by Steven Gould
It was offshore foul-weather gear. The pants were like overalls, coming all the way up to my arm pits with straps over the shoulders. The hooded jacket came down to midthigh and there were knee-high rubber boots in my size.
“You might want to hit the bathroom, first. And don’t bring anything that can’t get wet.”
I left the cell phone on its charger back in the house, used the bathroom, and changed to lighter clothes before donning the rain gear.
“Ready,” I said.
He held open his arms and I walked into them.
Dad was braced, but I wasn’t, and I staggered sideways when he let me go. The weather may have been downgraded to a mere tropical depression, but the rain was not so much falling as flying sideways, driven by a heavy wind. The fat drops felt like projectiles even through the jacket.
It was dark and Dad switched on a strong flashlight. We were in a small stand of trees at the edge of fast-moving water. I could barely see the other side of the waterway.
“What river is this?” I had to shout over the rain.
Dad shook his head. “That’s the road to Bhangura. It normally has a tiny stream beside it. Got this site?”
I took a deep breath and smelled something like burlap, torn vegetation, tropical flowers, and earth. “Got it.”
“Just in case. Mostly we can jump from the tent, but sometimes—” He shrugged.
Dad led me through brush, up a small rise, and pointed the flashlight down as the ground dropped away again. Several yards in front of us boats were pulled up onto the grass. Beyond them, the water stretched out until it vanished in the rain. “That’s the Baral River. You normally walk twenty minutes from here to get to its closest bank.” He started walking up the slight slope, parallel to both bodies of water. “The water is still rising.”
At first I thought we were coming to a building with trees close around, but it was the trees. Plastic was stretched between the trunks and stretched overhead and it was noisy, even above the storm, flapping and magnifying the sound of the rain drops. A few lights cast shadows on the plastic sheeting, trees and the outlines of people sitting close together. I had the impression there were hundreds.
“Don’t drink any water here,” Dad said, leaning close. “You had the oral vaccine for cholera but it’s only eighty-five percent effective.” He was talking about the Dukoral we took last year before spending some time in Nepal. “You can go home to drink. Leave the potable water for them.”
We continued to skirt the trees and tarps to where the trees thinned out again on higher ground. Seven jungle-camouflaged large tents stood in the open. Beyond the tents the ground dropped away again.
“Is that more water?”
“Yeah. This hillock is temporarily cut off, but it will be okay as long it doesn’t rise another two meters.” He looked back at the water and pointed the flashlight, blocking the rain from his eyes with his other hand. “Shit. Or if we get swamped with more refugees.”
I followed the flashlight beam. Figures in the rain were wading toward us, chest deep in the water, carrying belongings on top of their head or children on their shoulders.
Dad led the way into one of the military tents where I found Mom, eyes shadowed, counting boxes by the light of several battery-powered fluorescent lanterns.
“More refugees,” Dad said. “Wading in from the north.”
Mom smiled at me briefly before saying, “From the north? Why are they heading our way? The high ground would lead them to Bhangura!”
“Yeah.”
Mom tapped one of the boxes. “We’re good on water filters but the temperature is lower than we expected. Do we still have those bundles of blankets in the warehouse?”
“The synthetics? Yeah.”
She pointed at the back corner of the tent, where a panel of canvas hung down, making a private nook. “Do you think you could fetch them, Cent? I need Dad to watch the tent while I find out what’s with the new arrivals.”
“Sure,” I said.
Like me, she was wearing foul-weather gear, but she’d taken off the jacket. She fished it out from behind a row of emergency rations and pulled it on. “I thought the road took to the hills north of here, but if it’s cut off, we could see a lot more refugees.” She left.
I went to the nook and inhaled. Besides the moist jungle smells I got a whiff of musty cloth overlaid with mold. It would do. I jumped to the warehouse, but after five minutes of looking, I had to jump back.
“Uh, I’m not seeing the blankets, Dad.”
He sucked on his lip. “Oh, yeah. They’re wrapped in black plastic—big bundles almost as tall as you. In the corner near the door. I could barely jump them. You’ll have to open them and bring the contents in smaller batches.”
“’kay,” I said, and jumped.
Once I knew what they looked like, I found the blankets easily enough. They reminded me of giant cotton bales but there was a small label that said Blanket, Emergency Relief, Material Post Consumer Polyester, Color Green.
I jumped home to grab shears, then cut through the heavy black plastic wrapping. The blankets came in shrink-wrapped packs of twenty-five, weighing fifty pounds per.
I began jumping these smaller bundles, one at a time, to the tent, stacking them opposite the shielded nook. It only took a few minutes to stack twenty bundles.
I had the twenty-first package in my arms and was about to ask Dad if I should go for more when I heard Mom’s voice, loud, I thought, even over the rain. I dropped the package of blankets to the floor and sat on it.
Mom came through the door with a Bangladeshi man in a poncho. “Akash says the road to Bhangura is blocked by mud slides. The military is working to clear it and they’re trying to get some boats to go around, but the water is still running dangerously fast.”
The man nodded and in lightly accented English said, “We’ll be okay on food but shelter will be an issue. Are those blankets?” He looked at me, a puzzled look on his face. “Did another boat arrive?”
Mom shook her head.
“We could really use more blankets in the clinic tent.”
“Sure,” said Dad. “Fifty to start?”
“Yes. That would be excellent.”
Dad gave one of the bundles to Akash and took another himself. “I think we can come up with more tarps,” Dad said as they left the tent.
“Should I take blankets over to the people in the trees?” I said to Mom.
She shook her head. “In a bit.” She was counting the ones I’d stacked. “Are there this many more?”
I nodded. “Easily.”
“Okay. Grab twenty more packs. Always jump from behind the screen. If you hear me talking loudly, it means someone besides your father is in the tent, right?”
I nodded. “Thought so.”
Back in the warehouse I had to open another of the large, black-plastic bundles, but I had twenty more packs (five hundred blankets) stacked along the back of the tent within ten minutes.
“Done.”
Mom nodded. “Let’s take some blankets over and see if we get any takers.”
It was less like a car wash and more like a shower when we went outside. The rain was as heavy, but the wind had lessened so the fat drops weren’t moving sideways. The ground was covered with thick grass, but I felt like I was wading because the ground was mostly level and the rainwater was draining away slowly. I was grateful for the rain gear but it felt like I was a walking tent.
Mom ducked under into a large communal area under the tarps and I followed. It was wetter under the shelter than I expected. Water poured down from the edges of tarps and it was pooling. Some of the thin plastic tarps had ripped, either from the wind or where water had collected instead of running off, until the weight had torn the material.
The refugees sat or huddled, trying to avoid the places the rain splashed through, women in saris and men in lungi, a tube-like sarong. Kids wore a mix of traditional and modern clothing, including saris, lungi, and soccer shorts.
There were raincoats and ponchos and umbrellas and it was a riot of color—a bit overwhelming.
Raised tree roots were prime real estate, letting people rest out of the mud and water. A few people had folding chairs and there were a few portable cots and some air mattresses, but many people squatted or sat in the water, some of them holding kids in their lap, to keep them above it.
“That can’t be good,” I said to Mom, tilting my head to where five girls were standing in knee-deep water at the far edge of the shelter. I didn’t understand it at all, since there were other places under the tarps where the water wasn’t as deep. They stood in a cluster, holding onto each other for warmth. None of them had rain gear and their saris, though colorful, were soaking wet.
Mom saw them, too, and moved through the crowd saying, “Dekhi. Dekhi.” She went up to one of the aid workers, a young man in a red poncho. “Apni Ingreji bolte paren?”
He rolled his eyes. “I went to MIT, lady.”
Mom smiled. “What’s with them?” She indicated the young women with a tilt of her head.
The man sighed. “Chukri. They got away from their shordani when the floodwaters came into their, uh, house and floated down from Bhangura on wreckage.”
“Um. Different English they must speak at MIT. Chukri?”
The man looked at me and then stepped closer to Mom and said something I didn’t hear. Mom frowned and then said, “And what’s shordani?”
“Uh, landlady, sort of. She holds their contracts.”
“Got it, so why are they in the deep end?”
The man sighed, heavily. “They know.” He tilted his head toward a group of men sitting in one of the drier sections. “They chased them there. They tried to chase them outside entirely, but we were able to stop that.”
Mom looked like she could spit.
“What’s your name?”
The aid worker said, “My bhalo nam is Ramachandra. At MIT they called me Rama.”
“Rather presumptuous,” Mom said.
“What do I care? I’m Muslim.”
“Fair enough.” She shoved the package of blankets into the lap of a man sitting nearby and ripped open the top. She gestured at the people immediately around him and mimed passing them out, then looked back at Rama. “Will you translate for me?”
“Sure,” he said.
“This way,” said Mom heading toward the girls.
“What about these blankets?” I asked, hefting the bundle I carried.
“Bring them.”
Mom just waded into the water, walking directly up to the girls. I thought they were all younger than me, but now that I was closer, I wasn’t sure. Their eyes were old and wary and they looked at Mom with distrust.
“Cent, start giving them blankets,” Mom said quietly. I ripped open the bundle and snaked out a blanket and tried to hand it to a girl whose skin tone and bony thinness reminded me of Tara. She shrank back from me and put her arms behind her and said something.
“She thinks you’re a man,” said Rama. “She doesn’t want to take something from a man where they can see. They’ve said quite enough.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s the trousers, isn’t it?”
“Probably,” said Rama. “Also—” he touched the left side of his nose. All the girls standing in front of me wore ornamental piercings in their left nostrils.
I reached up and pulled the hood of my rain jacket back and shook my head. My hair wasn’t anywhere near as long as theirs, but it was longer than I usual wore it, well over my collar. And I wore earrings, little garnets that I’d started wearing when I first noticed Brett.
I didn’t have my nostril pierced but I didn’t think I looked like a guy, despite the trousers.
The girl’s mouth opened and she let her arms come out from behind her, but she still didn’t reach for the blanket.
I handed the bundle to Rama and unfolded the blanket until it was doubled, then I stepped up beside her and draped it over her shoulders like a shawl.
She said in a small voice, “Bhalo achi.”
I glanced at Rama.
“Thanks,” he translated.
“How do I say, ‘you’re welcome’?”
Rama wrinkled his forehead. “How long have you been in-country?”
Mom broke in, “She was diverted here because of the floods. She didn’t train for this destination.” All sort of true. To me, she said, “It’s ‘kichhu mone koro na’.”
“Kichhu mone koro na,” I repeated gravely to the girl. She smiled and stepped back.
After that, they were a little more trusting. As I handed out the blankets, Mom had Rama translate as she told the girls, “We have a place for you to rest, where you don’t have to stand in the water. And there’s food.”
She and Rama led the way and I brought up the rear.
Mom followed the empty stretches where the rain came through between the tarps or the mud was particularly bad, but some of the refugees, nowhere near the girls, twitched their clothes or belongings away, as if they’d be touched. Others ignored them, and some men smiled and called out. At first I thought they were being friendly but I saw the girls look away, their faces becoming even stonier than before.
We were almost to the door when a large man wearing a formal tunic, a sherwani, stood up and stepped forward, shouting. We’d just passed him, so I was closest, but he reached past me, to the last girl and grabbed her blanket away. He shook it in the air and was talking loudly, not to the girls, but to all the people around him.
I grabbed the edge of the blanket, angry, and tried to pull it back, but he was twice as big as me—not only tall, but heavy. He laughed at me and some of the men sitting nearby laughed also.
I clenched the blanket with both hands and jumped in place, adding an instant twenty feet per second, toward the door. I flew away from him and he tilted forward, the look of contempt abruptly replaced by one of shock and surprise. He let go of the blanket, but it was too late. He fell forward, hands waving, and belly flopped into the mud.
While some of the men had laughed before, now all the women and men laughed loudly, easily heard over the rain on the plastic.
Shifting his mass forward had absorbed my velocity and I barely stumbled before turning to follow the girls, now scurrying, outside.
The girls dashed through the rain to our tent, holding their blankets over their heads for protection. I flipped my jacket hood back up, trailing them, but my eye was on the place where we’d left the shelter of the tarps. Nobody followed us out into the rain, but I couldn’t tell if they watched.
Dad was back from taking blankets to the clinic tent and he watched the influx of young girls with a bemused expression on his face. Rama was doing some more translating for Mom. The girls were toweling themselves off with their blankets. Mom gestured to me.
“You all right?” she said quietly. “I didn’t see what was happening until I turned, going out the door, when he fell down.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Do you know what it was about?”
She grabbed another bundle of blankets and ripped it open, offering dry ones to the girls. “Rama? Who was that man? The one who was shouting.”
Rama grinned. “He’s a teacher, the headmaster, at a madrasa in the valley. A very traditional, and just now wet, madrasa. He’s been giving everybody a lot of trouble, shouting at women for being immodest because of the way their wet clothing clings. The local Imam shouted him down and quoted several Koran verses on compassion.
“When the chukri showed up, he wanted them driven into the flood. When you gave them blankets before his ‘chaste’ students received any, he became angry again and started preaching to the crowd.”
I stepped closer to Mom. “Chukri?”
Mom pursed her lips for a moment, then said quietly, “All right, they’re indentured sex workers.”
“Prostitutes?” I said, shocked. They were younger than I was!
“Their families sold them. Sometimes a new wife will sell her stepdaughters
. They have to work for a year to pay off their ‘debt,’ but their shordani, the landlady who holds their contracts, charges them for all sorts of expenses, and the debt increases instead of decreases. It can go on for years.”
She opened a case of bottled water. “Some of them were probably born in the brothels, of other chukri or of nonindentured prostitutes, who sell them back into the system.”
My jaw dropped. I tried to think of something to say but I was speechless. Finally I said, “Why can’t they just run away?”
“They did.” The corner of Mom’s mouth turned down. “But usually they can’t. They can’t even go out to shop. They buy overpriced food in the brothel and go further into debt. It’s like a prison.” She shook her head and said, “Enough. Let’s feed them.”
While I handed out water, Mom gave them each a twelve-hundred-calorie emergency rations bar. They aren’t bad—like lemon-flavored shortbread in taste and texture but with tons of protein and vitamins. You can drop packages of them out of a low-altitude airplanes without damaging them, though I’d hate to be the impact zone.
Rama assured the girls that they were okay to eat for Muslims or Hindus and demonstrated by biting into one himself.
Later, Rama got some refugees to come over from the trees to collect more blankets, and followed them back to supervise their distribution.
We shifted some rations and water filters to where the blankets had been, clearing part of the integrated floor. The tent was on higher ground than the tarps in the trees, so for the girls, the expanse of dry tent floor was like heaven after their time in the water.
Fed, warm, and mostly dry, they were asleep in minutes, and I found myself yawning, suddenly, surprised at how weary I was.
Dad looked at his watch and then at me. “Bedtime for you, too, bunny.”
The sky had brightened outside and now you could see the rain, not just feel it. I checked my watch. It said 9:30 which was U.S. Mountain Time at night. Local time was also 9:30, but morning. I didn’t normally go to sleep this early, but I hadn’t slept that well the last two nights.
Huh. I looked at the girls sleeping at the side of the tent, like a litter of puppies. I hadn’t thought about Brett in hours.
