Flash House Read online

  Also by Aimee Liu

  Cloud Mountain

  Face

  (Nonfiction) Solitaire

  FLASH HOUSE

  Copyright © 2018 by Aimee E. Liu

  Cover image courtesy of Mukul Saini

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Published by Jessfield Press

  ISBN: 9781625361387

  For Marty

  With honor, love, and laughter

  Always

  Prologue

  March 1949

  New Delhi, India

  JOANNA WAS DREAMING OF SNOW when Aidan kissed her goodbye. At his touch she came up fast and hard to a room too dark, hot against the phantom chill of her sleep. Her husband’s closeness alarmed her.

  Already dressed and seated on the edge of the bed, he smoothed the hair back from her face and kissed her again, longer this time, as if to imprint her with his leaving. He was off to Srinagar, he reminded her. Six A.M. flight.

  She tasted the mint of his toothpaste, smelled his Burma Shave on her cheek. At once consoled and reluctant, she remembered why he was going to Kashmir. The Border War. U.N. observers. Proving himself an “American.” Depending on what he came up with and when, Aidan would be gone from Delhi for at least two weeks.

  “I wish you didn’t have to do this,” she said.

  He squeezed her hand. She knew as well as he that there was no point discussing what he did or didn’t have to do, but it was unlike him to hold on this tight, this long. She could feel his wedding band pressing into her fingertip.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Will you say goodbye to Simon for me?”

  “You did yourself, last night.”

  “I know, but…he has a short memory.” The forced energy of his smile cut through the darkness. “I’ll be in touch, just as soon as I’ve got the right story.”

  “No need to wait that long,” she said lightly. But as he released her, she added, “Be careful.”

  “You’ll be fine, Jo. I’ve told Lawrence to see to it.”

  “That’ll make all the difference.”

  “Be nice. He’s a good friend, and we don’t have many. Besides, Simon loves him even if you don’t.”

  “I hope you don’t want me to love him!” She tugged her husband back down beside her, placed her lips against his ear to remind him of their lovemaking the night before.

  “It’s time,” he said, firmly turning his head. But again, that hesitation. He cupped one hand to her cheek. “I love you. You know that.”

  Neither forming a question nor a statement, the words seemed to wander between them.

  “I could go with you,” she suggested, though they both knew Simon and her work made such impulses impossible.

  He kissed her a third time, tenderly—briefly—then pulled back into his ritual preoccupation, reaching for his hat and bag, patting his pockets for wallet and documents: passport, visas, press certification, letters of safe conduct. Like a train edging cautiously but irreversibly out of the station, he moved toward the door. She started to get up, but he raised a hand. “Stay there,” he said, “just where you are. That way I’ll know where to find you.” The half-light from the hall illuminated his smile, the determined tilt of his head. Before the door closed behind him, he looked back into the darkness and blew her one last kiss.

  Moments later she heard the door to Simon’s room open at the other end of the hall. Then it closed softly and the sound of Aidan’s footsteps faded down the stairs.

  BOOK ONE

  March to June 1949

  Chapter 1

  1

  FROM THE BEGINNING, we were sisters more than mother and daughter. Joanna Shaw rescued me in her way, and I tried to return the favor. I do not say this boastfully, but ironies are the way of the world, and now that I am an old woman I tell you with certainty that those who presume to lift another are most often in need of being raised themselves.

  At the same time, those who appear the weaklings of this earth may possess strengths that overrule the mighty—that, indeed, may surpass even their own deepest longings and desires. I have seen this to be the case among women and children of my kind for as long as I can remember. Mrs. Shaw, too, was of my kind, though on the now distant day when I first claimed her I did not know this to be true.

  On the contrary, as I watched her making her way down G. B. Road in her stiff yellow dress and broad-brimmed hat with her handsome young Hindu escort I thought this must be some pampered firenghi who possesses no notion of pain. She looked younger than her thirty-four years, with a fire in her eyes that at once invited and warned me away. I was merely one of countless children of the red-light district. I owned nothing, not even my skin, but I knew why this foreign lady had come. The whole street knew. Tongas turned left instead of right at the sight of her. Khas-khas tati dropped over open windows. Smugglers bundled up their wares and trotted out of view. Women drew scarves across their faces, and the street became suddenly lively with dancing bears, monkey wallahs, and the calls of melon and paan vendors. All for the benefit of the foreigner who would come to save us.

  My keeper, Indrani, said that in the days of the British her kind were missionaries and bored commissioners’ wives. In the past two years since Independence they had been attached to the new Departments of Health and Social Welfare, and usually they were Indian, but they remained the same. Women with hair like dust clouds and radish noses who had never enjoyed the touch of a man—or so Indrani said. Such women in India, it was well known, were so weak that for centuries they had required the almighty power of the Raj to stand guard over their virtue. Now this responsibility had fallen to India’s own officials and police. We in the street could not know why these men should protect the dust cloud ladies when they freely preyed on us, but neither did we question such things.

  Mrs. Shaw was not ugly as the others I had seen. True, her body held hard juts and corners, and her lips were bare slivers against her teeth, but her eyes were large and filled with gold light, her skin and thick hair all the colors of honey. Her neck was long and slender and her ears shaped like perfect mangoes…

  You see, even as early as that first day, I was viewing her in a different fashion. We were strangers, yet any stranger who is drawing such examination becomes something else, doesn’t she? A stranger is strange, unknown, unexamined. When we study another we become familiar, and therefore cannot strictly be called strangers. I have often thought that of the thousands who pass in the streets each day, many hundreds may have passed before. Yet even if they pass two, five, twenty times, still they remain strangers except for those few who catch our eye, whose features we note and whose place in the street and day we remember—these are strangers no more but possessions of the mind. So in this way I, who was then called Kamla, claimed Mrs. Shaw even as I hid from her under the shadow of a bullock cart.

  It was easy to see that she was new to India. Her face was like a child’s at a puppet show, while her feet and twinkling gloves behaved as if they belonged to the puppet. How awkwardly they plucked at earth and air as she turned this way and that! For although Mrs. Shaw’s small mouth rounded with evident pleasure at the sight of a tinseled altar or Bharati’s little daughter, Shanta, with a red hibiscus in her hair, still she seemed to cling to herself, clutching her shiny white pocketbook to her waist as she stepped sideways past a dozing pi dog. Clearly she wished neither to touch nor be touched. Having claimed her, however, I dismissed this.

  I could not help imagining how it would feel to press my small dirty face between those clean f
olds of her skirt, to rub my palms on the whiteness of her gloves. I pictured my wild black hair coming smooth beneath the answering strokes of her fingers. My heart would quiet to a purr as her foreign voice poured over me. I loved her foreignness. I adhered to it. I did not believe she would rescue me, but I believed that she could if she so desired.

  At the same time, I did not desire rescue. Rescue, as it is understood in the red-light district, simply means greater suffering and risk. Oh, I had heard of girls who were “rescued” by husbands and lovers and caring friends, but I also had seen the deadness in their eyes when they returned. And Indrani made sure I knew all the many, many reasons why other less fortunate girls never returned.

  Mrs. Shaw could not know these things. I imagined that her kind dreamed in black and white, as I was told they lived. Black was the dirt, the baby, the fly, the water she would not touch. White was the disinfected palace where she must sleep at night and the other firenghi home to which she would flee when her time in India was over. Home for Mrs. Shaw must be a refuge, while home to me meant a dark place filled with blood and cries and madness.

  For I, too, was a foreigner, my homeland also a world apart from Delhi. But I dreamed not in black and white but in colors bright as the waters of Holi. Fertile greens and dirt red, glacial blues and gold, these were the hues of my vision of myself, my life, my possibilities. These colors I had seen not only streaming in the riots of festivals and the bloodletting of India’s Partition, but during my travels long ago away from that first place of fighting and death and what love I could recall. By the time I met Mrs. Shaw I did not remember the place or the journey, only those colors and the sounds that accompanied them. Sounds of thrusting rivers and wind, skittering rocks and rain, but also the throat-swell of men’s voices, the partition of vowels and guttural sighs, the language of my keepers. Whenever one from the hills came into the brothel, I would know it instantly and engage him with words from a buried poem, a song, a voice that once lullabyed me to sleep, a voice that had lost its face. And the man from the hills would roar. He would pull on his beard, cup his hand about my neck, and grope me with his eyes. He would talk at me a little and laugh, then set me down with a shake of his head, and Indrani would jerk her thumb for me to get back to my sweeping or go to the pump or fetch Mira or Fatya or Shahnaz for the hill man before he grew ill tempered. But then for a night or two my sleep would blaze with pink and gold, and the sounds would haunt me.

  An odd thing happened after I claimed Mrs. Shaw. Hers became the face of my dream voice, and the dreams themselves colored pale as her skin. Looking up through the yellow veil of her skirt I would see her head bent, the shadow shape of her nose and lips, that mane of hair. She would sing me the lullaby of the hills in low-drawn tones with a catch of the throat, and I would rock to and fro with her tenderness.

  Some days later she returned to our lane. Her dress this time was a speckled orange like the petals of a tiger lily, her hair swept back under a man’s hat, her pocketbook shouting out red. Her steps, too, were louder than before. This time when Bharati’s child ran forward with her grimy palm outstretched, Mrs. Shaw extended a gloved finger to brush the flies from the little brat’s eyes. Immediately, the Indian servant gestured his disapproval. The two exchanged words. If you brush the flies from one child’s eyes, he seemed to be saying, you must brush the flies from all. But even as he spoke, Shanta pressed closer, touching Mrs. Shaw’s skirt with her cheek and crying softly, grasping. The escort tried now to hurry Mrs. Shaw away, but she reached back and dropped three paise into those pleading hands. When Shanta ran over to show off her treasure, I knocked her into the dust. Indrani, who had been watching from the doorway, dug her nails into my arm and lifted me off my feet, screaming that I should learn such skill from Shanta and then maybe I would be worth the fortune she wasted to keep me.

  It had not always been this way. When I was younger, Indrani pretended to love me. A child of five or six, I had just arrived in Delhi, and she had recently a daughter who died. She would tell me tales of her own lost beauty. She had been a nautch girl in Lucknow, singing and dancing her seductions. The house was a packrat’s museum filled with artifacts of her wiles: A caged green parrot from the South African lover who had joined in Gandhiji’s Great Salt March. The yellow gold bells with which she used to adorn her hands and ankles. Saris spangled with silver, headdresses dripping mirrors and pearls. Photographs taken by an Oxford-trained barrister of her Pathaka mudra portraying the sun. For a time she would take me into her bed and hold me, humming the ragas of her youth, petting my “golden wheat-colored skin” and fawning over my turquoise eyes. But the house was hardly a business then. She had only Bharati. She still entertained customers herself, and her heart still possessed some measure of softness.

  The madness of Partition changed Indrani. She had a brother in Amritsar who was mistaken for a Muslim. He and his two young sons had their throats cut in their own home. While the Muslim quarter in Delhi burned, Indrani took to drink. Afterward, as business improved and our house became more crowded, she grew fat and hardhearted, and her tenderness toward me soured. I was a weight pulling her down. I was the biggest mistake of her days. I was the demon child from the north, but I would pay when I finally grew old enough. I would pay and pay and pay.

  I knew what Indrani meant. I was the one who emptied the slop pots, carried the water jugs, washed the sisters’ clothes and bedclothes and monthly rags. I shaved their lipsticks and kohl pencils, tidied jars of powder and rouge. I combed the coconut oil through their hair, lit incense at twilight, filled their oil lamps, brought the clay cups from which they drank whiskey and gin with their babus, I took them their glasses of tea in the morning and swept up the occasional shattered bottle. Sometimes I tended their bruises and wounds after this babu flew into a drunken rage or that one chose to act out the part of the jealous lover Rama. Unlike Shanta, I did not lurk behind the slit curtains or crouch outside the barred windows. (Shanta was always competing with the babus for her mother’s affections.) But even in my sleeping place in the kitchen I was surrounded by the sounds and smells, the undulations of brothel commerce.

  “A woman’s body is her implement,” Bharati told me once as we sat together patting out chappati for the evening meal. “Like the plow of the farmer, it is her means of livelihood and survival. Some say it is sacred. Others say it is evil. But it is a necessary vessel for spirit and for life. If as a girl you protect and use this vessel wisely, it may bring you comfort and wealth, a good husband and many sons. Once violated, however, a woman’s body is forever diminished. Like mine, it will yield only daughters and the shelter of the brothel.” Knowing the secrets of the flash house, I did not see that the protection and wise use of a body was much under a girl’s own control, but I accepted these words as a gift to hold in the back of my mind.

  And now as I watched Mrs. Shaw, I thought, yes, here is a lady who succeeds in using her body to secure a good life. Surely that is why she takes such pains to protect it from the violations of dust and beggars and the harsh midday sun. But even as this thought crossed my mind, she did something most unexpected.

  There had been an accident. A boy named Surie in the next house had lifted his mother’s sari while she prepared the morning meal. Somehow the fire got into the cloth, and both were badly burned. I had seen the victims with my own eyes as the flames engulfed them. They were lucky their faces and hands were spared, the legs not so good. By the time Mrs. Shaw and her escort arrived, the excitement had died away. Plasters of mud had been applied to the wounds. But it was still the talk of the street, and the visitors were drawn in.

  I went to watch from the communal tap a little down the lane as Mrs. Shaw moved forward and dropped to her knees, not to help the boy as I had thought, but in front of the mother. I heard a cry. At first I thought Mrs. Shaw was going to strike Surie’s mother, perhaps for allowing such a thing to happen to a son. But no, she called for water—boiled water, she insisted, and finally accepted a vessel of
tea, which she used to clean the wounds with her own hands. She removed her gloves.

  I thought surely she must stop and instruct one of the other women to take over, but no, she lifted the leg of the woman—a Shudra—with her bare hands. The servant brought a large white box with a red cross on it, and in the next instant Mrs. Shaw was stroking on the ointment with naked fingers, talking in a low murmur meant only for Surie’s mother. No one could believe it. Mrs. Shaw had the Untouchable’s very blood on her hands. Many of the onlookers turned away in disgust, but Mrs. Shaw’s daring only drew me forward. She was so intent, so confident and fearless! She bound the wound in a long white cloth, then turned and began to do the same for Surie. All the time squatting, her speckled skirt dragging in the dirt, her hat—a Western-style man’s hat of straw—slipping from this side to that until finally she flung it back to her young escort, who put it on his own head and then looked around as if he hoped no one would notice. And we all laughed at him, and he smiled. I had come so close, however, that it seemed he was smiling straight at me. Mrs. Shaw looked up and squinted through the light. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes. Quickly, I ducked back behind the water tank. My heart was racing, and my face was hot. I had claimed her, yes, but the very recklessness of her daring that had drawn me just instants ago now warned me away.

  Mrs. Shaw clucked her tongue and finished dressing Surie’s burn. Then she and the young man went from house to house asking after other injuries and sickness. I tried to keep out of sight, but I could see Indrani looking out for me and scratching at her collarbone, which meant that she was angry, so finally I collected my water jars and brought them back. She would have cuffed me about the ears, but the foreigners were approaching our house. So instead she fit her palms together and raised them, namaste. No, no one sick, Indrani assured them, no one needing tending. Mira, crouching behind me in the doorway, pushed Bharati’s child back into the shadows and held a finger at her lips to command her to silence.