by Pasha Malla
A zombie movie, that was India: the mindless thronging, the apocalyptic smudge of sky, the bus’s twitchy blue lighting that rendered every face undead. And, perfect, here was a soldier—toting a machine gun! But the guy was folded into the crowd and Matt was left wondering whether a military presence should incite relief or alarm.
If called upon, of course, Matt would spearhead the resistance. Among the brown faces he counted four potential allies: a middle-aged chinless couple in safari outfits; a business-type wielding his phone like a compass; and a blonde twenty-something woman clutching a very dark guy in a Jays cap. Matt tried to meet her eyes as the bus groaned into motion, the doors hanging open—scratch that: the bus had no doors.
Off they went. The crowd was packed so tightly that each jostle and lurch shook the lot of them like a pudding. At the terminal the crowd was released and carried Matt inside—only to join another, huger crowd swarming the baggage carousels and beyond. There was no escaping people. India was like being caught in a continuous mudslide.
Wait, was that racist?
But it was like a mudslide! Or at least ‘mudslide’ was Matt’s first thought. Why deny it? Honestly, thousands of brown bodies surged organically as one, muddy mass, sweeping him into their midst: mudslide was as good a comparison as any. It didn’t mean that Matt didn’t or couldn’t love them all. Given the chance, sure, he’d take each one for a beer and friendly Q&A.
How few women there were! And apart from the odd grey-bearded Sikh and a troupe of nervous-looking kids in fatigues with machine guns slung over their shoulders, the men seemed to be more or less the same character: fortyish, thin as a rake, wax-sculpted hair-helmet, moustache, outfit from an unfortunate family photograph circa 1979. Not like Ash or his dad in any way. More like monkeys.
Gosh, there really was something monkeyish about these men, all lithe and sinewy, a look at once cunning and melancholy in their eyes. And like monkeys each one seemed on the verge of treachery or mischief. Though, honestly, Matt meant this in a cute, not racist, way. Besides, they were little, and he was big. He shouldered through them to the baggage claim and staked his territory in a linebacker’s stance.
A siren flashed and the conveyor belt came to life and here was Matt’s backpack, after all, leading the charge. The alpha, he thought, shoving Indians aside to scoop it up.
But he wasn’t free yet. The corral to the exit was jammed end to end with bodies. A head above them all, Matt fell into step: the bovine plod of a slaughterhouse death march.
Though Ash had renounced this trip, he’d grudgingly arranged a pick-up and accommodations for Matt’s arrival in Delhi. (‘After that,’ Ash had said, ‘you’re on your own.’) Yet Matt’s name was not among the signs wielded from the barricades. One-by-one his fellow travellers reached the end of the corral and were greeted and embraced and swept away. But Matt was left unclaimed while the crowd seethed and dispersed—and a new one gathered for the next flight.
One clear thought pierced the rabble: Matt was in India. And in India he was no one; he could die, right then and there, and not a soul would frigging care.
Something dripped on him from above. A flap of ceiling hung loose, drizzling brown juice. So this is how his life would end, poisoned by disease-ridden effluent on the other side of the planet. Matt pictured himself huddled in a corner of the airport, green-complexioned and feverish and succumbing all alone…
And then he was touched. On the arm. The fingers belonged to a diminutive, finely featured character, now easing Matt’s backpack from his hands.
Matt yanked it away. ‘Hey!’
The little guy was undeterred. ‘Mister Matthew, sir,’ he said, and bowed, and summoned Matt to follow him. What else to do? He went.
Outside dawn had broken. The sky was pink and toxic. Nimbly that pixyish brown creature weaved through the crowd, vanishing for a moment and reappearing, beckoning Matt, forging ahead. Like a freighter trailing an icebreaker Matt followed behind—until the car-park, when his guide broke into a sprint.
Matt caught up, gasping, at a Mitsubishi hatchback. ‘What’s the hurry, bro?’
‘Bitu,’ the pixie said softly, tapping his chest. ‘Mister Sanjay driver.’
‘How did you know it was me?’
‘Come,’ said Bitu, gesturing to—no, not the driver’s seat, Matt realized; things were reversed. The passenger side.
But they weren’t home-free yet. Cars edged bumper-to-bumper out of the lot on a chorus of horns, like geese bawling in lust or rage. Bitu nonchalantly guided the steering wheel through it all with his fingertips, humming a quiet tune. Oblivious? Or unmoved? Either way, his serenity about the whole affair made Matt feel almost safe.
Then they hit the highway.
Horns bleated, cars swerved without cause or reason. Bitu came to life, a new fire in his eyes: veering around a motorcycle (whose female driver was applying makeup from a hand-held compact), slamming the brakes, screeching left, nudging a taxi onto the shoulder—more horns—and then drifting back into the roiling tide.
It was like bumper cars piloted by blind-drunk teens. It was the first lap of a smash-up derby before the collisions began. It was oceanic: schools of sealife plummeting along through the depths. It was a free-for-all, it was chaos, it was mayhem, it was terrifying; it was the most fully aware of what a car actually was—a killing machine—and what driving meant—a flirtation with death, with inevitable death—that Matt had ever been.
Yet Bitu was still humming. And clearly out of his mind.
Matt closed his eyes. If he was going to croak at the hands of this elfin psychopath, he’d at least prefer not to watch. But then he reconsidered: what if this might later become a memory? Matt would at least need to bear witness. Opening his eyes was like waking from a coma: here was this ludicrously teeming world again.
Beyond the highway were buildings upon buildings, and a hillock capped with shacks, and a pair of burdened camels—honestly!—trotting roadside. Scooters zipped through gaps no wider than their riders. And the traffic in the other direction was something to behold, too, arterial in the way it pulsed and surged past.
This felt not just a different place, but a different time, some new hour or epoch. Nothing here was new, nor had ever been new; this bus grumbling along the shoulder must have appeared on earth as it was, a rusty hull, trembling in its bolts and stuffed with passengers, their haunted brown faces gazing out the barred windows from some place beyond history, fumes billowing, dust billowing, horns shrieking. Everything in India was right frigging now.
‘This one CNG,’ said Bitu proudly.
‘Sorry?’
‘Bus. CNG. Clean gas.’
‘Okay…’
‘But bus, bad mens.’ Bitu’s tone had turned severe. ‘On bus, bad mens.’
‘Bad what?’
‘Mens, mens. Make womens…’ Bitu trailed off. He seemed genuinely pained.
Then Matt understood. He’d heard about the assaults—the rapes. In fact he’d even entertained fantasies of vigilantism in Delhi, dressing up in a sari and riding around with a shillelagh tucked into his girdle, waiting for a gang of leering men to slither into the seats around him. As soon as one made a move he’d pound them all into oblivion.
‘Is that still happening?’
‘Bad mens,’ said Bitu, shaking his head. ‘Bad, bad mens.’
They pulled up to a stoplight. Bitu turned off the ignition (interesting!) and pointed to bamboo scaffolding rigged around an overpass. A few shirtless, turbaned men were scattered upon it. Hammers tinked stone. ‘Subway,’ said Bitu. ‘Open soon!’
A handmade subway? Before Matt could ask, someone appeared at his window. A hollow-eyed woman in rags and riotous orange hair, with a baby tucked under one arm. She tapped the glass and made a gesture of putting food to the kid’s mouth, again and again: tap-tap, eat-eat; tap-tap, eat-eat.
Matt reached for his wallet. And Bitu held him back. ‘Sir, no. No give.’
‘No?’
‘No give,’ said Bitu. ‘No clean.’
Before Matt could argue they were pitching again into that anarchic motorcade. Between trucks and buses and sleek sports cars and great, glistening sedans flitted three-wheelers with gold canopied tops. They reached a roundabout and while Bitu waited to merge Matt peered into one: in the back sat a man with his arm around a goat.
‘There’s so much to look at!’
‘Yes sir,’ said Bitu, swerving in front of a Jeep, setting off another chorus of horns. He seemed so collected about it all, so cool. And when he spoke next his voice had the polish of rehearsal: ‘Welcome, Mister Matthew, to India.’
—
ASH’S COUSIN’S HOUSE was off the highway, past a shantytown and a pantless child and a boxy, neon-dappled caricature of a shopping centre, down a boulevard lined with palm trees, through a secured entrance, and finally onto a quiet side-street that reminded Matt of Florida, save the concrete walls topped with broken glass. The burbs, he thought. Or some Indian approximation.
A guard in a beret saluted the Jeep as it pulled through the gate of one of these houses, then hurriedly closed it behind them. Standing on the doorstep was a chubby fellow in shirtsleeves and Joseph Stalin’s moustache. A slash of vermilion marked his forehead. He clasped his hands at his heart, looking joyous.
‘Mister Matthew sir!’ he announced, steering Matt inside by the elbow. ‘Come!’
‘What about my bag?’
‘The boy will see to it. Come, sir, eat. Please.’ He spoke with a pronounced lisp.
Matt was led into a dining room and deposited at the head of the table. Arranged artfully upon a turmeric-stained tablecloth were plates of pastries, a bowl of fruit, a bottle of juice, a jug of milk, and a box of cornflakes.
Matt’s host stood at his side. ‘A toast? Omelette?’
‘No, really—’
‘Coffee? Chai?’ The man’s head wobbled. Then it stopped. His expression turned troubled. ‘Sir, Mister Dhar sends his regards.’
‘Which Dhar is that, now?’
‘Mister Dhar, the master of the house, is in Dubai. I am Sumit, his assistant. You will be very comfortable here.’
‘Ash told me—’
‘Some fruit,’ Sumit instructed, producing a knife. ‘You have tried banana?’
‘Oh, yeah, I’ve—’
Sumit sliced a stack of creamy disks onto Matt’s plate. ‘Try.’
‘Wow. Now that’s a banana.’
‘Yes, banana. This one, apple. Try.’
‘Lay it on me, brother. Delicious.’
‘Do you know chikoo?’
‘What’s that now?’
Sumit displayed something round and dully russet, like a shaved kiwi. ‘Very sweet.’
His knife exposed flesh the colour of a spoiled peach; Matt peeled a gooey clump from the blade. The taste was sickly with afternotes of soil. ‘Wow.’
‘Chikoo.’
‘Chick-ew,’ said Matt.
Sumit looked pleased. ‘And, sir, your itinerary?’
‘Honestly? I hadn’t really thought—’
‘This p.m. we will show you all the sites: Jama Masjid, Red Fort, Qutb Minar.’
‘Easy now, bro. I just got in!’
‘Here in Gurgaon, many beautiful malls. New malls. Beautiful malls.’
‘Wait, aren’t we in New Delhi?’
‘Just like in America!’
‘Hey. Canada.’
Sumit’s eyes fell to Matt’s empty plate with a look of dismay. Tilting into the hallway he screamed, ‘Omelette!’
‘No, hey. Honestly, I’m not that hungry.’
‘Sir,’ said Sumit.
The omelette arrived, scorched and oily, its papery edges drooping over a saucer. The man who brought it wore bellbottoms and a baseball cap. Another servant, thought Matt, which made four: Sumit, this chef, Bitu the driver and the guard at the gate. Which one was the ‘boy?’
Sumit barked something. The cook scurried away, returned with ketchup, bowed and disappeared again.
‘So, tell me, Soo-meat,’ said Matt. ‘Do any women work here?’
‘One girl Tuesday only. For sweeping, washing.’ Sumit nodded at Matt’s plate. ‘Eat.’
After breakfast, Sumit led Matt to his room, fragrant with Dettol. A flat-screen TV occupied most of one wall; another featured a calendar on which a flying monkey toted a mountain like a waiter presenting a massive, volcanic cake.
‘Luggages,’ Sumit said, opening the wardrobe, where Matt’s backpack sat as if teleported in.
‘Swell, bro. Mind if I take a shower?’
‘Please.’ Sumit gestured to the ensuite.
When Matt emerged twenty minutes later, glistening and pink and scrotally powdered, he still stood there, rocking on his heels and beaming.
Matt asked if he might be left alone to dress.
Sumit’s shoulders hunched in a sad bow. ‘Sir,’ he lisped, backed out of the room and closed the door—though not all the way. As he dropped his towel, in the crack Matt could make out Sumit’s shadow, lingering in the hallway, maybe even peeking in.
A DOG. ASH HAD FORGOTTEN that his mother and Rick had fostered one through some rescue organization, fallen in love, adopted the animal as their own. He knew this story, it had just escaped him. So when, rather than his mom or her boyfriend, a black Lab came bounding to the front door and went straight for his crotch, Ash worried for a moment that he’d walked into the wrong house, or that his mom had moved without telling him.
But other than the animal trying to molest him, the house was otherwise the same: the leather couch and recliner tilted amiably toward each other, the fireplace stacked and ready for ignition, the gentle ticking of the old clock on the mantle. And, of course, the smell: tea and Pine-Sol and wet wool and soup. The smell of home.
There’d been a time when Ash would have never thought of his mom’s house as home. At eighteen, fleeing to school in Toronto, any association with London had risked tainting his plans for big city bohemianism, so he’d more or less disavowed it. A blandly pleasant, intermittently forested outpost of three-hundred-odd thousand people stranded halfway to Detroit, it had the trappings of similar-sized municipalities south of the border—local sports lore, an east-west divide, a gutted manufacturing sector, a shit-ton of malls—but none of the character or manic Yankee pride. Neither city nor small town, American nor Canadian, London was a nothing sort of place with no identity of its own: a place to escape, Ash had believed, in order to find yourself elsewhere.
Even as the surrounding farmlands were fractalled with sprawl, London never seemed to change. It felt somehow outside time, and each big box development and pre-fab suburb felt less like progress than a replication of more of the same. But as time passed, this constancy turned comforting. And Ash’s mom’s house embodied that familiarity: it always felt the same, regardless of some new knick-knack—or some new Rick. Even the dog, snuffling between Ash’s legs with the tenacity of excavation, seemed almost archetypally domestic.
And here was Rick himself, galloping out of the kitchen in a great silver flaring of beard. ‘Burt! Down!’
The dog collapsed as if shot, eyes fixed on his master in terror and reverence.
‘Don’t let him dominate you like that, my man.’
‘Okay.’ Ash misinterpreted Rick’s extended arm as a request for a handshake.
‘No,’ said Rick. ‘Ash, greetings. But first let me touch your chest.’
Ash waited.
Rick bowed his head, hand planted firmly over Ash’s heart. ‘Sorry about your dad.’
‘Oh, that’s okay—’
Rick shushed him. ‘Wait until the blessing’s over.’ His voice turned sonorous:
‘Fatherhood is a sacred bond, and to shatter that bond is to cast the son loose. But, Ash, you are not lost among men. You are no orphan. For wherever you go, we are with you, all of us. We call you brother. We are all brothers. All of us, as one. All men.’
Rick nodded. Dropped his hand. The spot o
n Ash’s chest felt damp.
‘My mom around?’
‘Groceries,’ said Rick, with a note of apology. ‘She likes to go now when there’s no one there, just the night owls. Back soon though.’
Ash was offered coffee. He’d had this man’s coffee before, a sour, boggy concoction reminiscent of the juice at the bottom of trash bins. ‘Bit late for that,’ he said, and slid past Rick to the basement.
His old single bed was covered with a tenuously Aztec quilt, something with tribal aspirations that Rick had likely picked up at a yard sale. Ash set down his duffel. Checked his phone. No messages, no calls; maybe Sherene had given up. Nothing from Matt, either, which seemed ungrateful. Without Ash’s help he’d be begging for sanctuary at the gates of Delhi’s Canadian embassy. The least the guy could do was drop a thank-you text.
From upstairs came the sound of Rick creaking across the kitchen floor to the top of the stairs. ‘Hey, my man. You hungry? There’s some tagine left, happy to heat it up.’
Ash declined, though he was starving. Tagine? He wanted his mom’s home-cooking: meatloaf, mac and cheese. Not her boyfriend’s orientalist putties.
Boyfriend—odd word for a man nearing seventy. Yet it was what Ash’s mother called him. ‘I can’t abide this partner business,’ she’d explained more than once. ‘Makes us sound like cops.’ Rick had retired from Western’s anthropology department around the same time she’d been winding down at Brescia College, and soon after they’d started dating, and soon after that he’d moved his bongo drums into her basement, though he’d kept his townhouse as a showroom for their artisanal efforts. This Ash pictured: African masks on the walls, moccasins by the door, an odour of berbere and incense and beard.
If his mother’s hippie tendencies had culminated in once marrying a man from the mystical east, after the divorce they’d been limited to occasionally hauling out her old six-string to strum along to Joni Mitchell. Yet now, eight years post-retirement and seven into Rick, she’d time-warped back to the sixties, eating organic, dressing in caftans, breezing through her days with an airy, floral joy. In her twenties she’d sold handmade pottery at folk festivals all over North America, but after starting grad school the one time she’d touched her potter’s wheel was to lug it to the curb. Rick had reignited that artisanal spark, and now together they toured craft fairs hawking her bowls and the chunky leatherwork he referred to as his ‘art.’ And she was happy, inhabiting her nostalgia in ways that Ash’s father, for one, had never managed.