Sleeping On Jupiter Read Online Free PDF Page A

metal sheets with a line of iron spikes above. The gates closed behind us. The van stopped and we got out. The woman with us led us further in. We walked down earthen pathways, red and pretty, through gardens in which there were small houses. We were taken to a square building. One by one we were put under a tap and bathed. I saw the other girls in their underclothes, wet like birds in rain. They were thin and knock-kneed. They looked like me. Newly washed, in cotton tunics, hand in hand, the twelve of us were shown into a cottage. The cottage was screened by creepers and trees. Inside, in the room where we waited, the sunlight in the windows had gone pale green and yellow.
    The room had many pictures of a long-haired man. There was one that covered most of the wall on one side. It was much taller than any of us. I could not look away from it because his eyes in that picture seemed to follow me around. In front of it were incense sticks that smelled as sick-sweet as death. As we waited, the sticks turned into furry stems of ash. There were dark red mattresses and bolsters on the floor. I don’t know if this is exactly how the room was that day or if I am remembering it from all the later times when I went there and had to wait. It was always the same: the pictures, the incense, the red bolsters. Two women stood by the door, their palms full of rose petals. One was the woman who had come with us on the boat, the other had golden hair.
    After a while, the man in the pictures walked through the door and both the women stood straighter. The golden-haired woman gestured towards his feet and said “Guruji”. He hardly looked at us. He waved us away as we bowed down and strode past us into the second room, crushing the rose petals the women scattered in his path.
    Now, when I think of the time my turn came, and I stood in front of that second door, my mind changes the image. The door stays shut. Before my turn, I slip out of the line and run into the garden outside. There, under a tree, is my brother. He is smiling at me in his gummy way. “Silly donkey! Where did you wander?” he says. He swings me onto his shoulder. “You’ve got no front teeth any more!” he says.
    But that is not what happened. I couldn’t have run to the garden because the women would not let us step out of the line. The one with the hair like spun gold and eyes as blue as two drops of sky was taller than anyone I had seen before. She placed a long finger on her lips, she rolled her eyes, shook her head. I could tell she was saying just as my mother used to: “Quiet, not a word.”
    The door opened. A square of light. I stepped into it. The door shut behind me. The man who had just walked past us was sitting on a wide chair at the other end of the room. Guruji. He wore yellow robes and he had glossy black hair to his shoulders. He was not like other sadhus I have seen since. His face was clean and smooth like a woman’s, there were no matted locks nor a beard. He looked at me as if he saw nothing else. He sat there observing me for a long time, saying nothing. I thought he could see into me, through the tunic and my skin and bones, right inside. When he held up his hand to beckon me to come closer I saw that his arms had twice the girth of my father’s arms. My father was a skinny man even though he could lift big branches and chop tree trunks with his axe.
    Guruji patted his lap to make me climb on to it. Then he held me against him. His chest was warm and bare, and I could hear his heart beat.
    “You think you have nobody,” his voice said over my head, and I could feel its vibration enter my body. “That is not true. I am your father and your mother now. I am your country. I am your teacher. I am your God.” He said it like a chant, as if they were words often repeated, and always the same.
    His smile was kind. I must have smiled too because he put a finger into my mouth. He stroked the gap in my gums where my milk tooth had been.
    “When did