The Girl in the Road (11 page)

I drink a whole bottle of water one sip at a time and then refill it to wash the brine off my skin. I eat one pseudo-idlee in small bites so I have a little strength. Then I get out my medical kit and take some broad-spectrum nanobiotics for pain and infection. Then I arrange all needed supplies in a row: antiseptic wipes, antibiotic ointment, clearskins, bandages, surgical tape. I tend to each area in turn.

The nanobiotics will take a few more minutes to lessen the pain, and until then, the rocking of the Trail makes each wound feel worse. Insult to injury. I would call this Phase Four but I feel suddenly annoyed at the childish delineations of the previous night and abandon the whole schema.

To distract myself I look through my medical kit and thank Mehrdad and Misbah in my mind. It's fucking incredible. It's like a miniature version of the entire first-aid cabinet we had at the women's clinic, including both Ayurvedic and Western remedies. There's a tiny surgical kit. There are rehydration salts. There's Plumpy'nut Ultra for emergency nutrition. In addition to the broad-spectrum nanobiotics there are pills for parasites, viruses, chest infections, skin infections, eye infections, throat infections, digestive-tract infections, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, sunburn, anxiety, and depression. And all of this fits into a sealed bag shaped like a kidney.

I eat another idlee and then lie back down. I'm not going anywhere right now, and anyway, it's daylight, so I have to get used to sleeping now. But I can't sleep. Now that the pain is less I have the luxury of being angry. And I chew over everything I could be angry about. Why won't this Trail stop bucking so hard. Who put the snake in my bed in the first place. Who is the barefoot girl. Was she actually real. It's possible that my mania produced hallucinations.

I have to think about something else.

Preeti, then. One of my charges at the women's clinic in Thrissur. Eighteen years old, fatherless, mother some kind of addict. But she was pretty and petite and intense, with rare hazel eyes, and older men mistook this as indicative of some kind of woman-child depth, and she got involved with a married politician, K. P. Pillai, still very much in office, who got her pregnant and then beat her up to induce a miscarriage. She came to us. She miscarried anyway.

I was in the room then. What came out looked like a bloody squirrel. The doctor asked if she wanted to see it and she smiled and said no thank you, that's all right. And then in post-op counseling I asked Preeti, Would you like to press charges?

She didn't even know what I was talking about. Against who? she said.

Against Mr. Pillai.

Oh dear! For what?

For assaulting you and causing a miscarriage.

Oh, it was an accident, she said. He just needed to get his frustration out of his system.

There's no excuse for physical violence, I said.

It's more complicated than that, she said, patting my knee, even though she was eight years younger than me. She said, Human beings are passionate. Energy comes through us and we keep moving it around, and sometimes we're the receivers and sometimes we're the pushers.

Oh really? Have you ever been the pusher?

Oh yes, said Preeti, I'm very messy and it drives him crazy. I know it bothers him, but I never clean up enough before he comes over.

I stared at her.

I said: What do you want your life to be?

She laughed and said, Me and K. P., sitting in a tree!

I wanted to slap her. Right now I want to slap her too, slap that big childlike smile off her face. I didn't understand that people like this still existed in the twenty-first century and I still don't.

Mohini didn't understand why I couldn't be more compassionate. She said, Why are you in this line of work if that's how you feel? I said I was allowed to have complicated feelings about my charges. I was allowed to hold the private opinion that living in enslavement to “love” was a life wasted. Mohini said she didn't see how that described a state very different from my life, or hers, or anyone else's. I said, but Preeti only wants it from one person who hurts her, and no one else will do. That there are healthy and unhealthy ways to get love. It went on. It was a painful fight. Mohini dug into it like she needed to prove something to me. Something about how the fact that I always had fantasies of violence, even though I never acted on them, was problematic.

This isn't helping me sleep either. I try to clear my mind. I shift until I find the most comfortable position relative to the rocking of the Trail: curled in the fetal position, head forward, so I'm being rocked anterior to posterior, like I'm on a train.

I realize I haven't heard my own voice in almost twenty-four hours, so I sing the Suprabhatam to myself even though it's late in the day. In my life I've gone through cycles of hating it and needing it. I know the whole thing because Muthashan played the Subbulakshmi recording every morning when I was growing up, even after I stopped joining him for prayer. Mohini sang it herself, of course, and I thought she was better. I never thought I could sing for shit, but Mohini said I could, it just wasn't a good voice for Indian classical music. She said my voice was rough and wandering.

I get tired enough to stop singing and continue only in my mind, and then I get to singing on the sage Narada—
jhankaragitaninadaih saha sevanaya
—and my mind catches on the word
saha
and repeats it, and then the figures I've been drawing in my head start drawing themselves.

I'm woken by footsteps.

They echo in my head when I sit up. I stay still in my graphite bubble. I don't hear any more. They were probably relics of a dream. But they had a syncopated rhythm of steps on the Trail that I remember from watching the lifeguard, whose name I can't remember now, I think Cecilia?—something Christian—but in any case, something my subconscious must have recorded at the time, not a steady beat, but a scattered offbeat with a deeper rhythm, like raindrops.

I check the time. It's approaching sunset, and I'll start crawling then, trusting both my camo and the glare to hide me from eyes on shore. If I were still marking phases, then this would be Phase Five: A Stab at Routine. First I eat. I dissolve a protein cube in desalinated water on my solar plate, heat it up, and then add tamarind and cumin to soak. I break apart the last two idlee with my fingers and swab the pieces in the broth. It's salty but otherwise good. I think of the spicewaala Sunny in Thrissur and what he might be doing right now. It's dusk on a Tuesday. He's probably packing up his corner at Round East, closing shop on his fat cones of spice.

I think I'll try surviving only on idlee and protein broth for the foreseeable future; fewer of the latter, since protein requires more water to digest. With a kiln I can make all kinds of food, as long as it's homogeneous—chocolate, sweet lassi, imitation dal. But I can't give in to decadence. I can't afford it. I've come into a new phase of discipline where austerity and humility are key.

Speaking of humility, I have to shit. I'd forgotten entirely about that aspect of existence.

I get out the diaper and set it in front of me. Muthashi's voice comes back to me, lecturing her patients on how crucial bowel movements were. That they were a sign of health. That, and menses.

It would be a lot easier to face forward, because then the rocking motion would be aligned with my front-to-back axis. But that means I'd have to shit directly on the Trail. And I don't want to. It seems like bad karma. So I scuttle on my knees out to the edge and point my ass northwest and pray there are no fishing boats nearby to see. My ass is over my ankles, so to avoid mucking up the Trail I have to work my way back until most of my shins are over the water, and I can feel the waves smack the tops of my feet, and I extend my spine lengthwise as far as I can in a modified child's pose. I wait. I tense. There are a few explosions and dribblings. And then I pee, too, forgetting that I'm literally not in a position to do so. I just let it go and then try to move my gear in time to get out of the way of the puddle, which of course expands with the movement of the Trail. All hopeless. I'm wet, and so is my stuff.

But I'm my grandmother's granddaughter. I've cleaned up much worse in the clinic. I have no shame.

I wipe first with the modified diaper and set it in the sun to self-clean. Then I refill my desalinator and use the new water to wash myself clean. I didn't make a complete mess. I'll get better. I use another bottleful to wash the parts of my stuff that got touched with urine, and then another, to rinse the urine off the Trail. It feels like a housekeeping gesture. I'll never pass this way again but I'll keep it nice for those who do.

When I finish I realize that kneeling on the Trail is easier than it was the night before. I still get knocked around. I still fall sideways and forwards and backwards and have to brace myself, especially with my hands, which means my wrists burn and my muscles are in a state of perpetual incredulity.

But I'm getting better. And I resist the urge to take more nanobiotics. I have to break my body in.

I crawl a hundred more meters in the setting sun before I allow myself to rest. I feel like I'm roasting on a spit, skin crackling, muscles burning, pockets of fat bursting open. No wonder walkers walk at night.

When I look back, Mumbai is more faint in the haze. I might be half a kilometer from shore now. The tops of the buildings at Nariman Point are lined in bright orange from the sunset. This time yesterday, I was hiding in the seawall.

I take another capsule of nanobiotics for the pain. Everything takes fucking forever: getting out the medical kit, holding on to the bottle so it doesn't fly out of my hand when the Trail bucks, drawing more water, positioning myself to put the pill in my mouth, maintaining balance to drink water to get it down.

Then I crouch in child's pose and dictate to my scroll:

7:00 p.m.—wake up

7:00 p.m.–7:45 p.m.—first meal: two cubes of idlee, half cup broth, one bottle water

7:45 p.m.–12:00 a.m.—crawl. listen to music or read on audio. drink another bottle of water while crawling

12:00 a.m.–1:00 a.m.—second meal: protein dissolved in water with spices and one bottle of water

1:00 a.m.–6:00 a.m.—crawl. listen to music or read on audio, drink another bottle of water while crawling

6:00 a.m.–7:00 a.m.—third meal: my choice plus one bottle of water

7:00 a.m.–8:00 a.m.—get into pod, check position, inventory supplies

8:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m.—read or listen to music, leisure

11:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.—sleep

I feel this is a reasonable yet generous schedule.

Then I keep going. It's only 8:13 p.m. I exist on restricted choices. There's nowhere to go but the next scale.

I keep checking my pozit. I come to 1.5 kilometers. I congratulate myself on being so disciplined. Then I lie down, which feels so nice, and blackness comes.

I wake up. I reproach myself. I've only lost an hour, though.

The moon has set. I'm grateful for the darkness. I'm not forced to notice everything around me like I am when it's light.

Next scale. And next. And next. I count them in my head. I count to a hundred. Then I can only bear to count in rounds of fifty. Then twenty. Then ten.