The Girl in the Road Page 11

  I do. I feel like I’m walking a tightrope, but somehow the tightrope is as wide as the earth and I can’t go wrong. Night has almost fallen. The air is cool on my skin. Something crosses over in me. Somehow it’s not as hard. I keep my eyes on the woman in the cotton sari, a figure getting darker in the dusk. She’s crossed her arms, now, and she shakes her head from side to side.

  “Shaabaash, good,” she says. “You’re almost here.”

  The Trail stabilizes, the closer it gets to the seastead. It feels like I’m back at the pool again. Easy.

  The woman reaches out for me and pulls me off to the side, onto the seastead platform. After the rolling of the Trail, it feels like solid ground, and I fall to my knees, this time because it’s stable instead of moving.

  “Where are you from?” asks the youngest girl.

  “Suri, not now,” says the mother. “Go heat the water please. Sita, you help.”

  The two girls wander away, looking back at me. But the mother gets straight to business.

  “So. Sadhvi? Tourist? Thrill seeker? Fishwaala? Refugee? Cultist? Political dissident? Criminal? Scientist? Poet? Pirate?”

  “None of the above.”

  “Are you from HydraCorp?”

  I feel offended. But I remind myself this is a reasonable and even necessary question for her to ask. “No. I went to the HydraCorp Museum before I started walking, but that’s all.”

  “Are you from the government?”

  “No.”

  “Are you from the press?”

  “No.”

  “Just walking?”

  “It seems so.”

  “So where are your people?”

  “Keralam.”

  “I thought so, I could hear the accent. I have family in Alleppey. But I haven’t visited in years.”

  I’m thrown off by this bit of personal information. But I think it’s a good sign.

  “You can’t beat the fish curry,” she adds.

  I search for something to say. I feel like I’m in a dream, talking curry in the middle of the ocean. “That’s true,” I say. “I learned it from my Muthashan, but it’s been a long time since I made it.”

  “Can we make it?”

  Now I see the truth of the exchange. This woman has a veneer of hardness, which is necessary in her situation. But she’s glad to see me and craves company of a woman her age. And even though I just had breakfast, I’m famished. All I can think about now is fish curry.

  “If you have the fish,” I say, “I have the spices.”

  “We have the fish, all right.”

  Her name is Padma. Her husband is Ameem. I introduce myself to them as Durga, because now I’m in the habit. They position me rapidly vis-à-vis class and caste and region of origin, and I do the same, but refrain from commenting on what I presume is a Hindu-Muslim marriage. Not that it’s unusual anymore. But I wonder if that has anything to do with their living out in the middle of the ocean. They own the seastead, the aquaculture equipment, the motorboat, and all the profits.

  There’s one more adult, who turns out to be Rana, the Lost Son. I get out the mashed box of soan papdi his mother gave me and say, “She wants you to come home.”

  He rolls his eyes. “She wants me to sell fish,” he says.

  Instead, he says, he’s saving cash before he starts traveling through India, and heard that this was a better way to do it than hawking in Koliwada. He’s young and husky. He has long hair pulled back in a ponytail and wears only a white dhoti swaddled around his hips.

  “I have two jobs,” says Rana, kneeling by an open square in the platform. The seawater is still enough to reflect the half-moon. “First, I feed the fish”—he opens his fist to show me a clump of dark flakes—“and second, I dive underneath the cages to make repairs.”

  “You have scuba equipment here?”

  “No. I just hold my breath.”

  “Really.”

  “I’m a fisherman’s son. He taught me. The men of our family have always had a talent for diving.”

  I want to laugh, but he’s so earnest and I don’t want to embarrass him. He’s trying to impress me. He’s younger than me, maybe twenty-one. He’s at his sexual peak.

  And he hasn’t yet asked me a single question about myself. He’s in a state of life of total self-absorption and for some reason I’m attracted to that. I consider seducing him as I did with Anwar and Cecilia. Or I’m just excited at seeing other human beings after two days. So instead I say, “I’m a doctor’s granddaughter.”

  He’s unfazed by the class bomb. “Western or Ayurvedic?”

  “Both,” I say. “She’s actually famous for it. She designed the first clinical trials for Ayurveda, which had never been done before, because, you know. Ayurveda doesn’t deal with a single variable. So the statistics had to be invented, basically.”

  “Pretty cool.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Nope. Muthashi wanted me to be, though.”

  “Yeah, my mother wanted me to fish and sell fish,” Rana says, “but I’m too restless.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Father’s dead,” he says, no rancor.

  “That makes two of us,” I say.

  Rana looks up, doesn’t say sorry, doesn’t console me, just shakes his head. The parentless understand each other.

  Padma passes us, carrying an empty pot. “A half hour till the food is ready,” she says, though we hadn’t asked. I can see steam rising and smell the curry leaves, hot peppers, and coriander. She’s using my Onam spices.

  “Do you want to go swimming under the cages?” Rana asks me.

  “What? It’s dark.”

  “But it’s even cooler then. I’ll give you a light. Come on.” He begins to unwind his dhoti.

  “What am I going to wear?”

  “Your underclothes,” he says. “Don’t worry, I won’t look. I like men.”

  Chod. Of course he does.

  So we go behind his pod on the edge of the water, he in nothing but cotton briefs and I in my bra and underwear. He sees all of my bandages, including the big square on my solar plexus.

  “Whoa,” he says. “What happened?”

  “Snakebite,” I say.

  “I’ve never seen a snakebite there.”

  “First time for everything.”

  He hands me a pair of goggles with a headlamp. “We’ll dress it again after we come up.”

  “I won’t be able to hold my breath as long as you,” I say.

  “I know, don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll be watching you.”

  “How cold is it?”

  “It’s warm in the upper layers, like blood. But if you go past two meters down, then it begins to get cold. But not true cold. If you feel really cold, start swimming up.”

  He smiles and rubs his palms together like a cartoon character and dives into the water.

  This entire situation is bizarre.

  But here I am.

  I first sit on the edge of the platform, reliving my performance anxiety in front of Cecilia. Then I take a huge breath and heave myself off. It’s black underwater but silver motes drift by in the beam of my headlamp. I turn in space and see Rana swim up to me. He adjusts his headlamp so that I’m not blinded. He touches me on the arm and points toward the cage, a cube that drops several meters deep. We watch fat fish slither past one another. Rana swims to the other side to test the cage. I look up and see that the platform is built from hundreds and hundreds of plastic bottles tied together. Ingenious.

  My toe touches ice. I’ve drifted down too far.

  But the ice feels good after the days and nights of humidity, after a lifetime of heat. I let myself slide in, feel the ice inch up to my ankles, then my shins, then my knees.

  I feel a rough hand grab my upper arm. Rana is tugging me upward. I start kicking. We both break the surface and tread.

  “What was that?” he says. “Can’t you swim?”

 
I decide to lie again. “I’ve never been good at it,” I say. “I should have told you.”

  He treads water. He looks away from me. He doesn’t believe me. But he doesn’t say so.

  “You’re bleeding,” he says. “Come on, let’s get it taken care of.”

  He helps me back up onto the platform. I take off the bandage and it’s pink with blood. Rana gets a medical kit and sits down across from me. They have much the same array of supplies as I do. I hold my breasts out of the way while he swabs the five points with antiseptic. They all still have halos of infection and yellow scabs that got slimy in the water. Then he’s smearing sealant and pressing down fresh gauze and giving me a nanobiotic capsule. I feel like I want to kiss him. Or just thank him with my mouth, somehow. I’m famous for my cowrie-shell mouth. I’m aware of moonlight on my breasts. I want to be with someone again. Maybe I can convince him.

  But instead I take the towel he offers me and change inside his pod, where he’s stored my bag.

  After we eat, the children take away the dishes to wash. Padma makes chai and we recline on folded tarps that serve as pillows. A fish leaps up out of the cage into Rana’s lap, and he tosses it back in the cage and tells it to stay there, to be patient for its death.

  I use the opportunity to learn as much as I can. “Have any of you traveled the whole way to Djibouti?”

  “Oh no, we don’t travel,” says Ameem. “We have everything we need here.”

  “What do you do when there’s a storm?”

  “We drop over the side. The pods are watertight up to ten meters.”

  “That’s deep enough to avoid the turbulence?”

  “Yes. In fact both times we only had to go down four or five meters.”

  “So how many travelers do you get?”

  “We’ve only gotten a few,” says Ameem. He likes to explain, be in charge, be the authority. “But we’ve never seen anyone come back through, so we can only guess what happens to them. I think they stop and signal for help, or join one of the seasteads farther down the Trail.”

  “There are others?”

  “Yes. Not many, but there are others nearer to Yemen.”

  I don’t ask him how he knows that. Of course he doesn’t know, but he’ll bullshit like he does. He’s that kind of man.

  He continues, “We’ve taken the boat down the Trail as far as the Indian EEZ—”

  “Exclusive Economic Zone,” Rana says.

  “Which is two hundred and fifty kilometers west, and beyond that point the shipping lanes go right through the Trail and make it sink on a daily basis. So it’d be very hard to maintain a seastead there.”

  “If you get that far, you have to be careful,” says Rana. “Stay out of the way of the ships. They can’t see you, and anyway, it’s illegal to be on the Trail.”

  “I think that’s how people die,” says Ameem. “Frankly I think a lot of the travelers don’t come back because they die. Something bad happens to them.”

  “Ameem,” says Padma, warning.

  “I’m saying what I think.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. And that reminds me. “Has anyone heard of Bloody Mary?”

  And for the first time, everyone’s silent.

  I say, “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No,” say all three adults together, and then lapse again.

  I try to fill the vacuum. “When I was at the museum, and then again when I went to the Mart in Dharavi, I heard the name, so I thought I’d ask.”

  Ameem takes charge. “She’s a legend of the Trail. But I think she’s just the explanation for anything strange that might happen. Oh, I lost a rope, Bloody Mary must have taken it. Oh, here comes a storm, Bloody Mary is angry. But no one’s actually seen her.”

  Padma sits up. “I saw someone once, you know that,” she says. “But I don’t know who it was.”

  “Couldn’t it have just been another traveler?”

  “But she was coming from the other direction. And it was broad daylight. And she was naked.”

  Naked. In daylight. Out in the open.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a mirage?” I ask.

  “It was just like I’m seeing you now,” she says.

  Maybe I’m a mirage, I think to myself.

  “I think you couldn’t sleep and you were seeing things,” says Ameem to Padma. “It was during the first week we were here. You were tired.”

  Padma’s angry. “I saw something and that something is exactly what I just described,” she says. Now her pride is hurt, and I’m her target. “So Durga,” she demands, “tell us why you’re going to Africa.”

  Everyone is looking at me. I say the first thing that comes to mind, which is, “My parents died there.”

  Faces change, as if an underwater bomb has gone off beneath us. But after a beat, the interrogation continues.

  “How long ago?”

  “When I was born.”

  “How did they die?”

  “They were murdered.”

  A deeper charge. Boom.

  “I’m sorry,” says Padma. “But you never knew them, right?” Ameem and Rana have bowed out. It’s just her and me.

  “True. It’s fine. It’s been that way my whole life.”

  “But what do you do when you have no parents?” She seems to direct this question upward, to the universe.

  “You’re raised by your grandparents, if you’re lucky.”

  “But they cannot replace your parents.”

  Well, she’s on the warpath now. I feel like I need to not take offense, given their hospitality. “I guess not.”

  Padma wags her head as if I’ve given the correct answer. “Do your grandparents know where you are?”

  “No,” I say. “Nobody does.”

  “What will happen if you die?”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  Ameem laughs.

  “So,” says Padma as if summarizing a legal argument, “you’re going to make it to Africa, and then what? Are you going to visit the place where your parents were killed?”

  “That’s the plan,” I say. I’m feigning looseness and comfort and ease. “When I get to Djibouti City I’ll get a coffee and a cannoli in a seaside café and plan the next stage.”

  “You think it will magically occur to you?”

  “Yes,” I say. It sounds faint in my ears, like someone else is saying it, from another body. A fizzing black soda crowds my vision.

  “Leave her alone,” says Rana. “Maybe we’ve been asking too many questions. Durga?”

  I slide sideways.

  I wake up to the sight of silver fabric. I’m in one of the pods. I look to my left. Rana is curled up on his side, away from me, breathing deeply.

  I remember I’d fainted. I was probably dehydrated again. I look to my right and my backpack is still there, so I pull out my desalinator, sit up as quietly as I can, and take a few sips.

  Rana doesn’t stir. I suddenly love him, totally, just for being present and quiet, a nearby metabolism.

  I lie back down and notice that I’ve been well taken-care-of, with a neck pillow and a light cotton sheet. Maybe I should stay at this seastead. Maybe I could take over one of Rana’s jobs. The fantasy elaborates on its own. Every evening, Rana and I will go for a swim. I will tutor the girls in science and literature with nothing but my scroll and my imagination. I’ll go on walkabouts to the west when I want to be alone. I’ll take the spices I have left, select the whole seeds, and grow our own spices. I’ll grow a whole garden. They must be starving for fresh things here. I can provide them. Mohini and I had a garden at our house in Thrissur where we grew lettuce, mint, cardamom, ginger, cumin, coriander, peppers, cilantro, and turmeric. She was learning to cook, and that was the beginner’s palette I grew for her. She would water them every day, pouring from a height as if pouring chai, and with the thumb and forefinger of her other hand, pinching her sari up. Once I asked her, Can’t you water the plants without looking like you’re posing for the paparazzi?

/>   She gave me a sly look. How do you know I’m not? she said.

  It’s not as if I were actually protesting. I liked watching her, always. She looked like a royal courtesan every day, and I loved her for the care she put into her appearance, but also for the moment in the morning when she woke up, bare-faced, sleepy-eyed, hair-mussed, un-made.

  I turn over and look at Rana, lying on his back. He also has that nude look to his face, lips the same color as his skin. I wonder whether he really only likes men or whether he just told me that to trick me into showing him my breasts. I choose to believe the latter, right now, for my purposes. I think about spreading my hips astride him, and grinding down on him until he’s hard, and then pulling down his pants until his cock springs free, and then holding him in place, and then sinking down on top of him like depressing the plunger of a syringe. His skin is bare. Why would he do that if he didn’t want to flirt with me? Did he even ask me if I liked men? Why would he torture me like this? Yes, these are the same courses of thought that rapists have. Yes, I want to have sex with Rana even if he doesn’t want to have sex with me. I want to swallow him.

  I touch his arm. He opens his eyes and sits up.

  I don’t say anything. But he sees something in my eyes, and he sees that my nipples are hard.

  He gets up without a word and leaves the pod. From the circle of sky I see, dawn is near.

  When I emerge, Rana is nowhere to be seen. But Ameem is crouched over the fish cage.

  “Good morning,” he says.

  “Good morning. Sorry I fainted.”

  “You scared us. But you seem all right now.”

  “I think I was just dehydrated. I got up and had some water just now.”

  “Mmm,” says Ameem, still looking down at the water. I realize he’s a stranger. Everyone here is a stranger. They don’t really care about me because they know they’ll never see me again.

  Now I’m frantic to go, to be by myself again.

  “I have to go,” I say. “I need to get on the road, so to speak.”

  “All right then,” he says. “But go see Padma first. She feels terrible. She thinks she made you faint with all of her questions.”

  I think: She fucking did.

  When I go to Padma, she doesn’t apologize, but instead asks to see my food supply, and picks through my provisions, reading ingredient lists. She then starts packing more food for me, including two dozen dried fish filets. She wants to give me more but I insist it’s all I can carry.