She Will Build Him a City (25 page)

~

On National Geographic, he watches the close-up of a fly.

It’s washing itself, rubbing its front legs, the voice-over says it was resting, minutes earlier, on a trash heap near an open sewer in the city.

The camera slows down.

He sees the brown, black flakes of filth that the fly so lovingly caresses, its compound eyes glistening. The fly stops moving, balances itself on its front legs and cleans its hind legs, both up in the air. Then back to the front legs which it uses to clean its face, its eyes, all the while trembling hard, rubbing against each other, he can count the bristles around its eye, one, two, three, four, five, six, looks like hard black hair, and then suddenly, there’s the sound of something like an explosion, a flash of light, and the fly is on its back, its legs flail, convulse, and then it’s dead.

Someone swats the fly.

That’s how he wants to kill these flies, one by one, night after night, he wishes he could stop those legs from moving. Because they frighten him, they become blades that carve him open, slice right through his head and his heart. Empty out whatever is inside him. Like a butcher cleans a chicken, they wring his neck, let his entire blood drip, take out the nerves, the skin, the fat, all the insides, all that’s not edible.

And then they begin to fill him up, every space there is – between the arteries and veins, in between the bones – with guilt, big and black, fresh and bleeding.

~

He doesn’t want to meet the flies, he won’t go home tonight.

CHILD

Flicker, Tremble

From the evidence so far, Bhow is a dog who not only has a strong sense of fairness but one of duty as well and that’s why as soon as she finds a little clearing in the shadows inside The Mall, just a few steps away from Europa, Bhow stops, looks left, looks right, smells no one coming, goes down on all fours, gently eases Orphan off her back, rings herself in a protective curl around him, and tells him the story of Ms Violets Rose.

How much of it Orphan understands isn’t clear but one thing is: his eyes and ears remain open as long as Bhow speaks.

~

‘Deep inside The Mall, not far from where you and your friends from under the highway play, inside Europa, the most fancy of the seven cinema theatres in the multiplex, in a space which no one can see, lives Ms Violets Rose. Funny name that is, two flowers in one name, a tiny bouquet, if you so wish. Indeed, she looks like a plant because she is always in a green cotton dress dappled with leaf-patterns; her arms and legs so thin that it hurts looking at them, they resemble slender stalks and stems in the way they move when she walks. Look carefully and you will think Ms Rose has uprooted herself from a flower bed, brushed the earth and mud off, walked out of a garden in the morning – the brooch in her white hair glinting like dew, freshly fallen.

‘How old is she no one knows. Some say she is a hundred years old, in human years, some say two hundred, but, obviously, that’s an exaggeration. You may, if you do not know anything about Ms Rose but only see her in a crowd, not even look at her twice. You will think she is an old woman clocking the hours until the very end with nothing left to do.

‘Because in New City, where six out of every ten people are under thirty, where lights shine bright with hope and ambition, life and leisure, there is no place for someone as ancient as her, someone who, at first glimpse, is little more than a shadow, pale and bloodless, resting in a forgotten corner, a mere flicker of light, a tremble of the theatre’s curtains.

‘However, Ms Rose is anything but. Her eyes have a perpetual gleam, each step a spring in the dark. Because this, Europa, is her home. She knows this place. She knows The Mall’s multiplex inside out, left, right, centre. For this is her home long before The Mall is even a drawing on a sheet, long before glass and steel begin to line up in the sky.

‘This is her home when it is all farmland here, when wheat and mustard grow on either side of dirt-tracks, hard and unbroken, under a constant cloud of dust kicked up by a scorching summer wind that blows in from across the desert to the west. When Ms Rose is a young woman, when she and her father and her mother watch the first prospectors arrive, begin buying land around their farm, plot by plot, day by day. She watches cranes and excavators trundle in to gouge out holes in the earth so big they look like they have been made by something that’s come hurtling down from space. Each hole then becomes home to a foundation which, in turn, props up an entire building, ten, twelve floors, four apartments to each floor, three rooms to each apartment, each room like a cell in this creature called New City that grows bigger and bigger with each hour, day, month and year. Until they start working on The Mall, brick by brick, steel rod by steel rod, glass by glass, day by night.

‘So when her parents die, suddenly, leaving her nothing because they sell the land and there’s no inheritance for their daughter, Ms Rose decides to make her new home in Europa, the premium theatre in the multiplex, because it’s the one place where she can hide since it’s always in the dark, where the seats are deep and large, where Ms Rose knows how to squeeze herself into spaces most unusual just as we, dogs, do under parked cars, between rickshaws, on top of garbage heaps.

‘She knows which spaces exist where inside the theatre.

‘Between two adjacent seats. Between one seat and the other in front. Underneath a seat, on the steps, pressed against the handrail. In the margins left uncovered by the carpet. In the wedge between an armrest and its seat, even in the hollow meant for the coffee cup or the drink. Under its curve.

‘Sometimes Ms Rose may lie down underneath a seat if she is tired, curl up and go to sleep. At other times, she may sit behind the cinema screen on the main stage or even hide in the wings. Or walk into the folds of the heavy red curtains once they are drawn.

‘When there are many vacant seats – this usually happens during the first show of a weekday, early morning – she waits for the lights to be switched off, for the previews to be over and just before the feature presentation begins, when all the lights are dimmed, she slips out of her hiding place into one of the empty seats.

‘She likes to keep moving: So F14 one day, Row F, seat number 14; the next day C3, C27; the day after M18 or L9, a new seat number each time.

‘This is her world, all of this and only this, the cinema theatre in the dark. During shows and in between. Rumour has it that she knows a trick or two and only you, Orphan, can tell us whether this is true. I am not going to go by what others tell me, I will leave it for you to discover.’

~

Orphan is half-awake as Bhow carries him towards the theatre and when she reaches its entrance, fringed with drapes in deep blue velvet, she barks once, clears her throat, calls out to Ms Rose who appears instantly, as if she has been waiting all this while, at the door, for a dog to show up with a child on her back.

‘Ms Rose,’ says Bhow, ‘this is Orphan, Orphan, this is Ms Rose.’

‘Thank you, Bhow,’ says Ms Rose as she bends down to lift Orphan from Bhow’s back, and carries him inside.

‘Welcome, my child, it’s still dark, this is no time for a child to be awake,’ she whispers in the gentlest of whispers, each word half-stern half-soft like leaves in spring.

‘Let’s help you sleep.’ Her fingers, like petals, drum his back and for the first time since he left Little House, Orphan falls asleep in the embrace of a human, warm and close.

~

As for Bhow, with Orphan safely delivered into Ms Rose’s hands, deep inside Europa, she tears down the steps, her tail wagging into a blur, her bark bouncing off the glass walls of the stores, the noise magnifying into a swell that floods The Mall but this time she doesn’t care whether there’s someone who sees or hears, so happy she is.

WOMAN

Diary Entries

I keep writing to your father after he’s dead. Nothing long, just words and some sentences, fragments of sentences. Just in case his ghost wishes to read one day or night. I am going to read some aloud, some of the entries from the early years.

In no particular order.

I hope you are listening.

~

I use your pen. I take it to school. Every day. And like you, I, too, have a constant ink stain on my index finger.

~

How do I make it easier for our child? Do I wait for her to forget you? Maybe I should begin to hide some of your things so that she isn’t reminded of you. Like your books, your clothes, your spectacles.

~

I realise how little you have. Three shirts, three pairs of trousers, two pairs of socks, one pair of shoes. Two vests, two pieces of underwear. That’s all. It all fits in one suitcase. Sometimes, when no one is at home, I put the suitcase on our bed and I lie down next to it. I hear voices from inside – of you and your students.

~

Yesterday, cleaning the house, I come across your handkerchief. The big blue one, the one you get the ice in. It’s washed and folded, smells of soap, I don’t remember washing it. It was in your pocket on the day of the accident.

~

They give me your shoes and socks. I don’t wash them, I won’t wash them. Yesterday, I pick some dirt from one sole, I eat it.

~

What if, just like you, I am hit by a bus? What happens then? Have you thought of that?

~

Yesterday is the first day I don’t think of you.

~

We have the two ticketfoils. For the first and the only English movie we went to,
Ben-Hur
.
I keep them in that suitcase.

~

Your daughter, our daughter, needs you more than I do.

~

You push me to speak up, you push me to go out and work, you push me to do the interview, you push me to stand on my own feet. Why don’t you push me to learn how to live without you?

~

I miss you the most in the morning.

~

I am not going to change the newspaper you have used to line the bookshelves. I want to find out how long it takes for newsprint to turn brittle, crumble to paperdust.

~

They never find out who the bus driver is who hit you. Some nights, when I cannot sleep, I think of him, the driver. Where is he? Is he sleeping? It’s possible that one day I may board a bus the same man is driving.

~

Did you visit me last night? I hear someone talk, just like you, I feel someone get into bed. My eyes close, I reach out to touch you but you are gone.

~

Some nights, our daughter frightens me. Because she says she can see you even if we all know you are dead.

MAN

The Leela

He decides he will not go home tonight, he will check in at The Leela, the hotel so beautiful, so clean it clears his head. Free of the flies who rub their legs, stalk him day and night with their sour smell of damp. He loves how the hotel gleams at this time of the day when it’s past twilight, how its countless glass eyes, its windows, polished, unblemished, reflect the red from the sky, blue and white from the neons of The Mall, yellow from the traffic on the highway backed up on the thirty-two lanes at the toll gate. Exactly where he was last night, with the mynahs.

Maybe, if he’s lucky, he will watch the birds again tonight. In the windows of his Single Deluxe Suite. Bent and blurred, as if seen through tears. The Leela will send a BMW 6i to pick him up from wherever he is but, no, he will spare them the trouble.

He drives up in his own car which carries the remains of the day: streaks on the windshield, marked by water from police cannons; smudges left behind by flies – the fat woman on the highway, the VIP who jumped the line. In the car, there’s the smell of Balloon Girl and her mother. Laundry and lavender, sweat and street. On his clothes, he smells formaldehyde from the AIIMS mortuary and feels the warmth from the bodies on their backs, cut open and stitched closed. He shivers, a bit of the Paris wind that ripples the surface of the Seine is caught in his hair. On his fingers, between them, and on his wrists, the lories of Singapore have left the farm-odour of their feed.

He will wash all these away tonight.

Two cameras blink red and yellow as they scan the surface of his car at The Leela entrance. Two men in cheap black suits smile as they request him to open his door so that they can run a hand-held sensor over his dashboard.

All is clear, he hands them his keys, walks into the hotel, it’s the hour when The Leela rests because the late lunch crowd has gone, evening has just begun. Most of the rooms lie in wait, beds made, fresh and cold.

In the lobby, in the centre of an atrium that soars into the sky, a fountain gurgles around a sprawling Japanese garden.

~

The woman at reception who checks him in has fuzz on her arms, gold in colour in the light. His bill comes to almost Rs 50,000, including taxes and breakfast.

‘I can walk up with you, sir, do your check-in right in your room,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to stand here, would you prefer that?’

‘No need, please do it here,’ he says.