She Will Build Him a City (17 page)

‘This evening, there are only two or three children in the playpen. I know the girl who works there, she’s also from West Bengal, her name is Durga, she’s at least four years, five years older than I am. When Durga sees me, she tells me, why are you sitting there on the bench, come over to the playpen, no one’s looking, you can try out the blue slide and we can talk. She is talking aloud.

‘I say, no, I cannot go, what if Didi calls me, the waiter has said that he will come here to look for me.

‘Come over for just five to ten minutes, Durga says, we can see the waiter if he comes out. I am frightened because when Didi gets angry, she gets very angry, but then Durga is right, there is no crowd in the playpen, Krish is deep in sleep, I don’t think he will wake up so soon, this is also his sleep time.

‘So I tell Durga, OK, but only for five minutes. I go up and down the blue slide so many times I lose count, I climb into the tree house, I enter the toy kitchen, I play with the toy oven, the toy cups and plates. If Didi catches me playing, I can always tell her I am trying to see what new toys have come to the playpen so that I can help Krish play with them but Didi doesn’t come out, she is busy with dinner with Dada Babu. They take a long time, about an hour, and by the time they are done and step out of the restaurant pushing Krish’s stroller, I am back on the bench.’

~

‘Did they give you some food at the restaurant?’asks Ma.

‘They packed it, Didi said she has kept it in the fridge, she will give it to me for lunch tomorrow,’ says Pinki. ‘I will bring it home for all of you.’

‘No, no, not at all, never,’ says Baba, ‘you eat it at their house itself, that’s your share, no need to bring it home.’

Ma has heard it all, she begins serving dinner, a drop of sweat rolls down her forehead to the tip of her nose and as she wipes it with her sari, she wonders when has Pinki, not even eleven years old, grown up so much.

WOMAN

The Accident

Sister Agnes Consuelo, the principal, should not be here, she should be in her office. Instead, she stands at my classroom door, looking in, and then, without saying a word, walks in, right up to the blackboard where I stand. Children, please stand up, welcome Sister Agnes, I tell them, and they say, in a chorus of fifty-one distinct voices, good afternoon, Sister Agnes, welcome to Kindergarten Class, and they all stand up, boys and girls tired and drained because it’s 1.15 p.m., barely fifteen minutes away from the end of day.

I tell them to rest their heads on their desks, close their eyes. No talking.

Sister Agnes holds my shoulder; she has never held me like this. She leans into me, she wants to tell me something in confidence, she doesn’t want the children in the class to hear, she is so close I see the charts on the softboard – of the solar system, the sun and the planets, black and blue – reflected in the curve of her glasses.

Some children promptly go back to resting their heads on their desks, eyes closed, mouth shut, just as I have instructed. Others talk, open, close desks, pack, unpack bags, tie shoelaces.

Sister Agnes has her back to them, I raise my finger to my lips to tell them to be quiet.

Sister Agnes says she wants me to go with her to the office. She says she has asked her assistant to come upstairs and supervise the children until the end of the class.

‘Please take your bag,’ she says, ‘you don’t need to return to the classroom.’

The chalk slips between my fingers, I pick it up, I dust the blackboard.

I am about to tell the children that I will be going downstairs and I will see them tomorrow when Sister Agnes says, ‘Let’s go.’

We step out of the classroom, my fingers smeared with chalk dust, my eyes blurred, Sister Agnes holds my arm as if I am learning to walk.

~

I am in her office.

Sister Agnes steps out, leaving me alone, I hear her talking to someone, a man, but I cannot make out what they are saying, she mentions my name, she mentions your father’s name.

She walks in.

‘Your daughter is on her way, we have sent someone to get her. You please sit here for a while, can I get you a glass of water, there has been an accident,’ she says. ‘Your husband.’

MAN

Paris Walk

The water cannons work, the protest is broken, the protesters – forty, fifty of them, men, women and children – begin to disperse. Gone is their rage as, flanked by policemen, they shuffle towards the ramp that exits the highway, defeated, drenched and dripping like crows caught in rain.

‘Now, traffic will begin to move,’ says Driver, smiles as he hears engines all around switch on, indicators blink, rear lights gleam, reflected in water on the cars and on the highway.

He tells Driver to go ahead and wait at the next exit, he wants to check on a little something. He steps out of the car, out of the fierce noon day on the highway in New City into early morning, breakfast time, in Paris.

~

He finds he is on rue du Bac, a sign on the wall says this is the 7th arrondissement, this is where his friend Arsh lives. Number 100. He will drop by, give him a surprise but, first, he wants to go for a walk.

How the hell did you come to Paris, Arsh will ask, why didn’t you tell me in advance, I could have planned something, but now that you are here, I am sorry, I cannot do much, I have to go to work but here is the key to my house, help yourself to whatever is there in the fridge, make yourself comfortable, I will try to come back early and then we go out at night.

He wants to see the Seine, Arsh has told him it’s a short walk from his house.

He looks around, he’s at 15 rue du Bac, right across from him is a café, Le Gévaudan. It’s yet to open, a man is cleaning up inside. Four chairs sit outside under a red awning so wide it covers almost the entire cobbled pavement.

Next door is a restaurant, Artisan Boulanger. This is also shut. There is a wine shop, Nicolas, again closed, he must have come very early, what time is it? Let me walk for a while before the shops open, he thinks.

He is hungry, he hasn’t had anything since his drink last night when Balloon Girl and her mother were asleep.

A woman in a tan coat, which reaches to her knees, throws a cigarette into a drain.

Their eyes meet.

~

Two men walk past, talking to each other, he walks through them, in between. To his right is Galerie Verneuil: a CD, DVD shop, it sells posters and postcards too, it’s open but it doesn’t draw him in, he keeps walking. Up ahead, there is the office of CB Richard Ellis. It’s a familiar name, he has to interact with their India office at work. He pitches real-estate projects to them which they offer to banks which, in turn, offer these projects to their private clients as high-return investments. Projects in New City, commercial and residential, mainly luxury, off the highway where his car stands now.

It’s cold, he is the only one on the street in just shirt and trousers.

An old woman peers through the glass window of Du Bout Du Monde, he stops to look but cannot make out what kind of a store it is, it looks like a bar with a stage against the wall, some kind of a theatre.

Every second shop on this street is a gallery of some sort.

Montres de Prestige et de Collection, 34 rue du Bac, is he walking in the right direction?

He wants to see the river first before he meets Arsh. He knows from his Google walks that streets in Paris are short. He will walk down a few blocks, if there is no river, he will turn back. An Eric Kayser is open from where he smells bread, freshly baked, and coffee, should he stop and have something to eat before the walk to the river? He decides against it, crosses rue de Verneuil, heads east towards the sun climbing the sky in front, between the grand buildings on either side, with their arches and gabled windows, walks down the narrow road squeezed in between, perpetually in shadow.

One shop has a sign in English: ‘Farrow & Ball, Manufacturers of Traditional Paper and Paint’. He imagines a workshop in the basement packed with rolls of wood pulp, vats of boiling water, drums of glue, dyes of different colours extracted from flowers.

Two trash bags, tied at the mouth, are propped at the entrance.

~

The wind is stronger, colder, it must be from the river, he crosses rue de l’Université, keeps walking down rue du Bac, that’s what Arsh has told him, the river is a short walk from my house straight down and there it is, he can see the narrow road open up into a sprawling intersection. Past rue de Lille, rue du Bac ends and merges into Pont Royal from where he can see the Seine.

Flowing, in full spate, it must have rained the whole night here.

He crosses the street, he is along Quai Anatole France, steps into a puddle, he is beginning to shiver, his teeth chatter but there are too few people out at this time for him to attract attention. He will borrow a blazer from Arsh, in his pocket he has a handkerchief that has trapped some of the heat from New City. He wears it around his neck like a scarf, covers his ears, but that brings little respite.

Maybe if he walks faster it will be warmer so he breaks into a light jog, runs along Quai des Tuileries, the Seine to his left, the river he has been dreaming of.

He reaches a bridge where a man and a boy have parked their bicycles and are looking down at the river. The water is clear, the strong wind rakes its surface setting off little eddies, the early morning sun is to his right so his shadow falls across the bridge onto the water where it trembles with the ripples. The man and the boy sense his presence, turn to look, the boy smiles at him.

Arsh has told him the weather can abruptly change, he looks up at the sky, there is a big cloud but the rest of it is a clear blue. He wishes to sit outside, have breakfast at Eric Kayser, then walk back on rue du Bac, along the river, take the Metro because up ahead he sees a sign for the station, half a mile down from Musée d’Orsay: Concorde.

From there, it’s just three Metro stops along the Yellow Line, he knows all these by heart, Line 1 towards La Défense. Past Champs-Élysées, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George V and then Charles-de-Gaulle Étoile, that’s where the Arc de Triomphe is, the monument for soldiers, it looks so much like India Gate.

He wishes Balloon Girl were there, they could take Line 6 to Bir-Hakeim and then the Eiffel Tower, from where he will show her how cities don’t look so different from high above.

~

They are at the India Gate red light.

A young man with a camera knocks on the window. ‘Sir, a photograph?’

‘Do we look like tourists?’ Driver shouts at him as the lights turn green.

He wakes up.

‘Sorry, sir,’ says Driver, ‘these men don’t listen until you shout.’

‘Keep driving, I am not going to work today,’ he says, before closing his eyes again.

CHILD

City Lights

Home for Bhow, and this evening for Orphan, is a patch of concrete, dug-up, broken, over-run with weeds and trash, under the highway between two pillars, next to a traffic intersection. So tired is Orphan that the moment he gets off Bhow, his legs buckle, his eyes close. Bhow curls up around the child, adjusts herself so that her shadow falls on Orphan’s eyes, shields him from the fierce red of the setting sun about to roll off the highway.

~

The strays of New City, Bhow’s friends and family, wake Orphan up.

He feels their eyes and ears, fur and tail, whine and scratch, bark and growl as they lick him all over, their tongues and their bodies a blur of brown and black, white and grey. One dog has her tail chewed off, another has a limp, a third has an ear missing. Bhow tells them to back off, leave Orphan alone as he rubs his eyes to find that he is drenched with light. From the blue-white, red-and-yellow billboards at The Mall. There is Zara, Debenhams, Beer Garden, the glittering sign of The Leela as wide as a city block – all emitting a glare his eyes have never seen before as he wakes up for the first time not in Little House, but far away from its familiar shapes and smells, from his corner in the bed against its wall.

Orphan begins to cry.

‘Let’s help him wash,’ says Bhow, using her nose to point out to Orphan a pipe that runs down the pillar from which water gushes through a crack. ‘Licks and kisses won’t fill his empty stomach.’

Bhow helps Orphan undress, pulls down his shorts with her jaws, pushes him ahead with the tip of her nose until the child, half walking, half crawling, comes to sit down under the pipe. Water runs down his head, slips into his ears, over his nose and his lips. He gulps, swallows, he drinks the water, shivers in its sudden cold splash. Bath done, Orphan stands up, clumsy on his two feet, water crawls under him, up, between the legs, wetting some crusted blood from early this morning when he fell once, water stinging the bruise.

He sees the lights of The Mall through the water in his eyes, bent and refracted into the colours of a rainbow. Like through the kaleidoscope Kalyani had once brought to show him how easy it is to split light from the sun.

WOMAN

Last Rites

Your father is home.