Outside In

by Jennifer Bradbury

  The holy man lifted a hand to silence him. “Your trained soldiers are fine for protecting your borders. But your princes have within them strong spirits.”

  As king, Dasaratha could have refused the holy man. But he knew his sons were special. Their births were special; their lives so far had been special. The king knew all along that their destinies could be no less important. And he knew he alone could not prepare Rama and Lakshmana for what might await them. This holy man could. “You will bring them back safely?”

  “I promise. But it is I who need their protection. They need only my teaching. And I will teach them all I can.” The holy man knew how much of Vishnu was hidden within Rama and Lakshmana, even though they had no notion of it themselves.

  The king explained to his sons why the holy man had come.

  Rama and Lakshmana’s eyes flashed at each other. At last! Life in a palace in a peaceful kingdom is all very well and good for a time, but Rama and his brother were eager for adventure.

  But they were also loyal sons who saw how much it pained their father to even consider letting them go. Rama stuffed down his eagerness and asked his father, “Do you wish us to go with him?”

  King Dasaratha nodded gravely. “It is my wish that you learn from him and then return to me.”

  Rama and Lakshmana bowed low, letting the grins break on their faces for the first time.

  Ram awakes, jerking his head back and knocking it hard against the tree trunk. His left leg is asleep from bracing himself into his perch. When he tries to move it, he loses his balance and tumbles sideways out of the tree.

  Oof. The wind rushes from his lungs as he lands on the soft forest floor. He gasps for air, still trying to get his numb leg to move. Then he remembers the bicycle man. Nek.

  He sits up, the air just starting to find its way back into his lungs. The fires have gone out. Moonlight trickles through branches overhead, and Ram can make out the profile of the stone warrior statue still in the place where the man had been working.

  But then he realizes he is alone! He can search for his money in peace.

  Ram scans the ground around the statue, sees nothing. That Nek fellow may be pagal, but he wouldn’t likely leave a small fortune lying out in the open. Ram goes to the tarp sheltering the pile of junk, half limping as he stamps out the pins and needles pricking at his sleepy leg.

  It is too dark under the tarp to see much. Instead he feels inside jars and boxes and bags. He finds sand. Then his hand recoils when something sharp pokes his fingers. One box clinks promisingly, but when he holds it up to the light, it is full of soda bottle caps. His heart leaps when his fist closes around a corner of soft cotton, but when he pulls it free, it is only a ragged old sari.

  A sensible man would have taken the money with him. But Nek can’t be sensible, not after what Ram observed, how the man told the story to the statue—

  The story. The king. The princes. One of them named Rama. He must be the figure from the shrine with the blue skin. Maybe the other one, the scary-looking one—is the brother the holy man took along with Rama. Did Rama know, Ram wonders, that he was more than just a prince? How could he not? How could he not wake up every day and know his life was meant for more?

  Ram knows that feeling. It sneaks up on him sometimes—the hope that he is more than just a kid who has been left behind. The quiet, stubborn faith that someone will come along and claim him or call him out for an adventure. That he might have more of a story.

  It stirs in him now, that feeling. But he can’t sit around waiting. He can’t afford it.

  Ram steps back to survey the tarp and its contents. It’s too dark. He’ll have to sneak back when it’s light and make a proper search.

  Or perhaps it isn’t in the pile of junk. He eyes the stones circling the work space. Then he drops to his knees and goes to each rock, one by one, and tips it up to see if maybe his money is hidden beneath. He makes it halfway around the circle when he realizes there is another trail leading deeper into the jungle.

  Ha! The pagal man must have a proper hut deeper within. A proper place where he’d live and where he’d have taken Ram’s money. Ram springs to his feet and follows the twisting path. Suddenly a quacking, clicking sound makes him freeze. But then Ram recognizes the gecko’s chirp and knows the sticky-footed lizard can’t hurt him. Still, he’s nervous, alone in this forest, and his hand finds the watch on his wrist. He presses the buttons with his thumb, comforted by the thin little beeping sounds.

  After only a few dozen meters, Ram arrives at a wall covered in something bumpy, something rough and indiscernible in the moonlight, but the gap in it, the low arched doorway, is unmistakable.

  The back of his neck tingles. He is in a strange place created by an odd man. And there are probably even now snakes eager to drop on him.

  Still, he creeps closer to the door and pokes his head through, hands braced on either side against the sharp edges of whatever is stuccoed on the wall.

  His knees buckle.

  Hundreds of stone warriors stand arrayed on two slopes rising up from both sides of the path. Hundreds of figures nearly identical to the one Nek made tonight. They are too many, their eyes staring at him, and all the little fears expand inside him like a sail filling with fresh wind.

  Ram bolts from the wall and crashes through the forest toward the road. He doesn’t stop as he passes the clearing with the banyan where he hid. He doesn’t stop when his tunic snags the thorn of a low-hanging acacia. The fabric rips and the branch springs back behind him, raining its heavy dark pods onto the path. He doesn’t stop when he reaches the open air and the glow of the lights from Sector 22.

  He doesn’t stop running until he is home.

  Ram doesn’t know what to do with himself the next morning.

  He slept little, stewing over his lost fortune, Nek, and the army of statues that scared him so.

  But he also can’t stop thinking about Rama’s story. It feels familiar. Like an echo of a voice instead of the voice itself. He supposes if the story has to do with the figures in the shrine or the festivals this time of year, maybe he’s absorbed some of the tale without even knowing it. Maybe last night was just the first time he’d heard it laid out like that from the beginning, the first time the pieces started to fit together.

  But a story won’t feed him. So with his stomach rumbling, his mind still whirling, he creeps out from his hidden nest and makes his way to street level. He has his portion of the money that he reclaimed from the shrine. He could buy something, but there might be another way—there often is. His hollow belly urges him to hurry. The woman who runs the dancing school is standing on the sidewalk, supervising a pair of workmen who are repainting the lettering on her windows. She gives Ram a glance, crosses her arms, and goes back to scolding the painters. Ram pulls a branch of the neem tree planted in the strip in front of her studio, peels back the bark, and chews up the end, fraying it into bristles before scrubbing at his teeth. He showed Daya how to do this once, but she gagged at the bitter taste and said Ram needed a proper toothbrush and the minty paste she used.

  As Ram finishes his cleaning, Sonny the vegetable wallah pushes his cart past the samosa stand. “Go-biiiiiiii! Se-baaaaa! A-looooooo!” His voice rises at the end of each word calling out the cauliflower, apples, potatoes he has for sale today. Sometimes he’ll toss a bruised banana Ram’s way, but today he doesn’t even meet his eye.

  But Mr. Govinder Singh does. “Hey, Ram,” he says, stepping out of the way of Sonny’s cart and onto the sidewalk. He holds a bulging paper sack blotted with grease. Samosas from Rakesh.

  Ram smiles to show off his clean teeth. Maybe Mr. Singh’s bought enough to share?

  “Hello, Uncle ji,” he says. To others, Singh is Mr. Singh. To Daya, he is Papa. To Ram, he is simply Singh, or uncle. Ram knows how lucky he is to have a friend like Singh, and how fortunate it is to have someone of quality who looks out for him rather than down their nose at him. “What can I do for you today? Laundry picked u
p? Or do you have a book on order that I can—”

  “Nice watch,” Singh says, glaring at Ram’s wrist.

  Ram holds it up proudly. “Almost as nice as yours! Look at—”

  “Daya told me what happened yesterday afternoon.” Singh’s voice is stern.

  “Oh.” Ram’s shoulders go slack. Daya and her big mouth.

  “You’re taking a panga, keeping something like that, Ram. And I don’t like you involving my daughter in your schemes.” Singh is taller than anyone Ram has ever seen. He wears his hair wound up in a sky-blue dastar. His beard is tidy as always, the black giving way to silver slowly. His legs seem almost too long for his body and he moves deliberately, walking like he is afraid of breaking something. Ram asked him once why he moved like that, why he wasn’t a soldier or policeman like so many of the other Sikhs. And Singh told him that he had been a soldier when he was younger. He’d even fought in the last war with Pakistan—the short one—and been injured somehow, though Ram couldn’t get him to tell any more about it.

  “It wasn’t like that, Uncle ji! Those boys—”

  Singh holds up a hand. “I don’t care what it was like. Keep Daya out of your gambling.”

  “It isn’t gambling if I never lose.”

  The ghost of a smile flits over Singh’s face. He’s like this, Singh. A year ago, on a day when Ram must have looked even hungrier than he felt, Singh called down from his open window on the second floor of the government building, “I’ll give you two paisa if you bring me a cup of chai from the wallah in Sector Thirty-Two.” Ram jumped to his feet, caught the rupee coin Singh dropped from the window, and rushed to the next sector for the tea.

  Since then, it has been little jobs a few times a week. Dropping laundry with the washerwomen. Carrying letters to the post office. Fetching deliveries to his house in 19. That was how he met Mrs. Singh—a steely-eyed woman who spoke sharply to Ram when he turned up with parcels, who never offered him food. It was also at the house in 19 that he first met Daya, though they didn’t speak until much later. That wasn’t until the day when Singh missed his train.

  Singh had gone to Delhi on business that morning. But there were protests and troubles in the capital that afternoon, and Singh was unable to catch the express train back. But no one told Daya, who turned up at Singh’s office after school. She waited outside the office for an hour, then another, before Ram saw her sitting there. He’d had nothing better to do, so he sat with her and kept her company. When it began to grow dark and all the other workers in the building headed home, he could tell Daya was worried that something had happened to her father.

  “He’s probably already home by now,” Ram said. “He just forgot he was supposed to meet you.”

  Daya wrinkled her nose. “He doesn’t forget.”

  “Then you’ll sit here all night?” Ram asked.

  Daya looked nervously at the building behind her and then into the dusky lane that led back to 19. “No.”

  “Take a cycle rickshaw home, or a tuk-tuk,” Ram suggested. “I’ll wait here for Singh to tell him you’ve gone ahead.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  Ram didn’t either. “So we’ll walk,” he said. “I know the way.”

  Daya looked offended. “I know the way to my own house!”

  But she let him walk her home.

  Mrs. Singh had been frantic when Daya showed up at the front door, while Ram lingered under the maples that lined the front walk. But the next morning Singh had sought him out and thanked him for his help.

  A few weeks after that, Daya had a holiday from school and Singh brought her to work with him. She asked to play with Ram, following him around like a moony goat. He did the only thing he knew how to do: taught her to hit gilli.

  And since then, she seemed to find him, using some sixth sense to home in on him at any park throughout the city of Chandigarh. Daya was his audience, accomplice, and acolyte all in one. He supposed that was the closest to a friend he’d ever have.

  “What is to become of you, Ram?” Singh asks, waving Ram over to the samosa stand. “Two more, Rakesh.”

  Ram tries for humble and contrite, but the promise of food fouls up his self-control and he does a little shuffle with his feet.

  Rakesh mutters to himself, but he reaches under the clean white towel for the vegetarian samosas.

  “Not those!” Ram can’t help himself, waving at the pile under the red towel. “The meat ones!”

  Rakesh freezes, eyes narrow. He brandishes the tongs at Ram. “You should be grateful—”

  Singh shrugs him off. “He can have the lamb, Rakesh.”

  “Shukriya, Uncle ji,” Ram says.

  “This man is very important in Chandigarh!” Rakesh wags the tongs at Singh as he glares at Ram. “Show respect! Address him as Sri Singh!”

  “It is all right, Rakesh,” Singh says. “I told him to call me uncle.”

  “Thank you, Uncle ji.” Ram grins.

  Rakesh bites his lip, snatches two fat samosas from the other pile, and drops them roughly in a square of newspaper. He passes it to Ram and accepts the coins from Singh.

  “Shukriya,” Singh says.

  Rakesh nods, dropping the money in his apron pocket and then sliding his glance at Ram to give him the stinkeye. But Ram is already halfway through the first samosa.

  He follows Singh to the steps of the municipal building. Singh sits. Ram stays on his feet, keeping his distance.

  “Maybe if you’re fed, you’ll keep out of trouble today,” Singh says.

  Ram’s mouth is too full to make promises he won’t keep.

  They eat quietly for a moment.

  When the edge of Ram’s hunger has dulled, he slows down to savor the second samosa. “How is your work going, Uncle ji?”

  Ram knows a little about what Singh does. He is a sort of engineer, in charge of planning out the roads and supervising the crews and the placement of the new buildings in the city. He is, as Rakesh said, very important.

  “Fine,” Singh says without enthusiasm. “The roads get built, straight and sure. The buildings do too.”

  “I saw workmen digging out the ground in the middle of Twenty-Six,” Ram says. “What’s going there?”

  Singh brightens. “That will be something. Chandigarh is to have a museum! The mayor has decided if we are going to be the city everyone hopes we will be, we have to have all the things the other great cities of the world have. Like universities and museums.” He pauses, tilts his chin at Ram. “You know what a museum is, don’t you?”

  Ram moves his head noncommittally. He has no idea.

  “A place to display art. So other people can enjoy it.”

  “A whole building? For that? Oye.”

  Singh is shocked. “Of course! Art is important.”

  To Ram, important things are those that can be eaten, or worn, or saved in order to one day have enough money to do something important.

  “Like your bead,” he says now to Ram. “That’s art. Someone made that. Maybe for you. Or maybe just picked for you.”

  Ram’s never thought of it as anything but the link from him to the girl. He told Singh about her last year when he first saw Ram’s bead. When Ram told him how he came by it, about the girl he was beginning to forget, Singh asked many questions. Then he grew quiet and sad. Finally he sent Ram off with twenty whole rupees to buy him a copy of the Sikh newspaper, which cost only twenty-five paisa. When Ram got back, Singh was already gone.

  He never asked for the paper or his change.

  Singh wipes his fingers on his trousers. “Did you know that I used to love to draw? When I was your age?”

  It is impossible for Ram to imagine Singh at his age.

  “I thought I might grow up to be an artist,” Singh confesses. “But even if I’d been good enough, my father wouldn’t have allowed it. You can’t make much of a living as an artist. Even all the famous painters of Europe were poor during their lives. The paintings only became valuable long after they
died. So I studied engineering. Building. Architecture. At least I still get to draw some—”

  “Govinder!” A round-bellied man emerges from the building. “Your assistant said you might be here!”

  Singh pushes to his feet. “My morning break, commissioner. What can I do for you?”

  The commissioner has eyebrows like the crests of the hoopoe birds that forage on the play fields at the park. Red and black, feathered at the ends and flipping upward. The man is a head shorter than Singh at least, but the way Ram’s friend drops his eyes and widens his stance erases the difference.

  When the commissioner spins on his heel and points up the street, Singh gives Ram a quick nod to tell him he’ll see him later and then follows his boss.

  The morning is shaping up well enough, Ram decides. His belly is not so empty as it was an hour ago. And the sun is bright enough for searching.

  It’s time to go back and claim his money.

  He skips around the corner, walking up the block past the gates of the factory. The man’s bicycle with the crate mounted to the back is there again. Good.

  Ram lingers perhaps longer than he should, because the guard comes out of the little gatehouse, hands on his hips.

  “What do you want?”

  Ram doesn’t answer. He has what he needs. The thief Nek is working. Now Ram can go and find his money.

  The forest is different in the daylight. A grand rosewood tree shadows the spot where the path begins, its crooked trunk and red grooved bark curving over the path. The leaves tremble in the breeze, the shush-shush sound like a warning. Still, Ram walks more boldly this time with the sun slipping through the gaps in the canopy overhead. His steps startle a long-eared hare that springs into the scrub and disappears.

  He reaches the makeshift workshop inside the clearing quickly and is relieved to see the statue hasn’t moved. Feeling braver by the moment, he creeps nearer to look at it properly. Its eyes are large and round and white, with dark pebbles set at their centers for pupils. The head—covered in a sort of helmet made of broken shards—balances atop a curved neck. Bottle caps form a studded belt at the waist, and Ram can imagine a sword hanging there.