poked upright from the rotting wood in the window frames, and her footsteps in the snow brimmed with a strange azure light. She wished she still had Deepu's crayons so she could capture the hues of the shadows in and around the empty house: the blue and white of snow light, the aching aquamarine of the blind night, the black and silver color of sorrow, the no-color of the empty morrow. She found an old couch crouched in a corner of one room and huddled upon it. The floorboards groaned every time she tossed and turned, or whenever dead leaves rustled in the silence of the moonlight. All night long the cold rain beat restlessly in, soaking the couch, drenching her. The rest of the house loomed enormous with silent shadows and empty space. That night she did not venture beyond her little patch of moonlight by the window.

She was aware of the other inhabitants of the house, but they did not frighten her. They came and went as they pleased, ignoring her for the most part, and the house groaned with their dreams at night. Once, magically, she walked in to find her father poring over an old issue of the Ananda Vikatan, reading aloud an article about the Skylab disaster. He sat on the old painted-steel folding chair just below the green-plastic mango-leaf thoranam, and she could hear her mother's tuneless humming from the kitchen beyond as she chopped spinach on the armamanai. Another time she tiptoed into the back room and found a Chinese martial arts duel in progress. The women's swords flashed with a green fire, and they floated up many feet in slow motion when their swords came together.

One evening she found her grandmother sitting by the window, embroidering a forget-me-not pattern on a baby frock, straining to see the stitches in the failing light. Lalita's tears stained the delicate white of the frock and turned it yellow, while her grandmother patted her awkwardly and tut-tutted irascibly. "Misplacing a child indeed. I never heard of such a thing in all my life. He's just being naughty, hiding in the attic to scare you, like all children do. Hrrmph. He'll come back tomorrow, don't worry. And don't cry, girl. Tears never did anyone any good."

One night an Italian man and his solemn-eyed daughter stepped off an opera poster and followed her home. They moved in slow motion, like those dream sequences in the movies. Lalita was pleased by the child's silent presence in the house. She decided she would take the girl with her to the city the next day, to look for Deepu near the railway station. Deepu loved trains and stations and engines and the loving urgency of the arrival and departure announcements. As she reached out her hand to the little girl, she noticed how curiously skeletal her own fingers looked, blanched white in the dim twilight, grasping at a tiny patch of darkness.