The Girl in the Road (12 page)

It's not 6:00 a.m. yet but I'm so sore I need to stop. More pain medication. More anti-inflammatory. I worry that it'll always be like this, and I'll run out of medication in a week.

My third meal is My Choice. I renounce all prior declarations of discipline and program idlee and imitation dal on my kiln. The dal is homogenous, with no distinct lentils per se. But I eat it and then program another serving and eat that, too. The hunger is like a concavity in my stomach. My body is starved for energy.

The sky gets lighter and lighter and now that I'm stationary, I can appreciate how pretty it is. I'm two kilometers offshore, now. I'm effectively on the open ocean. I haven't had a single chance to appreciate what I'm doing. Now I can, for an instant, and watch the sun rise. It smolders between the towers of Nariman Point.

Two kilometers down and 3,186 kilometers to go. I look at the satellite map on my scroll. I'm still well within the continental shelf, and then the seafloor drops to abyssal plain about 250 kilometers out, and then a ridge introduces more complex topology about halfway through, and then the sea gets gradually shallower going into the Gulf of Aden, an unthinkable distance away.

I calculate how far I've come.

It's 0.06 percent of the way.

I try not to think more about that.

My third meal is done. According to my schedule, I'm now At Leisure.

I blow up my pod and climb inside before it gets too hot. What world will I enter, now: Tagore's Kolkata, Chu's Singapore, Morrison's Ohio?

I choose to read Sesay, again, her watery poetry. But I read three pages and then I'm already fantasizing about what I'm going to do when I reach Africa. Africa is the new India, after India became the new America, after America became the new Britain, after Britain became the new Rome, after Rome became the new Egypt, after Egypt became the new Punt, and so on and so forth. Now we're back to Punt. I've watched the African youth uprisings against land grabs or “colonization by invitation.” Mohini and I used to lie side by side and watch the reports roll in to the cloud. Addis Ababa, the city where my parents were murdered, is now the flagship city of Africa. Lagos is too big, Joburg is too white, Cairo is not really African, and so on. No one expected Addis to emerge as Africa's sweetheart city. But it has.

It feels good to leap into the future, when this current adventure will be done. First I'll recuperate in Djibouti. Then I'll take the train into Ethiopia and see what there is to be seen, because the woman who killed my parents was never caught.

When I wake up again, I have no idea where I am, only that I'm in an orange globe. I try to breathe steadily as memory comes back to me. I'm in my pod. The sun is setting. It makes the pod's skin glow.

I eat my appointed breakfast. As I do this I think, So this is what life as an ascetic would be like. Two days in, I don't know how I feel about it. The jury is hung.

I change the dressings on my wounds. Now this includes my elbows and knees, both rubbed raw from the crawling. Some of the swelling from my forehead is beginning to slide down my face, under the skin, making my eyes itch.

I set out crawling toward the west. My knees hurt every time I set them down, no matter how gently. The pain is a fascinating terrain. I ideate it as a bottomless tropical jungle full of toucans with razor beaks. I try to focus on counting.

Then I start to see a colony of kelp or an algae bloom building up on either side of the Trail, actually rising above sea level. Then I start to think it's a huge garbage patch, because I see glints of plastic, but I wonder why the garbage seems to have congregated in such a geometric arrangement. And then I see the blurs against the horizon. They're pods. They're not as well camouflaged as mine. They might be an earlier or cheaper model. But they're much bigger than mine, enough to fit two or three people, more like domes than pods.

So I've come to a seastead.

Now all of a sudden being on the Trail is not an ascetic experience at all. It's going to be a completely different experience, starting now. Fuck the numeric, this is Phase Beta.

I stop, balance, take off my bag, and check for the presence of all my gifts and barter items. They're where I thought they'd be. I wonder whether they've seen me yet. And now I feel ashamed that I'm still crawling. I can't let them see me like this. So, especially given the state of my knees and elbows, I should try to stand up now.

I tighten my backpack against my back. I thank Parvati for big tits that balance it out. From all fours, I come to kneeling, and then push my hands down and come to a crouch. Low center of gravity. Fingertips balancing on the sandpaper surface. I spread my feet, left forward, right back, to compensate for the rocking motion, and then I try to rise. It takes four tries. I have to spread my feet even farther apart. I have to first master standing with both feet on a single scale before I even attempt to stand on two different ones. There's no pattern to the duration of any single pitch. My legs are in a state of constant tension.

I come to a wide-legged warrior pose, as if I'm on a surfboard. I wobble in every cardinal direction. I feel like I'm on a Japanese game show. I would laugh at myself if I didn't also feel like crying. When I've counted to ten and am still standing upright, I take a step forward.

In the split second it takes for the Trail to buck my front foot such that I lean back to safety and find no surface at all and I slip and cartwheel into the ocean, I think,
Meena, this is the difference between monovariable and multivariable calculus
. Then I'm in the water.

The lizard brain takes over until I find myself back on the Trail.

Drenched and pissed, I stand again.

This time I try placing all my weight on one foot while I slide the other forward onto the next scale. I feel it bucking under my front foot. My shin is burning. My balance stabilizes. I begin to shift weight forward. The surfaces are rough, giving some traction. Otherwise I wouldn't have a chance. It's probably for the sake of the maintenance crews that never do any maintenance, according to Anwar. Briefly I wonder why they didn't just make special shoes for the maintenance crews, instead of making the Trail itself walkable. While I wonder this I realize I've already crossed over onto the third scale. It's better if I don't think too hard, apparently. It's like learning to salsa. I have to surrender to my partner and everything will go smoothly.

And anyway, now I have an audience.

There's a child ahead, standing halfway between me and the seastead. She's keeping perfect balance with the Trail, making me feel like a cow on roller skates. She regards me for a while, belly thrust out. I wave. She starts yelling and runs back toward the seastead. She emerges pulling the wrist of an older girl who, upon seeing me, turns and calls toward a pod farther up the platform. Then she looks me over with ennui, in perfect contrast to the younger girl, who's hopping up and down and clutching at her dress.

I try to walk toward them but I fall again and sprain my wrist. I feel ashamed and try not to cry.

A woman in a cotton sari comes out of a pod. I can tell she's the mother. I feel both grateful to see other human beings and resentful of their intrusion on my solitude, though, of course, it's the other way around. Will they welcome me? Isn't hospitality a requisite feature of settlements in deserts and tundras and other harsh environs, being a kind of communal survival mechanism? I remember reading that somewhere. Besides, they're just as illegal as I am, and I have nothing to profit by exposing them.

“Namaste,” I yell out. My voice sounds hoarse and thin to myself.

“Namaste,” she yells back, and continues in Hindi. “Having some trouble?”

I still my rage. “I haven't really learned to walk yet,” I yell back.

“It's hard for everyone at first. What's your business?”

“I'm just passing through,” I say. I decide not to mention the barefoot girl at all. They'll think I'm crazy. “Do I need your permission?”

“No,” she says. “But nobody is ‘just passing through.' Are you a tourist or sadhvi or what?”

“Something like that,” I say.

“Well, come on, then,” she says.

I feel like an animal in a zoo.

“Are you going to watch me?”

“Fine, I can turn away if you like, but you might want some pointers.”

“We get people like you,” says the elder girl. “We know what to say.”

I swallow my pride and capitulate.

“Okay,” I say. I come up to crouching on my own just to show them I can fucking do something by myself. “What now?”

“Spread your feet forwards and back,” she says.

I fucking knew that and did that already. But I do it again anyway.

“Keep your knees soft,” she says.

“Now try to rise up,” she says.

“Look at me,” she says. “Don't look at your feet.”

I look at her. She is standing, appraising, both fists on her waist.

“Theek hai, now switch legs,” she says. “Don't move forward, just stay in the same place.”

I manage this.

“Now go through your body and find where you're holding tight and try to let it go soft.”

Great. I'm in fucking yoga class.

“Are you angry?” she says.

“No,” I say.

“Now let your eyes go soft,” she says. “Be passively aware of your surroundings. Let there be eyes in the back of your head and all over your body.”

I wheel a couple times but I kind of know what she's saying and try to get in that zone.

“Shaabaash, now come forward, and keep your arms spread to either side, and just keep your eyes on me.”

I do. I feel like I'm walking a tightrope, but somehow the tightrope is as wide as the earth and I can't go wrong. Night has almost fallen. The air is cool on my skin. Something crosses over in me. Somehow it's not as hard. I keep my eyes on the woman in the cotton sari, a figure getting darker in the dusk. She's crossed her arms, now, and she shakes her head from side to side.

“Shaabaash, good,” she says. “You're almost here.”

The Trail stabilizes, the closer it gets to the seastead. It feels like I'm back at the pool again. Easy.

The woman reaches out for me and pulls me off to the side, onto the seastead platform. After the rolling of the Trail, it feels like solid ground, and I fall to my knees, this time because it's stable instead of moving.

“Where are you from?” asks the youngest girl.

“Suri, not now,” says the mother. “Go heat the water please. Sita, you help.”

The two girls wander away, looking back at me. But the mother gets straight to business.

“So. Sadhvi? Tourist? Thrill seeker? Fishwaala? Refugee? Cultist? Political dissident? Criminal? Scientist? Poet? Pirate?”

“None of the above.”

“Are you from HydraCorp?”

I feel offended. But I remind myself this is a reasonable and even necessary question for her to ask. “No. I went to the HydraCorp Museum before I started walking, but that's all.”

“Are you from the government?”

“No.”

“Are you from the press?”

“No.”

“Just walking?”

“It seems so.”

“So where are your people?”

“Keralam.”

“I thought so, I could hear the accent. I have family in Alleppey. But I haven't visited in years.”

I'm thrown off by this bit of personal information. But I think it's a good sign.

“You can't beat the fish curry,” she adds.

I search for something to say. I feel like I'm in a dream, talking curry in the middle of the ocean. “That's true,” I say. “I learned it from my Muthashan, but it's been a long time since I made it.”

“Can we make it?”

Now I see the truth of the exchange. This woman has a veneer of hardness, which is necessary in her situation. But she's glad to see me and craves company of a woman her age. And even though I just had breakfast, I'm famished. All I can think about now is fish curry.

“If you have the fish,” I say, “I have the spices.”

“We have the fish, all right.”

Her name is Padma. Her husband is Ameem. I introduce myself to them as Durga, because now I'm in the habit. They position me rapidly vis-à-vis class and caste and region of origin, and I do the same, but refrain from commenting on what I presume is a Hindu-Muslim marriage. Not that it's unusual anymore. But I wonder if that has anything to do with their living out in the middle of the ocean. They own the seastead, the aquaculture equipment, the motorboat, and all the profits.

There's one more adult, who turns out to be Rana, the Lost Son. I get out the mashed box of soan papdi his mother gave me and say, “She wants you to come home.”

He rolls his eyes. “She wants me to sell fish,” he says.

Instead, he says, he's saving cash before he starts traveling through India, and heard that this was a better way to do it than hawking in Koliwada. He's young and husky. He has long hair pulled back in a ponytail and wears only a white dhoti swaddled around his hips.