Sea of Innocence Read online

  The Sea of Innocence

  By the same author

  Witness the Night

  Origins of Love

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Kishwar Desai, 2013

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Kishwar Desai to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London

  WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue copy for this book is available from the British Library.

  HB ISBN: 978-1-47110-142-7

  TPB ISBN: 978-1-47110-143-4

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47110-145-8

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  For Jyoti, Scarlett and the thousands of women who have been raped and murdered in India – in the hope that one day they will get justice

  The Sea of Innocence

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 1

  The girl in the video did not look older than sixteen, a pale flame flickering amongst the four dark-skinned boys who crowded around her as she raised her hands and moved to the music. The boys merged together in the dim light as they tried to get close to her. They may have been older than her but since they were all dressed in t-shirts and bright shorts, and two of them had their hair tied in ponytails, they seemed young. The girl was tiny, in a yellow halter-neck top and short blue skirt, as they circled her, dancing with her eyes closed, mesmerized by the hypnotic beat.

  A low ceiling was visible behind them, lit by a single bulb covered with a red scarf, the light spilling in splashes of blood onto the swaying figures. Curtains lined the wall, and in one corner a circular window was visible. Familiar-sounding trance music bound them into a robotic movement.

  One of the boys suddenly said something vehemently to the girl. It was difficult to distinguish the expressions on the faces. The video was possibly shot on a mobile phone and the images were grainy. No effort was made to adjust the quality or to zoom in – and though the tone of his voice was sharp, the words were muffled by the music. From her relaxed manner, it seemed the girl knew him well. She shook her head and pushed him aside while he was trying to say something into her ear. It was obvious she was confident of herself. Without even opening her eyes, she carried on dancing.

  The boy slipped his arm around the girl and cupped her left breast. The other boys stared and the dancing came to a standstill. Nervous laughter broke out as the girl slapped him and one of the boys blocked the camera-view momentarily, trying to stop the fight, perhaps. He was jostled by the boy next to him and, as though made aware of the camera, he looked over his shoulder and stepped alongside the girl. The girl threw her long curly hair back over her shoulder and struggled with the boy, who continued to grope her. He managed to untie her halter top, exposing her breasts.

  The other boys became absolutely still.

  She quickly pulled the two ends of the top behind her neck, retying them. And then she lunged at the boy to hit him. But he ducked and caught hold of her wrist. There was a momentary pause, as though the script had gone wrong and someone had given instructions to redirect the video.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ one of the boys said. This time both the words and their implication were clear.

  ‘Shut up, you idiot,’ the girl replied, and then giggled and added, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ Oddly, she didn’t sound angry.

  The screen went dark. Then when the video started again three of the boys and the girl were on a bed. One of them was lying on his side, speaking to her.

  ‘You promised. You can’t be . . .’

  The audio was once more slightly blurred, and even the little conversation which could be heard was jagged and unclear.

  She was obviously immune to his persistent, persuasive tone. She lay flat on her back, still in her halter-neck top and short skirt, staring at the ceiling. Her legs were crossed but her feet were moving in time to the music.

  The camera was jerkier than before. Earlier it might have been placed strategically on some table; now someone – perhaps the fourth boy? – was holding it.

  ‘Come on . . .’ The voice was aggressive and shrill. The girl looked directly into the lens, but her eyes were completely unfocused. She pushed herself up, moving slower than before, and slid back as though the effort was beyond her. Was she drunk? Why didn’t she get up and leave?

  ‘Just take off her skirt,’ another voice said, even more loudly than the previous one, with a distinct Indian accent. I thought I heard a Goan lilt.

  The lens moved closer to the bed and hovered over the girl, scanning up her pale legs, getting closer to the fabric of her skirt, when there was a sudden flash of bare thighs and a triangle of blonde hair. Then the screen went blank again.

  The video did not last more than three minutes.

  I stared at the small dark screen of my mobile phone, still in a state of shock.

  The clip had been sent to me by Amarjit, an old college friend of mine and a police officer presently based in Delhi (while recovering from a high-profile divorce).

  It was accompanied by a message saying he wanted to speak to me. But after his ex-wife had threatened to name me as a co-respondent in their divorce, there was very little reason for me to communicate with him. In fact I had broken off all contact from him for the past three years.

  So was this some kind of horrible joke? A schoolboy prank: a lewd video sent to intrigue me and break the ice instead of a bouquet of flowers? Hook me with a mysterious and very disturbing message, and then reel me in.

  I wasn’t going to fall into that trap again.

  I answered politely, suggesting that he tie his feet to a 500-kilo weight and drown himself in the Arabian Sea.

  But the video had an unsettling effect. Its very visible sexual overtones and the vulnerability of the girl upset me more than I had thought. I was also puzzled and angry that Amarjit had chosen to send me the video, and at this time.

  As he probably knew, since he was still in touch with my mother, I had come to Goa for a holiday, to lounge on the fabulous beaches while the sun spread a golden glow on the water. Not for this. In fact I was still depressed after hearing about the horrific gang rape of a young paramedical student on a public bus in Delhi. No, I could not deal with this.

  I sighed and, chucking the phone into my bag, which was already overcrowded with guidebooks and the sunscreens I had come to collect from our hotel room, made my way back to the beach. I wanted to join Durga, my 16-year-old daughter, as quickly as possible, nervous that she had been left alone even for a short time.

  Durga, meanwhile, was sitting comfortably on the sand getting a henna tattoo of broken hearts in a daisy chain painted onto her arm.

  ‘Too depressing. Why broken hearts?’ I asked her briskly, deliberately not looking at her, unprepared for another argument, as we seemed to ha
ve had quite a few in the past few days, mostly over trivial things. Though we always made up, I didn’t want to risk an all-out war, which was so easy on holiday, particularly when you’re meant to be having a good time. ‘Try something else.’

  Maybe that’s what 16-year-olds want? a voice retorted in my head, as I began to liberally lather on the sunscreen.

  After all, I was thirty years older than Durga, and anything but trendy, even though I now lay next to her on a sunny beach, wearing a flimsy pink sarong over my daring black swimsuit, to hide any unseemly bulges. Durga had insisted on wearing an old-fashioned swimsuit with a high neck and a little flared skirt. If she was so decorous, I should have definitely been wearing a burkini, at least! And yet, secretly, I was relieved at her choice. After what I had just seen on my mobile phone, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with Durga’s sexuality, even incidentally, on display.

  I could just about handle her current passion for sad songs and heartbroken tattoos. What kind of a holiday was this going to be? Not very jolly, that was for sure.

  The black nail polish she had applied this morning had been a bad omen, and should have warned me of worse to come. Was she turning into a goth? What if she wanted rings punched into her lips and safety pins in her belly button? And what if she insisted on being miserable? Despite my resolution that I wouldn’t say anything, I felt my irritation rise.

  ‘How about a string of paisleys around your arm . . . like this.’ I tried to inject a happy note in my voice.

  I waved my own plump arm with its intricate paisley henna tattoo (which looked quite nice, if you ignored the accompanying bingo wings – with only a touch of cellulite, mind you), while being observed keenly by Veeramma. She was the canny beach vendor who had painted the tattoo on me, and had subsequently attached herself to us for the past three days, showering us with endless compliments in fluent, if ungrammatical, English, French and Russian – as well as her native Kannada. She sold everything from head massages to sarongs and all the while looking like she had just stepped out of a village in Karnataka. She was smarter than I could ever hope to be, proving the value of never stepping inside a school.

  ‘Perhaps you should’ve got a dragon tattoo,’ quipped Durga, as she presented her other arm to Veeramma. ‘It’s more suited to what you’ve been up to.’ She was teasing me about my penchant for trying to solve difficult crime cases, even though my avowed profession was that of social worker. And there were many who described my voluntary work as annoying interference in matters that didn’t concern me.

  Determined not to be provoked, I laughed at Durga’s little jibe and said ‘Touche!’, mindful of the fact that we still had a week left of our holiday. No point getting annoyed and ruining it.

  Instead, I wondered how Veeramma and her gang of fellow beach gypsies had the energy to walk around all day, barefoot on the hot sand, with a swathe of elephant-print sarongs slung on one arm, a bundle of silver jewellery dangling from the other, and a patchwork embroidered bag over a shoulder. And she smiled and smiled, used to dealing with camera-clicking, sensation-hungry tourists from all over the world. In fact, it was probably some of those very tourists who had tutored her in multiple languages.

  I had a feeling she was humouring us – sharing a wink and a smile with her sister vendors, gathered around us in a good-natured crowd. In India, a tamasha – a spectacle – could be created within minutes.

  Right now I had drunk too much beer to bother about the women’s obvious interest in us. I lit a cigarette, pleased for once at the slow pace of the Indian government, as the long-proposed ban on smoking on the beach still had to be implemented.

  I blew smoke rings and watched Veeramma deftly dribble another thin line of black henna on Durga’s arm. Obviously she knew who was more likely to win the battle of the broken hearts. I sighed and fell further back into the sand. Why argue when Durga wasn’t going to listen anyway? I tried to synchronize my breath with the rise and fall of the waves.

  Veeramma squatted comfortably on the sand next to us, while the other six vendors now edged closer to me and began complaining about their husbands and their mothers-in-law. They asked me, half-teasingly, to take them all, or at least one of them, back with me to Delhi, as they said they hated their lives, wandering around on the beaches all day. They longed to be inside a house, cooking and gossiping and squabbling like the overdressed housewives in the TV soap operas they watched at night. They did not even mind being hired as domestic help. Anything, so long as they were not looking for customers, made objects of ridicule, treated almost like untouchables, shooed away from the shacks serving food and drink which lined the Goa beaches.

  I glanced back towards the row of beach shacks: temporary thatch-roofed, sand, cement and wood structures. Barring a few, they would be removed every monsoon and then reconstructed in the holiday season, the licences given to them providing an additional income to the government babus who carefully priced every stamp of approval for these coveted allocations. The shacks created their own economic and social environment and life (or, very occasionally, death) on the beach depended on which shack you attached yourself to.

  ‘Bastards no let us come up to deckchairs, still taking hafta,’ Veeramma grumbled under her breath.

  I had already learnt that the cops who gave them permission to sell their wares took a cut from their earnings. In the few days that Durga and I had been in Goa, we had realized that a well-oiled, systematic food chain existed. The tragedy was that no matter who postured as the biggest fish, there were others still larger than them.

  Reluctant to get up, I gestured to the waiter near my erstwhile deckchair to bring my beer over, as it seemed too far away to reach in my flip-flops.

  In my present cautious mood, I especially did not want to leave Durga alone with the gossiping women. What if they asked her something awkward?

  They might want to know about the men in our lives and ask where my ‘husband’ (and presumably Durga’s father) was. Having revealed so much about their own lives, wouldn’t they be eager to know about ours?

  These were always difficult questions for an adopted child such as Durga to answer.

  Of course, she and I had discussed what she should say when asked. As rehearsed, she should mention that she lived in Delhi with her grandmother and me and that her father had died some years earlier. All of this was technically correct. There was no reason to reveal that her father had no connection with me. Or that he had been murdered. Nor should she discuss the tragic circumstances under which I had adopted her.

  And if after this brief introduction she withdrew into silence, hopefully any further queries would be stalled. I knew it was difficult and unfair to ask a young girl to keep so much to herself, but thankfully she had never been very loquacious and the last few years in the Delhi school had trained her well.

  The sand was soothingly warm against my back and I lay back, relaxing while Durga’s tattoo was completed.

  Slowly I became aware that Veeramma’s hypnotic movements over Durga’s arm had stalled as she stared towards the sea, her eyes glued to a young woman in a bikini running past us, her blonde hair bouncing behind her.

  I felt my stomach knot in tension. She reminded me far too much of the girl I had seen in the video less than an hour ago.

  Veeramma said something to one of her friends, who was also closely watching the girl. I couldn’t follow her comment, but both of them burst out laughing. Puzzled, I watched the girl speed over the sand, lightfooted like a gazelle. She seemed no different from all the other tourists who crowded the beach and were swimming in the water. Why had she caught Veeramma’s eye?

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked her.

  Veeramma shook her head.

  ‘Nothing. She new catch, I think.’

  ‘Caught by whom?’ I asked.

  A silence followed. Durga moved uncomfortably, as Veeramma’s grip on her arm tightened slightly. Then Veeramma looked up and smiled. But the smile did not reach her eyes.
/>
  ‘Some beach boys like fish.’

  The woman sitting beside her cut in swiftly, ‘They sell in market!’

  Another added, And making tasty curry.’

  ‘No. Masala fry! Chop chop! Bon appétit!’ giggled the woman next to her, saying the last few words in a perfect French accent, bowing slightly towards me and presenting her palm as though serving a culinary treat, while the other arm looped the air. Where had she learnt that astonishing perfection? Could just mixing with a few international tourists give these women this accent and style? Or was there some other secret behind their multilingual skills?

  As she stopped for applause, I thought the divergence between her words and light-hearted gestures was not only macabre, it was frightening as well.

  Watching her, all the women laughed out loud. Yet there was nothing funny about the implication of young men snaring women like fish and then selling them or slicing them up.

  Almost by a hidden signal the women started gathering their things, and stood up to leave.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Durga, her eyes darkening. In her own childhood she had seen and understood, far too early, about cruelty. She knew immediately that something wasn’t quite right. She might have also felt my unease.

  ‘Forget it, madam. Enjoy holiday. Many things on beach you don’t want to know.’

  ‘Goa, Goa . . . Goa, Goa.’ Another woman swung her hips in time to the chant, as she pirouetted on one heel.

  Veeramma poured a bit of oil on Durga’s henna hearts, and told her, ‘Don’t rub off now. Leave thirty minutes then tattoo will stay for few weeks.’

  I handed her the payment, but couldn’t help asking, ‘And how do you know that girl?’

  ‘I did tattoo, madam,’ she said, suddenly looking shy. ‘But private place.’ She quickly placed her hand just below her belly button and darted a look at Durga, who was listening fascinated.

  ‘Not you, baby. Shut eyes, ears,’ she added. Even though Durga was as old as the teenager who had just run past on the beach, Veeramma made the classic blunder of thinking that, being an Indian adolescent, she would be more innocent.