The Girl in the Road Read online

  You said, You must be an orphan.

  I disliked the way you said the word, so instead I asked, Why are you going to Ethiopia?

  You shrugged and made your voice sound casual. Needed to get out of Dakar, always wanted to see Addis for myself, you said. The music, the dance, the culture. And they make beautiful clothing there. When we come to the market in Lalibela I’ll show you the cotton dresses. They’re white but they have bright-colored crosses, like you see in stained glass windows. Have you ever been to a Christian church?

  What is that? I said.

  You laughed. Good little Muslim, you said.

  But I didn’t get the joke. What a bitter education it was, all these adults telling me what I was and wasn’t! Black, not Moorish; Hassaniyya-speaking, not French-speaking; Muslim, not Christian. That I Must Be an Orphan. The kreen was rustling in my flesh like a bird taking a dust bath.

  I asked for another ladoo but you said no.

  You knew what was best for me, Yemaya. I was greedy even then.

  We were in true desert now, so it was cooler at night than it had been before. There was a new moon so it was pitch-black, aside from the starlight. You and I had been sleeping on our sides facing away from each other. But that night, after a few minutes of both of us shivering, you told me to come close. You said we could keep each other warm with our bodies. So I stayed still and let you hug me like a pillow, with one arm thrown over me and the other under me, the inside of your elbow a warm, clammy spot to rest my cheek. I could hardly breathe for being so close to you, mashed up, skin-to-skin. But then I let myself breathe back into you, and feel you breathe forward into me. And for the first time, the kreen was totally quiet. Like a burn soothed with ointment. I felt calm and safe.

  I mouthed the word Yemaya, Yemaya, Yemaya to myself. It seemed a better word than saha, the word I’d first used to calm myself. I could no longer remember where it had come from—somewhere remote—but I knew where Yemaya came from. It came from you, the person holding me, and you were real and warm.

  Meena

  The Knife

  The memory has a solid component, of coolness on my cheek: I was leaning against the doorway because though my mother had called me in to her study, she didn’t notice me at first, so I lingered there.

  She asked me to sit down in the chair she kept for patients. I did. Then she told me that she was not really my mother.

  Is Appa my father? I asked.

  No, she said. I’m sorry, Meena. Appa is really your Muthashan, and I am really your Muthashi. But you are still our family, our granddaughter. We will raise you faithfully.

  I wagged my head. I didn’t want to know a single thing more.

  Do you want to know what happened to your parents? this formerly-Amma, now-Muthashi asked.

  I said yes because I was still scared of her.

  She gestured that I come forward and sit next to her, behind the desk. She told me to bring the chair closer so that I could see the file folder on the top of her desk. She’d planned and prepared for this day. She opened the folder and gave me a printout from the Times. “Indian Lovers Butchered in Addis Ababa.”

  Lovers, I said to myself.

  They were not married, she said, as if that were the most important thing. They were both medical students. But there was a big election happening and the atmosphere for Indians in Ethiopia was very bad. Their maid was a secret rebel who wanted them out. She killed Gabriel and his girlfriend, and then she escaped, and the Ethiopian police didn’t bother to go after her. You were three months premature. No one even knew your mother was pregnant. She was a shapely woman and hid it well. But the murders took place in an Indian hospital, so the Indian nurses found you and got you medical attention right away. It was a miracle you survived. You wanted to live very badly.

  Gabriel, I said to myself.

  Gabriel is your father, and my only son, she said. Would you like to see a picture of him?

  She didn’t wait for me to answer. She opened a desk drawer and handed me a framed picture of a young man. He was running backward, wearing a red cricket jersey, smiling as bright as the sun. He was extraordinarily beautiful. He had long wavy hair, golden skin, and bright lotus eyes. He looked like a prince from my Children’s Illustrated Mahabharata.

  As you can see, he was very handsome, she said, as if explaining an anatomical chart. He was studying to be—

  I threw the picture against the wall. Then I was running away from that woman, who was now standing and yelling at me.

  I ran outside, through the courtyard and down to the river beneath the banana palms where the quail was singing her winding spiral song, waterspouts that were spent as soon as formed. I summoned to mind a long knife, a kilometer long, with a blade so subtle that its edge began long before it was visible. It was only an atom thick so that it began to separate matter, invisibly, long before it cut. And it could cut anything. Coconut palms, silken saris, fruit stands, the metal of trains, and people. Everything would be halved.

  I closed my eyes and turned in a slow circle.

  Phase Two

  The pain wakes me up. I’m rocking back and forth with my cheek on a cool surface. I feel like I got sucked down a wormhole of sleep and then spit up again. The snakebites in my chest feel like the tips of five skewers, rotating.

  I see light to one side. I turn my head. My vision aligns. It’s a beautiful ring of orange stars. That triggers the cascade of locus et tempus: it’s late night, I’m on the Trail, I’m looking at Marine Drive from two hundred meters away, and I’m injured. No more euphoria. I’m in Phase Two of this journey now.

  I rise to my hands and knees and all my muscles tingle. Eight scales so far. That means I’ve come eight meters. I can try another eight and then see how I feel.

  I make it three more before I throw up.

  I retreat from the vomit. I wait politely and let the seawater slosh it off. I examine my finger, which is swelling and stiff to the touch, but not broken. I might take anti-inflammatories when I get a bit farther.

  I cover two more. It’s getting harder to see the outlines of the scales and perceive depth accurately. I have visions of myself as a cat.

  I miscalculate and hit my chin again. I’m pretty sure the skin’s come clear off this time because I can feel a liquid trickle down my throat.

  I scramble forward in a fresh burst of energy. As a result I hit my knee so hard I get an instant headache.

  I take a rest.

  I give myself permission to go very slowly and cover five without throwing up or significantly hitting any body part.

  I stop to rest. I take deep breaths of sea air. The waves make glock-glock sounds.

  I look behind me. The Queen’s Necklace glows. I can still see the cars on Marine Drive and hear their gentle zooms.

  I cover three more.

  I’ve come twenty-five meters.

  To celebrate, I dry-heave.

  The nausea passes again.

  I cover five more without causing more injury to myself. It was an unthinkable goal twenty minutes ago. I pause to appreciate this.

  I look ahead. Past a certain point, the Trail becomes a ribbon of silver, lit by the moon. How can something so beautiful be so difficult. Eve, beauty, snake, treachery: all the accidents of misogyny.

  I cover five more meters. I must call them meters instead of scales. They are successive units of length that I conquer one by one.

  I notice that the color of the light is changing. A little less is from the streetlights of Marine Drive, and a little more is from the moon overhead.

  How long till the light is all moon.

  I can’t rest.

  Am I in Phase Three yet.

  I cover ten at a stretch and on the last one, collapse back into beetle pose.

  I tell myself I’m on a train. I got to ride an antique coal-powered train, once, which was bumpy. Mohini hated it, but I liked it. I’ve always been able to sleep better when rocked by movement. I think it’s because I used
to nap on the floating jetty on the river that ran past Muthashi’s clinic, where I used to have dreams of a sky full of milk.

  I get up again and cover seven before I have to rest.

  Walking upright on this thing is fucking unthinkable. So I just won’t think about it for now. I will crawl all the way to Africa if I have to.

  Various parts of my body report to my brain, reminding me of pain and serious injury.

  Forehead.

  Knee.

  Chin.

  Heel.

  Finger.

  Solar plexus times five.

  Armpit, don’t forget the armpit. I cut out a delta of skin there with a filet knife.

  Each wound is a blazing star, and I’m a moving constellation.

  I see myself as a cat again.

  I used to watch cats pad along the ramparts of the stone wall around Muthashi’s clinic. I watched their shoulders rotate and wished I could reprogram my flesh.

  For the first time, I lose count of how many meters I’ve come.

  Too late to go back and recount.

  Sixty-ish, though.

  That accounts for space. As for time, it’s like a cloth being pulled underneath me, crosswise, wrinkle by wrinkle.

  The water is black edged in white, like obsidian and shaving cream.

  Things are not themselves. Just symbols. This experience should be a practicum for IIT-Bombay’s introductory philosophy course. I’ll have to write to the department about it.

  Sixty-five-ish now.

  I’ve covered the last five without paying as much attention.

  I see a buoy bobbing to my right, outlined by moonlight. I wonder how much else is out there around me, but not visible. Floating fakirs. Cartoon sharks. Things with tentacles.

  The barefoot girl, winged and perfectly dry.

  I’m not in my right mind.

  I can see the clouds better, now. There’s a bank of them sleeping against the horizon.

  Something like eighty-two.

  Of all the pain stars, the one in my armpit is shining brightest. I stop to examine it and see that my entire left flank is soaked with blood. I pinch the fabric of my shirt and it peels away with a wet sucking sound.

  I venture to half-turn, again, to see the shore. The streetlights on Marine Drive are smaller and dimmer and farther away.

  I have to calculate what is reasonable.

  I have to rest. I have to take water. I have to, if at all possible, re-dress my wounds.

  The past hour is a patchwork of shades of black.

  I make myself go twenty more meters, taking lots of breaks. And then I stop. I have to rest.

  I sink into my new best friend beetle pose and take off my backpack. For several long moments I feel unspeakable rage at the sea. I don’t understand why it can’t be still just for five motherfucking seconds. What animal would ever choose to make their home atop a medium that moves.

  I’m still not in my right mind.

  I find my sunbit and squeeze it so I can see better. Earlier today I read my pod’s inflation instructions while I was still sitting in the seawall. I hope I remember them right. I can program the pod from my scroll, or vocally, but I don’t remember the command sequence, so it’s good that there are also manual controls on the panel of the pod itself. “Press Full to activate the molecular pumps in the pod’s skin, so that it slowly fills with air.”

  I press it and nothing happens. I realize why. The skin isn’t charged. Here I spent the entire day’s worth of sunlight reading about Senegal instead of charging my pod.

  Crying would be a luxury, here, now. So to deal with it in the short term I name it a Mild Annoyance. I curl up on one side and fold my pod into a neat pie-shaped wedge that will make an economical pillow until the sun comes to charge it. I hug my bag to my body and curl around it. I close my eyes.

  I get sucked back down the wormhole.

  I get spit up again.

  I open my eyes. The sky is a little paler. A little trickle of seawater is surging, with each pitch, across the scale hinge toward my head.

  I don’t know how much I slept but I spring to as if I’ve had a raj’s rest in a feather bed because I remembered something: the compressed gas capsules. Misbah talked me into buying them, saying, These will work if it’s cloudy and you can’t charge the pod. They come in a hard case so they can’t be crushed accidentally.

  I find the case. Its edges are quivering. I’m grotesquely lucid. I have to make the best of it while it lasts. I pick out one capsule, make a rent in the pod with my thumbnail, toss in the capsule, reseal the pod, bring down my fist on top of the capsule, and then jump back. I watch the pod blow up into a real thing. I remember dimly that now I’ll be one of those blurry smears that Anwar sees against the sea from his office high up on Nariman Point. This feels like Phase Three, finally. Things are looking up.

  I wait till the skin is taut and then slice an opening and climb in quickly so that the air doesn’t get out, and reseal it behind me by pinching the material closed.

  It’s pleasant. Actually it’s wonderful. The air from the gas capsule is perfectly mixed and scented with rose. I remember that the pod also has settings for porosity and opacity so I find the control panel and experiment with sliding my fingers along the scales. When I increase opacity, the inner surface of the pod goes silver-gray. This is much better than full transparency. I also increase the porosity so that passive air exchange is increased. The internal pressure of the pod will lessen, but not enough to collapse in on me.

  I’ve made my house.

  I close my eyes and fall back asleep before my head finishes falling.

  Canticles

  New canticles of pain wake me up.

  My skin is hot. My brain feels like throbbing strings of glue. I must be dehydrated. I realize I haven’t drunk any water since setting out last night. I also never tended to my finger, which is blackish purple now, like I dipped it in ink. Several life-threatening emergencies I must address calmly and in turn.

  I slice an opening in my pod just big enough for my forearm. Wet heat and light flood in. I lean out over the water and dip my desalinator bottle. Someone watching would see an arm appear out of nowhere and then slip back into its own dimension.

  While the water filters, I take anti-inflammatories and wrap my pinched finger with gauze. Saliva wells up around my gums and I pinch the pressure point between my thumb and forefinger to prevent nausea. I should probably eat something too, so I turn on my kiln, which came already charged. But fucking fuck I have to stuff something organic in it. I slice an opening again and hang over the edge again. I see a kelp patch and so I haul in a handful of it, which looks like felt-coated plastic holiday garlands, and draw it back inside and stuff it into the top of the kiln. I program idlee at ambient temperature and close the door and save the rest of the kelp for later and after ten minutes there are four cubes of rice meal in the well. They don’t yet come in the proper saucer shape but I hear they’re working on it. I don’t know why they haven’t yet. Because if you’ve developed organic matter reprogramming, then topological finishing should not be that fucking hard.

  I drink a whole bottle of water one sip at a time and then refill it to wash the brine off my skin. I eat one pseudo-idlee in small bites so I have a little strength. Then I get out my medical kit and take some broad-spectrum nanobiotics for pain and infection. Then I arrange all needed supplies in a row: antiseptic wipes, antibiotic ointment, clearskins, bandages, surgical tape. I tend to each area in turn.

  The nanobiotics will take a few more minutes to lessen the pain, and until then, the rocking of the Trail makes each wound feel worse. Insult to injury. I would call this Phase Four but I feel suddenly annoyed at the childish delineations of the previous night and abandon the whole schema.

  To distract myself I look through my medical kit and thank Mehrdad and Misbah in my mind. It’s fucking incredible. It’s like a miniature version of the entire first-aid cabinet we had at the women’s clinic, includi
ng both Ayurvedic and Western remedies. There’s a tiny surgical kit. There are rehydration salts. There’s Plumpy’nut Ultra for emergency nutrition. In addition to the broad-spectrum nanobiotics there are pills for parasites, viruses, chest infections, skin infections, eye infections, throat infections, digestive-tract infections, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, sunburn, anxiety, and depression. And all of this fits into a sealed bag shaped like a kidney.

  I eat another idlee and then lie back down. I’m not going anywhere right now, and anyway, it’s daylight, so I have to get used to sleeping now. But I can’t sleep. Now that the pain is less I have the luxury of being angry. And I chew over everything I could be angry about. Why won’t this Trail stop bucking so hard. Who put the snake in my bed in the first place. Who is the barefoot girl. Was she actually real. It’s possible that my mania produced hallucinations.

  I have to think about something else.

  Preeti, then. One of my charges at the women’s clinic in Thrissur. Eighteen years old, fatherless, mother some kind of addict. But she was pretty and petite and intense, with rare hazel eyes, and older men mistook this as indicative of some kind of woman-child depth, and she got involved with a married politician, K. P. Pillai, still very much in office, who got her pregnant and then beat her up to induce a miscarriage. She came to us. She miscarried anyway.

  I was in the room then. What came out looked like a bloody squirrel. The doctor asked if she wanted to see it and she smiled and said no thank you, that’s all right. And then in post-op counseling I asked Preeti, Would you like to press charges?

  She didn’t even know what I was talking about. Against who? she said.

  Against Mr. Pillai.

  Oh dear! For what?

  For assaulting you and causing a miscarriage.

  Oh, it was an accident, she said. He just needed to get his frustration out of his system.

  There’s no excuse for physical violence, I said.

  It’s more complicated than that, she said, patting my knee, even though she was eight years younger than me. She said, Human beings are passionate. Energy comes through us and we keep moving it around, and sometimes we’re the receivers and sometimes we’re the pushers.