The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  She crossed the main road and entered a maze of alleys, rolling her suitcase behind her, eyes on the map in her palm. Autorickshaws paused putteringly to offer their services to her – ‘No, I’m fine. Yes, I’m sure’ – then zigzagged off into the traffic, waggling their bums. The alleys narrowed and disintegrated to ruts and rubbish. Cars and autos gave way to cows and chickens. The sun rose like the red in the Global Climate Change thermometer. Her rucksack was a hot grasping thing on her back, her suitcase wheels crudded with mud, by the time she deadended in front of a house that looked like marzipan – matte pastel walls, slanted roof and windows. A cow lounged in front of it.

  This was absurd. She was Zambian, for goodness’ sake. And Indian, by descent at least. How could she be lost? The cow swung its tail and painted the back of her calf with a slick brown stripe of god-knows-what. Self-pity stung her throat again. A woman stepped out onto the balcony of the marzipan house, nursing a baby while talking into her Digit-All wristband. Naila asked for directions, and after a stilted English conversation and a dozen more labyrinthine turns, she found herself in a hotel lobby icy with air conditioning.

  Her clothes stiffening as her sweat dried, Naila filled in the register. As she wrote the time, she realised she had managed to catch her train only to lose an hour getting lost. She rushed up to her hotel room, changed into a kurti, threw a shawl over her head, grabbed her rucksack, and went back down to book tickets for the temple. The concierge shook his head. It was far too late to buy a Special Entry Darshan ticket to see Sri Venkateswara today. But, he smiled, if she was willing to walk up the mountain, darshan would be free.

  ‘How long is the hike?’

  ‘Oh, just five–seven hours for pada yatra.’ His head wobbled smugly. ‘Beautiful views.’

  ‘I’ll book a car,’ she mumbled. ‘Tweather says it looks like rain. Early monsoon.’

  The concierge wobbled his head again, as if he had expected this of a foreigner, then lifted his beaded finger to his ear to book her a car. She was considering running up to her room to stash the box of ashes in the safe when the driver walked in. He was in his forties, wearing jeans and a windbreaker. His Bead was flashing like a strobe – his torch function was stuck, he apologised. Once she was in the back of his Lexus, he gave a rehearsed speech into the rearview mirror:

  ‘Temple is ultimately top of seventh hill of Tirumala, which we are calling Venkata. Tirupati is not this temple where you can do quickly darshan and go, no. Because in actual matter of fact every day there are thousands-thousands pilgrims who want to do same as you are asking and are looking for the ways and opportunities. There are very-many queues, Madam, but there are ways-and-means. If you have…’ he rubbed his thumb against his fingers, sending his Bead light scurrying over the car, ‘then black market is also happening.’

  ‘No, I’ll just do darshan tomorrow. But can I get tonsure today?’

  ‘Kalyana katta?’

  Their eyes met in the rearview, then his skittered over her silver haircut.

  ‘Yes, I read online that it doesn’t take long. And it’s free, right?’

  He nodded. ‘This time of day, very-many queues at main complex. But I take you for doing mokku at cottage. A friend of mine is there and I’m getting very-good discount for you.’

  He started the car and drove them through Tirupati’s chaotic traffic, which sorted itself only slightly when they reached the queues of the Alipiri tollbooth. He dropped her off to get her passport checked and picked her up on the other side. Soon, the Lexus was spiralling up the mountain just as the plane had spiralled down to Chennai. Is the sky best traversed in circles? Naila felt drowsy. The slow spin, the lowhanging clouds, the green hills, the radio’s soupy murmur—

  ‘Temple of Tirumala,’ said the driver.

  She checked her Bead. The drive had only taken half an hour. The word pilgrimage had always conjured for Naila a desert – feet pocking into dunes as the sun laid itself to rest on a wide horizon – or maybe a forest – dense foliage from which a ruined stone temple would surface like a barnacled whale. But Tirumala was a complex of hefty buildings and broad avenues, great paved plazas, metal accordion fences everywhere for the queues. There were statues and fountains, gardens and BeadTime kiosks. It was as grand and officious as a capital city.

  ‘Very rich temple,’ the driver smiled at her surprise. ‘Pilgrims donating weight in gold.’

  ‘Ya, I read that it has more money than the Vatican,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t think…’

  He circled a roundabout and drove into the hostel area – tree-lined roads, two-storey buildings, clothes hanging to dry on the balconies. Families strolled around, looking clean and alien with their freshly shaved heads. He parked on an incline in front of a small building and gestured for her to go inside. Naila got out and walked up to it. A sign outside pictured a dozen items circled and crossed out in red, including shoes, a beaded palm, a camera and a suitcase. Naila pulled off her Adidas and set them beside the cairn of black sandals outside the door.

  Fluorescent lights, white walls, and windows with metal grills all gave the scene a medical cast. The floor was concrete grey and sluiced with hair like marbling over its skin. The feeling in the room was animal and wet. Everyone seemed pleasant and calm. Along one wall, male barbers in all white sat cross-legged, directly across from the female barbers who wore saris in a jungle’s worth of pattern and colour. Pilgrims of matching gender knelt facing them, heads bowed to be shaved.

  Naila joined a queue on the women’s side and the pilgrim in front of her turned and smiled, head gently rocking. The barber they were lined up for wore a satin fuchsia sari with white geraniums, its beauty contravened by the banal plaid towel on her lap. Her own hair was pulled back into a long braid. She worked quickly, silently, one hand gripping the bowed head before her and tilting it incrementally, the other holding her blade, which swooped in swift arcs towards her, from neck to crown to forehead.

  When it was Naila’s turn, the barber frowned and interrogated her with bits of pungent Telugu, spitting words like clove seeds. The newly shaved pilgrim from the queue translated: ‘Barber is asking you why, Madam. Are you a widow?’ Naila bit her lip and nodded. The barber made an acquiescent gesture. Naila knelt and bent her head. The blade was cool and made a slivery sound. She watched her silver hair waft into the plaid towel and onto the slick slate floor. This was so very different from Mother’s ‘harvests’ for Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd. The air in the room shifted like clouds across Naila’s scalp until it was bare sky. When her head was completely shorn, it rose up all on its own.

  The barber beckoned the next woman in line. Naila stood and stepped aside, touching her scalp, looking at the scrolls of fallen hair. According to custom, it would be donated directly to the god – she did not have to take it to him. Daddiji’s debt had officially been repaid. But in reality, she knew, her hair would be weighed and sorted and distributed to one of the wig factories in Tirupati. Someday it might mingle with another woman’s hair on yet another woman’s head. Anonymous, profitable, generous – was this the gift economy her nonna had aspired to when she had sponsored the Hi-Fly salon?

  The driver was leaning against a wall outside, smoking a beedi with another fixer. Like a bad boyfriend, he took no notice of her haircut and kept chatting. Naila put on her trainers and saw her rucksack sitting at his feet. He handed it over and scolded her for leaving it next to the open window of the car.

  He took her to the pavilion to do a bit of tourist shopping. Naila mounted the broad steps bordered with stalls selling medicine and bangles and key chains and Tirumala t-shirts – mementos of loss, of having given something away. At the top of the steps was a station where people were burning coconut. Naila stood in the midst of that nutty, sooty smell, wondering if Daddiji’s ashes – in the box in the bag on her back – were stirring, sensing burnt friends nearby. She looked out at the white temple and the gold temple bey
ond it, where tomorrow she would visit Sri Venkateswara. She clicked on her Bead, held her middle finger up, extended her arm to zoom, and narrowed her eye professionally. She tapped her index finger and thumb to take the picture, then examined the photo in her palm. Figures were cavorting on every inch of the temple’s facade. Even the walls here had people.

  * * *

  She knew she was supposed to wash immediately, cleanse herself of the barber’s contamination. But instead she went back to her hotel room, stripped off her sweaty kurti and underclothes – her bra and panties like kelp – and slid under the sheets. Her newly bald head felt tender. She tried to ignore the operatic mosquitoes drifting around her. They looked like flecks of ash. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  What had it been like? Had Daddiji fallen asleep feeling fine and woken up to spasms and death? Perhaps he had eaten supper spiced up with Rivonia mango chutney, then some Earl Grey, a nap in his leather chair with the taste of bergamot on his tongue, and then – what? Spasms and death? Mother had found him. Had she tried to shake him awake? Had she knelt at his feet? Had she washed them before they took him to the mortuary, before they slid him into the furnace at the crematorium? Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down…

  Naila woke up with her bladder half full, a comfortable ache. She turned on her Bead and ran through her messages. Four from Joseph – gawd, so needy – one from Gabs just checking in, and a linked article from Tabitha: ‘Revolution is a Slow-Moving Riot’. Naila started reading it, then gave up – insects kept flitting in her face, drawn to her Bead. She got up to pee, and already in the bathroom anyway, she finally relented and took a shower, the water thrilling against her bare scalp. She threw on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt to go out for dinner. She put her passport in the safe and tried to shove the rucksack with the box of ashes in there, too, but it was too big, so she slung it over her shoulder. Better safe than sorry.

  Stealing Daddiji’s ashes had been easy. Mother hadn’t hidden the box. If anything, she’d flaunted it, leaving it on the sideboard so she could gesture to it while making her macabre jokes. Getting here had been more difficult. Naila had used up all her savings flying back to Lusaka from uni. She had eventually found an old bank card of Daddiji’s stashed in the back of a kitchen drawer – there was very little left in the account but it hadn’t expired and it had a credit line with just enough for a plane ticket from Lusaka to Chennai via Dubai.

  Naila stepped out of the freezing hotel lobby into the steaming hot night. She checked Tweather for Tirupati. 97°F. Jeez. She clicked ‘like’ to confirm the temperature with her Bead’s own measurement. As she made her way to the busy main drag, Tirupati glowed around her, as if lit with burning crops. Chitemene. Did farmers still do that? Burn it all down to start over? Tracing her route to the well-rated restaurant she’d found online, Naila came to a big, white building with an electric sign that said HANK YO. It looked colonial – columns and balustrades and palm trees and a fountain – but it was strung with gaudy lights. She heard drumming and saw people in traditional garb, their Bead lights dancing. A wedding? A wake? Bodies were being lifted and carried. It felt human and alive and just out of reach.

  She opened her Maps app but the location service wasn’t working – the blue circle kept drifting across the lines in her palm. She stared blankly at a road sign. She was lost again. She was on a bridge, in the middle of a crowded pedestrian path, autorickshaws buzzing past like flies. She slung her rucksack down and knelt to dig inside it, searching for the printout of her hotel reservation, which had a tiny map on it. She stood and aimed her Bead at the rumpled paper, looking up now and then to orient herself. There. She had found herself. The restaurant was a few yards away. When she reached down to pick up her rucksack, it was gone.

  * * *

  Sitting in the Tiruchanoor police station, a yellow building with a clutter of motorbikes parked outside, Naila bowed to her fate. She put her elbows on her knees, her bald head in her hands, and whispered to the floor. You win, Mother. The place was full of police officers – men wearing tan uniforms with short-sleeved shirts, big black belts, and bulky caps. They all had moustaches and nothing to do. A lipsticked grandmother sat on a bench, weeping, dabbing her eyes with the edge of her periwinkle sari. A man in a loincloth lay on another bench, passed out.

  The woman behind the counter called her name and Naila approached the glass window. She was handed a registration form on a clipboard with a chewed corner. She looked it over.

  ‘Ya, I don’t know my passport number,’ she said. ‘My passport’s in the safe at my hotel.’

  ‘We can quite simply scan your Bead, Miss,’ the woman said. Naila stuck her finger under the glass and the woman touched her own Bead to it. As both Beads beeped, Naila thought, as she always did, of Adam and God in the Sistine Chapel.

  ‘The officer will be with you shortly.’ The woman gestured for her to sit again.

  Naila slumped back onto the bench next to the dhoti man. Glances hovered around her like bugs. Naila was used to this by now. She was mixed and itinerant; she was Zambian here, Indian there, foreign and uncomfortably female everywhere. The weeping grandmother rose to her feet and shuffled to the glass window. After an exchange in Hindi, the official handed the old woman a key with a dented Coke can for a key ring. She shuffled over to a door in the corner and let herself in.

  Naila had made this trip to fulfill the promise Daddiji had made to Sri Venkateswara when she had fallen from the jacaranda tree in Kalingalinga. Before he had arrived at UTH and learned that she had only a fractured wrist, Daddiji had bargained for her life with mokku, the hair on his head. But he had never returned to India to bequeath it, even though he had worked all his life precisely to afford luxuries like international air travel. In the end his bank card had paid for a plane to circle his ashes up and down in the air, for a Lexus to drive them up and down a mountain. The one thing it could not pay to do was to bring them back to life, restore what was lost.

  The grandmother shuffled out of the bathroom and shut it behind her. She was no longer weeping. She returned the key and headed straight for the exit, her nose lifted imperiously. The moment she was gone, a brown trickle crept out from under the bathroom door. Everything ground to a halt. The official came out from behind the glass, shaking her head, marching to and fro, ordering a miserable-looking cleaner about. The dhoti man stood arms crossed, frowning. The smell was profound – so incomprehensibly rank and pervasive that Naila was forced to breathe through her sleeve.

  It was another half an hour before things had settled down enough for a police officer to usher her into his office and take her statement.

  ‘So, Miss Balaji,’ the man with the moustache began. ‘Anything of value in this stolen bag of yours?’

  2020

  Joseph first took Naila to the New Kasama house on her lunch break. It was like he was trying to keep the visit short. She had been back in Zed for a year and they had fucked their way to a kind of intimacy. But he seemed to want to lock her down now that his Virus experiments were over. She had become his sense of purpose. As he sped down Leopards Hill Road, she gazed out of the passenger window, avoiding his covetous glances, those green eyes tugging at the side of her head. She ran her hand over the cropped hair there, her rings clicketing over the cuffs riddling the outer rim of her ear. Her hair had grown back at its usual rapid rate, but she had kept the sides shaved since Tirupati, as a souvenir.

  He turned off Leopards Hill onto a dirt road and pulled into a cracked driveway strung with weeds. They got out and she followed him down a path that wound through a jungly garden. A humming entered her ears. At first it swelled in gentle pulses but as they walked on, it filled every crevice of the air. It was deafening by the time they stepped into a clearing. It was coming from a cloud of insects hovering over a swampy pool across from a half-built house.

  Joseph had told her that the owner, some big-shot army general, had been appointed to a
government position and moved to an official state residence before this one had been completed. It looked like it was slinking back to nature. The columns poking the sky were streaked with bird droppings. Bushy reeds grew up the mildewed facade, which was reflected to infinity by the fallen glass from a shattered sliding door. They walked around the unswimmable pool – the swarm seemed to follow them like eyes in a painting – and crunched through the shards into the darkness of the ground floor.

  The electric hum was louder in here, as if amplified by speakers. They picked their way through rubbish towards a slant glowing tube – from a skylight, she thought, until she looked up and saw the jagged edges of a hole in the ceiling. She tracked the light down again and blinked as it parted, curtain-like, to reveal a man reclining in a pool lounger. He was shirtless and barefoot, his jeans low on his hips, his face featureless in the brightness. His thumbs fiddled with a black box on his stomach. Smoke swirled around the tube of light like serpents around a staff.

  Naila had been asking to meet Jacob for ages but Joseph had been reluctant to reintroduce them. Now, as Jacob stood and walked towards them, torso rippling with muscles, she saw why.

  ‘Ati bwa?’ she grinned.

  ‘So you have come to punish me?’ he grinned back, still fiddling with his box.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Joseph asked stupidly.

  ‘You forgot,’ said Naila. ‘He frikkin knocked me out of that tree.’

  The hum intensified by a notch and she glanced around. The darkness had encroached. She leaned her head into it and saw that it was swarming with little black bits. The hum stopped and there was a brief skitter – a rain shower on a tin roof – as the air cleared and brightened.