TAKEN FROM HIM
By Joseph McElroy
Copyright © 2014 by Joseph McElroy
Turn away from the arguing voices, be a guest unnoticed, the issue on this slum beach the ancient fort and your group you’re not wholly of — the leader your friend who won’t take No from a gold-badged Mumbai functionary, who swings a hand out like a traffic cop, chops it downward: the fort is off-limits. Hindi translates well into prophetic gestures. He and his two men, uniformly moustached, police the shore, the dubious beach, the huts, the area of the old fort, the view. While in the viewfinder of one’s borrowed camera, distinguished but never to be made friends with, is found the flared gunwale of a skiff, a flash of water light, a patchwork square of yellow-and-gray sail out there for an instant.
Off-limits, the police are saying to our leader, who is not to be taken lightly. Centuries old, its walls stained now, dilapidated, a sight, this fort abandoned but not abandoned, commanding the bay once — now repurposed. A democracy of voices raised, is it India, is that all? — the sheer agitation? Cannot go in there! body language itself warns; while for the visitors, their mentor, an overseas visitor himself this trip, Indian he and his wife, brilliant, famous, quite evidently answers the entrenched official, Nothing says we can’t.
In English, catching the eye of his friend now, who is a sort of special guest tagging along, he tells his people that these guys don’t know what they are doing, though what they are doing saying No to us is finding something to do. While the lead officer, interrupting, has switched to English, yet even now and with this contingent of visiting landscape design specialists from the States, how do you tell if this irate debate is serious? The leader not giving up, his friend the special guest can turn away unnoticed in all probability, the diamond-cable Sea Link bridge a huge sail-shaped glint of it in the camera viewfinder bypassing us to connect North and South Mumbai — Arabian Sea — beyond; the bay this side; and then on a near corner of this shore in the privacy of this lens is found between a jaundiced rampart and you a hand. And a shining profile waiting to go somewhere, a slender shoulder, hopeful, a palpable neck, a comb lifting and gathering a fall of abundant hair. This borrowed lens at a tilt now wide-angling a corner of the fort, when aimed a degree to the left seems followed by the person who then is lost. A degree further, she’s there again, then gone: her hand signaling, it seems, to come in.
Is it the viewfinder of an expensive camera one would never buy that asks the eye to shoot, to click? Instead see with your own eyes a trace of color vanish at the nondescript entrance to the fort, blue gone about its business, hints of silver reflection — yes, a fold in the tunic across the chest young and brave. Perhaps there isn’t time. Look back, remember these young companions you count on to get you from one place to another, the next stop in a metropolis of mapless alleys and slum lanes, Vespas bearing whole families, democracy overlap, ghostly caresses of hands out, begging. No architect, or planner or graduate landscape designer or even taker of snapshots, the mystery guest taken care of, a joke, really. And the person entering the viewfinder, what has she seen, or why?
A pale and speckled dog skittered along the strand looking over his shoulder. Men in shorts wandered the sands. Where are the shells? Historical ground underfoot, befouled beside the waters of Mahim Bay where under the sun a lot is almost happening, fishing boats, an anchored dredger far out near a reclamation dock confirmed on the map, beyond it another of those forts, Worli, on a peninsula, one of two like crab pincers that grasp the bay; or nothing is happening, shaped by some delay in history itself, which is meaningless accelerations. Here, once marked by the Mahim Fort or held by it you could say, sand and coral from the sea met silt and clay from the creek. A shear between materials later confounded by the British with a causeway built across the connecting creek in the 1840s blocking most of the creek deposits. Without them, the sea slowly prevailed, some foundations of the fort eroded, the beach wore away and this whole corner of shore inched north, we’re told. The visitors with a view now to intervention in this landscape, the municipal authority has such projects on hold.
Our leader was talking local Maharathi to the guards now, you’re certain of it at a guess. The guards overmatched by our leader? That’s not quite it. They perhaps do not wish the fort seen inside, the darkness of its population experienced, you could say. But the day has been carried, those who want to go inside the fort, may go, if any after all do. Already at the doorway, camera cased, beware the narrowest passages into what? — hundreds of families housed in a small fort.
It is a plunge like nothing but the stench. In a foreign sea, when will diver descending come back up, breath and heartbeat mortal noise. A faint catch in the chest. Who is here? At once inside the entrance a bend of passageway, in a corner a person shelling or preparing something, from a sack into a pan. Further in, like the City, a ladder to a second floor — a third? — scaffolds up there, the light real — each level four feet or maybe five headroom, sitting-down room. A bent old person in a sari can just lift her pot, a sense of others crouched, seated, maybe busy. Two women speaking of this visitor below, old men lurk. “Ah, you see?” a girl said. “I knew you would come.”
“What do you mean you knew?” It was she from the viewfinder. “You are not one of these architects,” said the girl.
He had smelled her before she spoke standing beside him now (tunic, bluejeans) and knew the smell. Not the breathtaking stench living around them and of waste established suffocating at first and humanly familiar from other stops on the itinerary, but her scent, a plant scent, a distance maybe not hers at all, the intruder into the camera. Water dripping from above, “Careful you will soil your shirt.” It was she for sure. Feel for the camera. She had taken something from him, or would. He did not think of himself. Face, shoulder, glinting comb she’d sent his way in the viewfinder. She was serious about something, she had taken something from him, taken it on or meant to.
This twenty-year-old? She was giving a tour perhaps that he must pay for? She talked from the heart not loudly, like low laughing. “They built this place to last,” she said. A sudden inside of life brushed close as the ladder and the ghost of someone’s elbow bumped, and above, life on a rickety second tier like a loft; then a tunnel almost a rough, coolly crumbling-feeling but established passage ahead cramped to connect or for escape, rutted, a future, smotheringly narrow. He thought she would say something that would strike him and if one can’t wholly listen (even to a strange compliment), the place asks everything.
“Hang onto your camera.” “It’s not mine.” “All the more.” “Don’t really know how to use it.” “That is irresponsible.” “Worse if I misused it.” “I saw you taking a picture of me.” “I didn’t take it.” “You should have.” “Not the first I haven’t taken.” The girl laughed. “It was a photo opportunity, suhrr.” She held up to him, but to do what with, a bar of soap that smelled. “God is in the details,” he was inspired to say. “You mean everywhere?” “Only sometimes.” “You are not a cruel person, but…” — absorb her talk — “you are not here for long. I am an intern. I can drive a scooter. I have two sisters. You understand that.” “I what?” “Here is a boy, he works for the metal recycling over by the river (?).” Scarcely to be seen, a child grins, glad to see you. “The Mithi?” “Precisely.” “Is it really a river?” “Ah, you see that is why I am here.” Who would say such things? But this is what she thinks of the overseas visitor.
Look. In the amber, gray, or angular light everywhere, alcoves, nooks, people by twos or ones, like shrines. Underfoot hard ground pushed up, and rock, concrete, broken and worn smooth and yet uneven, the original undissolved lime showing through a glimmer of puddle (ca
n it be true?). Light ahead outlined a man and a boy in the passage, little room to pass. A ladder rung fingered, see what’s up here. Set foot on a ladder and find the floor above lined in slumwall-like cardboard. A cot occupied by three children and a man with one leg, another actual alcove space set off, a small TV, a toy cricket bat — a stool like a carton is a carton. Eyes of adults, the darkest of foreheads measuring headroom. A poster of a shining celebrity bare to the waist. What looked to be cloth hangings, wash. Between buckets of wash an electrical cord leading under rubbish. No one up here with the hand out. “Can you see the whole place — can you walk everywhere up here?” he asked (though among all these murmurings where was the girl below and why did he ask? About an intricate, compartmented slum?). “Come,” she calls, “the way through is down here.”
Only the passage still, this hacked, shaped, even natural and practically pretending to be ancient corridor and several feet away lighted by a bulb, or, now, a fork in the passage. “It’s a very pricey camera,” her hand on it. “It’s very borrowed,” you say. “Very borrowed,” she took his arm but nowhere to guide — “someone made you take it!” she hits on the explanation. The jasmine, a faint scent, shadows her, it is thin like her young nose, a stud in one nostril. “It’s my sister’s.”
“I knew it. I have a sister.”
The girl was somewhat educated, maybe more.
“Did anyone else come in after me?” “They are ahead of us.” “I don’t see how.” “You don’t have to.” “I need a compass now.” “You have your compass.” “I’m here.” The girl made a warm sound, like a thought. “Inside” — insaieed, she said. “To be inside,” she said. He felt for the camera.
“You have an instinct,” she said, a hint pretentious, this young one.
“Well, didn’t I hear them speaking Marathi?” “Yes, at the end, you knew.” “How can you believe that?” “I will keep you in suspense.” “Was it Marathi?” “It was.” Two little girls were whispering, murmuring seriously; women in saris smiled hello. “You know this place well.” Was she insulted? He looks her in the face, not knowing her name, her forthrightness in the dusk democratic and more; he hadn’t meant Does your family live here; but he had. Presently the girl said, “My grandfather was a magistrate.” “And your family?” Chatter erupting above, she is definitely educated. “And your family?” asked again. Odor like animal hide close, rank, and another question drifts in. “You speak all these languages?” She understood some. “I have a picture of him,” she says of her grandfather.
Ladders, one with a railing, and here are two missing middle rungs leading to how many families — which families?
Up, rung by rung, slipping, to find the girl right behind him, her knuckles on the small of his back, holding onto his belt. “Your sister knows you have an instinct.” “For what?” “For what? It is only what she thinks. To be the welcome guest,” words came back at a slant. Near the top the girl hops magically around the considerably older man with her, the jasmine scent her, a thread along the rank hide smell; or a reminder of some part of her that secretes the jasmine. She addresses two women squatting behind a drape of wash; a third, a wisp of nearly bald old lady, her knees drawn up to her chin under a luminous-pearl sari. Dried here, what will wash smell like? She did the talking it seemed, the women hidden, soft-spoken. Unconvinced by her? How did he know she had spoken of him? Hunched down, on this second level, seeing into another space he felt the overhead on his shoulders. He has only a knack for languages — nothing serious, inherently lazy and older, dreamt conceivably, and now American after so many years. “How did you like that?” “Like a mattress balanced on a bottle of wine.” “You are funny.”
“Grandfather on your father’s side?” is the way to ask the question — as frontways he precedes her down the narrow ladder, heeling the rungs, and the smell was of ordure enriched by charcoal burning all day and rice, historic urine, life a considered hum of humans not entirely their voices. “My father?” she says abruptly above him. “He is a driver.” “He has” — you ask as much as tell her — “encyclopedic knowledge.” “You know he has,” she’s at you oddly. “Is he his daughter’s father?” “Everywhere he goes, he knows everything, he thinks, but only two roads he drives,” her voice, ignoring the question, a hidden edge. “Where he works?”
Light swims through a green cloth hanging, it’s in the beholder. “You spoke of me to those ladies.” “Nothing you don’t know.” “I know nothing.” “He is occasionally humble, he thinks he has everything, I said, and asks for nothing. I told them far from it.” “What did you mean?” “They do not like it here. It is closed in.” “That it is.” “That it is,” the girl he will remember — and knows there’ll be cause to remember — has said caustically, admiringly.
Two (can they be) water pipes, run along the corridor taped together. To get through one stretch of passageway go sideways? Which then intersected with another yet narrowed with effort and familiarity, a more than physical squeeze to get through though more spacious. A man in basketball shorts long on him brushes by, looking down; suddenly he targets man and girl darkly, much of that here. He had no smell himself, in contrast to, it’s worth telling her, the encompassing liquid silage smell recalled from a cow farm he knew once, a story he can tell her in a minute, richer though than this acid trashy garbage going nowhere. She has been looking at him in the dusk, which is no less morning.
“How do you get to live here?” all he could say, with a wave of his hand.
“They pay rent.” “Who do they pay?” “If you don’t pay you are evicted.” “From here” — his words final in the half-light and business as usual. Busy here. But at what?
The girl seemed to think. “You never know when you will have to fight. You know that. I know you do, I have always known you did. What are you but that?” she presumed to say.
“Is this slum rehabilitation like they talk about?” he has weighed her words, is she disturbed? “This? This?” the words incredulous in themselves from her, yet again this view of him: “I could walk away, like you.”
“To a high-rise with a toilet?”
She chuckles, with all of herself. “Plans afoot you know of.” He did. “You know the deal.” He did, having been told by someone important. “Some few lucky ones who get to move, but are they?” he acts her equal. She means that the new high-rises are convenient for women, they have toilets — but are a far cry from the low, sociable shacks interconnecting with hand-improvised shelters folks were supposedly used to. “You will hear from the horse’s mouth,” she went on, her strange foretelling like something she might know but really didn’t; and stranger still, “They look up to you.” Who? he wondered. A pretty sibyl; no more. She was not a beggar, was she? Or not here.
The camera in its case, they have been in the fort too long, and she’s been telling about a handsome sustainable architect he will meet who builds in spaces between buildings but that’s not all. Halfway up the ladder a space up beyond opens a third level on top of the second, like scaffolding held by what look like sugarcane stalks, and two guys stand one above the other up there, high up buried, hands on their hips looking down at you, shining with sweat on their necks and narrow chests. Probably eyeing the girl waiting below.
All, as you retreat down the sticky rungs, a mess of intricacy making a monumental warren hard to view, greater than its idea, than the close flickering, draining places he must get himself out of now but stops. The girl at ease looking up at him when he twists around to look at her, carries a shoulder bag he had not seen and she has understood better than he why he’s stopped on the ladder. “You know,” he begins — and before you know it, paused on the ladder, he has told a story of milking the cow in Devon when he was eight when two people, wrestling above the stall in the haymow tumbled out not silently and fell ten feet to the cement floor of the barn and scraped their cheeks, girl and guy, who hit his head. The Guernsey with her great head and giant neck looked around and there was blood on the cem
ent and saw the boy rip his shirt and take a strip of it and tie it around his brother’s temples like an Indian… “I’ve lost track of the time,” he added, turning to face the ladder he’s on.
“They will wait. I will show you still more, suhrr. I know what you want to see.”
“I’m a special case.” “Just wait and see, special-case.” An infant crying like a newborn piercingly, unusual for India, far inside the fort — or is it India? — you take the hand that takes yours for a moment. Built by the British centuries ago to protect against the Portuguese, what have we? “Some stories not for telling,” said the girl — “What the Cow Saw.” A passageway turns slightly uphill, and a corridor taken without thinking, “I lost track of the time.” “You have me.” And then that which is lost finds relief in light and, thinking her father must drive a taxi, maybe just a scooting three-wheeler, a motor rickshaw wallah cutting it so close, you ask, “Is he hard to live with?”
“He is driver in the National Park” covers that one.
“The National Park.” “You have seen the caves.” She looks inside her bag, a flash of dusky red in there, a woman’s bag. “Why, yes — not all three thousand.” “Yesterday.” “Yes.” How does she know? They have been there once to see the overflow water system down the rocks from basin to basin, channeled, through cracks, and dating from the first century, it is said, the monks, their water catchment system. “Climbed to the top” — deep at the center of the National Park; and will go again, it was said. “You will go again to National Park,” said the girl. How would she know that?
“Here they use the west wall for their toilet,” again she answers not the question but still a question — water — meaning where the beach has eroded there beside the fort into a ditch filling and emptying twice a day, tidal toilet. “And if you get evicted?”
A ghostly push, a turn, and two easy boys on their way out bringing somehow light in on bare feet, and the threshold is blinking what the hell at the hard beach and a scoured-out ditch along the foundations where erosion came and went. Leaning as if he were running, and looked for his people around the corner of the fort. This girl, tunic with the silver mirrors — who had said she knew what he wanted to see, was probably twenty or older and he took the camera and asked who they paid rent to, but she wasn’t behind him — and what in the National Park did her father drive? Cab? Truck? But she wasn’t there. He had her voice down.
Taken From Him (Kindle Single) Page 1