The attendants cleared the trays and dimmed the lights, the video screens casting an eerie glow over the cabin. Naila sat sleepless in that artificial dusk. She regretted taking her shoes off. Her feet were already swollen. She thought of Daddiji’s feet, how she had washed them as a girl, carrying a shifty bowl of water to his hallowed, hollowed leather chair. He had washed hers once in return, when she was twelve. She had dropped a glass while doing the dishes and stepped on a shard. She had swept up, wiped off the blood and gone to bed. He must have seen it sticking out from the blankets. She had woken to a cool wet cloth on her sole, the tingling scrape of scabs being undone…
Naila glanced at the Cadbury man. He had fallen asleep to his action movie. Grief flooded her then and she wept, grateful for the anonymous dark and for being in a place where sniffles are not unusual and people keep their eyes closed or locked on screens. ‘It’s okay,’ said the Cadbury man, her jolting stirring him awake. His breath was warm and stinky and human. Naila tried to corral her sobs, but he just nodded, his eyelids drifting down in gentle pulses. She wept against his shoulder as he dozed. He stroked her hair, murmuring the name of his modern bride-to-be, until he fell asleep again, his inevitable hand warming her thigh.
* * *
When Naila had arrived back in Lusaka a week ago, she hadn’t been sure that anyone would be at the airport to meet her. She had rolled her suitcase outside to where the waiting families were standing behind the barrier, sick with solitude, her eyes searching the crowd. Relief. There they were: her three sisters, arms around each other’s shoulders, a twisted rope of beige limbs. Naila hugged them each in turn, then all of them together. The smell of their swaying black hair – spiced with sweat and product and their distinct yet harmonious pheromones – swelled her heart.
She was sporting a silver bowl-cut, but her sisters all wore their hair long now. This made her unreasonably happy, this proof that they had at last escaped Mother’s business, if not her home. Laughing and chatting, the four sisters daisychained to the car park through the tunnel with the blue canopy and the flashing ads. They hopped into the old Mazda, Gabriella in the driver’s seat, Naila beside her. It smelled spitty in here. She turned to the back.
‘So we’re going to shave our heads, right? For tonsure?’
‘Mother is supposed to do that, not us,’ Gabriella frowned.
‘And has she?’ Naila scoffed.
Gabriella stared ahead, hands on the wheel. Contessa opened her mouth, closed it. Lilliana sighed. The girls tossed their dark, wavy manes and fell silent, gazing out of their respective windows as Gabriella drove home. Naila was only twenty-two herself but as the eldest, her authority still muted them – which was too bad because she could have used a warning. As it was, she walked into the family home in Kamwala unprepared.
At first everything in the sitting room looked the same. The patchy orange carpet. Framed family photos infesting the walls. The American stereo system hulking blackly in the corner with its tangle of dust-furred cords. Workers steadily criss-crossing the room. And Mother, ruling over it all. She was unaccountably sitting on the back edge of the sofa, a heap of white hair between her knees. She was sorting it, issuing commands to the workers all the while. Naila’s eyes fell on the packets of brown, red and yellow hair lying like dead fish on the sofa beside her – chopped and dyed and priced. If her sisters had quit the hair business, then how—
‘So you decided to come home, did you?’ Mother asked without looking up.
The pile of white hair between her legs twitched – Naila blinked – and a face nosed its way out from it, cheeks wrung with wrinkles, a sloppy smile between them. Naila rushed over and sat on the sofa and took Nonna’s birdboned hand in hers.
Nonna Sibilla was Naila’s accomplice. She had opened an escape hatch from this family by taking Naila to Kalingalinga that day ten years ago. Naila had fallen out of the jacaranda tree and into a new world. That world was dirty and scary and unclear – like being inside a dust storm – but it was real and she had loved it: the crowd of people running her through the compound, the speedy drive to the hospital, Dr Lionel Banda’s flashing eyes, the smell of his cologne mingling with Dettol and soap, the stinging pull of the stitches, and the wet slime of plaster mummifying her broken wrist. Naila had loved it all and she loved her nonna for tossing her into it.
After that accident, Mother had put severe restrictions on them both, but Nonna had continued to smuggle little liberties to her granddaughter. Nonna had covered for Naila when she snuck out to clubs. Nonna had washed cigarette smoke and whisky sweat and semen from Naila’s clothes. Nonna had given Naila financial support when she transferred to a university abroad. Nonna had encouraged her with curt, signed Whatsapps when Naila chose to major in political science. But Naila had neglected her grandmother over the past two years, as she began to spend more time at protests than in classes, and to take holidays with friends rather than home in Lusaka.
To see her intelligent, mischievous, rebellious grandmother reduced now to a pile of white fur, to see her fall under the axe of time and Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd – it redoubled Naila’s grief. She had lost her two closest allies in the war of her family.
* * *
Ding. The cabin lights came on. Naila lifted her head from the Cadbury man’s shoulder. He pulled his hand off her leg and smiled forgivingly, as if she had been the one to impose this intimacy. The flight attendants paced the aisles like antic tightrope walkers, with fixed smiles and mussed make-up. They were done with coddling. They snatched Naila’s blankets and demanded her headset, they claimed her rubbish and chastised her tilted seat. Naila snuffled her apologies and slid open the window shutter.
It was midnight. Darkness above, darkness below, both littered with grains of light. Out there was a fatherland. The engines grew louder, heaviness swelled into the loftiness, and the plane began its leisurely downward spiral. It landed with a scorch and a wobble, slowed with a blustering sound, then swung grandly round. Digit-All Beads, now permitted, immediately strobed over the cabin, clashing like light sabres. The seat-belt sign went off and passengers popped up to queue in the aisles. Naila boycotted the rush and stayed staring out of the window.
Everything is always flashing at airports. But only at night do you really notice the pulse of it, like fireflies with their rhythmic pickup lines. Once, when she was nine, Naila had heard a fierce electrical noise coming from the transformer that translated between American and Zambian voltage for the stereo. She’d pressed the crusty orange wave of the off/on switch, and the lights on the stereo had faded, but the shrill buzzing had kept on. She’d found it eventually: a cricket, mottled as maize, clutching a power cord, still singing to its machinic mate.
Except, unlike the love signals of bugs, she thought as she tugged her rucksack from under her seat and shuffled into the aisle, the flashing lights at airports don’t forge connections between the planes. They help them avoid each other’s paths. What lonely lives machines lead. You’re one to talk. You touch and touch and remain untouched. Even by Joseph, who loves you. Naila was at the threshold of the plane now, surrounded by the attendants’ chiming goodbyes and democratic smiles. The Cadbury man was already striding ahead in the tunnel, disappearing into the eddying crowd. Onward. She, too, had a mission here. Naila stepped forward, her feet thick with the blood that had sunk there.
* * *
Death had changed the Balaji family, the way the loss of one tooth leads the others to shift, to drift in the thick of the gum. The change was especially stark in Mother. Over the years, as Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd had grown into an empire, Isabella Balaji had cultivated an easy magnanimity in proportion to its success. Mother-the-boss reigned serene. But now she erupted out of this moneyed calm. She bustled about town, collecting payments the second they were past due, scolding negligent clients, firing workers on a whim.
Hidden away in a bedroom, Naila’s sisters recounted all this, concluding
with the scandal of the funeral. Mother had insisted on holding the service at the Catholic mission.
‘With psalms!’
‘They splashed holy water and everything.’
‘But that’s insane—’
‘You weren’t even here, Niles. You can’t complain now.’
‘I had finals! And even if I had been here—’
‘Don’t,’ said Lilliana softly. She had been the most wounded by Naila’s absence.
‘Was there a casket?’ Naila asked after a pause.
‘A white one!’
‘And gold!’
‘Gold is fitting at least,’ Naila snarked. The four of them giggled. ‘Was she pleased?’
‘Is Mother ever pleased?’
‘She absolutely lost it when we got home. The workers were doing their thing—’
‘No!’
‘Believe you me! Full-on village-style wailing.’
Naila pictured it: the workers’ howls perfectly calibrated to the measure of respect due to the deceased, to how poor the mourners were, and how needy. None of them would receive any money anyway. The will was vague – that was how Mother had managed to get away with a Catholic service – except for one key instructon.
‘So when do we go?’ Naila asked.
Lilliana closed her mouth. Gabriella stared. Contessa, the youngest, gave Naila the news.
‘Mother wants to keep the ashes here.’
* * *
Naila was the last passenger standing at the baggage claim when the scales of the carousel slid to a stop. Men in overalls pushed trains of luggage carts and giant wooden brooms – brooms as big as Christ’s cross – over the shiny linoleum floor of the Chennai airport. Naila perused the queue of black and blue suitcases that had been pulled off the carousel, then gave up and headed into a small glass office.
There, another stunningly gorgeous Emirates employee told her that her suitcase had not made the connection in Dubai. It was on the next flight, which would arrive in about five hours. It was just past 10 p.m. If Naila waited for her bag, she would have barely enough time to catch her morning train. She felt her eyes sting at the injustice. Was Mother thwarting her, like some grey-eyed Greek goddess swooping in to interfere?
‘It’s not just clothes and shoes in that bag, you know?’ Naila said to the official, pressing her breastbone against the high counter.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the woman said, blinking her long lashes. ‘But there’s nothing we can do.’
Naila parked herself on one of the plastic chairs in the baggage hall, messing about on her Digit-All Bead until the next flight came in. She joined the other passengers around the carousel, feeling like an interloper. Her suitcase was an interloper too, so scuffed it looked mauled. Naila grabbed it, checked the contents in the ladies’ room – thankfully, it hadn’t been disturbed by airport security – transferred the heavy box into her rucksack and ran out of the airport.
* * *
‘How can you betray him like this?’
Mother ignored her. She was sitting at the dining-room table, which was tiled with white receipts. She tapped listlessly at an ancient calculator, its buttons squeaking feebly.
‘You know your Bead has a calculator, right?’ Naila pulled up a chair.
Mother turned her hand over with a faint frown. ‘I hate this thing.’ The Bead in her finger and the circuit in her palm looked purple under her skin. ‘Your father hated his too. He insisted that we pay full price to get them right away – “technology-technology!” – but his Bead always just got in his way.’
Naila’s mind reached for him, sending seeking tendrils into the rooms of the house. Where’s Daddiji? This was the feeling now. Not the anguish that had wrenched her when Mother had called to say he was dead. Just: Where is he? Where? thrumming over her skin…
‘When they set him on fire,’ Mother was saying, ‘his Bead didn’t even burn. The crematorium gave it to me in a baggie – black bits and bobs. Like some kind of refund.’ She glanced at the box of ashes sitting on the side table beside a bowl of Madrasi mix. ‘And now Beads are free anyway.’
‘Mother,’ Naila urged softly. ‘He wanted for us to take his ashes home.’
Mother’s eyes silvered. She turned back to her calculator. Her hands grew busy again. ‘The dead do not want for anything,’ she said.
* * *
In the taxi to the train station, Naila wrapped her arms around her rucksack and saw the driver’s eyes harden in the rearview mirror. No, she wanted to explain, the precious cargo she clutched was not money. She put on her chattiest face and asked him questions to even the scales: You, me. Brown, brown. But the questions he returned – about her family, her education – unbalanced them again. Her discomfort at answering him disturbed her. According to Marx, the money form is an illusion – she ought to be able to talk frankly about it, no? The driver’s eyes flashed from their caves. She was rich and female and African and he resented her. No doubt he would charge an unreasonably high fare. But then he didn’t, and in her haste to catch her train, she forgot to tip him.
Naila and the dawn arrived at the train station at the same time. The sky looked battered, like beaten tin. It was ten to six but the station was already crowded. Voices scurried, rickshaw bells and car horns jangled, smells smoked through the gritty air. Knowing her Bead wouldn’t work without Wi-Fi, Naila had printed her ticket in advance. Clutching it – the flag of a tourist, if ever there was one – she raced to the platform, brushing off the porters, her rucksack tucked under her arm, her roller suitcase bumping behind her over the uneven ground. With ten minutes to spare, she clambered aboard her train and panted her way to her seat.
The other passengers were mostly families: unsmiling fathers, doting mothers, children like small gods – smooth-skinned, bright-eyed, quietly aware of their power. No one spoke to her. Her ripped jeans and silver hair set her apart from them. Chai wallahs marched the aisles, croaking out their wares and fares. At exactly 6.25 a.m., the train jerked and slugged forward. This didn’t feel like the India she’d read about in the news: authoritarian measures, class tensions, poor amenities, the threat of rape hanging everywhere.
The conductor strutted down the aisle, using his Bead to scan the tickets projected on passengers’ palms. When he reached her, Naila handed over her printout, its corners curling in the humidity. He lifted his chin and refused it. Naila blinked at his rapid Hindi, helplessness sticking in her throat. The ticket had cost less than a meal at the uni canteen but TripAdvisor had said that it was essential to have a reserved seat. Finally, ‘Bead, Bead,’ the conductor said in English and she shook her head and turned hers on to show him that it didn’t work here – but then of course it did. He rolled his eyes, scanned the QR code in her palm, and marched off.
That her Bead worked in India was a relief – it would be much easier to get around. She should have known her SIM would sync automatically with a local network. After all, developing countries had all got Bead-fever first. Digit-All had been savvy. Instead of calling these technological gadgets chips, the company had marketed them as beads, which sounded smooth and round and ever so ‘cultural’. After an initial high-cost roll-out to spark interest, Digit-All had partnered with local governments to distribute free Beads. The Third World had been ripe for them. Power cut? A torch in your finger. Poor schools? Google in the palm of your hand. Slow communication? A photo beats a thousand words: a Bead was also an eye.
Naila opened the camera app now, reversed it, and stared at the girl in her hand. She ruffled her greasy mop of hair, pinched her chin pimple – satisfyingly, it spat its ivory guts out – and plucked a remnant of saag from her teeth. She hadn’t showered in days. This was starting to feel like a matter of principle: she was in mourning, she refused to be clean. She had three more hours on the train. Suitcase and rucksack tucked around her like a fortress, Naila closed her eyes.
&nb
sp; * * *
She was inside a warped cage of grey limbs shot through with violet light. She saw the ground from up in the tree – dappled shadows over rooty ground – then at eye level, the dull planes of the earth, the purple wrinkles of fallen blossoms. She was curled up on her side. A pair of green trainers approached but then the shoes became brown feet, a woman’s manicured toenails. She was being lifted, carried. A curtain parted. Steady, sure arms – a passage.
* * *
Naila woke to the tumult of Tirupati. It was not a quiet town, as she had supposed, given how close it was to a pilgrimage site. The train rumbled between narrow buildings with flat roofs and multicoloured walls, Telugu script crawling like creepers over them. When it pulled into the station, she disembarked with the other passengers and walked out to the main road, which was as busy as Chennai had been. There were no apparent rules or lights to obey: pedestrians shuffled around and between cars, their pace calm, their movements fluid – no jerks or pivots. Fooled by this rhythm, the friendly brown faces and the modern feel of the place, she decided to save the taxi fare by walking to the hotel a few blocks away. It was around 10 a.m. She had time to spare now.
The Old Drift Page 58