Outside In

by Jennifer Bradbury

  Nek looks at Ram expectantly, waiting for him to figure it out.

  Ram knows—feels—he is being tested. Nek wants to see what he will do. Nek wants to see if Ram can see as he sees.

  And Ram knows it is a true test, just like the one Rama faced with Shiva’s bow.

  Ram pulls one of the smashed bangles from the box, holds it up to the statue. He unfolds it enough to slip it over Sita’s arm.

  Too big.

  He crimps it around her wrist.

  Too bulky.

  He balances it on top of her head, like a crown.

  Too silly.

  Nek pretends to busy himself tidying up the shop, but then Ram spies a pair of snips in a wooden toolbox. He grabs them and cuts the bangle at the weak points where it was bent before. Then he holds the fragments up against the statue, bending the ends back easily.

  He almost gasps when he sees it, what he figures Nek was imagining all along: those bangles, broken and cut and rearranged, will make a pattern more beautiful and colorful than any sari in the whole world.

  “It will take a while,” Nek says without turning. “But it will be worth it.”

  Ram drops to the dirt, too happy to have passed to care how long it will take, or how sore his hands will grow.

  When they leave the garden together late that afternoon, Nek rides home, but Ram feels energized by what he’s accomplished. Sita is taking shape. The chicken-wire-newspaper frame is done, and cement covers the skirt up to her waist. Nek showed Ram how to smooth it with his hands.

  Ram doesn’t want to go back to his sector yet. And it’s been ages since he last took a bath. Now his usual grime is layered over with cement and grease and smoke. It is time. And the lake is just south of the garden.

  He hurries past the wide boardwalk on the front side of the lake, crowded with walkers even at this time of day. He picks along the shore opposite the docks, deeper into the marshy parts where there are no paths. When he reaches his favorite spot, he strips down and steps into the chilly water. Ram likes being clean, but he wishes it didn’t have to be so cold. He finds the cake of soap he hid under some rocks the last time he bathed and lathers as best he can. If it were warmer and earlier, he’d wash his clothes, too, but not tonight. How nice it would be to have clean clothes waiting for him when he came out of the bath. He knows other kids must have taps in their homes, and towels to dry off with rather than just the weak sunlight and the breeze to shiver in. But Rama and Lakshmana didn’t have warm water or clean tubs on their adventures. Ram takes some pride in that they had to bathe in forest streams and lakes like this one.

  The watch on his wrist feels funny in the water, and for a moment Ram panics. The he remembers that it is waterproof. Good. He holds it up to catch the light.

  Siyappa!

  A great glob of concrete has crusted around the buttons on the left side. And the little display is blank instead of filled with the numbers and the date.

  He tries all the buttons. Nothing. No sound at all.

  Hoye.

  Ram emerges from the water, staring at the ruined watch. Maybe from concrete, or maybe Peach Fuzz lied about it being waterproof. Either way, Ram is more heartbroken than he cares to admit. Maybe it will dry out and work again. He can only hope.

  Ram dresses and wanders back to town, invisible in the way only a boy like Ram can be. He plucks an orange from another shrine to Rama and Sita, this one with the two lovers holding hands and facing each other.

  How could Lord Rama secretly carry so much of Lord Vishnu and not even have known it himself? How could something so wonderful be hidden from everyone? And how is it possible Ram shares a name with such a man as this? Did Rama ever feel invisible?

  Ram passes the small play field attached to the government school. He wonders: If Rama could hold such secrets, maybe he can too.

  Maybe, he thinks, I am secretly a prince. He would not be so greedy as to aspire to being a god, but a prince? Why not? Or if not a prince, at least the lost son of a wealthy man who laid a full table every night. Or maybe the lost son of an artist who marked you with a special bead before you were separated.

  Ram is embarrassed by his imagination. Nonsense. Besides, Pehn gave him the bead.

  But who gave it to Pehn? Of course it couldn’t have been Nek. But still. The notion burrows down inside his mind and takes root, like a weed growing out of the sidewalk.

  Alongside it grows another idea. Maybe Ram and Nek were supposed to meet. Maybe they were meant to look after each other. Like Rama and Lakshmana.

  Maybe Ram doesn’t have to be quite so alone.

  There are a dozen kids playing pithoo in an area where the grass is worn down to nubs, dust clouding around them with every step. Ram leans against the fence. He’s played before, but he’s not very good. Pithoo requires friends to play with you.

  A girl his own age knocks down the tower of stones and begins running, another boy rushing up to restack them while another kid chases the girl, throws the ball, and tags her out.

  A little farther on he sees another game going. Cricket. Yes. A little cricket would be fine. And if the cricket evolves into a gilli match, a little wager, well, his pockets and his stomach will not say no.

  Ram climbs the fence and begins jogging toward the boys. He’s maybe fifty yards away when the bowler stops, takes a few steps, and points at Ram. Good, Ram is relieved. They want me to join in!

  But the tallest calls out to the others, and as one they move toward him. Ram is frozen for a second, losing precious time. Something isn’t right.

  The pack comes into sharper focus. Peach Fuzz glares at Ram just as murderously as the day Ram took his watch. “It’s him!”

  Ram’s so dumbstruck by his bad luck that he remains fixed to the spot. Or maybe it wasn’t just bad luck. Maybe they were in this end of town for a reason, looking for him. When following Daya didn’t work, maybe they figured coming to the area where they lost track of him would. Either way, Ram can’t believe it. The broken watch feels like a weight on his wrist.

  The boys are closing fast, and he is in an open field with nowhere to hide. Finally his legs remember what to do, and he runs.

  Ram’s toes find holds in the chain-link fence and he throws himself over and breaks into a sprint. Too soon he hears the pack hitting the fence as well, rattling it as they climb over like some many-armed monster.

  He’s still in the open, still exposed. He could run back toward his own sector, but he’s led them there once, and if they see that, they’ll know where to find him for certain.

  The forest. He can hide in the forest.

  He veers right, hard and quick, feet slipping on something slimy, but he keeps moving. Ahead he can see the new road the city is building. He hurdles over the dirt piled up at the edges, feet kicking up the gravel waiting to be paved over with smooth blacktop. On the other side, he leaps again, launching into the trees.

  It swallows him up. A clutch of hoopoes shriek oop-oop-oop and scatter as Ram charges deeper in. He can still hear the boys shouting behind him, though he is uncertain if they have followed him inside. He has stuck to the paths around the workshop, and this part of the forest is unfamiliar. The cover is denser and the light is lower.

  Ram trips over a scrubby neem tree, its yellow berries squishing under his feet. He must hide. Another banyan tree, maybe, where he can wait for the boys to give up.

  But then his knee explodes in a fireball of pain. A sound like the shattering of a hundred stones fills the air, and for a moment Ram wonders if it is the sound of a bone breaking. He draws the knee up to his chest and hops wildly on the other foot, biting his bottom lip, fighting against the urge to cry out.

  Then he sees what he hit.

  Siyappa! A statue lies on its side. One hand holds something like a pitchfork. Miraculously, the pitchfork’s spindly tines have survived the fall, but the head has rolled a few feet away, one eye dislodged from its socket. But what is one of Nek’s statues doing all the way out here? And if it
is out here, are there others nearby as well? Is he closer to the garden than he thought? Or is the garden much bigger than he realized?

  Suddenly Ram is not worried about the boys anymore—he is worried about Nek. What will Nek say? Ram limps toward the head, hoping against hope that he can just put it back on and Nek won’t know the difference. But two steps closer he goes still.

  Just beyond where the head has fallen, the ground drops away, a gorge some twenty feet deep and sixty feet long opening up below him. It is sheer on both sides, with only scrubby bushes filling in the bottom. Ram could have launched himself over that cliff. He could have been hurt far worse than just a banged-up knee. He looks at the fallen statue, feeling oddly like the thing has saved him, has sacrificed itself for him.

  Ram scoops up the head, backing away from the precipice. He positions it near the body and tries to imagine how he will tell Nek.

  Behind him, he can hear the boys calling to one another. They are closer.

  “He went in there!”

  “Go after him!”

  “You go after him!”

  They are afraid of the forest. But their fear won’t keep them back for long.

  “Spread out and search!” Ram can recognize the voice of Peach Fuzz now. What’s more, he can tell that they are closer.

  If they keep coming, they’ll find the statue.

  He has to draw them away.

  Ram leaves the statue where it has fallen and begins crashing through the brush, making as much noise as he can as he cuts toward the new road that dead-ends into the one the boys chased him across. Just to make sure they take the bait, he calls out as loud as he can, “Little schoolboys afraid of the forest?”

  The taunt hits the mark.

  “He’s heading east toward the main sector!”

  “We’ll get him now!”

  Ram tries to enjoy the fact that his plan is working, but his knee is slowing him down. Plus, it’s easier for the boys to keep pace with him as they run along the edge of the forest. They’ll be even with him by the time he is in the open again.

  Faster.

  He makes it to the road and vaults over the earthen embankments, springing past the piles of stones.

  “There he is!”

  Ram doesn’t dare glance back. He ignores the pain in his knee, but his lungs are beginning to burn. He can’t keep up this pace. . . .

  At his own sector, he rounds the corner and sees his salvation. Another of the processions is clogging the lane. Giant paper heads, cars covered with garlands of marigolds and jasmine, horses bearing handsome men and women. A large battery of drummers keeps time, an army of horn players and bell ringers following behind. The cars honk as voices chant.

  Ram dives into the thicket of musicians and horses’ legs, running with the flow of the parade as he goes. A man reaches over from his horse as if to swat him, but for the most part, no one pays Ram much mind. He runs all the way to the beginning of the procession, passes under a platform borne on the shoulders of four men.

  Only after he dives into the crowd on the opposite side of the street does he pause to look back.

  No sign of the boys.

  And then he sees what those men were carrying on the platform: life-size plaster figures of Rama and Sita, their hands raised in blessing.

  As Lord Rama passes, Ram cannot help but notice the little smirk someone has painted on his face.

  And Ram smiles back.

  The next morning, Ram doesn’t feel like he has slept at all. He also doesn’t feel much like eating. He lingers at the corner for Daya before figuring out that it is Sunday. Even though he knows Nek is probably already at the garden, he stalls. He finds some kids hitting gilli in a park in Sector 13 and picks up a few rupees. But he hits badly, the sound of the sticks cracking together too much like the snap of the statue’s neck.

  He still isn’t ready to face Nek, so he settles in to watch part of a pageant play in the park. Thanks to Nek’s story, Ram recognizes the characters, but he is too far away to make out what the actors are saying. Even still, the holiday season is all beginning to make sense. The endless parades and overflowing shrines and pageants are part of this story. It makes him feel wise to know about how things connect.

  But he can’t shake the worry—the worry of what Nek will say when he explains what happened last night. By the time he finally makes his way to the workshop, the worry sits heavy, like Ram has swallowed stones.

  “Where have you been?” Nek says. He’s already adding the next layer of cement to Sita’s form.

  “I have to show you something, Uncle ji.”

  Nek doesn’t glance up. “What is it?”

  “Er,” he begins. “There is a statue I ran into last night.”

  Nek stops smoothing out the cement. “Ran into?”

  Ram nods. “It was an accident. It was dark, and I didn’t know that part of the forest and I broke it.” He says, repeating, “By accident.”

  “Where?” Nek growls.

  Ram gestures into the thicket. “That way. I don’t know how far. At the top of a sort of ravine—”

  Nek is already walking, quicker than Ram has seen him move before.

  Ram hurries to catch up.

  Nek’s silence is unbearable. Ram follows him along an almost invisible path through the trees. They pass through another arched doorway, the wall extending ten feet or so on either side, covered in bits of broken mirror. A little farther on, they pass by the exposed roots of a tree as the hillside towers over the path. Only on his second look does Ram realize that the roots are not real roots. They are made of cement, though how Nek has managed to make them twist and curve this way Ram cannot guess.

  “Why is it so far away?” Ram asks finally. “From the other statues?”

  Nek does not slow down. “Shiva is where he is supposed to be.”

  “Shiva?” Ram asks. The one whose bow Rama lifted? Why does he belong here and not with the laughing army?

  They hurry on. From the dry streambed on their left comes the chit-chit-chit of a mongoose, and the answering hiss of a cobra. But Nek doesn’t even slow down.

  They reach the ravine Ram almost stumbled into last night. Nek climbs up the hillside, using the cement tree roots as handholds. The drop into the ravine is not as steep as Ram thought it was last night in the dark, but it still could have injured him badly.

  When they reach the top, Nek goes straight to the spot and scoops up Shiva’s head. Ram follows slowly. Nek’s anger and frustration radiate off him in waves. “What were you doing up here? I told you not to be in the garden without me.”

  Ram can’t believe how small his own voice sounds. “I didn’t think I was. All the things you showed me in the garden are hundreds of meters from here.”

  Nek scans the ground. “Where is his eye?”

  “I don’t know, Uncle ji.”

  Nek crouches, begins combing the undergrowth for Shiva’s lost eye. “You didn’t even bother to search for it?”

  “I didn’t have time. . . .” Even now he stands paralyzed, fiddling with the strap of the broken watch.

  Nek keeps searching. “You had time to creep around my garden when you were told not to, time to break Lord Shiva’s head clean off, but not the time to find all the pieces?”

  Ram’s frustration boils into anger. “I didn’t have time because I was being chased!”

  Nek’s hands go still. His voice is quiet, somehow even more terrifying. “Chased?”

  “These boys, they chased me last week when I won their money. I ran into them yesterday half a kilometer from here and I thought I could hide in this section of the forest, but—”

  “You led them here?” Nek is on his feet. He still holds Shiva’s head in his hands. Ram worries he might throw it at him. “You led them here?”

  “I didn’t think they’d follow me. But they did. After I knocked over the statue, I realized they were still coming. So I made a lot of noise and led them back to the street and outran them back to my se
ctor before I hid in a parade.”

  But Nek doesn’t seem to have heard anything else. Doesn’t care that Ram was clever, or quick, or that he got the boys to follow him away from the garden instead of deeper in.

  “Leave,” Nek says coldly.

  “But—”

  “Out!” Nek is transformed. Ram knew he would be angry, but he didn’t expect this! He’s been yelled at plenty of times, thrown out of shops and doorways often enough, but this is different. It was never a friend shouting or sending him away before.

  “But I saved the garden . . . ,” Ram begins. “I kept them from seeing it. And you still owe me money—”

  “Go before I lose my temper!” Nek palms Shiva’s head with one hand, points with the other back toward the road.

  Ram is used to being unwanted. But being banished is new. And so much worse.

  Ram stays away for four whole days. He spends them in distant sectors, making sure to come back late, after the factory is shut, so he won’t risk running into Nek.

  At dusk on Thursday, Ram slumps on the curb across from the municipal building with a few pieces of buttery naan from the tandoor past the market. He bought them with one of the coins Nek paid him with on Saturday. The bread tastes like paste in his mouth.

  Somehow having had a job to do and now having it ripped away is the worst thing of all. When Sita was just beginning to look real, too.

  A burst of red explodes in the sky overhead, the boom coming a second later. The sky has barely begun to surrender to dusk, but the fireworks have already begun. They pop and hiss from all around him, sulfurous smoke clouding the air. They’ll continue starting earlier and earlier, all the way up until the last day of the festival, until Dussehra ends and the three-week countdown to Diwali begins.

  “Hello, Ram.” Singh settles beside him, a few feet away.

  “Why are you still here?”

  “Catching up on some work.”

  A parade rounds the corner at the end of the lane and begins marching up the street. First a corps of drummers, then a motley assortment of people clanging cowbells and cymbals. A pair of trumpets bleat tunelessly.