I craft a powder, a chaser made with the sweet and tart flavors of takuan and infused with electrolytes. It would complement a sake with a strong rice aroma and a deep umami, one that goes well with Ena’s favorite breaded pork dish.
“This is for you, Ena, for pushing me to forge on.”
I do a quick reprogram of a SKIM-2 and it serves out the drinks, tinkling its melody as it pours them into dried squid cups: the sake, pure, without adulteration, followed by the electrolyte chaser. I take a sip. The concoction’s not perfect yet, but it would be great for an athlete. Chasing away dehydration and fatigue.
I think of all the people we’ve helped with the vaccine. I think of how they won’t have to deal with what Ena had to deal with. What we had to deal with together. The anxiety and dread as the disease took its toll. I think about all the good times with Ena and my parents, the small family we cobbled together.
SKIM-2 serves another round of drinks.
I peer at the butsudan, at the picture of Ena’s smiling face next to the memorial tablet. I place an offering of satsuma and steaming rice. For good measure, I position by her photo SKIM-2’s output of a small cup of rich junmai sake. Next to that, I set down the electrolyte chaser it shook and poured.
You’re my first customer, Ena. I’ll serve this at my bar next.
I imagine her smile after practice, sweaty but vivacious at the bar counter, keeping me company as I finish work. She recounts judo moves as she puts me in a playful choke and plants a kiss on my cheek, her other hand reaching for a quenching cup of sake.
I can’t help but think that’s ikigai. Getting together with your loved ones, sharing a drink.
And for a moment, I forget about speed or execution and the utter convenience of kwik koji—it’s about being together for it all and savoring each instance once there.
I dip a finger in sake. I caress her cheek, and holding my finger there for what seems like an eternity, smearing the glass of the frame with a fingerprint of my home-brewed concoction, knowing she’d be happy for me.
I wish I could say the smile in her photo gets wider.
I smile back and get ready for tomorrow, just another day at the bar.
10
A Necessary Being
Indrapramit Das
0
Brishti had a memory that seemed unreal but wasn’t, of an army of giants carrying an entire forest on their shoulders and backs. She couldn’t remember her mother, but she remembered this. The giants had carried the forest to the city, and pounded old roads with their great fists, tearing asphalt and concrete like cloth, filling trenches with fresh soil to plant the trees they’d carried.
People watched from the valley of buildings around them, many wearing face masks. Some shook their heads or shouted as they watched their roads vanish. Others clapped and cheered as they watched the forest come to their plague-haunted city, to bear fruit and breathe for its choked denizens. Brishti couldn’t remember who had held her in that moment, listening to the tolling of their fists, warned to keep a distance by the flashing lights on their bodies.
One of those giants would become Brishti’s father.
I
It was well into the age of plagues that Brishti was born again. It was a time of warnings, of sirens blaring across the skies, alerts sparking across networks to warn people of pandemics, wildfires, superstorms, flocks and swarms that darkened the sky in panic. The streets of Kolkata were emptier than they had been for centuries, with most of its millions huddled at home or in rows of garibaris, old fossil-fueled cars reclaimed as interim homes for those who didn’t have any. Hundreds of thousands had vanished to overcrowded crematoriums, ghats, and burial grounds.
During superstorms, the roads were rivers. As one of these cyclones roared into the megacity from the Bay of Bengal, unhindered by the sunken Gangetic delta, a lone child clung to a bobbing branch in one of those rivers. She shouldn’t have survived that maelstrom, but some atavistic impulse, some holy hope, had kept her clinging to that branch, saved only by her scant malnourished weight on the shattered tree limb. As the child tumbled through the city on her branch, the wind strengthening with each passing second, she floated near a giant who stood in the waters, epaulettes of light flashing on its shoulders and bursting in starry spray across the flowing floods and rain-slashed air.
The giant saw her.
The giant swept one great arm down and snatched her off the branch, taking the child to their chest as a mere man might hold a tiny kitten found in a gutter. And the giant’s chest opened up to reveal their beating brown heart—a man, who took from the giant’s hands the child, his skin quickly shone by the rain to match the gleam of his new charge. The giant’s glass-webbed ribs shut again, to seal in their confines man and child, as well as the little girl’s first memory of the new life she was hurled into by the storm. It was, perhaps, a memory only imagined later when her father told her how it had happened—the memory of her first time inside the giant, from cold to the warm gush of the giant’s breath against her, steam fogging the panes of their transparent chest, the earthy smell of the man’s soaked limbs holding her to his chest, the softly blinking lights that lined the inside of her great savior as they stood waiting. “You’re safe, you’re safe,” the man told her over and over again, like the words of a song.
He would tell her often that he’d had named her Brishti, rain, right then and there, rain outside lashing the giant’s skin, rain inside running down their skin and turning to fog on instruments and windows. Brishti knew he hadn’t named her in that moment. It didn’t matter—it was true in the same way that he was that being of ultra-strong but lightweight metal and carbon fiber that had rescued her. In that moment she was born Brishti, daughter of a giant and a superstorm, even if neither of them knew it yet. He wiped the caul of rain from her dazed face and smiled at her for the first time.
THE GIANT SPENT THAT NIGHT WALKING THE STORM-LASHED CITY, REMOVING FALLEN trees, cables, and posts from the street, their outer body sometimes sparking when live wires shocked it, dimming the lights inside.
Brishti spent that night curled against the giant’s heart, sat in his lap, shivering despite the heat inside, which the man had turned up to dry the both of them, having no clothes to replace her tattered t-shirt and shorts. He’d wrapped a threadbare blanket and towel around her.
The giant waded Kolkata’s streets, sweeping searchlights across the waves and hurtling squalls. The giant’s heart lent the girl the heat of his blood as he piloted his greater body, his arms moving in comforting concert with the limbs outside, the wired braces around his limbs sometimes pushing against her with a comforting assurance. She had no mask. She could have been infected with any number of the novel pathogens scouring the world, her foreign body a hazard to the greater one of the giant and their heart. But the giant’s heart kept her in their shelter, let her arms unfurl slowly from a tight curl against her chest to an embrace around his torso, cold hands tucked between his back and his seat, head against his ribs. She was the rain against his chest. Inside, outside. She could hear his heart beat, even above the hum and hiss of the giant’s sinews, the roar of raindrops against their body.
THE NEXT DAY, BRISHTI WATCHED HER RESCUER HELP CLEAR THE STORM-STRUCK megacity with other giants, all the while sitting in his lap. She learned the face of the giant’s heart by light of day—his fearsome but graying muttonchop beard, insomniac eyes bloodshot, bald pate always glistening with sweat, heralding a surprising ponytail of curly hair tied with a rubber band. His white tank top was grayed by extensive use.
They never had direct contact with other humans, only seeing giants and vehicles, or people, in the distance, at their windows, descending up or down the mountainous spires of multi-stories on tensor cables from their balconies, tending to the vertical gardens hanging off the buildings. It came back to her, this land recreated by the giants—roads turned to forested paths and groves, buildings forming verdant vales and geometric hills bejeweled with windows, the
distances of emptiness given to the city by the plagues filling with vegetation. The giants had wandered Kolkata like gods, transforming the land, grasping in their titanic hands an opportunity to draw the wilderness back to cool the Earth’s raging fever.
Brishti watched keenly through the giant’s transparent chest, as their hands righted the fallen trees that could be salvaged, and embedded their exposed roots into heaped earth again, packing the soil around their trunks. Around her, the man’s smaller arms moved in the same way, hands dark and calloused like the bark of those trees he was restoring, but so delicate in their movements. His body of flesh and blood looked frail in comparison to the one that enclosed them, his limbs tough but wiry.
They never left the inside of the giant, though it began to stink of damp. Brishti wondered if they would be inside the chest forever, watching the city pass by. The giant spoke to the other giants through their instruments, voices crackling disembodied over speakers, coordinating efforts. Sometimes, the cousins of the giants—solar and biofuel cars and lorries—passed by along the roads, cousins also to the still rows of garibaris. Reformed like the giants themselves were—some had been used for military and police, in past lives. As Brishti watched the city, she knew that it was her home, though she had no other clear memories of her life before, except of the giants planting the trees that were everywhere. The storm, or something else, had knocked them out of her head.
Sometimes masked people came out of buildings, and walked out into the roads to give thanks to the giants. They came with offerings of fruit and vegetables from the rooftop gardens of their high-rises—capsicum, tomatoes, apples, mangoes, cucumbers. The giant would squat low to respect these pilgrims. The civilians would wave through the glass, brush their palms against the giant’s limbs, and leave their offerings of food in a small mouth below the giant’s chest, which was flipped open from the instrument panel inside. Offerings to gods. Brishti remembered this. This was the country they lived in. Giants were gods too, in some of the stories. The giant swallowed these offerings. But inside, the giant’s heart ate nothing. So Brishti ignored the gnawing in her gut. She drank from the water tap he’d shown her among the instruments.
Brishti didn’t speak. The heart needed to beat, so the giant would move and help the people of the city, the ones inside their garibaris and high-rises and ancient crumbling houses that had survived the age of development by donating their plots of land to reforestation, their centuries-old structures hidden by trees. It was work that required a deep attention.
As the sun receded behind the city, windows began to glow through the foliage trailing down from rooftop farms and gardens and snaring the remnants of useless billboards whose faces wept with rust. The roads and paths of Kolkata glistened in the firefly glow of alor gach, the bioluminescent trees and plants that had replaced most streetlamps, their light-flecked leaves giving the impression of stars rustling close enough to touch.
In the quiet, under a sky ripped cloudless and moon-shot after the storm, the giant came to rest at the shore of one of the many streams and canals of Kolkata, which were only a few years or decades old at most. Along the water, there were garibaris parked in their permanent spots, solar-powered lights glimmering behind their brightly curtained windows, the shadows of their residents flitting like moths trapped in paper lanterns.
The humming of the giant’s body died down. Insects drummed against the glass of their chest, a stringed charm of dried chilis and lemons twirling in front of the panes. The giant’s heart picked Brishti up off his lap and sat her down in the extra seat next to his. She looked nervous to finally leave his lap. He pushed a lever on the instrument panel.
The ribs of the giant’s chest hissed open a little, letting a cool draught of air inside.
“You can speak, child?” the giant’s heart asked, turning to her. “You understand Bangla?”
She nodded.
“Do you have a name?”
She said nothing.
“That’s alright. What about a home I can take you back to?”
She shook her head.
“You are lost.”
She nodded.
“And found,” he peered at her. “Do you remember anything? That the world is sick? That you should stay away from people?”
She nodded.
“Good. Good. This,” he waved his arm. “This is a mekha. I, too, am mekha. You understand this?”
She nodded.
“The mekha allows me to be one with god, so I may give service to the people of Kolkata, help them in this age of plagues. Our bodies,” he patted his chest. “They can’t protect us. But this body can. It is an emanation of god. In here, you are safe. You are one with god.”
She said nothing.
“Ah! Are you hungry?” he said, and his stomach growled to follow his words.
She giggled.
He smiled at her. “I am a fool. I forget not everyone is like me. I have been alone for a long time. I go long hours without eating, you know . . . when I am one with my mekha. Look at me babbling. Words won’t fill your little stomach.”
He freed himself of the braces that connected him to the giant’s body, collapsing them with practiced movements and letting them hang in the air above the seat. “Remember the food those people gave the mekha? It is their thanks. Now we eat it.” He played with his instrument panel, his fingers dancing across the mystery of switches. Something hissed and clanked in the guts of the giant. He bent down and opened a hatch below the console, revealing a cache of fruits and vegetables fed to the giant by grateful people over the day. There was a citrus scent of disinfectant in the air. He handed Brishti an apple, and took one himself, biting into it. Brishti did the same, juice squirting on to her dirty face.
“You’re . . . a boy or a girl?”
Brishti paused as if to think about this, and nodded.
“Boy?”
She shook her head.
“Girl. Of course. Stupid me.”
She crunched on the apple.
“Do you have a . . . a mother and father?”
The words tumbled out of her mouth with bits of half-chewed apple, as if she hadn’t been silent all day, her voice small and cracked in the tight space of the giant’s chest, assertive in its desperation: “You are my father.”
He looked at her, his chewing stilled.
She continued devouring her apple, not looking at him. As if she were suddenly afraid of looking at him, for fear that he wasn’t actually there.
He tapped her shoulder gently. He noticed the tears rolling down her cheeks now, mingling with the juice on her lips, salt and sugar that she licked quietly. She concentrated on the apple, and nothing but the apple, taking huge chunks out of it with her teeth. He waited a moment, and tapped her shoulder again. She looked at him fearfully with her big brown eyes.
“You are right,” he said, softly. “I am your father. By god’s grace, I am your father.”
The giant’s body pinged in the silence as it cooled. The girl looked down at her mostly eaten apple. Her hands were shaking.
“I remember you,” she said, voice wavering.
“You do?” he asked cautiously.
“I saw you and the other giants carry the forest on your shoulders. You planted it in the city.”
He looked out of the giant’s ribs. Indeed, there it was—the “forest,” entwined into the labyrinth of the city. He and all the mekhas in Kolkata had walked hundreds of kilometers across Bengal to a tree farm and transplanted the harvest to the city, replacing smaller streets with groves, seeding the empty spaces of fields, racetracks, golf greens, and club lawns into forest land for new villages of public housing. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since that great march, carrying young trees like umbrellas against their shoulders, along endless highways emptied by the age of plagues. It had been one of many marches, performed over decades, before he became a mekha. The last one had been five, six years ago, maybe. The girl was older than he’d expected, if she
could remember that. He barely remembered Kolkata when it was less reclaimed by forest, when cars moved in armies down the streets like he and his fellow mekhas had during the forestation march, when people flooded the footpaths like water did after the storms. Like his parents. People who, in another time, would have had to risk death and walk thousands of kilometers to their distant villages, when pandemics hit and they were left with no jobs or help by uncaring governments. His parents had no giants to walk for them on those harsh migrations, no free housing to give them shelter, not even makeshift villages of repurposed cars, no urban forest from which to gather communal food.
“We moved the forest,” he agreed.
“Because you are a giant,” said the girl. The apple in her hands was whittled to its core.
“Are you scared of me?” he asked. After all, the word she used, daitya, could also mean monster. Perhaps that was what the word father meant to her, he thought, with fear in his heart.
She shook her head. He couldn’t tell if there were still tears fresh on her cheeks, because her face was so grubby.
“You don’t mind being a giant’s daughter?” he asked, his body heavy with exhaustion, limbs aching from the work of the day. He hadn’t been this close to another human being in a long time. He had never shared this space inside his mekha with another, ever.
She shook her head again.
His relief was so palpable that he had to wait a moment before he spoke again. He had never wanted a child. But the thought of sending this girl out beyond the safety of his mekha’s body terrified him, an idea that was a corruption of all the mekha stood for, all he stood for in his place inside it, as a servant of god and of the people of this wounded land. He stood, and reclined both their seats. “Sleep now. You need to rest.”
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