Temporary People

by Deepak Unnikrishnan

  “I pinched Mani Aunty’s baby because she wouldn’t hug me,” said Saji.

  “So you know what it’s like to want something, right? When you don’t have what you want, you get mad.”

  “Yeah, mad.”

  “I wanted to make more money, wanted to learn how to turn myself into a mid-sized hotel. But you needed a permit to do that. I didn’t care.”

  “What’s a permit?” said Saji.

  “It’s when you need to have permission from something to do something else,” said Mukundan.

  “Like getting all my sums right before I can watch TV?”

  “Very similar,” said Mukundan.

  “So you became a hotel?” said Saji.

  He began moonlighting as a mid-sized hotel, admitted Mukundan, charging patrons even more, eventually getting caught because these things don’t stay secret for long. Angry officials lugged him off to jail, then to court, where he was made to promise he wouldn’t turn into a building or a hotel without a permit ever again. “So I did.” But he got sentenced, and the judge and the jailers brought their friends and family over to show them the man who could turn into a hotel. So they would take him outside to the yard and threaten to report him when he refused to oblige, taunting him until he simply gave up. Food. Drink. Exercise. Gave it all up till he didn’t have the strength to brush his teeth or wash his hair or speak to visitors, and he began to forget the things he used to know. Like where he lived, or that he loved overripe bananas, or that he used to turn into a mid-sized hotel and made good money doing it. He forgot many things, he said. He forgot to cut his nails and wash his armpits. He forgot his counselor’s name. He forgot to wear clean underwear or eat. He forgot the voice of his wife and his son. He stopped praying. He couldn’t remember when his father died. He lost track of dates. And one day, they decided to let him go, because they could, because they realized they had forgotten him, that he didn’t need to be there anyway, because the Indian consulate had made some deal with the government, that he was free to go, but they’d forgotten to process his paperwork. “It was great news.” But he was forced to leave a part of himself behind, he told his son. “They made me,” he said. “Give,” they said. “Give!” And he did. He gave. The jailers turned that part—“what I gave!”—into paste, smeared most of it on the walls of Mukundan’s cell. They diluted the rest of it in water and mopped the floors. It was how they would keep him there, leave that part of him there. A memory. Then he left. And here he was now. With his son, Saji, telling him all this, telling him the truth, so Saji didn’t have to worry anymore: Mukundan had served his time.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Look at my skin,” Mukundan insisted. “Why do you think it’s this way? Look at me! Some of me—elsewhere.”

  The next day Gulf Mukundan left home. He didn’t leave a note, didn’t take anything with him, not even clothes. He didn’t say goodbye.

  The town folk checked the river first, then the pond by the house, the water wells in the area. They spoke to the fishermen returning with their catch from a few miles away. They then checked the trees, the banyans and the palms, empty houses, anywhere a man could hang himself. Jump. They didn’t find him. They asked the medical stores if a man fitting his description had bought pills, and they asked the little shops if a man fitting his description had bought rat poison or cleaning detergent. They found nothing. They then checked the temple’s rest houses, the rail tracks, and the morgue. They checked the hospitals across six districts, phoned his former friends in the Gulf and relatives in other states. They bribed hospital peons and police constables and roadside vagrants for information. They put his picture on lampposts, in movie halls, showed it to the people in the street, but it was useless. They found nothing. Mukundan had vanished. His uncle wasn’t happy. He wanted a corpse, something putrefying in a ditch, a letter in the mail, some sort of closure, but his nephew disappointed him. “His kind, better off dead,” he told Mukundan’s wife. “You sure he’s not out there sucking someone’s cock? If only he’d hanged himself in his room like any reasonable man. I mean, couldn’t you tell, woman? Don’t the women in your family know how to hold onto their husband’s dicks? You could’ve sucked his balls, put a finger in his ass, at least kept him. Or if your cunt couldn’t handle him, could’ve called a friend with tits or something. Or arranged something on the side without him soiling the family name. Think what’s been done to our reputation! Pathetic, just pathetic!”

  Saji waited by the door every evening for his father. He did this for weeks, and then decided one day on his own that his acchan may take longer to return.

  That week he wandered over to a roadside construction site by their house, where sun-blackened barefoot women lugged flesh-colored bricks on their heads. He stole a brick, took it home, and put it in his room.

  Every night he stared at the brick for over an hour. What was he supposed to look for, again? He felt his skin. And if this brick didn’t work, how was he going to pick the next one? He wondered how long the mutation would take. His father had explained he needed to concentrate very hard to do what he did. But Saji couldn’t wait. He began to cheat. He rubbed the brick on his skin till it chafed and began to bleed. He did this until his mother found out and threw the brick away, but he wouldn’t explain himself. “Tell me!” she cried. He wouldn’t. When he healed, he found another brick and took it to his room and looked at it constantly. He tried closing his eyes, feeling for signs that his skin was turning coarser and he would finally know what it was like to experience what his father did. He even brought the brick to school, taking it out at recess.

  He did this even as his great-uncle was making funeral arrangements for his father. They hadn’t found Mukundan but it didn’t matter. In circumstances where remains couldn’t be found, there was another way to insure Mukundan’s tortured soul could move on. Mukundan’s wife granted consent. Saji would play the part of the grieving son. The neighbors weren’t told of the ceremony, but they found out. Mercifully, they left the family alone.

  On the decided day, the priest, some nut-job Mukundan’s great-uncle found, was given a bag filled with Mukundan’s possessions. It had the clothes he arrived back home in, his Indian passport, his canceled Emirati work permit, the letter from the judge pardoning his crime, photographs from the Gulf, his wife’s wedding ring and chain, personal letters and bed sheets, a dinner plate and coffee mug, his address book, his birth name written out in Malayalam on a piece of paper, and the date of his death engraved on a piece of bark: June 4, 1991. The items, as well as a carved wooden puppet dressed in a full-sleeved shirt and dark pants, were placed on a wooden pyre, and then covered with a white sheet. A pot of ghee was poured on top. The priest, smelling of camphor and Marlboros, spoke to the gods, explaining that a man had died. He spoke of birth, life, death, and rebirth. He talked about souls. He spoke in a tongue his ancestors probably used over a thousand years ago, but he could have mispronounced anything and no one would have known. When he was done, he called for the dead man’s son. The boy was nudged in the priest’s direction.

  Saji, forced to bathe, wrapped in a white sarong held up by a leather belt, naked above the waist, was given a lit piece of wood longer than his arm. His mother had been asked to remain indoors.

  “Go on, son,” the priest said. “It was written this way. Give him peace.”

  Saji refused. “Acchan’s coming back. Why you say he’s dead?”

  Mukundan’s uncle slapped Saji hard. “Boy! Stop this foolishness. Light the pyre; you want your father’s soul to squirm?” The sound startled the crows on the telephone lines. They began to caw. “Do it!” he yelled. The boy wouldn’t budge. Mukundan’s uncle slapped him again. He pinched Saji’s left ear and then took his hand in his. Made him put flame to wood. Then he forced him to stay, as Saji struggled. “He’s gone, you understand? Finally, dead.” Saji watched his father burn.

  Everything burned.

  That night, Saji took the brick from his room and
began to rub it all over himself. Thoroughly, like a bar of soap. Then he went to find his mother. She was sitting by the veranda with the women of her family. She was now. Widow. Widow. Widow. Widow. Gulf Widow.

  Saji placed what was left of the brick at her feet, his eyes round and frog-like. He looked at his mother. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m not good enough, Amma.” Her son was naked. His arms and legs were bleeding. His body was covered in sores and red dust, flesh raw from the rubbing. He smelled like brick, like dirty earth, like ancient dust. As though he had emerged from the ground after mining it for days, decades even, searching for something, coming out empty.

  And his mother looked at her boy and laughed. “Admirable how you could love a man you barely knew,” she said. “It’s as if you’re desperate for the world to know that you miss your father. I miss him, too, you know. But I suppose I’m left with you now. I won’t be allowed to miss him because I’ll be staring at you as you grow more and more like him. I won’t be allowed to forget him because you’ll inherit his mannerisms. One look at you and everyone will know that you’re your father’s child. So tell me, son, be truthful now, children who lie to their mothers rarely fare well in life. Do you think about boys?”

  CHABTER SEVEN

  BLATTELLA GERMANICA

  WHERE I LIVE NOW, where the lake is a masquerading sea, every summer, or at least when it’s pouring outside, a water bug the size of a little ship crawls out of the sink in the bathroom and decides to take a stroll. It’s always one bug. When I squish it or gas it, a day passes and then another one arrives, as though the bathroom is a port of entry or the moon, only one bug allowed to visit at a time. I kill that one, too. After a week, I call my building manager Laurel and inform her that one fat roach visits my home a day, asking her whether they could send someone over from pest control. You mean water bug, sir, she first responds. No, I mean roaches, I say. Of course, sir, she says, I shall send our exterminator to check on the water-bug problem, sir. Laurel, I should really say, these ain’t water bugs. Roaches, woman, them roaches, these roaches. And I know roaches. I grew up with them. Not the obese or indolent kind, critters with limited survival skills, I knew the best in the business, pellet-sized fuckers, Blattella germanicas—German cockroaches.

  They demolished the building I was raised in years ago. Those who lived in our kitchen, our bathroom, the cracks in the doors, came to feed when we fed ourselves, or when we slept, or when Milo, our irritable canine, pissed or pooped on newspaper in the bathroom, or when there was no one around, the house quiet, when it was opportune and safe to venture out, them sniffing the air with giddy antennae or congregating like mobsters or card players, or scuttling away and fornicating, or defecating or dropping turd-colored egg sacks polished like shoes, or simply roaming for fun, strolling, scratching a back between toothbrush bristles, passing the time, finding a way into the fridge and not leaving because cold grub smelled so good it seduced, seduced so good it killed. If any of those bugs survived the demolition of our building, then let me tell you this: somewhere, in a house, in the kitchen or bathroom or anywhere there’s a crack in the wall or the floor, these insects are conspiring to take over the building, to observe its tenants, mimic their habits, learn their language, to subdue them, to eventually become them, take over their roles.

  I’ve seen firsthand the perils of infestation. I’ve seen ungodly things. What the bugs become. I’ve seen them practice pretending to be other things. At night, I’ve seen unmentionable things, heard frightening things. Roaches in little shirts and trousers and skirts, in panties and briefs, roaches who spoke what we speak, roaches who taught themselves to walk upright. Roaches who turned human.

  I wasn’t young or slow in the head. I didn’t take meds. I was seventeen—seventeen—when I knew the bugs could talk.

  Our kitchen door back then resembled the color of dried cocoa, riddled with cracks and punctures, like the bark of a rotting tree. That night, as my family slept, I waited on my haunches by the kitchen door, ready to pounce as soon as the clock struck two, when the kitchen turned most humid, pleasing its nocturnal tenants, and I wanted to be there when they ventured out to feed. I had reasons. At dinner earlier that night, as my friends ate at the table covered by Amma’s best tablecloth, roaches crawled in plain sight, on the carpet, by the AC, under the sofa, near the lamps, the TV, around the rim of Milo’s water bowl, in his food. Amma flicked them away. I then flicked them away. It was disgusting. It was embarrassing. Light no longer deterred the critters. Never again, I vowed, never again, and so there by the kitchen that Amma always closed for the night, I crouched like a primitive man brandishing a wooden club, waiting. To kill.

  My left trouser pocket held bug spray; my right hand gripped yesterday’s newspaper, rolled fine for murder. That’s when I heard a cackling. Voices, from the kitchen.

  I understand Malayalam, I speak it. Arabic, I can manage, and a few others, like Urdu and Farsi and Tamil, I can identify by ear, recognizing the cadences from multiple tongues. That night, what I heard combined every language I knew or sorta knew, maybe more, resulting in a lexicon so strange, so distinct, so familiar yet distant, a mysterious patois, words perhaps heard then taken from maybe the Egyptians on the eleventh floor, the Sudanese family on the fifth, the Palestinians across from us, the Mallus, the Bombaywallas, the English woman, the Pathans, the Sri Lankans and the Filipinos, words spoken to sons and daughters, to husbands and wives, between lovers and foes, words collected and taken out, poured into heads, practiced in secret but out loud, words selected then changed, pronounced and mispronounced, combined to form new sounds, to conjure old ones, to produce meaning, to obfuscate secrets or express joy. Very words I heard in our kitchen, spoken, it seemed, by a large congregation. Burglars, I assumed. Burglars in our little kitchen, a family of burglars, a bunch of polyglots that had somehow gotten in, speaking in code, and I needed to do something, or warn my family, or get the dog. But I didn’t. I rushed the door in a moment of madness. Rushed in, locked the kitchen door, and switched on the lights. The first live thing I saw was a white roach in a sport coat and shorts made out of dry and putrid vegetable peelings. It stood upright, like a man, and smoked a beedi smaller than a needle’s tip. A few feet across were many bugs of his kind, putting on little clothes, wearing little clothes, attempting to walk like men, swaying from side to side, practicing, it seemed, coolly looking at me, talking over me. Still talking in a language that wasn’t mine.

  I felt for the spray can.

  They ran. Scattered. I ran after them, stepped on them, swatted them. I upturned things, beat them until they turned to mush. I sprayed until my finger hurt, until the nozzle discharged only bits of foam. I killed as they hurled instructions at each other, escaped into cracks, abandoning friends, warning others. I killed as they swore, as they pleaded, as they said nothing. What transpired couldn’t have lasted longer than ten minutes. I waited then. Twenty more minutes, the time it took to find bugs pretending to be dead. Then I swept them all into a big pointy pile and left them in the center of the kitchen for Amma to find in the morning. But before I left, I crouched low, near enough to smell the gas on the bodies, and I paid attention to the dresses the bugs wore, to the bespoke shoes on their many feet, to the craftsmanship; I also paid attention, in case someone was still barking instructions, in case a critter still lived. Outside, disturbed by the din, Milo had waited patiently for me. He licked my ankle, guiding me to the couch in the hall, where I fell asleep with his bum next to my face. I slept until afternoon, when my headache woke me. When I asked Amma what she thought about the mess in the kitchen, she didn’t know what I was talking about. I discovered then that the roaches not only ate their dead, they also returned for them. So a month later I went back to duplicate what I did, and the bugs were there, in their human dresses, speaking their human languages, taking instructions from someone else. I killed them all again, I made an even larger pile, I took pictures with my grandpa’s old Nikon, but the film went bad, a
nd in the morning, once again, the pile I made disappeared, which made me mad. I pressured Amma to ask Acchan to have an exterminator come and speculate on what could be done. The exterminator refused the job. Too late, he said. I could take your money, he said, but they’re everywhere, as if announcing a victor, and it wasn’t me. I think the bugs knew. They began talking to me and taunting me. As I brushed my teeth or took a dump or fell asleep on the couch watching TV, one would run by my ear, shouting Wictory, Wictory! They took notes in the open, listening as my parents talked to me about life, listening as I disappointed my family, when I told my Amma to fuck off, when I shoved my Acchan around. The roaches muttered goodbye in eleven different tongues when I left for college, never to return. So when I tell Laurel I know roaches, I mean it. They took over my house once. It mustn’t happen again. These fat imbeciles roaming my bathroom, one at a time, one day at a time, may not have the germanicas’ chutzpah, but I am not taking any chances. My neighbor, Helen, a crone with bent spine and pink lipstick, mentioned spotting a fat bug in her bathroom the other day, too. Beeg, she mimed, beeg! These may be reconnaissance missions. Maybe someday these averse bugs will emerge from the bathrooms in droves, dressed like professionals or labor or like my dumb super, who doesn’t speak a word of English and simply smiles, speaking American with an accent, dragging us from our beds, tying us up, taking us to our own bathrooms, pushing us down those sinks, flushing and kicking us out and moving in because it’s time. The exterminator, Laurel, get me the fucking exterminator! Because there is something Laurel should know. After I’ve killed each fat bug, I leave pieces of their bodies in the bathroom, near the sink, in the tub, the basin, by the window near the exhaust. Every morning, when I wake up to piss, the body parts are all gone, returned to whence they came. Then that evening another averse bug arrives, like an offering. It’s a trick, a game, but I’m onto them. Before I whack the bug, I check if it’s wearing shoes or a skirt or a jacket or a tie or crotchless undies made of putrid garbage, whether the bug’s taking notes, whether it’s attempting to walk upright. I watch it before making my move. Then I get as close as I can to this thing, corner it almost, and ask, Do you speak English? Yesterday, Laurel, I got my first response: Yes, Boi, a little.