Joker Moon Read online

  “Yaj, please. You make me feel old—we’re the same age! I told you to call me Aarti. I have told you a thousand times. After twenty years trapped together in this house, can we not dispense with the formalities?”

  “No, Aartibai. It wouldn’t be proper. If we did, I might forget my place.” He smiled, and the sun caught the lock of hair falling across his forehead, the strands shining. No gray in it yet; Aarti would have taken gray hair for herself, if that were the price for actually having hair. It was hard to feel like a woman without it. She had no wrinkles yet, but what use was such vanity when the joker marks still stretched across her skin, when she had to watch her swollen head when crossing a doorway? At least she had gotten used to the pain, had learned how to manage it after so much time.

  Manju’s salves had grown more effective with experimentation, though Aarti hesitated to ask what the old woman put in them. Manju had given up body-servant duties to Yaj a few months ago, when Aarti had refused to get in a new girl to help. Manju had been scandalized, but she knew better than to argue with her stubborn mistress. And really, Aarti could mostly manage her dressings on her own these days, after long practice—she only needed help reaching the ones on her back. Yaj had a gentle touch, and she found herself looking forward to the moments when his fingers brushed against her spine. Not that she imagined he desired her; she wasn’t such a fool.

  “See that you don’t,” she said. Joking, joking. That was how they had learned to get through their days. Let us pretend that everything is fine, that we are ordinary middle-aged people living an ordinary life.

  “It isn’t easy,” he said, in a tone that hovered on the edge of seriousness—no, it couldn’t be. That look in his eyes. Turn away, turn away. Aarti busied herself with rinsing the sleep from her eyes in the washbasin, ignoring the pain as she lifted her arms to rub sandalwood oil across her bare scalp. For a time after she’d discovered the Moon, she had ignored her body’s needs, let it lie in the bed, festering, but the servants grew too distressed. It seemed cruel to make them suffer, so she dragged her body from its bed, cleaned and cared for it as they insisted she do. Over time, the routine grew automatic so that Aarti could move her body and let her mind drift, planning what she would do when night finally fell and she could return to her true home.

  “Will you be painting today?” Yaj kept the room she had laid out as a studio spotless—rows of brushes in their metal tins, an indulgent assortment of pigments.

  “Maybe a little. We’ll see.”

  She ought to paint, though it was frustratingly difficult, compared to working on the Moon. She could at least sketch out some ideas, develop them. Yaj and Manju loved her drawings—kept trying to get her to send them to a gallery, maybe even sell them. It felt pointless to her, though—they were so inadequate, compared to what she could paint up there.

  Still, it was good to work a little here, too. The day went faster when Aarti went through the motions—cleaning herself and dressing, cloaking and masking enough to go to market, or walk on the beach, inhaling the reek of the fish vendors, their nets spread wide, their catch glistening in the Bombay sunshine. And there was breakfast, lunch, and dinner—her body still needed sustenance, and eating made time pass. She even took pleasure these days in the fresh mangoes Yaj cut for her, in Manju’s delicate akuri, mixed with green chilies and fresh coriander. There were small pleasures in this world—but none to match the Moon.

  Not even a dream of Yaj’s dark eyes could keep Aarti from that moment, pressed against the bars of her window, waiting for the Moon to rise once more.

  She watched them come in their ugly spaceship. Hating them even before they landed, and so much more when they stumbled out in their clumsy suits. Aarti built herself binoculars, so that she might lurk in the distance yet track their every move. She couldn’t hear what they said, but she could watch as the hatch slid open, as a man stepped onto the surface. Polluting the sanctity of the gray dust with his filthy feet. He started walking, on a path that would bring him past her, eventually, and Aarti watched, wondering what she would do if he discovered her.

  What would an earthman think of her? These days Aarti mostly dispensed with clothes and walked stark naked across the lunar craters, letting her hair swirl around her. She walked in the body she once had, one that looked as young as when she had stepped onto the boat for Oxford. In her mind, she appeared to be forever eighteen. A pardonable vanity. If the earthman saw her, he would surely think himself mad.

  The man was getting closer. Aarti couldn’t be sure it was a man in that suit, but who else would they send? It must be a white man, full of arrogance and swagger, come to lay claim to yet another land they had no right to.

  Get out! Get out! She wanted to scream the words at him, but there was no air on the Moon, nothing to carry sound. Any screaming she did would be only in her own mind. Your greed has no place here on my beautiful Moon. You want to build ugly buildings here, bring machines to mine whatever you can find, strip Her of everything of value She possesses, leave Her raped and bruised and broken behind you.

  Aarti leaned forward, her pulse racing as he came closer. Look at the legacy you left behind in my homeland, the millions dead. What of Amritsar, atrocity committed under your very rule? You swore that you would raise us up, to reach the heights that only the white man could command. And instead, you drag us down with you, into the filth and the muck, stinking of your shit.

  Her Appa would be appalled at her language, but perhaps also a little proud to see his daughter finally stand up to the white man. Although she couldn’t be sure—was he even British? It was more likely that it was an American or a Russian in that suit, but oh, did it matter? They were all the same. They had pillaged their way across much of the Earth, and now they had come for the Moon. Her Moon. Aarti’s fists clenched at her sides, soft brush-tips hardening into edged claws with the force of her fury. If he came a few steps closer …

  He turned. Headed back to the ship, where the hatch had opened again and another figure emerged, sliding down the side of the ship, falling to his knees in the beautiful gray dust. Good. Let him stay there, on his knees, where he belonged.

  But no. That one clumsily climbed to his feet, and now the two of them were working together, gazing at something on the ship—she narrowed her vision, sharpening it. Ah, a gash that ran across the bottom. Enough to keep them here, to die here in the dust when their air and water ran out? A fitting end, but she didn’t want them here for even that long. How could Aarti force them to leave?

  They were assembling a machine. It took at least an hour, under the glare of the naked sun. And then they went back to their ship, one man pausing to draw something in the dust as they went. And then they were inside, the hatch closing. Oh, leave, leave—risk it and go! Aarti was shaking with the force of her longing, her wish that they might simply depart.

  The engine started up—then died. She started walking, then running toward the ship. Aarti couldn’t let them climb out again—if she had to, she would figure out a way to somehow hurl them off the lunar surface. Her fingertips had gone to brush tips again, and she reached forward, eager to paint something that would send them away, away—but then, in an impossible leap, the ship surged into the sky. No engine noise, no burst of rocket flames—they were simply up and gone, inexplicably, but Aarti didn’t care. She spun around in triumph, raising a dust storm to swirl with her.

  When the dust finally settled, she was alone again. The mechanism they’d built remained. She smashed it to pieces, lifting it and pounding it back down into the Moon’s rocky surface with her own two hands. Whatever it was, Aarti wanted no part of it. They would undoubtedly assume it had simply failed; the Moon was too harsh for human tech. They did not belong here! Whatever the man had written had now been completely erased, and Aarti took pleasure in that small victory.

  Aarti waited for the sun to set, for the Moon to rise. It would be hours yet, and who knew what was happening on her beloved Moon? She had imagined herself u
tterly inviolate there, but now strange men had come, and Aarti felt soiled by their presence.

  She sat on the veranda, her feet tucked up beneath her in the cane chair, grateful for the extra cushioning they’d added to it so as to not add pressure to the sores. Aarti bandaged them less these days—a combination of Manju’s salve applied while she slept and fresh air when she was up and about seemed to minimize her discomfort most effectively. There were no children to be frightened here; she had no need to hide away. “Yaj, what would you do, if an intruder came here?”

  He paused in his sweeping of the veranda, and Aarti was struck by how rarely she saw him this way, still.

  Yajnadar had been constantly in motion for the last twenty years—whenever she saw him, he was tending to the house, the garden, the car they had purchased a few years ago. His hands were long and slim, and she liked to watch them, surreptitiously, at their tasks—tying up bougainvillea branches, stirring a pot of jackfruit curry, smoothing down the sheets on her bed.

  Manju had asked permission to retire; she had a niece who would take her in, and the old woman was tired. Aarti had agreed, of course, and so now it was just the two of them in the house, two ghosts circling around each other, waiting for—she wasn’t sure what. Death? Not yet, not yet—Aarti was not even forty years old, and her great-grandmothers had all lived past a hundred. There were days when she thought she couldn’t bear the pain of the sores a day longer—but Aarti had never seriously considered ending her life. She wasn’t ready to give up on this body yet, for all the ways it had failed her. But if she lost the Moon …

  Yaj frowned. “Aartibai, have you heard something? At night? I have told you, you must hire more servants. A young man who can defend the house if needed, a young woman to tend to your needs…”

  “No, no—please, no strangers in this house.” The thought made her heart beat faster. She and Yaj were comfortable together—she had long ago stopped bothering to cover her face around him. He didn’t seem to mind her bulbous head, or the craters and protuberances that spread across her cheeks, her neck, her upper chest, her arms. If she could see herself with his eyes, maybe she wouldn’t notice them, either. But if there were new people here, they would surely be shocked, repulsed, or, worst of all, pitying.

  Yaj said, “They wouldn’t be strangers for long.”

  “Are you tired?” Had she been thoughtless, a cruel mistress? Aarti was stricken by the lines on his face—Yaj didn’t look old, but he didn’t look young, either. What would she do if she lost him? Maybe she should hire more servants to ease the load. “Do I ask too much of you?”

  “Never,” he said firmly. Yaj smiled, and with that smile, the years dropped away, and he looked young again, as she was when she walked the Moon. “You know me, Aartibai—I wouldn’t know what to do with myself without the work.”

  Still, she felt obscurely guilty. “You should go to school, Yaj, do more than tend to the needs of an old woman for all your life—my family has not done well by you, I’m afraid.”

  He shook his head. “I am content where I am, and you are far from old. But if you have heard something, we should make a plan, hire someone—”

  Aarti had to head him off, though for a moment, she wished she could tell Yaj what she was really worrying about. If only she could take him with her—“No, no. It was just a thought. If someone were to bother us, what would we do?”

  “Whatever we had to, Aartibai.” His voice was low, and his gaze direct. “Whatever is needed to survive.” Yaj frowned. “What’s wrong? Is the pain bad today?”

  She shook her head. “No, no. It’s nothing, Yaj.” Nothing he could help her with.

  He asked, “Do you want to go for a drive?”

  Since buying the car, that had been one of Aarti’s few earthly pleasures—to fight their way through traffic until they were out of Bombay, and then drive and drive on country roads, with the windows down and the wind streaming across her scalp. Aarti could forget everything then, losing herself in the pleasure of sun and wind against skin. She liked to sit beside Yaj in the front, rather than letting him chauffeur; she could see the road better that way, and he tolerated her demands, as always.

  Sometimes Yaj would sing to her, old folk songs or Tamil film standards. He would sing of love undying, passions that could withstand family betrayal, societal disapproval, and she would be painfully aware of how close his thigh was to her own, inches away. He should have married. Married and had children and even grandchildren by now. It might have been nice, having children running around the big, empty house. Why hadn’t Yaj married? Aarti had never had the nerve to ask, afraid of what his answer might be.

  “No drive today, thank you. If you could bring me a cup of tea?” Her mother had used to say that tea cured all ills. Manju had taught Yaj the way of it, boiled in milk on the gas range, heavily sweetened. With enough tea, you could face down an army.

  “Of course, Aartibai. It’ll be just a moment.” He ducked back into the house, leaving her alone on the veranda.

  Making the tea and drinking it would consume twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, with an eternity to follow until night.

  After the men came, Aarti realized that she had been far too blasé in her ownership of the Moon. Men had come—would they come again? Had they come before? Might there be men on the other side of the Moon right now? She sensed no other humans there, but how much could she trust her senses?

  Aarti began systematically quartering the Moon’s surface, mapping its peaks and crevasses. She painted herself a literal map, a golden globe that hung in her miniature Taj Mahal, marking each section that she explored. She was three-quarters finished before she found anything unexpected—but what she found shook her to her core.

  It was nothing human—she was sure of that. She’d almost missed it at first—a cave entrance led to a subterranean cavern in the Ocean of Storms. The passageway down was narrow; she’d had to re-form into a thinner version of herself to squeeze through its twists. But it opened into a vast space, curving domed walls made of a strange, crystalline substance. Rooms filled with strange, metal objects, complex machines that sat on the floor, on tables, propped up against the walls. There had been no attempt to make the space airtight, as far as Aarti could see. Who could possibly have lived here, without needing to breathe? Nothing human. Yet someone had lived here, and for some time. The crystal floor of the cavern was scraped and worn, as if large objects had been dragged against it. A thick layer of moondust had drifted in, coating the machines. Aarti poked at them for a long time, but if they were meant to be powered, she had no idea how to turn them on. There was no way for Aarti to tell who had been here at all, or how long ago. Five years, fifty, five thousand? Might they return tomorrow?

  Aarti’s hands clenched uselessly at her sides.

  “Aartibai—what’s wrong?” Yajnadar had brought her tea as he did every day, but she wasn’t sitting at her desk waiting for him. She was under the covers still, pulled tightly into herself, arms clasped around knees pulled to her chest. Aarti’s refuge had been stolen from her. There was no peace for her there, no safety. But she couldn’t hide here, either—was she to live her life out in this bed? Aarti took a deep, shuddering breath. Released it and pushed the covers back, sitting up.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.” There must have been something in her face, something that told him this morning was not like the others, because Yaj came closer, and actually sat on the edge of the bed. Not touching her, of course—he was too proper a servant for that. But he waited there, patient expectation in his face. If only she could talk to him, could pour out her troubles and her worries; he would surely know what to say to make her feel better. He was right there, just inches away. If he wanted to, Yaj could lean forward and kiss her.

  Instead, she kissed him. It was an impulse; if Aarti had stopped to think about it, she would never have done it. But she had been so lonely for so long. She had told herself that she liked the solitude, but Aarti was human
, and a woman, and she remembered, faintly, what it had been like to kiss a man. This was different, though.

  It was the briefest brush of lips to lips, and then she remembered where she was, what her body and face looked like on this Earth. She was no young moon maiden—a forty-year-old woman in a joker form, her head alone twice as large as his. Yaj must be disgusted, repulsed; Aarti jerked away, appalled at what she’d done. Worst of all, he was a servant; she had put him in an impossible position. “Yaj, I’m so sor—”

  He was kissing her. Before Aarti could even get the words out, he had leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers. He didn’t seem to care that her lips were gray, that her skin was pocked and cratered, that despite all of Manju’s salves, there were still a few open sores. Yaj slid his right arm around her back, pulling her closer; his left came up, that hand cradling her cheek as he kissed her with a combination of tenderness and desire that left her breathless. Heat rushed through her, from tingling lips to a suddenly pounding heart.

  Gods—this was madness! But every time Aarti tried to talk, to protest, he just kissed her harder. And somehow, her hands were tangled in his hair, and she was leaning back against the pillows, and Yaj was moving above her, his long body sliding under the covers, his hands—oh god!—his hands pushing up the cotton salwar she wore for sleeping, sliding under the fabric to cup her breasts. And Aarti finally let go, let herself relax into pleasure that made the pain—not disappear, exactly, but not matter. If there was still pain, here and there, it was subsumed in the electricity that Yaj’s fingers and mouth brought, the soft and urgent heat of his lips and tongue, grounding her in this bed, this Earth.

  Right now, there was nowhere else she’d rather be.

  Everything changed. Now, when she returned from the Moon, Yaj was waiting for her. He pressed fevered kisses on her gray skin, without fear or hesitation. There were days when Aarti mourned the wasted years, but he reminded her, smiling, that they were lucky to have what they had. Month after month together, and it wasn’t as if there hadn’t been a relationship before that. They were almost an old married couple even before they fell into bed together, though bed definitely added something significant to the equation.