The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (62 page)

“Ma, I won’t do it again! I promise!”

The fear in her daughter’s voice brought Amrit up short. The child was looking at her the way a mongoose observes a cobra that is beginning to rear. Amrit felt a pang. She did not wish her own daughter to fear her – not beautiful, bright, long-fingered Meera, remnant of her brief happy marriage, her only concrete contribution to the world’s future. But if fear was what it took to stop the child from throwing her life away, Amrit would harden her heart and use that fear for the child’s own good until she could find something better with which to motivate her. So all she replied was, “I want to show you something, Meera.”

They walked to the bus stop past beggars, businessmen, newspaper vendors, police. On the bus, which was nearly filled with after-work shoppers and evening-shift workers headed for cleaning jobs in the offices and apartment buildings round about, they sat side by side, Amrit still holding tight to Meera’s hand, as though she feared losing her, as though any moment she might declare her independence, run off to a party, get drunk, get her face pierced, take drugs, enter upon a life of prostitution. At the Mahim Railway Station, they got off the bus. As they mounted the steps into the station, still hand-in-hand, Meera asked, “Are you sending me away?”

“Don’t be foolish. Of course not. I said I wanted to show you something.”

“She started it!” The girl planted her feet, stared up at her mother (up? no, truth be told, only very slightly up, they were nearly of a height now; how could Amrit have not noticed that before?). “She called me a thief, Ma! She said I stole the cell phone, that it was her phone, that it could not possibly be my phone because we could not possibly afford anything so toff, and that I must give it back at once or she would tell the Vice-Principal. I told her it was not her cell phone, that it was our cell phone, that I was not a thief, and that Mother Kali could pluck out her lying tongue and feed it to her for breakfast, for all that she was of the Kshatriyas and very nearly a Brahman.” Her daughter gulped, caught her breath. “And then she slapped me. So I struck her the way Uncle Saavit showed me.”

“Are you finished?”

Meera nodded. There were tears in the corners of her big eyes, and her cheeks were flushed with passion, but there was no remorse at the corners of her mouth at all. “Then come,” said Amrit. “It’s only a little farther, this thing that I wish to show you.”

There were high brick walls between the back of the railway station and the thing Amrit wished to show her daughter, but Amrit knew every square inch of this area from childhood hours spent staring up at it from the other side. They threaded their way unnoticed through the knots of waiting commuters, sellers, and alms-seekers, past a group of saffron-clad Buddhist monks wearing sunglasses (at seven o’clock at night?), past a magazine rack sporting lurid film-star magazines, and finally to the spot she had remembered: a narrow doorway with a chain across it saying
ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY
in seven languages. “We are going up there?” inquired her daughter querulously, peering up into the dimness.

“We are,” said her mother firmly, and lifted the chain. “For what I have to show you may only be viewed conveniently from the top of this stair.”

“But,” said Meera, and that is all she said, for Amrit was half-pulling, half-pushing her onto the staircase with her.

The stairs were made of wood and smelled of old urine, chapati grease, stale cigarettes, and ancient durian. A faint light filtered down the stairwell from someplace high above, but it was very dark, and the stairs were littered with trash left by squatters down through the years. Twice Meera stumbled. The first time her mother was able to arrest her fall, but the second, Meera ended up on one knee on the stair, narrowly escaping being stuck with a discarded hypodermic needle. In later years she would recall this upward passage as the most horrific experience of her young life, yet in the end they attained the top of the stair and emerged onto an open causeway under a Mumbai night sky that had somehow become overcast during their million years in the dark.

The women paused to catch their breaths. Meera was surprised to realize how far they had climbed. Behind and below them through pollution haze stretched the Mumbai they had just left: the railway station, apartment buildings, office blocks, tooting thoroughfares. Meera could see the tracks for the Western Railway stretching away into the distance, where they crossed the Mahim Sion Link Road; beyond that, she could see the filthy black waters of Mahim Bay. “Turn around,” said her mother. Her voice sounded distant, like a goddess’s. Meera turned, and found herself looking down onto a vast, confusing jungle of silent, swampy slum. “Do you know what this is?” her mother asked, sweeping her arm outward to encompass the world before them.

“Of course, Ma. Dharavi.” She could not keep the contempt from her voice.

“And what is it, this Dharavi? What do you know of it?”

“It is where the poor people dwell.” The wind picked up, bringing with it from Dharavi the scent of sewage.

“What sorts of poor people? Specify.”

“Well, potters,” she said. “Furniture makers. People from the provinces who can’t afford to live anywhere else. Tailors, people like that.” Meera found the contrast between the hooting hum of the Mumbai behind them and the deep quiet of the slum before them deeply unsettling, and she looked uncomfortably around her. They were alone on the causeway. “They all look dead from up here,” she said.

“They are not dead, child. They are resting, those who are not sewing garments all night for less income than the beggar outside our sweetshop makes in three hours. One and a half million persons living in a reclaimed mangrove swamp. No sewage treatment facilities. Uncertain electricity. Water of such poor quality that one considers oneself fortunate merely to contract dysentery from it.” Amrit looked thoughtfully out over the maze of little lanes and thoroughfares. “But see the temple, there? And the mosque? And those buildings, that school, there? Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jains. Recycling everything, because one cannot afford to buy anything new. Your father was born there” – she stabbed the dark with her chin – “off Ninety Feet Road, not far from Kumbharwada.”

“My father? Born in Dharavi?” She could not believe what she was hearing. Meera did not remember her father; she knew him only from the holos on her mother’s old e-album, a small man, small like her mother, with ropy-muscled arms, large knuckles, and intense dark features. “You said he was from Rajasthan!” Meera’s tone was accusatory.

“I never did. I said his people were from Rajasthan. They were weavers and textile-painters. His parents came to Mumbai after the great famines, and settled in the Potters’ District. When I met your father, he was living with ten other young men in a garage, refitting automobiles for resale.” She had literally run into him, having ducked into the garage in an attempt to evade an irate fruit vendor from whom she had swiped three small green mangoes and a bar of chocolate. She had been eleven, a little girl; he, fifteen, nearly a man; out of pity he and the boys had hidden her, and afterward he had walked her home. When next she had encountered him, at a Kumbharwada street festival, nearly three years had passed, and neither he nor she had thought of her as a little girl any longer. He had known her at once. “Why, it’s the little thief!” he had cried upon seeing her again.

She had laughed in his face, giddy with the news she had just received in the post: that she, youngest daughter of a factory worker and a dockhand, had been the first female student to be accepted as a trainee computer specialist at the newly revamped and expanded Bandra-Kurla Complex. He had bought her sugared wafers, under the watchful eye of her three older sisters; and that summer, at the height of the worst dysentery outbreak Dharavi had endured in several years, they had kissed for the first time in the pouring rain.

Standing with her daughter on the border between light and darkness, Amrit turned to Meera and said, “Listen to me, girl. No, listen. The Kshatriya girl? The one who called you a thief? She was speaking the truth.”

“No, Ma!”

“The cell phone was not yours to borrow. Nor was it mine to loan, though had it been I would have loaned it to you for the asking. It belonged to the company for which I work. Today I had to purchase another cell phone to replace the one that was broken in the altercation between you and the Kshatriya. The cost of that phone will be deducted from my wages.”

“I’m sorry!”

“It is too late for sorrow.” Harden your heart, she reminded herself “The Vice-Principal from your school came to see me at work today. I suppose you know this?” The girl nodded miserably. “Do you know what he said to me?” Meera shook her head. “He told me that in light of the four violent quarrels in which you have been engaged this term, unless I agree to have you outfitted with a nanny chip to curb your aggressive response tendencies, he will see that you are expelled from the Academy.”

Having hurled her bomb, Amrit watched it hit home and burst behind the girl’s eyes. She had not let go of her daughter’s hand the entire time they had been in the street, and it was well that she had not, for the moment comprehension dawned in Meera’s young face, the child turned and lunged for the nearest guard-rail.

Amrit yanked her, pulled her back. “What are you doing?” she cried. “What are you doing?”

“Let me go! A nannychip? I would die, rather!” Her mouth was an open wound. Howling, Meera reversed direction and barreled into her mother, sending her staggering backward. “I hate you! A nannychip? I hate you, I hate you!”

“Stop it! I did not say that I had agreed!” Amrit slapped the girl’s face. Meera cried out, once; then stood stock-still, hands over her eyes, thin shoulders shuddering in the thin jacket of pirated ripstop nylon, sobbing raggedly.

“What is going on up here?”

Amrit turned, clutching Meera to her protectively. A man had come up the stair and was shining a flashlight in their faces. “You are not permitted on this causeway! Did you not observe the sign below? What is going on here?”

“We were just,” said Amrit, and for some reason she was having a hard time summoning enough breath to form the words, so that they came out in puffs, like Uncle Saavit’s cigar-smoke, “we were just, just, seeking the, view!” And then she was pushing past the man, half-carrying her daughter, half-dragging her, tumbling down the stair as fast as she could, while the man shouted, “You are not permitted! You are not permitted!” over and over again.

When they returned to their flat, they found that Dakota had been pried from his electronics and sent to bed, and that Gloria had returned and was huddled in fierce consultation with Uncle Saavit and the elder Mrs Chaudhury. These three looked up as Amrit and Meera came in. To their questions Amrit replied not a word, but marched Meera past them and into her little room. Less than a minute later, Amrit emerged from the room, sans her progeny, shutting the door firmly behind her. Then she went into the tiny kitchen to fix a pot of tea.

Gloria followed her into the kitchen and stood silently, waiting, her arms crossed over her chest, while Amrit filled the teakettle and lit the pilot light on the ancient propane stove. Gloria was nearly half Uncle Saavit’s age, and would have been a beauty, thought Amrit, had it not been for her absurd adoption of the latest youth styles from China: LEDs imbedded in her forehead and chin and chop marks tattooed on her neck. Gloria, Mumbai born and bred, had been working as a waitress in one of the new holo-discos when she had met Saavit, and Amrit was not blind to the effect Gloria’s excruciatingly modern presence in the house was having upon impressionable young Meera. Young! Amrit thought, waiting for the water to boil. In the old days, at fifteen Meera would already have been married a year, with a child on the way. She herself had married Meera’s father at seventeen, and now here she was, a widow at thirty-two, with a dead-end job and no romantic prospects, certainly. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, she chided. You speak of the old days? In the old days, you would have been expected to have flung yourself upon your husband’s funeral pyre. At least you have a job.

The kettle sang. Amrit had readied the tea leaves in the next-best steeping pot; she poured the boiling water over them until the steeping pot was filled, then replaced the kettle on the stove and put the lid on the pot. Only then did she turn round and smile at the waiting Gloria. “Would you like some tea, Auntie?” Amrit asked.

It was an old joke between them. When first Uncle Saavit had brought his fiancée home, Amrit had judged her an opportunist fishing the river of senility, and had said as much to Saavit in so many words. But over the weeks and months, and after the wedding when a pregnant Gloria had moved in with them, Amrit had come to appreciate her probity, practicality, and intelligence; and she was certainly a hard worker, contributing to the communal treasury through long hours at the e-cafe a substantial portion of the revenues that Saavit’s ailing limousine service failed to provide. So Gloria and Amrit had taken to calling one another “Niece” and “Auntie,” and usually it eased the tensions that occasionally cropped up between them.

But this time Gloria did not smile. She said, “Saavit and Parvati just told me what has happened.” For reasons unclear to Amrit, Gloria was the only one in the house hold suffered to address Amrit’s mother-in-law by her given name.

“And how would Saavit and Mrs. Chaudhury know?”

“The Assistant Vice-Principal told them when he brought Meera home this afternoon.”

“Ah. Of course. No tea?” Gloria shook her head. In the dim kitchen, her LEDs were pinpricks of light. “Then you all know that Meera faces suspension for quarreling.”

“Yes. It is so unjust!” The words came out slowly, almost thoughtfully. “It was the other girl’s fault. Saavit says that the Assistant Vice-Principal admitted as much.”

“Nonetheless. Meera knew the rules. This was her fourth offense. She must take her share of the responsibility.” Amrit turned away, took down a teacup, saucer, and tea strainer from the shelf, and removed a teaspoon from the kitchen drawer. She noticed that her hands were trembling. She set the tea things on the little kitchen table to await the completion of the tea leaves’ steeping. Without looking round again, Amrit said, “Did the Assistant Vice-Principal also inform you under what circumstances Meera would be permitted to remain at school?”