“Of course, Aunty. Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of her,” the boy promised.
“We all will,” Padma said. Shot the crooked boy a look as straight and sharp as a knife.
“The foreign woman’s coming over here?” Deepa asks. “Are you sure?”
“A blind girl, a boy with a crooked spine, and a hijra-in-training? All standing in a pile of rubble?” Joy laughs bitterly. “Of course she’s coming.”
It’s exactly the kind of truth the photographer dreams of capturing on camera. A truth so anemic that it might as well be a lie.
“Excellent. Where are the drivers?”
“Around the other side of the bulldozer,” Padma says.
“Just what are you up?” Neelamma Aunty asks her daughter.
Deepa ignores her mother, turns toward the sound of the photographer’s footsteps, and says, “Please, ma’am, will you take a photo of me with my would-be?”
“That was perfect. How’d you learn to speak Hindi like that?” Rukshana asks.
“Same way I learn everything,” Deepa says. “By paying attention.”
The photographer approaches and asks, “‘Would-be’? What is ‘would-be’?”
“Would-be. The man I’m going to marry.”
“He is your husband?”
“Not yet. Soon,” the boy says eagerly. Clutches Deepa’s hand like he’s being photographed on the flower-strewn stage of a wedding reception, not the dust-covered ruins of a half-destroyed slum.
“Your eyes. Are your eyes fine?” the photographer asks, her Hindi dissolving in her excitement. “You. Your back. Your back okay?”
“Don’t worry about my back,” the boy says. “Just listen to my fiancé.”
“Let’s go over there,” Deepa says. Slowly, clearly. Like she’s talking to a child. To Joy she says in Kannada, “Take us over by the drivers. Then make me look as pathetic as possible.”
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Rukshana asks.
“I’m trying to prevent us from being killed,” Deepa says.
“Stop arguing, Rukshana,” Padma says. “For once in your life, just listen.”
Joy leads Deepa and her fiancé to the emaciated strip of shade where the drivers smoke putrid bidis, sip fizzy drinks. Discuss wives, children, threats to their own futures, disasters that loom over their lives that are as cruel as the bulldozers they are paid to drive. In their distraction, they don’t notice Deepa, her cheeks radiating heat. Don’t see Joy loosening Deepa’s hair so it falls tangled and half-plaited down her back. Don’t see Deepa clinging to her future husband’s arm, body sagging with exhaustion. Don’t see Banu taking the photographer by the elbow, the way we do with Deepa when we take her someplace she’s never been before.
Which makes sense, really, since the foreign woman suffers from a different kind of blindness.
Don’t see Banu kneeling down and showing the photographer a frame she’s squared between her fingers. Inside are Deepa, Joy, and Deepa’s fiancé. So are the drivers, BBMP vests glittering, lit bidis glowing.
When the clicking starts, when the flash goes off, the bulldozer driver with the wart looks up, drops his jaw. The bidi he’s just lit slips out of his mouth. Falls to the ground in a shower of orange sparks, black smoke. Burns itself out in a burst of rotten flame.
The day we met Deepa’s would-be, we walked to the park in a huddle, whispering and worrying and glancing at Deepa and her crooked boy trailing behind us, arm in arm.
“How could Neelamma Aunty allow this?” Padma seethed. “Just because Deepa’s blind doesn’t mean she deserves to marry someone like—like—him.”
“His parents are horrible,” Rukshana said. “Did you see how his father spoke to us?”
“I bet they think they’re doing her a favor,” Padma said. “They think she’s just a pair of useless eyes and nothing else.”
“Exactly,” Joy said. “Deepa’s blind, but she’s the best dancer in Heaven.”
“The best storyteller. The best cook too,” Padma said.
“The most loyal friend,” Banu said, fingering bits of paint hidden inside her curls.
“So what do we do?” Joy asked.
Joy was right. It was time to hone a strategy, to prepare for battle. But when we turned to check on Deepa and the boy, what we thought was a war looked a lot more like peace.
“So can you see anything at all?”
“A little,” Deepa said. “I’m surprised you asked. Most people think blind people live completely in the dark.”
“I’m studying public health and management. When my parents told me about you, I decided to do some research,” the boy said. “Did you know that India has some of the highest rates of childhood blindness in the world?”
“Do you need that for your course? Or just for our marriage?”
“Probably just our marriage. But I like doing research. I like knowing what else is happening in the world.”
“Me too. Especially since I don’t get to go out in the world very much,” Deepa said.
“That’s a shame,” the boy said, nodding seriously. “We’ll have to do something about that when we’re married, won’t we?”
As they talked, the boy maneuvered Deepa around the jagged edges of the broken sidewalk, the snapped power lines that swung from the poles like electric snakes. Smiled a not-on-purpose smile. Like he was enjoying himself.
“You know how there’s more to Deepa than her useless eyes?” Banu asked. “Maybe there’s more to this boy than his crooked spine.”
When the drivers finally realize they’re being photographed, they fly into a rage. Their voices slap the air, furious and violent.
“What the hell is this?”
“Who are you clicking?”
“Stop right now,” the one with the wart says to the foreign lady. Points at her with an index finger bent unnaturally at the top, like he’s got arthritis, or an old injury that didn’t heal properly. Clenches his jaw so that the muscles pop beneath his black and white stubble.
“Which one of you called her?” asks the driver who is wearing tennis shoes. His words quiver with panic.
“What, you think we brought her here?” Selvi Aunty shouts.
“Watch your mouth, woman.”
“Don’t tell her what to watch and what not to watch. Idiot.”
Their noise builds, drowning out the frenzy of the main road, where water balloons burst on vehicles and pavement, autos swerve out of the paths of drunken boys and men. The city is loud, but Heaven is louder.
“You lot will stop at nothing,” says the driver with a patchy face. Pulls the bidi out of his mouth and throws it on the ground. Grinds it viciously under the sole of his blue plastic sandal.
The driver with a wart pushes his face so close to Deepa’s that when he speaks, his sour breath heats her cheeks.
“Make that woman leave. Now,” he says.
“What? A little blind girl like me?” Deepa says. “How could I possibly do that?”
The driver swears loudly. Pounds his fist into the side of the bulldozer so hard that he dents the metal. Doubles over in pain, yelping in every language he knows.
The foreign lady clutches her camera so hard that the skin on the top of her knuckles changes color.
Which is funny, because when we close our fists, our skin stays exactly the same. Like our bodies are already the color of crisis.
Banu shakes her head and says, “Keep going. Keep clicking. More pictures.”
The photographer gulps. Says in her broken Hindi, “I am here to help.”
Even though Deepa is the only one facing down an angry man, she is also the only one who stays calm. Soothingly, she tells the photographer, “Of course, of course.”
Under her breath, she adds in Kannada, “You’re helping us more than you’ll ever know.”
The park was only three streets away, but it looked like a foreign country. Women the color of unlit camphor walked briskly in circles around the edges of the gree
n lawn. Foreign tennis shoes squeaked, handloom dupattas fluttered. The only person who looked like us was a gardener gathering fallen branches, pulling up thorny weeds.
But the humans didn’t matter. Because everywhere, everywhere, we saw them: the butterflies.
Migration, as it turns out, isn’t always a bunch of straw-haired country kids hauling sand on their heads. Sometimes, migration is the vibration of ten thousand new mothers beating their tiny, spangled wings.
Deepa felt the feathery brush of insect feet, smelled the flowers unfurling their petals to make space for new life. Heard our gasps and sighs and oohs and ahhs. But of course, none of that was really the point.
“What is it like?” she asked.
“It’s glittery and blue,” Padma said. “Like the river in my village.”
“It’s like the necklace Kaju wore in that item number we all like,” Joy said.
Deepa nodded even though she didn’t understand. What are glitter and jewelry and item numbers to a girl whose world is webbed and black?
“Oh look!” Banu said. “Deepa, one landed on your hair!”
“Really? What is it like?” Deepa asked eagerly.
“It’s bright orange with black bits.”
“It looks like a tiger?”
“Or like a fire?”
“It’s like warming your hands over the dosa tava after the sun goes down,” the boy said.
We looked again. Banu nodded and said, “You know, he’s right.”
“These?” she asked, sweeping her fingers over a blood-colored blossom covered in blue and black wings.
“These are like the wind that blows right before it starts to rain,” the boy said.
The boy took Deepa’s arm and led her around the garden, guiding her hands toward clusters of wings. Butterflies nudged Deepa’s fingers with their honey-hungry noses, dropped their scales like silken rain.
“This one is like the smell of wild mint when it first pushes out of the soil. This one is like dry tree bark scraping against your fingers. This one is like handing out chocolates on your birthday.”
“How’d you get so good with words?” Joy asked.
“I like to read,” he said. “The college library has a lot of novels. They let you borrow them if you’re a student.”
“Really?” Joy asked. “English or Kannada?”
“Both,” the boy said, nodding seriously. “You can’t understand other people’s stories if you don’t understand your own.”
“I wish I could go to college,” Deepa said.
“Of course you can,” the boy said. “They have correspondence courses now. That’s how I got my tenth- and twelfth-class pass.”
“Would that be all right?” Deepa asked.
“Why are you asking me?” the boy said, laughing. “If you want to study, of course you’ll study. Haven’t you heard? Education is a human right. The government says so.”
The way he answered, we could tell he knew that Deepa read the papers every day. That he knew a lot about Deepa, in fact. Maybe even a few things that we didn’t. Couldn’t, because we never thought to ask.
At the end of our hour of freedom, all of us were chattering and giggling as though the boy was one of us. As though his spine was not the shape of a question mark but a full stop. As though he was not the man taking our friend away but a boy bringing us closer together.
Deepa never learned to write her Kannada letters with an ah-ahhh, oh-ohhh, ee-eeee or her English alphabet with an A, B, C. But she learned other things. How to be angry and demanding, clever and mighty, even when the world tells you to be silent and grateful, weak and small. How to eavesdrop on the right people at the right time. How to turn condescension into an advantage. A weapon, even.
The drivers have all closed in on Deepa now. She can feel the rage rolling off of their bodies, a cocktail of indignities brewed from decades of being told who they can and can’t be, what they can and can’t do. Rage for their families. For themselves.
She knows that rage. She has it too.
“We didn’t invite this woman, but we are friendly with her,” Deepa says to the driver wearing tennis shoes, her words rhythmic as a bulldozer’s engine purring to life. “She mentioned she might give these photos to the paper. The kind of newspaper that, say, might be seen by the headmaster of the private school where you’re trying to enroll your son. Which is a pity, because nobody wants to enroll the child of a man who bullies blind girls and their polio-stricken fiancés.”
Turning to the driver with the maroon patch, she adds, “It’s too bad about your daughter too. Who wants to marry a girl whose father is in the business of destroying lives? A girl’s reputation is so fragile as it is. This won’t help.”
“It’s true,” Neelamma Aunty says, inserting herself in the middle of the men. “As a mother, I should know.”
“As for you,” Deepa says to the man with the wart, “allowing a foreigner into a demolition site to take photos of drivers fighting with women? To document government officials engaging in human rights abuses? That doesn’t sound like leadership material at all.”
“Not what the city’s looking for,” Fatima Aunty calls out, “that’s for sure.”
“Leave now and we’ll tell her not to print the photos,” Deepa says. “But if you stay, we’ll tell her to print them. We’ll personally deliver copies to that posh private school. Your neighbors—or, at least, the ones with eligible sons. Your managers too.”
“You bloody women,” the driver with the wart says. “You have no shame.”
“We have no shame? What about you?” Selvi Aunty says. “Wrecking people’s homes for a living. Your poor wives. How do you face them?”
“At least we make a living,” the one with the wart says. “Where are your husbands? Maybe if they were more like us, you wouldn’t live in a place like this.”
Except we know these men’s wives live in a place exactly like this. If they didn’t, the men wouldn’t be so afraid.
The night it was decided that Deepa would marry the boy with the crooked spine, Padma came to Deepa’s house for dinner. For once, it wasn’t because she was hungry (although of course she was). This time, Neelamma Aunty had asked her.
“I didn’t want this. To marry her so early, to keep her from school. But you girls are all moving forward. She has to move forward too, doesn’t she?” Neelamma Aunty whispered, clutching Padma’s arms before she even stepped inside the doorway. “Plus you’ve seen the demolition notices, haven’t you? If they go through with it—well. Then you know what will happen.”
Then we can’t protect Deepa any more, Padma thought. Without Heaven, we can’t protect anyone. Not even each other. Not even ourselves.
Out loud she said, “I know, Aunty. I know.”
On the main road, a cow bellows, a pack of dogs howls. Buses rumble by, brakes wailing and groaning. But Heaven is as still as a held breath.
“Let’s go,” the driver with the tennis shoes and the out-of-school son says.
“But what about the overtime?” The one with the patchy skin balls his fists into his eyes. Thinks of the dowry he hopes he’ll still have reason to pay.
“He’s right, yaar. Better we go now before things really get bad.”
“Before you go, call your supervisor,” Fatima Aunty says. Uses her union voice, which is also the voice she uses to scold Rukshana. “Tell him to honor the date of the demolition. Give us a month to deal with this the right way. Without bulldozers, without police. With our lives intact.”
“Or what’s left of them intact,” Banu mumbles.
“This is too much,” says the man with the wart.
“A man like you, up for a promotion,” Deepa says. “You must know the right people, no? Or are you small-time, like your friends here?”
The driver looks stricken, trapped. Moves away muttering to himself and pressing the keys on his phone. The other men shuffle off.
When the one with the eligible daughter climbs into the bulldozer wh
ere Deepa is standing, his friend says, “Leave it. Don’t want these people to get too comfortable.”
Two of the bulldozers pull off, and the photographer keeps snapping her photos. Deepa leans back and closes her eyes. Sunlight ricochets against the mirrors woven into the fabric of her dupatta. She looks powerful, enormous. Like she is about to launch herself and all the rest of us into a kinder universe. A more generous sky.
“Is it over?” Rukshana asks.
“No,” Fatima Aunty says. “There’s still a demolition order. But we’ll go to court on Tuesday and file for a stay. That should give you girls long enough to finish your exams. After that, we’ll see.”
“Do you want to come stay with us?” Deepa’s fiancé asks her.
“No,” Deepa says, leaning against his shoulder. “We’d rather stay home.”
The foreign woman doesn’t call the newspaper. She doesn’t bring help. She doesn’t do much of anything at all besides framing the photographs she took and hanging them in a gallery.
One of the photos features Deepa right in the center of it. Back against the tires of the bulldozers, toes bare and dusty. Crooked safety pin clinging to the dupatta falling off her right shoulder. She stares almost into the camera but off to the side a little bit. Just enough so you can tell she can’t see.
The caption says, “Blind girl and Bulldozer.”
But it’s not just a blind girl and a bulldozer. Deepa’s fiancé is there, staring at his future wife, pupils full of awe, wonder, love. Like he can’t believe that this is the woman he’s going to marry. Joy is there too. Neck long and proud as a swan. Hand on her hip, elegant and poised. Radiating strength even when she’s trying to look weak.
And in the corner of the picture, the edge of a vest. A stained shirt, a stubbed-out bidi. The bottom of a letter B. The contours of the men entrusted with our destruction. Men whose worlds are as precarious as ours, whose powers are as fleeting.
Men who saved us. Who saved Heaven.
But only because we made them.
16
Heaven
A People's History of Heaven Page 23