She Will Build Him a City (2 page)

Passengers ride escalators like toy men, toy women in a Shanghai factory he once saw on the Discovery channel: small and stiff, gliding up the belt, emerging face first. Followed by neck, chest, waist, legs, and, in the end, feet.That topple into a box to be hot-sealed closed, shipped across the ocean. To cities where there are more toys than children.

Next train 02 min.

The station is crowded, he closes his eyes, sees everyone naked and bruised.

Deep gashes scour bare stomachs and thighs like mouths of brown bags slit open.

Women squat on haunches blowing air into wrinkled penises.

Like children with balloons.

One is red, a womb floating in blood, inside which a foetus glows.

He feels an erection coming.

He opens his eyes, his heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, John Keats.

~

He likes poetry, he doesn’t like wet, he doesn’t like spray or spatter. No knife, no thick rope, no iron rods, the most popular weapons behind the headline murders in this city. Of Aarushi, the schoolgirl; mother Gurpreet and daughter Jasmeen; French tourist Lauren; Afghan woman Paimana and the elderly couple in Greater Kailash I, most of them stabbed, cut in many places. Or strangled, bludgeoned. Won’t work for him because he knows his arms lack strength and even if he gathers enough force to hit, it’s unlikely he will kill with the first blow which means he will have to keep hitting and, in the process, smear and stain larger areas. Perhaps, provoke a scream. There are 29,468 people per square kilometre in this city (Census 2011), twice that many is the number of ears.

Someone is bound to hear.

He could use a gun with a silencer, quiet and quick. As in movies he’s watched, books he’s read. Murder in Echo Park, Los Angeles, rain sliding down car windows, fogged in the cold. A park in Asker, near Oslo, a politician found in an empty swimming pool, a white tennis ball hammered deep into her throat. But this is fact, not fiction.

There are 20 million bodies in this city and then there is the heat.

Each body softened, warmed throughout the day in a marinade of its sweat and odours, hair oil, dust thrown up by diggers, cement mixers, earthmovers, dumptrucks. All tearing down, building up. New station, new flyover, new apartment block, new mall, new street, New City. Where everyone rubs against you, stands so close you hear their blood flow, skin crawl, hearts pump. Like the sound of trains running at night. You see remnants of meals lodged in teeth, trapped under nails stained yellow; cellphone screens smudged with wax from ears, flecked with flakes of dead skin.

Late at night, just before they close, eyes gleam with greed; during the day, they dim with despair.

~

He read a poem in school,
On Killing a Tree
by Gieve Patel, a doctor who lives in Mumbai. He has some lines by heart.

It takes much time to kill a tree,

Not a simple jab of the knife

Will do it . . .

. . . So hack and chop

But this alone won’t do it . . .

. . . The bleeding bark will heal

And from close to the ground

Will rise curled green twigs . . .

No,

The root is to be pulled out –

. . . Out from the earth cave,

And the strength of the tree exposed
,

The source, white and wet . . .

. . .Then the matter

Of scorching and choking

In sun and air,

Browning, hardening,

Twisting, withering.

And then it is done.

End of poem, he’s never killed a human being. Only once, he has killed – a dog.

~

He hears the train.

He loves the Metro from the bottom of his heart, the place where he knows bad blood turns into good. He loves each train with its four, sometimes six, some have eight, Bombardier coaches. That’s why, on nights like this one, he leaves his car at home to take the train back from wherever he is.

~

When he is nine years ten years old, he has a severe stomach ache, fierce spasms twist and crush his insides, make him cry into his pillow every night for a week. Father takes him to hospital where they make him swallow barium sulphate, then track its movement by taking X-ray pictures every half-hour until they have an entire album of black, translucent plates which, when held against the light, show the barium travelling through his body.

He holds that last image in his head: that of a thin, white trace moving straight down in the black, through the cloudy haze of organs, knotting into whorls and loops where the ulcers are, then travelling clear again, uninterrupted.

Like the Metro.

Each train a glowing pill swallowed, coursing through the dark insides of this sick city.

On the way home from hospital, Father buys him a cricket bat and a roll of Poppins hard-boiled candy to take the barium’s taste away.

~

The train pulls in, pushing, in front, a wave of warm air from the tunnel to the platform. Doors open, people spill. A smell like rotting vegetables, bread and bananas gone bad.

Dead and damp.

Poet Gieve Patel is a painter, too. He did
Man in the Rain with Bread and Bananas. (
Oil on canvas, 2001
.
) That’s his favourite because the man in the painting looks like his father. The same sad eyes, the same old glasses.

Next station is Patel Chowk, doors will open to the right, mind the gap.

Twelve stops before he reaches home in Apartment Complex, New City.

Standing, he closes his eyes.

CHILD

Little House

The night is so hot the moon shines like the sun, its light as bloodless white as bone, casting a cold shadow of a woman as she steps off an autorickshaw, carrying her newborn wrapped in a thin, blood-red towel, tells its driver to wait, walks up to Little House, a home for children, orphaned and destitute, leaves the baby on its doorstep, turns and walks away into a wind, slight but searing, that slaps her in the face and fills her eyes with water.

The only eyewitness to this abandonment is Bhow, a black-and-white dog, surprisingly clean given the garbage heap she’s sitting on. She watches the woman leave the child, she watches her get back into the autorickshaw which drives away, the vehicle and its shadow both swallowed by the night heat rolling in from across the scorched bed of the Yamuna, the river with no water.

By night’s end, this heat pushes the temperature to a few points above 40, the highest minimum in the city’s recorded history.

It kills twelve people, seven over sixty, five under six.

The city’s two night shelters, mandated to be kept open by the Delhi High Court during winter, turn into makeshift clinics to treat those with dehydration and heat stroke. These shelters, however, soon run out of beds, food and water, forcing hundreds to sleep on pavements, many on street dividers fanned by exhaust from passing vehicles. Some find spaces in the shells of broken-down buses, some at the entrance to Metro stations where, if they are lucky, they catch whatever they can of the air-conditioned draught that escapes from inside a coach when its doors open, when a train stops.

~

At nine the next morning, by which time the temperature has already touched 45, Mrs Usha Chopra, the conscientious receptionist and secretary to the director of Little House – she takes the Metro from her home in Dwarka and, underground, the air conditioning works – discovers the baby, its eyes closed, its pulse jumpy, and when she touches the tip of its wrinkled nose, its heat almost scalds her finger.

Hurriedly draping her dupatta over the bundle, Mrs Chopra carries the baby inside, sits down at her desk, pulls her chair closer to the aircooler and when she peels away the towel’s layers, she almost cries out aloud as if she has witnessed a miracle unfold.

For, this is a boy.

Only the second boy in the orphanage – there are seventy-eight girls – and a boy with no visible disability, a fact of no small import since the only other boy in Little House is Sunil, no last name, five years old and still unadopted because he has Down’s syndrome.

The new baby begins to cry.

~

‘Let me look, Didi, let me look,’ says Asma Khatoon, the janitor, running, almost tripping over the bucket of Dettol water she is mopping the floor with. ‘
Masha Allah
,’ she says, wiping her hands on her sari, torn in too many places to count, ‘so beautiful is this child, may I hold him?’

‘No, no, nothing doing,’ says Mrs Chopra, ‘your hands are wet, we can’t let anything happen to him. He doesn’t look more than a day old, look at the red patches on his head, the skin peeling off his fingers. You go tell the day nurse to prepare some milk, God knows how long he’s been unfed, we need to clean him up, we need to fill him up with water. Imagine, this poor child, left alone in this heat. What if a dog from the garbage heap had scented him out, attacked him last night.’

According to the rules of Little House, Mrs Chopra’s first task is to report this new entry so she walks to the director’s office but not before she has recorded a clip of the baby on her phone, the blink of one eye, the slight wiggle of one toe, and checked the boxes in the form: ‘normal, male, infant’.

~

In his thirteen years as director of Little House, Rajat Sharma – Indian Administrative Service, 1988; MPA, Kennedy School, Harvard, 2000 – has never seen a ‘normal male infant’ being left on his doorstep.

‘Who lets go of a boy, Mrs Chopra, tell me who? Which mother has done this? And, that too, in so killing a heat wave? Which father’s heart is so hard?’ says Mr Sharma, himself the father of a son. ‘Let’s immediately get his files in order, I want all paperwork done before I leave for home today. And if we get this right, Mrs Chopra, I, you, all of us, will be on TV. English, Hindi, all channels. Boy deserted on the hottest night since Independence. I can already see the ticker: “Breaking News, Coldheart Mother Dumps Baby In Record Heat”.’

‘Of course, sir,’ says Mrs Chopra. ‘What name should we enter in the file?’

‘Name?’ He pauses but only for a second. ‘Call him Orphan. That’s it, Orphan. It’s an unusual name, that’s what TV people want.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Mrs Chopra.

‘Also, it’s a common noun,’ says Mr Sharma, ‘like a blank. Like “Baby”. Any family which adopts him can fill in their own, whatever name they like.’

~

Over the next hour, Orphan is fed, changed, washed, all the while lying next to the red towel he has been found in.

‘This must carry the smell of his mother,’ Mrs Chopra tells Asma, ‘until Kalyani the night nurse comes, this will help calm him down.’ And help it does. His hunger fed, his thirst quenched by milk and water spooned into him, his body cooled by a sponge-wash and wind from the aircooler through which running water gurgles like a stream, the sound of a lullaby, Orphan slips in and out of sleep, his head resting on the red towel left behind by his mother.

Where is his mother?

Where’s Bhow, that first eyewitness?

The dog has watched it all and although, in the normal course of things, her little head and heart should not register any of this, they do, and so she finds a cool corner in the garbage heap to sit where she sheds a drop of dog-tear that no one but herself can see.

WOMAN

Old Child

I speak so softly I wonder whether my words carry to you. Up the stairs, so weak, do they slip under your door, climb into your bed, reach your ears? Because if they don’t, please let me know. I will retell this story, of the giant, the very tall woman.

~

Last night, I hear nothing. I am in bed, tired, my legs hurt, my eyes begin to close, I hear neither the door knock nor the window rattle. Or the sound of her footsteps up the stairs, her fidgeting with the lock, her walking into the house, all 12 feet of her. She knows where I am, she knows where everything in my house is because she walks without disturbing a thing, no tripping, no stumbling, she walks into the bedroom, to the edge of my bed from where she lifts me up, she carries me out of the room, she walks with me and the strange thing is that I am not aware of any of this because I have fallen asleep, I don’t know when exactly, and it’s only when my eyes open that I realise I am not in bed, the floor is at least 9 feet, 10 feet below me and it’s clear this is the woman you asked me about that winter afternoon thirty years forty years ago.

She is here.

The woman, at least 12 feet tall.

~

The last time I am lifted so high off the ground, it’s on the Ferris wheel in the park with you and your father. We are on our way back from the Zoo. You are six years seven years old, I get so dizzy I close my eyes. Your father laughs, look, she’s so scared, he says. That dizziness returns last night although I have no reason to be afraid: she holds me firm, my chin rests comfortably on her shoulder, I smell the cotton fabric of her sari, bright yellow, I feel her hair, black and glossy, brush my face. I wish to see what she looks like, for that I need to turn my head but I prefer to stay still. Once, twice, she bends, tries to avoid grazing the ceiling. I try to speak but fear, like someone or something, has pushed its way into my mouth, caught my tongue between its fingers. So, my lips part but no words come as she pats me on the back like I am a baby she is trying to help fall asleep.