Taken From Him (Kindle Single)

by Joseph McElroy

  In front of him, an American voice, about to be interrupted, part of the design discussion, thinking for herself (or us all), asks Will this “intervention” get done? sketchbook under the point of her pencil. But “Build in the sea what you can’t on land,” the leader sweeps an arm half in irony, excited or is it irked by the Sea Link bypass, “out at sea, and over it!” — noticing now that the explorer has returned. From the beginning he could come with them or not — had he other Mumbai appointments? In fact a total stranger here. Recurred to by the girl with the sketchbook, it comes back to you, the proposal — a major creek dug to bypass causeway, encourage mangroves, provide “axis” for fishing vessels, as for market “access” (the vocabulary again), communal connection, recreation, link sea with river, much with much.

  Sewage pumping station further north? Possibly counterproductive there in the light of reclamation: It’s not so hard to reclaim land from sea but is it what you want to do? And re- ? As if land never belonged in sea? and now leader and his wife, equal leader, instructing design people what we are looking at in the project, how groves of coconut palms, the primordial settlements here, may eventually again protect the shore, facilitate docking of imagined biotreatment barges visitable as facilities that would “improve life” for families lodged in the Fort. Deservedly famous couple pause to “welcome back” journeyman guest, ask a question somehow jointly framed. How do they do that? It’s not simply in unison, it’s sensually prefabricated, psychic, curious — Indian? lovable? — and understood, though, that the question, “Did you make any friends in the Fort?” doesn’t need to be answered. He absorbs what’s asked without always hearing it — look ahead, and others in the circle on the beach half turn as if they have not been where he has. Something has changed. To belong as a guest, was that it? What the girl has taken from him did he give? Will he pay?

  In transit now through the days from Fort to volcanic City dump and along its smoking composite shores fenced off from the street and a going Muslim economy cosm we move with, glimpse the functioning of in its walking discreteness, almost know and leave, with the thought that we do not only describe like snaps to show that you were there. The leaders inspire the group, with further thoughts about their related project at the ancient fishing community out there scheduled tomorrow by Worli Fort at the entrance to the bay still closer to Sea Link but postponed, you hear.

  Another day unfolds recycling communities their hidden, jammed nakedness, nearby the smallest indoor/outdoor pottery factories, city folk eyeing visitors even momentarily to inquire all and nothing of them, street footpaths, puddles long as sourceless runnels, ladders always like propped permanence up to small clothing-factory stitcheries, whatever is holding them stacked with expectations one room above another three, four, a period room of manual typists, and this is nothing; and goats quite at home with you of such many-god-given saffrons and browns, black and white — navy blue streak? — and you’d swear of certain grays a dusty green less likely the breeder’s idea than goat’s diarrhea ultimately.

  Yet winding among waiting hours, taken to a scintillating developer’s real-time office early one evening, to virtually witness the mysteriously subsidized spirit of almost seven hundred low-cost slum rehab units jointly spread-sheeted against possibly literal explosion of population (forty million in twenty years), lower-rise, and plotted about a 24-storey upper sailing-ship-shaped structure stepped profile due to terracing — the words thought themselves again to the girl as if she weren’t always in his mind — “in essence” housing for the poor “funded by the speculative market” by means of this “commercially viable component.”

  The deal, in short.

  You can feel her here, is she on the way up or nowhere? His appointment in Mumbai.

  Interesting duplexes for lap-swimmers above with high views of sea and golf course — voices everywhere informed as the talents are cobbled together — embedded in which even in a computer slideshow is to be seen for those on whom nothing funny is wasted a real hand, the developer’s young assistant (on the slide? or between slide and screen?) signaling in memory another lensed hand two, three days ago. Getting in your way, like you putting yourself at least in the way of experience.

  One morning this tightly scheduled group of visiting designers, privileged young nomads buying bottles of water as they go, passing grand old homes made grander by banyans, by old trees once imported, and now passing down a street towards temple buildings, are to discover a many-headed Doum palm and suddenly around a corner of six-storey flats (in one of them a Hindi movie-music genius trained at Juilliard in New York one has forgotten to look up) on Malabar Hill — a great long tank of water, huge stone tranquil tank, legendary Banganga (“arrow shot into the Ganges” it was created by, once if not now). Sixty by one hundred fifty feet at a guess, sacred, flower-and bread-strewn waters, offerings laid out along the steps for purchase, stone steps on all four sides of the tank, at festivals hundreds here; beside the temple a Peepal tree, its figs sacred but not visible, a few hundred feet from the hidden sea this tank surrounded by slum voters in the midst of the City and still supplied by distant springs, an old man bathing, two boys in a small canoe chilling.

  Remote one is, yet near another. As hundreds, thousands, of monks up among their rockbound caves sleeping each upon his plinth practiced water management two thousand years ago by simple overflow of seasonal monsoon into small rock cisterns at their thresholds one down to the one below, or side by side overflow, many to many, cracks in the rock, channels made by hand and weather to catch rain little by little thoughtfully — thoughtful rain — from high to lower as if it were also from low to high. That deeply remote sector of the reservoired and forested, vast hard-to-grasp National Park bordering the mind as it borders Mumbai — in fact is in, or you could say of, Mumbai. To be there, what would it cost? you plot your question to be real with help. A guide already valued on such fugitive acquaintance who is not at Banganga nor at the caves nor to be found in the viewfinder will be paid somehow, and now like many places at once turning away from you almost unnoticed, quite far from here how does she bring home what the monks left? Which was enough if we would grasp to take away with us not just the monks’ sensible conservation but what came with it. Is it the monkeys, the macaques, that multiply near the caves and nearer the visitors and their lunch? No. Is it other animals in the forests — sequestered, it is said, if imperfectly fenced?

  The girl knows. How is she near? For she is.

  Somewhere near the National Park, its lands for all its mountains, or we would say high hills, its lands also bordered by everyday Mumbai avenues, a slum resettlement 20-square-meter flats incorporated into what foots the bill for the rehab high-rise — or was it in Worli sector? — who of us can tell in this estuarial Bombay / Mumbai / anciently offshore island of islands — but a deal in multirational syntax undertaken jointly with a local firm by a global American. Three dozen folding chairs one especially welcome for a foot-weary tourist facing in lowered light a large projection screen, the handsome working space beyond occupying a handsome ground-floor like a London or New York loft and above it an open upper level reached by stairs or ladder, your call.

  What is wrong, with everything so right? A still larger architect studio tonight, is it mad easygoing? — after this evening’s presentation of recent completed institutional work by the firm’s representative head architect here. Weighty college campuses outside Mumbai (you had to wonder watching slides slide by), seeing double the neoclassical banal. Young Asian from Cornell sitting in the next seat, her foot comfortably under her, asks, all by herself, “Why this?” Others equally young murmur sort of wordlessly like a so soft ululation, but her elbow jabs you by mistake, as, equally astute, she whispers she is sorry like a silent, sweet-breathed snicker and her neighbor hears himself say quite out loud to the very big, still unknown man at the projector, “How does it change you to walk into a set of buildings like that?”

  “Have ya never been to coll
ege? Well, good luck finding landscape clients,” the host replies, not knowing the questioner.

  Presently, lights up upon the erosion of the evening still waiting for the meaning to coalesce amid a constant, virtually structural smiling. One takes in the place without looking too closely out of one’s curious curiosity. Against the walls formica surfaces, stacks of drawings, tracings, invoices, books, black and white, or planed precariously like a fanciful mock-up a fugitive red notebook perched under an anglepoise — three dozen anglepoise lamps continuous with the tilt of drafting tables either side of a median spread of light refreshments. And the jovial host weightily big but with the athletic timing of certain also shaved-bald holy men, “originally” from Sacramento, once a flood risk, now a drought, here in his office grinning upon being introduced by leader and friend to the mystery visitor: “— giving us his take on our—” “What?” “— our coastal interventions and you know terracing up in the —” “His take?” “— up in the valleys.” “Ah.” “Outlet channels in the reservoir valleys turn them into —”

  “Holdings,” special guest intervenes on his own on his leader and kind friend’s behalf — “Ah, yeah, yo’ water-lovin’ gig up there in the Naeetional Park.” The two architects laugh. “Good luck with that stuff, buddy, that’s your kind of uh —”

  “— like a field,” mystery guest intervenes again, “rather than channel, as I understand it, spreading the monsoon waters, even terracing as sewage filters (?), as I under —” “Ah, you’ve experienced the monsoon?” resident Yank to a visiting — who now, as if it were all natural — spots the girl the girl.

  “But he is an economist,” intervenes your leader politely adding (using, including, surely not almost needing you), “aren’t you, and” (to the host) “a poet quite well-known.” “A real writer,” the radiant Indian wife adds / offers / corrects / adroitly perhaps peace-makes (?), “oh a real —”

  “— story teller!” comes a voice that stills it seems the whole place for a moment, familiar voice: astonishingly it is the Mahim Fort guide and companion photo-op girl who has been here all the time, unseen for a moment behind the boss’s retorting bulk. Or earlier at large in the studio. Mingling in an efficiency of overhead floods and designer guests. Her contribution to this joint introduction inserts too much clarity, for already the host, overlapping her, as he turned to reveal her behind him, addressing the visitor but not quite contemplating him, “Well, you’re going to have to start telling the truth now” — grins all around.

  “About the work we’ve seen tonight?” mystery guest returns the point point-and-click. Host turns slowly, the girl behind him brushed by her employer’s elbow, even the back of his hand? (a pet?) — for you’ve said your say; for what is at stake? Yet her laugh, so exact, is heard equally now by the host who must speak to it as well: “Oh I’ve done that for you in the slide lecture, pics worth a thousand words,” host fixes his cordial aim like a corbelled balcony pushed out over everyone threatened.

  “Then why the lecture?” you have to wonder; yet host-employer turning to the girl, for it is she, the Fort girl, astonishingly, but of course! and as before with eye makeup but not lipstick, it seems, and, if heard by anyone else, only by you by some state-of-the-art device his words to her are grasped — “The mystery guest, I gather,” ignoring your “It takes me so long to learn.”

  “You have so much at stake,” the girl said then as clearly as words could describe it, “take it from me,” whatever in the world she could mean, though she swept her look between the two men; and the leader-friend and his wife, and the younger Americans, all together for a moment in her knowledge of how far out of it she in her state might be, yet no special comradeship for the older woman to be sensed in the girl. The maturity of women not an act, the storyteller hopes.

  It had been a laugh, hers if you wanted to hear it, near and material, sociable, ghostly, and in an original thread young. Among all the would-be professional bodies and voices, here again, not ancient, the Indian girl: so show you know her. An intern maybe, who’s found an everyday home, standing like a guest which she wasn’t, cordially near the Americans, the architects, the pros, and the visiting design students loading up on cashews, carrots and cheese, olives, best of all crisp pakora, drinking from plastic cups all somehow associated with the girl, he would understand in a moment.

  Both men, if nobody else, had felt the girl’s laugh, and the American architect, the host, with a pretty big if puppet operation here, snapping his fingers pointed her to some task she needed to attend to, small is beautiful. When she moved, a familiar earring, some silvery shape with a shining jet dot of eye in it perhaps, and she was gone; as the visitor, the writer, the also amateur tagging along with his professional friends, grasping at it all (who had everything, even unto being an amateur), added (for her to hear), “It takes me even longer” — though not without a slant at the host, though himself for the moment old; and watched her go and actually disappear, swaying as she went, a life-form in a silver-mirrored blue tunic and jeans, taking time with her: reappear and fling open a fridge and its interior lights that itself seemed to appear out of a wall that hadn’t been there. Which man had she been laughing with? Was there any doubt? A microwave saving time.

  “What stories?” tonight’s host puts it to you but maybe not; growling like quick-sketching a Greco-Roman façade for India’s future. But, turned to by him whom he has challenged, big man nods agreeably elsewhere to the Americans as if they have spoken to him, and maybe one of the gals is looking for a job over here designing campuses or atrium décor — or slum-rises.

  Yet presently at the far end where an Indian gentleman is telling us who would listen what the anthropology of the slum-family’s field of planning and structure implies, and the deceptive drums and tailgate Ganesh festival you have seen out your cab window coming from the airport, the girl is not at this end now, she’s passed through the fridge and the microwave into the distant front end of the studio. Transferring from cardboard boxes to platters potato and fried eggplant pakoras, only to interrupt herself and answer, with quick, aroused steps toward him, the big man, her employer. Who has something to say to her, and she to him — they have words — when he points toward the back now fifty feet away — it’s the mystery guest surely he points to — and she does not look, she’s having a discreet row with her boss, who cools, shakes his head as she speaks, and again shakes perhaps more than his head — who just maybe reprimands her not to fire her but to keep her, holding her by the shoulders not quite to shake her, as anyone can see who misses nothing.

  The anthropologist asked his question again, the leader elbowed you gently, his overflow of pleasure in others as fluid surprises almost in themselves — and mystery guest obliges in kind: So now your citizens are to carry hammers to break car windows if high water floods automatic systems. The terrible swift floods of July 2005, as one understands it, blamed your poor little fucked-up River Mithi, which even more is now to be fixed in a predictable map of city planning procedure in fact a centuries’-old war against water, which is not what an estuary’s aqueous terrain demands. Likewise one’s family asks access each member to each across creeks flowing in more than one direction, elastic spaces to be improvised with, lived with, mudflats our in-between resources for overflows or high tides not to be erased by reclam— … (you seem to tell a story, what was the original question anthropologist asked? — for people are nodding alertly — an Asian woman writing in a notebook)… family you arrive at is like water and will be given its various motions, its gradients and fields of porous holdings not dammed and master-planned.

  The wife in all her radiant wit and responsibility her lightly brocaded kurti, her senses of others, also her genius, takes your arm, “You see! It was an amazing answer to the question how economics, landscape, everyday life and storytelling coincide!”

  And your laugh at this — and not drunk at least on the wine — though breathless seeing then your Indian girl at the other end —
has she lost her job? got even? — stride across to find her bag behind a stack of office things — will cover other reasons to laugh, as you reluctantly excuse yourself. (“Remember Worli Fort tomorrow,” words follow perhaps from what has been said.) The girl has taken a medium notebook from a precarious stack of folders and books — a plastic wine glass takes a tumble — the red notebook recalled from the Fort she slips into her bag looking only to her exit yet seemingly everywhere, a god unknown to herself, if the amazing answer to an almost unknown question could be written down in a letter to her.

  At the door mystery guest will not hearken to the host’s call, the presiding American thug architect’s Hey where you goin’? — but outside in the evening established before you, are dark edifices built by the British in this professional neighborhood of is it south central Mumbai darkened even in daytime by great imported trees now in the half-light the bark alive with an India foreigned of such profit-sharing distances as New York and London offer and those half-knowns we make into knowns, a warped and gall-bulging raintree scale of trunk not for all the poor all of the time, and there are many trees but not clear what they are doing.

  Where is this? Across the street a man sits the seat of a Vespa, the girl her hand on its near handlebar angry and exact. A pose that says Family but says to the forty-year-old man who sits the seat poised to spring grimly mechanized wholly from here that she will not be tolerated by him. Angrier and more the two of them, her hand on the Vespa says to herself she has a stake in this Vespa through the body of the man who owns it and even her at times; who shakes her hand off so he can get going — she could wrench the angled right-side mirror right away from its base.