She Will Build Him a City

by Raj Kamal Jha

  ‘I need to take breaks during which I sit down on the floor of the kitchen, close my eyes, that seems to reduce the pain. Didi walks in, asks what is wrong. I don’t wish to hide anything from her so I tell her that my body hurts. She says, forget the dishes today, just do the floors and go home. Don’t forget to take some medicine from me when you leave because there is a party at home tomorrow. At least eight to ten people have been invited, we will serve them snacks, drinks and dinner so there will be a lot of work to do, many dishes to wash. I want you to be here tomorrow and the day after, that’s why no need to tire yourself out today. Don’t forget to take the medicine when you go.

  ‘Twice, I feel I am falling down. After the floors are done, when I tell Didi I am going home, she gives me a banana and says, eat this because you should not have medicine on an empty stomach. She makes me take two green capsules. Rest for a while, sit down on the floor, leave after ten, fifteen minutes, says Didi.

  ‘The capsules work like magic. Ten minutes, the pain is gone.

  ‘Don’t forget, says Didi, as I leave, tomorrow is a big day. Tell people at home that you will be returning late tomorrow night. Take this capsule for the morning, she says, have it just before you come.’

  ~

  ‘I hope you are feeling better, Ma,’ says Kalyani. ‘If not, I can go to Didi’s tomorrow and help her out.’

  ‘The capsules have worked, I will be all right, I feel better already,’ says Ma.

  After dinner, she washes the dishes, empties out the coal oven. The ceiling has sprung a tiny leak, a thin stream of water from the tank on the roof scurries down the wall, collects into a puddle from where it darts into the cracks on the floor. Kalyani puts a bucket against the wall to collect this water.

  ‘We will have to fix it tomorrow,’ says Baba, ‘before the rains.’

  ~

  They live in one of a row of rooms, small rectangles cut out of brick and mortar, each with a tarpaulin sheet as a door, the tin in the roof beaten, cracked in many places. These rooms are owned by a slumlord who comes once a month to collect the rent. Many families who live here are from Bangladesh, all illegally migrated, who have, to escape detection by the local police, changed their names from Muslim to Hindu. The police know this, the owner knows this, both use this information to threaten, coerce and extort. You complain about water leaking, you should be lucky I am letting you stay here, the slumlord will say if Baba goes to complain. At least once every six months, there is pressure from higher-ups – usually following a debate in the press or a security threat – to crack down on the migrants. Suddenly, platoons of policemen show up, in helmets and with riot shields just in case bricks and stones are thrown. Bulldozers run through homes, what’s inside – pots and pans, clothes and boxes – is thrown outside. Some residents are picked up, taken to the detention centre in the city. But most are out at work where they stay until they get news that the police have left. Some families get split, wife is arrested, husband hides, children are picked up, some tears are shed but within hours, it all settles down, the police are paid off, the slumlord raises the rent saying his risk has gone up.

  ~

  The children are sleeping, Baba’s eyes are closed, too, one arm over his face to shut off the light that slips into the room through the gap in the door.

  Ma imagines Pinki playing on the blue slide in The Mall. The capsules have helped ease the pain, banished the fever, but not the heaviness she feels almost crushing her forehead. She tries to distract herself with new questions, new concerns.

  What will Kalyani do now that she has left the orphanage?

  Why did she leave? Why does she look so drained?

  We don’t need her money immediately, all of us are earning, so she can take some time off. She says she already has a job at a new hospital. What kind of a job is it?

  They all need voter-identity cards otherwise they will have to keep paying the police; they need ration cards; they need to save money; they need to find a husband for Kalyani.

  She worries about Pinki after she heard last month that a thirteen-year-old girl, a few rooms down, ran away with a twenty-five-year-old good-for-nothing boy, returned after two weeks, pregnant. What if something like this happens to Pinki? And Bhai? Someone has talked to her about a girl for him, time to get him married so that his wife can come and help you, how long will you run this house but, no, Bhai is still a boy, let him grow up, let him earn, save some money.

  She hopes Baba doesn’t fall ill, how will he pull that cycle rickshaw? Even when he is healthy, his legs, his arms are so thin, so weak. Their savings, all of it in a tin box, underneath the blanket, will be gone once they have to see a doctor.

  She has heard frightening stories in the neighbourhood, of an entire family’s six months’ savings gone for just a few blood tests, an X-ray, two visits to the doctor.

  Fear swirls like floaters, brightly coloured, in front of her eyes as they close to the drip of water from the roof into the bucket. She times the drips, roughly one a minute. When the bucket is full, it will be time to wake up.

  WOMAN

  Shortest Story

  The shortest love story ever told is when a parent tells her child that she loves a man who is not her father. Because that’s all she needs to say.

  There is a man, he isn’t your father, he loves me and I love him.

  Whatever else she says, by way of explanation, serves no purpose because, for the child, this new love is always a kind of betrayal.

  ~

  That’s why I will keep this short:

  Yes, your father’s student and I love each other.

  And as I say this, I can see them come, the fireflies in the dark, ready to enter our heads, light the darkest of our dreams.

  MAN

  The Flies

  A fly from the AIIMS mortuary slips into his car and sits on his dashboard. He tries to swat it away, he turns the fan on to maximum, rolls all four windows down but it doesn’t leave.

  ~

  He cannot avoid the flies just as he cannot avoid the poor.

  Wherever he looks, wherever he goes, they are there, many many more of them than there are of him. They stalk him, look him in the eye. Whether they stand or sit, crawl or crouch, cry or laugh. Or, even when they make love, as he sees them once, in the middle of the road in the middle of the night, they keep looking at him. At traffic lights, they tap and claw at his windows. Leave trails on glass. Of sweat and slime, like the dead do in movies. They even look like the dead, many of their faces half-eaten by disease. Some have noses missing, their lips chewed off. Some have black hollows where once there were eyes, stumps where once were limbs, wounds and sores where once was skin.

  They speak the language of those whose tongues are twisted beyond repair. They use few intelligible sentences, theirs is a rambling, an incoherent garble of beg and beseech. Some fall to the ground and stay there, sniff at his trouser-legs, rub themselves against the heels of his shoes. Like lonely dogs do, when in heat. Others sprawl on pavements, their legs splayed, their heads thrown back as they sleep.

  So many of them crawl out at night that he fears he will trip and fall right into them, into their mass, damp and dark. Like the basket of bait, fresh worms, grey and slimy, he sees at the fish market. Once they suck him in, their faces will touch his, his fingers will slip into their mouths, their lips and tongues will meet. They may even make love to him, rape him, and if he’s lucky, they will let him do whatever he wants to do to them in return for money.

  That’s on the road.

  ~

  Off the road, at home, when he sits down to dinner, they stand outside his room, looking in.

  Like mournful pets kept out, they stare at him through the window or the door. If either is made of glass, he can see them. All standing in line, young and old, big and small, looking at his hands as his fingers pick up food and drink, their eyes following each movement from plate to mouth, from glass to lips.

  They don’t spare him even if
he hides in a place they cannot see. Because they know he is there, they smell him out, like dogs, they pound the wall, scratch at the plaster, crack the cement. Like bawling infants who do not have words to either express or explain their hurt or anger, they sometimes hit their heads against the wall. Hard, harder, hardest, until they bleed. Until blood, thick red and brown, flows down their faces, mixes with their drool and sweat, loops back to enter their mouths through their parted lips.

  Most shameless are mothers with children. Like the one he sees when he stops under the highway, next to the traffic lights across from The Mall. She shows him her tongue, her nipples, once she shows him her vagina when she lifts her sari all the way to her waist and before the lights turn green, she shows him her bandaged baby. The sight of the baby makes him hard, she makes him throw up as well. Then there is a man at the same signal, who is only face and chest. He crawls up to the car and smiles at him. Give me money, he says, mocking, give me money and ask me anything in return, I will do it. I will show you how I shit, how I pee and how I fuck. You want to see that? Given that I have no legs, no arms, do you wish to see how I hold my woman?

  ~

  On National Geographic, he watches the close-up of a fly.

  It’s washing itself, rubbing its front legs, the voice-over says it was resting, minutes earlier, on a trash heap near an open sewer in the city.

  The camera slows down.

  He sees the brown, black flakes of filth that the fly so lovingly caresses, its compound eyes glistening. The fly stops moving, balances itself on its front legs and cleans its hind legs, both up in the air. Then back to the front legs which it uses to clean its face, its eyes, all the while trembling hard, rubbing against each other, he can count the bristles around its eye, one, two, three, four, five, six, looks like hard black hair, and then suddenly, there’s the sound of something like an explosion, a flash of light, and the fly is on its back, its legs flail, convulse, and then it’s dead.

  Someone swats the fly.

  That’s how he wants to kill these flies, one by one, night after night, he wishes he could stop those legs from moving. Because they frighten him, they become blades that carve him open, slice right through his head and his heart. Empty out whatever is inside him. Like a butcher cleans a chicken, they wring his neck, let his entire blood drip, take out the nerves, the skin, the fat, all the insides, all that’s not edible.

  And then they begin to fill him up, every space there is – between the arteries and veins, in between the bones – with guilt, big and black, fresh and bleeding.

  ~

  He doesn’t want to meet the flies, he won’t go home tonight.

  CHILD

  Flicker, Tremble

  From the evidence so far, Bhow is a dog who not only has a strong sense of fairness but one of duty as well and that’s why as soon as she finds a little clearing in the shadows inside The Mall, just a few steps away from Europa, Bhow stops, looks left, looks right, smells no one coming, goes down on all fours, gently eases Orphan off her back, rings herself in a protective curl around him, and tells him the story of Ms Violets Rose.

  How much of it Orphan understands isn’t clear but one thing is: his eyes and ears remain open as long as Bhow speaks.

  ~

  ‘Deep inside The Mall, not far from where you and your friends from under the highway play, inside Europa, the most fancy of the seven cinema theatres in the multiplex, in a space which no one can see, lives Ms Violets Rose. Funny name that is, two flowers in one name, a tiny bouquet, if you so wish. Indeed, she looks like a plant because she is always in a green cotton dress dappled with leaf-patterns; her arms and legs so thin that it hurts looking at them, they resemble slender stalks and stems in the way they move when she walks. Look carefully and you will think Ms Rose has uprooted herself from a flower bed, brushed the earth and mud off, walked out of a garden in the morning – the brooch in her white hair glinting like dew, freshly fallen.

  ‘How old is she no one knows. Some say she is a hundred years old, in human years, some say two hundred, but, obviously, that’s an exaggeration. You may, if you do not know anything about Ms Rose but only see her in a crowd, not even look at her twice. You will think she is an old woman clocking the hours until the very end with nothing left to do.

  ‘Because in New City, where six out of every ten people are under thirty, where lights shine bright with hope and ambition, life and leisure, there is no place for someone as ancient as her, someone who, at first glimpse, is little more than a shadow, pale and bloodless, resting in a forgotten corner, a mere flicker of light, a tremble of the theatre’s curtains.

  ‘However, Ms Rose is anything but. Her eyes have a perpetual gleam, each step a spring in the dark. Because this, Europa, is her home. She knows this place. She knows The Mall’s multiplex inside out, left, right, centre. For this is her home long before The Mall is even a drawing on a sheet, long before glass and steel begin to line up in the sky.

  ‘This is her home when it is all farmland here, when wheat and mustard grow on either side of dirt-tracks, hard and unbroken, under a constant cloud of dust kicked up by a scorching summer wind that blows in from across the desert to the west. When Ms Rose is a young woman, when she and her father and her mother watch the first prospectors arrive, begin buying land around their farm, plot by plot, day by day. She watches cranes and excavators trundle in to gouge out holes in the earth so big they look like they have been made by something that’s come hurtling down from space. Each hole then becomes home to a foundation which, in turn, props up an entire building, ten, twelve floors, four apartments to each floor, three rooms to each apartment, each room like a cell in this creature called New City that grows bigger and bigger with each hour, day, month and year. Until they start working on The Mall, brick by brick, steel rod by steel rod, glass by glass, day by night.

  ‘So when her parents die, suddenly, leaving her nothing because they sell the land and there’s no inheritance for their daughter, Ms Rose decides to make her new home in Europa, the premium theatre in the multiplex, because it’s the one place where she can hide since it’s always in the dark, where the seats are deep and large, where Ms Rose knows how to squeeze herself into spaces most unusual just as we, dogs, do under parked cars, between rickshaws, on top of garbage heaps.

  ‘She knows which spaces exist where inside the theatre.

  ‘Between two adjacent seats. Between one seat and the other in front. Underneath a seat, on the steps, pressed against the handrail. In the margins left uncovered by the carpet. In the wedge between an armrest and its seat, even in the hollow meant for the coffee cup or the drink. Under its curve.

  ‘Sometimes Ms Rose may lie down underneath a seat if she is tired, curl up and go to sleep. At other times, she may sit behind the cinema screen on the main stage or even hide in the wings. Or walk into the folds of the heavy red curtains once they are drawn.

  ‘When there are many vacant seats – this usually happens during the first show of a weekday, early morning – she waits for the lights to be switched off, for the previews to be over and just before the feature presentation begins, when all the lights are dimmed, she slips out of her hiding place into one of the empty seats.

  ‘She likes to keep moving: So F14 one day, Row F, seat number 14; the next day C3, C27; the day after M18 or L9, a new seat number each time.

  ‘This is her world, all of this and only this, the cinema theatre in the dark. During shows and in between. Rumour has it that she knows a trick or two and only you, Orphan, can tell us whether this is true. I am not going to go by what others tell me, I will leave it for you to discover.’

  ~

  Orphan is half-awake as Bhow carries him towards the theatre and when she reaches its entrance, fringed with drapes in deep blue velvet, she barks once, clears her throat, calls out to Ms Rose who appears instantly, as if she has been waiting all this while, at the door, for a dog to show up with a child on her back.

  ‘Ms Rose,’ says Bhow
, ‘this is Orphan, Orphan, this is Ms Rose.’

  ‘Thank you, Bhow,’ says Ms Rose as she bends down to lift Orphan from Bhow’s back, and carries him inside.

  ‘Welcome, my child, it’s still dark, this is no time for a child to be awake,’ she whispers in the gentlest of whispers, each word half-stern half-soft like leaves in spring.

  ‘Let’s help you sleep.’ Her fingers, like petals, drum his back and for the first time since he left Little House, Orphan falls asleep in the embrace of a human, warm and close.

  ~

  As for Bhow, with Orphan safely delivered into Ms Rose’s hands, deep inside Europa, she tears down the steps, her tail wagging into a blur, her bark bouncing off the glass walls of the stores, the noise magnifying into a swell that floods The Mall but this time she doesn’t care whether there’s someone who sees or hears, so happy she is.

  WOMAN

  Diary Entries

  I keep writing to your father after he’s dead. Nothing long, just words and some sentences, fragments of sentences. Just in case his ghost wishes to read one day or night. I am going to read some aloud, some of the entries from the early years.

  In no particular order.

  I hope you are listening.

  ~

  I use your pen. I take it to school. Every day. And like you, I, too, have a constant ink stain on my index finger.

  ~

  How do I make it easier for our child? Do I wait for her to forget you? Maybe I should begin to hide some of your things so that she isn’t reminded of you. Like your books, your clothes, your spectacles.