Outside the office, Lena flagged down a three-wheeled auto rickshaw. She negotiated a rate with the driver who did not seem to find it at all strange that a woman in a tailored suit wanted to go to Dharavi. The sprawling slum was nestled between the Western and Central rail lines. To the north, Dharavi bordered a mangrove swamp, and to the south, it butted up against the fashionable suburb of Bandra. The rickshaw driver dropped her off in front of her building, which was located on 60 Feet Road just across the street from one of the western entrances to the Dharavi district.
A block from her apartment building, a flat lot had been fenced off. A dozen pieces of heavy machinery stood idle. The bulldozers, front-end loaders, and backhoes were waiting for the go-ahead to begin leveling the portion of the district right across from Lena’s apartment that was slated for demolition. The cheery canary yellow paint jobs seemed somewhat incongruous, like a muscled mob enforcer with a KISS ME, I’M ITALIAN button on his lapel. The machines were the face of the enemy in a war for the control of the fabulously valuable land on which nearly a million poor and outcaste squatted with few rights and little security.
On impulse, Lena decided to forgo the pleasures of a hot shower in favor of an impromptu visit to Uncle Ramananda. She did not have to worry about whether he would be home. Her godfather was agoraphobic to the point of being a virtual shut-in. He rarely, if ever, left his house.
The entrance to Dharavi was less than inviting. A rickety wooden bridge spanned a canal that seemed to contain more bottles and plastic bags than it did water. A few dense mats of foul-smelling weeds floated on the surface. Sometimes, the Dharavi boys swam in the canal, a sight that always caused Lena’s stomach to turn slightly. The plastic was doubtless the least objectionable thing in the canal.
On the far side of the bridge, a young boy in dirty red shorts and a white T-shirt sat on a thin reed mat with a wooden bowl set on the ground in front of him. He had no legs below the knees. A growth on his neck the size of a golf ball added to his misshapen look. Begging was his profession. The boy sat there at the end of the bridge all day, every day. At night, he slept under the bridge like a troll in a children’s fairy tale.
Lena fished a ten-rupee coin out of her purse and dropped it in the boy’s bowl.
“Here’s the bridge toll, Tahir.”
“Thank you, madam.”
Lena and the boy had something of an understanding. He did not beg from her and she did not provide charity. He was performing a service, collecting the ten-rupee toll for crossing the bridge. That Lena was the only one asked to pay the toll was immaterial. She paid him every time she crossed. For Tahir, it was the difference between hunger and starvation.
There were no real streets in Dharavi, just narrow twisting alleys lined with businesses, homes, and workshops. There were no street signs or maps either. You had to know your way around. For those who had been born here, it was second nature. Lena was still learning, and it was easy for her to get lost if she wandered too far from any of her established routes.
The slum had a vibrant if unregulated economy. Some businesses actually relocated to Dharavi to take advantage of the relative freedom from red tape. Pottery and textiles were the biggest businesses, but on the short walk to her godfather’s home, Lena passed a noodle shop; two beauty salons; a bar that she suspected doubled as a brothel; half a dozen kiosks selling magazines, cigarettes, and warm Coca-Cola; and a small factory that turned out cheap plastic toys for the domestic market. There were jobs to be had in Dharavi if you were willing to work hard. They just did not pay especially well.
Even in the hothouse of the slums, a few exceptional individuals thrived. Ramananda was one. He was a rogue, and her father was right that she should be skeptical of his motives, but she enjoyed his company and she could use a little cheering up right now. Her godfather was wealthy by Dharavi standards. He occupied an entire three-story building that in an American city might have been considered a modest townhouse, but in Dharavi it could have housed fifty people.
Lena knocked on the door frame and ducked her head as she stepped inside. At five-ten, Lena was tall for an Indian. Her lanky height was a constant reminder that there would always be something foreign about her here. It was good never to forget that. Ramananda was sitting on a cushion on an elevated dais.
It looked like Ramananda was cleaning up from a party, or at least having it done. Ramananda never exerted himself more than he absolutely had to, and a young boy wearing a T-shirt with the swirling saw blade logo of the Mumbai Indians cricket squad was collecting plastic cups and discarded napkins from the floor. When he saw Lena, however, he dropped his trash bag and came close to her, smiling shyly but expectantly.
“Hello, Nandi,” she said. “Don’t worry. I have something for you.”
Lena fished through her purse for a moment before producing a Halloween-size pack of Twizzlers red licorice. The kids in Dharavi loved American candy and her father sent care packages that she could parcel out to the children. Red licorice and Starbursts were the most popular and the easiest to keep close at hand. Chocolate had an unfortunate tendency to turn to soup in the Mumbai heat.
Nandi was one of her favorites. His family was poor even by the standards the residents of the slum used to judge poor, but he had a spark about him that made those around him want to smile. Even his name, Nandi, meant “one who pleases others.” Nandi was one of the regular students in Lena’s school, and one of the best. He was a quick study in math. He had already learned to code in Python, and he could repair just about any of the dated pieces of technology that kept the Dharavi economy stumbling forward. Lena used copious bribes of candy to keep Nandi and the other kids coming back for their lessons. But Ramananda too had seen something special in the boy, and his plans and hers had little overlap.
Ramananda’s business model was a conglomerate, like an underworld version of General Electric. A number of independent divisions within the firm ensured a consistent revenue stream even when times were tough in any one particular area. Some of the divisions were relatively respectable: recycling trash, begging, and gambling. Others were manifestly on the wrong side of the law. He did not like to talk about it, but Lena knew that Ramananda had a piece of the action in extortion, bid rigging, fencing stolen goods, and petty larceny. Her godfather “the Godfather,” as her father had put it. A group of street toughs called the Hard Men served as enforcers. Nandi was currently apprenticing in petty theft, but Ramananda—who had no children of his own—had told her that he hoped to train Nandi to serve as his number two and ultimately, perhaps, to inherit the business.
Ramananda had long ago earned enough money to move on from Dharavi. But he stayed. He liked it here, he had told Lena once. His criminal activities were all outside the ward. He offered Dharavi businesses his “protection” on a pro bono basis and the loans he made to the residents of the slum were closer to the bank rate than to the usurious interest he charged in his more traditional loan-sharking operation. Dharavi was his home. Ramananda was a gangster and a mob boss, Lena knew, but he had a softer side as well.
It was in his capacity as an advocate for the ward and the underclass who lived there that he had first crossed paths with Lena’s father. He had been perhaps less hardened back then, not quite so captured by the criminal net that he would ultimately weave around himself. Still, the compassion he felt for the poor and downtrodden of the slums was, Lena believed, genuine, both then and now.
Ramananda had once explained to Lena that he saw himself as a kind of Robin Hood, redistributing India’s newfound wealth to ensure that the lower castes were not left permanently on the lowest rung. Robin Hood, Lena had observed, had not kept 80 percent of his Merry Men’s take for himself. Ramananda had laughed at that.
Lena herself had visited Dharavi often as a child. Sometimes with her mother when she came to teach art classes or visit friends who had stayed behind. Sometimes with her father when he came to
meet with Ramananda or other Dalit activists in the slum. She had grown up playing in these narrow, twisted alleys. It was why she had chosen to live if not in Dharavi then at least alongside it and do what she could to improve conditions for even a few of the hundreds of thousands living there in grinding poverty. Dharavi was her home too.
Ramananda had not moved. He sat cross-legged on the dais, a thin sheen of sweat on his face as though the simple act of breathing were enough to exhaust him. Lena walked over to him and bent to kiss his cheek. He smelled of cardamom and cheap aftershave.
“It looks like you’ve been entertaining.”
“That makes it sound as though I was enjoying myself, and I assure you that I was not. I was receiving petitions.”
The social contract in Dharavi demanded that Ramananda, as a man of power and wealth, listen to the problems and concerns of the residents of the slum and do what he could to improve their lot in life. Many asked for a loan to start a business or feed their families, and Ramananda was typically happy to oblige. Others needed help navigating the Indian bureaucracy. Ramananda was well connected and with a phone call could often make minor disputes with the BMC and its various service branches disappear. Unfortunately, the Gummadi brothers were even better connected, and Ramananda had not been able to stop the Five Star development’s approval.
“How did it go with Vamsam?” Ramananda asked.
“Not well,” Lena admitted.
“I’m not surprised.”
Ramananda’s relationship with Vamsam, the ward administrator responsible for implementing BMC policies in Dharavi, was not an easy one. Twenty years of development planning—some well meaning and naive and some grasping and greedy—had foundered on the rocks of entrenched local interests. No interests were more local, or more entrenched, than those of Ramananda. Lena knew that no development plan for Dharavi could succeed unless the developers were willing to work with the residents rather than seeing them as obstacles, stones they needed to remove before plowing the soil.
“Vamsam is a snake,” Ramananda continued. “And there is only one way to deal with a snake.” He slammed his open hand on the floor beside him with enough force to make the raised platform jump.
“So what do you think we should do?” Lena asked.
“Fight back.”
“Against the BMC? That’s taking a pretty big bite, don’t you think?”
“Not more than I can chew, I assure you,” Ramananda said, baring his teeth in a mock scowl.
“Why, Uncle, what sharp teeth you have.”
“The better to chew Sayyap Vamsam a new orifice with.”
“Don’t do anything foolish,” Lena pleaded. “The last thing the neighborhood needs is more trouble with the authorities. You too. Prison wouldn’t suit you.”
“I’m too pretty, aren’t I?”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Okay, not Vamsam. He’s not the weak link, in any event. How about the Gummadi brothers?”
“As the weak link?”
“Yes.”
“That’s an even more ridiculous idea.”
Ramananda did not make idle talk. He always had an agenda, an angle. If he said the Gummadi brothers were somehow vulnerable, there was a reason for it.
“I don’t mean head-on. No muscle.”
“So what do you have in mind?”
Ramananda stood up. This in itself was worthy of note. It was not something that Lena had seen often.
“Nandi,” he called. “Bring me the bag you picked up for me earlier today.”
The boy brought over a blue paper sack that looked like the kind that held sugar or flour in the supermarket.
“The Gummadi brothers are tough customers. But the machines they have positioned to assault our homes are not quite so invulnerable.”
Lena thought about the earthmoving equipment parked in the lot across the entrance to the slum. There had been a fence, but no guard.
“Uncle, are you going monkey-wrenching?”
Ramananda sat back down, puffing at the exertion, the blue sack balanced precariously on one knee.
“I’m unfamiliar with the term, but if it means what I think it means, then, yes, I am.”
“What’s in the bag? Are you planning to put sugar in the gas tanks?”
“Alas, that doesn’t really work. It’s an urban myth, like the old story about the crocodiles in the Kolkata sewer system. The sugar just clogs the fuel filters. Put in a replacement and the engine’s as good as new.”
Ramananda pulled a small folding knife out of his pocket and sliced open the top of the bag, pouring a small pile of white powder out onto the floor next to him.
“This, on the other hand, is another story altogether. I have a cousin in Jaipur in the gem-polishing business. He sent me a few bags of silicon carbide. They use it to polish diamonds. Mix it in with the oil in the crankcase and it will shut down the engines permanently. It will take weeks to get replacement parts.”
“And just who’s going to get that assignment? I have trouble seeing you squeezing under the fence, Uncle.”
Ramananda laughed. “Me? Never. That kind of work is for the Hard Men . . . and the young and nimble.” He looked over her shoulder, and Lena turned to see Nandi sitting at a small table in the corner with an empty Twizzlers wrapper in front of him and a small pile of Starbursts that he had doubtless pilfered from her purse while she was talking to Ramananda. Nandi had demonstrated a remarkable natural aptitude for picking pockets.
“Nandi,” she scolded him gently. “No more taking candy without permission. If you do it again, you’re cut off. No more Tootsie Pops, no more licorice, no nothing.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Lena,” he replied in his Bengali lilt. “It was really just for practice. Here, you can have them back.” He pushed the small pile of Starbursts toward her on the table.
“You keep them this time. But no more stealing.”
“No more stealing,” Nandi lied solemnly.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
APRIL 5
It was his favorite painting, the one that reminded him most powerfully of her. Sam had set up the living room in their Capitol Hill townhouse in such a way that it occupied the spot where a normal family might have put a television. Sitting on the couch, with his feet up on the coffee table, NPR’s JazzSet on the radio, and a tumbler full of sixteen-year-old Lagavulin in his hand, he was looking right at the picture.
It was not a self-portrait, or if it was, it was not a literal representation of what Janani had looked like. There were enough photographs scattered throughout the house to serve that purpose. The woman in the painting had sharp, angular features. His wife’s face had been rounder and softer. But the woman in the diaphanous sari floating above the city like a figure in a Chagall painting captured something about her that was simultaneously ineffable but essential. Sam never tired of looking at the painting with its dark, somber colors and suggestions of impending mortality.
Janani had already been diagnosed when she started the painting and was suffering through the first round of the chemotherapy that would ultimately leave her too weak to hold a brush. The painting had depth to it, a pathos that was well beyond anything that she had done previously. The certainty of dying had elicited in Janani something that transcended her talents as a serious amateur, as though that knowledge had allowed her to tap into a well of artistic sensibility that had been buried somewhere deep and safe. Lena hated the painting for the same reason that Sam loved it. It was more reliable than their memories. More real than the truth.
Vanalika was right, Sam decided. He was living with a ghost. He should move on with his life. Lena said the same thing, and she had loved her mother at least as much as Sam had. But he did not want to. He did not want to meet somebody new. He wanted to look at the painting. If Vanalika would leave Rajiv, maybe the two of them wo
uld have a future. But even though Sam had proposed that very thing to her, his reaction to Vanalika’s gentle rebuff had been closer to relief than disappointment.
He thought about the intercept he had read of Vanalika’s purported conversation with Guhathakurta. He tried to think as an analyst: clearly, objectively, and dispassionately. He had been gone for maybe half an hour, and he had taken their one car. It was possible, he supposed, that Vanalika had arranged for another car to be parked somewhere nearby. She could have gotten dressed after Sam left, followed him to town, and made the call before driving back, ditching the car, getting naked—and here Sam momentarily lost his hold on professional dispassion—and getting into bed before Sam made it back from town. It was possible, he supposed, but somewhat far-fetched. On top of that, it was impossible to reconcile the contents of the message with what he knew Vanalika believed about Kashmir and the Indo-Pak dynamic. Sure, she was a patriot. But she had a sophisticated worldview that was not consistent with the paranoid fearmongering from the alleged intercept.
Occam’s razor—the principle that the simplest explanation was the correct explanation—argued in favor of the message being a fabrication. Why and how were secondary questions, and for the moment, Sam would have to put them aside until he could learn more.
He worked the issue over in his mind as though he were prodding a loose tooth with his tongue. He finished the glass of Lagavulin and poured himself another two fingers.
JazzSet was followed by the news program All Things Considered. The lead story was the death in the early-morning hours of White House Chief of Staff Solomon Braithwaite. It had been the talk of Washington all day, and the parade of journalists and “experts” on NPR had little new information to offer. Preliminary reports from the D.C. police indicated that the single-car accident on Rock Creek Parkway was a result of alcohol and excessive speed. The usual conspiracy nuts and talk-radio loonies were already calling it a government cover-up.
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