The Girl in the Road Read online

  Can I go? I asked.

  Of course, you said. I’ll meet you there.

  Ten years later, I was assigned to the ship carrying the last scales to their destination. In the middle of the night, when all the crew slept, I slipped out of a hatch by moonlight. I swam to the Trail just a kilometer away from where our ship had dropped anchor. I pulled myself up. At first I crawled, and then I walked, and by morning I was far, far away.

  Night has passed and the stars have cartwheeled overhead. Now by the light of the eastern horizon I see the little woman’s cowrie-shell mouth is shaped like mine.

  So this is my mother.

  I’m so tired. After everything, this is all the final chamber is, was, and ever will be, the concrete shack where her own mother is upside down, mid-rape, saying she’d be all right, on repeat, forever. That was the end of her life. There’s nothing anyone else can say to her. I don’t have the energy to try, even if it set the course of my life as a bloody baby trying to enter people who are not my mother.

  There’s nothing anyone can say to me, either.

  So I just say, “Thank you for the story, little girl.”

  Then she asks if she can touch my face.

  I say yes.

  She crawls forward and reaches for me, and her skin is like leather, and she stinks of sweat and sour brine, and she wraps her arms around my head, like she’s forgotten how to hug. I tell myself: My mother is hugging me. This should feel good. But it doesn’t. She’s hugging my head to her chest more tightly and my arms are limp at my sides. I open my eyes and see blackness. She squeezes harder and harder. I start seeing sparkles. She wants to consume me.

  I push her away.

  She looks terrified. She curls into a ball and rocks. “Have I angered you, Yemaya?”

  “No,” I say. “I just couldn’t breathe.”

  “Forgive me,” she says, uncurling and reaching for me again. “I just wanted us to be together again, one and whole, as before.” Then with a shy look dawning in her eyes, she lies back and parts her legs before me. Her yoni is soft and hairless from age.

  I look away. I focus on the sea. I try to imagine what the goddess would do. I try to imagine what would make us whole.

  I crawl forward and lie down next to her and turn her over and hug her to me like she says Yemaya used to hold her. She’s fragile. Her body expands and collapses. I breathe her in and now under the brine I smell a faint violet smell from a recurring dream I’ve had all my life but couldn’t remember till now.

  For a time, we sleep, and share that very dream.

  We wake near dawn, when the clouds are sage and gold.

  She turns over and holds my face in her hands and says, “I am yours, Yemaya, as I always was. Take me.”

  Djibouti

  It begins to rain.

  So this is how the Trail will end for me. A Trail-ending rain, a world-ending rain. I think again of holding the knife, the blade with the infinitesimal edge, that could cut everything, palms, saris, salwar kameez, fruit, the metal of trains, and people. Here the world is already split in two for me: sky, sea. But now in the rain they blur into one continuum. So does the Trail. I wonder where the real Yemaya is now. I wonder what her real name was. Maybe she did go to Addis, for a few months, feckless, to go slumming and do the artist thing, only to realize that she had no skills and no job prospects, only to move on to another imagined paradise, and then another and another, because she could never go back home. I begin to see visions of Africa, coming from the west. The fantasy of flotillas was naïve but surely I’ll be welcomed, somehow. Who else has walked this far. Who else has stepped off the edge into the arms of the continental shelf. I want to be a hero for practical reasons: I’ll be taken care of: I’ll be given a bed and warm food. I remember pictures of Djibouti. The sovereign nation of Djibouti. The colonial architecture. Cafés and sea spray. The musical legacy of which I know nothing but have no doubt exists. A little crossroads of the world. A tongue of land. A continuation of the planet on which women and men, clean and healthy, go about their business on solid ground, in suits, with jobs, picking up pastries from kiosks on the way to work. Like waking from a dream I begin to remember what real food is like. Hot food with different kinds of things in it. Hot food over rice. Pappadams that crackle. Spices. Cold icy drinks and hot steaming drinks. Sugar. Pickles. I have to spend the next few hours wisely. I have to conserve energy. Even though I’ve lost the strength to walk I still crawl, down the mid-line, not permitting myself to think except about food. I have to make it to land. I have to see whether life continues, after I laid my mother on top of the waves and let her sink, and watched her head bend back, and her little body turn in the current until I couldn’t see it anymore, and then I closed my eyes and watched her from the inside, and saw her pass through the warm upper reach, then cross the boundary into the freezing dark, descending down the gradient, down into darkness, then carried on currents to the deepest parts of the world, until her body came to settle in a place where the sky was always black and the moon was always new.

  I have only two kilometers’ notice that I’ve reached the end of the world, and I don’t see land but I keep crawling because this is definitely the last and most cruel hallucination, made worse by the rain that confuses sea and air, and I’ll pass through this veil like all the others, even though my mother is already found and lost again, life will be nothing but more veils to pass and pass through again. I know this now. There are yet more chambers. I crawl to the end.

  The scales end in the middle of the sea.

  There’s no land in sight. I think that there must have been a catastrophic break where the Trail drowned and didn’t resurface and I get frantic and plunge my hands down into the water, but feel the two mooring cables that I remember running into below the surface, at the very beginning, in Back Bay. This is definitely the end of the Trail.

  I dig out my pozit. I’m only a kilometer offshore. I should be able to see land. But then I see a flock of hovercraft glinting in the distance, turning this way and that, swimming through the air like a school of fish, low over the water, and now I understand that the sovereign nation of Djibouti is nowhere in sight because the sovereign nation of Djibouti is gone.

  Epilogue

  I approach one of the cook fires on the beach and a young girl sees my traveling clothes, jumps up, and offers me passage. She’s wearing a hijab and demure jean shorts with flowers embroidered on the pockets and she has a hoverboat that she assures me is very safe, very comfortable. She’s in her element. This is the heart of the world, for her, both before and after the wave, which didn’t hit as hard here on the west coast as it did on the east coast. But it still hit. The world changed when Yemaya came ashore.

  I show her the address written on the side of my hand and she nods and gestures me to follow her. This is too easy. This part should be harder. I expected resistance or some other species of difficulty but now everything is going very fast. We get into her hoverboat and she takes me out into the shallows, down alleys of water between houses on concrete pillars, and above us, men in sky-blue robes watch from their porches and call to the girl, who yells back with clever rejoinders that make them laugh. I like her. I want to be like her.

  Too soon, the girl slows down the boat and pulls up to a concrete staircase leading up out of the water, up to a square house with a narrow porch running all around, just wide enough for a stool to sit on and look out in any direction. On the walls are white chalk drawings of crescent moons and fish.

  I want to ask the girl to stay with me, to beg her, really, to stay in her hoverboat at the foot of the stairs, in case something goes wrong, in case I change my mind. But instead I pay her in rupees and watch her go. And then I’m left alone on the concrete stairway.

  There’s nothing left to do but ascend.

  How did this moment arrive so quickly?

  My thoughts keep slipping from the present. They want to avoid it and go somewhere else. Nothing is like I thought it wou
ld be: the concrete, the sea, the white chalk drawings. I become self-conscious. I make myself look down at my feet and take fifteen steps. But when I reach eye-level with the porch there’s only a dog by the door, who lifts her head and thumps her tail, once. Maybe I have the wrong name or the wrong house. In fact, I hope I do. I feel like I might float up into the sky. But I have to stay here. I have to be present for this.

  Then a little girl comes to the doorway. She’s wearing a clean white dress and is otherwise barefoot. She falls back against the door frame, shy, her finger in her mouth, looking at me.

  I’m not confident in my Hassaniyya but I’ve learned some French during my travels, so I try it on her. I ask her if her mother is home. She says no, she’s at school. The girl is sweet but looks confused at my clothing, my manner, my nervousness. I feel panicked. I’m intruding, clearly. It was arrogant of me to come, and even more, to think I’d be welcome. I apologize and begin to turn back down the stairs.

  But then an old woman comes to the door, wearing a dress the color of young leaves.

  She knows my cowrie-shell mouth.

  She puts her hand on the little girl’s shoulder and closes her eyes and I know I’ve found who I’m looking for, and so the act is done and can’t be taken back, so I say nothing, and just wait and listen to the surf, the calls of men, the cries of children, the laughter of women, course up and down the waterways.

  Then she opens her eyes and nods to me and says to the little girl,

  HASSANIYYA: You must invite our guest in, Saha.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks to Deepti Gupta, Nebeyou Zewdie Tesema, Dr. Stefan Gary, and Dr. Jennifer Bishop for their professional assistance on the manuscript; and to R. Subramanian, Umair Kazi, Sisay Gebre-Egziabher, and Aatish Salvi for their insights. Thanks also to my early readers Stefani Nellen, Kat Howard, Jay O’Berski, Byron Woods, and Dr. Beckett Sterner for their warm encouragement.

  The novel never would have been written without the Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship for Wellesley College alumnae. I cannot express enough gratitude to the fellowship committee for having faith in me. For the same, I also thank the Durham Arts Council and the Vermont Studio Center. Thanks and love to those who aided and sheltered me during my travels: Sisay Gebre-Egziabher, Samson Challa, Eva Miranda, Jessica Ozberker, Nicole and Joshua Wengerd, Marcy and David Aldacushion, and the kind staff of Mr. Martin’s Cozy Place in Ethiopia; Leena PS, Alysha Aggarwal, Chriselle Bayross, Dilna Shelji, Dr. Sarath Chandran, Anuradha and Gautham Sarang, Unny LJ, Bala Prakasam, and the extraordinary staff of Vijnana Kalavedi in India; Eleanor Kleiber in Fiji; and the hundreds of unnamed strangers who pressed on my heart, especially the little girls who wished me well.

  Warm thanks to my wonderful agent, Sam Stoloff, who’s been my advocate and champion since day one. He made the match with Zachary Wagman at Crown Publishing, who turns out to be the kind of editor every writer dreams of working with. Along with Molly Stern, Jacob Lewis, Sarah Bedingfield, Lauren Kuhn, Kayleigh George, Cathy Hennessy, Rachelle Mandik, and Emily Burns, working with Crown has been a dream come true. And though I don’t get to see them as much, the team at Little, Brown UK has also been an incredible pleasure to work with: editor in chief Antonia Hodgson, marketing director Charlie King, editorial assistant Rhiannon Smith, head of digital sales Ben Goddard, and export sales manager Rachael Hum. I thank them all for handling my work with such care, wisdom, and generosity.

  Thanks also to those who supported me during the very earliest days of writing: Lucy and Don Aquilano, Mary, Andrew, and Ginny Beazley, Clare, Donald, Julie, and Mary Byrne, Amy Calhoun, Erik and Martin Demaine, Danielle Durchslag, Cynthia Fischer, Mirren Fischer, Jackie Geer, Cecilia Gerard, Jim Haverkamp, Stefan Jacobs, Scott Jennings, John Justice, Sam Kirkpatrick, Jessie Kneeland, Alice Kunce, Jeanne Manzer, Lisa Martin, Ellie Mer, Jenny Nicholson, Cally Owles, Kristin Parker, Michelle Legaspi Sanchez, Laurie Stempler, Beckett Sterner, Sandy Sulzer, Ingrid Swanson, Laura Westman, Prem Yadav, Frances Wiener, and Laura Wysong. Thanks also to Arian Aareeyan and his agent Hanif Yazdi for accommodating my strange request.

  For research on this novel, I’m deeply indebted to the nonfiction writings of Gita Mehta, Michio Kaku, Anand Giridharadas, Susan Casey, Laurence C. Smith, Roz Savage, Nega Mezlekia, Jeffrey Tayler, Kira Salak, Bill Bryson, and Thalia Zepatos. I also give thanks for the wonderful novelists whose books guided me in writing my own: Norman Rush, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Renault, Kim Stanley Robinson, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Donna Tartt, and Haruki Murakami. Also, percolating through this book like water through limestone is the music of Meshell Ndegeocello. I thank her for being herself and no other.

  My companions in this life are Mary Anne, Donald Edward Jr., Julie Elizabeth, Donald Edward III, Clare Siobhan, and Mary McMonigal. I love them more than I know how to say. From the day I was born, they’ve held all my dreams in a space of unconditional love and support, including my dream for a creative life. As Julie once said, No one could ask to be so blessed in this world.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Book I: Meena

  Book II: Mariama

  Book III: Meena

  Book IV: Mariama

  Book V: Meena

  Book VI: Mariama

  Book VII: Meena

  Book VIII: Mariama

  Book IX: Meena

  Book X: Mariama

  Book XI: Meena

  Book XII: Mariama

  Book XIII: Meena

  Book XIV: Mariama

  Book XV: Meena

  Book XVI: Mariama

  Book XVII: Meena

  Book XVIII: Mariama

  Book XIX: Meena

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments