Sleeping On Jupiter Read Online Free PDF

that fall out?” His voice was tender, as my father’s used to be when I fell and hurt myself. He shut his eyes and murmured a mantra. “I have prayed for you. Whenever you are frightened, think of my face. I will keep you safe. You have come to my ashram now. This is your refuge. Nobody will harm you. There is food and there are clothes and you have friends to play with and you will go to school.”
    He put his hand into a steel box and brought out a laddu that he popped into my mouth. “Don’t tell the other girls I gave you this, I haven’t given it to them,” he said. “Be very quiet, not a word about this to anyone. This is your Initiation. You are born again.”
    *
    I remember the ashram very well although I cannot remember a single thing about what was around it. Were there mountains or tall buildings? Were there shops or houses nearby? Did a road go past it? Could we hear any traffic sounds when we were inside? In my head the ashram is in the middle of nowhere, it is the only building on earth. Sometimes I wonder how much of what I remember is true. I have read that your memories can be concrete and detailed even about things that never happened to you and places you have never been to. Like fungus that takes birth in warm and wet places, memories ooze from the crevices of your brain: spawned there, living and dying there, unrelated to anything in the world outside, the slime can coat everything until you can’t tell the real from the imagined.
    I remember clearly, though, how enormous the ashram was and dark with trees. At night we were scared to be out alone especially because we had heard that five dogs were let loose every night to patrol the place. There were cottages in the grounds that were set at a distance from ours, in which Guruji’s disciples stayed. They came and went. There were many, from everywhere in the world. In our part we had Guruji’s cottage and a few other cottages, our dormitory building, a dining room, a puja hall and our school.
    Many years later, my new foster mother would ask, after another long silence at the dinner table: “Tell me about your school there, tell me about your friends, tell me about the building, tell me
something
.” And I would wonder what to say, where to start. I could tell her my very first school, at the ashram, was in a yellow building – that was easy. It made her look hopeful. She waited for more. I said nothing. We both listened to the sound of a neighbour clipping his hedge. A boy cycling outside shouted to a friend. Still I found nothing to say. Then her sister phoned and my foster mother gave up waiting for me to speak.
    Outside, I could see a blue and white bird and the hedge that went around her tiny lawn and, across the road, white houses with red roofs. Each house was exactly like the one next to it. The sun was like a moon in this country, and in its light I felt as if I was looking at everything through a pearl. It was cold and the trees had no leaves. I had never seen a leafless tree before. My foster mother dropped her voice, speaking fast and softly, even though I could not understand what she was saying to her sister.
    What else could I tell her?
    Of course she knew I had been in orphanages before I came to her, and when I spoke about the ashram I made it sound like yet another orphanage. I told her the school was not far from the dormitory where we slept. We went there after our morning’s milk and banana. I told her the school had a courtyard with a jamun tree. I got stuck trying to explain what a jamun was: was it sour or sweet or bitter? How to explain its strange taste, and the way our tongues went purple and fat after eating them? And wondering how to explain jamuns, I would be distracted remembering how all day we did our lessons or our chores as if we boat girls were like other girls, but at night I would hear one girl grind her teeth fiercely enough to set mine on edge and another girl sob. Only when I felt my pillow wet with