Flowing, in full spate, it must have rained the whole night here.
He crosses the street, he is along Quai Anatole France, steps into a puddle, he is beginning to shiver, his teeth chatter but there are too few people out at this time for him to attract attention. He will borrow a blazer from Arsh, in his pocket he has a handkerchief that has trapped some of the heat from New City. He wears it around his neck like a scarf, covers his ears, but that brings little respite.
Maybe if he walks faster it will be warmer so he breaks into a light jog, runs along Quai des Tuileries, the Seine to his left, the river he has been dreaming of.
He reaches a bridge where a man and a boy have parked their bicycles and are looking down at the river. The water is clear, the strong wind rakes its surface setting off little eddies, the early morning sun is to his right so his shadow falls across the bridge onto the water where it trembles with the ripples. The man and the boy sense his presence, turn to look, the boy smiles at him.
Arsh has told him the weather can abruptly change, he looks up at the sky, there is a big cloud but the rest of it is a clear blue. He wishes to sit outside, have breakfast at Eric Kayser, then walk back on rue du Bac, along the river, take the Metro because up ahead he sees a sign for the station, half a mile down from Musée d’Orsay: Concorde.
From there, it’s just three Metro stops along the Yellow Line, he knows all these by heart, Line 1 towards La Défense. Past Champs-Élysées, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George V and then Charles-de-Gaulle Étoile, that’s where the Arc de Triomphe is, the monument for soldiers, it looks so much like India Gate.
He wishes Balloon Girl were there, they could take Line 6 to Bir-Hakeim and then the Eiffel Tower, from where he will show her how cities don’t look so different from high above.
~
They are at the India Gate red light.
A young man with a camera knocks on the window. ‘Sir, a photograph?’
‘Do we look like tourists?’ Driver shouts at him as the lights turn green.
He wakes up.
‘Sorry, sir,’ says Driver, ‘these men don’t listen until you shout.’
‘Keep driving, I am not going to work today,’ he says, before closing his eyes again.
CHILD
City Lights
Home for Bhow, and this evening for Orphan, is a patch of concrete, dug-up, broken, over-run with weeds and trash, under the highway between two pillars, next to a traffic intersection. So tired is Orphan that the moment he gets off Bhow, his legs buckle, his eyes close. Bhow curls up around the child, adjusts herself so that her shadow falls on Orphan’s eyes, shields him from the fierce red of the setting sun about to roll off the highway.
~
The strays of New City, Bhow’s friends and family, wake Orphan up.
He feels their eyes and ears, fur and tail, whine and scratch, bark and growl as they lick him all over, their tongues and their bodies a blur of brown and black, white and grey. One dog has her tail chewed off, another has a limp, a third has an ear missing. Bhow tells them to back off, leave Orphan alone as he rubs his eyes to find that he is drenched with light. From the blue-white, red-and-yellow billboards at The Mall. There is Zara, Debenhams, Beer Garden, the glittering sign of The Leela as wide as a city block – all emitting a glare his eyes have never seen before as he wakes up for the first time not in Little House, but far away from its familiar shapes and smells, from his corner in the bed against its wall.
Orphan begins to cry.
‘Let’s help him wash,’ says Bhow, using her nose to point out to Orphan a pipe that runs down the pillar from which water gushes through a crack. ‘Licks and kisses won’t fill his empty stomach.’
Bhow helps Orphan undress, pulls down his shorts with her jaws, pushes him ahead with the tip of her nose until the child, half walking, half crawling, comes to sit down under the pipe. Water runs down his head, slips into his ears, over his nose and his lips. He gulps, swallows, he drinks the water, shivers in its sudden cold splash. Bath done, Orphan stands up, clumsy on his two feet, water crawls under him, up, between the legs, wetting some crusted blood from early this morning when he fell once, water stinging the bruise.
He sees the lights of The Mall through the water in his eyes, bent and refracted into the colours of a rainbow. Like through the kaleidoscope Kalyani had once brought to show him how easy it is to split light from the sun.
WOMAN
Last Rites
Your father is home.
They take him off the stretcher and place him on a canvas sheet someone has spread on the floor, they bring blocks of ice, speckled with sawdust, that they press against his body, push smaller pieces of it between him and the sheet, under his neck and between his legs, around his feet. In the heat, however, the ice begins to melt into fingers of chilled water that draw puddles across the floor, send wisps of steam into the air.
They say it was an accident, the bus was crowded, he was standing on the footboard when he slipped and fell, was run over by another bus but where are the marks?
A bus hit him, he fell onto the street, and I see not one scratch on his face. Where is the blood? The injury? Instead, he is dressed in the calm and peace of sleep, his glasses are off. His blue shirt is unruffled, neither smudge nor tear, there are thin grey streaks on his black trousers as if he only leaned against a dirty wall. Lying on his back, his hands by his side, the palms are open, upturned towards the ceiling, again no marks there. There’s nothing to mark that this is his end.
~
You whisper into my ear, wake him up, wake him up. You step into the puddle, you walk from me to him, you leave footprints on the floor. You touch his fingers, you hold them like you do when you go for a walk with him. You feel inside his shirt pocket to check if there is something inside, a gift he never told you about.
You whisper into my ear, wake him up, wake him up.
Then you tell him, wake up, wake up, you begin to scream so loud I am afraid you will stop breathing. I hold you, I promise I will not cry in your presence, that’s the least a parent can do for her child.
~
Krishna says she will take you to her house, she will help you wash, change your clothes since you are still in school uniform. She will give you dinner, she has two nieces your age, you can play with them, she says. Ma’am, she is very young, she doesn’t need to be here any more, I am taking her with me, I will be with her throughout, don’t you worry, I will bring her later in the night, after the cremation. When Krishna picks you up, you have fallen asleep, I see you leave the room, your head resting on her shoulder, your face streaked where the tears mixed with water from the ice.
I don’t want to see you go, I want to hold you until your father comes back from the dead.
~
They undress him, bathe him, ask me to pour water on him.
They dress him in white, give me his blue shirt and his black trousers. They tell me to stay at home. They say women do not, should not, go for the cremation.
No, I say, I will go.
They send the priest to talk to me, I send him back. There is sudden disquiet in the room.
‘Are you sure?’ asks Sister Agnes, ‘are you sure you want to go?’
‘Yes,’ I tell her.
MAN
Penguins, Pelicans
No, Balloon Girl isn’t waiting at Charles-de-Gaulle Étoile Station. Maybe she doesn’t like Paris, maybe she finds it too cold and wet, the brisk wind from across the river, so she flies, on her own, halfway across the world to warm Singapore, where his friend Sukrit lives, waiting for Sheela to join him once they are married. So when he steps out of the station, he finds himself at Changi Airport from where he takes a cab to Orchard Road, takes the Metro to Boon Lay, a bus to Jurong Bird Park.
And there she is.
In the crowd of tourists in Penguin Coast, the park’s most popular attraction, right at the entrance, 1,500 square metres of a climate-controlled enclosure, its interior flooded with a blue-whi
te light meant to simulate cold sun glinting off the ice cap. The observation deck is an almost full-scale model of a Portuguese galleon, complete with a mast, wooden beams and timber floors. It moves under your feet to make you believe you are watching the penguins from onboard an ancient ship sailing the stormy sea.
‘I knew you would come to see me,’ Balloon Girl says, slipping her hand into his, her face bathed by the cold blue light.
She takes a step back so that they are now both in shadow, no one is looking at them, everyone’s eyes are trained on the penguins.
He can do anything to her, with her.
Blood-rush floods his head, the tips of his fingers tingle, he has to close his eyes to steady himself.
No, he doesn’t want to hurt her but he doesn’t trust himself so he wants Balloon Girl and himself in the open, in the hot humid bright sunlight, where there are people, where everyone’s watching, where he cannot do what he wants to do, where she will be safe.
He holds her hand, turns to leave.
‘No,’ she says, ‘let’s wait, they will feed the penguins now, I want to watch.’
She lets go of his hand, runs down the ramp leading from the deck to where the glass is, walling off the enclosed den in which the penguins are. Her face is inches away from the wall. A penguin swims under the surface, coming straight to where she is as if her breath is a homing signal, it touches the glass wall and swims away, splashes out of the water, clambers aboard the rocks on one side of the tank. It’s a Humboldt Penguin, small, a black horseshoe band on its front, a white stripe on its head.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘it’s so much smaller than me.’
The small penguin is up on the rocks, with the entire flock of its family, more than a dozen penguins, small and big. Balloon Girl points to King Penguin, almost as tall as her, its orange ear patch gleaming like fresh paint.
‘I want to watch how they eat,’ she says, her arms outstretched, inviting him to lift her up so that, raised, she can look at the man, in scuba gear, who has entered the tank and is throwing fish, from a pail, into the penguin crowd.
He lifts her high over his head, he can smell the detergent on her, clean and fresh although it’s been seven hours, eight hours since she put on the clothes he washed. He holds her at the waist, firmly, her neck is inches away from his face. Her skin, soft and brown. He smells the soap in her hair from last night, his arms begin to hurt but he keeps holding her until all the fish in the man’s pail has been fed to the penguins, until she wants to get down and go see the lories.
‘I want to feed birds,’ says Balloon Girl.
~
So they take the boardwalk that leads from Penguin Coast to Pelican Cove, passing a lake so crowded with pelicans, white with big yellow beaks, the water looks like a sprawling green meadow covered with flowers with long bulbs, many moving, many still; some even swooping down across the sky to plunge in. Past Pelican Cove are the gliding swans on the way to Lori Loft, its gigantic net draped over a huge enclosure, almost 9,000 square metres.
From a counter where they show their tickets, he and Balloon Girl pick up a cup of nectar each, the bird feed, and walk down a swaying wooden bridge. Scenting the feed, lories and lorikeets fly down, unafraid, perch on her head.
Three birds feed from her cup: two sitting on her arm, the other walks up and down, from the elbow to her wrist. She laughs, the noise makes it fly away.
‘Quiet,’ he says, and the birds return.
One sits on her shoulder and pecks at her earlobe, the other on the rim of the nectar cup. The birds are a blaze of colour around her face and her arms. Yellow, red, blue, black. Stripes, bands and patches. He watches the birds begin to peel her skin, tear her earlobe away. He watches her blood mix with the feed in the nectar cup, he hears her cries for help mingle with the birds’ ceaseless chirp and chatter. He wants to put his mouth there, where she bleeds, drink it all in, feel the wind from the flutter of the birds’ wings in his face.
CHILD
Uncle, Aunty
‘Hey, kid, don’t finish all the water, leave some for me.’ It’s a woman’s voice shouting out to Orphan over the roar of water gushing from the pipe.
‘Relax, Aunty,’ says Bhow, ‘you will have enough water to wash your baby’s bandage. Let him clean himself.’
‘Look at this,’ she shouts to an imaginary audience, ‘a dog telling me about being clean, a bitch who lives in the garbage heap.’
With a one-year-old baby girl, Aunty shares living quarters with Bhow’s family. Home for her is under the tarpaulin sheet she has draped on pegs hammered into pillars that prop up the highway above, the sheet held down with bricks. Who the baby’s father is, where she has come from – is she even the mother? – no one knows, no one asks. Each day, before rush-hour begins, Aunty wraps the baby in scraps of clothes she has picked up from the trashheaps of neighbourhoods in New City across the highway. Torn, unwashed, the dirtier the better. She wraps white cotton gauze around the baby’s forehead, wets it with a red dye she’s procured from no one knows where. Props in place, baby is ready. Looking injured, bleeding: a spreading red stain across her forehead, her face pinched and pitiful under the cruel white.
When the traffic lights turn red, Aunty rushes to the intersection, chooses a car with at least one woman in it, knocks on its window, presses the baby against it so that she is level with the passengers. Sometimes, she goes down on her knees and raises the baby skywards as if in prayer. At other times, she suddenly breaks into a startling scream, her mouth agape, tears flow down her face, mucus from her nose.
Regular passengers who drive by this traffic intersection know Aunty’s trick, they don’t even bother to look, they only raise the window, turn AC or music on, wait for green. Some give her money to ensure she doesn’t dirty the car.
~
With Aunty, there are others who live and work around the traffic lights. Orphans all, like the ones in Little House but with no roof, no bed.
There is Uncle, who has neither arms nor legs. He is only a head, a torso, a waist and four stumps where the limbs should have been. Pushing himself from his waist, he crawls from pavement to car every time the lights turn red, then back to the pavement. He and Aunty work in tandem: if she targets one car, he does the next. He shares some of his daily collections in return for food she cooks.
~
There is a boy–girl duo who show up in the morning and leave by sunset. Girl does cartwheels, boy cleans windshields. No one knows where they come from or where they go. They both claim they are ten years eleven years old but each one looks much younger, much smaller.
~
There are vendors, at least a dozen of them, who flit in and out of this intersection from sunrise to sunset. One sells coconut slices, another car dusters and phone chargers, plastic helicopters, magazines and bestsellers in shrink-wrap. Men, boys who know how to strike a bargain between a traffic light’s red and green.
~
‘Where have you come from, you little prince?’ Aunty asks Orphan. ‘I have never seen Bhow and his family so protective, so caring about anyone.’
Orphan cannot talk.
Wet and naked, he shivers.
‘Let him wear his clothes, Aunty,’ says Bhow, ‘you want him to catch a cold or fever?’
‘What a nice, quiet little boy, he’s so shy,’ she says. ‘I will help dress him up and he can also help me with my act.’
‘He’s doing no such thing,’ says Bhow. ‘He’s just a child, a baby. And this is only temporary, he won’t stay here.’
‘They all say the same thing when they come,’ Aunty says, walking back to her tent outside which an aluminium pot simmers on a bed of burning coal. It’s her dinner: rice, salt, half an onion a truck driver drops into her palm.
She returns with a scrap of red cloth with which she towels Orphan dry, wraps it around him and then puts his clothes back on.
‘You are a handsome boy,’ she says.‘Wait for about half an hour, I will give you somethi
ng to eat. I will mash some rice for you.’
Orphan can only cry in reply.
‘Don’t waste your tears, little man,’ says Aunty, ‘learn a lesson from me. In this city, do not cry when no one’s looking.’
MEANWHILE
Mrs Usha Chopra Babysits in Mumbai
Mrs Chopra of Little House has two children, Elder Son and Younger Son.
Younger Son’s wife, Lata, has had a baby and she has to return to work since her ninety-day maternity leave is ending but their nanny has to go back to her village because her mother is ill. Lata cannot extend her maternity leave since the Mumbai asset-management company she works for has named her lead fund manager for a real-estate fund it’s launching as markets are climbing back, the US job-loss rate is tapering off faster than expected.
There is Deepa, the cook, who is efficient, but she can’t take care of both baby and kitchen. Lata’s mother cannot come, she is full-time carer to Lata’s father who last week slipped in the bathroom in their Bangalore house and sprained his back.
So Mrs Chopra gets a call from Younger Son.
~
‘Ma, you work too hard at that orphanage of yours, take some time off, come and spend some time with your grandson,’ he says.
‘Of course, I will, maybe in the winter when it’s freezing here.’
‘Ma, I am sorry, we cannot wait that long,’ he says, ‘we need you here, it’s kind of urgent, there’s no one to take care of the baby. I have sent you the air ticket for tomorrow.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘I know, Ma, that’s too short notice but I was very busy. I am sure you will get leave if you tell them it’s a family emergency, I am sure they will understand.’
‘I am sure they will,’ she says.
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