#15. Telling Lies, Episode 1.
Introducing Telling Lies, a new section on Wit’s End where I will publish fiction. Regular free posts will continue as usual!
Dear Readers,
May I introduce: Telling Lies, a new section on Wit’s End where I will publish fiction. You won’t need to read the episodes in order, they are a collection of interconnected stories, a tapestry. The principal cast of characters includes Aisha, Vishnu, Arjun and Nayna. Their lives unfold mostly in contemporary Bombay and Goa.
Of late, I’ve been picturing the four of them at sunset on surfboards off Galgibaga waiting for a wave. One that I feel compelled now to generate to set them on their way, wherever that may be.
Below is Episode 1, which is a public post on Wit’s End. Subsequent episodes will be available to paid subscribers. Both free and paid subscribers will continue to receive regular (usually), weekly (usually) non-fiction posts, and my deepest, deepest gratitude.
As always, thank you for reading!
~ TS.
Download the Substack app if you are viewing this post on your phone, or click here to read Wit’s End on my Substack website to better engage with the community!
Telling Lies: Episode 1: Aisha Adrift.
AISHA TOLD ARJUN about the day she got the call. Dr. (Mrs) Mâri Alphonso, Principal, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour Girls School, Mapsa (whose desk the phone was on), couldn’t meet her gaze. Which was fine, because whatever had happened, she didn’t want to hear about it from Principal Pain-au-Chocolat. Empress of Eternal Beige Sadsackery. Baroness of the Brown Saree. Aisha picked up the receiver. Pack your bag, I’m coming to pick you up. It was Zepharino. Aisha collected her water bottle from the hook outside her classroom and the textbooks from her desk inside, where someone had etched ‘T loves S’ in the old Burma teak.
She hurried down the corridor that led to the dusty playground while Miss Gaitonde droned on about the circumference and height of the pillar at Sarnath. The same details delivered in the same deadpan were dutifully received by the nineteenth set of 10th graders that sat before her. No mention of Emperor Ashoka’s wild swing to The Middle Path after years of bloody conquest. No asking if this story was true at all. And though they suffered in school daily with clerical work, there was no whisper of dukkha, The Pain, how to hack it, or what those four lions frozen in sandstone for all eternity had been screaming about silently for over two thousand years. Aisha learned about these lofty things eight years later at The Ball, from Nayna. It was during a graduate seminar at Princeton, she said, that a lecture on the intersect between Buddhism, modern psychology and the biological basis of morality, changed her life. Aisha’s first impression of Nayna was not good. What a bombastic idiot. Floating in her own private Nirvana. One bought by Daddy!
Aisha’s college experience had been quite different from Nayna’s and involved paying Franey Dastoor twenty-five rupees, the cost of one mutton biryani at the canteen, per ‘proxy’ to meet the seventy-five per cent attendance rule at St. Paul’s, Bombay. Aisha didn’t have the time to attend seminars because she spent her college days riding pillion through the southern tip of the city on her best friend Vishnu’s scooter. They’d eat hazardous, delicious street food and people-watch at the Gateway of India and Marine Drive. Sometimes she would help him pick trash from the mangroves at the mouth of the Mithi River or be a one-woman Make-up and Wardrobe Department, during his first shows in those smelly old dives in Bandra West. But now, shivering in the sunshine on a bench outside Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, waiting for Zepharino to come bearing what could only be bad news, that whole life was still a while away. With nothing else to do, she pulled out her peach and pink journal, and in blue ballpoint pen, made this entry:
FREE AT LAST. Liberté, égalité, fraternité!
Sitting behind Zepharino on his motorcycle and hurtling away from that school forever, she couldn’t hear a thing he said. Why had he not fixed the silencer? On second thought, maybe it was better this way. It gave her a little more time to not know what had happened. She placed her face against Zepharino’s back and watched Mapsa’s grey buildings and garish markets morph into the highway and then dusty roads. She closed her eyes as the diesel fumes and traffic noise gave way to the smell of salt and shrieks of gulls. When they reached the creek, Angelo and Savio waved at her from the other side. She saw that they’d arranged only four chairs in the clearing of the coconut grove. Is Felicidade still at school? Aisha asked. Yes, she was, they lied. Felicidade didn’t want to be there when they told her and was waiting by the white cement cross, knowing she would come straight there, after.
Once Aisha had sat down on a chair in the clearing, Savio kneeled before her, put his hands on her knees said: the night before, three men - a Bolivian, a Columbian and a British citizen of Indian Origin - had been caught with five kilogrammes of cocaine. She interrupted him to say this sounded like the beginning of a really bad joke. But it was not. Iman and Celeste were at the party when the arrest happened.
That day under the coconut trees was the first time Aisha had a feeling that would follow her all her life. A feeling that she was floating three feet above herself, watching everything. Light-headed. Disjointed. Not really there. Her chair tipped in the soft sand. Angelo lept forward to hold it steady. In Iman and Celeste’s bags, said Savio, with the oils and incense, the police had found a sticky black block weighing forty grammes and a little bag of white tablets.
Someone said something about a lawyer and someone else said something about jail. Aisha could feel her heart bang around in her ribcage. She had heard the party thump through the night and felt its music shake the hills at dawn. Before they left, as she always did when her mothers worked late, Aisha brought in the beach dogs Colette and Gigi, locked her bedroom door and lay in bed, listening for the splash of otters in the creek. She didn’t know that this would be the last time she would hear Celeste curse in French at the floodlights, laser shows and fireworks at the ‘saison stupide’ at the year’s end that confused the turtles, or the last time she would watch Iman smoking cigarettes under the stars trying to enjoy life, despite it all.
At the white cement cross, Aisha told Felicidade she had rolled her eyes at them as they left for work the night before. Foot massages at a thirtieth birthday party for a Bombay heiress at Elysée? How low could they go? Aisha’s said. College fund, Celeste replied. I’m staying here with you two and the dolphins - forever! Aisha had told them. Zepharino put his arm around her: The boys and I will look after you, Felicidade and the dogs too. It will be okay, it was a mistake. They were set up. Privately, he was not so sure. After all these years, he still didn’t really trust these foreigners.
Zepharino met Celeste the year Aisha was born, which was the year after his wife had died giving birth to Felicidade. Savio and Angelo were ten and twelve, growing up fast. Celeste had walked up to his old fishing boat, the ramshackle Elvis, and asked if he would help her find where the olive Ridleys nest. Night after night, for a fee, they’d sat on the beach waiting for turtles at Morjim and Mandrem, exchanging stories in the moonlight. He was a man with three young children and no wife, some acres of ancestral land, an old brick house on the beach, a few onion fields and no money.
Iman and Celeste rented the brick house and Zepharino, with the boys and Felicidade moved to a shed at the back. He started taking the tourists who came for massages out on dolphin sighting trips in his fishing boat. The nets were coming up empty and the onion fields did not yield. Besides, he was old. The fields were too hard to work alone and he couldn’t afford to employ anyone to help.
During one of their nighttime vigils, Celeste told Zepharino she had met Iman in Paris while helping refugees. They fell in love. This was fine for Iman, she had no family and had left everything behind in Oran years ago. But for Celeste things were different. She was, her parents reminded her constantly, a d’Orléans. Not so rich now, but once, very. That she would never give them grandchildren was bad enough, but this proximity to poverty? Those grabby brown hands? That was too much for them. They cut her off, assuming it would shrivel the affair. But it did not. It smoked them out of Paris and set them off to Pondicherry, and from there to Goa.
Antoinette! Iman called Celeste from the house. Othello! she replied arms outstretched. Zepharino didn’t understand the exchange. He was looking for turtles, trying to remember his wife’s face, what it had felt like to touch her.
© Tara Sahgal.
Substack is a network of readers and writers that works on free and paid subscriptions - you will not be advertised at! To support my work, subscribe, leave a comment, share it with a friend or consider liking it by clicking the heart icon below. Thank you!