by Sam Winston
Sengupta’s foot too wavers between accelerator and brake. It pumps the latter when the woman or girl steps into the road, yellowed in pale light. Sengupta lowers the passenger window. No, sorry, he’s going home, he’ll say. But when the girl, for that’s what she is, leans into the cab, he sees she’s brown. Indian or Arabian. Black eyes framed by blacker curls. Top lip gently arched.
Sengupta thinks of T.
The girl mumbles a destination near the warehouses on the east side. Later Sengupta will realize this was a sign, a warning. But now the girl’s opened the back door, slid to the seat’s center, a fig of a purse beside her.
Sengupta drives. In the mirror the girl’s head sways to a silent beat or the road’s broken rhythm. Again Sengupta thinks of T, of small hands clasped over his belly, the bicycle’s fast wobble, the sun on his back. This girl is much older, of course, sixteen or eighteen or twenty-one. Worldly, jaded, old in the eyes. Sengupta imagines the girl’s face streaked red and yellow. His thoughts of T dissolve into screams and smoke and shattered glass.
There, she says, some minutes after they’ve crossed the river that splits this city. Sengupta blinks. Right there, the girl says. She points to the mouth of a dark alley between warehouses. The cab’s headlamps are the only light. Here? Sengupta thinks to ask. He doesn’t.
The girl moves more quickly now, opens the door as the taxi slows. When she leans to reach into her purse, her jacket gaps open at her shoulder. There, in the dome light’s glow, Sengupta sees the top of a tattoo—a swooping thin line.
Then she’s gone, three crumpled bills in her wake.
Sengupta puts the cab in gear. His boot rises from the brake, then stops when he sees.
The alley is no longer dark. A beam of light moves down it, toward his car. In his mirrors, more light, separating into two headlamps. Then four.
This development is not expected, not surprising. If Sengupta could smile, he would. He shifts into PARK, waits. The three cars, also taxis, look black; but Sengupta knows they are the deepest blue. They glide to a stop. Sengupta pushes open his door and climbs out. Slowly.
The three cabs’ doors open. The man emerging from the nearest is the tallest. Even against the night Sengupta can see the odd taper of his head, as if his mother changed her mind on delivery, scissoring her legs as the boy crowned. Vikram.
Vikram steps toward Sengupta, the ochre dot of a cigarette before him. The other two men flank Sengupta. With a glance he knows several things: they are new drivers, not from Vikram’s usual crew, not regulars at Zia’s; one is short, wheezy, a white T-shirt hugging his paunch, a cricket bat of all things at his side; the other is wiry, flinty-eyed, no weapon; like Vikram, like the girl who’s scuttled far away by now, each has the 3-like Om symbol somewhere on his body; he could kill both of them in seconds, but won’t.
Vikram spits his cigarette aside. So? he says.
Sengupta shrugs. Even that is more than he wishes to offer.
Okay then, Vikram says, almost wearily. He nods at the other two.
Hands clasped behind his back, swimming into his trance, Sengupta wonders what he’ll feel first—their fists, the bat or, most likely, nothing at all.
(Chapter 2 excluded)
3. Now
Sengupta awakens to pale light, slick blood, sweat.
His forearm rises to cover his face, as if he’s still on the asphalt tongue of the alley. He’s not. He has slept this way, writhing, hands and arms shielding his face then opening to embrace ghosts. They were here with him, P and T. Luminescent and sad.
He reaches past the bed’s edge, to a stool that holds a tiny gold Ganesh, soot-covered, and a metal cup with a red rose and a small white one. Sengupta sits up.
This is Sengupta’s home. As much as a room with a mattress, a hotplate, a sink, a toilet, a window, a view of bricks can be a home. Sengupta’s fingers trace the swelling at his face, move to the half-moon of a scar at his chest, the whorled flesh of three more, round and evenly spaced, on his gut.
He rolls off the bed. His palms and toes find the tile, arms lock straight. Then he’s lowering his body to the floor, raising it, not a tremble, hardly a breath. Again and again. A hundred times. Sometimes two hundred, three hundred, each rise a rebirth.
Sengupta rises, steps to the room’s far side, toward an old TV, its frayed wire snaking to an outlet with no cover plate, and a dented videotape player. On top of the TV and lined beside it are videotapes, no covers, many unmarked, others with names scrawled in marker along their spines. KENPO, KARATE, KRAV MAGA. Sengupta selects a tape, pushes it into the player. He stretches. A swan dive that brings his nose to his knees. A slow-motion near-splits from which he rises as if on skates, no hands.
A small plastic panel in the wall buzzes.
Sengupta steps to the panel, pushes a button. The street’s honks and hiss steal into the room. Open it fucker, a voice rasps. Sengupta does nothing.
The video has begun: a man in green fatigues squat-thrusts on-screen. The panel buzzes again. Sengupta shakes his head, pushes another button on the panel. He opens the door.
Heavy steps in the hallway, then a massive belly pushes into the room. A paper bag’s clutched against it, greasy against a sweat-stained blue shirt. Next comes a grinning brown pumpkin-face. Breakfast, the man says through a full mouth. He holds up the bag.
I only have one mug, Rahul, Sengupta says. But his shoulders relax.
Rahul sits on the bed’s edge. I heard about last night, he says.
Sengupta has begun the squat-thrusts, easily doubles the video soldier’s rhythm. He grunts. It’s not clear if this is part of the conversation.
Why not just join them? Rahul swallows. I mean . . . us.
Sengupta’s arms and legs splay into jumping jacks.
Many benefits, Rahul continues. Sengupta slaps his palms hard above his head, punctuating the words.
Chicken – korma, Sengupta says, is not – much of a – benefit.
Yes, but gulab jamun is. Rahul smiles, clicks his rings together.
Sengupta’s jumping jacks speed into a flurry of steps and slaps. He stops. For the first time this morning his eyes meet Rahul’s. If it’s about the food, he says, join the Muslims.
Rahul, who’s been looking into the pork bun bag as if it contains plump white virgins, exhales loudly. Yes, he says. Maybe I should. He laughs.
A question, Rahul says as Sengupta hooks his fingers over a pipe along the ceiling and pulls his body up, unblinking, now just a trace of sweat at his hairline. You put your body through this every day. You let Vikram and those fuckers wallop you whenever they want. You still haven’t told me why you went after the limo the first—
Fifteen, Sengupta says too loudly. Sixteen, seventeen . . . He stops at twenty-five, drops to the floor. You said you had a question, he says, not unkindly.
Why not just cut-cut the middle man and kill yourself?
When Rahul has gone and the sun is still low in the sky, Sengupta drops to a knee next to his bed. His hand disappears into a gash in the mattress’s side. Returns with a sleek and snub-nosed pistol. He whispers Rahul’s question to himself. Why not kill yourself?
Not yet, he says. Then more loudly: Not yet.
(Chapter 4 excluded)
5. Now
The car is behind him again.
Sengupta can’t see it. But he knows it’s there. Just out of sight. Silent, clean, white. It will stop just short of the cab company, turn down a side street. Vanish. As if it had never been.
Perhaps it hadn’t.
The white car is not there every day. Just enough that Sengupta doesn’t forget. Just enough that he’s developed a sort of respect for this sometimes companion of rolling steel.
Osborne Cab hunches on the first floor of a massive grey building south of the city’s center, near the river. High ceilings with bare metal beams, giant segmented doors that roll open and shut with a switch, rats brazen enough to jump at the cabbies’ sandwiches, pizza slices, roti remnants.
> Sengupta checks in at the wire cage in the room’s center. As he walks away he hears a rolling whine. Behind him, growing louder.
Why the hurry? the voice, low, melodious, says.
Sengupta turns around. Before him is a man in a wheelchair. Unlike Ashok Sengupta, this man has skin of grey-white. Hair nearly the same shade. A concave gut retreating from a pressed and buttoned shirt. Thin-rimmed glasses over dull blue eyes.
Why the hurry? Osborne, owner of the eponymous taxi company, says again. His fingers caress an ivory cane, eyes move slowly over Sengupta’s bruises. You’re hurt, he says.
I am okay, Sengupta says. He holds up the check-in card, though it’s no explanation, and strides toward one of the rolling doors, where his cab waits outside.
A day on the road. In this city, perhaps in all such cities that birth bankers and beggars from concrete wombs, no fare is like the next. The day’s first: Sengupta stops for what looks like a tall pale woman in a leather skirt, only to spy in his mirror too-thick eyeliner, stubble erupting through pancake makeup, an Adam’s apple.
As the sun slides nearer building tops two purple-black women squeeze into the cab. In the mirror, giant breasts, jowls. The women lean closer together, whisper and coo. Then frowns, they part, a seismic shift. I paid you that damn five dollars, the larger one says. Didn’t, the other says. For the first time their eyes meet Sengupta’s, in the mirror. As if he knows the truth about the debt. The women embrace. They kiss with gusto, open mouths, one now merged with the other.
Dusk. The last fare, a woman in mink despite the heat. The opera house, she tells Sengupta. She clears her throat and sings, Tra la la loo loo loo. Again: Tra la la loo loo loo, the last oo drawn out with a flourish. Sengupta has not entered the opera house, but suspects he is no opera fan. As the woman steps from the cab, no tip, the mink head leers at Sengupta in his mirror.
This is Sengupta’s day life; no, his day-and-night life now: driving forward, looking back.
His FOR HIRE light is off, back seat empty. His last destination is minutes from the opera house. Along the way, eatery windows where couples toast, mannequins in dark storefronts, men unfolding cardboard beds in alleys.
Sengupta sees none of this.
The building he stops beside stretches into the night sky. The city’s whistles and honks and hiss still flow around him. But there is a quiet here too. A stillness through which Sengupta gazes up the building’s spine. A bank and boutiques on the first floor. Law firm on the next three. The apartments begin on the twentieth. Sengupta knows. He has studied.
To the side of the lobby is a door framed in black marble, a separate entrance for residents and guests. Beyond it, a desk, a doorman. Sengupta watches men and women step from cabs and limos, brown versions of the mink diva and her kind, all Rolex and Dolce and henna-dyed hair. He watches them strut and laugh into the black marble mouth.
He knows where they’ll go next: a mirrored elevator, up, up, up.
Sengupta envisions the pakoras and paneer cubes and mint chutney in silver trays and tureens. He imagines the tumblers of scotch, lipsticked cigarettes, tips for this or that tech stock. It will happen on the top floor of this building, the city’s tallest, where a Gatsby-green light now pulses.
And Sengupta, who’s pulling the cab from the curb, knows who will preside over it all. A man whose green eyes radiate only darkness. A man Sengupta lunged for on the streets of Little India. A man for whom Sengupta has traveled from death to life, through a vast city and a quiet hill station, across an ocean, trading homeland for no-man’s land, to kill.
In The Jungle of Black and Yellow is available here for your Kindle.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Prelude: In The Empowerment Zone
One: The Polaroid
Two: The Shelter
Three: The Tigris and the Euphrates
Four: The Driver
Five: One Police Plaza
Six: Some People Wait Forever
Seven: Make Straight in the Desert a Highway
Eight: Old Royalty
Nine: The Approaching Storm
Ten: Salted Earth
Eleven: The Garden of Eden
Twelve: The Coming of the Fall
The Author