“It’s too far to walk. Plus, it’s environmentally friendly.” He pushed open the door of their university-sponsored dorm, the searing heat defeating the building’s anemic air conditioning in a solitary wave of damp stickiness. She had no choice but to follow J.P. into the rickshaw. Once they were on the road, overflowing buses and swerving scooters passed in a blur as Lindsey sat trying to sort out her environmental and humanitarian politics. They stopped with a jolt.
“Dhonnobad, Bishnu. Pore dakhaa hobe.” J.P. hopped out.
“Thank you,” Lindsey said slowly and clearly, examining Bishnu’s dark brown face for signs of suffering. He spat a long straight stream of paan juice into the dusty road, smiling and bending his head slightly to the side. Lindsey tried not to stare at his uneven teeth, stained red.
“You’ll want to meet everyone, see where the supplies are, and get started,” J.P. said.
Their work was in The Royal Commemorative Estates, commemorating what J.P. said he didn’t know. The squat square building, its sandy courtyard ridged by walkways, was a hive of activity, but the inhabitants went about their business with blatant disregard for the foreigners in their midst. They paid no heed to Lindsey’s arrival.
J.P. led her to a storage room filled with rows of rakes, stacked plastic buckets, and boxes on which the words Eco-Compostable NE20 flowered like bruises across the softened cardboard. Lindsey turned to J.P. “I’m not sure I’m at the right place. I’m supposed to facilitate sustainable initiatives with a focus on water conservation—”
“We like to call it waste management.”
The truth dawned on Lindsey. “You brought me here to install toilets?” she said, forgetting she’d volunteered. How would she build capacity through communication and information sharing? How would she use the knowledge of women’s oppression gained through reading Taslima Nasrin’s Shame, a book banned—banned!—in Bangladesh, if reduced to plumbing?
“Composting toilets. Sewage coverage is vital, and these require neither water nor electricity to get the job done. Think about how unsanitary and inconvenient it is, women rising at four, men at five, to go off and find somewhere to shit. It’s an amazing opportunity to support sustainable development. This will revolutionize their lives!”
Lindsey was not convinced by J.P.’s evangelical fervour. “I know all about eco-toilets, of course, but I thought—”
“—the project would be a little less hands-on? Look, this is some of the best work you can do. It cuts through all the bureaucratic bullshit and—”
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
The call to prayer emanated from a loudspeaker mounted on a pole Lindsey had first taken to be a streetlight.
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
Men unrolled prayer mats and bent down. Lindsey’s heart beat a little faster at finally seeing something authentic.
Ash-had al-la ilaha illa llah.
“Unless you’ve converted,” J.P. said, “you might want to get to work.”
It wasn’t hard to install a composting toilet. After getting over her initial displeasure at the assignment’s complete underuse of her skills, displeasure that saw a flurry of emails to Dr. Hassan back at school, she took her advisor’s suggestion to pitch in and be adaptable to heart. Lindsey was no stranger to hard work, and her body seemed to hold its memory of physical labour, calluses lurking just beneath her soft, educated skin, waiting to betray her origins.
Lindsey further proved her ability to acclimate by eating fiery curries despite the havoc they wreaked on her digestive system, an intestinal malfeasance requiring Bishnu to pedal her back to the dorm at unscheduled intervals. And she tried eating with her fingers just like everyone else, even after her initial faux pas of using both hands. Only the right! J.P. had hissed through the shocked silence of the shared meal. The left is for wiping!
She was also starting to communicate with the various inhabitants of the Royal. The boys were first to venture forth, throwing pebbles at the ground beside her and running away when she looked up. They inched closer until one day they were near enough that Lindsey, ignoring their smell, offered them candy. Having won them over, she set her sights on the women who cast furtive glances her way while pegging pants and shirts and dresses alongside maroon, blue, and yellow saris drying in the breeze. Lindsey attempted eye contact even though they hid their faces while giggling behind their hands. She enticed them with gifts from home—organic teas, impossibly small bottles of maple syrup, and shiny barrettes, offerings she had no way of knowing would be quickly hawked at the night bazaar—until the women, too, approached, tentative and jumpy like spring sparrows on the farm.
The project proceeded admirably, especially once Lindsey learned to pace herself in the tyrannical heat after the embarrassment of fainting on the second day. She vented pipes, pinned up insect netting, and helped heave toilets into place while J.P. gave lessons on the manual mixing of humus despite what seemed to be a rapidly waning enthusiasm for the whole project. Lindsey was finally finished, except for the party.
She charged ahead with her plans despite J.P.’s lack of interest. She scattered signs around the building, pestering him to translate them into Bengali. It wasn’t a farewell party for her, even though she was leaving the next day to start a summer seminar with Dr. Hassan, but a get-together to celebrate the bestowing of toilets on this vulnerable population. There was even going to be a ribbon-cutting ceremony with the building’s owner.
Lindsey packed and then spent most of the day shopping at Banga Bazaar, turning up at the Royal laden with toys, sweets, and bags of oddly flavoured chips. Bishnu followed, staggering under the weight of three crates of warm Pepsi.
She commandeered a table in the dusty courtyard, gesturing for Bishnu to place the pop beneath. She waved him off, but he simply melted into the background, perhaps sensing the festive mood. Lindsey didn’t mind, there’d be more than enough to eat. She smoothed the hand-embroidered tablecloth she’d bought, so cheap she didn’t bother to bargain, and arranged the chips in handcrafted bowls she planned to give to Anjali and Priya, two of the women she’d befriended. Already she’d glimpsed them moving through the courtyard, chattering behind one of Anjali’s daughters lugging a sack of rice into Priya’s.
Lindsey checked on the Eco-Compostable NE20 in 2F, surprised at the dwelling’s emptiness. Maybe it was some kind of cleansing ritual, an in-with-the-new sort of thing. Or maybe it had to do with purification, she’d seen a documentary about that once. She’d have to ask J.P. She unfurled the shiny red and green ribbon she’d found at the bazaar and looped it around the toilet’s back, making a bow to rest atop the lid. She made a final adjustment to the netting before returning to the courtyard, where she sat on an overturned pail to wait. Sweat pooled beneath her breasts as she watched for the women. The familiar odour of onions and garlic and ginger frying in ghee wafted out of Priya’s open door followed closely by cumin, coriander, and cardamom. She closed her eyes, breathing deeply. The smell of garlic frying never failed to conjure her mother, and it had taken more than a few days to stifle the grief the pungent air provoked in her. She got through it only by offering to help the women and their daughters prepare the food, laughing and crying over the chopping of onions and boiling of rice despite the language barrier. Priya and Anjali showed her how to roast spices and fussed over whether she was eating enough, pinching and measuring her with their hands as they pressed Lindsey to their thin bodies each night before she returned to the coolness of the dorm to sleep. Maybe she’d teach her father to cook a curry once her summer schedule allowed a trip back to the farm.
“Ei-je!” roared a voice before a horde of boys tore through the courtyard, hot on the heels of a scrawny chicken making for the now empty storeroom. It realized its mistake seconds too late and showed its displeasure by cowering in the corner with a guttural groan. Sabir, one of Priya’s sons, moved in on the bird, parading it back through the cour
tyard to the stump where the butcher waited with his knife.
Bismillahi Allahu Akbar, he sang as he brought the blade down on the bird’s neck.
Here was a culture that respected its meat, where the chicken was cherished, not to mention local. Lindsey’s thoughts were interrupted by the boys, who’d lost interest in the dead bird and were shuffling in ever-shrinking circles around her table, eyes alternating between the chips atop and pop beneath. She smiled and forked over some of the toys to keep them occupied, watching the eviscerated chicken disappear into Priya’s. She hoped they didn’t eat too much. She wanted them to enjoy her food.
The sun tucked itself under the tops of nearby buildings. The Royal was abuzz with activity, the near constant drone of shrieking children even louder than usual. They must be excited about the party. Even the ever-present laundry had been collected off the lines, and Lindsey was pleased to see the Royal’s inhabitants taking the festivities seriously.
“Ready to get back to civilization?” J.P.’s voice had an increasingly familiar edge to it.
“I’ll miss it.” Despite her difficulty with the project and her lack of digestive fortitude for the lunches, Lindsey liked the Royal. “It wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be—”
“It never is.”
“But I feel I’ve helped. In a small way,” she hastened to add.
“Look behind you.”
Lindsey turned to see the women of the Royal, Priya and Anjali at the forefront, children spilling out behind, placing an enormous steaming vat onto her table.
“For party,” Sabir said.
Lindsey felt a lump forming in her throat. “Dhonnobad,” she managed.
“Dhonnobad, thank you,” a voice boomed out behind her. “MrAbijhitNarayan—youcancallmeAbi—nicetomeetyou.” He stuck out his hand.
Lindsey took it, surprised at the softness of his skin.
“Welcometomyhumbleabode,” he said, pumping her hand up and down.
The residents of the Royal scattered at the appearance of their fast-talking, well-fed landlord. The boys began to chase one another around Abi’s car, too fast for the sinewy arms of the driver, their reflections streaking across the shiny black paint. But one by one they too disappeared at the insistent calls of their mothers.
The celebration came and went without much ado. Abi cut the ribbon she’d looped around 2F’s toilet, the family gathered round, huge smiles stretching their faces. Lindsey hadn’t met them, she could only assume they worked in the garment factories during the day. The landlord then helped himself to a heaping plate of Priya’s chicken biryani, the grease mixing with the sweat already dotting his moonish face. His driver then ate, which Bishnu seemed to understand as a sign he too could partake, and so three plates of the food were eaten. The rest sat congealing beside Lindsey and J.P. once Abi had stolen away, “pleasedtomeetyoucometoBangladeshagain,” tumbling out of his mouth.
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t they come to my party? They seemed interested, excited even, but then no one showed up.”
J.P. kept his eyes on the ground. “Tough to say, and you might not know the whole story. Different customs—”
“I know all about different customs, but I still don’t get it. I cooked with these women every day, thought I was making progress. Then they didn’t even come to my party.”
“You don’t know their reasons.”
J.P. was right, she didn’t know. She decided to leave the toys and chips and pop for the kids as it wasn’t their fault the party was a bust. She rolled up the tablecloth—she liked the pattern so much she planned to use it as a bedspread—and signalled to Bishnu she was ready to go. He put down his Pepsi, burping softly as he picked up her bag.
“I’ll see you out,” J.P. said.
They walked through darkness to the front of the building only to be met with rolls of bedding trussed alongside cardboard suitcases set out like dominoes. Lindsey glimpsed Priya as well as Anjali’s husband—Jagan, if she remembered right. Grandparents sat on boxes bearing the now almost-illegible stamp of Eco-Compostable NE20, wielding canes to keep wayward children in order. Sabir met her eyes until his grandmother drew him back with the corner of her sari.
They’d been packing. Just when she’d finished installing toilets, they were leaving. Maybe this is what Dr. Hassan meant when she’d cautioned development work was difficult, that one toiled when the effort might not appear, in the end, to be appreciated.
“Where will they go?” Lindsey asked after a minute.
“Somewhere cheaper,” J.P. said.
A Year of Coming Home
A. S. Penne
Spring
A woman knows the lay of her land the way she knows her lover’s body.
She knows the places in her garden that some plants grow better than others, where she needs to cajole and baby or where she can be hard and demanding. Just so she knows the silky purse of her man’s scrotum, the grizzle of unshaven beard on his cheek, and the dark mole on his neck that she checks regularly for cancer. All these a part of her daily life.
She works her garden for sustenance and purpose, but also as a meditation, a relief from real life. Today as she digs and hoes, she replays her beginnings with him; recalls how after he’d bedded her in those first days, his presence had felt all-consuming, stirring up the silt of her life like a King salmon in spawn.
But life is change. Last night he had pulled away from her in frustration, unable to ejaculate. Already he is thickening at the waist and now there is this, another marker of waning hormones. When he rolled over, she had curled in close, spooning him and circling the bulge of his bicep with her hand, thinking to soothe him somehow. Beneath her fingers the rough alligator skin on the back of his arm.
In the garden she buries her hands in the still-cold soil of the vegetable bed, searching for a splayed ball of buttercup roots. When she finds it, she takes hold in a way that reminds her of the cupping of his apricot-balls. A sudden warmth spreads between her legs, the way it used to be whenever he opened the door at day’s end, the air beneath her sternum tightening into a knot of anticipation at his approach, his hazel eyes locking on her mouth as though he wanted to hold her down, plant his seed.
She thinks of the years gone by, how things have grown and changed. She has a vague memory of last summer’s heat fading into the cool of fall and then the period of moving inside before the lockdown of winter. On the calendar, now, a new season has arrived but still she waits for the land to show her, spring as reluctant as his sperm.
Another week passes, another week of his rolling and tossing at night and then one day a hint of sunlight accompanies the early morning birdsong. In the garden she bends over the beds, digging in compost with an eye toward the harvest, and when the gate opens behind her, she is not ready for what happens.
“I’m going,” he says. And when she turns in surprise, she sees the duffel bag. His whole wardrobe stuffed into that one small bag.
Her voice cracks when she asks: “Where?” Thinking, Why?
But he does not respond, only looks at her blankly before spinning on his feet. He puts his bag in the cab of the truck, the dogs in the rear, then starts the engine. She stumbles toward him, trowel in hand, wanting to touch him, but as she makes her way forward, the truck backs up and around, drives off.
She watches the cab’s rear window as the crown of his head disappears down the driveway. When he’s gone she lifts her eyes and sees rain clouds in the distance.
She feels lost in a way she can only describe as homeless.
* * *
She waits two weeks but he does not return. She tends the garden, urging spring towards the morning when it will be warm enough to plant.
In the yard she feels the presence of the giant firs and cedars standing guard behind her. The May rains leave a gauzy mist and the forest becomes a ghostly rampart. But she d
oes not feel protected by their fortress ranks, only cut off by the density of green, as though she were the last person on earth. A Gretel lost from her Hansel.
To resuscitate the feel of his presence, she slips arms into jacket and feet into rubber boots and heads into the trees’ dark shadows. But the quiet in the forest emphasizes the missing snuffling of the dogs. He has claimed them as his alone and their loss is one more betrayal, a kidnapping of her children.
In her chest that same knot of air as when they began and he said things like, “I want you….right here.” But this time the knot is a block of cement, her breath held in fear. She keeps her body tight, unable to let go, and for the first hundred yards the branches whip at her face, roots grab at her boots. Dense fog shrouds the shadows and she walks with hands in front of her, a specter sensing the ground of this path trudged so often, always with the dogs, sometimes with him, and now so alone. Now she feels bear-like, awakening from a long hibernation. Hungry and stumbling with sleep.
Damp seeps through the wool of her sweater to the cotton shirt beneath. She closes the snaps on her jacket and hunches her shoulders, trying to stop the shivers that chase her. All around she can smell the wet: in the fingers of mist poking between crusty trunks and in the spongy moss beside the trail where once they had made fast, heated love. And under her feet the mulch of rotting bark, each year returning a little more of the trees to the earth. She moves forward.
But she is not going anywhere—merely trying to be at home alone with herself.
* * *
At first he had wanted them both to leave, find somewhere else to call home, the tissues of connection ravaged by the virus of his restlessness. But until his announcement, she was blind to the severity of the situation.
“Let’s buy a forty acre spread in the interior,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows in disbelief. Her protest—“It’s too open”—when she saw his seriousness.
“There’s forest,” he countered. “Pine and aspen. Spruce.”
Everything Is So Political Page 17
