I felt very out of place in my jogging bottoms, trainers and woolly cardigan whose sleeves were too long, but I was inside now, and knew it would be worth asking some questions. A few men turned with leering eyes to look at me but, to my relief, turned away again. I went to the bar and ordered a sparkling mineral water: I wanted to keep my wits about me in this place. The man beside me had a girl who barely looked eighteen sitting on his lap. As she licked his ear, he played with the strap of her pink dress and kissed her upper arm. I looked away. On my other side, a woman sat alone, smoking an e-cigarette that smelled like cherries. Her black hair reached the small of her back.
Once I paid for my drink, I asked the waitress if I could speak privately to the manager.
‘Why?’
‘I’m looking for work.’
She looked me up and down as if to say Really? and pointed to a wooden door at the back of the bar.
‘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.’