The Girl in the Road (2 page)

I'm sitting behind a support beam, so the girl can't see me unless I let her. She joins the flow of the crowd but moves at half the pace. She looks around. She's clutching her dress, fabric balled in her fists. If this were the first time I was seeing her I'd think about approaching her and helping her. Mohini would, in an instant. Her heart bled for the charismatic lost.

She departs through one of the gates to the outside. I put the last of my idlee in my mouth and get up and head out of the train station in the opposite direction.

Outside of Victoria Terminus there's chaos. D. N. Road is a human river, clogged to a halt with cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, rickshaws, autoshaws, and autorickshaws. A local train glides overhead on its way to the suburbs. I smell oil, sparks, and sewage, all the smells I forgot about while living in a hippie Keralite enclave. People on foot weave between the vehicles and animals weave between the people on foot. There are cows, too. I read that the tourism office lets them loose for ambiance.

On the other side of the road begins Azad Maidan, the gathering ground. At one end there's a cricket game in session, at the other end, a protest. From what I can see it looks like Ethiopian domestic workers. I walk faster. They're everywhere, Keralam and Mumbai both.

Not everywhere, says Mohini, Not at all. This is your fear speaking to you. Your family history.

A flock of children runs toward me, breaks around me, and re-forms behind me. I calm down. I know this city. Already I'm remembering the grid and my orientation within it. I feel good. This is the manic phase of psychosis but it feels good for the duration, and only abnormal afterward, and so I'll just accept this, that there's nothing I can do to change my course. I remember this is the park where I bought a first edition of
Crime and Punishment
and read it while eating bhelpuri from a newspaper cone. I sat under the bodhi tree, right over there, the one with the perfect shape. Enlightenment de Dostoevsky.

An explosion goes off.

I fall to the ground and cover my head.

Onam, I tell myself, it's just Onam firecrackers again, even here in Mumbai, they're celebrating a Keralite festival, that's nice.

But then I see a circle of motionless bodies at the end of the green where the protest was and and so, it's not firecrackers.

I turn around and see the barefoot girl, staring at me from across the green.

Now things are starting to make sense. I take off in the opposite direction. I'm running perpendicular to everyone else who's either running away from the explosion or toward it. It's like a game. I'm dodging missiles. I collide with someone and I fall so hard my skull bounces. I get up and keep running.

I run till I hit Fashion Street and then turn south. I just assume the barefoot girl's following me. If she's still barefoot, that's fucking dangerous for her, and I can outrun her in boots, especially on stone roads. The faces of people I pass begin to change. First, people who are running toward the explosion. Then, people who only heard the explosion and are worried. Then, people who are still oblivious to any explosion that might have happened and are going about their lives, hefting mangoes at street-side stands.

I'm beginning to get tired. I can't keep running. This is like a movie. What does an action hero do? She takes a turn onto a side street and then ducks into a shop and lets her pursuer run past. So that's what I do. I thank The Film Industry in my head and then take a sharp turn into an alley and count one, two, three shops, then duck into the fourth one, which turns out to be a pharmacy, which solves the problem I began with, of needing first aid.

I get out of sight of the doorway and bend over, wheezing. I hear a cry from the woman behind the counter. She's asking me if I'm all right. I hold up my hand. I can't talk yet.

“You're bleeding,” she says.

I look down at my kurta. So I am. The snakebites have opened up again, probably while I was running.

“Did you come from Azad Maidan? Is it from the terrorists?”

So the news hit the cloud already. “Yes,” I say.

“Lie down,” she says.

I do, out of sight of the doorway. I watch the ceiling and listen to the sound of drawers being opened, product wrapping rustling. I count to forty.

The attendant's face reappears over me. “Fucking Habshee,” she says. “They want to live like Indians now.”

Here I would usually say what Mohini would want me to say: first, that I'd like to know which Indians she's talking about. And second, that Habshee is a derogatory word for black people and she shouldn't use it. And third, that Habshee doesn't equal Ethiopian.

But right now I don't care.

The attendant begins peeling up my kurta. And then I remember the nature of the wounds and force it back down. She's startled.

“Sorry,” I say, “they're not shrapnel wounds, they're something else. I'll take care of it.”

She looks hurt but she hands me all of the supplies she'd gathered. I start peeling a square of clearskin but my hands are shaking. She watches me. Then she snaps her fingers.

“You! You went to IIT-Bombay, yes?”

I look at her face again. I realize it's the exact same attendant who worked here when I was at university nine years ago, and had my little episode over Ajantha, not unlike my current episode. Now it occurs to me that every word I say to this woman, and every minute more I spend here, is a liability.

“I have to go,” I say. “I can pay for these.”

She waves it off. “But how are you?” she says. “You were so sad. I never forgot about you.”

“I'm fine,” I say. Then I start making things up in case anyone comes to question her, later. “Been living in Gandhinagar. Just in town to see family.”

“For Onam? Aren't you Malayalee?”

“Nope,” I lie. “Just a darkie Gujarati.”

That shuts her up.

I thank her for the supplies and head back to the street. No sign of the barefoot girl, so my ruse worked. Why did I say I was from Gandhinagar? That's where my mother's from. It's deep dusk now. The sky is lilac and all our faces glow.

I have to find another place to apply the dressing, the farther away from the explosion, the better. The barefoot girl can't track me if I'm on wheels. I turn to face traffic and raise my arm to flag down an autoshaw, but one with a driver sees me first and veers to the curb. Its cord is dragging in the street so I pick it up and tuck it back before I get in. I tell her to take me to the first place I think of: Butterfly, a Singaporean club at the north end of Marine Drive. Mohini pointed it out to me when we visited last monsoon. It was very much her scene and very much not mine, but that's a good thing, now. Even if the barefoot girl tracked me there, they wouldn't let her in.

The driver powers up. I can see her smiling in the mirror. She has two dimples big enough to hold cardamom seeds. She might be fifteen.

As we speed up she begins shouting, loud enough to be heard over the wind, and I strain to listen so I can respond, but I realize she's talking to someone in her ear. Her sister. Wedding plans. The caterer has fallen through but she knows someone else, a brother of a boyfriend, who's cheap but not cheap enough to insult their in-laws.

Then the buildings pull back like stage curtains and I see the ocean. We stop at a red light. It's beautiful, the golden light on black water. The wind blows in from the bay. The ocean tang is stronger here, dirtier and saltier than in Keralam. There are more spices in this sea.

The light turns green and we swerve right onto Marine Drive. When we break free of the swarms and hit open road, she floors the acceleration and hugs the curve and I press my hand to the side to keep from sliding out. A fingernail moon rises over the sea. I fight to keep sight of it. It means something.

It's full night by the time we reach Butterfly. The autorickshaw slides to a stop and the driver says, “Yashna, wait,” and turns around, holding out her wrist with a cheap mitter flashing.

“Do you take cash?”

She wags her head and turns over her palm.

I pay her and tip generously. She tucks the bills into a pocket sewn onto her kurta. “Thank you very much!” she says in English without looking back. I step out and she floors the pedal and is gone.

Butterfly is the neon confection I remember. The bathroom is down a black hall with pink track lighting. In the stall I get toilet paper and ball it up and run it under the faucet and then go back into the stall. For the first time, I take off my jacket and peel up my kurta all the way up over my breasts. The cloth is stuck to the dried blood and rips the scabbing when I pull up. Fresh blood wells like tears and runs down my belly. I wipe it up and press the wet wad of toilet paper to the wound, or rather the constellation of wounds, five scratches of varying depths, not deep but not superficial, either. I don't know what kind of snake it was. It wasn't a cobra, krait, or viper, because I know them all by sight and anyway, I'd be dead by now. This snake was colored golden bronze. I take out my scroll and search for images, but none are the right kind of gold, or at least not native to Keralam. It might be an African species. If it is, that would tell me something.

I wipe up the wounds, apply oil, smear some on my throat because it smells like peppermint, press squares of clearskin to the wounds, and then the larger white bandage over them. I flex my torso to make sure it'll stay in place.

I come out and look in the mirror. I'm still wearing what I put on in our bedroom in Thrissur this morning. I feel the need to alter my appearance. I take my jacket off, then, and stuff it in my satchel. I roll up the sleeves of my kurta past my elbows and undo three more buttons. I can do nothing radical with my jeans or boots. So I start unbraiding my hair. There's something about dressing my own wounds and fixing my own hair that makes me feel invincible. Look on my works, ye Mighty: I both heal and adorn my own body. In fact I could go for a drink, now.

Here is my new strategy: act normal.

When I come out into the club there's a people-scape of black silhouettes against violet light. A Meshell Ndegeocello bhangra remix is making the floorboards shake. The bartender looks like an old Bollywood hero with shaved and pregnant biceps. He's wearing a threadbare T-shirt with holes along the seams, carefully placed, Dalit chic, not authentic. His eyes flicker up around my head and, seeing nothing, look back down at me.

“What can I get you, madam?”

“Jameson's.”

He takes a second look at me. “Malayalee?” he says.

How'd you guess, chutiya?

“Nominally,” I say. “My family's lived in Mumbai since the Raj.” Lying is so easy and useful, I don't know why I ever stopped.

“Isn't it Onam?”

“I guess.”

“Not much one for tradition, huh?”

“Not really.” This bartender talks too goddamn much. And I'm a quiet person. Talking takes energy and anyway, nothing I want to say comes out right. I use my body to talk, when I can, but that's not an option here, so I say, “We live in Santa Cruz East. Haven't been down much lately. What's going on around here?”

“Oh, bombs on Azad Maidan, the usual.” He concentrates on pouring my drink, looks angry.

“It's probably Semena Werk,” I say. It's prejudicial speech that Mohini would warn me against. Given the snake. Given the barefoot girl. Given Family History. “They can't be reasonable.”

“So they bomb their own people?”

“They don't think of them as their own people. They think of them as traitors.”

“True.” The bartender pushes the glass of whiskey to me. I take a sip and, as soon as the sting reaches my stomach, start to unkink. I hadn't realized how nonlinear the day has been. Now things feel like they're proceeding in order.

“Looked like you needed that.”

“I did.”

“Glad I could oblige.”

I'm beginning to feel comfortable. This may be the end of the mania. Or it may be a new phase of the mania.

“So what else is going on downtown?” I ask.

“Lots of foreigners moving in, especially because of Energy Park.”

“Which is—?”

“It's the cluster of towers at the end of Nariman Shallows, the one that looks like Oz. You should go see it if you haven't. They have a new museum in the HydraCorp building.”

“A museum of what?”

“Energy.”

“That could mean a lot of things.” HydraCorp is one of the biggest multinational energy conglomerates. They're also the hippest because they invest five percent of all profits in developing weird new energy sources. I read about a device to power a Gandhian cotton wheel with human shit. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

“Have you heard of the Trail?” he asks.

I pause. Mohini and I saw an episode of
Extreme Weather!
about the Trail a few years ago. The bartender sees I know what he's talking about and says, “At the museum, they give you the corporate version, but it's still worth seeing.”

Now memories come back, shook loose by whiskey. The Trail seemed unreal: a floating pontoon bridge moored just offshore from Mumbai, which spanned the whole Arabian Sea, like a poem, not a physical thing. I asked Mohini what she thought it'd be like to walk on it all the way to Africa. She received my enthusiasm in her gracious way but cautioned that the Trail was all blank sky and faceless sea, the perfect canvas upon which to author my own madness.

“What's the corporate version?”

“I can't tell you. Only, don't call it ‘The Trail' when you're there.”

“Why?”

“They try to discourage people from swimming out to it and walking on it.”

I am amazed. “People walk on the Trail?”

“I've heard of—hey, Arjuna!”

Another man is in my space. He's well groomed, wearing a silver-gray shirt, unbuttoned to show a bush of glossy chest hair. He leans across me to kiss the bartender and his leg presses against my knee. He withdraws and presses his palms to me in apology. And when we make eye contact I realize I know him: Arjuna Swaminathan. He was in my nano seminar at IIT. I used to fantasize about him instead of paying attention to the lecture. But unlike the clerk at the pharmacy, he doesn't seem to recognize me.