The Girl in the Road (28 page)

Why did you run away from home in the first place? he said.

This was the one question I was afraid he'd ask, Yemaya. No one had asked me that question for thirteen years. And yet tonight, I'd received the sign that all would be well. Tonight was a night for breaking the habits of years and breathing free air.

We were Haratine, which meant we were slaves, I said. My mother and I served the Brahim household. The father was always sending me away to spend time with my mother. When I was a child, we escaped and tried to settle in one of the slums. But somehow he found us. I came back from the beach to the concrete house my mother had made for us, and he was there, and he was wearing a sky-blue robe like the men in Mauritania do. My mother looked at me, and even though she was upside down and I was right side up, she looked at me and said, Don't worry, I'll be all right.

I found myself held against Gabriel's body. I had never been held in such a way. I was a virgin. But I reminded myself: I had received the sign. This was all right.

I ran away, I said into his chest. She had told me to, if anything happened to her, because she never wanted me to be enslaved again.

He held me tighter. His body was warm and hard.

For so many years, to calm myself, I'd said
Yemaya, Yemaya, Yemaya.
In the darkness, against his chest, I mouthed it, feeling the way it formed in the back of my throat, touched my lips, and ended with an open mouth. And then I tested the new one:
Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel.
It didn't feel quite as right as your name did. But for now, for this life, on this earth, it would do.

Mohini, how did I get here?

The bodies are routine now. They're always you, in a golden sari, with your head hanging off the edge of the Trail. They never animate or sit up and start talking. I just hear your voice in my head.

We talk about how I moved to Thrissur when I was twenty-three and got a job at the women's center, where I worked with survivors of domestic abuse. It was a struggle. Most of the time I just wanted to find the abusers and kick the shit out of them on my clients' behalf. You know this about me. I'm honest with you. You're gentle and understanding.

You say, You're carrying a lot of baggage.

You're right, I say.

I kneel at the edge of the Trail and empty my bag and, like Jesus separating the sheep and the goats, I put things into two piles. The breakdown goes like this:

Pile 1: Underwear, bra, sunglasses, desalinators, toothbrush, toothpaste, tongue scraper, kiln, solar plate, filet knife, fishing kit, irradiator brush, medical kit, menses sponge, diaper cloth, pod, ropes.

Pile 2: Mitter, purse, sandals, soap concentrate, protein packets, broth packets, sunbits, gas capsules, sea anchor, laminated map, pozit, flares, picture of Rana, compass, brimmed hat, sun cap, hoodie, T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, canvas shoes, thong sandals, and the pair of pants I'm not wearing at the moment.

Without letting myself think about it I sweep the second pile over the edge. The various items scatter on the surface. My pants bloom to life as they take on water. The hoodie is hardest to sink. I have to tow it back in and hold it under and it accepts this fate, having been long embittered about its role, grumbling as it sinks. The other items are more obliging. One by one, they disappear. When they're gone, I feel lighter. I've gotten rid of a lot of weight and my bag will be easier to carry. Already my body itself is lighter and easier to carry. All my fat has disappeared. My breasts are flat. My bones are prominent. For the first time in my life, it hurts to sit, and so I eat curled up on my side.

Your golden body appears every thirty meters or so, like a crumb trail. I consider these part of the ordeal. More chambers. They all have some purpose I can't yet tell, something that will prepare me for the final chamber, the first and the last, Ethiopia.

Patchwork rafts are lashed together and covered by Persian carpets, their corners wet and dragging in the water. There are half a dozen residents and they all look like Maharishi devotees from 1968. They rouse from beanbags and lurch up, heavy-lidded, like zombies. The nearest one wears a batik robe that pools around his feet and leaves his shoulder bare.

MARATHI
:
Who goes?

“Durga,” I say.

MARATHI
:
Whoa. Durga. Do you bring new life or destruction?

“Both,” I say.

He gestures to the assemblage of beanbags and the adherents press their palms and bow toward me. But their aim is off. One of them is bowing to the space to my left and the other is bowing to the space above me. Not a film, not a dream. What chamber is this, then? Maybe a test. “Please, partake with us,” he says.

“What, hashish?”

“No, seawater,” he says.

“You can't drink seawater,” I say.

“Ah, but you can,” he says. “Five hundred milliliters a day before your kidneys revolt. We're here to prove it.”

“To whom?”

“To the world. That Bloody Mary is real and exists.”

“What does Bloody Mary have to do with this?”

“You call her Bloody Mary, but we call her Mother of the Race to Come.”

Mohini, this sounds like some bullshit.

“I'm not keen on giving up fresh water, thanks,” I say. “I'll be on my way.”

The batik man moves with surprising speed to block my way.

“Either you sacrifice your desalinators to Bloody Mary, or you offer a story,” he says. “That's the bargain.”

Ah, so I was right, Mohini. This is a test.

Tell them the one about Parvati, you say.

I'm sure they know about Parvati, I say.

No, Parvati Rai, you say. Your first client at the women's center. Remember?

Oh, Parvati Rai.

I tell Batik Man to sit on his beanbag because I'm about to tell a story. My words will get fucked up because I'm me, but there's going to be a beginning, a middle, and an end. I feel you behind me, listening and supporting.

“Once there was a slave woman named Parvati. She had been born into slavery, not in the sense of intrinsic worth or karmic reincarnation but in a social construction sense, obviously, and not by any fault of her own but just because people can't control where they're born, and then energy flows directionally through the human race because the gradient's always trying to reach equilibrium. Like the layers of the ocean. Right?”

You say, Just tell the story and don't worry about extemporizing. The facts are enough.

“Okay, so. Parvati's mother died when she was young, so she grew up in the house alone, as the slave of the family. They called her a servant, but that's just the kind of bullshit rurals get away with; according to the international definition she was a slave because she never received schooling, was never paid enough to live on her own, was prohibited from forming any kind of relationships that would help her get out of her situation, et cetera. The man she served was violent towards her, especially after his wife left him and took her three daughters with her. So it was just Parvati and him in the house and he raped her a lot. And that was just her normal life.”

My voice is beginning to shake, but I can feel you behind me, holding me in strength. I stop to swallow and take a breath.

“Sometimes Parvati thought about killing herself. But she needed to believe that life was worth living if only she could get free. So she ran away to another village, but no one would take her in. Eventually her master found her through her aadhaar. He humiliated her in public and then put her on top of his truck and strapped her down like she was luggage, and started driving back to his village really fast. The bumping on country roads loosened the knots, and Parvati fell off the truck, into the road. She hit so hard her skull cracked. She was still lying in the middle of the road, bleeding from the head, and she thought, I should just stay here in the road.

“But she was still alive. And things that are alive need to move, eventually, whether they want to or not, because they still have energy to spend. She crawled out of the road. She was weak, but she pinched the skin of her upper arm and dug out her aadhaar with her own fingernails and left it in a field. She crawled farther to put distance between her and her aadhaar. Then she got up and walked through the night. When it got to be dawn, she found herself on a road high above the plain, and she saw a car passing, and she flagged it down, and it turned out to be a medical student, who took her to the hospital. That student was my father, Ramachandran Gabriel.”

And after that? you say. Finish it.

“Parvati got better. She started helping other women. When I arrived at the women's center many years later, she was its director. On my first day, she told me about how my father had rescued her from the road. She also told me that she went back to her old ‘master's' house. She'd forgiven him. She wanted to lay eyes on him again and show herself that she had nothing to fear. But when she got to the house, it was empty. The wind blew through it like the bones of a skeleton. He'd left long ago.”

“So,” says Batik Man, “what did she do?”

“She went back to her wonderful life,” I say.

All of the devotees press their palms and bow to me again.

“You may pass now,” says Batik Man.

In answer, I take out my two desalinator bottles, and like a buzzard spreading its wings, fling each into the ocean. They arc to my right and left and drop into the water at the same exact moment.

You've passed the test, you say behind me. Now you're ready for the next chamber.

I stop wearing clothes. They felt like just one more barrier between me and the elements. I want to merge with the elements instead of remain separate from them.

The batik man said the body can tolerate five hundred milliliters of seawater a day. I take my first capful of it—the water of life, all around me; what was I thinking?—every other thought is an epiphany for the ages—and drink it down, careful not to let it touch my lips. The salt burns my throat like a neat shot of liquor. I let it settle and sink into my cells. I tell them to welcome the new food. It's better than water. It's broth.

I begin to see that the Trail is actually contained within a glass tunnel. There's no fear of being swept away to either side. There's not even any danger of drowning. The sea, sky, and moon—the members of my old Element Diary, fondly resurrected—are the background film that's playing while I walk, and will, until I reach Djibouti. I can see the end of the Trail in my mind's eye: it stops offshore, but I can see the lights of the city. Not as vast or majestic as Mumbai, but it'll have some other quality, something essentially
African
as the skyline of Mumbai is essentially
Indian
. I try to imagine it but I feel like anything I imagine will just be a function of stereotypes. Violet lights, instead of orange? An assemblage of low colonial-era buildings instead of the towering HydraCorp tiara? I don't know anything about Djibouti, but for reasons I can't name, I'm expecting something welcoming and warm. And friendly hands to help me ashore.

I thought the bodies would go away after the commune. But they keep appearing, and now, in different positions, as if I'm paging through a very slow flip book.

I know the story they're spelling out for me. So I start telling it first, to get ahead of them.

Mohini, life got better for me after I went to Madurai.

I'd left college after the episode with Ajantha. I went home but I had no place with my grandparents. They were too sad even to be angry with me. I moved in with a divorced man in Aranmula for five months, then left in the middle of the night. I baked bread in Varkala for two weeks and then got sick of the tourists. I worked at the Kashi Art Café in Kochi for longer but, again, got sick of the tourists. And then for a year I worked as a waitress in Kodaikanal, writing poetry at night huddled in blankets, but I was getting sick of the cold. Then one day I was serving a customer, a stick-up-the-ass Hindu nationalist, who saw my nametag and asked me when was the last time I'd visited my namesake Meenakshi Devi at her temple in Madurai, which was just down the mountain from us, the jewel of the plain.