The Girl in the Road Read online

  You’ve passed the test, you say behind me. Now you’re ready for the next chamber.

  Madurai

  I stop wearing clothes. They felt like just one more barrier between me and the elements. I want to merge with the elements instead of remain separate from them.

  The batik man said the body can tolerate five hundred milliliters of seawater a day. I take my first capful of it—the water of life, all around me; what was I thinking?—every other thought is an epiphany for the ages—and drink it down, careful not to let it touch my lips. The salt burns my throat like a neat shot of liquor. I let it settle and sink into my cells. I tell them to welcome the new food. It’s better than water. It’s broth.

  I begin to see that the Trail is actually contained within a glass tunnel. There’s no fear of being swept away to either side. There’s not even any danger of drowning. The sea, sky, and moon—the members of my old Element Diary, fondly resurrected—are the background film that’s playing while I walk, and will, until I reach Djibouti. I can see the end of the Trail in my mind’s eye: it stops offshore, but I can see the lights of the city. Not as vast or majestic as Mumbai, but it’ll have some other quality, something essentially African as the skyline of Mumbai is essentially Indian. I try to imagine it but I feel like anything I imagine will just be a function of stereotypes. Violet lights, instead of orange? An assemblage of low colonial-era buildings instead of the towering HydraCorp tiara? I don’t know anything about Djibouti, but for reasons I can’t name, I’m expecting something welcoming and warm. And friendly hands to help me ashore.

  I thought the bodies would go away after the commune. But they keep appearing, and now, in different positions, as if I’m paging through a very slow flip book.

  I know the story they’re spelling out for me. So I start telling it first, to get ahead of them.

  Mohini, life got better for me after I went to Madurai.

  I’d left college after the episode with Ajantha. I went home but I had no place with my grandparents. They were too sad even to be angry with me. I moved in with a divorced man in Aranmula for five months, then left in the middle of the night. I baked bread in Varkala for two weeks and then got sick of the tourists. I worked at the Kashi Art Café in Kochi for longer but, again, got sick of the tourists. And then for a year I worked as a waitress in Kodaikanal, writing poetry at night huddled in blankets, but I was getting sick of the cold. Then one day I was serving a customer, a stick-up-the-ass Hindu nationalist, who saw my nametag and asked me when was the last time I’d visited my namesake Meenakshi Devi at her temple in Madurai, which was just down the mountain from us, the jewel of the plain.

  I said, Never.

  He slammed down his fist and said, That is unacceptable. How will you receive her blessing? How will she even know you exist?

  I didn’t tell him all the complications behind my name, that it was also my mother’s name and that my mother was murdered with a scalpel, that my grandmother was Catholic, and that anyway I wasn’t particularly religious to begin with. I was stunned by his passion.

  So I just played the poor waitress card and said, I don’t have the money.

  He got out an actual billfold and held up an actual fifty-thousand-rupee note.

  I’ll give you this, he said, If you promise to use it to visit Meenakshi Devi and ask her blessing.

  I was sure the note was fake. But just in case it wasn’t, I promised with all solemnity that I would use it as he instructed. He gave me the note. I folded it in my pocket. I served him extra respectfully after that.

  On my break, I took the note to the cashier’s office, and found a dusty box of miscellanea that included paper money and a pen to check for fake notes.

  The note wasn’t fake.

  I left the restaurant, fed the bill into my account so that the money was accessible on my mitter, went back to my studio flat, stuffed my things in a sack, and flagged down an autoshaw to take me all the way down the mountain to Madurai on the plain. The farther we descended, the more I felt myself coming to life. I was warming up. I’d forgotten how much the cold had frozen all the parts of me and now it was like I could move again.

  I got a hotel room and then went out walking. Of course I wandered toward the temple complex because that’s where all the roads lead. I had Reshmi West’s essays running through my head. It happened to be a Friday, Meenakshi Devi’s special day. So there were tens of thousands of pilgrims there.

  The bodies have been lying perpendicular to me on the Trail. Now they start swinging toward me, headfirst.

  There was a thick crush of people trying to get around the Golden Lotus Tank to see Meenakshi Devi at the other end of the complex. So I just had to wait. And I paid the full one thousand rupees to get in line to get right up close to the deity. But again, I didn’t feel impatient or unhappy, I just felt content. I’d never felt that way in my life. The line moved from one chamber to another, from the daylit open air to the dark inner passages lit with tubes overhead and oil lamps set in the walls and fans that moved the air of a thousand exhalations. Shiva giving a boon. Shiva killing a boar. Shiva and the elephant. But the real show here is the divine feminine: she’s the one we want to see: and then I’m before her and she’s black, resplendent, petaled, and smeared.

  I looked at her and felt like I wasn’t answerable for anything I’d done and I was free of all family, all history, all circumstance. Like I was free of context and could reenter the world as a baby.

  Soon after that, I met you, Mohini.

  The bodies start tilting up, feet in the air, head dangling, like upside-down marionettes. The golden saris fall down around their hips.

  Onam 2068 would be our second anniversary, and I was planning a feast.

  That day, when I got in the door from the market and put my bag on the kitchen counter, I heard the sound of furniture moving in another room. Mohini must be cleaning, I thought, or rearranging the bedroom as she had to do every few months “to keep things fresh.” I tiptoed down the hall, trailing my fingers along the wall. It was an old cottage, almost a hundred years old, made of plaster that always stayed cool. When the monsoon came we’d open every window and door to let the rainy air flood the house. We’d painted it with warm colors, each room a different shade of sunrise, with mandalas and murals and verses of the Vedas. As I approached the room, I took off my jacket, and then my shirt, leaving them in a trail in the hallway, and then unzipped my jeans. I heard heavy breathing and felt so much love for you, because you worked so hard for our home. Then I came into the bedroom and saw you lying on our bed in a golden sari with your head turned away from me. I thought you were sleeping. I moved around to the foot of the bed. I came closer to kiss your forehead. And that’s when the snake lying on top of your body struck at me.

  Your eyes were upside down, open, and tired.

  I ran away.

  Witness Dogs

  The bodies go away.

  For a long time I’m left with the basic elements again. Sea, sky, moon, and the Trail in its glass tunnel. It’s transparent, so it’s hard to detect. Sometimes I think I see its outline above me. Once I even see the little woman crawling overhead. Whether that lends credibility to her actual existence, I’m not sure. I consult my counselors, who are now broadcasting from the Semena Werk pirate radio station, including both my mother and father weighing in now, up and running and fully ideated, speaking from recliners made of clouds.

  AMMA: If she tries to hurt you, we’ll protect you, molay.

  APPA: Right! We’ll give her what-for!

  AMMA: Are you eating enough?

  APPA: And make sure you get enough sleep. You’re crabby without it.

  AMMA: Make chamomile tea tonight and I’ll tell you a story.

  They’re an opium drip of all the things I’ve wanted to hear my whole life.

  On a diet of seawater, and the kelp I don’t bother converting anymore, my body changes. My blood gets thicker. My flesh is gummy. If I press my finger into my arm, a depr
ession stays, like a dimple, and it takes a long time to fill up again. My lips crack and crust over and I peel them till they bleed. I have trouble sleeping when I lie down during the day, and I have trouble staying awake while I’m walking. The lines between different phases of consciousness aren’t clear. I go through cyclical periods of lucidity and fog. I lose a lot of energy. I want to sing a kriti but I can’t remember the words, and anyway, I don’t have the strength to sing. I can feel the salt on my vocal cords.

  But I left you, Mohini, not knowing whether you were alive or dead, so any suffering on my part is good and deserved.

  On the horizon I see a new structure. In a burst of lucidity I send up a prayer to whatever gods might be listening, saying, Please, I can’t take any more hippies.

  But there seems to be only one inhabitant. He’s standing on a barge moored to the Trail. There’s a kiosk set up, a little thatch-hut stand with a bar, painted in bright tropical colors. He’s standing behind it and is working with metal tongs and a plate. I see steam rising from below. I get closer to the kiosk and now I can see a sign that says WITNESS DOGS in five different languages. There’s one stool at the bar.

  He’s still busying himself behind the counter. When I get to him, and open my mouth to say hello, nothing comes out, so I just knock on the counter and wave when his head pops up.

  He looks at me and cries out. I jump back. It’s a startling sound after so much of just waves and wind.

  “What happened to you?” he says in Hindi.

  Again I try to speak, but my throat has the texture of jerky.

  He sees me trying to form words. “Here,” he says, and indicates the stool. “Sit down. I have a lot of work to do with you.”

  First, he fetches a robe. I’d forgotten I was naked. I hold out my arms so he can fit the sleeves over me and then I manage to wrap it around my front so my breasts are covered.

  Then he puts a glass of clear water on the counter. I look at it and turn around just in time to throw up. The vomit is dark green against the barge platform.

  “Oh dear,” he says. “No, don’t get up. I’ll take care of it. You’re in worse shape than I thought.”

  I watch him clean up my vomit.

  “Now take a look at the glass of water again,” he says.

  I will myself to.

  “Just look at it,” he says.

  I can do that.

  “Good,” he says. “There’s hope for you. I don’t suppose you ran into the Lotus Eaters a few hundred kilometers back, did you? That’s what I call them. So what, you couldn’t think of a story and they confiscated your desalinators?”

  I can’t think of an expression, or series of expressions, that would convey that I did tell a story, and then threw out my desalinators of my own volition. Let alone why. I wish I knew sign language. Maybe they have entire vocabularies for explaining unexplainable things, even motivations unknown to the speaker.

  “Don’t worry about talking yet,” he says. “I’m speaking rhetorically. My name is Subu.”

  I shake my head to tell him I’m with him. He’s already a better trail angel than Ameem and Padma were, ten thousand years ago.

  “I run Witness Dogs. I run it for two reasons. One, to serve food. As you can see here, in addition to the fruit of the sea, I cook hot dogs. Kosher. Vitamin-enriched. Don’t look at them too long—we don’t want you throwing up again. I wrote a designer program for the kiln, patent pending.

  “Two, it seemed to me that on a landscape like this, a walker needs a good reality check. That’s why I witness.”

  Here it comes, I think. He’s a Jesus freak.

  “Empiricism,” he says. “I witness for empiricism.”

  Didn’t see that coming.

  “Look at my hand. I’m real.”

  I shake my head in assent.

  He pokes me in the shoulder. “Feel that. You’re real.”

  I assent again.

  “Good. Now take another look at this glass of water.”

  I do. I place my hands around it to steady it so that the water doesn’t slosh out to either side.

  “Now just put your lips to it. Don’t drink yet.”

  I do. I have the same feeling as I did when I descended down from the mountain to the plain. What have I been doing?

  I fall asleep at the counter.

  When I wake up it’s bright afternoon. It doesn’t feel right. I should be asleep.

  Subu is lying in his boat, hands folded across his stomach, with his hat over his face.

  Mohini, I don’t know what I expected the Trail to be like when I began. But I don’t think I thought it’d be like this.

  I put my head back down.

  I wake up to Subu’s voice.

  “All right then, let’s see how we do with the water this time.”

  I raise my head to see him throw out the old glass. I feel an impulse to stop him, but I don’t have the strength, and so I just watch him do it.

  He pours a fresh glass and puts it on the counter. “Just a little sip now,” he says.

  I take a sip. After the brine of seawater, it tastes like sugar.

  “Slow, now.”

  I take another sip. I drink a third of it. And then I drink the whole thing.

  I rest, this time in my own pod.

  I wake at sunset and drink some more.

  I can start to whisper words and, with practice, even put a little voice to them.

  I start to return to the world. I hadn’t even noticed I’d gone.

  The third night, Subu judges I’m in good enough shape to try a hot dog.

  Again he assures me they’re kosher. I make the gesture to say, It’s okay, I don’t mind either way.

  He claps the metal tongs a few times and then reaches into the steamer and pulls out a thick, pale hot dog. He puts it in a bun.

  “What would you like on it?”

  I sweep my hands wide, which I hope conveys The Works. So he adds curry sauce, sugary ketchup, mango pickle relish, onions, tomatoes, thick dal, and crumbled paneer. He makes one for himself, too, and I wait. Then he says, Let’s eat, and we both take up the overflowing oblongities and chew, looking back east, where the dusk is pink and blue.

  “So, where are you from?” he says.

  I point east. “Keralam,” I whisper.

  “What’s your name?”

  I begin to say Durga. But that name seems to belong to another, delusional self. I’m like a snake that keeps shedding skins. Every time I shed a new one, I think it’s the last one, and I can’t believe there could ever be a new one to shed.

  “Meena,” I say. “Named after my mother.”

  “Is she in Kerala?”

  “No. She’s dead.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I bet your walking has something to do with her dying.”

  A former self would have taken offense at this. But I just say, “Yeah.”

  “Looking for her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you hope to find?”

  Well, I hope to find some ancient matron on the street in Addis who’ll see me and jump up and cry out, Miss Meenakshi Mehta, can it be you?—even though I look so much more like my father. She’ll see something in me that I can’t see. Some evidence that my mother existed. Some evidence of her regard for me. Someone who knew her while she was in Ethiopia. A lost diary. Her flat in Addis. Her favorite restaurant in Addis. A photograph where she holds a stethoscope to a smiling patient’s chest, smiling. Records of her visa application. The gardens she used to stroll with my father. Our Lady of Entoto Hospital. The clinic inside Our Lady of Entoto Hospital. The room inside the clinic inside Our Lady of Entoto Hospital, where she died.

  The woman who killed her.

  I answer, “The innermost chamber, whatever that is.”

  He’s Hindu. Culturally, at least. He gets it. “Do you have anyone at home?”

  “Yes,” I say. And then I say, “No.”

 
“I see.”

  “I did, but I left her. Even though she’d been attacked.”

  “Attacked by what?”

  “A snake. The snake bit me, too.” I parted my robe to show him the five scabs, which have become like overlapping red moons and their penumbrae.

  “Who put the snake there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did the snake look like?”

  “It was golden.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Sunny,” I said.

  “Ah,” he says.

  I concentrate on watching the dusk. I count to ten, then to twenty, then to a hundred. The colors turn to red and violet.

  “So,” says Subu. “In the interest of empiricism, what really happened?”

  “He was the spicewaala I went to for cardamom,” I say. “He’d broken in.” And he was folded over Mohini like a frog, with a hand at her throat, and her eyes looking upside down at me, tired.

  “What did you do?”

  “Same thing. I ran away.”

  I stay at Witness Dogs for two more days. I drink the water Subu gives me, and for every meal, I have his vitamin-fortified hot dogs. Always with everything on it.

  When I’m healthy enough to go, he checks my kiln to make sure it’s working properly, and then uploads his special hot-dog program. He also gives me two desalinator bottles. “Don’t lose these,” he says. “You want to make it.”

  “I do,” I say, and I mean it truthfully.

  “Good luck,” he says. “But I have a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “If there was no snake in your bed, then where did the bite marks in your chest come from?”

  My mind compiles the explanation. “There was still a snake there. Sunny was using it as a weapon.”

  “But how many fangs does a snake have?”

  “Two.”

  “Then tell me, why are there only five bite marks in your chest, and not six?”