by Неизвестный
“Go on, do it,” said Savio.
Manisha was startled by the interruption. She hadn’t even noticed that the machine was now in front of her. How long had she been staring right at it? How long had everyone in the room been staring at her, waiting for her to do something?
“Oh, I didn’t—,” Manisha began.
“She doesn’t have to do it if she doesn’t want to,” the trainer interjected, grabbing the machine away just as Manisha finally started to reach for it. The trainer quickly slid the machine along to the next person. “They told me some of you might have religious objections. I don’t want to start an international incident.”
Before Manisha could open her mouth to respond, Roohie was already thrusting her finger into the slot to get her prediction. It was a bad one, and the whole room paused to comfort her. Manisha hadn’t meant to give up her turn, but it wasn’t the right time to speak up.
Why did I hesitate? Manisha wondered.
After the last card was handed out, the trainer jumped right into empathy training without missing a beat and left little time for discussion. The next time Manisha had the chance to speak, it was to answer a question about customer satisfaction. Before she knew it, the training was over. The woman had packed her machine back up in the brown duffel bag and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Back to the phones.
“Thank you for calling Machine of Death Analysis. My name is Manisha; may I know your cause of death?”
Thank God, this customer was a talker. The ‘cancers’ usually were. Sometimes Manisha’s job was more about listening than talking, and her head was swimming with thoughts too much to concentrate on holding up her end of the conversation. That seemed to be the case throughout the bay. She overheard Savio say “Thank you for calling autorickshaw.”
“I wish I had called sooner,” the customer said. “I mean, I wish I hadn’t been so afraid of talking about this stuff. My wife and I, we made a pact not to tell one another how we would go. I didn’t want to worry her with, you know, with that.”
Why did I hesitate? Manisha asked herself again. Now that she thought about it, that card was exactly what she needed. Hard evidence once and for all that her mother was wrong. And if she was wrong about the water thing, what else was she wrong about?
“I knew she was acting weird,” the customer continued. “I thought she was just being stubborn. We were trying to get to her sister’s house, and I was sick of the weird little shortcut she always made me take that seemed to take us an hour out of the way. She insisted, but I told her that I was driving and I would take whatever route I damn well pleased.”
That trainer was long gone now, probably on a plane back to America, where she would regale her friends with tales of her trip as though they took place in an adventure novel rather than on the highway between the Hotel Intercontinental Grand and a Goregaon office park. Manisha would probably never see one of those machines again.
“She didn’t tell me,” reiterated the customer. “God bless her, no matter how much I screamed at her and called her a stubborn old nag and an annoying backseat driver, she kept that promise and she didn’t tell me.”
It had been Manisha’s one shot. Now she would be stuck living her life based on the whims of that orange-pajamaed old man until the day she finally got married and moved out. And she couldn’t even do that without his say-so.
“Her card said I-94. That’s why she’d been avoiding that road. God bless her, she kept that promise. And I told her… no, I don’t even want to think about the last thing I said to her before the truck hit.”
Manisha suddenly snapped back to reality and felt guilty for ignoring her customer. Maybe I should have paid attention to that empathy training after all, she thought.
Thursday
A mere five hours after getting home from work, Manisha was already awake and dressed, not to mention two buses and a train into the day’s errands. All because it was time to cash her check, and her mother had chosen a bank with both a single location on the other side of the city and a two p.m. closing time.
Getting off at Grant Road meant a stroll through the Chor Bazaar and a chorus of shady shopkeeps in nameless and ever-changing stalls hawking everything from bootleg DVDs to the stolen DVD players you could play them on.
She had learned to ignore the salesmen, but there was something she enjoyed about the endless parade of nameless stalls draped in AV cables to devices that might or might not exist anymore. The piles of paperbacks that someone had meticulously photocopied page by page then tried to sell for more than a used original would cost. The way the man sitting on a pile of boosted car radios smiled like he was the most honest businessman in the world.
“Nokia, Motorola, Sony!” one man yelled out as Manisha approached. She focused her gaze on the bank just ahead of her and didn’t acknowledge him. “Nokia, Motorola, Sony!” he repeated loudly. Just as she passed, he quietly added, “Machine of Death.”
Manisha froze. She took a few steps forward, then stopped at a nearby stall and pretended to skim DVDs as she tried to figure out if he’d just said what she thought he’d said. The man caught on to her hesitation and strolled over.
“Machine of Death?” he asked her directly. The owner of the DVD stall caught the man trying to poach his customer and the two salesmen had a loud, angry argument in Gujarati. When the shoving started, Manisha slipped out and ran into the bank.
A few minutes later, she was back. The man sat on the ground quietly grinning, with his wares delicately laid out across a blue piece of tarp. Out-of-date cell phones. Faux-leather cases. Universal remotes. An orphaned Super Nintendo controller. He didn’t say a word. He knew the fact that she’d come back meant he had her, and at double the price she would have gotten five minutes earlier.
“Machine of Death?” she quietly asked.
The man looked to his left, looked to his right, then silently folded the four corners of his tarp together and slung the whole thing over his shoulder. He stood up and started to walk through the crowd. He motioned for her to follow.
Between two stalls was a rusted old metal pull-down gate. The man raised it and walked into a dark, dirty stairwell. Manisha followed and waited for him to turn on the light, until she looked up and saw the broken pieces of fluorescent tubing dangling from the ceiling. Instead, he pulled the gate back down so that the only light coming into the room was that creeping in from under the gate. The only thing illuminated was the path of the rats scurrying across the floor. From deep under the stairs, the man pulled an old sack and plopped it, half-opened, out in front of her.
“One reading, nine hundred rupees,” the man barked.
It was steep, but Manisha had just cashed her check. She started to reach into her bag before realizing what a vulnerable position she was in. Suddenly she was filled with dread. This man could just pull out a knife at any moment. It was too noisy outside for anyone to hear, and no one in the world knew where she was. She was terrified. It was exhilarating.
She had experienced a similar mixture of fear and excitement the weekend prior, when she had snuck out of the house after her mother floated the idea of an arranged marriage. She met up with the office’s trekking team. This was nothing new. She’d been on mountain climbs with them before, always telling her mother she was on some made-up weekend training session at work (the one time her office’s love of poorly timed training came in handy). Only this time, it was a white-water-rafting trip.
The feeling she had flying over the rapids, through the spray, after twenty-two years of not being allowed to so much as step in a puddle, was matched only by the feeling of stepping back onto dry land, safe and sound. There had been a moment when she closed her eyes and felt the mist splashing against her face, the bright sunlight streaming through her eyelids. It was the best feeling she’d ever had. She had felt free.
After that, this little man was nothing to be afraid of. She put the money back into her purse and barked back at the man, “Show it to me.”
He opened the sack, and Manisha leaned in to get a look. It was dark, but she could tell right off that it wasn’t even the right shape. It looked more like a broken kitchen mixer sitting on top of an old cassette deck. He figures most Indians don’t know what one looks like, she thought. He’s right.
“What is this?” Manisha demanded. She pulled open the cassette tray and found a stack of white cards that surely had deaths prewritten on them. “This is fake! Are you trying to cheat me?”
Manisha smacked the man across the back of the head and demanded he open the gate. She certainly wasn’t going to touch that rusted old thing. The man dutifully obeyed, and she was on her way.
She stopped in the middle of the busy market and closed her eyes. The sun wasn’t as bright as it had been on the river. She could almost still feel the mist. She wanted to feel that freedom again. I’ve got to find one of those machines, she thought.
“Thank you for calling Machine of Death Analysis. My name is Manisha; may I know your cause of death?” Back to work. Back on the phones. Manisha rubbed her eyes to keep from collapsing. She tried to figure out the last time she had gotten a good night’s sleep. She’d been in meetings and on errands every day of the week. She had been too excited to sleep after the rafting trip. Even when she had the chance to sleep, she couldn’t. The last time she remembered really being rested was before she and her ex had split up. Could it really have been a month?
Her customer sounded terrified.
“Hi, um… I was just on a plane. AL413 out of Detroit,” the woman began. “I just—I had to get off. I’ve always been afraid of flying, but this was just… different, you know? They had already closed the doors, but I just… I just had to get off.”
First timer, Manisha thought. The ink on the card is probably still wet. They never answer the question right off. They’re still trying to make sense of it in their heads. They feel the need to tell you the whole story before the dramatic reveal, as though it was a tale she’d never heard before.
“So I’m sitting there in the terminal for over an hour,” the customer continued. “My flight’s left without me, I’m thinking about how fired I’m going to be for bailing on this meeting, and then I see they got one of these Machine of Death things over by the pay phones.”
So you decide to use it, hoping it will prove your death isn’t air travel related, and you can merrily catch the next flight and be on your way, Manisha guessed.
“So I think, here we go: I get my card, prove there’s nothing to worry about, and get on the next flight.”
Manisha tried to guess what air-related reading the woman had gotten. Engine failure. Improperly stowed tray table. Single-serving salted peanuts. No, wait, they don’t serve those anymore.
“The card said AL413. The flight I’d just gotten off of. I don’t know what… My heart just jumped out of my chest. There was a sticker on the side of the machine that said to call this number. Did I just… Did I just beat death? Is that possible? Was I supposed to die on that plane?”
Manisha laughed out loud.
“Ma’am, the machine is never wrong,” she explained. “Just because you don’t get on Flight AL413 today doesn’t mean it won’t fly again tomorrow. Or Monday. The airline’s website says it runs five times a week. Maybe you’ll never set foot on it again, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t drop an engine one day onto your car. Or crash into your house. Hell, maybe someone will invent a variation of the AK-47 named AL-413 and you’ll get shot with it. The most likely scenario, though, is that the flight number itself has spooked you, leading you to get off the plane that would have taken you to safety, sending you into a dangerous situation you wouldn’t otherwise be in, and you’ll die this very afternoon.”
“Oh, um. Okay,” the woman responded.
“Flight tracker says AL413 landed twelve minutes ago safe and sound,” Manisha added happily. “Is there anything else I can assist you with today?”
“Uh, no, that’s it,” the woman replied.
“Thank you for calling Machine of Death Analysis,” Manisha said. “You have a great day.”
Friday
Manisha stared at the patterns in the peeling section of wallpaper next to her bed that she had come to know well during her many sleepless days. The effort it took to hold her eyes closed in the hopes of falling asleep took more energy than she had. Her whole body ached. Her teeth clattered involuntary as if they had someplace more important to be.
She tried once again to close her eyes, hoping to feel the mist, but all she could see was the lingering pattern of the wallpaper. It had been burned into her retinas. This was wallpaper that her mother had chosen, not her. But it had become part of her through sheer repetition.
These missed opportunities with the machine had gotten her brain working overtime. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was stuck in a life that wasn’t hers. One that had a beginning, a middle, and an end before she opened her eyes for the first time. Her name had been chosen before she was conceived because the seven letters in it were a numerologically pleasing combination. The second she was born, the date and time of her birth decided how she would die. Everything in between was paint by number. It wasn’t her life. And without that card, she didn’t know how else she could prove it.
As always, her mother had passive-aggressively turned the television up far too loud, to show that no respectable person should be sleeping at ten in the morning. Manisha could usually tune it out, but there was a lot of screaming and shouting on the news. She peered over the blanket to see what was happening.
“Malad West,” her mother said. “They got one of those Death Machines at the big mall out there.”
Manisha sat up quickly and saw for herself. It was one of the larger models, like they must have had at that airport her customer was calling from. Someone had risked the wrath of the moral watchdogs by importing one. The news quickly cut to the scene outside, where a mob of Shiv Sainiks were predictably throwing chairs through windows and employing their favorite move, setting a bus on fire. This machine wasn’t going to be there for long, and if this was how people reacted, it really would be her last chance. Manisha started putting on her clothes.
“Where are you going?” her mother asked.
“I’m going over there,” Manisha responded. She was too exhausted to make up an excuse.
Her mother was shocked into silence until a whisper creaked out. “I don’t want you going out there!”
“It’s selfish to think you can always get what you want,” Manisha snapped back.
This time the words shot directly from her brain to her mouth, before Manisha even had the chance to think about it. It may not have been a conscious thought, but Manisha knew exactly where it came from.
It was the same line her mother had used on her a month earlier, upon meeting Ritesh. He and Manisha had been secretly dating for two years. She had finally worked up the guts to introduce him to her parents, because they were planning to get married.
They met for lunch. Manisha and her mother on one side of the table, Ritesh and her father on the other. And at the head of the table—surprise, surprise—a special guest who ‘just happened’ to drop by. The numerologist.
Mom and Dad didn’t ask Ritesh where he came from. How he’d met Manisha. Where he worked. They didn’t ask a single question. The only one speaking was that orange-pajamaed old man. He had one thing to ask.
“Do you choose three, five, or seven?”
Ritesh paused and waited for some sort of follow-up or context. Manisha knew it wasn’t coming. Mom and Dad glanced at one another, taking his silence to be indecisiveness, not a good trait at all in a son-in-law. Manisha mentally pleaded for him just to pick one.
“Th-three,” he finally squeaked out.
The numerologist was stone-faced. He didn’t say anything. That one word was enough to seal Ritesh’s fate. The old man politely washed up with the finger bowl and excused himself. Manisha’s parents followed him ou
t. Manisha and Ritesh sat silently at the table, pretending as though they couldn’t hear the discussion on the other side of the door.
Manisha’s parents were adamant. “That boy is not a good match for you.” Ritesh was adamant. “I won’t come between you and your parents.” She never saw him again. She left the call center they both worked at soon after and started working for Machine of Death Analysis.
She hadn’t slept since.
“It’s selfish to think you can always get what you want.”
It took all morning to get to the mall. No taxis would go anywhere near the place, even if they could find a clear path. Not even the ambulances could find a way in. The violence was all over the street, and the unfortunate vehicles that were stuck in the resulting citywide traffic jam were being rewarded for their patience with broken windshields and slashed tires. She’d had to fight her way to work before through situations like this. Many businesses closed down when it got bad, but the American companies who hired her were unmoved by Indian politics. In those cases, it was always about finding a way around the chaos. This time, she was heading right into the eye of the storm.
No one bothered Manisha on her way in. They must have figured that anyone with a look of determination like that must be on their side. She took no notice of the hundreds of people spouting party catchphrases, the bricks flying past her head, or the broken shards of glass she had to step over.
The rioters had certainly taken control of the city, but as soon as she reached the doors of the mall, it was like entering a sovereign nation. The Embassy of the Great Kingdom of Capitalism. The line to get past the lobby was like airport security, if the airport employees carried assault rifles to keep undesirables from even getting in line. They noted that Manisha was not one of the rioters and let her through to the scanners. She was herded through a metal detector and patted down, the contents of her purse emptied out on a table, and then politely handed a coupon for buy-one-get-one-free fruit smoothies.