Mrs. Lamba shook herself loose from Mrs. Bhosle's grip. She pointed an accusing finger at Divya.
"What will I tell my sister when she gets back from London! Her son has been subjected to this ... this unspeakable sight! The poor boy! And you call yourself a hostess! Wife of a vice-president!"
She turned to the other guests standing in shocked silence on the steps.
"Let us leave this horrible place ... these ... people,” she said. “They have no standards.” She turned to Divya, shook a finger in her face. “Never have I been so insulted in all my life!"
Divya looked from the dead body of the man to the upturned faces. Mrs. Bhosle shook her head, but nobody said anything to contradict Mrs. Lamba.
"Yes, please leave,” Divya said firmly. Charu had begun to sob against her father's chest. Poor Vikas—he looked completely shocked. Mrs. Bhosle and Mrs. Raman helped everyone find purses and shawls, and then ushered them all out. Divya did not say any goodbyes except to thank Mrs. Bhosle and Mrs. Raman for their help. Already, as the party was going down the stairs, she could hear Mrs. Chaturvedi's high, whining voice, eagerly discussing the incident. The ladies would feast off it for many parties and dinners to come.
While they waited for the police to arrive, Charu cried against her mother's shoulder, her sobs shaking her whole body. Divya could do nothing but hold her. Waves of guilt washed over her. If only she could go back to that moment in time, when the old man had knocked on the door and Charu had been taking the parathas to him! Perhaps the parathas would not have saved him (the damned things were still in the fridge)—but who could tell? The poor man, to die like that! It wasn't fair—to raise your son and grow old, and be turned out to starve ... Nor was it fair that she, Divya, was to be punished for one moment of carelessness, one instant where she had forgotten the right thing to do—and that this oversight should carry so much weight that it outweighed all her earlier acts of kindness to the old man, the giving of food, and the chance to earn a little money and respectability. Had none of that counted for anything? Would she now have to tiptoe through the world, watching for any lapse, any moment of forgetfulness? If the punishment was to be hers alone, she could bear it—but how cruel of the world, to punish a child instead: Charu in her new blue dress, who had learned on the day she turned twelve that Death lived in the world, and in time it would devour everyone she loved. And that it was possible to die alone and unloved. How does a child of twelve recover from that?
That moment ... she kept returning to it in her mind. If only she hadn't been so hungry at the time! If Damyanti hadn't given Vikas those pakoras, or if Vikas hadn't been asking her about the rat poison...
The rat poison. A cold terror swept over Divya. How had the rat poison gotten to the old man's bedside?
She heard Vikas pacing to and fro in the drawing room, waiting for the police.
She had put the blue vial back on the bathroom shelf, behind the shampoo. The little square of stiff paper that had been in the dead man's hand she had put in the little dresser drawer where she kept her jewelry. It was a black and white picture—she hadn't had time to look at it properly. Now she made Charu sip some water.
"He was an old man, Charu,” Divya said. “He was ill. Nothing we could have done would have saved him."
And so we lie to our children, she thought bitterly.
Charu choked on the water, coughed.
"He said the rats were running all over him at night..."
Divya held her breath. “Did you give him the rat poison?"
Charu nodded. “He said the rats were really big and he was afraid of getting bitten..."
Divya steadied herself, patted the child's hair.
"Listen, Charu, what you did was fine, but I don't want you to mention it to anyone. All right? Don't say anything about what the old man said or what you did. Let Papa and me talk to the policemen."
Charu's eyes went wide.
"Oh mama, do you think ... oh, do you think..."
"No, no, child, quiet now. Everything is going to be fine."
Two policemen came, took notes, banged on the servants’ door and on Mr. Kapadia's as well, but there was no answer. It was Saturday and Ranu and her husband were out—if Mr. Kapadia was in, he didn't care. The policemen didn't seem to care either. They nodded when Divya talked about how Ranu and her family had neglected the old man, but shrugged when she asked if they would be brought to task.
"If we launched an investigation each time some old fellow dies of starvation, we would be overwhelmed,” said one. They got up and left the family to the silence, the splendid ruins of the birthday party.
During a visit to the bathroom, Divya got a chance to look at the picture the old man had been holding when he died. It was a black-and-white photo, creased with age, and it was nearly impossible to make out whose picture it was. Divya would look at it many times in the next few months and wonder if the person was a woman or an animal or something entirely different.
Divya slept next to Charu that night, something she had not done in many years. They both slept fitfully. Divya felt sorry for Vikas, tossing alone in the big bed in the next room. It would soon be time to worry about what would happen to his job. How strange that their fates should be tied to one old man whom nobody had known, whose speech nobody had understood (except for Charu—she realized, with a shock, that Charu must have been able to understand him to carry out his last request). Simply by dying, the old man would change their daughter's view of the world, and affect Vikas's career and the delicate network of social connections and links in which he existed, and change Divya herself in ways that she was yet to discover. She wondered what the old fellow had been trying to tell her these past years, in his broken voice; she should have listened more closely. She should have ... she should have...
The old man lay in the center of her whirling thoughts like an enigma. Some of the tears she wept that night were for him, but as sleep slowly came to her she realized that she had never known his name.
In the weeks and months that followed, Vikas gave up his job, changed companies and began to plan a move to a different apartment in a different part of town. His new job was not as prestigious or as well-paying as the old one had been, and Divya could tell that he was unhappy. He began to play around with an old hobby, photography, disappearing for hours sometimes on weekends, and coming back to plunge himself in the darkroom he had set up in a storeroom in the flat. He refused to talk about the terrible incident, which bothered Divya because before this she had been able to talk to him about everything. Charu had the resilience of youth; she appeared to recover quite quickly, although her school performance suffered in the months following the incident. But Divya could tell that something had changed within the child. There was a sadness about her eyes that Divya could sense even when Charu was laughing with her friends. Charu had always been a soft-hearted girl, but after the incident she could no longer bear any kind of cruelty, nor could she, as a consequence, watch the news without tears. Divya worried how Charu would live in the world, whether she would learn to adapt enough to survive its horrors. She feared also that Charu blamed her for the whole thing, but apart from the inevitable distancing that growth brings, there was no indication of this. There were times when the girl would come upon her mother and give her a fierce, deep hug for no reason at all, and Divya felt Charu was trying to tell her something in some other language, and that she was able to comprehend it in that other language as well.
But the change in Divya herself was perhaps the most peculiar. She had, like most mothers, always been sensitive to the needs of those she loved, but now she was able to anticipate them even before there was any evidence of them. She knew, for instance, that Charu would have her period tomorrow, and that the cramps would be bad; consequently she refused to let Charu go to school that day. She knew in the morning if Vikas was going to have a bad day at work, and when Kallu the crow landed on her kitchen window with an injured wing, she knew it before he had alighted.
When she went out, however, the gift or curse that had been left for her by the old man's death took its strangest form. When she looked upon the faces of strangers they appeared to her like aliens, like the open mouths of birds, crying their need. But most clearly she could sense those who were hungry, whether they were schoolchildren who had forgotten their lunch or beggars under the bridge, or the boot-boy at the corner, or the emaciated girl sweeping the dusty street in front of the municipal building. Even in the great tide of humanity that thronged the pavements, amidst busy officegoers and college students with cellphones, or in the shadows of the high-rises and luxury apartment blocks, she could sense the hungry and forgotten, great masses of them, living like cockroaches in the cracks and interstices of the new old city. Their open mouths, gaping and horrific with need, at first frightened her, but then she began to carry about with her a few parathas, which she handed out to the hungry without a word, in the hope that the keening chorus of despair that nobody but she was able to hear would lessen a little. Although this didn't happen, she found herself unable to stop handing out parathas to the needy. Meanwhile she continued to read her science fiction novels because, more than ever, they seemed to reflect her own realization of the utter strangeness of the world. Slowly the understanding came to her that these stories were trying to tell her a great truth in a very convoluted way, that they were all in some kind of code, designed to deceive the literary snob and waylay the careless reader. And that this great truth, which she would spend her life unraveling, was centered around the notion that you did not have to go to the stars to find aliens or to measure distances between people in light-years.
* * * *
I grew up in New Delhi, and when I was about fifteen we lived in an apartment that was part of a 4-plex, like the one in the story. There really was an old man who lived on top of the stairs, who was turned out and left to starve by his son and daughter-in-law. That memory has been with me for years, like fruit ripening on a tree, waiting to be plucked and thus to become the core of a story. The story is not really autobiographical because the part of it that actually happened is such a small fraction of the whole thing. Most of the stories I write are like this, based on a memory or an image that becomes transformed by the imagination into something I couldn't have predicted when I wrote the first sentence. That's one of the reasons I write: to find out what happens at the end.
Vandana Singh
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A Map of the Everywhere
Matthew Cheney
Alfred worked in the sewer fields because all the other jobs he'd held had disappointed him. He was easily given to disappointment. A few days after his seventh birthday, his parents had stopped talking to each other, and soon they used only the smallest possible words with him, often communicating purely through grunts and snorts. Aching for more variety and another way to live, he apprenticed himself to a clockmaker when he was fifteen, but never quite learned the craft before running off to work for a potter, then a civil engineer, then a mason.
None of these jobs held his interest for long; he showed no talent for them, and though he disliked making decisions, he found the one decision that came naturally to him was the decision to move on. When he was twenty-two, he entered a mountain monastery, but he discovered his faith was thin, slippery, and easy to lose, and he found the daily routine of prayers and flagellations left many scars. He moved on to join the nomadic coffee pickers who wandered past the monastery every few days shouting out obscenities at the monks, who, legend had it, had once refused to pray for a picker who had plummeted to his death after reaching for a bean dangling off the side of a cliff.
Alfred enjoyed his time with the coffee pickers, enjoyed their ribald humor and earthy wisdom, but the constant exposure to coffee kept him from getting much sleep, and after a few sleepless years he found himself wandering farther and farther away from his colleagues in search of beans to pick, until one day he realized he'd lost his way and wandered all the way back to the city.
He did not want to be in the city, and so he walked down street after street, but the streets only led to other streets, all of which seemed to lead back to each other. He asked pedestrians for directions, but only one spoke to him, a small old woman with eyes obscured by a grey-green gauze of film. “Get yourself a shovel and dig,” the woman said, then snorted dryly and blew a cloud of dust from her nose. Alfred would have been annoyed and distressed if he weren't so exhausted, but he did not have the strength to offer any response. He stumbled down a blind alley, curled up amidst a pile of outdated computer components dumped behind a pet shop, and fell asleep. He dreamed of roads leading toward treeless hills where wind scarred the soil and a grey moon cast shadows that looked like ancient pictograms written across the landscape.
When he woke, Alfred discovered he had been loaded into the back of a large pickup truck along with the computer components. He ran his hands over acoustic couplers, memory cards, logic boards, monitors with sentences burned into their glass, and bulky CPUs sporting little metal labels saying, “Made in China."
Soon the truck came to a stop at a junkyard. A plump man with a scraggly grey beard and a missing eye asked him who he was and why he was in the back of the truck. Alfred said he was looking for work, and the man said there was no work at the junkyard, but the sewer fields a few miles in that direction were always looking for workers with nowhere else to go, and Alfred thanked the man and began walking down the road.
He was still far from the sewer fields when he heard the clanks and groans of the refinery. Soon he could see the massive pipes and smokestacks silhouetted on the horizon, and then he saw the fields, the broad expanse of brown-black sewage oozing from the side of the road to the farthest horizon. He had heard about the sewer fields, heard terrible stories of the people who toiled in them, sorting through the waves of excrement in search of objects and materials that would please the field owners. Workers who were lucky could make quite a lot of money, it was said, but Alfred had never met anyone who knew a lucky worker—at least one whose luck had held out long enough to be enjoyed. Instead, he heard tales of Jack's friend Franco, who got sucked up into the refinery engines and turned to smoke and ash, or Rosa's Uncle Hans, who drowned in the sewage, or the ghosts that spoke in ways no one understood.
Alfred, it turned out, was neither lucky nor unlucky, which is the best fate for a field worker. After only a few days in the fields, standing in chest-high sewage with a yellow plastic colander the foreman had given him on the first day, he stopped noticing the stench, stopped retching and puking, stopped thinking that at any moment he would collapse and end up like Franco or Uncle Hans. By the beginning of the second week, the refinery's gasps and screams and hums calmed him as he worked, lulled him into a pleasant state of half-dreaming, his mind lost in images of roads and of the words for roads, images that lasted just long enough to be erased as his hands held the colander and sifted through the sewage.
At first, Alfred spent his nights sleeping on the edge of the fields. He could have joined one of the camps of workers farther out, but by the time the sun set, he was too tired to talk. He ate the roots and vegetables that grew plentifully near the fields, and enjoyed his solitude. It required no prayers or self-abuse, and it gave him time to think about the strange visions that filled his daydreams: visions of lollipop-shaped children and old men with mouths full of coins and cuckoo clocks that held midnight rituals to sacrifice pocket watches to the gods. He had never had such visions before. Before, the monotony of daily work would lull him into a blind and mindless state, letting time drift through him without notice.
One night, Alfred woke to the sound of whispers. A pair of gauzy eyes stared down at him from a face as craggled as the moon. “This is where I have come to dig,” the voice (little more than a breeze) said from dusty lips.
Alfred stood up. He could not tell if it was a man or woman in front of him, wrapped in shreds of plastic, leaning on a rusty shovel. “What a
re you digging?” Alfred said.
"A hole,” the creature replied.
"Why?” Alfred said.
The creature paused for a moment to consider the question, then said, “I must dig a hole to China."
Alfred tended toward grumpiness whenever he was woken in the middle of the night. He said, “Look, I already have enough surrealism in my life, and I really don't have the patience for more. Would you please explain to me why you have to be exactly here, exactly now, doing exactly this?"
The creature spoke of pecuniary canons of taste, the conservation of archaic traits, modern survivals of prowess, and the belief in luck. Alfred didn't listen closely. The voice slipped more and more toward silence as the creature stood there, sweeping loose gravel with the shovel, until the voice disappeared in the scrape of rock and dirt against metal. Alfred feared that the creature was crying and not able to make a sound or shed a tear, its voice hollowed out, its ducts gone dry. Alfred shuddered. He walked away.
As the first bits of sunlight slipped over the horizon, Alfred stopped walking and looked out across the shadowy plains of the sewer fields, where he saw workers already sifting through it all and foremen riding motorized sleds from one worker to the next to note who had collected what and to prod them on with lectures about empowerment and the good life. Alfred fell to his knees, ready to pray for salvation, but then he remembered that he had lost his faith and lost his way, and so he clawed at the damp soil in search of something he could not name, hoping his luck might reveal itself if he just jostled the topography a bit, but he found only some berries. They were sweet and made him smile.
Behind him, Alfred heard soft footsteps. He turned around. Three creatures with gauzy eyes, craggled faces, and dusty lips, all wearing shreds of plastic, all leaning on shovels, stood staring at him. “You must dig a hole to China,” one of the creatures whispered.
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