“This boy,” Deepa says, “is my future husband.”
The night she stopped the demolition, Banu’s ajji heard her husband speaking to the neighbors. Listening, really, and fixing things: the fractured frames of their fallen homes, the rusted remnants of their broken roofs. The neighbor’s child stood off to one side, watching and kicking at the dirt with his bare toes.
“They came without warning and they stopped without warning,” the neighbor was saying. “It was the strangest thing.”
“Ajji stopped them,” the child said.
“Who? The kolam lady?” the neighbor asked. “No, no. That can’t be.”
“She stopped them,” the child said. “She said something to the head police officer and then it stopped.”
“She spoke to the commander, is it?” Banu’s ajji’s husband asked. His voice was strained, but she was sure no one else could tell. No one else had heard him speak enough to notice.
“That can’t be right,” the neighbor said.
“Why not?” her husband said. “My wife is a resourceful woman. I’m sure she thought of something.”
“Well that’s true. She’s a good woman, Kadhir’s mother.”
“Yes,” her husband said. “She is.”
He means it, Banu’s ajji realized then. He’s changed.
But then, Banu’s ajji had changed too. The way she spoke to the police commander? It was no longer the way she spoke to her husband. Sometime during the decade and a half that they had been married, she had stopped being the unwanted wife. He had stopped being the unwilling husband.
Love had never grown between them. But something else had. Affection, perhaps. Respect. A marriage that, against all odds, had also become a partnership.
“What could she have possibly said? That policewallah doesn’t listen to anyone, least of all women,” the neighbor was saying.
“Forget the commander. These knots are all wrong,” her husband said. “Bring me some rope so I can mend it.”
He didn’t actually address the question. But Banu’s ajji knew he knew the answer.
“Just where do you think you’re going? Your mother told you to stay here, so you will stay,” Banu’s ajji says, her throat dry and aching, her voice devoid of its former gravitas.
There was a time, decades ago, when every child in Heaven bent themselves willingly into Banu’s ajji’s care, obeying her orders, eager to please. Today, though, she is not taking care of Deepa so much as Deepa is taking care of her. And both of them know it.
“I have my husband’s permission,” Deepa says. “Traditionally, he outranks my mother, doesn’t he, Ajji?”
Banu’s ajji raises her eyebrows at this boy Deepa calls her spouse. He shrugs, grimaces, grins. He is young, this one, but he is reliable. Banu’s ajji has seen enough men to know that much.
“At your own risk then,” Banu’s ajji says.
“The city’s not going to hurt me, Ajji.”
“It’s not the city I’m worried about. It’s your mother.”
“I can handle her,” Deepa says, pinning a dupatta to her shoulders. Softly, she adds, “But if you need me, Ajji, then I’ll stay.”
“Chee! Don’t be silly. Why would I need you?”
“I’ll be out there with everyone else. But you’ll be here all alone.”
“Alone? That’s nothing. I’m used to it, aren’t I?” Banu’s ajji says. The words taste corroded, bitter. Like the lies that they are.
It’s been fifteen years since Banu’s ajji’s husband died, a decade since her son and daughter-in-law did too. Almost twenty-four hours since the city leveled the home her husband built, since she lost the place where she raised her child, her grandchild. The spaces between these massive losses were dotted with so many smaller ones: friends, relatives, neighbors. All crushed beneath the wheels of horrors and hardships reserved only for the poor.
After Deepa and her fiancé leave, Banu’s ajji closes her eyes. Focuses on the air the fan valorously churns into a tepid breeze. Listens to her own frail chest rising, falling, rising, falling, to her lungs crunching like breaking tin, like crumbling bricks.
Destruction, Banu’s ajji realizes, always sounds the same.
15
Crooked
the air is as soupy as twice-warmed sambar, as viscous as stale rice porridge. We cluster in the shadow of the bulldozers, shifting every hour, chasing the shade that migrates with the sun. Our mothers spread worn-out bed sheets and dupattas over the dirt, ply us with freshly boiled drinking water and sliced-up cucumbers seasoned with chili and lime. Our neighbors come and go, joining us during the breaks between their jobs washing dishes and mopping floors. We can’t blame them—in Bangalore, there’s no such thing as demolition leave.
The main road is a symphony of men and boys. Water balloons splash and water guns pump, throats screech and bare feet thump. Rhythms pounded out by people who are expected to protect no one besides themselves.
Halfway through the morning, the bulldozer drivers arrive, loose change and bus tickets crammed into their shirt pockets, bidis and betel nut crammed into their mouths. The one with the tennis shoes has a purple stain on his trousers, like he was hit by a color-filled water balloon and didn’t have time to change.
“You’re back, is it?” Fatima Aunty asks. She tries to sound threatening, but her words fall limply in the wilting heat. “Don’t even try to start those bloody machines.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll wait for the police to come beat some sense into you first,” says the driver with the wart. Spits a wad of betel on the ground, where it hits the dirt with a blood-colored splash.
The driver with the patchy face shrugs and adds, “Demolition or not, we still get paid.”
Not long after the drivers find their own shade, the photographer shows up too, full of pride at fulfilling her promise. All morning, she crouches and ducks and leans, dancing her strange dance of pessimism and pain. At first, Banu trails her again. Before long, though, she gets bored of helping the foreigner frame the same pathetic images over and over and over again.
“This is torture,” Rukshana says as Banu collapses next to her.
“I wish something would just happen,” Joy says, sighing in agreement. “Anything at all.”
As though she’s heard, Neelamma Aunty’s voice slices the thick air like a machete through a tender coconut. Sharp and curved and angry.
“Is that my daughter?”
“Can’t be,” Selvi Aunty says. “You told her to stay inside, didn’t you?”
“Anyway I can barely make them out,” Fatima Aunty says, peering at the two silhouettes that are slowly approaching us, still too far away to be more than outlines of bodies struggling against the glare of the unforgiving sun.
“It’s her. I can tell,” says Neelamma Aunty, who in the past sixteen years has barely left her daughter’s side. Knows Deepa’s movements better than she knows her own.
Still, Selvi Aunty says weakly, “Your daughter’s a good girl. She would never disobey.”
Rukshana guffaws and Joy hits her on the back of her head.
“Which one of you is responsible for this?” Neelamma Aunty says, rounding on us, like she’s just remembering we’re here. We see her tallying our numbers, making sure we are all present and accounted for, like our teachers do every morning.
There’s Banu, sketching a city skyline in the dirt. Padma, doing practice questions from a board-exam preparation book she’s borrowed from Janaki Ma’am. Joy, reciting Urdu couplets to Rukshana, who is making faces to cover up how much she’s enjoying them.
“I don’t think the girls are to blame this time,” Selvi Aunty says, squinting into the distance. “Deepa’s coming with—someone else.”
Fatima Aunty follows Selvi Aunty’s gaze and shakes her head. “She’s right, Neelu. I’m sorry to say it, but today, you only have yourself to blame.”
“What are you talking about?” Neelamma Aunty says.
Until she sees it too.
Last Thursday, we walked to school on a winter morning and left on a summer afternoon. Bangalore’s like that: in just a few hours, the city switches its allegiances, trading one season for another. Sunlight blazes and riots, breezes cower and still. Summer soaks the earth, saturates the sky. Seeps into our bones injecting us with restless heat, reckless abandon.
“Let’s skip our chores and go to Lal Bagh,” Rukshana said. She’s loved the botanical garden ever since she figured out how to climb the silk cotton tree without getting caught.
“Too far away,” said Padma, who had to pick her mother up from work.
“Fine. Then let’s get Bowring kulfi at that place by the Metro.”
“Too expensive,” said Banu, who spent all her money on medications for her ajji.
“Let’s go to the park,” Joy said. Held up a day-old English-language paper her mother rescued from the dustbin of one of the houses she cleans. “The one on the posh side of town.”
“The posh park?” Rukshana asked. “Why?”
“Because today it’s covered in butterflies,” Joy said, flapping the paper open with a flourish that makes its pages rustle like beating wings. Peered at the mess of English letters, traced the smudgy photograph. “It says here that hundreds of butterflies have come to Bangalore from all over the country. They find the leafiest places in the city to lay their eggs.”
“They’re mothers!” Padma said. “That’s beautiful. Then where do they go?”
“Nowhere. After they lay their eggs, they die.”
“So they just leave all their children behind?” asked Banu, voice trembling.
Joy swatted her and said, “Don’t be so negative. You’re the artist, no? You of all people should appreciate it.”
“Plus, it’s close by, and it’s free,” Padma said.
“Exactly,” Joy said, closing the paper and folding it carefully. “Come, let’s get Deepa.”
“Deepa?” Rukshana asked. “Why would we take a blind girl to see butterflies?”
“Because she’s one of us,” Joy said sharply. “Now let’s go.”
Joy’s words launched us like rockets into the brand-new weather. We careened through Heaven, crackling like fireworks, boisterous and bright and bursting.
“Deepa! Let’s go!” we yelled. “We’re taking you out.”
But unlike us, Deepa’s house was silent. There was no Neelamma Aunty in her usual place behind her Singer sewing machine. No Deepa on the doorstep chopping beans and tomatoes and onions. No hum and buzz and chatter and sizzle pouring out through the open door, inviting us in with all our chaos and complications and noise.
“They must be inside,” Padma said, bounding through the door. But before she fully crossed the threshold, she halted and said, “Oh!” We slammed into her, one by one, flailing like carom pieces. Stopped cold by the scene we had inadvertently disrupted.
Deepa’s family sat cross-legged on the ground. Neelamma Aunty worried her sari with her cut-up hands, fingers calloused and scarred from needles aimed the wrong way. Deepa’s father bounced his knee up and down, brow taught and wrinkled, weathered from years of driving in the sun and rain. Deepa sat perfectly still, face secreted behind the pallu of a purple organza sari, wrists dense with bangles, legs dense with anklets.
They faced a family sitting against the opposite wall. A mother who could’ve been our mother, a father who could’ve been our father. And a boy, who could’ve been our brother—or, actually, our much older cousin.
The boy—who might be a man—did not look right. Spine crooked and bent, shaped like the years before we were born. Before every child in every slum opened their mouths to receive bitter and lifesaving polio vaccines on their tongues. Before the Rotary Club hung yellow banners on the footbridge declaring India polio free.
And this boy. This crooked boy that none of us would give a second glance?
Deepa was serving him a cup of tea.
“Looks like the butterflies aren’t the only ones thinking about reproduction today,” Rukshana whispered.
“Good morning, um—Aunty,” Deepa’s fiancé says. Swallows hard and looks to us for help, but all we can do is shrug. How are we supposed to know what to call your future mother-in-law? Especially when she’s staring at you the way Neelamma Aunty is staring at this boy. Like she wants to send him to the mountains of Kashi in the middle of an avalanche.
“What do you two think you’re doing?” Neelamma Aunty asks. “Deepa, I specifically told you to stay at home.”
“You can’t tell me I’m old enough to get married but I’m too young to protest,” Deepa says. “It’s not fair.”
“Of course I can. I’m your mother. I can tell you whatever I want.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Am I an adult or not?”
“An adult? Ha! That you’re definitely not.”
“Well I have permission from my husband to be here, so there’s nothing you can say.”
“He’s not your husband! You’re not married yet! You two aren’t supposed to be talking, let alone wandering around together.”
“Oh, so the fact that my fiancé cared enough to check on me is a bad thing, now? You’d rather pair me off with someone heartless who doesn’t care about me and my family?”
“Aunty, I apologize for the impropriety, but—” Deepa’s fiancé says.
“Nobody asked you,” Deepa and Neelamma Aunty say at the same time.
“Oh. I, um, I mean—”
“Shhh,” Joy says, grabbing the boy’s arm and pulling him into our quieter, safer fold. “Let them be. They’ll burn each other’s fuses out, just wait and see.”
“Are they always like this?” the boy whispers.
“Worse,” Padma says.
“But not as bad as the rest of us,” Rukshana says.
Our mothers’ tempers are constantly ignited. Selvi Aunty and Fatima Aunty once yelled for two hours about who was entitled to more space on their shared clothesline. Neelamma Aunty stopped speaking to Vihaan’s mother because she removed Neelamma Aunty’s bucket from the water line. Banu’s ajji once threw a brick through a window because she was so angry about losing an ironing client to a neighbor.
Deepa’s future husband, though, doesn’t know this. He’s never lived in a place like Heaven, where rage turns the air red and ugly and ripe. Never had to raise daughters after a father abandons them. Never had to learn to mother after being unmothered, how to love after being unloved. In Heaven, anger is not about any one person. It’s about the whole world. The people around you are just close enough to take aim.
The foreign woman hears us too. Looks up from where she is photographing a stray dog and her puppies curled up among the jagged pieces of a broken roof. Scar above her eye, thumping tail broken off in the middle, puppies pulling hungrily at her teats. It makes us feel embarrassed. Like this dog’s survival is more photogenic than our own.
It makes our anger flare just as hot and strong as Neelamma Aunty’s. Stronger even.
“What are you looking at?” Rukshana yells.
“No, no,” Deepa says, turning away from her mother and gesturing at the woman. Uses a voice fit for the starving puppies, for the suckling dog. “Come, come. It’s okay.”
“What do you think you’re doing now, you mad girl?” Neelamma Aunty yells.
“Saving Heaven,” Deepa says. “Now stop screaming and help me.”
We all know the rules. Daughters listen to their mothers before their marriage, and to their husbands after. Because all daughters must get married. Or, more specifically, daughters must get married to the highest bidder. And for girls like Deepa—girls like us—bidders aren’t guaranteed.
As far as fiancés go, this family was probably the most Deepa’s family can hope for. The first time we saw them, we could tell t
hey weren’t rich, but they were better off than we were. The boy and the father wore shirts so new that the collars were still crisp. The mother wore gold on her wrists and ears, diamonds in her nose. Neelamma Aunty and Deepa’s father mostly stared at the floor, trying to hide the callouses on their toes, the frayed hems of their clothing.
The longer we watched, the more we realized how much was at stake. The less we knew what to do.
Deepa was the first of us to go like this. It did not feel like an auspicious beginning.
“Girls, this is not a good time,” Neelamma Aunty said, smiling a smile as thin and false as the fabric hiding Deepa’s face.
“Sorry, Aunty,” Padma said.
“We were just going to see the butterflies,” Banu stammered. “It’s supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
“Butterflies?” the crooked boy asked.
“There’s an unusual number of them at the park right now,” Joy said in her most sophisticated voice. “The newspaper is calling it a mass migration.”
“You’re taking a blind girl to see butterflies?” The boy’s father laughed, a noise like falling rocks. The boy’s mother covered her smile with her hand, flashing flamingo-pink nails sculpted in a salon.
“Well I think it’s a wonderful idea,” the crooked boy said.
Something in the air straightened.
“Why don’t I escort them?” he said. “We’ll get to know each other. Make sure this alliance is correct.”
“I’m not sure if that’s proper,” Neelamma Aunty said, glancing at the boy’s parents.
“No, no, no. Don’t worry. My son has the right idea,” the boy’s father said, booming the way big men do. Slapped Deepa’s father’s shoulder and said, “Have to keep up with these modern times. Let’s give them an hour, shall we?”
“An hour is fine,” Deepa’s father said.
“You’ll be careful?” Neelamma Aunty asked.
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