The Girl in the Road Read online

  Sea: Gold.

  Sky: Tufted.

  Moon: Cocktail Onion.

  When I wake, dark clouds are bearing down, blocking out the sunset.

  I start walking. I keep one eye on the clouds and, in another part of my brain, wonder if I can retrain myself to call everything another name—grammar intact, just different words. Here’s my rule: though corresponding words are allowed to be nouns, each reassignment must be as arbitrary as possible. For example, Moon can be neither Circle nor Sun, as those are a descriptor and antonym, respectively. So,

  Sea: Sari.

  Sky: Braid.

  Moon: Pickle.

  I’ll see how I do with these initial word reassignments. It doesn’t occur to me that there’s anything dangerous about this. I fuzz my vision and watch the waves, each one a hand rising to offer a card, then withdrawing it back into the deep.

  Wind springs up. The surface of the sea shivers as if chilled. I can see a curtain of rain to the south. I could walk through it, but with all my bandages, I should probably stay dry.

  I can already feel drops of rain on my face as my pod inflates. I climb inside. I adjust the pod’s skin to one hundred percent transparency. When the rain comes down, it’s incredible, like there’s no pod at all, just the shape of the space I’m in. I face west, where the wind’s coming from, and the rain makes an electric starburst shape.

  I lie on my back. I don’t feel hungry or thirsty. Instead I sing the first thing that comes to mind, which is “Lament for Aravan,” something Mohini wrote. In fact it’s the song she sang the first night I saw her, when she was performing at the Kuttampalam Theatre, once only for kutiyattam, now reappropriated by all kinds of performance groups, especially queer ones, including the new hijras. Hijras had been assured of ostracism for most of recent history, except when they were allowed to sing at weddings or the birth of boys, or to serve as bottoms for men who had sex with men but weren’t gay. But now hijras had come to encompass all queer people who identified with transgenders, as well as cross-dressers and transsexuals in whatever stage of treatment they had chosen (or not chosen). Of course petty hierarchies had developed about who was a true hijra. Mohini was not; she was trans. But she embraced the hijra identity all the same and, by the time I saw her, had become a celebrity in the queer community. Everyone wanted to see her perform mohiniyattam. (I later asked her whether the dance had come first, or the name. She said they coevolved from a young age. The boy she used to be, Kunal, loved to dress up in ceremonial saris and dance the mohiniyattam, so she made her mother start calling her Mohini. When she turned fourteen, her mother started saving money from her salon, Millennium Beauty, and Mohini entered treatment at the age of twenty-three. But she’d already been passing for years. Her female classmates were fond of her. They presented her with an expensive makeup kit at the graduation performance.)

  That night, I came too late to see her dance, though the stage was littered with marigolds, so I assumed whatever had just happened was a success. A stagehand brought her a white linen napkin and she dabbed her forehead. I took a seat near the back. The audience was calling out various endearments and she acknowledged each with a secret little smile. I could immediately see why I’d heard so much about her at the women’s clinic. She was a solar beauty. She had delicate features and high eyebrows and skin with warm undertones. Her nose was long and slender, and she wore a golden headdress, golden earrings dripping to her shoulders, and gold glitter on her cheekbones. In her septum was a big gold ring. Her hair was parted on the side and swept back in the style of classical dancers, in a crown of braids and marigolds, though later I learned she was wearing extensions, and her real hair was a bias-cut mop that fell across her face sideways.

  Still in her mohiniyattam costume, she sat on a stool that had been set out for her, and arranged her hands, one on her chest and the other just below it, on her solar plexus. Her head bent to one side and her face assumed an expression of sadness. A tanpura drone began in the dark behind her. She began singing. The song was for Aravan, the mythical hero who sacrificed his life in battle but wished to be wedded before he died, so Vishnu became a woman named Mohini, wed him, then mourned him. I had a Hindu grandfather, so I knew the story. She sang, turning on slight intervals, then leaping high, then sliding back down deeper and diagonal from where she’d begun. I felt her voice knitting together nerves in my body. She clenched and unclenched her fists to punctuate her words.

  That night I first saw her I knew I had to talk to her though I didn’t know what I’d say. I just knew I wanted to wake up next to those eyes every morning and trace her face with my fingers every night. I’d never felt that way about anyone. I was a known bed-jumper and it suited me fine. But I knew I would have to take extraordinary measures for extraordinary beauty. So when she turned around on her stool in her dressing room to see who’d come in, I dropped to my knees to touch her feet and said I want to be with you.

  Months later, when we were deep inside the garden of new love and still finding out how big it was, I asked her why she clenched her fist at her solar plexus while she sang. I told her I’d had painful surges in that spot all my life, like someone had stabbed me there and poured vinegar in the wound. She said it was the manipura chakra, a yellow flower with ten petals, and being an adrenal cortex, corresponded to issues of fear and anxiety and sadness. So of course she would emphasize it when mourning a lover.

  Even thinking about it here, lying on my back and looking up at the rain slide down around me on all sides, I feel it hurting. I try to calm myself by pushing up my shirt and resting my hand over the bandage. Mohini used to rest her hand there all night, sometimes, on the nights I told her I didn’t feel I really belonged to this world and never had.

  It’s been a week since I left home.

  Crossing

  Now I miss crises. Crises gave me something to focus on. I hope a new crisis comes soon. I call the seventy-year-old NOAA buoy north of me on their old telephone line just so I can hear a voice recite wave data.

  I walk through nights in a fugue state, first counting, then despairing of counting, then despairing of despairing. One moment I rejoice in my progress. The next moment I think about how many more kilometers I have to cover and it’s like I’m falling upward into the sky. I make a rule for myself: I can’t think past two nights into the future. That includes Djibouti. My world is contained between two horizons, the forward and the back. That’s all I’ll worry about.

  Just after dawn one morning, I hear a horn.

  My first thought is: the horn of Mycenae.

  My second thought is: They’ve finally found me.

  I scan the horizon in the direction the blast came from, southeast. There’s a ship. Didn’t Ameem say the main shipping routes intersected the Trail much farther west? So it’s probably the Indian Coast Guard. Shit.

  I inflate my pod, get in, trust the camo, and watch it come. It’s far enough away that the descending scales won’t affect me. I can already see them starting to disappear, ahead, one by one, like a necklace pulled underwater, dropping below the surface to let the ship pass. The closer it gets, the more I see it sideways, and the bigger it gets. It’s fucking huge. If this is a military ship, it’s an aircraft carrier or something.

  Then I see its flag: a white star on a blue field. It looks familiar but I can’t place it. It’s definitely not Indian.

  So this is some merchant ship and there’s no reason for them to take an interest in me. I get out of my pod and sit to watch the ship pass. I see only one person on deck, a man with both elbows on the railing, hands clasped as if in prayer. He’s looking down at the Trail. He beckons behind him, and four more men join him, all staring down at the sea like he is. Of course: the Trail must be a sight to see. It might even be a rite of passage like crossing the equator. More and more sailors come to the side until it’s crowded like birds on a wire.

  Then I hear a hollering. I’ve been seen. The sailors all cheer. They’re waving and clapping an
d calling out to me. My glotti picks up only some of it, then gets overloaded and confused:

  FRENCH: Look it’s a walker it’s a walker it’s one of the walkers

  SOMALI: A man or a woman? Walker

  FRENCH: Is she alone

  ARABIC: She is the hero

  SOMALI: Woman walker

  ARABIC: She is in the story

  SOMALI: Who are you with?

  ARABIC: She is telling a story

  FRENCH: Have a good trip madame good trip hello mademoiselle

  ARABIC: Where are your people?

  SOMALI: Walk to Africa

  ARABIC: Where is your mother?

  SOMALI: It’s not too far

  ARABIC: Is she birthing or dying?

  SOMALI: You will be all right

  FRENCH: Mademoiselle you are a one-of-a-kind Adventurer

  SOMALI: You are mother to a new race

  FRENCH: Hail Yemaya!

  The ship slips through and the scales start to resurface. Then I place the flag: it’s a Somali oil tanker, obviously. Maybe headed for Karachi. And I’ll have to look up the word “Yemaya” because I want to know what I’m being hailed as.

  I tell my scroll to look up the last word translated in my glotti. As I do, I see another anomaly in my peripheral vision, not a ship. Beyond where the Trail is resurfacing, there stands a little woman. She’s naked. I can’t see her face. But when she sees me look up, she turns and dives into the ocean, and doesn’t resurface, even though I stand still, staring at the spot, until the sun is one finger higher in the sky.

  No-Mother

  I must be having stress responses. Hallucinations are common when one is under stress. Evidence the barefoot girl, who’s hard to remember now.

  Anyway, eyes deceive. When I eat at sundown I stare at banks of clouds and can make myself believe that I’m actually staring at mountain ranges. I don’t have much empirical data to say otherwise. Just my pozit and scroll, which both say I’m ninety kilometers into the Arabian Sea and there are no mountain ranges around. But if I didn’t have those, I could believe I was in any of a hundred places on Earth. Off the coast of Namibia, or Samoa, or Chile. I’m in something like the largest open-air park in the world but actually my experience of it is two-dimensional because I’m on a one-way conveyor and can’t step off to either side. Meanwhile, phenomena present themselves, and I can only watch. Shadows on the cave walls.

  My scroll has much to say on Yemaya. She’s also named Yemalla, Yemana, LaSiren, Imanja, Yemaja, Yemowo, Iemanya, Janaína, and Yemoja. Apparently she’s a West African orisha who got carried over to the Americas and back. She’s celebrated in Afro-Caribbean communities. She’s enjoying a resurgence among young progressives in West African cities. Her primary affiliation is with the ocean. She also embodies motherhood.

  So this is what the sailors called me?

  I’ve never wanted to be mother to anything, because I don’t have a mother.

  Muthashi doesn’t count. She knows that. My real parents are dead. My grandparents don’t know anything about my real mother, Meenakshi Mehta. They didn’t even know their son was dating someone in Addis. Details only surfaced later: she was nineteen years old, brilliant, classically beautiful, tall and curvy, from a conservative family in Gandhinagar. Whenever I was going through a shitty period as a teenager I looked up photos of her a lot. She was light-skinned, so whatever darkie genes I got came from my father. But when her family heard of the murders, they told Muthashi and Muthashan that their son had brought shame to their family, and wanted nothing to do with us, or with me. It remains that way to this day. I’ve tested them. They blocked me every way possible. When I got older and learned a few more tricks, I looked them up again, but there was no record of Mehtas fitting their description in Gandhinagar. I called their old neighbors. The Mehtas had moved to the South Pacific and not been in touch since.

  I sketch my mother in my mind. I’m already eight years older than she was when she died. I like to imagine she’s a composite of six or seven tall, strong women I’ve known who weren’t afraid to take up space. Some were friends, some I slept with. I think she would like coffee black, chai unsweet, and dal thick like porridge. But then I remember this is entirely a creation on my part. So I erase the slate and start making another sketch. The truth is, I don’t know anything. I don’t know what she would think of me. I don’t know whether she would have approved of my being with Mohini.

  Though I don’t seek anyone’s approval, generally. My grandparents loved me but with pain. They saw I was my own creature. I battled Muthashi until she finally washed her hands of me. Once I ended a fight by throwing an urn of medicine that broke on the wall behind her. I ran to the kitchen and pressed my forehead to the table, trying to breathe. She came in and began making chai as if nothing had happened. But her hands were shaking and she didn’t look at me as she spoke. She said, It’s enough that we have you. It is enough. It is enough. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself but couldn’t.

  She finished making the chai and then offered me some. I didn’t answer. I let the silence stretch on and on, making her feel worse. She left to find Muthashan. I sat there in the kitchen until the sun set and my anger got cold.

  They both stepped back after that, out of parental roles and into sponsorial roles. They paid school bills and medical bills, but didn’t interfere otherwise. My explosions had damaged them. When I dropped out of college they didn’t even say anything. But a few years later, I started feeling guilty. When I was living in Kochi I started calling them every day. I asked them how their days had gone. We became something like friends.

  And then, three monsoons ago, they met Mohini for the first time.

  The rain was blowing in sideways. Mohini was fussy about making an entrance. She wanted to impress my grandparents with her beauty, which was formidable, but still, she took care, like the old Bollywood stars she idolized. She insisted on coming in a closed car, using a parasol to protect her hair, wearing a full-body raincoat to protect her sari, and, having interrogated me about the entranceway blueprint of my grandparents’ house, disrobing in the foyer before they could lay eyes on her. The plan worked. She bowed to my grandparents looking like a vision from the Kama Sutra, her hands pressed together, fingernails painted, perfectly ovaline eggs of gold, blue sari edged in gold, modest red tilak on her forehead, and hair (by her own mother, Seeta, of course) worked with golden ornaments.

  Rupa had made special dosas. She was learning the basics of Ayurveda from Muthashi before applying to school, and in return, she cooked for us. She also joined us at the table. That had been the subject of one of my teen tantrums: that I wouldn’t live in a house where servants couldn’t sit down and eat with our guests. That they must have every opportunity I have. It made no difference to Muthashan, but Muthashi tried to tell me that the world simply didn’t work that way. I said, It does if you do it. After that our servants joined us at the table and we got a reputation in the neighborhood for being radical.

  Mohini was nervous about meeting my grandparents. Her family was backward caste, which I said didn’t matter anymore, but she pointed out to me that that was my privilege to say, being Brahmin and wealthy. I stayed quiet at the table and let Mohini talk and impress both my grandparents, and Rupa, who watched her in fascination. Having arrived in splendor as planned, Mohini was the star of the table, facilitating discussion on everything from the plays of Josefina Paz to the success of the Haratine Liberation Front.

  My grandparents were polite. And they never brought up her treatment. Even if they were curious, even if they disapproved, it was beneath them to say anything. They were perfect models of kind attention. I did love them for that.

  That night, in bed, I apologized to Mohini that she couldn’t meet my mother. I felt culpable. She held my head to her chest and stroked my hair and asked me to imagine what it would be like if I could.

  I was prepared, of course. The parentless have a deep well of reunion fantasies. I was quiet, t
rying to think of the most beautiful or impressive one, and when Mohini asked what I was thinking about, I told her. There was no boundary between us. What I thought was what I said. I told her that I ideated my mother as a goddess. Which is to say, she lived in the heart of the temple, in the innermost of innermost chambers like in the temple complex at Madurai, and that my life would be an act of circling and penetrating each chamber, passing through each illusion until I finally arrived at the truth. The essential mother. The pearl of my existence.

  The devi-urge, Mohini said.

  I tickled her and she lurched from the bed screaming and then from opposite sides of the room we made a truce not to tickle anymore or make any more English puns. She came back to the bed, and she said, I don’t mean to joke. That image is beautiful, Meenaji.

  It seems too obvious.

  You prefer your metaphors inaccessible?

  I just don’t know if it’s the right one.

  But that itself is allowed for, in your metaphor. Each chamber is imbued with its own degree of doubt or certainty. Including the chamber wherein you don’t know whether the temple metaphor is the right one.

  Yeah. What if I discover, Fuck, wrong religion.

  Yes. You should have been Buddhist all this time.

  My mother is no-mother.

  There is no mother.

  Buddha mother-is.

  But that’s allowed for too: the chamber of the temple that’s not a chamber at all, but a zendo, or a lab, or a kitchen. Or a dead end.

  Yes. All of them are parts of the temple. All are moving me closer towards the center. But I never know which chamber I’m in.