A Walk Across the Sun

by Corban Addison

  When Suchir closed the door, the boy stood stiffly, unsure how to proceed. In his eyes, Ahalya saw a mixture of awe and apprehension. He moved closer and kissed her mouth. His excitement grew when she didn’t resist. She lay back on the bed and submitted to his desires. He wasn’t as rough as Shankar, but still he caused her pain.

  Afterward, she lay on the thin mattress, staring at the ceiling and feeling profoundly unclean. She got up from the bed and washed herself at the sink. Sitting on the toilet, she realized the brute fact of her existence. A beshya could expect nothing more from life than air in her lungs, food and water in her stomach, a roof over her head, and the affections of her kind. To survive in such a world, she would have to sever her heart from her body. She had no other option. She thought of Sita, waiting for her in the upper room, fearful, wounded, yet somehow still inviolate after a week and a half in Suchir’s brothel. Sita needed her to be a bulwark against the terrors that awaited her.

  She couldn’t allow herself to surrender to despair.

  Chapter 6

  The Battle of Bombay is the battle of the self against the crowd.

  —SUKETU MEHTA

  Somewhere over South Asia

  When Thomas awoke, he had no idea what time it was. He looked at his watch and realized it was still displaying D.C. time. The cabin of the Boeing 777 was dark, and most of the passengers in business class were asleep. He needed to use the restroom, but the passenger next to him was out cold, his seat fully extended, blocking access to the aisle.

  Thomas raised the window shade. The sun was setting over snowcrusted mountains, painting them shades of ochre and henna. Afghanistan, he thought. From thirty-five thousand feet, the war-torn land reminded him of Colorado. Its beauty was striking, at once severe and serene.

  For the hundredth time, Thomas asked himself why he was doing this. The obvious answer—that he had been railroaded into it by guilt and circumstance—was no longer adequate. He could have been on a flight to Bora Bora, Amsterdam, or Shanghai. As it was, he was two hours away from landing in Bombay, his briefcase stuffed with every government report, academic study, and news clipping on the worldwide crisis of forced prostitution he had been able to get his hands on.

  He had planned his departure in a whirlwind; it wasn’t in his nature to procrastinate. Lunch on the Hill with Ashley Taliaferro, CASE’s director of field operations, between briefings she had scheduled with congressional supporters. An expedited visa appointment, courtesy of Max Junger. A trip to the mall to shop for travel gear. Updating his immunizations. Arranging with Clayton to deposit his pro bono stipend into his bank account to cover his bills. Exchanging e-mails with Dinesh—his roommate at Yale—and accepting his long-standing invitation to visit Bombay. And reading, reading, incessantly reading—on the Metro, waiting in the checkout line, and at home between research sessions on the Internet.

  In the trafficking literature, he entered a world as astonishing as it was troubling, a subterranean realm inhabited by pimps and traffickers, corrupt officials, crusading lawyers, and a seemingly endless supply of women and children captured, brutalized, and transformed into slaves. He wondered how Porter was able to cope with it—the faces, the names, the stories of abuse as diverse as human cruelty. And now he was about to enter that world. Of the many cities known for the trade in human flesh, Bombay was among the worst.

  “You’re going to be doing what?” his mother had asked when Thomas had taken a break long enough to make the call. “But that’s dangerous, Thomas. You could get hurt. I said you should follow Priya, not get yourself mixed up with the underworld.”

  At that point his father had taken the phone and asked what all the fuss was about. He listened only long enough to learn of Max Junger’s ultimatum. “Why didn’t you call me, Son?” he had asked. “I would have gotten this cleared up.”

  “Clayton needed a fall guy, Dad,” Thomas said, feeling like the not-quite-grownup he had always been in his father’s eyes. “Wharton demanded a sacrificial lamb, and Mark Blake wasn’t about to put himself on the altar.”

  “Mark Blake is an egomaniac and a fool,” the Judge replied angrily. “The man can’t argue his way out of a paper bag.” He ranted a while longer and then calmed down. “Did I hear your mother right? You’re going to India to work with CASE?”

  “That’s right.”

  His father had been silent for a long moment. “When you get back, you’re going to have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “I know,” Thomas said. On such matters, the Judge was always right.

  Turning his mind back to the present, Thomas watched a flight attendant walk down the aisle toward him. When she noticed he was awake, she asked him in a whisper whether he had any interest in a prearrival meal. He shook his head and asked for a bottle of water.

  He looked out the window again. Darkness had fallen over the rugged land, but the crest of clouds was still tinged with light. Again, he pondered the unanswerable question: why?

  Tera had been the first to ask it out loud. The morning after her surprise visit, he had awakened on the couch in the living room with a pounding headache and a powerful sense of remorse. After a hot shower, he’d met her in the kitchen, and she had offered to make him breakfast. He had looked at her strangely. She had never stayed overnight before. Yet here she was wielding a whisk, a carton of eggs beside the stove.

  “I’m going away for a while,” he said.

  “What?” she asked, the whisk suspended in her hand. She blinked. “Where?”

  “I’m not sure,” he replied, preferring to lie than to elicit more questions.

  She looked wounded. “What about Clayton?”

  “I’m taking a leave of absence.”

  “For how long?”

  “A while, I imagine.”

  “Did I do something wrong?” she asked, putting the whisk down on the countertop.

  “Of course not,” he responded and then realized how insensitive he sounded. “Look, I know it’s abrupt, but it really isn’t about you. I’m sorry.”

  It was at that point she had spoken the riddle. “Why are you doing this?”

  He thought of any number of responses but decided on the simplest. “I don’t know.”

  She had stared at him for a moment, blue eyes fraught with confusion and pain. Her mouth hung open, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she gathered her things and left the house without another word.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the disembodied voice, “we have begun our descent into Bombay. Please make sure your seatbacks and tray tables …”

  The voice droned on, but Thomas didn’t pay attention. Looking out the window, he saw the sprawling metropolis rise out of the void like a brilliant starburst. The sight reminded him of Los Angeles, but there the comparison ended. Bombay had three times the population in a landmass one third the size.

  Thomas’s nerves were on edge as the plane made its final descent toward Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. Over the years, Priya had tutored him in the Indian mind and its sensibilities and had tried, with little success, to teach him Hindi. But that education had taken place on Western soil. The city beyond the tarmac was the real India, an alien world defined by a radically different set of cultural expectations. Colonialism and globalization had built bridges across the chasm, but the divide between East and West remained immense.

  The aircraft touched down gently and taxied to the gate. The real India greeted him before he got off the plane. From his window, he could see a vast warren of slums, lit only by a network of bare bulbs strung doorway to doorway like Christmas lights. Children played in the streets and people were moving about in the shadows. Thomas watched the slum children with fascination. The West had its ghettos and barrios, but nothing like this.

  After collecting his luggage, he met Dinesh at the taxi stand.

  “Thomas!” his friend exclaimed in lightly accented English, wrapping him in a bear hug. “Welcome to Bombay!”

  Dinesh took the second o
f Thomas’s suitcases and led him through a dense crowd of taxi-wallas and placard-wielding hotel chauffeurs to a black coupe sitting in a dirt parking lot.

  “I hope you don’t mind being cramped.”

  “Not a problem,” Thomas said, piling his luggage in the trunk and climbing in.

  The night air was cool and dry, and Dinesh rolled down the windows. “We get two months with no air conditioning,” he said with a laugh. “The rest of the year we sweat.”

  Dinesh navigated the car out of the airport and into the chronic congestion of city traffic. For long minutes, they inched through the gridlock, crowded on all sides by vehicles large and small and choked by exhaust fumes. Eventually, Dinesh grew weary of the exercise and nosed his way toward the median. Flooring the accelerator and laying on the horn, he used the opposite lane to dodge around an auto-rickshaw, barely missing a collision with a bus. Thomas gripped the door handle, appalled by the maneuver.

  Dinesh laughed. “You’ll get used to it. In America, you drive with the steering wheel. In India, you drive with the horn.”

  He took a ramp onto an expressway where traffic moved more freely. “This is the Western Express Highway,” he shouted above the wind. “The streets were so crazy the city decided to build the highway above them.”

  Ten minutes later they rounded a bend and paralleled a wide bay. The odor of urine and brine hit Thomas like a sledgehammer.

  “Mahim Bay,” Dinesh said. “The stink is another thing you’ll get used to.”

  “Is it always like this?” Thomas asked, struggling to breathe.

  “It’s bad tonight. In the morning it will be better. The sewers run into the ocean. You don’t want to swim anywhere in Bombay.”

  The highway did a 180-degree turn and dead-ended in an upscale residential neighborhood. Dinesh drove the car up a hill and took a stonepaved ramp that let them out onto a street lined with tall apartment buildings and lush vegetation.

  “This is Mount Mary,” he said. “The ocean is a block to the west.”

  Dinesh made a sudden turn into a parking lot at the base of a tenstory stucco building. Two watchmen sat in chairs on either side of the gate, smoking cigarettes.

  They parked in a garage and took an old accordion-door elevator to the top floor. From the grime coating the public spaces, the building looked as if it had been built forty years ago and never touched again.

  Dinesh’s apartment, by contrast, was a marvel of modern style. The fixtures were polished brass, the furnishings wood and leather, the floor was tiled and covered with rugs, and the walls were adorned with tapestries. The best part of the apartment, however, was the view. The windows along the western wall afforded a stunning perspective of the Arabian Sea, and French doors led onto a wraparound balcony.

  Dinesh showed Thomas his bedroom and invited him to share a beer on the terrace. They took seats on wooden deck chairs and looked out at the sea sparkling in the moonlight. The lights along the coastline extended far to the north and reached their terminus at a point that seemed to jut out into the sea.

  “Santa Cruz West is first and then Juhu,” Dinesh said, following the direction of his friend’s gaze. “Many Indian celebrities live here.” He paused. “So tell me, what brings you to Bombay? I heard from a friend that Priya is back, and then I received a message from you saying you need a place to stay for a while.”

  “It’s a long story,” Thomas said.

  “All good stories are.”

  Thomas hesitated. He knew he owed his friend an explanation, but the thought of answering probing questions about his family made him weary.

  “Priya’s grandmother had a stroke,” he began. “She came here to be with her.”

  “I hadn’t heard that,” Dinesh replied. “I saw her brother in Colaba a couple of months ago. He didn’t say anything.”

  “It happened recently. No one expected it.”

  He thought back to the day Priya had delivered the news. He remembered how exhausted she looked, standing in the kitchen telling him about her brother’s phone call. He was three days into the Wharton trial, and his stress level was at an all-time high. When she showed him the one-way Air India ticket, he reacted badly and accused her of abandoning him. He remembered the fury that had burned in her eyes. “How can you say that?” she had asked. “You’re the one who abandoned me.”

  Dinesh took a sip of his beer. “So that explains Priya. What about you?”

  Thomas took a breath. “I needed a break from work. The firm let me take a sabbatical.”

  He saw his friend’s eyes narrow and imagined him thinking: Then why are you staying with me? He decided to season the lie with a morsel of truth. “Things aren’t great with Priya right now. That’s why I got in touch with you.”

  Dinesh studied him for a long moment and then shrugged. “I’m sorry to hear that. You’re welcome here as long as you like.” He changed direction. “You mentioned in your e-mail a group called CASE. I’ve not heard of them before.”

  Thomas let out the breath he was holding. “They’re a legal aid organization. They combat forced prostitution in the developing world.”

  Dinesh finished off the last of his beer. “I imagine Bombay keeps them busy.”

  They chatted for a while longer with the ease of old friends, reminiscing about their years at Yale, swapping stories about girlfriends past, and laughing at the pranks that they—usually Dinesh—had played on their classmates. Dinesh’s wit and irresistible good humor lifted Thomas’s spirits and left him with a sense of optimism about his presence in Bombay. If nothing else came of it, he would enjoy rooming with his friend again.

  After a while, Dinesh yawned and stretched out his arms. “I think I’m going to turn in,” he said, standing with his empty beer bottle. “It’s great to have you here.”

  Thomas stood as well. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to stay out here for a while. My body still thinks it’s daytime.”

  Dinesh laughed. “Sure. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Thomas took out his BlackBerry and sent e-mails to his mother and Andrew Porter, informing them of his arrival. Then he walked to the railing and looked north toward Juhu Beach. His thoughts drifted to Priya. He wondered if she was asleep or if, like him, she was standing on a terrace somewhere looking at the sea.

  He took a deep breath of the salt-laden air and tried to imagine her childhood. The privilege of her upbringing had never seemed quite real to him. She had been born into a family of Gujarati real estate magnates who had settled in the city when the British were still reclaiming land from the sea. Her grandfather owned something like a quarter of the apartments in South Bombay, along with diverse holdings around the world.

  With any other parents, Priya might have turned snooty and pretentious. But her father had chosen a life of austerity at Cambridge over the luxuries to which his birth entitled him. Professor Patel had transplanted his family to England when Priya was a teenager, and she had spent the formative years of her adolescence among the ivy and stone of the Old Campus.

  It was at Cambridge that she had matriculated as an undergraduate in art history. And it was there, a year from her tripos, that Thomas had met her on a summer exchange from Yale. He remembered the lecture her father had delivered at King’s College and the umbrella she had left behind. Her absentmindedness had given him an excuse for an introduction, and the introduction had turned into a coffee-shop conversation that altered the course of their lives.

  He took out the picture he had taken of her in Fellows Garden, which he had restored to his wallet before he left for the airport. He remembered the way she had kissed him in the shadow of the old gnarled oak. It had been a shy kiss, laden with the taboos of her culture and the memory of her father. But the fact that she did it at all had revealed the depth of her feelings for him.

  He put away the photograph and drained the last of his beer. “Namaste, Bombay,” he said, looking out over the city. Then he turned and went inside.

  The next mor
ning, he awoke to the alarm on his BlackBerry. It was seven thirty and the sky was yellow with smog. He checked his inbox and found two e-mails. The first was from Ashley at CASE informing him that he had passed his background check and introducing him to Jeff Greer, the director of the Mumbai field office. The second was from Greer himself, inviting him to meet him at Café Leopold for coffee at ten o’clock.

  He found Dinesh in the kitchen brewing a pot of chai. They ate breakfast on the terrace overlooking the sea. Thomas told Dinesh about his appointment with Greer.

  “Perfect,” his friend said. “You can come with me to work and catch a cab from there. All the taxi-wallas know how to get to Leopold.”

  At eight o’clock, Dinesh hailed an auto-rickshaw to the Bandra railway station. The rick resembled a squat yellow beetle on wheels. The unmuffled engine sounded like a chain saw. When the driver entered a swarm of identical ricks along Hill Road, Thomas fought the temptation to plug his ears.

  The ride to the station was a riot of near collisions. The driver was either the boldest man on earth or a complete lunatic. He used the horn with fanatical persistence, as if the noise would shield them from the dangers of his driving.

  “This man is insane,” Thomas shouted to his friend over the wind and the engine.

  Dinesh laughed. “By that standard, so is every other rick driver in Bombay.”

  At the train station, they bought first-class tickets and followed a steady stream of passengers to the platform. When the train came in, it was so packed with bodies that men were hanging from the cars by their fingertips, yet the crowd surged forward, undeterred.