Taken From Him (Kindle Single)

by Joseph McElroy

  In angry argument with the man, her father doubtless, now (as if one hadn’t seen it happen) not on the Vespa but standing on the curb beside her and you’d cruelly like to hear what they are saying; it was English, now not.

  She’s told him she quit her job. Or told him nothing, or will go on with could-be nonpaying internship — or she has said nothing new. And “tomorrow” is heard, and “day after tomorrow” in English, then as she turns away from her father, for it must be him, or her prideful uncle, and has seen a man she knows of a certain age in a rainjacket with an umbrella, and the anger growing as words sink away from it inhabits the man’s eyes which are his daughter’s eyes and wishing to hear what they’ve been saying about what will happen tomorrow and tomorrow in a place, the American has been noticed…

  The man with his daughter’s eyes sees him and does not look away for a moment. One might have said, Your father… thinking also, has an instinct.

  She wouldn’t quite touch him, she’s going to walk. He swings his leg through and settles on the seat, reaches for the starter button. He tries, he’s absent, absorbed, male, grim, humiliated again, looking ahead and speaking; he jiggles the button, she points somewhere and he finds an aerosol can of contact cleaner with a straw coming out the top, and she berates him and then he has got the Vespa going. He swings the back of his right hand hard across her face cleverly enough to nearly knock her down.

  And he is gone. Is she his wife? Not likely, he looks like her, acts like her, doesn’t he? — will look ahead and claim things are true. Is still a father. Like day laborers, three men watch her get herself together, she is adjusting her nose it seems.

  “It is only family,” were stiff words later remembered, like a precise demeanor embracing their history in the Fort and in the handsome ground-floor studio just now and her estimate of people, if not of him, officially greeting him at the curb, “You see what becomes of me if I speak about a bridge in the National Park and a reservoir if there was a canoe for you the best entrance along the east road.” To one’s longing she speaks.

  Yes, that was her father and not a bad man, though wild, she grants.

  Wild?

  See what he drives, she shakes her head not like a young fan of the motor trade. He knows all kinds of things in the National Park, he knows his job. He knows what happens every day.

  What is that?

  “Do you doubt me?” The umbrella gathered in her hand she is glad of, her nose not bleeding. “What has happened will happen. But that is not all. That is what he says.”

  She both prolongs her stay on the curb of the sidewalk and does not. Why must you go everywhere with this group? she wants to know. Because they were smart, because he has a job to do really, though it is not spoken of. A sprinkle of rain seems to pass but doesn’t. Water in Mumbai holds us together. She has charmingly taken from him his compact umbrella, holds it tight. She looks O.K. What did she take from him in the Fort?

  She had stuck to you and surely not by your following her. Day after tomorrow the best entrance to the National Park — she mentions a street. Why day after tomorrow?

  She has turned away. “But what are you?” she’s back without having gone. Her hands are free-looking as if she weren’t holding the umbrella, a fighter. “I could walk away from this. There are enough bad architects — it is like that global education center down South” — her phrase strange — “with marble everywhere and informal seating around the grand staircase like those big dams the man once called temples.” Nehru she meant, centuries of planetariums ago it seems, who could not love India so much loved he not the future more. Two women stopped without quite stopping, speaking in undertones as if you had stopped for them, and the girl produced a few coins, muttering reproachfully, “And why you say it takes you so long to learn? You said that in there. It was him or you.”

  And, while he looked in his pockets, thinking he’d probably never see her again, “Well did you make any friends in there tonight?” she said, she might have heard the question asked him two days ago when he came out of the fort apparently without her, the compacted existence and rank thought inside, and raw dwelling, relations and underfed energy, almost impassable corridors by turns distant-daylight or lightbulb dusk, that late Mahim beach morning, And then, with the group, a change of itinerary outside the Fort that morning, and then another, and the girl all but forgotten. Yet she had described an architect she would take him to visit. “But your group is already going — it is Novi Mumbai — New Mumbai — a studio for many thinking people to work and live, he says, ‘Space we subconsciously create’ — and a filler of in-between spaces, between your home and a warehouse for instance, a place sandwiched” (she had laughed, taking them down a corridor holding out her hand to a woman who passed as if she passed through them, so close).

  And now tonight he thought Who was the architect she had meant, who also had built a summer house very open with a secret room beneath for water fed from an aquifer still further below, sustainable, he had thought she said, though which aquifer and how could it be privately sourced? So that now in the narrow street of a professional neighborhood that her father had just departed, a taxi like a question slowed, then accelerated, and the two women moved on fluidly or doing their job. And the girl said, hearing his thought, “You remember the man I told you of, his secret water room, his in-between architecture, I could take you to him. Planted trellises, wood screens filter out what you need not turn away from. But you will make something better, or you already have, at your age.” Could she have meant something already achieved? — for she had muttered, he would swear, “They will look up to you,” swear later, at home in a fifth-floor B&B with antique bureaus and is it mahogany the wardrobe, and a casement looking out on the spectacular promenade of Marine Drive at night and bordering it a bay and Arabian Sea, the view nothing like Mahim Fort’s bay three miles away on this islanded terrain, three mornings ago — for what has changed?

  Two Vespas one after the other senselessly close to the curb as if this were a once-cobbled puddle path in a teeming market street. And she was still here. He could not give her money. He could get her a visa, the thought found him like a wild and insidious friend in himself who would walk away unnoticed; later an idea he might have bought her a meal after all those hors d’oeuvres. “You are like a flurry of rain,” she turned to leave him here knowing he could use a guide to get home, “end of the monsoon, you know? That final sweep coming in from the sea across Marine Drive,” she spoke so, “you know where that is, I know you know, even the weight of it at the very end of the monsoon, you will see it tomorrow. You come and you go.” Her voice holds its own music. With her free hand she picked from her hair the jasmine sprig before it fell.

  “I hear you,” her American ventures, “but there is a day after tomorrow?” What had she and her father spoken of? Between them, father and daughter whatever is shared awkward ongoing, stupid yet raw, not fixed.

  A mark on her nose, a fine bruise her hard-worked beauty, imperfect, had contempt for, like the fleck, infinitesimal crack on her lip, not old lipstick but surely not blood. Character. For she let him go by going herself without a word more except what she left him with to recall — did he hear her say, “Not gonna take it”?

  Yet to cross the path of such a person and not know what it was — an interesting danger? some access traded to him for what? And later imagine that she who might prove as impossible as a Mumbai girl begging persistently on the street had stuck to him of all people, And beginning when? For he, a brief visitor in the City, was hardly here, he felt the borrowed camera at his rib as if he would catch as catch can what this girl took from him, which was some ID he had as a guest, it came to him, appropriated by her for the moment. At least see her home wherever she lived. She was gone with the umbrella.

  And so it was that what was to happen, or nothing, on that day after tomorrow, might happen where her father, of course, was a driver. Three scheduled trips left for the group of landscape archite
cts. Two, as it fell out, but in the end, one that the visiting amateur strangely settling in was able to join, or so it would seem. A humid early morning that began along the densely inhabited, slow promontory track at Worli of low slum dwellings infinitely unalike crammed together like caves of a village open to sea light and ancient activity, the small Fort at the end where the boat ramps and the blue nets and, everywhere, drying fish — what kind? — kept one there like a settler; the Sea Link bypass bridging so near now out to the left in one direction as to be on top of you, the bay of fishing boats in the other, the low Fort a pivotal monitor host once, now antique outpost fortified with the habits of people bypassed by a greater scale which is motion, distance, traffic, even talk, he’s telling three fellow-tripping photographers — who’re shooting fast yet, so young, still listen, to almost an elder or equal: what he is looking at out there and sort of questioning them, these landscape architects — at least Alex and Alexis (though a preoccupied sound from the third, the red-haired one, of agreement, or whatever), not just the mysterious geology of it all or the hidden flows of volcanic event that shaped this west coast, horizons that dip beneath the sea now and again as if to afford entry for the great creeks of fluid estuary terrain threatened with wholesale reclamation — imagine barges out under the Sea Link biotreating the future or right here a walkway anchoring stepped terraces to be enlarged for markets, fishing, and it is said theatrical performances part of a loose generous circulation over the bay to Mahim and the vast micro economy of slum industrial Dharavi, for one, that through contact they all — several more “stations,” these professionals say in their language, is it Sewri? — may become what they are.

  Alex and Alexis zooming near and far, respectively, one can tell. A craggy guy, you think his name is Alex — quite patient, or something else, like one of one’s own kids coping in San Diego, Cincinnati, New York — lowers his camera, and here is this abandoned cracked-concrete booth and counter open for unimaginable business months maybe years ago open to the wind he’s been shooting with a corrugated lean-to roof pinned to a couple of beams; over the counter on the right wall hanging by nails two chipped reddish-clay tantrics also a goddess chart like an ad faded with many robed yet exposed folded legs and slender feet poly-positioned. On the front support beam are chalked, “Rock on Boy” — and “FUCK 9:00 PM TEAM.” Did that mean a gang? (Yes, Alex thought so.) Showing up at nine? Alexis, who will be half Filipino, that taut, still soft terrain around the eyes, who’s lowered her camera, smiles on it, happy with what is about to happen. In the depths of the camera what is looked at changes, is that it? Alex screens back to shots taken. Is it to his friends or, half, to you he’s speaking in this sea-stilled place? “We’re taught to design for access, maximum access to activities and other people in a place, a material place connected to the next place, right? Materiality; access, and so on. We intervene. But look at this broken concrete, it’s nice. We’re supposed to consider everything. Look at the family fish baskets on the boat ramp. What was the question?” The third colleague laughs. “Whatever,” he murmurs, still within earshot. The Sea Link anchored above his red hair: “Whatever,” he’s heard to say, he’s focused on a long, inexpressibly graceful skiff in emergency need of total repair overturned near two children sorting shrimp. Alexis, behind her extra-large sunglasses, asks, because it is a question, “We looked for you last night.”

  They did?

  “Where did you go in such a hurry? That was some answer you gave. It made me think.”

  “Me too.”

  “I could tell. It’s … who you are. We went to Worli.” “Food run out?” Alexis’s high laugh, “Yeah, those pakora”—.

  Worli? A club in Worli. The music? Alex lets his camera dangle. Some Fusion.

  “No Daft Punk?”

  “You know them?” Alex asks.

  They had something coming out. Random Access Memory” (?) you thought it would be called — those underwater voices. “Whoa,” Alex will look at you like a prophet. “You know them?” He means the band members. It’s just from one of your grown kids, in the business — whom you never see. Never? says Alexis. One not for many years… “The music one?” “I go back to Talking Heads, Alex.” “Daft Punk, man. You went in Mahim Fort, right? Saw you go in.” Alex holds Alexis’s hand, here at Worli Fort. She reaches for yours. “Tonight?” “We’ll see. I’m taking the afternoon off.” Alexis squeezes your hand, reading your thought. “Hey,” their friend calls from the far side of the ramp, a blue net with a catch of small silvery fish, he’s drawing rapidly in his book, eat them bones and all. “Hey I read they kidnap kids for their kidneys.”

  Late, late in the day, the leaders waiting unexpectedly the far side of Marine Drive, clouds coming in. And what they see unexpected for them too, and not only the end of the monsoon but what happens in the human world.

  He could not live here but he is finally here. Coming up Veer Nariman Road happily alone, so late in the afternoon it is practically evening, the shops, the coconut water stand beside a great dilapidated tree, its roots reaching up out of the ground. Now coming home on his own. The end of the afternoon his, what common thing has happened? A minute child in a sari sticking with two tourists crossing even against the light to get away from her, her hand touching a shopping bag, touching a wrist. It was the street, the mentality here where they could know anything; the begging now touching thought.

  Right here on the sidewalk, ensconced between a palm he passes and a battered tree with a swollen trunk, two little ones on a thin blanket, patterned, faded, no more than a sheet. A girl bending over them then knelt to play with them, the two-year-old who sat, so straight of spine, next to a baby on the pavement. Could they be hers?

  And the two women there, darker, were talking to her, squatting in their saris, or however their legs were arranged under their pink and black-and-rose dyed saris, something was going on and the girl, it seemed, had just arrived, playing with the two tiny ones, as he approached and heard the women at her, one of them familiar.

  When the girl turns, it is his friend — here again. Is it the same? Always pretty nicely gotten up in her blue tunic and bluejeans. More than a girl, and with that bearing, that urgency — it was the girl from last night and the Fort and the viewfinder, the studio, the fridge, the Vespa father. How could he pass by?

  He had to hear what they said to her. She was of them but not; and they were on not even a blanket, or very light blanket perhaps, which they might sleep on at night, you could feel the pavement soften. Yet had he seen them here early this morning near the tree? He knew the name of this tree, he thought.

  Passersby all but stepped over the family. Of them also now a boy approaching two women tourists, asking for spare rupees, asking and asking, hand like a ghostly touch upon the forearm — barefoot, only in shorts — falling back, to approach somebody else, and then a severe elderly gentleman with gold-rimmed eyeglasses who interested the boy for the cage in which a young red-breasted macaw swung.

  Up through the trees light ripening or whatever it was doing upon the coastal boulevard ahead as if whatever it was came from land as well as from the sea, this more than peopled City, its southern sector. And if, as he passed the family, part of it, he half hesitated to hear what the two women were saying to the younger one in evident irritation or worse — “even stay,” he thought he heard (so he felt for the camera he wasn’t used to on a shoulder strap, realizing they weren’t speaking English) — she turned from the little one she was playing with, joking with her, petting her, and was in profile and knew he was there, he believed, this pedestrian passing, and she looked toward him, looking through him like a flicker to yell at the boy down the street doing his job, quick, thin, at home. Faces that want something or are ready to from you, or nothing, and if nothing, what then?

  Thinking he shouldn’t recognize her here, his heart split its threads of dumbness but all he could do was be ignored: “You laughed last night? Who were you laughing at?” But here he was lurid
to himself, the girl on the sidewalk beneath him. One of the women he knew from Mahim Fort. Who were they all? The girl’s less educated family? Not only. And close and not close. One spoke: Who is he? he imagined she said.

  He was gone, her voice behind him then, “I know why you pass by here. You know I know.” He was at the sidewalk stand buying water ignominiously, thinking about his umbrella, fleeing an enchanter, but listening.

  And with all this he arrived at the curb where V N Road came out into elegant, breakneck Marine Drive, and to his surprise saw, past the cars, carriages, motorbikes, vans, and against the backdrop of South Bay and the Arabian Sea out beyond them, his friends, the leaders of the research trip, this couple seeing him as if they had been waiting for him or thinking about it, having missed him this afternoon, but no. The traffic lights had not quite turned, one set for crossing, one for cars violently turning in to V N, but you don’t know these lights, and over on the far side of the boulevard his friends are waving, and along the promenade, couples perched on the barrier looking out at the empty bay, their backs to him as he has set off still against the light to cross Marine Drive.

  Shouts somewhere in the early evening traffic bearing down on you — you do not think sometimes what’s behind as you in your sometime job must know what’s ahead — out and to the northeast the slender arc of the island city once several islands reclaimed from the supposed waste of sea but there curving finely in profile now, hopelessly to mark, though only fractionally or suggestively, the bay, much less the sea it’s part of and the silvery vast light darkening now with sudden acceleration. Vespas and two quite brisk horse-drawn carriages, the body home-fabricated silver, seem to be in a race — the noise here, this country where you can raise your voice in a dispute if you know how, and the nicely protective Indian landscape designer who with his partner one was apparently crossing this grand, insane boulevard to meet joked that it was the only thing he liked about India now.