Songbirds(42)

‘He’s in his office,’ she said. ‘Knock three times and wait.’

I did as she said. I waited for more than five minutes before the door opened and a small man who looked a lot like a hamster opened the door. He had a huge grin, dead-white teeth and a pot belly that spilled over his trousers. But he carried himself like a king.

‘What can I do for you, young lady?’ he said.

‘Well, I’m not exactly a young lady anymore,’ I said.

‘You’d be surprised.’ He smiled widely.

I had no idea what he meant.

He invited me into his office and I sat on a low stool by a high antique desk. He sat in a pivoting office chair – soft leather with broad arms – and looked down at me.

‘You knocked three times. You’re looking for work.’

‘No.’

He raised his eyebrows and, for the first time, irritation erupted on his face. He glanced at the clock on the wall. In spite of the music outside, this office was strangely quiet.

‘I know that many foreign domestic workers work here,’ I said, ‘and because of that I wondered if you have ever seen this woman.’ From my handbag I pulled out one of the flyers Keti and I had made and pointed at Nisha’s picture.

From the top pocket of his shirt the man retrieved a cheap pair of gold-rimmed glasses and put them on, taking the flyer from me and studying it. He seemed deep in thought for a very long time. Finally, he looked at me and said, ‘No.’

‘You’ve never seen her?’

‘No.’

‘She’s never been in here?’

‘Well, if she has, I never saw her. But I don’t sit by the front door and memorise faces.’ He glanced again at the clock and stood up.

‘There are so many foreign workers here, they might have seen Nisha, they might know something,’ I continued, desperately.

‘Nisha, huh?’ he said and smiled. ‘Do you know that in Sanskrit, Nisha means “night”?’

I told him that I didn’t know that.

‘All the women I have ever met called Nisha are beautiful and mysterious. If I had met her, I definitely would have remembered. Leave the flyer with me and I’ll put it up. Don’t worry.’

I decided to hand out flyers to some of the women. Many of them were foreign domestic workers; there was a chance that they may have known Nisha, or at least someone may have seen her that night. The women here were usually tucked away, wrapped up safely in our domestic routines. It struck me how one person’s emancipation sometimes relies on the servitude of another. These thoughts tormented me. I feared that I would never be able to tell Nisha what I had understood.

I stood there in the candlelight, clutching on to Nisha’s flyers.

On the table near me, three young women sat talking. They laughed. They drank hot tea in tiny glasses.

‘Hello,’ I said, awkwardly, feeling that I was intruding.

All eyes looked up. ‘Good evening madam,’ said the woman closest to me.

‘I’m wondering if you have seen this woman?’ I placed one of the flyers on the table and they leaned in to take a look.

‘Yes!’ the one on the left said. ‘I know her!’ She was a slim woman with thick black curls.

‘Me too!’ said the one next to her. ‘That is Nisha . . . I forget her family name now.’

The first, who had placed her cup of tea on the table, was leaning in, looking concerned. ‘Well, that is my friend, Nisha. Sometimes we go to church on Sundays, when she is free; she meets me at the other café around corner from here, the one where all of us girls meet on Sundays, and we have a cup of tea together.’

‘Nisha has gone missing,’ I said.

‘When?’ asked the woman who hadn’t spoken yet, startled.

‘Two weeks ago. Do you know anything? The police said she might have gone to the north of the island.’

The first woman laughed now, but with a darkness that seemed to extinguish even the dim light. ‘They always think these things. They think we are thieves, too. My madam thought I stole her wedding ring. That’s how I go fired. That’s how I ended up here.’ The woman shook her head and suddenly glanced down at Nisha’s poster. She stared at it for a long time. ‘I hope you find her, madam,’ she said.

As I walked away, I realised that I had not asked the women their names. They had called me ‘Madam’. From that point on, I held out my hand and introduced myself.

‘Good evening. My name is Petra.’

I met so many women that night. Diwata Caasi, a sixty-one-year-old woman from the Philippines, who had been forced to drink water from a jam jar because she was only a maid, and the food was rationed so that she was eating less than the cat. She eventually left her employer and had nowhere to turn.

Mutya Santos, from the bay-side city of Manila, who used to be a midwife. She loved her elderly employer and had dinner with her every night, but when the old lady passed away Mutya was placed with a man who kept touching her, who walked in on her while she showered, who came to her room while she slept. She had complained to the agency who did nothing to help. When her employer found out, he fired her. Again, she was left with nowhere to go and huge debts.

Ayomi Pathirana, from Sri Lanka. Her parents were both farmers. As a child she would wake up early every morning to help her parents on the farm before going to school. Later, she left college as they were financially hard-up and found a job in a bookstore for two years; but the money was not good, she could not progress and her parents were getting old. Her cousin encouraged her to apply for work as a nanny abroad. She went to Kuwait, where she was faced with difficulties. Eventually, she made plans to come to Cyprus, where she found similar problems. She was so young when she came here. Then she met a Cypriot man who promised to get her work, and though it was the wrong kind of work, she could not return to Sri Lanka because of the debts she had.