She Will Build Him a City (13 page)

Your father returns by the time you are finished with breakfast, he has brought your clothes right on time for you to put them on. The skirt and top, neatly folded in places where the creases should be, covered on either side by the newspaper, the pair of socks folded, placed on top. You are ready to slip into your uniform, spotless, stainless white. Perfectly straight, each pleat in perfect place.

Look at my little princess, says your father, as he walks you to the bus stop.

~

Ma, you tell me one day, there is a girl in my class, her name is Priya, there are ice cubes in her water-bottle, it’s wrapped in canvas, that prevents the cold from getting out. Every morning, she takes me to a corner of the classroom, lets me dip a finger into the water and touch the ice. Even by lunchtime, the ice hasn’t melted and she lets me drink some of that cold water. Ma, why can’t I have some ice and I tell you that Priya probably has a fridge at home and that’s why she can get ice cubes every morning and we don’t have one and you ask me why and I say we need to wait until your father has saved up enough money.

You don’t accept this explanation and you begin to cry when your father enters the room and he takes one look at you and says, what’s wrong with my little princess and I tell him the ice story and he says we need to quickly get some ice to freeze those tears.

~

Give me my handkerchief, he says, and goes out looking, this time for Ice Man, and in an hour, he walks in, a small block of ice wrapped in his handkerchief, covered with sawdust. Quick, quick, my little princess, go get a bowl of water, he says, we need to clean the ice, wash all the sawdust away. You are so excited that you laugh, you cry, you shout as if he’s got a puppy wrapped up in that handkerchief. The sawdust gone, I use a steel cup to break the block of ice into smaller pieces, one of which darts across the floor leaving a cold trail of water for you to chase.

You try to pick the ice piece from the floor but it keeps slipping from between your fingers. We cannot play with ice, let’s make a nice drink, says your father, as he takes out a bottle of squash he has bought along with the ice. We mix water and squash in a big pitcher, drop all the shards of ice in it.

You drink two glasses, you say you want to keep some for the water-bottle that you will take to school tomorrow and your father says, it will not stay, the ice is already beginning to melt. I will get some more this weekend, he says, from the Ice Man, and we drink all of the squash until we are full and the floor is cold where the ice was and sticky with sugar and water.

MAN

Kahini’s Clothes

The bathrobes that Balloon Girl and her mother wore are washed. He is going to put them back in the wardrobe. In The Room, the most special place in his house, deep inside, farthest from the door, a place he doesn’t enter until he has to. Like this morning when he has locked himself in, told Security Guard not to let the maid disturb him. The Room is where his past lives, a past in which there is Kahini, a woman he loves, and the faint promise of their child.

That’s why in one corner, propped up against the wall, there is a wooden easel with double-sided magnetic boards, blackboard and whiteboard. There is coloured chalk on the floor, erasers, wooden shapes, the letters A to Z from a brightly coloured magnetic alphabet with pictures. Strewn around, for little hands and feet to push and kick in the course of play. Yellow tennis balls, red footballs fill up a wicker basket in the centre of which stands upright, like a prop in a school play, a child’s red-and-yellow umbrella, open, planted in the middle. The basket on the floor and a butterfly mobile hanging from the ceiling, blue and white, with a wingspan of three feet, create the two bright splashes of colour in The Room which is, otherwise, painted in silent colours, its walls and ceiling in office white, drab but spotless. Across the easel and the blackboard, against the wall, is a shoe rack where in neat rows of black, brown and a dash of red-and-blue, are Kahini’s shoes. All worn, the leather veined on the heels, softened by her feet, but each one gleaming, as if freshly dusted and polished.

Then there is the wardrobe. Its veneer is light oak, it has two mirrored central doors behind which is a hanging rail on which are her clothes. Saris, salwar kameez, jeans and shirts, long skirts, trousers. He pushes the clothes to one side, makes space on the railing on which he hangs the two bathrobes. The air in the wardrobe is musty, he needs to let the sun and the wind touch the clothes so he leaves the mirrored doors open, walks across The Room to the easel, picks up a wooden letter from the floor, lets it drop down. Its weight kicks off motes of dust from the carpet. In the mirror, the white-hot light from the summer sky bounces back to hurt his eyes.

He walks to the window, pulls the blinds down because he likes the dark, he likes everything in The Room to be wrapped up in puddles of their own shadows. Like he himself is right now, cold and naked.

CHILD

Wall Collapse

‘We have breaking news coming in,’ announces Priscilla Thomas to the soundtrack of cymbals clashing, drums rolling, a globe spinning across the blue screen, the map of India scattering stars in its wake.

‘If you live in the capital and if you have looked outside, you know the weather is playing up. Playing up rather seriously. After the very, very hot days, so hot that people died in the heat, we have a thunderstorm, we have news of walls collapsing, streets flooding, trees falling, people getting killed.

‘Reporter Payal Wadhwa has braved the weather to send us this report. Payal?’

~

‘Absolutely, Priscilla,’ says Payal Wadhwa, standing under an umbrella embossed with the
Camera India
logo.

‘The dust storm we have seen in the capital today was very much in the forecast for the last two days, not just here for Delhi but for Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh as well as Rajasthan. But when it hit today, it surprised even the Met Office which says that the wind speed and severity of the storm were much stronger than anticipated. But the storm is unlikely to continue until tomorrow which means this respite could be short-lived.

‘The reason behind the dust storm and the wind is an upper-air cyclonic circulation that lies over Haryana with another western disturbance lying over Pakistan adjoining the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Some showers have been seen here in the capital accompanied by thunder and lightning and more rain is expected through the day. As far as the maximum temperature is concerned, it was 44 degrees yesterday and today it’s come down by more than 12 degrees to 32, temperatures in the entire north are expected to come down.

‘Along with this good news, Priscilla, is some not so good. At least five construction workers have been killed and ten are feared trapped when a building they were working on in the centre of the city collapsed in the storm. Local residents say the disaster could have been averted but builders violated the construction plan cleared by the municipal corporation. Four floors were approved but workers were building a fifth floor. That’s not the only rule flouted. Police sources have told
Camera India
they suspect the use of poor-quality raw material to be responsible for the wall collapse, but so far no action has been taken against the authority which gives the final quality certificate to the builder for the material they are using.

‘There’s a report of another wall collapse but this is a minor one, at a place called Little House.’

‘Of course, I know where that is, that’s where we broadcast live from just the other day,’ says Ms Thomas.

‘Absolutely, Priscilla, the very same place. From where you welcomed that wonderful boy, Sunil, into your life. I have received a video from one of our viewers who captured the scene on his camera phone and we will play it for you a little while later. It shows that a section of the wall of Little House has been broken. There are no reports of any casualties but authorities are checking how and why this happened. So far, one child, yes, one child, is reported missing. We will send you an update as soon as we get one.’

‘Thank you, Payal,’ says Ms Thomas. ‘It only goes to show the shocking state of our public infrastructure, one freak storm and so much damage – that will be the subject of our debate later in the evening. We shall play that video Payal has got and we will get Mr Rajat Sharma, the director of Little House, on the show, too.’

MEANWHILE

Mr Sharma’s Son and the Camera Phone

My name is Aman Sharma, I am eleven years old, my father says I am too young to own a cellphone of my own. It’s not about money, he says, because my father can afford one, he is director of Little House, it’s an orphanage. He was on TV recently. He is always on his phone, his secretary is Mrs Chopra and he keeps calling her to check who has called him in the office.

My mother has a phone, too, not a smartphone, but it has a very good camera. When I am done with school homework, when her phone is charged, she allows me to play with it. For forty minutes, forty-five minutes every day, slightly longer on Saturdays and Sundays.

She has set five conditions.

One: I can only use the phone when she is at home.

Two: I can only use the phone when she gives it to me. I cannot pick it up even if it’s lying unattended.

Three: I cannot make any calls except in an emergency. Emergency means if there is a fire in the house or if I find her unconscious. Something as serious as that.

Four: I cannot answer any incoming calls.

And, five: I cannot give her number to any of my friends in school.

Yes, I say, I will follow these rules. Which is quite easy since I am not interested at all in any of these things. I don’t have any calls to make, I don’t have any friends I wish to talk to. All I am interested in is the camera. Because whenever I get the phone, I go straight to camera, options, choose video.

And I film.

~

I know all camera options on my mother’s phone, video format: high, normal, basic. Scene mode, night or auto. How to record camera sounds, even add text. I know that the best time to film outdoors is before sunset, that you should try to keep the light behind you so that there isn’t too much shadow. I cannot download the video and edit it outside the phone so I use the phone camera itself as an editor. Recording and pausing, recording and pausing. Sometimes, I record black or white between scenes. That’s my fade-in and fade-out. I keep deleting much of what I have recorded because there is not enough space on the phone. There are a few films I like which I have not deleted.

Nothing very special, but for some reason I like these films.

~

The first is called
Lunch
.

It’s about my mother warming lunch for me when I am back from school. She takes the portions out of the fridge one by one, rice, chicken, dal. She puts each back on the gas. Its flame is blue and yellow. Then she serves them neatly, on the white china plate that’s my favourite. Speaking clearly and slowly, naming each item, I record that as voice-over. The last scene: my lunch on the table, my mother washing her hands.

~

The second film is called
Mynah Bird
.

It’s about a mynah, drenched by the rain.

It flies onto our balcony, finds its perch in a tiny space where the wall meets the roof. I have never seen so wet a bird; so much water drips from its feathers that it can hardly sit or balance itself. There’s a wind and the mynah trembles. Behind the bird, you can see the sky, dark and grey. I switch the camera to night mode, record the rain, its sound, the rustle of the mynah’s feathers as they scrape the wall. The bird is so frightened that, even when I bring the camera to just about 10 inches from its beak, it doesn’t fly away. I get a tight close-up, I am able to film that funny sound the bird’s feathers make as they rub against the wall.

~

I tell my mother I need a camera, I really need a video camera. A small camera. She can set a hundred, a thousand, a million conditions and I will follow each one. My mother says, you aren’t doing well in school. Wait for a year, two years and if you do well, I will tell your father to get you a camera. Two years? That’s such a long time, I tell my mother, hundreds and hundreds of scenes will pass me by, unrecorded, but she doesn’t listen.

I want to – but I cannot – tell her that every day in school all I think of is what to record when I get my own camera.

For example, when Sharmila Ma’am is teaching history, my eyes record her lips. Red. Her eyes, her glasses, their steel frame. Chalk in her hand, dust on her fingers, some on her sari. The shape of our exercise books in her red bag. Her shoes, her toenails also painted red. I fail the history exam. Not only because I don’t listen to what Ma’am says but also because I don’t like memorising dates and numbers.

‘Mrs Sharma,’ Sharmila Ma’am tells my mother at the parent–teacher meeting, ‘you need to sit down with your child. He needs help with history. He is bright but he is very distracted, he keeps looking at everything except the blackboard.’

‘Of course, I will,’ says my mother.

~

My mother is nervous. She is waiting for my father to return home. I know when she is nervous, she plays with the ring on her finger as she is doing now. Taking it off, putting it back on.