The Girl in the Road Page 20

  MUTHASHI: There are five stages of hallucination. The person experiencing hallucinations progresses from understanding their unreality to believing in their reality. And then that reality fuses with real reality, and the person cannot tell the difference.

  What if one of the hallucinations is dangerous, and actually real, and I fail to deal with it?

  MUTHASHI: I suppose that’s a risk. Better to defend yourself as a rule. You’ll find out on a case-by-case basis whether the threat is real.

  But Muthashi, what qualifies something as real in the first place? You define it in the scientific sense: that which is observable, predictable, repeatable, and falsifiable. But so many phenomena are none of those things. Especially lived experience.

  DILIP: Damn, girl, you’re deep.

  Dilip, shut up, you assfuck. I wish you were ten thousand times smarter than you turned out to be.

  In two nights, losing my scroll starts to feel like a blessing.

  Didn’t I want to lose context and find myself?

  I have nothing to fall back on. Nothing to pull me out of the world I’m in. I have to learn to read stars instead of words. I have to let them write their meanings on my mind. This is what Mohini was trying to tell me: I’m passing through chambers. I have been, ever since I mounted the Trail, but now I’m aware of it and can move forward in a directed and conscious way. My scroll was a distraction.

  My pozit tells me it’s the first of November. On land I might be celebrating Diwali or, more accurately, scorning Diwali as a racist northern festival while Mohini celebrated it, teasing me that cultural phenomena are allowed to have multiple meanings for goodness’ sake. So I would suffer myself to go to temple and light candles with her and be secretly delighted to do so. It was all a show. I loved accompanying her. I loved being seen with her.

  I remember less, now, of what came before. My mind used to travel through the same space, and at the same intervals, that my body traveled in. Now my mind only skips along the surface of the space my body travels in. Like a skipping stone.

  When the dawn comes, the light shows water colored pale turquoise and green. I might be over a reef, though the nearest shore I know is Oman, a few hundred kilometers north of me, according to my laminated map. I can see schools of psychedelic fish darting a zigzag pattern under my feet. I get out my fishing kit for the first time. There are lines, lures, and sections of a meter-long staff that have to be screwed together, with a hook on the end. It takes some experimentation to find the best position for holding the staff and then for spearing quickly and effectively. I always seem to strain a muscle group I hadn’t been aware of before, and only discover via pain. But soon I have three small fish, all of which look innocuous.

  I cut off their heads with my filet knife, slice and clean each of them, and put them on my solar plate to cook. I let the fat melt and then sprinkle on spices.

  I eat sitting cross-legged as the sun comes up. Now is the difficult time—between dawn and mid-morning, when I used to read. Now I close my eyes and take long tours of places I know. Muthashi’s clinic. The house attached to it, where I grew up. The university in Mumbai. Kochi. Kodaikanal. Madurai. Then I open my eyes and stare at the skin of my pod, watching it breathe for me.

  I talk to Mohini, who knows my moods, including the manic ones. I’ve always had a gift for sounding sane when I feel insane inside and she was familiar with that, too. I abused this gift. If I was in conversation with someone I thought was intellectually inferior, I took absurd positions and argued them with perfect equanimity. Mohini would get upset when I did this. She didn’t think it was an admirable trait. I saw her point. The longer I was with her, the more I noticed myself refraining from humiliating the less intelligent.

  Mohini was intelligent, though. She was brilliant. We had a game we used to play called Distraction. The game was this. We’d be having an intense, heated conversation about religion or politics or literature, and then without warning one of us would steer the other (still conversing) to the bed. The steer-ee would have to keep talking while the other performed erotic acts on her body. So, I would be remonstrating the Indian Congress for their sanctimonious attitude toward the African middle class, whom they essentially regard as a lower caste, though it’s not polite to say so, and Mohini would be passing her fingers over my lips and brushing her lips over my breasts. I had to keep talking or I “lost.” Mohini, of course, would continue engaging with me, asking me why I was ignoring the very real and cumulative influence of African fundamentalists, and I’d have to respond. It was a doomed game because nothing was at stake. Eventually one of us would break and we would dive into bed. Or onto the table, or against the wall, whatever surface presented itself for the feast. I once told her: Your body is my shrine. This is where I perform my pujas. This is that to which I attend.

  She took this worship as her due. She was used to being beloved. She had a following by the time I met her, but she pointed out that I did too. I didn’t remember what I looked like that night but she told me exactly: she noticed my extraordinary mouth, first, shaped like a cowrie shell, and that I was wearing a tight red tank top, tight jeans, brown military boots, a thick tangle of gold necklaces, and red and gold smears on my forehead. She thought I was Hindu. I am, somewhat. But I told her I’d taken to thumbing pastes and powders onto my forehead as an act of identification: culturally Hindu, even though God qua God was not really important to me, except as God manifested in my lovers and the emptiness left by my lovers. It was the only thing I knew how to do, being motherless, fatherless. I had made a religion of making presence out of absence.

  When the morning comes, the water around me has turned amethyst. I can see fathoms and fathoms down, a violet sparkle devoid of any life. No fish, no algae, no floating flotilla of seaweed. I stop for the day. I lie down on my stomach. There’s a flash of dark at the corner of my right eye. I turn just in time to see a small figure slip into the sea, feet-first. Another hallucination of the small naked woman.

  Mohini, see, this is what I mean about my religion.

  You say, Yes. Presence and absence are the same thing.

  Memory Lane

  To escape, I also retell myself stories of my life.

  These stories take several nights, which in general have much less resolution now. They combine into mega-nights. I tip into an extended period of recalling past lovers and the extent of our affairs, one night per lover. I call this mega-night Memory Lane.

  Initially it’s because I start thinking of the first woman I ever slept with, Ajantha. She was eighteen. I was fourteen. She was my peer counselor at D. K. Soman International. It was a scene from a lesbian pulp comic. One night late at school at our counseling session we were sitting across from each other cross-legged and she leaned over as if to whisper something in my ear but instead she sucked on my earlobe. I remember my vagina made an actual noise, an un-glocking, because my labia got so swollen they unsealed. Ajantha heard it too and pressed her palm over my pants and things went on from there.

  She was expelled once she was found out. But I caught something from her, an inclination to disregard norms, boundaries, appearances, already present because of my nonstandard upbringing, orphaned and all. And it was in the air because while I was growing up India was undergoing its third or fourth cultural revolution of the century and even twentysomethings were shocked at what teenagers were doing and teenagers looked at toddlers and wondered what cocktail of traditional and radical and appropriational they’d serve up one day. Mohini and her mother, Seeta, were at the vanguard, calmly accepting Mohini’s trans identity and taking action at an early age, despite being lower middle class. But there was more. A whole new sector of the world population declared themselves transracial and sought genetic modification. At college I slept with a man who was undergoing treatment to change from Anglo to Desi features. Rafael aka Rahul. He was misguided.

  He was one of a whole string of lovers at college. Having barely made it into IIT-Bombay and therefore ful
filled the Indian grandparent’s wet dream, I got there and learned what I’d already known, that I didn’t want to be a biofuel engineer, the vague vocation I’d named for my grandparents to placate them, and so I strapped on my goggles and went about destroying myself. People became flavors, collect all fifty. I was riding the wave of a new sexual revolution where all known venereal disease was either inoculable by vaccine or curable by the full-spectrum nanobiotics that came out when I was fifteen, and where all birth control was perfect, administered via aadhaar at puberty in both women and men that had to be deactivated if you wanted to get pregnant, a triumph of international public health in the 2040s.

  I ran in the small circle of fellow discontents at IIT-Bombay and had slept with everyone by the end of the semester, even the holdouts I considered a challenge. I studied sex. Women, men, trans, didn’t matter. Skin was skin. I was shy and quiet and hated speaking, but I made up for it with genius for flesh. Sexual triumphs were like trophies I piled up in a corner and stared at. Rebekah punched a hole in the wall beside her bed. Krishna liked to slap my face. Munny sneered like Elvis when he came. Sonali screamed so loud that someone called campus police. Ying used a harness that suspended her from the ceiling and I’d kneel below her and lick her like honeysuckle. Mukesh and Thomas were gay but shared a fetish for tag-teaming a woman. Bilal needed to be blindfolded and deprived of breath. Ahmed was ticklish after orgasm. Kiran wanted me to say dirty things to her in Malayalam while I fucked her. I absorbed this fetish and demanded it of new lovers and so over the course of three months got dirty talk in Cantonese, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, French, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Maya, Arabic, and Zulu.

  But in the second semester everything started catching up with me. Munny and Ying started dating and shunned me. Krishna started slapping harder than I wanted and so I kicked him out. Ahmed was religiously repressed and stopped calling me back.

  Meanwhile, though my first yoni-love Ajantha had been expelled from Soman International, she’d enrolled somewhere else and gotten into IIT-Bombay two years ahead of me. She generally tried to avoid me, but I was still in love with her. One night I saw her on Fashion Street in the company of a young man and I called out to her and she saw me but pretended not to, whereupon in my last greatest act of self-destructive conflagration, I started screaming in the middle of the street and beating my fists on the asphalt until I’d attracted a crowd, including a pharmacy attendant who drew me in and calmed me down and took care of me, for hours.

  And then recognized me nine years later.

  I reach the halfway point of the Trail, which is 1,610 kilometers. Everything will be easier from here. Everything is downhill, so to speak. And to mark the occasion there’s a lump on the Trail that turns out to be a body.

  Chorus

  Mohini still talks to me, as do Muthashi and Muthashan. They’re joined by others who all sit enthroned in a ring around my skull and advise me or comment upon the sights. Ajantha is there, and so are Ameem and Padma (though curiously not Rana), and Navid and Mohsen, and the two little girls I met on Marine Drive who directed me to Koliwada, and so are various people from my life whom I respect, and others I don’t respect but think are sexy, like Anwar, Dilip, and Rafael aka Rahul. They’re the comic relief.

  They all say different things about the body I found on the Trail. It was human, certainly. I have no sense of bodily decay rate but I thought she might have died recently. No birds had disturbed her yet. Her face was turned south, away from me, and I didn’t look. I went on quickly. The first time I thought maybe I should have lingered and determined cause of death, or pushed her over into the sea so that no other traveler would have to see her and suffer some kind of despair-attack that I miraculously had not, I was two kilometers away.

  Muthashi-in-my-head again insists it was a stress hallucination.

  MUTHASHI: Admittedly it’s a more sinister one than you’ve been having up to this point, but consider that you’ve been on the Trail for almost eight weeks now, and surely you’re suffering from the Ganzfeld effect. Extended sensory deprivation results in hallucinations, including threatening ones.

  ANWAR: Dear bitch!—

  ELDER LITTLE GIRL: My amma says that people die on the Trail all the time. They run out of food or they lose their water filters.

  YOUNGER LITTLE GIRL: Or they just lie down because they don’t want to live anymore.

  DILIP: Have you ever thought about, like … not living?

  AJANTHA: You’ve fucked some winners.

  Ajantha, I realize that. But I’m asking you whether you think the body was real.

  AJANTHA: Did you touch it?

  Only with my foot.

  AJANTHA: Was it solid?

  Seemed so. Looked Desi. She was wearing a golden sari.

  AJANTHA: Do you trust your senses?

  Not really. Muthashi keeps bringing up the Ganzfeld effect. And I’ve seen other things I can’t explain. Like the little naked woman and the handprint, when I was underwater. Those seem like textbook hallucinations. And the fact that anyone would wear a sari on the Trail is bizarre. I can’t even walk in those things on land.

  ANWAR: Fifty percent!—

  AMEEM: I’d say it was probably another traveler from another seastead who got unlucky. Lost her filter somehow and didn’t know whether she should crawl forward in the hopes of finding another seastead, or back, to reach one she knew was there, even though it was kilometers away. She must have tried to go forward because she knew it was her only chance.

  But she could see all the ship crossings just like I am. She could have flagged one of them down and bartered for a new filter.

  PADMA: Perhaps she was running from the law. Do you have enough fish?

  I ate all the ones you gave me.

  PADMA: Onions keep at sea. I should have given you onions.

  I’m all right for food.

  PADMA: You need a mother.

  Fuck you.

  AMMA: Molay, I’m right here.

  I stop.

  I say “What?” to the open air.

  The voice unfolds in my head once again.

  AMMA: Yes, molay, I’m here. And your father, too.

  I take a few long breaths.

  It’s the first time I’ve ever heard that voice.

  If I do something wrong it might scare it. It might go away again for good. So I don’t say anything.

  I just keep walking but not hoping. I can’t allow myself to hope.

  Then I realize my chest wounds are infected again and so I stop and reapply dressing.

  I don’t know what day of the week it is anymore. When I try to figure it out I get snarled at the point where I started marking nights instead of days. It’s either a Sunday or a Monday night.

  The moon is waxing. I know that much.

  Now that I’m halfway through I break my usual rule of not thinking more than two days ahead and start fantasizing about what the end of the Trail will look like. Whether it’ll just end in the middle of the water, or extend all the way to a dock. Whether there will be police waiting for me, or a flotilla of happy Djiboutians. Whether the Djibouti shore is even swimmable, or if I’ll get dashed against a breakwater.

  I break another of my rules and start ideating suicide. It’s not that I want to kill myself. It’s just another thing to fantasize about when walking. I keep it light and comical. I didn’t know my mind was so inventive. It generates categories for different types of death, and even prizes for superlatives. Most Awful (guinea worm). Most Fun (heroin).

  I tell all these things to Mohini-in-my-head, in our own language. We could begin a conversation one day and pick it up again four days later, keyed in by a word, both knowing exactly where we’d left off. As if we existed outside of time. As if parts of us were carrying on conversations on other planes, with other organs; not just the skin and the brain, but our livers and noses and kneecaps, conversing about whatever they converse about.

  Now I tell her I’ve been thinking abou
t what it would be like to not exist.

  She says, Walking in front of a train would accomplish that.

  I knew you’d bring that up someday.

  It didn’t work.

  No. People pulled me over, which was lucky.

  But still, you tried.

  What’s your point?

  The act splits the soul. You’re haunted by the part of you that tried.

  I feel like I’m whole.

  Oh, really? she says. Were you not at first followed by a barefoot girl?

  Mariama

  Quit Ethiopia

  Yemaya, you may not believe me, but even as a child, I immediately understood what had happened. Lalibela really was the doorstep to heaven, and at the moment of baptism, you had transcended, dissolved in bliss, passed into the spirit world—whatever religious image one could use, you had done it! And of course, I hadn’t gone with you because I wasn’t ready. I had to understand you better. In the days before we reached Lalibela, I had become proud, stubborn, and—worst of all—possessive of you. But you belong to no one, and come and go as you please, which is how you are able to love so intensely. Over the long years, now, I have come to understand: you held nothing back from me: you revealed your golden meaning right away. But I wasn’t ready to receive it.

  I certainly felt affection for other people over the years. I felt gratitude to Muhammed, who was still at the trucks when I wandered back from Lalibela town, who asked me what had happened and, when I said that you had disappeared, swore (which startled me!) and shook his head. He didn’t understand, as I did. But he took me down through Addis, after all, and then finally to Hawassa, to the orphanage to which he had first promised me. I was too old to be adopted, but I was happy about that, because I’d already been on such a long journey and Ethiopia was my long-promised home. I didn’t want to go anywhere else. Muhammed went back to his wife and his daughters, Fatima and Rahel, and he came to visit me once a month until I turned twelve and then he told me he didn’t feel it was appropriate anymore. I heard he died from brain cancer a few years later.