Tehelka - The People's Paper

Tenderly written, Sonia Faleiro’s debut novel is set in the town of Azul. In this extract, the two men who loved the Girl discover her diary. It confronts them with a tale of love, betrayal and loneliness

The girl
By Sonia Faleiro
Penguin Viking
Rs 250

Although the caretaker tried, he could not stay awake, stalking with his matchstick eyes, walking belligerently back and forth across the garden, day and night. And when finally the heat and dust and the somnolence that is the Goan summer got to him, we got to her. Simon and I, with Mama Lola’s portents of doom to accompany us.

I did not want to take anything from the house. Truthfully, we did not even wish to return. There were too many memories embedded within its skin for us to wish ourselves inside once again.

Yet we felt a need, an urgent hiss which appeared to inhale and exhale in our ears each night as we slept — Simon on his single bed, me inside a sleeping bag under the open window — and so we knew that she wanted us to return to her home, and I cannot say why or how she thought we might do it, but it would not be hard, for severity of any sort was not in her nature.

So we snuck into the caretaker’s room, and skimmed the key off its hook by the door. We turned it quietly in the lock. I went first with a torch, and Simon followed, carrying a stick, a small bag of fruit (‘in case we get locked in and never get out’), and a pair of night-vision goggles.

I don’t know what we expected except that which we saw.

Empty rooms enclosing the thick smell of dead paint. We walked upstairs and into the bedroom the Girl and I had shared...

The sky was embedded with stars. So many were never seen again by Simon or me. And when I left Azul, after he left Azul, I could look up at the same stars in what seemed like a different world and see the two best friends I had ever had peering down, smiling slightly, laughing a lot. On a heavy warm summer’s day.

We walked out of the bedroom, through the study. Then Simon stopped.

He dropped his bag quietly on the floor and began walking around the room. Slowly. Counting in his head and on his fingers, tucking a piece of straggly brown hair behind his ears. Five steps from the door, then one to the left. He stopped and banged his foot on the wood. Then again. He knelt down and, taking a small knife out of his back pocket, began running its blade over the floor, prying until it allowed him to wrench out an entire block of wood.

A Native Mood: Faleiro

We wanted the Girl to be all those things we could not be ourselves

I realized what was happening and a shot of pure purple jealousy shot through me and lodged in my head, capturing my breath and filling me with nausea.

I had lived with her, but he knew. I had made love to her in this room on this weather-beaten floor, tapping this same hollow board with the small of my back, but she had told him. I stared at him, ignoring for a moment what he now held in his hand, and I felt like slapping the side of his head with all the force in my fist and kicking him until he fell through the boards taking with him whatever he held in his shop-soiled hands, but thank God in His heaven that I did not.

The diary was fatly covered with a layer of dust but otherwise as crisp as though purchased the previous day at Baga.

‘She told you?’ I asked unnecessarily.

He nodded, picking it up. ‘Just in case.’

‘Are you going to read it?’ I asked, again unnecessarily. He did not answer. He was holding it so gently, the dust slept undisturbed. He was holding it as though he could already read what lay within...

We had to leave then. For in finding the diary we had found what she wanted us to.

I had returned to Azul as soon as I heard about her death and I now roomed with Simon. Still, we did not see each other for a few days after he retrieved the diary. But I never stopped thinking about it.

I knew the weight of its possession hung heavy on Simon’s shoulders, making him stoop over his greasy counter as he wrote receipts for prawn rissoles and strawberry chews, or watered plants that refused to bud, or nodded to Mama Lola as her mouth moved in ceaseless motion until the dark forced them both to lower themselves into sheets steamed each week by a sun whose relentless heat speared the fading green walls of their unhappy home.

When Simon met the Girl, he knew what their subsequently entwined lives would be like. He was wrong. She was not as strong as he, as determined to beat her fate and create her own destiny. The Girl I knew had known how the story would end and she did not want to change even a word.

I know what I — what all of Azul — wanted from the Girl.

I wished her to be tangible proof that people can survive tragedy and emerge the bolder yet the gentler from it. That they can hum amidst the noise of rush-hour traffic, walk steadily beneath the canopy of a thrashing storm, cheerfully meander through the confusion of a white wedding, and sleep deeply through arguments between strays, or lovers, or fishermen who had to feed their families and caught no fish but yet enjoyed the magnitude of the meagre crumbs proffered by an unseen hand.

In Goa, much is left to the Lord that living thus is an easy task. Homage to death is as routine an experience as an afternoon meal. The bereavement of a mother who sat in the wrong seat in the wrong car; of a boy who ran too fast and a young bride who cooked too slow; of buds that wilted before bloom and dogs that skidded, screaming, into wells concealed by palm fronds. Mangoes that sour on their stems, frogs swept away by the breathless paddling of a monsoon day, snakes trampled by truck drivers who had better things to do than watch where they were going. Loss is expected, and dealt with, with an equanimity...

Most of all we wanted the Girl to be all those things we could not be ourselves. To be all she was worth, which was so much more than you or me or all our dreams together. The Girl was our hope. The collective hope of all those in Azul who knew her or wanted to be her.

But hope dies.

And now Simon has her diary, and he will read it. But so will I.

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