The Girl in the Road Read online

I run till I hit Fashion Street and then turn south. I just assume the barefoot girl’s following me. If she’s still barefoot, that’s fucking dangerous for her, and I can outrun her in boots, especially on stone roads. The faces of people I pass begin to change. First, people who are running toward the explosion. Then, people who only heard the explosion and are worried. Then, people who are still oblivious to any explosion that might have happened and are going about their lives, hefting mangoes at street-side stands.

  I’m beginning to get tired. I can’t keep running. This is like a movie. What does an action hero do? She takes a turn onto a side street and then ducks into a shop and lets her pursuer run past. So that’s what I do. I thank The Film Industry in my head and then take a sharp turn into an alley and count one, two, three shops, then duck into the fourth one, which turns out to be a pharmacy, which solves the problem I began with, of needing first aid.

  I get out of sight of the doorway and bend over, wheezing. I hear a cry from the woman behind the counter. She’s asking me if I’m all right. I hold up my hand. I can’t talk yet.

  “You’re bleeding,” she says.

  I look down at my kurta. So I am. The snakebites have opened up again, probably while I was running.

  “Did you come from Azad Maidan? Is it from the terrorists?”

  So the news hit the cloud already. “Yes,” I say.

  “Lie down,” she says.

  I do, out of sight of the doorway. I watch the ceiling and listen to the sound of drawers being opened, product wrapping rustling. I count to forty.

  The attendant’s face reappears over me. “Fucking Habshee,” she says. “They want to live like Indians now.”

  Here I would usually say what Mohini would want me to say: first, that I’d like to know which Indians she’s talking about. And second, that Habshee is a derogatory word for black people and she shouldn’t use it. And third, that Habshee doesn’t equal Ethiopian.

  But right now I don’t care.

  The attendant begins peeling up my kurta. And then I remember the nature of the wounds and force it back down. She’s startled.

  “Sorry,” I say, “they’re not shrapnel wounds, they’re something else. I’ll take care of it.”

  She looks hurt but she hands me all of the supplies she’d gathered. I start peeling a square of clearskin but my hands are shaking. She watches me. Then she snaps her fingers.

  “You! You went to IIT-Bombay, yes?”

  I look at her face again. I realize it’s the exact same attendant who worked here when I was at university nine years ago, and had my little episode over Ajantha, not unlike my current episode. Now it occurs to me that every word I say to this woman, and every minute more I spend here, is a liability.

  “I have to go,” I say. “I can pay for these.”

  She waves it off. “But how are you?” she says. “You were so sad. I never forgot about you.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. Then I start making things up in case anyone comes to question her later. “Been living in Gandhinagar. Just in town to see family.”

  “For Onam? Aren’t you Malayalee?”

  “Nope,” I lie. “Just a darkie Gujarati.”

  That shuts her up.

  I thank her for the supplies and head back to the street. No sign of the barefoot girl, so my ruse worked. Why did I say I was from Gandhinagar? That’s where my mother’s from. It’s deep dusk now. The sky is lilac and all our faces glow.

  I have to find another place to apply the dressing, the farther away from the explosion, the better. The barefoot girl can’t track me if I’m on wheels. I turn to face traffic and raise my arm to flag down an autoshaw, but one with a driver sees me first and veers to the curb. Its cord is dragging in the street so I pick it up and tuck it back before I get in. I tell her to take me to the first place I think of: Butterfly, a Singaporean club at the north end of Marine Drive. Mohini pointed it out to me when we visited last monsoon. It was very much her scene and very much not mine, but that’s a good thing, now. Even if the barefoot girl tracked me there, they wouldn’t let her in.

  The driver powers up. I can see her smiling in the mirror. She has two dimples big enough to hold cardamom seeds. She might be fifteen.

  As we speed up she begins shouting, loud enough to be heard over the wind, and I strain to listen so I can respond, but I realize she’s talking to someone in her ear. Her sister. Wedding plans. The caterer has fallen through but she knows someone else, a brother of a boyfriend, who’s cheap but not cheap enough to insult their in-laws.

  Then the buildings pull back like stage curtains and I see the ocean. We stop at a red light. It’s beautiful, the golden light on black water. The wind blows in from the bay. The ocean tang is stronger here, dirtier and saltier than in Keralam. There are more spices in this sea.

  The light turns green and we swerve right onto Marine Drive. When we break free of the swarms and hit open road, she floors the acceleration and hugs the curve and I press my hand to the side to keep from sliding out. A fingernail moon drops into the sea. I fight to keep sight of it. It means something.

  It’s full night by the time we reach Butterfly. The autorickshaw slides to a stop and the driver says, “Yashna, wait,” and turns around, holding out her wrist with a cheap mitter flashing.

  “Do you take cash?”

  She wags her head and turns over her palm.

  I pay her and tip generously. She tucks the bills into a pocket sewn onto her kurta. “Thank you very much!” she says in English without looking back. I step out and she floors the pedal and is gone.

  Butterfly is the neon confection I remember. The bathroom is down a black hall with pink track lighting. In the stall I get toilet paper and ball it up and run it under the faucet and then go back into the stall. For the first time, I take off my jacket and peel up my kurta all the way up over my breasts. The cloth is stuck to the dried blood and rips the scabbing when I pull up. Fresh blood wells like tears and runs down my belly. I wipe it up and press the wet wad of toilet paper to the wound, or rather the constellation of wounds, five scratches of varying depths, not deep but not superficial, either. I don’t know what kind of snake it was. It wasn’t a cobra, krait, or viper, because I know them all by sight and anyway, I’d be dead by now. This snake was colored golden bronze. I take out my scroll and search for images, but none are the right kind of gold, or at least not native to Keralam. It might be an African species. If it is, that would tell me something.

  I wipe up the wounds, apply oil, smear some on my throat because it smells like peppermint, press squares of clearskin to the wounds, and then the larger white bandage over them. I flex my torso to make sure it’ll stay in place.

  I come out and look in the mirror. I’m still wearing what I put on in our bedroom in Thrissur this morning. I feel the need to alter my appearance. I take my jacket off, then, and stuff it in my satchel. I roll up the sleeves of my kurta past my elbows and undo three more buttons. I can do nothing radical with my jeans or boots. So I start unbraiding my hair. There’s something about dressing my own wounds and fixing my own hair that makes me feel invincible. Look on my works, ye Mighty: I both heal and adorn my own body. In fact I could go for a drink, now.

  Here is my new strategy: act normal.

  When I come out into the club there’s a people-scape of black silhouettes against violet light. A Meshell Ndegeocello bhangra remix is making the floorboards shake. The bartender looks like an old Bollywood hero with shaved and pregnant biceps. He’s wearing a threadbare T-shirt with holes along the seams, carefully placed, Dalit chic, not authentic. His eyes flicker up around my head and, seeing nothing, look back down at me.

  “What can I get you, madam?”

  “Jameson’s.”

  He takes a second look at me. “Malayalee?” he says.

  How’d you guess, chutiya?

  “Nominally,” I say. “My family’s lived in Mumbai since the Raj.” Lying is so easy and useful, I don’t know why I ever stopped.


  “Isn’t it Onam?”

  “I guess.”

  “Not much one for tradition, huh?”

  “Not really.” This bartender talks too goddamn much. And I’m a quiet person. Talking takes energy and anyway, nothing I want to say comes out right. I use my body to talk, when I can, but that’s not an option here, so I say, “We live in Santa Cruz East. Haven’t been down much lately. What’s going on around here?”

  “Oh, bombs on Azad Maidan, the usual.” He concentrates on pouring my drink, looks angry.

  “It’s probably Semena Werk,” I say. It’s prejudicial speech that Mohini would warn me against. Given the snake. Given the barefoot girl. Given Family History. “They can’t be reasonable.”

  “So they bomb their own people?”

  “They don’t think of them as their own people. They think of them as traitors.”

  “True.” The bartender pushes the glass of whiskey to me. I take a sip and, as soon as the sting reaches my stomach, start to unkink. I hadn’t realized how nonlinear the day has been. Now things feel like they’re proceeding in order.

  “Looked like you needed that.”

  “I did.”

  “Glad I could oblige.”

  I’m beginning to feel comfortable. This may be the end of the mania. Or it may be a new phase of the mania.

  “So what else is going on downtown?” I ask.

  “Lots of foreigners moving in, especially because of Energy Park.”

  “Which is—?”

  “It’s the cluster of towers at the end of Nariman Point, the one that looks like Oz. You should go see it if you haven’t. They have a new museum in the HydraCorp building.”

  “A museum of what?”

  “Energy.”

  “That could mean a lot of things.” HydraCorp is one of the biggest multinational energy conglomerates. They’re also the hippest because they invest five percent of all profits in developing weird new energy sources. I read about a device to power a Gandhian cotton wheel with human shit. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Have you heard of the Trail?” he asks.

  I pause. Mohini and I saw an episode of Extreme Weather! about the Trail a few years ago. The bartender sees I know what he’s talking about and says, “At the museum, they give you the corporate version, but it’s still worth seeing.”

  Now memories come back, shook loose by whiskey. The Trail seemed unreal: a floating pontoon bridge moored just offshore from Mumbai, which spanned the whole Arabian Sea, like a poem, not a physical thing. I asked Mohini what she thought it’d be like to walk on it all the way to Africa. She received my enthusiasm in her gracious way but cautioned that the Trail was all blank sky and faceless sea, the perfect canvas upon which to author my own madness.

  “What’s the corporate version?”

  “I can’t tell you. Only, don’t call it ‘The Trail’ when you’re there.”

  “Why?”

  “They try to discourage people from swimming out to it and walking on it.”

  I am amazed. “People walk on the Trail?”

  “I’ve heard of—hey, Arjuna!”

  Another man is in my space. He’s well groomed, wearing a silver-gray shirt, unbuttoned to show a bush of glossy chest hair. He leans across me to kiss the bartender and his leg presses against my knee. He withdraws and presses his palms to me in apology. And when we make eye contact I realize I know him: Arjuna Swaminathan, half Persian. He was in my nano seminar at IIT. I used to fantasize about him instead of paying attention to the lecture. But unlike the clerk at the pharmacy, he doesn’t seem to recognize me.

  The bartender says, “Arjuna, I was just telling—what is your name?”

  I need to be careful. I lie again. “Durga.”

  “I’m Sandeep,” says the bartender, and plants a clear shot in front of Arjuna, who takes a seat next to me and rolls up his sleeves. His hands are huge. His fingers are muscular. I can see the veins snaking up his forearms. “I was just telling Durga about the Trail. Didn’t someone try to walk it last monsoon?”

  “Oh yes, people try. They’re crazy. Mostly poor kids who hear they can make a living from fishing and so they swim out to it and no one ever hears from them again.”

  “Arjuna should know,” Sandeep says to me. “He works for HydraCorp.”

  “Do you work on the Trail?”

  “No. But I can see it from my office window pretty far into the distance. Every now and then you can see a blur against the sea, so you know someone’s camping, because they get special camouflage pods. They only walk at night.”

  “So they don’t get caught.”

  “I imagine.”

  “What’s the penalty if they do?”

  “A night in jail, a month in jail, whatever the police feel like. It’s corporate trespassing. But we don’t have the resources to patrol it all the time. If you want to just feel what it’s like, you can—”

  Sandeep snaps his fingers in Arjuna’s face. “Don’t tell her!”

  “Don’t tell her what, chutiya?”

  “I told her she has to go see for herself.”

  Then Sandeep leaves to help someone else and Arjuna turns to me, opening his body to face mine, spreading his legs. “He means the museum,” he says smoothly. “I can get you free tickets.”

  On another night, I would not be impressed by his moves. But he’s sexy, despite himself. This is a familiar sequence: see someone with potential, want to fuck them, fuck them. It is such a clean exercise of power, such a simple application of effort, leading to a desired result. He hasn’t asked about my aadhaar. He didn’t even check. I appreciate that.

  I keep looking at the floor. Sometimes I can only talk to other people if I can make myself believe I’m talking to myself. “Would you go walk on the Trail, if you could?”

  He shakes his head, Western-style. “No, I don’t see why. It’s like kids who ride the tops of trains. A thrill for thrill-seekers, but that’s not me. I have a nice enough life.”

  And I can tell he does. I can tell he’s a tech prince, an unmarried Third Culture playboy with a modern flat and a few servants. He’s an only child. His parents are divorced. He works out every morning in his tower’s basement gym. I can picture the wings of his iliac crest.

  “Who needs thrills?” I say.

  He smiles, leans back. “You remind me of someone I used to know,” he says, “a girl at college. She wore heavy boots and a scarf around her neck, even in monsoon. She never looked anyone in the eye. She came to class alone and she never spoke.”

  I think: I didn’t make eye contact because eye contact is too intense for daily use and I didn’t speak because nothing would ever fucking come out of my mouth right. Sex was how I said what I wanted to say.

  “I heard she dropped out,” he continues. “But I remembered her. Fierce, but shy, like a femme trapped in a butch body.”

  I think: How perceptive of you.

  But I don’t say that. Right now I’m playing Durga, so I say what Durga would say. “What would you say, if you saw her today?”

  “Probably? … I would ask her for a kiss.”

  Now my whole loin area is burning. The conversation goes on but the goal is secured, so it’s all filler, now, and my mind sustains small talk with Arjuna as I’m having another conversation with myself: I need a place to sleep for the night. He’s smarmy but my body needs this. I need the flavor of someone else in my mouth besides Mohini. I can delay planning for my journey or even better, consider this a part of it. I assure myself it makes sense that a day including an assassination attempt and a terrorist attack would end in the urgent need to fuck. In fact I can’t even think about anything else right now but fucking this man.

  When we leave the nightclub and mount his scooter, before we pull away, I scan the waterfront for the barefoot girl, sitting and looking at the bay, her headscarf rippling along the rampart. I don’t see her.

  The Trans-Arabian Linear Generator

  I wake up alon
e in a pool of sunlight.

  I’m lying in a wad of white sheets. I’ve slept maybe two hours. I’m still too wound up. The mattress sheet came off in the night and the pillows are all on the floor except the one we used to prop up each other’s hips at various points. There are stiff spots in the fabric where our juices dried and left solids behind. I’d forgotten what it was like to have sex with a man. Mohini, by the time I left, had fully changed into a woman with woman-parts. We celebrated with a rosewater cake. I’m a good cook when I want to be. There’s so rarely an occasion that merits my talents. But I was so happy to love her, finally, as she wanted to be loved and in the body she wanted.

  But when a man is inside me, I feel like the eye of my body is held open, and I’m not allowed to blink.

  And how is it possible that … Anwar? I can’t believe this but I can’t remember his name. My mind is blank. I’m sure it started with an A. This is ridiculous. But regardless of his name, why didn’t he recognize me from college? Maybe he does, and he just never said so. Maybe we had sex and now he’s going out to get the police, who are looking for me, a Malayalee on the run, nursing a snakebite to the solar plexus. Maybe he was filing away the information to use against me later.

  This might be a trap. In fact I’m sure it is.

  I can’t run out of the room this second. I have to think. I sit down. I use the breathing exercises Muthashan taught me when I was little, but they fail.

  I find the bathroom, get in the shower, and turn it on icy-cold. I count to ten.

  When I get out of the shower I at least have the illusion that I can think more rationally. I run my fingers over the patch covering my wounds. When I took off my shirt last night, he—Arjuna, for fuck’s sake, Arjuna—didn’t even acknowledge it was there. He wasn’t really present, in general: a vigorous lover, but too aware of himself, parroting endearments from Bollywood films, never having broken the surface and learned the real language.

  I find a towel and spread it on the floor. I sit and lean back against the shower door, naked, dewy bush out. I haven’t had five minutes in the last eighteen hours to just sit and plan my next move. I close my eyes and try to remember the flavor of my life one day ago.