She Will Build Him a City (6 page)

It’s called
On Dreams.

There is a strong link, Bergson says, between what we see, what we touch and what we hear when we are awake and what we see, what we touch and what we hear when we are dreaming – between our self and our dream-self. He says that, when we are awake, ‘we live outside of ourselves’ and it’s only when we sleep, that ‘we retire into ourselves’. So when we close our eyes, right at the moment of falling asleep, the coloured spots and moving forms that we see are the ones that consolidate into the outlines of objects and people we then go on to see in our dreams. Bergson calls this the ‘visual dust’ that fabricates our dreams. This visual dust is fed by memory and sensations. Memories stored deep in our unconscious. And the sensations we feel when we sleep: external sensations like the touch of the pillow, our feet against the sheet, the hard bed; internal sensations like the heart beating inside us, the blood coursing through our veins. All these combine to become the content of dreams.

~

That’s where the idea of using the toys came to me. Not just the toys, my child, look around and you shall see. There is so much more.

I sprinkle visual dust all around.

I set up your bedroom before you arrive.

I buy toys, put them in a line right next to the windowsill, so that you will look at the animals before you fall asleep. I get an air conditioner on rent, only for you, install it in a place so that its draught covers the entire bed. I change the mattress, get one that’s stiff, that stays firm, so that when you lie down, your back doesn’t strain. I get a bedsheet the colour of water, a thin blanket the colour of grass.

So if Bergson is right and if your hands brush against the toys or the toys are the last thing you see before you close your eyes, maybe you will dream of a forest. With happy animals in it, all brightly coloured. You will dream of a yellow mouse going to school, a giraffe in a hat, a bear with an umbrella. You will find yourself lying down on a bed of soft green grass. In your hair, there will be a cool wind. And because the room is so cold, the forest floor will be covered with snow.

MAN

House Guests

‘Only ten rupees,’ says Balloon Girl.

~

Red Balloon must have been filled recently since it tugs hard, wants to fly away into the night, so the girl has tied its string around her wrist – looped it over several times – which she now thrusts at him.

‘Only one left,’ she says. ‘The last.’

‘Come home with me,’ he says, ‘there is food, I will give you a bed to sleep in, I will give you some money, there’s no work that you have to do.’

His heart’s racing so hard he can hear it. He’s never done something like this before, he is amazed that he has said what he has said.

Balloon Girl smiles, looks at her mother who looks at him.

The mother, too, has never before heard anyone say this to her.

Once, not very long ago, a woman rolls down her car window and says, ‘Why are you and your daughter begging? Why don’t you come and work in my house? Bring your daughter along, I will pay you.’ Before she can reply, however, the lights change, the woman’s car drives away, she never sees her again. Another time, there’s a man in a car who gestures to her to come closer, puts his hand in his pocket to make it seem he’s taking out money to give to her but when she walks up to him, stands right next to his window, his hand darts out and, in full view of everyone, he grabs her breast.

But this is the first time someone’s telling her, come home with me, I have things to give, none to take. He looks young, he doesn’t look so strong. If he tries to do something funny, she can hit him, there are two of them against the one of him.

~

‘Whatever you have to give, give us here, we are not going anywhere,’ the mother says, drawing her daughter close to her, Red Balloon half covering her face.

‘There’s nothing to fear,’ he says. ‘I will drop you back right here.’

She doesn’t answer, she walks away. He counts her steps, one to twelve. He watches her talk to her daughter.

‘Tell me quickly, I can’t keep waiting,’ he says. ‘I am going for a walk, I will be back in five minutes.’

~

That’s an act he’s putting on. For, he is wary now. A hospital security guard is looking at him. He can’t arouse suspicion, he walks towards the hospital’s main entrance, looking straight ahead, trying hard to appear normal, as if he is a patient or a visitor. He turns around to look at her, makes that turn as casual as he can. Sees she is still talking to the child. What are they discussing? The mother needs the daughter’s advice? Will she call someone? He isn’t sure. These days, everyone has a cellphone, even those who go hungry. Does she have one, too? If she has, won’t that be a problem? He’s barely yards away from the Emergency entrance when he turns again to look. If she doesn’t respond, call out to him, in the next one minute, two minutes, he is going to keep walking, he will walk out of the hospital and never return because he doesn’t want to be stopped, questioned by anyone although he knows that’s unlikely given the crowd of visitors even at so late an hour.

The next time he turns to look at her, she nods her head.

Mother and Balloon Girl agree.

He calls a taxi.

He opens the rear door for them, slips into the passenger seat in front.

Apartment Complex, New City, he says.

Let’s go, says Taxi Driver as he looks at the woman and the child in the rear-view mirror.

~

They stand in the centre of his 800-square-foot bathroom, Mother and Balloon Girl, casting shadows on the white onyx tiles on the floor, holding each other, fearful the walls will close on them and the spotless, smooth floor will move away from underneath their bare feet.

‘Nothing to be afraid of, both of you are so dirty,’ he says, knowing that he should put it more politely but aware that he doesn’t need to be polite, there’s no one in the room listening to him except these two.

‘I am going to leave you in the bathroom alone, I have clean clothes for you here.’ He points to a brown wicker chair in the corner where he’s put two bathrobes, one for the mother, one for the child.

Their empty eyes follow his.

‘You wear them like this,’ he slips on a bathrobe over his clothes, ties its belt at the waist. It reaches just below his knees, it will cover her ankles. ‘It’s like a towel,’ he says, ‘it will soak all the water, dry you up.’

His movements are awkward, he hasn’t done anything like this before.

Neither mother nor child says a word.

‘Take this,’ he says.

He hands Mother and Balloon Girl a fresh soap each, pink for the girl, blue for the mother (Shea Soap, Rs 175 each). Each gets a Bath Lily (Rs 200).

‘Use this to scrub the dirt off,’ he says. ‘But you need to wet it with water first.’ He shows them how, switches on the fan in the bathroom, turns it towards the bathtub.

‘Sit in there, here are two buckets, I will mix the water for you, hot and cold,’ he says.

Two buckets full.

‘I am right here’ – he leaves the bathroom, closes the door behind him –‘you take your time, let me know if you need anything.’

~

It’s a little after one in the morning, most lights in Apartment Complex are out. He pours himself a drink, drops an ice-cube into it, hears it crack, hears the water splash in the bathroom, hears Balloon Girl and Mother talk, laugh, the shower curtain rustle. He hears the tap run.

‘Be careful,’ he calls out, ‘keep checking the water otherwise you may burn yourself.’

He isn’t sure if they know blue is cold, red is hot.

He doesn’t want an accident.

So far things have progressed smoothly: he brings them here by taxi, Red Balloon between them, touching the taxi’s roof. Sit on the floor, he whispers to them when they are about to enter Apartment Complex, to avoid the closed-circuit TV cameras at the entrance. Taxi Driver couldn’t care less, he’s not even looking. In case Security Guard at the entrance to his building stops, asks him, sir, who are these two, he knows what to say: they are my new maids, they were stranded since they missed the last Metro and I had to go and pick them up.

But when they walk in, Security Guard isn’t there.

He tips Taxi Driver extra for not speaking throughout the ride, for not asking any questions.

~

Mother and Balloon Girl step out of the bathroom, dripping, both in bathrobes half-wrapped, half-open, their old clothes in a soiled heap on the floor. He has kept food for them on the table.

Warm bread with butter and jam already spread, for Balloon Girl. Boiled egg. Breakfast at night. For the mother, there’s fried rice and chicken leftovers from the meal he ordered in from the Chinese restaurant at The Leela the previous day.

They don’t want to sit at the table. They eat, sitting on the floor, their bathrobes wet against the wall. He leaves the room, lets them eat in private.

He returns to pour them water in glasses, chilled. He shows them the guest room where they can sleep where the AC has been on the entire evening, the room cold like in winter.

~

Balloon Girl is fast asleep. Mother, too. The girl has tied Red Balloon to the armrest of a chair in the room, some of its gas has leaked away, it hovers above her face, above her hair, black, cropped close. He doesn’t want them to know where he lives, he has to drop them off before sunrise but he will let them sleep for a while because he likes to watch them sleeping.

Watch Balloon Girl’s bare legs, her mother’s feet. He can do anything with them now and no one will know.

~

In their white bathrobes that fall open so that he can see their skin, Mother’s breast and Balloon Girl’s ribs, they look like giant white canna lilies strewn on his bed. Like the women in the Diego Rivera print he has framed on his wall. He takes all the time in the world to move, step by careful step, as if he’s walking on jagged glass, so that they are not disturbed. He gets into bed, lies down, his back pressed against the wall, in a position so awkward he isn’t sure how long he can stay that way.

Next to him, Mother and Balloon Girl move in their sleep.

He can’t get his heart to slow down, he’s afraid its beating will wake them up. He is still, his body tense, his muscles taut. He can smell them, soap, water and dinner. Water from their hair has stained the bedsheet in two shapeless patches of wet. In the night light, he can see Mother’s feet, her nails ingrown and chipped. Countless crevices crack her hard heels, skin peels on the soles of her feet like earth gone dry. Balloon Girl’s feet, in contrast, are soft, she must have stayed in the water for a while because the tips of her fingers and toes are still wrinkled.

He touches Balloon Girl’s heels, she doesn’t move her leg, he lets his hand rest there and he closes his eyes, setting the alarm clock inside his head for an hour so that he can wake them up in the dark, get them to change back into their clothes, give them some money, drop them back at the entrance to the hospital.

And if Balloon Girl doesn’t mind, he will keep Red Balloon which bobs in the night air in the room, drowsy, not far from the sleeping child and her mother.

CHILD

Enter Bhow

In her broken English, which she is trying to mend at free classes an NGO offers two days a week to domestic helps, Kalyani reads Orphan stories from books donated to the Little House library. She sings him Bengali songs she’s heard from her parents, nonsense rhymes; she tells him about days when she herself is a child in the village who hears the April nor’-wester whistle through mango trees, chases dragonflies as they flit, from leaf to leaf, across the surface of the pond unbroken, still as glass, just before the skies open up with rain. She tells him how she goes to the city one day to see the trams. Like trains, but smaller. Only two coaches that go so slow you can hop on, hop off without the tram stopping. The first circus her father takes her to where a man rides a motorcycle spinning himself up and down the sides of a spherical cage. She includes bits from her biography: about her brother, who works as a gardener, and her sister who would love to play with him. She tells Orphan about how her father and mother don’t have any money to buy her dolls when she is a child so she makes her own. With paper, shreds of cloth, broomsticks, coloured glass from broken bangles. Of course, Kalyani knows that Orphan is too young to understand any of these stories, that her words sail over his head but, she knows this, too, that the words, wrapped in the warmth of her voice in all its cadences, its sings and its songs, lull him to sleep.

~

There’s one story that’s her favourite.

And Orphan’s, too, for this is the one he responds the most strongly to, in which he follows each move of Kalyani’s eyes, hands and lips, tracks her every gesture. So Kalyani makes this part of her daily routine with him, right at the end, just after he is fed, washed and ready for bed.

Carrying Orphan, she walks with him down the long hallway of Little House.

‘Today, we will look at three of your friends and see how each one of them came here. Look, there is Sunil, you know how Sunil came here? He came here in a big car that drove right up to the gate.’ Through a window, they can see the street outside and Kalyani points Orphan to a car passing by.