A Walk Across the Sun Page 2

  Ahalya took a deep breath and clutched her sister’s hand. Wading across the submerged landscape, the girls made their way to the remains of the home they had known for nearly a decade. Before the arrival of the wave, the grounds around the bungalow had been a nature preserve of flowering gardens and fruit trees. Soon after moving the family from Delhi, Naresh had planted an ashoka tree near the house in honor of Sita. As a child, she had played beneath the evergreen sapling and imagined her namesake, the heroine of the Ramayana, rescued by Hanuman, the noble monkey god, from captivity on the island of Lanka. Now the ashoka and all of its verdant companions were matchsticks denuded of leaf, branch, and flower.

  Sita paused beside the skeleton of her beloved tree, but Ahalya tugged at her hand and insisted she keep moving. The windows on the lower floor of the bungalow were washed out, and furnishings that once had graced the living area now floated in the yard. Still, the house seemed sound. As the girls approached the wide-open front doors, Ahalya listened for a human voice but heard none. The house was quiet as a crypt.

  She stepped into the foyer and wrinkled her nose in the dank air. Looking into the living room, she saw her aged grandmother floating facedown in the murk beside a mud-encrusted couch. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes, but she was too exhausted to weep. The discovery of the old woman’s remains did not shock her. After finding her father, she had half-expected that her grandmother, too, had perished.

  Summoning the last of her resolve, Ahalya waded through the living room to the kitchen, praying desperately that Jaya had survived. The housekeeper had been a fixture in the Ghai family for longer than Ahalya had been alive. She was like a member of the family, unique and indispensable.

  When Ahalya entered the kitchen trailing a limp and pliant Sita, she found a wasteland of debris. Overturned baskets, containers of detergent, glass jars stuffed with sweets, and stray mangoes, papayas, and coconuts floated on the stagnant waters. Beneath the surface, pots, pans, bowls, and silverware littered the floor like sunken wrecks. But there was no sign of Jaya.

  Ahalya was about to leave the kitchen and search the dining room when she noticed that the wooden door to the pantry was ajar. She saw the hand before her sister did and wrenched open the door. Wedged into the cramped confines of the pantry was Jaya. Of all their departed family members, Jaya was the most peaceful in death. Her eyes were closed and she looked as if she were asleep. But her skin was cold and clammy to the touch.

  The vertigo came without warning and Ahalya nearly fainted. Standing there in calf-deep water, the truth of their predicament hit her. She and Sita were orphans. Their only surviving relatives were aunts and cousins in distant Delhi, none of whom she had seen in many years.

  Just as the thought crossed her mind that all hope was lost, Sita reached out and took her hand. The sudden sensation of touch stirred Ahalya to action. Shouldering again the responsibility of the firstborn, she led Sita up the stairs to their bedroom.

  The wave had scaled the steps and mired the floor, but the secondstory windows and furniture remained intact. A single thought occupied Ahalya’s attention—finding her purse and mobile phone. If she could contact Sister Naomi and find a way to escort Sita to St. Mary’s in Tiruvallur, they would be safe.

  She recovered her purse from the bedside table and dialed Sister Naomi’s number on her mobile. As the phone began to ring, she heard the sound of distant rumbling coming from the east. She moved to the window and looked out at the silt-stained surface of the Bay of Bengal. She couldn’t believe her eyes. Another wall of water was hurtling toward the beach. In seconds, the noise of it escalated into a throaty roar and drowned out the voice on the other end of the line. “Hello? Hello? Ahalya? Sita?” Ahalya forgot about Sister Naomi. Her world narrowed to her sister and the second killer wave.

  The churning mass of water reached the bungalow and flooded the lower floor. The house shuddered and groaned as the wave hurled itself against the foundations. Ahalya slammed the bedroom door and urged Sita onto the bed. Wrapping her trembling sister in her arms, she wondered whether Lord Shiva had chosen water over fire to bring about the end of the world.

  The terror of the second wave seemed to last forever. Briny water poured in through the cracks around the bottom of the bedroom door and fanned out across the floor. The sisters huddled in a pile of blankets as the water level rose. At once the house shifted beneath them and the floor tilted at an angle. The bedroom door burst open and brown water rushed in. Ahalya shrieked and Sita buried her head in the damp fabric of Ahalya’s soiled churidaar. Ahalya closed her eyes and mouthed a prayer to Lakshmi to absolve the sisters of their sins and assure them safe passage into the next life.

  In that place of dissociation, she barely noticed when the noise diminished and then ceased. The house stood firm as the current reversed and the second wave retreated to the sea. The sisters sat unmoving on the bed. The ravaged world left behind by the waves seemed eerily bereft of sound.

  “Ahalya?” Sita whispered at long last. “Where are we going to go?”

  Ahalya blinked and her mind reengaged. She let go of her sister and felt the weight of the phone in her hand. Numbly, she pressed the familiar numbers.

  “We need to get to St. Mary’s,” she said. “Sister Naomi will know what to do.”

  “But how?” Sita asked, hugging herself. “There is no one to drive us.”

  Ahalya closed her eyes and listened to the ringing of the phone. Sister Naomi picked up. Her words were anxious. What had happened? Were they in danger? When Ahalya spoke, her voice seemed far away. A wave had come. Her family was dead. She and Sita had survived, but their home was destroyed. They had no money, only the phone.

  The line crackled with static for long seconds until Sister Naomi found her voice. She instructed Ahalya to walk to the road and catch a ride into Chennai with a neighbor.

  “Go only with someone you trust,” she said. “We will be waiting for you.”

  Ahalya ended the call and turned to Sita, trying to look confident. “We must find someone with a car. Come now. We need dry clothes.”

  She led her sister across the room to a chest of drawers. She helped Sita peel off her wet, soiled garments and handed her a clean churidaar. Then she changed her own clothing. She tried the sink, hoping to wash her face, but found no water pressure. They would have to live with the grit coating their skin until they reached St. Mary’s.

  Sita moved toward the door, ready for the journey, but Ahalya stopped to collect a photograph from the bureau. The image showed the Ghai family at Christmas a year before. She removed the photo from its frame and slipped it into the waistline of her churidaar. She also retrieved a wooden box and placed it and her phone in a cloth satchel. The box contained gold jewelry the sisters had received as gifts over the years—the sum of their collective wealth. Ahalya took one last look at the room and nodded in farewell. The rest she would leave behind.

  The sisters descended the stairs and waded through the foyer to the front yard. Outside, the sun was hot, and the standing water left by the second wave had begun to reek with the odor of dead fish. Ahalya led Sita around the back of the damaged bungalow and out onto the lane. The family’s two vehicles, both parked in the driveway before the arrival of the waves, were nowhere to be seen. Ahalya thought to take a last look at the bungalow, but she resisted. The ruined world left by the waves was not the home they had known. The former world, and the family that inhabited it, lived now only in their memory.

  When they reached the main road, they found it awash with debris from the palm forest. Ahalya felt a twinge of despair. Who would venture out on the roadway in such conditions? A thought came to her then: perhaps they could catch a ride with someone from the fishing village. She knew it was a long shot. Most of the villagers lived in seaside huts that probably had been leveled by the waves. But the survivors would need to obtain provisions and assistance from Chennai. Before long someone from the village would have to make the trek.

  The sisters walk
ed side by side without speaking. For nearly a mile they saw no sign of life. All ground-level vegetation had been swept away, leaving the earth on both sides of the tarmac naked and forlorn. By the time they reached the outskirts of the fishing village, they had begun to sweat heavily, and their throats were parched with thirst. Even in winter, the South Indian sun was merciless in its intensity.

  Ahalya led the way down the road to the fishing community. As they neared the shoreline, they saw a man wearing a muddy white skirt, or lungi, walking toward them with a child in his bare arms. Behind the man was a bedraggled line of fisherfolk, carrying palm baskets on their heads and colorful satchels on their shoulders.

  The man stopped in front of Ahalya. “Vanakkam,” she said in the customary greeting. “Where are you going?”

  The man was so agitated that he didn’t acknowledge her question. Pointing and gesturing wildly, he told her about the waves.

  “I was in my boat,” he said. “I felt nothing. When I returned, everything was gone. My wife, my children—I don’t know what happened to them.” He turned around and swept his hand across his ragtag band. “We are the only ones left.”

  Ahalya absorbed the man’s grief and steeled herself against her own. She focused instead on practical things.

  “Your chieftain has a van,” she said. “Where is it?”

  The man shook his head. “It is wrecked.”

  “And your drinking water? Surely you kept drums from the monsoon.”

  “They were washed away.”

  “Where are you going?” Ahalya asked again.

  “Mahabalipuram,” the man replied. “We have relatives there.”

  Ahalya tried to conceal her disappointment. Mahabalipuram was five miles in the wrong direction. “We must get to Chennai.”

  The man stared at her as if she had lost her mind. “You will never make it.”

  Ahalya took Sita’s hand and spoke with defiance. “We will make it.”

  The sisters accompanied the villagers back to the main road, where they parted ways.

  “We should go to Kovallam,” Sita said softly, speaking for the first time in many minutes. “Maybe we could catch a bus.”

  Ahalya nodded. Kovallam was a larger fishing community two miles to the north. Even if they couldn’t find a bus, she felt reasonably certain that they could get filtered water at the Kovallam market. Water was her first priority. Transportation would have to wait.

  The miles passed slowly in the tropical sunlight. A breeze blowing in from the ocean brought occasional relief from the heat. Otherwise, the trek was monotonous and painful. Their sandals, soaked and sandencrusted, made the soles of their feet raw with blisters.

  By the time they reached Kovallam, Sita’s face was locked in a perpetual grimace, and Ahalya was having difficulty maintaining her composure. From the angle of the sun, she judged that it was nearly eleven o’clock in the morning. Unless their luck turned, they stood little chance of reaching the convent by nightfall.

  The village of Kovallam was a hive of activity. Oxcarts and wagons vied with cars and pedestrians on the narrow, waterlogged roads. Ahalya stopped an old woman wearing a mud-splattered sari and inquired about a bus to Chennai. The woman, however, was beside herself with grief.

  “My son,” she cried. “He was on the beach. Have you seen him?”

  Ahalya shook her head sadly and turned away. She asked a man carrying a basket of ripe bananas for help, but he stared at her blankly. Another man trailing a cart loaded with grapes responded to her with a curt shake of the head.

  “Don’t you know what happened here?” he demanded, spitting a stream of paan juice on the street. “No one knows whether the buses are running.”

  Ahalya struggled against a sudden riptide of desperation. She knew if she didn’t stay calm, she could make a rash decision and endanger them.

  She led Sita into the Kovallam market. As she expected, only a few stalls were unshuttered. She asked a cane juice vendor whether he could spare a bottle of water. Mustering her best smile, she explained that the wave had taken her purse and that she had no money. The vendor gave her an unsympathetic look.

  “Everyone pays,” he said brusquely. “Nothing here is free.”

  Taking Sita by the hand, she approached a vendor of vegetables. She told him their circumstances and he responded with pity. He gave them bottles of water and a patch of shade beneath an umbrella.

  “Nandri,” Ahalya said, accepting the water and handing a bottle to Sita. “Thank you.”

  They took their leave of the sun and drank thirstily. After draining her bottle, Sita leaned her head on Ahalya’s shoulder and dozed. Ahalya, however, resisted the urge to sleep and searched the market for a familiar face. Her father knew a number of men in Kovallam, but she couldn’t recall their names.

  As time passed and she recognized no one, she began to calculate the street value of the jewelry hidden in her satchel. How much would it cost to hire a driver to take them to Chennai? Her instinct cautioned her against securing a taxi, but she had seen no buses pass through the market, and she doubted any would make the trip that afternoon. She and Sita could not make it to Chennai by foot, at least not that afternoon, and she knew of no place outside the city where they could spend the night in safety.

  The girls rested for over an hour in the shade of the umbrella. Sita didn’t stir, and Ahalya finally drifted off to sleep. When she awoke, she saw that the sun had passed its zenith. She had to make a decision soon.

  She turned toward the vendor to ask about a driver, but at that moment something triggered in her memory. A face in the crowd. A dinner reception in Mylapore earlier that year. The man had greeted her father warmly, and her father had responded in kind. Ahalya couldn’t recall the man’s name, but she never forgot a face.

  She pinched Sita awake and told her not to move. She wove her way through cows, automobiles, and rickshaws and approached the man.

  “Sir,” she said, speaking in English, “I am Ahalya Ghai. My father is Naresh Ghai. Do you remember me?”

  The man looked at her and broke into a grin. “Of course,” he replied with crisp English diction. “I am Ramesh Narayanan. We met last spring at the Tamil Historical Society.” His look turned to puzzlement. “What are you doing here? Are you with your father?”

  The question pierced Ahalya. She looked away from Ramesh while she collected herself. In halting speech, she told him the truth about her family.

  The blood drained from Ramesh’s face as she spoke. He struggled to find something appropriate to say. Finally he asked, “Where is your sister?”

  Ahalya motioned toward the vegetable vendor’s stall. “We are headed to our convent school in Tiruvallur. The sisters will take care of us.”

  Ramesh glanced back and forth between Ahalya and Sita. “To reach Tiruvallur, you will need a ride.”

  Ahalya nodded. “We walked this far, but Sita is very tired.”

  Ramesh pursed his lips. “We are in the same position then. The bus I was on is no longer running. I’ve been trying to find a driver to take me back to Chennai.” He paused and gave her a smile. “Don’t worry. I will make sure you arrive in Tiruvallur by nightfall. It is the least I can do for the daughters of Naresh Ghai.”

  Ahalya was nearly overcome with relief.

  “Wait with your sister,” Ramesh said. “I will come for you as soon as I can.”

  Sometime later Ramesh returned with a wiry man dressed in a loosefitting shirt, or kurta, and a pair of khaki pants. The man had gaunt cheeks, cold eyes, and a scar on his chin. He looked at the sisters and then nodded to Ramesh. Ahalya felt an instinctive distrust toward the scar-faced man, but she had no option but to accept Ramesh’s help.

  “Where are we going?” Sita asked, a slight tremor in her voice.

  Ramesh answered her. “This man—Kanan is his name—has a truck with four-wheel drive. He is the only person in all of Kovallam willing to brave the road after the waves, and his price was remarkably fair. We were lucky
to find him.”

  Ahalya took her sister’s hand. “It’s all right,” she said.

  Staying close to Ramesh, the sisters trailed Kanan through the marketplace toward an alleyway draped with brilliantly colored fabrics. The truck—a dust-coated blue Toyota—had seen better days. It stood battered and rusting beside an apothecary’s shop. Ahalya, feigning claustrophobia, declined Ramesh’s invitation to ride with Sita in the cab and motioned for her sister to climb onto the flatbed. The idea of sitting so close to the scar-faced man repulsed her.

  Kanan started the engine and engaged the clutch. The truck shuddered and lurched forward. After navigating the streets of Kovallam, he took the highway toward Chennai.

  The waves had turned the scenic coastal plain into a silt-infested swamp and the roadway into a mud flat. The truck made slow headway across the crust of sand. Although there was no traffic on the road, it took them an hour to reach Neelankarai, the southernmost suburb of Chennai, and another hour to reach Thiruvanmiyur, two miles shy of the Adyar River. The waves had destroyed many of the coastal dwellings, flooded roads, overturned cars, and washed fleets of fishing boats ashore. The East Coast Road was overwhelmed with pedestrians, and traffic moved at a glacial pace.

  Half a mile south of the river delta, traffic halted altogether. Horns blared and drivers shouted obscenities, but nothing dislodged the unseen logjam. After ten frustrating minutes, Kanan reversed course and took an inland road toward St. Thomas Mount. The sun was low in the sky when they crossed the river by way of the bridge at Saidapet. The thoroughfares north of the river showed no signs of damage.

  The driver turned east toward Mylapore and the coast. Ahalya took a small measure of comfort in the chaotic dance of cars, trucks, buses, bicyclists, and auto rickshaws. She squeezed Sita’s hand to reassure her.