The Girl in the Road Read online

  Oh really? Have you ever been the pusher?

  Oh yes, said Preeti, I’m very messy and it drives him crazy. I know it bothers him, but I never clean up enough before he comes over.

  I stared at her.

  I said: What do you want your life to be?

  She laughed and said, Me and K. P., sitting in a tree!

  I wanted to slap her. Right now I want to slap her too, slap that big childlike smile off her face. I didn’t understand that people like that still existed in the twenty-first century and I still don’t.

  Mohini didn’t understand why I couldn’t be more compassionate. She said, Why are you in this line of work if that’s how you feel? I said I was allowed to have complicated feelings about my charges. I was allowed to hold the private opinion that living in enslavement to “love” was a life wasted. Mohini said she didn’t see how that described a state very different from my life, or hers, or anyone else’s. I said, but Preeti only wants it from one person who hurts her, and no one else will do. That there are healthy and unhealthy ways to get love. It went on. It was a painful fight. Mohini dug into it like she needed to prove something to me. Something about how the fact that I always had fantasies of violence, even though I never acted on them, was problematic.

  This isn’t helping me sleep either. I try to clear my mind. I shift until I find the most comfortable position relative to the rocking of the Trail: curled in the fetal position, head forward, so I’m being rocked anterior to posterior, like I’m on a train.

  I realize I haven’t heard my own voice in almost twenty-four hours, so I sing the Suprabhatam to myself even though it’s late in the day. In my life I’ve gone through cycles of hating it and needing it. I know the whole thing because Muthashan played the Subbulakshmi recording every morning when I was growing up, even after I stopped joining him for prayer. Mohini sang it herself, of course, and I thought she was better. I never thought I could sing for shit, but Mohini said I could, it just wasn’t a good voice for Indian classical music. She said my voice was rough and wandering.

  I get tired enough to stop singing and continue only in my mind, and then I get to singing on the sage Narada—jhankaragitaninadaih saha sevanaya—and my mind catches on the word saha and repeats it, and then the figures I’ve been drawing in my head start drawing themselves.

  Discipline

  I’m woken by footsteps.

  They echo in my head when I sit up. I stay still in my graphite bubble. I don’t hear any more. They were probably relics of a dream. But they had a syncopated rhythm of steps on the Trail that I remember from watching the lifeguard, whose name I can’t remember now, I think Cecilia?—something Christian—but in any case, something my subconscious must have recorded at the time, not a steady beat, but a scattered offbeat with a deeper rhythm, like raindrops.

  I check the time. It’s approaching sunset, and I’ll start crawling then, trusting both my camo and the glare to hide me from eyes on shore. If I were still marking phases, then this would be Phase Five: A Stab at Routine. First I eat. I dissolve a protein cube in desalinated water on my solar plate, heat it up, and then add tamarind and cumin to soak. I break apart the last two idlee with my fingers and swab the pieces in the broth. It’s salty but otherwise good. I think of the spicewaala Sunny in Thrissur and what he might be doing right now. It’s dusk on a Tuesday. He’s probably packing up his corner at Round East, closing shop on his fat cones of spice.

  I think I’ll try surviving only on idlee and protein broth for the foreseeable future; fewer of the latter, since protein requires more water to digest. With a kiln I can make all kinds of food, as long as it’s homogeneous—chocolate, sweet lassi, imitation dal. But I can’t give in to decadence. I can’t afford it. I’ve come into a new phase of discipline where austerity and humility are key.

  Speaking of humility, I have to shit. I’d forgotten entirely about that aspect of existence.

  I get out the diaper and set it in front of me. Muthashi’s voice comes back to me, lecturing her patients on how crucial bowel movements were. That they were a sign of health. That, and menses.

  It would be a lot easier to face forward, because then the rocking motion would be aligned with my front-to-back axis. But that means I’d have to shit directly on the Trail. And I don’t want to. It seems like bad karma. So I scuttle on my knees out to the edge and point my ass northwest and pray there are no fishing boats nearby to see. My ass is over my ankles, so to avoid mucking up the Trail I have to work my way back until most of my shins are over the water, and I can feel the waves smack the tops of my feet, and I extend my spine lengthwise as far as I can in a modified child’s pose. I wait. I tense. There are a few explosions and dribblings. And then I pee, too, forgetting that I’m literally not in a position to do so. I just let it go and then try to move my gear in time to get out of the way of the puddle, which of course expands with the movement of the Trail. All hopeless. I’m wet, and so is my stuff.

  But I’m my grandmother’s granddaughter. I’ve cleaned up much worse in the clinic. I have no shame.

  I wipe first with the modified diaper and set it in the sun to self-clean. Then I refill my desalinator and use the new water to wash myself clean. I didn’t make a complete mess. I’ll get better. I use another bottleful to wash the parts of my stuff that got touched with urine, and then another, to rinse the urine off the Trail. It feels like a housekeeping gesture. I’ll never pass this way again but I’ll keep it nice for those who do.

  When I finish I realize that kneeling on the Trail is easier than it was the night before. I still get knocked around. I still fall sideways and forward and backward and have to brace myself, especially with my hands, which means my wrists burn and my muscles are in a state of perpetual incredulity.

  But I’m getting better. And I resist the urge to take more nanobiotics. I have to break my body in.

  I crawl a hundred more meters in the setting sun before I allow myself to rest. I feel like I’m roasting on a spit, skin crackling, muscles burning, pockets of fat bursting open. No wonder walkers walk at night.

  When I look back, Mumbai is more faint in the haze. I might be half a kilometer from shore now. The tops of the buildings at Nariman Point are lined in bright orange from the sunset. This time yesterday, I was hiding in the seawall.

  I take another capsule of nanobiotics for the pain. Everything takes fucking forever: getting out the medical kit, holding on to the bottle so it doesn’t fly out of my hand when the Trail bucks, drawing more water, positioning myself to put the pill in my mouth, maintaining balance to drink water to get it down.

  Then I crouch in child’s pose and dictate to my scroll:

  7:00 p.m.—wake up

  7:00 p.m.–7:45 p.m.—first meal: two cubes of idlee, half cup broth, one bottle water

  7:45 p.m.–12:00 a.m.—crawl. listen to music or read on audio. drink another bottle of water while crawling

  12:00 a.m.–1:00 a.m.—second meal: protein dissolved in water with spices and one bottle of water

  1:00 a.m.–6:00 a.m.—crawl. listen to music or read on audio, drink another bottle of water while crawling

  6:00 a.m.–7:00 a.m.—third meal: my choice plus one bottle of water

  7:00 a.m.–8:00 a.m.—get into pod, check position, inventory supplies

  8:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m.—read or listen to music, leisure

  11:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.—sleep

  I feel this is a reasonable yet generous schedule.

  Then I keep going. It’s only 8:13 p.m. I exist on restricted choices. There’s nowhere to go but the next scale.

  I keep checking my pozit. I come to 1.5 kilometers. I congratulate myself on being so disciplined. Then I lie down, which feels so nice, and blackness comes.

  I wake up. I reproach myself. I’ve only lost an hour, though.

  The moon has set. I’m grateful for the darkness. I’m not forced to notice everything around me like I am when it’s light.

  Next scale. And next. And nex
t. I count them in my head. I count to a hundred. Then I can only bear to count in rounds of fifty. Then twenty. Then ten.

  It’s not 6:00 a.m. yet but I’m so sore I need to stop. More pain medication. More anti-inflammatory. I worry that it’ll always be like this, and I’ll run out of medication in a week.

  My third meal is My Choice. I renounce all prior declarations of discipline and program idlee and imitation dal on my kiln. The dal is homogenous, with no distinct lentils per se. But I eat it and then program another serving and eat that, too. The hunger is like a concavity in my stomach. My body is starved for energy.

  The sky gets lighter and lighter and now that I’m stationary, I can appreciate how pretty it is. I’m two kilometers offshore, now. I’m effectively on the open ocean. I haven’t had a single chance to appreciate what I’m doing. Now I can, for an instant, and watch the sun rise. It smolders between the towers of Nariman Point.

  Two kilometers down and 3,186 kilometers to go. I look at the satellite map on my scroll. I’m still well within the continental shelf, and then the seafloor drops to abyssal plain about 250 kilometers out, and then a ridge introduces more complex topology about halfway through, and then the sea gets gradually shallower going into the Gulf of Aden, an unthinkable distance away.

  I calculate how far I’ve come.

  It’s 0.06 percent of the way.

  I try not to think more about that.

  My third meal is done. According to my schedule, I’m now At Leisure.

  I blow up my pod and climb inside before it gets too hot. What world will I enter, now: Tagore’s Kolkata, Chu’s Singapore, Morrison’s Ohio?

  I choose to read Sesay, again, her watery poetry. But I read three pages and then I’m already fantasizing about what I’m going to do when I reach Africa. Africa is the new India, after India became the new America, after America became the new Britain, after Britain became the new Rome, after Rome became the new Egypt, after Egypt became the new Punt, and so on and so forth. Now we’re back to Punt. I’ve watched the African youth uprisings against land grabs or “colonization by invitation.” Mohini and I used to lie side by side and watch the reports roll in to the cloud. Addis Ababa, the city where my parents were murdered, is now the flagship city of Africa. Lagos is too big, Joburg is too white, Cairo is not really African, and so on. No one expected Addis to emerge as Africa’s sweetheart city. But it has.

  It feels good to leap into the future, when this current adventure will be done. First I’ll recuperate in Djibouti. Then I’ll take the train into Ethiopia and see what there is to be seen, because the woman who killed my parents was never caught.

  Aquaculture

  When I wake up again, I have no idea where I am, only that I’m in an orange globe. I try to breathe steadily as memory comes back to me. I’m in my pod. The sun is setting. It makes the pod’s skin glow.

  I eat my appointed breakfast. As I do this I think, So this is what life as an ascetic would be like. Two days in, I don’t know how I feel about it. The jury is hung.

  I change the dressings on my wounds. Now this includes my elbows and knees, both rubbed raw from the crawling. Some of the swelling from my forehead is beginning to slide down my face, under the skin, making my eyes itch.

  I set out crawling toward the west. My knees hurt every time I set them down, no matter how gently. The pain is a fascinating terrain. I ideate it as a bottomless tropical jungle full of toucans with razor beaks. I try to focus on counting.

  Then I start to see a colony of kelp or an algae bloom building up on either side of the Trail, actually rising above sea level. Then I start to think it’s a huge garbage patch, because I see glints of plastic, but I wonder why the garbage seems to have congregated in such a geometric arrangement. And then I see the blurs against the horizon. They’re pods. They’re not as well camouflaged as mine. They might be an earlier or cheaper model. But they’re much bigger than mine, enough to fit two or three people, more like domes than pods.

  So I’ve come to a seastead.

  Now all of a sudden being on the Trail is not an ascetic experience at all. It’s going to be a completely different experience, starting now. Fuck the numeric, this is Phase Beta.

  I stop, balance, take off my bag, and check for the presence of all my gifts and barter items. They’re where I thought they’d be. I wonder whether they’ve seen me yet. And now I feel ashamed that I’m still crawling. I can’t let them see me like this. So, especially given the state of my knees and elbows, I should try to stand up now.

  I tighten my backpack against my back. I thank Parvati for big tits that balance it out. From all fours, I come to kneeling, and then push my hands down and come to a crouch. Low center of gravity. Fingertips balancing on the sandpaper surface. I spread my feet, left forward, right back, to compensate for the rocking motion, and then I try to rise. It takes four tries. I have to spread my feet even farther apart. I have to first master standing with both feet on a single scale before I even attempt to stand on two different ones. There’s no pattern to the duration of any single pitch. My legs are in a state of constant tension.

  I come to a wide-legged warrior pose, as if I’m on a surfboard. I wobble in every cardinal direction. I feel like I’m on a Japanese game show. I would laugh at myself if I didn’t also feel like crying. When I’ve counted to ten and am still standing upright, I take a step forward.

  In the split second it takes for the Trail to buck my front foot such that I lean back to safety and find no surface at all and I slip and cartwheel into the ocean, I think, Meena, this is the difference between monovariable and multivariable calculus. Then I’m in the water.

  The lizard brain takes over until I find myself back on the Trail.

  Drenched and pissed, I stand again.

  This time I try placing all my weight on one foot while I slide the other forward onto the next scale. I feel it bucking under my front foot. My shin is burning. My balance stabilizes. I begin to shift weight forward. The surfaces are rough, giving some traction. Otherwise I wouldn’t have a chance. It’s probably for the sake of the maintenance crews that never do any maintenance, according to Anwar. Briefly I wonder why they didn’t just make special shoes for the maintenance crews, instead of making the Trail itself walkable. While I wonder this I realize I’ve already crossed over onto the third scale. It’s better if I don’t think too hard, apparently. It’s like learning to salsa. I have to surrender to my partner and everything will go smoothly.

  And anyway, now I have an audience.

  There’s a child ahead, standing halfway between me and the seastead. She’s keeping perfect balance with the Trail, making me feel like a cow on roller skates. She regards me for a while, belly thrust out. I wave. She runs back to the seastead and disappears into a pod. She emerges pulling the wrist of an older girl who, upon seeing me, turns and calls toward a pod farther up the platform. Then she looks me over with ennui, in perfect contrast to the younger girl, who’s hopping up and down and clutching at her dress.

  I try to walk toward them but I fall again and sprain my wrist. I feel ashamed and try not to cry.

  A woman in a cotton sari comes out of a pod. I can tell she’s the mother. I feel both grateful to see other human beings and resentful of their intrusion on my solitude, though, of course, it’s the other way around. Will they welcome me? Isn’t hospitality a requisite feature of settlements in deserts and tundras and other harsh environs, being a kind of communal survival mechanism? I remember reading that somewhere. Besides, they’re just as illegal as I am, and I have nothing to profit by exposing them.

  “Namaste,” I yell out. My voice sounds hoarse and thin to myself.

  “Namaste,” she yells back, and continues in Hindi. “Having some trouble?”

  I still my rage. “I haven’t really learned to walk yet,” I yell back.

  “It’s hard for everyone at first. What’s your business?”

  “I’m just passing through,” I say. I decide not to mention the
barefoot girl at all. They’ll think I’m crazy. “Do I need your permission?”

  “No,” she says. “But nobody is ‘just passing through.’ Are you a hiker or sadhvi or what?”

  “Something like that,” I say.

  “Well, come on, then,” she says.

  I feel like an animal in a zoo.

  “Are you going to watch me?”

  “Fine, I can turn away if you like, but you might want some pointers.”

  “We get people like you,” says the elder girl. “We know what to say.”

  I swallow my pride and capitulate.

  “Okay,” I say. I come up to crouching on my own just to show them I can fucking do something by myself. “What now?”

  “Spread your feet forwards and back,” she says.

  I fucking knew that and did that already. But I do it again anyway.

  “Keep your knees soft,” she says.

  “Now try to rise up,” she says.

  “Look at me,” she says. “Don’t look at your feet.”

  I look at her. She is standing, appraising, both fists on her waist.

  “Theek hai, now switch legs,” she says. “Don’t move forward, just stay in the same place.”

  I manage this.

  “Now go through your body and find where you’re holding tight and try to let it go soft.”

  Great. I’m in fucking yoga class.

  “Are you angry?” she says.

  “No,” I say.

  “Now let your eyes go soft,” she says. “Be passively aware of your surroundings. Let there be eyes in the back of your head and all over your body.”

  I wheel a couple times but I kind of know what she’s saying and try to get in that zone.

  “Shaabaash, now come forward, and keep your arms spread to either side, and just keep your eyes on me.”