After the last members had left, she would oversee the closing up, wave goodbye to the departing staff, and let the night watchmen fill their water bottles from the water cooler before locking the glass reception doors from the inside and retiring to her office. She would watch TV for a while if there was something on she was following – she had started to enjoy a couple of Bangla soaps of late – or read a book till she fell asleep. There were days she considered giving up her apartment and simply staying at the office. But she retained the lease on the outside chance that she would have a relationship again; one that lasted more than the three-week average of her past relationships. Until then, she felt more at home sleeping at the gym, and if that was pathetic, so be it.
Now, she sat on the cushioned seat of a lat-pulldown unit, surrounded by the ghostly shapes and silhouettes of the machines that were her livelihood, and realized just how good the past couple of years had been. Perhaps the best ones of her life, barring maybe those few years of middle childhood back in Daman when her mother was still around and before her father had been transferred to Mumbai and begun doing undercover work and everything had fallen to pieces. Now her life was beginning to crumble again, and though she was a grown woman now, there seemed to be almost nothing she could do to tackle the situation.
There’s always something you can do. Always.
Yeah, sure.
The roots of her present predicament lay not in the superficial municipal licensing laws and regulations she had allegedly violated, as today’s notification listed out, but with a case she’d worked on several years ago, back in Dakshineshwar. At least, it had ended in Dakshineshwar. The case had begun in Assam where she had been hired by a very eminent north-eastern politician, ex-chief minister of Assam, now a wealthy industrialist and head of the party’s north-east office, to find and retrieve his runaway seventeen-year-old daughter. Sheila had tracked the girl through the region for a month, finally locating her at Dakshineshwar in east Kolkata where she found her living in a contented same-sex relationship with a woman boxer of Bangladeshi origin. She had got to know both young women better and soon realized that running away from home had been the smartest thing the young girl had done in her short life. The father was knee-deep in dirty political dealings and underworld activities, and was that certain noxious type of Indian male whose one-sided sense of morality had frozen fast around the time that Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and to whom same-sex relationships were a gross aberration, incomprehensible and unacceptable under any circumstance. What made the situation even worse was the fact that the young woman boxer his daughter had chosen to leave him for happened to be a Bangladeshi Muslim. Sheila knew that once she reported back to him that his precious only child was spending her nights in bed with a lesbian Muslim Bangladeshi, if the bastard survived the shock, he would almost certainly want the other woman killed on the spot. He would then force the daughter into marriage with a suitable boy of his choosing, no doubt managing to find an alliance that furthered his own political and business interests at the same time, and that would be that. Sheila had done her share of bad things and had seen worse done, including some done to her. She had no intention of being part of the summary justice that the father would undoubtedly mete out to his daughter and her lesbian lover once he came to know of the truth.
Sheila made her choice. The daughter was five weeks shy of turning eighteen and becoming a legal major under Indian law. Sheila called Shillong and told the father’s secretary that the daughter had gone to Pondicherry with a boy. Shortly after, she had gone down the east coast herself in hot pursuit, sending back periodical updates and
Now, she sat on the cushioned seat of a lat-pulldown unit, surrounded by the ghostly shapes and silhouettes of the machines that were her livelihood, and realized just how good the past couple of years had been. Perhaps the best ones of her life, barring maybe those few years of middle childhood back in Daman when her mother was still around and before her father had been transferred to Mumbai and begun doing undercover work and everything had fallen to pieces. Now her life was beginning to crumble again, and though she was a grown woman now, there seemed to be almost nothing she could do to tackle the situation.
There’s always something you can do. Always.
Yeah, sure.
The roots of her present predicament lay not in the superficial municipal licensing laws and regulations she had allegedly violated, as today’s notification listed out, but with a case she’d worked on several years ago, back in Dakshineshwar. At least, it had ended in Dakshineshwar. The case had begun in Assam where she had been hired by a very eminent north-eastern politician, ex-chief minister of Assam, now a wealthy industrialist and head of the party’s north-east office, to find and retrieve his runaway seventeen-year-old daughter. Sheila had tracked the girl through the region for a month, finally locating her at Dakshineshwar in east Kolkata where she found her living in a contented same-sex relationship with a woman boxer of Bangladeshi origin. She had got to know both young women better and soon realized that running away from home had been the smartest thing the young girl had done in her short life. The father was knee-deep in dirty political dealings and underworld activities, and was that certain noxious type of Indian male whose one-sided sense of morality had frozen fast around the time that Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and to whom same-sex relationships were a gross aberration, incomprehensible and unacceptable under any circumstance. What made the situation even worse was the fact that the young woman boxer his daughter had chosen to leave him for happened to be a Bangladeshi Muslim. Sheila knew that once she reported back to him that his precious only child was spending her nights in bed with a lesbian Muslim Bangladeshi, if the bastard survived the shock, he would almost certainly want the other woman killed on the spot. He would then force the daughter into marriage with a suitable boy of his choosing, no doubt managing to find an alliance that furthered his own political and business interests at the same time, and that would be that. Sheila had done her share of bad things and had seen worse done, including some done to her. She had no intention of being part of the summary justice that the father would undoubtedly mete out to his daughter and her lesbian lover once he came to know of the truth.
Sheila made her choice. The daughter was five weeks shy of turning eighteen and becoming a legal major under Indian law. Sheila called Shillong and told the father’s secretary that the daughter had gone to Pondicherry with a boy. Shortly after, she had gone down the east coast herself in hot pursuit, sending back periodical updates and
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