Searching For Rumah

It’s winter; the skies are clear, and it hasn’t rained for a month. In the village this is the best time of all. She has never seen Dhaka; never seen the tendrils of smoke floating over the road as the fumes build up during the day, never seen a road blocked by a hundred rickshaws. The buildings are taller than she has ever seen, scaffolded by bamboo, surrounded by the pink dust of brick-makers.

They ride wildly past the wealthy areas of Gulshan and Banani, where they spot white-skinned foreigners. They skirt the airport, heading deep into the traffic-snarled Farmgate, where enormous noisy buses clog the roads. Down a side-street into Moghbazar, filled with apartments, every window barred. Down, down to the river, past the crumbling old city with its ancient gates, its tiny mud-brick mosques.

“Oh – look – there’s Rohanna!” Adib yells back at her.

Shuli has just a glimpse, for an instant, of the tallest woman she has ever seen. She is clad in a figure-hugging sari, and she is animated, a baby on one hip, her free arm gesturing wildly, with a group of women listening to her, gesturing back. She hasn’t tied back her hair; it flows long and free over her shoulders, down her back.

“She’s from a shanty-town?”

Her only answer is a long, loud laugh. Shuli has no idea whether that means yes or no. She has been told she’ll be working with Rohanna, however. Everyone has heard of her. But all Shuli knows of her is what she has just seen; she is tall, and she wears a bright red sari like a bride or a prostitute.

“She still wears a salwar!”

Rohanna strides over to the window, unwillingly transfixed by the small neat figure standing in the courtyard. The girl is wearing loose trousers with a long patterned tunic; it is embroidered, Rohanna notices with amazement. The salwar kameez is only ever worn by young girls in Bangladesh; not women.

Then she looks again, flicking the end of her red sari over her shoulder. The salwar is short-sleeved, and tailored to the shape of her body – the cuffs of the rousers high, revealing the bones in her ankles. She has a little silver anklet around her right foot. And her orna, her embroidered scarf, droops dangerously low – certainly not obscuring her breasts as is its purpose.

And she has short hair.

“Who is this?” Rohanna asks incredulously, turning back to face her director. “She has short hair, she wears a salwar kameez – has she completed first grade yet?”

“Came top of the class, too.”

Rohanna does not allow herself to be put off-balance by Shuli’s sudden appearance.

“Congratulations.”

Then she turns, and sees something like disappointment in the girl’s eyes.

The rest of the afternoon is spent with the director in the office. Shuli sits behind the desk, her hands folded calmly in her lap, listening to the story of Ar Na, how it began, why it is the only organisation that actually rescues the children kidnapped and trafficked across India and the Middle East, what happens to the children. How the rescue rate is frighteningly, terrifyingly, low.

Rohanna paces behind her for the entire interview. Shuli has never known anyone so restless. Occasionally she corrects the director’s figures, and he concedes her point, every time.

They are talking about the brothels of Bombay, where about half the children will end up, when there is a knock on the door and a boy enters. He has an envelope, and Rohanna snatches it out of his hand.

“Ahsan Manzil Museum.”

“The pink palace?” Shuli breaks in, then stops as Rohanna turns a look of amusement her way.

“Oh, so you saw that on your tour, did you?”

So she and her brother had been seen that day. Shuli suddenly wonders whether Rohanna heard her shanty-town comment too.

“You think this is accurate?” The director breaks in, frowning a little. “That museum was once a palace, you know. It has hundreds of rooms . . .”

“Hundreds not used by the museum, too,” Rohanna points out, tucking the message under the shoulder of her blouse. “People go in and out all day long. Why not use some underused section as a holding place, especially when they know we’re watching the usual bus and train stations?”

The director makes a sideways nod of assent. “All right. You two can go tonight. Bring him here in the morning, if he’s there.”

“He?” Shuli questions, before Rohanna can make any protest.

“Prem. He’s about ten years old.”

“Prem.” Shuli repeats quietly. “So someone named him love.”

So it’s dark. So it’s darker. Rohanna doesn’t care, moving through the place like she knows it, like she’d know it blind. Pushing aside chairs, shelves, whole tables out of the way, knowing that ahead of her lies something more important than the layout of a palace.

The building lies along the riverbank, a road between it and the docks. A huge pink building, with well-tended gardens, swept walkways, sprawling lawns. And a wall, of course, right around the palace and its gardens, with broken glass embedded on top. There is a gate, but it is only wide enough for the rich. She’s never used gates, anyway.

Rohanna remembers that the left wing of the palace is locked up; even the windows are barred. It’s supposed to be dangerous, the ceilings or floors unstable. And it is said there are evil spirits, from the massacre when the British left. But Rohanna barely recalls the rumour.

Inside, the rooms are thick with dust and cobwebs. Furniture lies in odd positions; a table upside-down, a large mirror resting precariously on a chair. Three long sofas piled on top of one another. Rohanna hardly sees the obstacles; the note is beginning to make sense, not just the palace, but the floor, the carvings, leading her to where the small boy must be hidden. Just out of her grasp, and so she moves forward with confidence.

Shuli stays behind her, moving more slowly, watching around. Doubtfully even. Unlike Rohanna she believes in things she can’t see – believes in them more passionately than those things her eyes casually pass over.

“Don’t hesitate now.”

A growled warning; Shuli almost gives a shout of fear. Instead, she crouches, rolls under a tent formed by a cupboard fallen across a wide table. Kicks out at the hand grabbing at her ankle. Stubbornly silent in the dark ballroom. Rohanna needs her own instincts to lead her, not distraction.

When she opens her eyes, it is Rohanna who stares at her, with her characteristic look of amused puzzlement on her face. Surprised that Shuli hadn’t recognised her voice.

“You were quick.”

Shuli scrambles out awkwardly, brushing herself down, refusing to look at Rohanna until her colour fades. But Rohanna has already moved on.

Up the mouldering staircase, the banisters smooth from a thousand hands. The glass of the windows is shattered, and rough boards let in little starlight. The stairs lead to a long straight hallway, with dozens of rooms coming from either side. It is so very quiet.

A cloth covers a low table; two glasses stand in position, exactly opposite one another. The door beside the table is ajar, and Rohanna slips through it.

A small room, as dusty and forgotten as the others. The furniture in its peculiar disarray, as though someone had given a single push and every piece had fallen onto another, balancing precariously on its side.

“Not here.”

Shuli hesitates, then moves forward by Rohanna’s side. Her face sharp with disappointment.

“So where next. What could we have done, to know how wrong –“

Then a slight movement to the right, and Shuli leaps back, crouching behind a toppled chair. And at the same moment, Rohanna jumps forward, grabbing and tearing away a grubby curtain.

There a cage; there a boy in a cage, like a dog or a rat. Rohanna strides forward and throws sarcastically over her shoulder at Shuli:

“So, your instinct is to hide from danger, not run to meet it?”

Shuli jumps up at that and answers defiantly.

“That’s right. I stay out of sight till the danger’s past.” And then she runs forward, opening the cage filled with sore, maimed child.

What’s left of Prem is a mass of bones, welts, a tremble of a boy. He gives out a soft, high-pitched sound of distress. Rohanna lifts the child into her own arms.

“No danger here,” she croons, rocking the child bereft. “No danger.”

So that when Shuli squats down that night, balancing on the rickshaw’s footboard as they head back, she can neither feel angry nor guilty nor ashamed, just confused. The destroyed child still in Rohanna’s arms, being sung to.

“Wait.”

Shuli has her hand on the gate outside the minister of finance’s residence. They’ve been called there because the minister’s daughter has been snatched, just that morning. It’s unusual, but not unknown, for children of the wealthy to be taken for trafficking. It’s just as unusual to find them again.

Rohanna is squatting down beside a beggar-woman on the ground outside the white-washed wall of the minister’s home. The woman is sitting, quietly feeding her baby. She has the ubiquitous tin plate beside her, as well as a roll of cloth. That is obviously all she possesses.

“That’s a new baby.”

“Five days old,” the woman agrees negligently.

“What will you do?”

The woman nods towards the tin plate, continuing to stroke the baby’s head.

“Where’s her father?”

“He’s dead.”

It strikes Shuli that Rohanna is looking extremely angry, although she can’t see what the woman has said to provoke her.

Rohanna fishes out a hundred taka note, and slides it under the edge of the tin plate.

“A girl was stolen from that house this morning. You’ve been here all day?”

“Of course.”

“Anyone in a hurry?”

The woman shrugs.

“Anyone in a burqa?” Shuli asks.

Rohanna looks up at Shuli, but she meets her eyes. It isn’t uncommon, for children to be snatched by a woman, tucking the child under the voluminous dark coverings of a burqa. And anyway, the woman says yes, there was a woman in a burqa, but she went around the back way, and though she came in a rickshaw, she left in a baby taxi – the three-wheeled scooters that buzz through the city with a sound and stench to remember.

“What’s your name?”

Shuli waits again by the gate as Rohanna gets up.

“My name? Shuli.”

Her head jerks at that, but then she looks at Rohanna.

“We’ll go round the back.”

They tramp around the side of the building. It’s an old double-storied house, from before the war, probably from the time of the British. And although there are low gardens in front of the house, the ground along the side of the house is hard, baked earth. There’s no way to tell who walked there. A child is screeching, and Rohanna’s face goes hard. When they get to the back they see a girl on the ground, and a woman kicking her.

The woman is plump, her face red and furious. Although it’s cold, there are damp patches on her embroidered sari blouse. Her foot pauses, and she stares at the two women.

“Who are you?”

“We’re here about Rumah. From Ar Na.”

“Oh.” And then she kicks again, and the child screeches again. “This good-for-nothing girl was supposed to be minding her. This –“

Rohanna moves forward and swiftly grasps the child by the shoulder, pulling her up and behind her. The woman overbalances a moment; then she rights herself. She opens her mouth to protest, but meets Rohanna’s eyes. Then she shrugs.

“I’ll be rid of her. I’ll send her back to her mother, and she can try to find more work in Dhaka – she can try –“

Rohanna inclines her head. “I’ll take her. She’s what – seven?”

Shuli sees that the child’s hair has been shaved for the heat; and she touches her own hair, remembering how her hair used to be cut each summer too.

“Who knows? Seven, eight? You need a child servant? Don’t take her –“

“I won’t take her to serve me, no,” Rohanna agrees sarcastically. “I’ll take her back to her mother.” She turns and speaks softly to the child, who runs into the house. A man comes out, dressed in the western manner. It is the minister; he nods to them, says something sharp to his wife, and then ushers them inside.

There is a smell of damp inside the old building. The floor is cold underneath the coconut matting; and the walls are discoloured with mould. The hallway leads into a sunnier room, with chairs, a low table. They have tea; they have biscuits, too, and they balance on a finely upholstered couch, while the minister relays exactly what happened that morning.

His wife is now sobbing, wiping her eyes with the corner of her sari.

“Rumah, my Rumah! If that girl had been minding her, she would not have been taken . . . oh, my Rumah!”

“Or if you had been minding her,” Rohanna suggests, without malice. “Or anyone else. But it makes no difference now –“

And Shuli stays silent, watching Rohanna at work, asking questions, provoking wild answers, provoking answers. It makes no difference now, because the girl has been taken, and she is somewhere in the city, with perhaps a few other girls, or perhaps alone. She handles a photograph and nods at it, seeing a beautiful six year old child where someone else saw a potential whore.

“When will you have her back?”

Rohanna gets up, shrugs, and looks, for the first time, sorry.

“I will say this until I have her in my arms and I give her into yours. I don’t know. I am sorry. I don’t know.”

The minister rises, shows Rohanna to the door, but she shakes her head and goes out the way she came, waiting at the kitchen for the girl.

“You’re taking her as a witness?”

“I’m taking her,” Rohanna agrees, and watches as the child slides carefully out the door, running to the gate. As though something will stop her, as though a hand will grab at her and pull her back. As perhaps it has before.

“Wait here,” Rohanna says again, walking over to the huddle of rickshaws opposite the house. The rickshaw wallahs nod at her, as though she is familiar to them.

“What’s your name?” Shuli whispers to the little girl.

“Shabana,” the child answers softly.

“Did you see the woman in the burqa too?” Shuli asks. The girl nods.

“She had a face like a shout but she didn’t say anything . . .”

Rohanna is still talking with the rickshaw wallahs, Shuli notices. Or at least one of them . . . he wears a lungi like the others, a coloured cloth wrapped around his waist. He leans back on the seat of the rickshaw, and laughs, while Rohanna seems to be arguing vehemently with him. Strange, that there are eight wallahs but only seven rickshaws.

When she comes back over to them, Shuli nudges her.

“Did you get us a ride?”

Rohanna looks abashed. Then she nods over to one of the men, and he cycles lazily over. It is not the man to whom she has been speaking.

“His price was too high?” Shuli suggests, and Rohanna smiles grimly.

“Too high for me, anyway,” she says.

Rohanna finds she is unaccountably distracted by the silver chain resting below the right ankle of Shuli’s foot.

It utters grace. She does not desire the jewellery so much, but the graciousness of the girl who is sitting beside her. The bus rocks on its way to the small village near the Bangladesh-India border. Shuli moves with the rhythm of the vehicle, although she is asleep. The anklet jingles.

She has never worked with another girl before. She has never worked with a girl who keeps her hair childishly short, and continues to wear a salwar kameez into adulthood.

She has never worked with anyone who can ask a single question and thereby gain every answer. Rohanna discovers that she has been avoiding Shuli’s direct gaze, in order that she might avoid her questioning. Somehow she is afraid of what she might say.

The bus halts, and she shakes the girl awake, moving down the aisle and out onto the road. There is nothing but fields on either side of them; fields, and a rough path across them. The harvest is finished and the land is empty. A distant clutter of lights indicates the small village which Rohanna knows; she tugs at the girl, almost sleeping on her feet beside her, and moves her on.

“If a bus filled with girls passed over this border, they will know,” Rohanna explains to Shuli. “They aren’t in Dhaka, and they haven’t been seen near the train station.”

“So how do we know it’s this border, and not any of the others – just as easy?”

Rohanna hesitates. “I had a tip-off.”

The village is like every other that Shuli knows; a cluster of one-roomed wooden shacks, on a hill raised a few metres above the fields. In the monsoon it will flood, and the village would be cut off from the road. Then the water-lilies will grow, and the people will harvest them instead.

There is a big clay oven, and a well, and a large pond where the people bathe and wash their clothes each day. Shuli washes under the pump now she is in the city; she misses the quiet coolness of the pond.

They’re heard a little before they come into the light of the first hut.

“Hey!”

A boy comes up – he has a large snake in his arms, and it winds sensuously around him. “Look, we just found it in the tree!”

Shuli notices how idly Rohanna fondles the skin of the snake.

“Go tell Ismael we are here,” she directs the boy. Then she turns to Shuli, still standing in the dark. “Stay quiet.”

The head of the village, Shuli recalls, also works on the border crossing. She blinks a little, still partly in sleep, and sways on her feet. Then Rohanna nudges her, and she sees a small plump man, dressed in western trousers and a long shirt, coming towards them.

“Rohanna.”

And Shuli waits for Rohanna to kneel before the headman of the village and salaam him. Rohanna feels the girl behind her begin to move closer, and halts her with a movement of a hand.

Salaam. A moment of utter respect. An act of subjugation, crouching at the other’s feet, completely vulnerable. The crouch, the hands patting the feet, moving to the lips. It is called a salaam, a greeting. A sign of respect, though in many places it is simple courtesy, a ritual carried out with only slight awareness of its depth.

By refusing, Rohanna gives the salaam its true meaning, shows she understands it. No way she’ll crouch at another’s feet, humbly waiting for their kick or kiss. No way she’ll make herself so vulnerable.

That is why she never performs the salaam, even as a child. Quite early on Rohanna realises where she is – under the heels of the world – and vows never to recognise that. Not denying poverty, but poverty’s status.

So she will not crouch at another’s feet, will never perform the salaam, and thus is seen always as arrogant. A handshake is performed with the head up, the chin lifted. Eyes in contact; a handshake indicates equality. That is why she has never seen a woman step forward, hand outstretched to a man; that is why she does it.

“Ismael.”

So Shuli will discover. Forget custom. Forget conciliation. According to custom, a man could be cured of venereal disease by fucking a virgin. According to custom, you could sell your daughter for the price she’d bring.

“Come, eat with me,” Ismael says, without hesitation. He smiles a little, leading the women inside his hut. It is exactly like the rooms Shuli has known from her own village; the large bed covered with a woven mat, for sitting on and eating. The metal cupboard against the wall, where all his clothes would be folded neatly. There is a prayer-mat in the corner.

Food is set out in bowls on his bed, and they sit cross-legged there and eat.

“So who is this?”

Rohanna shrugs casually. “She helps me.”

“Just another one to take a cut, Rohanna,” Ismael warns. Then he grins at Shuli. “We could get a lot for her. If she grew her hair, anyway . . .”

“Shut up.”

Ismael shrugs, and the cold feeling inside Shuli grows until she begins to shiver.

“Did you get them across – those ones we sent recently?”

Ismael takes a swig of water, and wipes his mouth. “It was no problem.”

“And they’re headed to Delhi first.”

“Mmm. You should get a lot for these. Remember that load we took – oh, two years back? All to the rich houses of Oman. We’ll never make so much as we did then . . .”

“No.”

“But we had some good boys, in that lot. This was just little girls – pity, really.” He looks over at Shuli again, and winks. “Bigger girls are much better.”

“I told you to shut up.”

Ismael laughs. “I won’t touch your girl. But you’re a fool to take a cut in pay. Why do you need her? You used to do it all yourself.” He leans forward. “Right from the village to Bombay. Oh, you used to travel in those days! They say you haven’t been out of Dhaka in a while now . . . I haven’t seen you for ages. Don’t you miss it, the travel? Not just India, but beyond –“

“I don’t miss it.” Rohanna’s voice is so cold that Shuli wonders Ismael doesn’t begin to shiver too. Instead he laughs again.

“You do, but you won’t say so in front of the girl.”

“Go.” And Rohanna stares at her. “There’s the bathroom, out there – see? And the hut beyond is empty. Stay there until I come.”

Shuli opens her mouth, shuts it again, spills her glass across the bed. Then she leaves, finding the door of the hut open, clambering her way through the darkness. There is a large bed, and she creeps underneath the mosquito-net, still shivering.

The door creaks open. A figure is outlined in the doorway; a man’s figure. He moves over towards the bed, and Shuli screams out, terrified, rolling across the bed to the wall, as the man moves towards her, pushing the net out of the way.

And then there is another figure in the room.

Rohanna is there, her hand on the man’s shoulder, spinning him around, pushing him against the wall. She punches him hard, twice, then pushes him again, out the door, kicking him, still silent, while he groans, yelling out. But there is no answering calls from the people in the village.

Then the door is slammed shut, a bolt drawn across, and Rohanna is on the bed, flinging away the net, grabbing at Shuli’s hand.

“It’s all right . . . it’s all right . . .”

“That was – that was why they all said you were so good. Because you had done it before,” Shuli gasps, scarcely aware of what she is saying.

“Yes,” Rohanna says, with so much sadness in her voice that Shuli stares, searching for tears.

“Lie down,” Rohanna commands softly, putting her arms firmly around the girl. But Shuli is shaking still, so much that the bed rattles with it. Finally Rohanna gets up and fumbles in her bag, before crawling back on the bed.

She ties a red thread around Shuli’s wrist, with a small piece of paper attached. It has a few words from the Koran written on it.

“There. There, now sleep,” Rohanna directs again, pulling the blanket over them both, keeping her arms tightly around the girl. Slowly the trembling ceases; slowly they descend together into sleep.

“But aren’t we headed for Delhi?”

“Calcutta. And stop looking behind you,” Rohanna tells Shuli sharply.

It’s early; the Azan, the call to prayer has just sounded. Shuli pulls her orna from over her head and looks back along the road to the village. The small village casts a low shadow in the morning light.

“What do you think – that the man will bother coming after you, along this road, right here and now?”

Shuli looks again, then fingers the red thread at her wrist. Rohanna sighs and places her own hand over the thread.

“It wasn’t anything to do with you, Shuli. It was just a test of Ismael’s – just to see what I would do . . .”

“A game,” Shuli murmurs as the bus finally pulls up. The driver throws their bags onto the roof, and they push their way on, finding a seat together near the back. Rohanna’s hand stays firmly around Shuli’s wrist, as they slide into the seat.

“That’s it – it’s a game to him, to all of them. With living pieces . . .”

“And how often do you win?”

“Ahhh.” Rohanna sighs and within that Shuli hears her soul. She leans her head down onto Shuli’s shoulder. “Not often. Not often enough.”

The swaying motion of the train to Calcutta makes Shuli feel slightly nauseous; she excuses herself, moving to the open door and hanging tightly onto the rail, while the fresh air blows in and clears her head.

Children wave from fallow fields; a man lifts his head from the plough and stares at the noisy locomotive as it passes. A boy races the train on his bicycle, laughing as it overtakes him.

When she turns back down the aisle, grabbing onto the seats to keep her balance, she is aware of someone in the crowd of people who seems familiar. A man.

In the seat behind them, but on the opposite side . . . his eyes flicker over Rohanna, again and again, with something more than interest featuring there. He watches her, but as soon as his eyes turn away, to the window, to the rest of the train, he looks back, as though afraid in those moments he will forget her.

Shuli pauses in the aisle, as though to keep balance. He is wearing the loose trousers and the small hat of a religious man. But she is certain last time she saw him he was dressed in nothing but a lungi, and he was among rickshaws.

What rickshaw wallah could afford the train fare to Calcutta?

But she knows she is not mistaken in that narrow face and curling hair, in those eyes that look over at Rohanna with something like hunger. She moves on, slides in beside her friend, and nudges her.

“Did you know he was here?”

“Yes.” Her tone is guarded, and Shuli realises it is not because the man might hear; it is because she does not want to tell her. She shrugs. Perhaps it is her brother, watching out for her, except he does not look at her like a brother.

“What is his name?”

“Ridoy,” Rohanna answers automatically, then grimaces. As though there is something dangerous about having that name on her lips; or that word, because Shuli remembers it means heart.

Perhaps he is a brother, or a brother’s friend; perhaps he is someone important, except that Rohanna continues to ignore him, even when the train slides into the station at Calcutta, and they disembark, losing him in the crowd.

They wind their way through the market beside the station, a sea of small stalls, beggars and thieves. Somehow, the beggars seem not to see Rohanna, as though she seems as poor as themselves, despite her dress. She pushes through the crowd confidently, weaving her steady way past the lights and the noise, leading the way to a small hotel across from the park.

It is a low narrow building, just two storeys high, tucked in beside a bank and a bakery. The outside is grimy, and inside it is dark and cold. Shuli tightens her woollen shawl around her. It seems colder in Calcutta than the village, than Dhaka itself; colder than she’s ever been. She suppresses a shiver.

A small man with a large moustache leads them upstairs to a small room with a smaller window. There is a narrow bed, without a mosquito net. There is a sink in the room, but the bathroom, so he says, is down the hall. A cockroach scuttles by as he points; he squashes it casually.

When Rohanna shuts the door on the man, she turns to Shuli with a grin.

“Did you know it’s very hard to find a hotel that will take single women?”

“I see,” Shuli replies. “I thought we must be on a tight budget.”

Rohanna inclines her head. “That too, of course.” She begins to unwind her sari, folding it carefully.

“Tomorrow we have to be very careful. Especially you – you look so young, they’ll take you in a moment.” She eyes Shuli thoughtfully. “I wish I had time to teach you to defend yourself.”

“Who taught you?”

A flash of pain. Then a small grin. “You know I didn’t come from a village like you. I grew up knowing where to aim a kick.”

Shuli shrugs. “I’ll be careful. Do you know where to look?”

“I think so . . .” She sounds deliberately vague, and Shuli suddenly feels uneasy. Nothing seems clear . . . it had nothing to do with you, she had said, but it did, it does.

Later, when Rohanna’s breathing is steady, Shuli clambers quietly from the bed and moves over to Rohanna’s bag. She doesn’t know in the least what she is looking for, but she searches anyway. Some clue to the man, perhaps, or to the girls, or to herself. A key to unlock the mystery of Rohanna.

There is nothing, however. There’s no photographs, scraps of paper with cryptic messages, nothing but her basic necessities. Shuli crawls back beside her friend, watching her sleep, wondering from where her own doubts stem. Then she recalls the expression on the man’s face, the man from the train. The intensity of his face.

When Rohanna wakes, she find Shuli curled up trustingly about her.

Her stomach tightens. Somehow she doesn’t like having to lie to this girl; somehow she wishes the truth were easier to understand. She wishes she understood it better herself, had the words to explain it.

Asleep, Shuli looks even younger than usual. Rohanna waits a little, watching her rest, before slipping from the bed and over to the window. He’s there, on the fire escape, and she grabs Shuli’s woollen shawl, wrapping it around herself, before opening the window and climbing out to meet him.

It’s freezing in Calcutta on a winter’s morning. It’s cold enough wearing a sari blouse and skirt, wrapped about in a thick shawl. But he’s sitting there in cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, grinning as though he’s basking in the sun.

Empty. Nothing looked emptier than a room you expected filled with everything you ever wanted to see. But when Rohanna races up the stairs, running down the hallway, pushing open the doors, and sees nothing at all - the concrete floor the windows the ceiling – it seems as empty as the sky.

Shuli comes in a second later, frowning. “Wrong address?”

“They were here,” Rohanna growls softly. “I know it. We’ve just missed them.”

She turns, brushing aside Shuli and runs back to the auto-rickshaw at the bottom of the stairs, swinging herself into the back and calling out swift instructions to the driver. Shuli barely brings her legs in before the driver has them out again at the road.

“How do you know this was the right place?” Shuli questions. “Yesterday you talked about a brothel you knew –“

“I had a tip-off,” Rohanna mutters, holding onto the side of the vehicle as it swings around a bend. “They know we’re after them, and they’re moving the girls on rapidly.”

Shuli’s stomach contracts a little, her suspicions growing, and she studies Rohanna’s face carefully. But it is as blank as usual. Then the woman grabs her hand, threading her fingers through her own.

“We’re going to have to search the trains. But don’t attempt to confront them if you see them – just give me a signal, and I’ll come.”

“What if there’s no time?” Shuli asks reasonably, although her fears are mounting.

“Just do as I say,” Rohanna persists, and Shuli nods. The auto-rickshaw, the tiny three-wheeled vehicle dwarfed by any ordinary car, buzzes its way into the small road by the station. Rohanna thrusts a few notes into the driver’s hand, then runs out, lifting the hem of her sari, running through the crowd with Shuli at her heels.

“Check the trains south; I’ll check the north-bound trains,” she calls back, and races down the far platform, swinging herself onto the front carriage.

Shuli follows suit at the opposite end of the station, leaping up onto the trains and running along the aisles, pushing people aside, jumping over luggage, her orna flowing behind her. She grabs it and ties it about her waist, before coming to the end of the train and leaping to the next.

It’s not a north or south-bound train, it’s headed west, to Delhi, the capital. The front carriage consists of private sleepers, and Shuli finds herself banging on doors, pushing them open authoritatively, staring in at t-shirt clad foreigners, fat men in uniforms, women clad in richly embroidered saris, and once a police officer handcuffed to a prisoner. There are no children.

The next few carriages are the ordinary three-tiered sleepers, which have been set down as seats until nightfall. The whole of India seems to be piled on the train, in every costume from every part of country, speaking in a thousand different languages, families, single men, accompanied women. Little children clambering over the upper luggage racks, banging at the windows. None of them wide-eyes frightened six-year old girls.

And the last carriage is the wooden-seated compartment for the very poor. Luggage is crammed under seats, shoved into the aisles. People are arguing furiously over a seat beside a broken window, and then Shuli sees some children on the floor behind a large sack.

She halts, going back to the door obediently, swinging herself off onto the platform and giving Rohanna a piercing whistle. Her heart is pounding. What happens now, whether those children end up with her tonight or no, is up to Rohanna. Whether her loyalties are truly with Ar Na, or the strange man with the intense gaze who is very likely their worst enemy.

A whistle answers her own, and she relaxes, but for only a moment. It is not Rohanna, although she can see the woman running up from the opposite end of the station. It’s the station-master who has whistled, which is why the train has already begun leaving the platform.

Shuli freezes, then begins to run, running for the open door of the carriage. She grabs the handrail, swinging herself on, falling into the carriage on her knees.

“You little fool.”

She is staring at a pair of boots, and when she looks up she sees Ridoy, clad as a foreigner in jeans and t-shirt. It occurs idly to Shuli that she will never know what he truly looks like.

“Didn’t Rohanna tell you to wait for her?” He mutters in a low voice, looking hastily down the carriage. His hand is gripping her arm, and she shakes him off, looking back down at Rohanna who is still running up the platform. “What do you expect to do now?”

Shuli’s mouth opens and shuts, and then she is sure. She falls back, suddenly, and the man gives a muffled exclamation and jumps forward, snatching at her. But she swings to the side, grabbing at the side handrail, balancing on the step, and watching dispassionately as he falls, rolling onto the platform just as it comes to an end.

She watches quietly as she balances there, seeing Rohanna run up to him, pull him to his feet, checking hastily for injuries, all the while shouting furiously at him. That he ruined her game, Shuli supposes. And a good game it was, to ruin any chance of saving these children by becoming part of Ar Na herself. No wonder she had not been happy at the idea of having a partner.

Another train flings itself by them, on a different line, and the noise causes everyone in the carriage to look up. Shuli grips the handrail more tightly, her heat beating loudly in fright. She begins to pull herself into the carriage, before seeing a large man separating himself from the crowd of children beside him. She watches him quietly make his way up to the front of the carriage, and wonders finally what she is supposed to do. Because this man would not jump to save her if she lurched.

Instead when he sees her, he lays a firm hand on her, and gives her one strong push. She scrabbles desperately for a hold, and screams out, but no one else on the train even looks up. As though they all know the score. Then another push, and she is falling back, landing on the gravel, being carried along by the force of the train, her kameez tearing into pieces as she slides along the ground and then slides away altogether.

The train has gone, but she doesn’t care. The room she finds herself in stinks abominably, and an odd dripping noise disturbs her right ear, but she cannot allow herself to mind.

For there’s an old trick Shuli has learned, she’s learned long ago – ignoring the pain makes it throb harder, intruding forcefully into her thoughts. But absorbing herself within each pang makes it manageable.

The colour of each ache is her focus now. Its shape and very texture is all that engages her.

So while she lies flat on her stomach, her wounds being dressed, she hears nothing, thinks nothing, just feels. On that ocean of pain she rides, not to oblivion, but to an island of acceptance.

Seeing that flesh scored with bloody tracks strikes her, shoots her in the belly. It is all messed up. The skin black with filth, the oozing blood messed with small thorns, slivers of stone. Every touch, every necessary movement to clean the wounds brings a fresh moan of pain. Rohanna can’t help it. In a second tears burn at her vision, in a moment she is sobbing above the ruined body. She’s seen it before! But not on this landscape.

Now she knows this background, this body. The straight short hair – dusty and bloody now. The narrow slim body, the skin like dark gold. But it has changed, now, it has been marked forever. Rohanna finds herself leaning over the girl, one hand on the bed that a local clinic has provided, another across her own eyes. She feels her tears dampen her fingers, she feels water trickling down her face – as though it’s just a hot day, or she has simply been working hard. But this salt is from her heart, because she has destroyed her friend.

When the nurse has finished picking out the debris from Shuli’s back, she bandages the girl, and then leaves them alone in the strange-smelling room. Shuli gives out a gasp; Rohanna chokes on a sob, and kneels down, looking desperately at the girl’s face. It is white and strange to her. She chokes again, and then sees Shuli move a finger, an arm, a hand towards her. When Rohanna holds it she realises Shuli is meaning to comfort her. She loves that the girl has dragged herself out of her pain in order to hold her hand.

“I thought you were playing both sides. Playing your own side –“

They sit on the roof, because it’s getting warmer now, and it’s quieter up there above the city. When the electricity goes out, as it does almost every night, the new city disappears, the new buildings, and the noise along with it. On the roof in feels as though only the past exists.

“I thought you and Ridoy were working together to get the girls for yourselves, your own game.”

“It’s no game to me.” Rohanna’s voice aches. They know now the girls are long gone, probably out of India altogether and in a large brothel, or someone’s household. The girl in the picture with bright six year old eyes has disappeared. “I should have trusted you enough to tell you.”

Except that there are still no words to explain who she once had been. She uses plain language and it still makes no sense at all . . . that she and Ridoy had run around the streets together as children, had worked together in child trafficking later on, and then, when finally Rohanna had changed sides – he’d changed too, just as easily, at her word. She couldn’t understand it herself.

“You never told anyone, though – that Ridoy was out of it and working with you.”

Rohanna looks over at Shuli with a small smile.

“I never had anyone to tell.”

“Do you – are you in love with him?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

The lights come on, then; the mosquitoes become more annoying, and they move towards the stairs. Shuli hangs onto the railing awkwardly. Then she stops, and turns around.

“Do you love him?”

Rohanna’s voice is almost pleading. “It isn’t love. It isn’t anything like that – it’s that he’s saved my life, and I’ve saved his. He knows me and I know him, better than we even know ourselves. It’s that I can see where he is in a room, even when my back is turned –“

Shuli nods then, and turns back to the staircase.

“We’ll go back to Dhaka tomorrow,” Rohanna says finally. “I’ll go to the minister’s house and tell them.”

Shuli says nothing at all. And when the next morning she is gone, Rohanna realises she has not gone to Dhaka. She has caught another train west.

There is nothing in the envelope except a photograph.

It’s a mass of colour. It’s a pile of rubbish. Rohanna stares at the picture, seeing a coke can, a newspaper, half a torn box of washing-powder, in amongst weeds. It’s debris.

Then she sees that the blue isn’t sky but a dress, a fragment of a child’s frock. And the brown isn’t the earth but a leg.

When she turns the photograph over she sees that Shuli has penned a single word.

“Rumah.”

There will be a story as to how Shuli found a child discarded in amongst the trash. Perhaps she followed the train to Islamabad and discovered only two children where there had been five. Perhaps the man had told her the girl had got sick, that they’d got rid of her along the train track only miles from the station.

There could be a thousand reasons the child lies now with everything else society calls disposable.

Rohanna doesn’t know. All she knows is that when she sees Shuli again it is automatic to fall, to salaam her – more natural than anything else, the crouch, head down towards the ground, hands brushing bare feet –

But Shuli pulls her up almost immediately and embraces her, lifting her from the earth.

...h.o.m.e...
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