Taken From Him (Kindle Single) (2 page)

“How do you get to live here?” all he could say, with a wave of his hand.

“They pay rent.”  “
Who
do they pay?”  “If you don’t pay you are evicted.”  “From here” — his words final in the half-light and business as usual.  Busy here.  But at what?

The girl seemed to think.  “You never know when you will have to fight.  You know that.  I know you do, I have always known you did.  What are you but that?” she presumed to say.

“Is this slum rehabilitation like they talk about?” he has weighed her words, is she disturbed?  “This?  This?” the words incredulous in themselves from her, yet again this view of him: “I could walk away, like you.”

“To a high-rise with a toilet?”

She chuckles, with all of herself.  “Plans
a
foot you know of.”  He did.  “You know the deal.”  He did, having been told by someone important.  “Some few lucky ones who get to move, but are they?” he acts her equal.  She means that the new high-rises are convenient for women, they have toilets — but are a far cry from the low, sociable shacks interconnecting with hand-improvised shelters folks were supposedly used to.  “You will hear from the horse’s mouth,” she went on, her strange foretelling like something she might know but really didn’t; and stranger still, “They look up to you.”  Who? he wondered.  A pretty sibyl; no more.  She was not a beggar, was she?  Or not here.

The camera in its case, they have been in the fort too long, and she’s been telling about a handsome sustainable architect he will meet who builds in spaces between buildings but that’s not all.  Halfway up the ladder a space up beyond opens a third level on top of the second, like scaffolding held by what look like sugarcane stalks, and two guys stand one above the other up there, high up buried, hands on their hips looking down at you, shining with sweat on their necks and narrow chests.  Probably eyeing the girl waiting below.           

All, as you retreat down the sticky rungs, a mess of intricacy making a monumental warren hard to view, greater than its idea, than the close flickering, draining places he must get himself out of now but stops.  The girl at ease looking up at him when he twists around to look at her, carries a shoulder bag he had not seen and she has understood better than he why he’s stopped on the ladder.  “You know,” he begins — and before you know it, paused on the ladder, he has told a story of milking the cow in Devon when he was eight when two people, wrestling above the stall in the haymow tumbled out not silently and fell ten feet to the cement floor of the barn and scraped their cheeks, girl and guy, who hit his head.  The Guernsey with her great head and giant neck looked around and there was blood on the cement and saw the boy rip his shirt and take a strip of it and tie it around his brother’s temples like an Indian…  “I’ve lost track of the time,” he added, turning to face the ladder he’s on.

“They will wait.  I will show you still more, suhrr.  I know what you want to see.”

“I’m a special case.”  “Just wait and see, special-case.”  An infant crying like a newborn piercingly, unusual for India, far inside the fort — or is it India? — you take the hand that takes yours for a moment.  Built by the British centuries ago to protect against the Portuguese, what have we?  “Some stories not for telling,” said the girl — “What the Cow Saw.”  A passageway turns slightly uphill, and a corridor taken without thinking, “I lost track of the time.”  “You have me.”  And then that which is lost finds relief in light and, thinking her father must drive a taxi, maybe just a scooting three-wheeler, a motor rickshaw wallah cutting it so close, you ask, “Is he hard to live with?”

“He is driver in the National Park” covers that one.

“The National Park.”  “You have seen the caves.”  She looks inside her bag, a flash of dusky red in there, a woman’s bag.  “Why, yes — not all three thousand.”  “Yesterday.”  “Yes.”  How does she know?  They have been there once to see the overflow water system down the rocks from basin to basin, channeled, through cracks, and dating from the first century, it is said, the monks, their water catchment system. “Climbed to the top” — deep at the center of the National Park; and will go again, it was said.  “You will go again to National Park,” said the girl.  How would she know that?

“Here they use the west wall for their toil
et
,” again she answers not the question but still a question — water — meaning where the beach has eroded  there beside the fort into a ditch filling and emptying twice a day, tidal toilet.
 
“And if you get evicted?”

A ghostly push, a turn, and two easy boys on their way out bringing somehow light
in
on bare feet, and the threshold is blinking what the hell at the hard beach and a scoured-out ditch along the foundations where erosion came and went.  Leaning as if he were running, and looked for his people around the corner of the fort.  This girl, tunic with the silver mirrors — who had said she knew what he wanted to see, was probably twenty or older and he took the camera and asked who they paid rent
to
, but she wasn’t behind him — and what in the National Park
did
her father drive?  Cab?  Truck?  But she wasn’t there.  He had her voice down.

In front of him, an American voice, about to be interrupted, part of the design discussion, thinking for herself (or us all), asks Will this “intervention”
get
done
? sketchbook under the point of her pencil.  But “Build in the sea what you can’t on land,” the leader sweeps an arm half in irony, excited or is it irked by the Sea Link bypass, “out
at
sea, and
over
it
!” — noticing now that the explorer has returned.  From the beginning he could come with them or not — had he other Mumbai appointments?  In fact a total stranger here.  Recurred to by the girl with the sketchbook, it comes back to you, the proposal — a major creek dug to bypass causeway, encourage mangroves, provide “axis” for fishing vessels, as for market “access” (the vocabulary again), communal connection, recreation, link sea with river, much with much.

Sewage pumping station further north? Possibly counterproductive there in the light of reclamation: It’s not so hard to reclaim land from sea but is it what you want to do?  And
re
- ?  As if land never belonged in sea? and now leader and his wife, equal leader, instructing design people what we are looking at in the project, how groves of coconut palms, the primordial settlements here, may eventually again protect the shore, facilitate docking of imagined biotreatment barges visitable as facilities that would “improve life” for families lodged in the Fort.  Deservedly famous couple pause to “welcome back” journeyman guest, ask a question somehow
jointly
framed.  How do they do that? It’s not simply in unison, it’s sensually prefabricated, psychic, curious — Indian? lovable? — and understood, though, that the question, “Did you make any friends in the Fort?” doesn’t need to be answered.  He absorbs what’s asked without always hearing it — look ahead, and others in the circle on the beach half turn as if they have not been where he has.  Something has changed.  To belong as a guest, was that it?  What the girl has taken from him did he give?  Will he pay?

In transit now through the days from Fort to volcanic City dump and along its smoking composite shores fenced off from the street and a going Muslim economy cosm we move with, glimpse the functioning of in its walking discreteness, almost know and leave, with the thought that we do not only describe like snaps to show that you were there. The leaders inspire the group, with further thoughts about their related project at the ancient fishing community out there scheduled tomorrow by Worli Fort at the entrance to the bay still closer to Sea Link but postponed, you hear.

Another day unfolds recycling communities their hidden, jammed nakedness, nearby the smallest indoor/outdoor pottery factories, city folk eyeing visitors even momentarily to inquire all and nothing of them, street footpaths, puddles long as sourceless runnels, ladders always like propped permanence up to small clothing-factory stitcheries, whatever is holding them stacked with expectations one room above another three, four, a period room of manual typists, and this is nothing; and goats quite at home with you of such many-god-given saffrons and browns, black and white — navy blue streak? — and you’d swear of certain grays a dusty
green
less likely the breeder’s idea than goat’s diarrhea ultimately.

Yet winding among waiting hours, taken to a scintillating developer’s real-time office early one evening, to virtually witness the mysteriously subsidized spirit of almost seven hundred low-cost slum rehab units jointly spread-sheeted against possibly literal explosion of population (forty million in twenty years), lower-rise, and plotted about a 24-storey upper sailing-ship-shaped structure stepped profile due to terracing — the words thought themselves again to the girl as if she weren’t always in his mind — “in essence” housing for the poor “funded by the speculative market” by means of this “commercially viable component.”

The deal, in short.

You can feel her here, is she on the way up or nowhere?  His appointment in Mumbai.

Interesting duplexes for lap-swimmers above with high views of sea and golf course — voices everywhere informed as the talents are cobbled together — embedded in which even in a computer slideshow is to be seen for those on whom nothing funny is wasted a real hand, the developer’s young assistant (on the slide? or between slide and screen?) signaling in memory another lensed hand two, three days ago.  Getting in your way, like you putting yourself at least in the way of experience.

One morning this tightly scheduled group of  visiting designers, privileged young nomads  buying  bottles of water as they go, passing grand old homes made grander by banyans, by old trees once imported, and now passing down a street towards temple buildings, are to discover  a many-headed Doum palm and suddenly around a corner of six-storey flats (in one of them a Hindi movie-music genius trained at Juilliard in New York one has forgotten to look up) on Malabar Hill — a great long  tank of water, huge stone tranquil tank, legendary Banganga (“arrow shot into the Ganges” it was created by, once if not now).  Sixty by one hundred fifty feet at a guess, sacred, flower-and bread-strewn waters, offerings laid out along the steps for purchase, stone steps on all four sides of the tank, at festivals hundreds here; beside the temple a Peepal tree, its figs sacred but not visible, a few hundred feet from the hidden sea this tank surrounded by slum voters in the midst of the City and still supplied by distant springs, an old man bathing, two boys in a small canoe chilling.

Remote one is, yet near another.  As hundreds, thousands, of monks up among their rockbound caves sleeping each upon his plinth practiced water management two thousand years ago by simple overflow of seasonal monsoon into small rock cisterns at their thresholds one down to the one below, or side by side overflow, many to many, cracks in the rock, channels made by hand and weather to catch rain little by little thoughtfully — thoughtful
rain
— from high to lower as if it were also from low to
high
.  That deeply remote sector of the reservoired and forested, vast hard-to-grasp National Park bordering the mind as it borders Mumbai — in fact is
in,
or you could say
of
, Mumbai.  To be there, what would it cost? you plot your question to be real with help.  A guide already valued on such fugitive acquaintance who is not at Banganga nor at the caves nor to be found in the viewfinder will be paid somehow, and now like many places at once turning away from you almost unnoticed, quite far from here how does she bring home what the monks left?  Which was enough if we would grasp to take away with us not just the monks’ sensible conservation but what came with it.  Is it the monkeys, the macaques, that multiply near the caves and nearer the visitors and their lunch?  No.  Is it other animals in the forests — sequestered, it is said, if imperfectly fenced?

The girl knows.  How is she near?  For she is.

Somewhere near the National Park, its lands for all its mountains, or we would say high hills, its lands also bordered by everyday Mumbai avenues, a slum resettlement 20-square-meter flats incorporated into what foots the bill for the rehab high-rise — or was it in Worli sector? — who of us can tell in this estuarial Bombay / Mumbai / anciently offshore island of islands — but a deal in multirational syntax undertaken jointly with a local firm by a global American.  Three dozen folding chairs one especially welcome for a foot-weary tourist facing in lowered light a large projection screen, the handsome working space beyond occupying a handsome ground-floor like a London or New York loft and above it an open upper level reached by stairs or ladder, your call. 

What is wrong, with everything so right?  A still larger architect studio tonight, is it mad easygoing? — after this evening’s presentation of recent completed institutional work by the firm’s representative head architect here.  Weighty college campuses outside Mumbai (you had to wonder watching slides slide by), seeing double the neoclassical banal.  Young Asian from Cornell sitting in the next seat, her foot comfortably under her, asks, all by herself, “Why this?”  Others equally young murmur sort of wordlessly like a so soft ululation, but her elbow jabs you by mistake, as, equally astute, she whispers she is sorry like a silent, sweet-breathed snicker and her neighbor hears himself say quite out loud to the very big, still unknown man at the projector, “How does it change you to walk into a set of buildings like that?”

“Have ya never been to college?  Well, good luck finding landscape clients,” the host replies, not knowing the questioner.

Presently, lights up upon the erosion of the evening still waiting for the meaning to coalesce amid a constant, virtually structural smiling. One takes in the place without looking too closely out of one’s curious curiosity. Against the walls formica surfaces, stacks of drawings, tracings, invoices, books, black and white, or planed precariously like a fanciful mock-up a fugitive red notebook perched under an anglepoise — three dozen anglepoise lamps continuous with the tilt of drafting tables  either side of  a median  spread of light refreshments.  And the jovial host weightily big but with the athletic timing of certain also shaved-bald  holy men, “originally” from Sacramento, once a flood risk, now a drought, here in his office grinning upon being introduced by leader and friend to the mystery visitor:  “— giving us his take on our—”  “What?”  “— our coastal interventions
and
you know terracing up in the —”  “His
take
?”  “— up in the valleys.”  “Ah.”  “Outlet channels in the reservoir valleys turn them into —”