She Will Build Him a City

by Raj Kamal Jha

  From Los Angeles, Ms Rose takes him into a scene in a village in West Bengal where Orphan looks at a steam-engine railway train for the first time in his life. It is a black-and-white movie and they stand behind a sister and her brother in a field, the wind blowing through bamboo grass. Orphan is frightened at the sight of the engine tearing down the tracks, its black smoke, he begins to cry but no one can hear this above the piercing whistle of the train. From the train in the village, one day they move to the boat in the sea. This movie is part of a special screening in Europa, a very short movie about a boy, ten or eleven years old, who builds a ship near New City and then drags it to the sea near Kolkata from where he sets sail, down the coastline to Antarctica, to get some ice for his father who is dying. Ms Rose knows that Orphan will never see the sea if he lives in The Mall and so one night, during the last show, she and Orphan enter the scene in which the boy is sailing in the Bay of Bengal. They climb into the boat, sit on its floor behind the boy, who is whistling a tune as he rows tirelessly across the calm sea. Ms Rose points out to Orphan fish that fly in the dark, seagulls, with wings brightly coloured, riding the white crest of waves that bounce back light from the moon.

  WOMAN

  Giants Waiting

  Tonight is ending and she is back, the tall woman. There she is, standing still, all 12 feet of her, drenched with streetlight. She knows where I am, I am sure of that, she doesn’t need me to open any doors or windows, she can walk in anytime, anywhere. Like she did last night.

  Why is she here? Does she think I am tired? That my body hurts? That I want her to carry me, help me fall asleep? Maybe I should walk up to her and tell her that, unlike last night, I am not sleeping, I am wide awake. That you, my child, are at home with me and I am waiting for you to wake up. I will tell her, thank you for last night, for the little walk we took, I like being carried around but not today because I do not wish to leave the house with my daughter sleeping.

  So I wave to her, knock on the window pane to get her attention, I switch on all the lights in the house so that she can see I am in. But she stands still.

  ~

  An hour goes by, she is still here.

  I open the windows again.

  This time, she looks up, I see her face clearly, like those of goddesses in idols: perfectly shaped, bedecked with jewels, earrings and necklaces that shine in the dark. Jasmine flowers, bloodless white in black hair.

  She gestures she’s thirsty, that she wants something to drink.

  I get a jug of chilled water, I put ice into that as well, it must be very hot outside and she’s been standing there for quite a while. But when I step out of the house into the street, she is not there. I leave the water on the pavement, I look around but there is no one. No lingering fragrance of the flowers in her hair, nothing she has dropped.

  A light drizzle has begun, I feel its first drops on my face.

  All this while, I have been wide awake, waiting for you, but this brief interlude in the open, this slight wind, the night sky above me, the drops of rain, have all conspired, it seems, to tell my mind to start shutting down my body, to let go, force me to sleep. Suddenly, I sense myself in the dark, I am sleepwalking, every muscle in my body aches, each step requires an effort so strong that by the time I enter the house, an overwhelming exhaustion has come over me. Maybe the arrival of the tall woman has something to do with this. Maybe she is helping me fall asleep so that she can, like last night, walk into the house, lift me up, carry me.

  But I will not fall asleep, I cannot. I need to be here for you when you wake up, so I wash my eyes and my face, I wet my hair, I let water drip down my neck and I wait.

  ~

  She returns but not alone. This time, with many many more.

  Giants in dozens, scores, hundreds, visible as far as my eyes can see. A massive gathering, a festive crowd of men, women and children, tall and taller, some so tall they tower above trees and streetlights, their heads shrouded by the dark. Some as tall as 50 feet or more, some part of the city’s distant skyline, standing shoulder to shoulder with the buildings, their neons lighting their face. They are all outside the house, crowding, any second some of them will be inside. They can break down walls, doors and windows, they cannot be stopped.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  It’s the tall woman, now dwarfed by others who stand behind her.

  She opens her arms, bends down, invites me to climb into her lap.

  No, I do not wish to go with you tonight, I tell her.

  To which she smiles before she brings her face level with mine and she whispers in my ear that she knows you are here tonight and so she is not going to take me away. She says that she and her family and her friends have all come to see you, to thank you for that winter afternoon when you were eight years nine years old, when you thought them to life.

  Can we see your little girl, she says, and I say you are sleeping in your room, that I would not wish you to be disturbed. But then I remember that winter afternoon, my promise to you that I will let you know, the gleam in your eyes when you say, Ma, let me know when you meet her, Ma, promise me that you will let me know, I want to see her, I want to see her carry you.

  So I tell her, please wait outside. That, in a short while, just when day breaks, you will wake up and then you can meet each other.

  Maybe you can carry me, I tell her, for a while so that my daughter can look.

  And she says, of course, I will.

  MAN

  Red Towel

  Kahini tells him about the baby inside her.

  In reply, he speaks as if he’s reading from a script, standing on stage, stiff and awkward, his face white under the lights, his body unsure what to do with his hands and feet. As if he’s standing in front of an audience he cannot see.

  ‘Look around,’ he tells her, ‘look at all that I’ – he corrects himself –‘that we did together, built together. I haven’t even told you how much money I have spent on this but money’s not the issue, it never has been with you, it never will be. We need to do this all over again.’

  She turns to look out of the window, finds it comforting that the night begins just beyond the glass, that from where she stands, she can reach out and touch the dark.

  ‘We are not ready,’ he says. ‘I am not, you are not either.’

  She wants to say to him, ‘How do you know? What’s there to be ready about?’

  ‘I am ready,’ she wants to say, without looking at him, because this is the first time they have had an argument. ‘I am ready for whatever it is that sits inside me, that’s fast asleep or wide awake, upside down, growing breathing feeding on my blood. That you are also responsible for.’

  But she doesn’t say any of this.

  ‘I love you,’ he says, ‘we love each other, we are both running away from something. The last thing we need, before we have built our future, is this thing between us.’

  ‘That is not a thing,’ she wants to tell him, ‘that is not between us,’ she wants to tell him, ‘it’s inside me.’ And why can’t we keep running away, she thinks, the three of us, now, instead of just the two?

  A bright yellow truck is speeding down the highway. So small, she can block it with a finger in front of her eye. She is trying not to listen, she is building a soundproof wall between them which his words keep climbing over.

  ‘We need to get rid of it,’ he says, and he leaves the room. ‘You think about it.’

  She thinks.

  And for the first time since that winter morning when she leaves home, she thinks of going back to visit her mother. To tell her what she sees on the screen in the doctor’s room, the smudge of grey moving against black. The gel on her stomach so cold she worries it may make the new heart inside tremble, she is relieved when the doctor wipes it away with warm tissue. She thinks of returning home so that she can stand on the balcony and wait for her father to appear so that she can tell him, in the silence that fills the space between them, what she hears when the doc
tor switches the speakers on: the sound of that smudge. That insistent beat, that drumming, getting loud and louder, like that of an approaching train in the night.

  From where she stands, at the window in his house in Apartment Complex, if she tilts her head, she can see the Metro glide by. She hears him, in the next room, talking to someone on the phone.

  ‘That will be perfect,’ she hears him say, ‘the earlier the better.’

  ~

  ‘Have you decided?’ he asks. ‘I have made all arrangements, they say it won’t take more than a couple of hours.’

  ~

  Kahini knows she should say no, she should stand up, but when she looks around, she can only see the countless things she stands to lose.

  Yes, he is right, they cannot go back to where they have come from: the small house where her mother clocks her last days or the village where his father lives alone, all their years spent with little to show except the ravages of time on body and mind and the vague comforts of a clean conscience.

  No, he won’t go back to that, he’s made that clear. She, too, will not.

  Not only because she loves him but also because – and she is proud of the fact that she has the courage to admit this, even if it’s only to herself – she is an average woman with less than average skills and much, much more than average dreams but with neither the drive nor the means nor the luck to chase them on her own. That’s why she likes his constant hunger for more, she craves it because it feeds her as well, it gives her all that she has started to like: the million-and-one things that she is losing count of that, together, make up the present and the promise of a future. From the 800-square-foot bathroom with white onyx tiles on the floor in Apartment Complex to the wardrobe that he got designed for her, its oak veneer, the double-glazed Fenestra glass through which New City reaches out to her, inviting her to build her home and live her life.

  Will she let all this fall apart?

  She will not.

  ~

  So she goes with him the next day, just after daybreak – I chose a slot when there is no crowd in the clinic, he says – and signs the consent form, they talk to a nurse and a doctor, both very welcoming, warm and smiling. She has never had surgery.

  They sign in and wait.

  The TV in the lobby is playing a rerun of an old cricket match. A nurse escorts them to a room where a doctor explains the procedure in detail. He tells them about anaesthesia, dilation, suction, mild cramps, a little blood, very quick. Absolutely nothing to worry about, the nurse says, you won’t feel anything. He watches as they insert a cannula into the vein just above her wrist, for the drips that she will need. They ask her to change into a gown, drop her clothes into a clear plastic bag that’s so cold it must have been taken from a fridge. She hands the bag to him, they tell him to wait outside.

  Sir, please make yourself comfortable, says the nurse.

  ~

  The bag in his lap, he looks straight ahead, at a framed print on the wall. Of a baby, white, blue eyes.

  He closes his eyes.

  Naked, he enters Kahini, swims inside her womb in butterfly strokes upstream through the amniotic fluid, moves towards the baby and as he gets closer and closer, he can hear her heart above his head, he can hear the baby, too, their baby is screaming now, air rising in bubbles from its mouth, only partly formed. Before they scrape and suck the baby away, he wants to touch it, to wrap himself around it.

  Excuse me, sir, can I get you a glass of water, asks the nurse.

  He opens his eyes with a start. The cold plastic bag with Kahini’s clothes covers his hardness. No, he says, I don’t need any water, thank you.

  Just about half an hour, says the nurse.

  ~

  Dressed in a gown that opens at the back, Kahini is told to lie on a bed, soft inverted V-shaped supports under her knees. Something enters her, probing, cold and sharp, the doctor asks her about her college, which subjects did she take, I have a daughter, too, he says, almost your age, he asks her about her father, which city did you grow up in, how old are you, you are so young, you will have a baby again, take your time, she feels the grey smudge move, she hears the sound of a train hurtling in the dark, then sliding off the tracks, she hears people screaming, the sound of metal twisting and snapping as the train’s coaches crash into each other, move against the black sky like the little heart once did on the screen.

  When she wakes up, they give her two wheat crackers and a cup of chilled orange juice. She gulps it down and when she rushes to the bathroom to throw up, she finds she is bleeding.

  She washes herself, waits for two hours and returns home, emptied.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, when they enter the house. ‘We will do this right the next time.’

  She cannot understand what he says because he speaks a language she has never heard.

  ~

  That night, when they lie in bed, the 2 feet of distance between them, stretched tight across the bedsheet, folds over, tears, throwing open a chasm so deep that she falls into it, along with the entire night, and finds herself on the street in the city, carrying a newborn boy, perfectly formed, in a blood-red towel.

  They are in an autorickshaw that comes to a stop outside a decrepit building, in front of a giant garbage heap. She can barely read the scrawl on a tin board at the entrance: ‘Little House’.

  A dog, black-and-white, looks at her as she walks up, leaves the baby at the doorstep, gets into the rickshaw that drives away. A wind, slight but searing, slaps her in the face, fills her eyes with water.

  CHILD

  Exit Bhow

  Three weeks after David Headley, the Chicago-born alleged terrorist who was picked up by the FBI, reveals plans to target schools in New Delhi and intelligence agencies confirm that the threat does, indeed, have some basis, Mr Rajat Sharma, director of Little House, sends a letter to the Secretary of the Child Welfare Department that after ‘much deliberation and assessment’, he is ‘constrained’ to put on record that Little House is extremely vulnerable to a terrorist attack. And that all arrangements should be made to plug what he calls ‘glaring holes’ in the security of this building.

  Times are always tense, it is always the season to play safe. Mr Sharma has gained some attention after the TV episode with Ms Priscilla Thomas – the wall collapse is now history, no one even remembers the name of the boy who has gone missing – so his letter promptly secures him an invitation to a two-day meeting of all security agencies with principals and parent–teacher representatives of the ten largest schools in the city.

  Anyone wishing to speak is allowed to do so, the result being that the meeting, initially planned as a two-hour, one-day event, becomes a marathon talkfest that drags on and on into the hours well after midnight, in which speaker after speaker stands up, outlining the threats, wild and fanciful, limited only by the scope of their imagination.

  One principal, for example, cites the siege of the school in Beslan, Georgia, by suspected Chechen terrorists and says, perhaps, the time has come for such a storming to happen here, at Shri Ram School, Delhi Public School or Modern School. That’s the way you get eyeballs on TV.

  Representatives from the American Embassy School and the British School say their campuses are the most threatened given the international demographics of the student community: sons and daughters of diplomats and expatriates, most of them from countries fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan.

  One principal says that all Urdu-medium schools, because they have Muslim students, are the most secure since terrorists would never target children of their own religion.

  To which another principal gets up to say, ‘What kind of communal nonsense is that, sir? I have a better idea, why not take all these Muslim students, there are about 25,000 of them, and distribute them all over the city in all the other schools? Because it will serve two objectives. One, these students will get a decent education since Urdu medium schools, we all know, have abysmal facilities and terrible pass percentages. And, two, going
by your logic, having a Muslim student in each class in each school in the city will be our insurance against a terror attack.’

  Someone laughs nervously, someone applauds.

  ‘In the heat of all these arguments, we are forgetting the cold light of reason,’ says Mr Sharma, when his turn comes. The brief exposure to national TV has made him watch TED talks for hours to polish his public-speaking skills.

  ‘Most of you, ladies and gentlemen, are from schools where there’s already very tight security because VVIPs send their sons and daughters there. They will be the first to complain the day they notice something amiss. And so you are safe. In some schools, as we all know, ministers’ guards, special commandos, come to drop off the child and they wait outside during school hours which, by itself, is very reassuring. But that’s not the case with Little House. I know this isn’t a school but we do teach little children. Every child there is an orphan, every child an abandoned child. There will be no angry parents outside your office when terrorists hit Little House. Ladies and gentlemen, listen to me, please, this is the age of TV, this is the age of drama, of tears. The more the drama, the bigger the impact. Why did Mumbai work so well? Because they stormed five-star hotels. Now, imagine storming an orphanage, a home for the destitute and the homeless. Imagine killing one orphan every six hours, a small body being thrown out and no parents to grieve. The orphan has no one in the world except our dedicated staff, of course, but think of the power of that killing. It will strike fear in the hardest of hearts.’

  Silence.

  Whether it’s the reason underpinning Mr Sharma’s argument or the emotion that he invokes from the number of times he uses the word ‘orphan’ it isn’t clear, but one thing is: no less a person than the Chief Minister herself is persuaded.

  ‘Your point is noted, Mr Sharma, thank you very much,’ she says. ‘I don’t do such a thing, I’m not authorised to do this but, at this moment itself, I am making an exception and clearing a metal detector and a security guard right away for Little House. The metal detector may take time but the guard should be there any day. Please work out the estimate and I am granting prior sanction. I am asking the ministers concerned to expedite the process.’