The Girl in the Road (18 page)

I sketch my mother in my mind. I'm already eight years older than she was when she died. I like to imagine she's a composite of six or seven tall, strong women I've known who weren't afraid to take up space. Some were friends, some I slept with. I think she would like coffee black, chai unsweet, and dal thick like porridge. But then I remember this is entirely a creation on my part. So I erase the slate and start making another sketch. The truth is, I don't know anything. I don't know what she would think of me. I don't know whether she would have approved of my being with Mohini.

Though I don't seek anyone's approval, generally. My grandparents loved me but with pain. They saw I was my own creature. I had some battles with Muthashi before she finally washed her hands of me. Once I ended a fight by throwing an urn of medicine that broke on the wall behind her. I ran to the kitchen and pressed my forehead to the table, trying to breathe. She came in and began making chai as if nothing had happened. But her hands were shaking and she didn't look at me as she spoke. She said, It's enough that we have you. It is enough. It is enough. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself but couldn't.

She finished making the chai and then offered me some. I didn't answer. I let the silence stretch on and on, making her feel worse. She left to find Muthashan. I sat there in the kitchen until the sun set and my anger got cold.

They both stepped back after that, out of parental roles and into sponsorial roles. They paid school bills and medical bills, but didn't interfere otherwise. My explosions had damaged them. When I dropped out of college they didn't even say anything. But a few years later, I started feeling guilty. When I was living in Kochi I started calling them every day. I asked them how their days had gone. We became something like friends.

And then, three monsoons ago, they met Mohini for the first time.

The rain was blowing in sideways. Mohini was fussy about making an entrance. She wanted to impress my grandparents with her beauty, which was formidable, but still, she took care, like the old Bollywood stars she idolized. She insisted on coming in a closed car, using a parasol to protect her hair, wearing a full-body raincoat to protect her sari and, having interrogated me about the entranceway blueprint of my grandparents' house, disrobing in the foyer before they could lay eyes on her. The plan worked. She bowed to my grandparents looking like a vision from the Kama Sutra, her hands pressed together, fingernails painted, perfectly ovaline eggs of gold, blue sari edged in gold, modest red tilak on her forehead, and hair (by her own mother, Seeta, of course) worked with golden ornaments.

Rupa had made special dosas. She was learning the basics of Ayurveda from Muthashi before applying to school, and in return, she cooked for us. She also joined us at the table. That had been the subject of one of my teen tantrums: that I wouldn't live in a house where servants couldn't sit down and eat with our guests. That they must have every opportunity I have. It made no difference to Muthashan, but Muthashi tried to tell me that the world simply didn't work that way. I said, It does if you do it. After that our servants joined us at the table and we got a reputation in the neighborhood for being radical.

Mohini was nervous about meeting my grandparents. Her family was backward caste, which I said didn't matter anymore, but she pointed out to me that that was my privilege to say, being Brahmin and wealthy. I stayed quiet at the table and let Mohini talk and impress both my grandparents, and Rupa, who watched her in fascination. Having arrived in splendor as planned, Mohini was the star of the table, facilitating discussion on everything from the plays of Josefina Paz to the success of the Haratine Liberation Front.

My grandparents were polite. And they never brought up her treatment. Even if they were curious, even if they disapproved, it was beneath them to say anything. They were perfect models of kind attention. I did love them for that.

That night, in bed, I apologized to Mohini that she couldn't meet my mother. I felt culpable. She held my head to her chest and stroked my hair and asked me to imagine what it would be like if I could.

I was prepared, of course. The parentless have a deep well of reunion fantasies. I was quiet, trying to think of the most beautiful or impressive one, and when Mohini asked what I was thinking about, I told her. There was no boundary between us. What I thought was what I said. I told her that I ideated my mother as a goddess. Which is to say, she lived in the heart of the temple, in the innermost of innermost chambers like in the temple complex at Madurai, and that my life would be an act of circling and penetrating each chamber, passing through each illusion until I finally arrived at the truth. The essential mother. The pearl of my existence.

The devi-urge, Mohini said.

I tickled her and she lurched from the bed screaming and then from opposite sides of the room we made a truce not to tickle anymore or make any more English puns. She came back to the bed, and she said, I don't mean to joke. That image is beautiful, Meenaji.

It seems too obvious.

You prefer your metaphors inaccessible?

I just don't know if it's the right one.

But that itself is allowed for, in your metaphor. Each chamber is imbued with its own degree of doubt or certainty. Including the chamber wherein you don't know whether the temple metaphor is the right one.

Yeah. What if I discover, Fuck, wrong religion.

Yes. You should have been Buddhist all this time.

My mother is no-mother.

There is no mother.

Buddha mother-is.

But that's allowed-for too: the chamber of the temple that's not a chamber at all, but a zendo, or a lab, or a kitchen. Or a dead end.

Yes. All of them are parts of the temple. All are moving me closer towards the center. But I never know which chamber I'm in.

Right. You only believe in the present chamber and its sensory actuality. But every chamber contains a chamber, and is, in turn, contained by a chamber.

Is will involved?

What do you mean?

Like, if you say, I want to be out of this chamber and into the next one. If you actually call out the goddess directly.

It might work like that, I said. But if you call too soon, and you're not prepared, and not purged of desire and sentiment and fear, you may not be ready for what you summon, and she will destroy you.

One morning I throw up from too much sun exposure and too little water. Only some thick, pasty idlee vomit dissipated by the waves and snapped up by fish.

I play a game, trying to discern exactly when the sky becomes lighter. I try to define the threshold of non-ambiguity—is it when I can see the hair on my forearms? Is it when I can begin to see color? I stop walking and just stand still, moving up and down. Which colors are the first to appear?

I turn around to face the east. I relish sunrises. Every single sunrise is the greatest show on earth. I want to intuit the very instant the sun first appears. I'll say
Now
whenever I think it's coming. I say it low under my breath, “Now,” but it's much too early. I get quieter. I stand absolutely still, and watch, and listen, and then whisper, “Now,” and the live coal appears.

I once said to Mohini, Motherless children are addicted to beauty.

When I sleep, I dream a corporeal companion to the usual dream of finding new rooms in one's house: I discover new limbs on my body. First I sprout wings from my shoulders. Then three penises grow between my legs, long enough to become legs themselves, so I spin like a starfish. Extra arms bud from my flanks. I become a dancing Shiva, rolling up and down a rippling cloth but never moving forward.

My language experiment doesn't last long. Around the third day of calling the sea
sari
and so forth, I feel nauseated, like I've rolled ladoos in salt and eaten a hundred.

I've been walking for twenty-seven nights.

For a few nights I was rapturous about the stars. The experience was approaching holy. And then the next night the stars failed to produce the same ecstasy and I felt angry. I'd started out too high.

The nights are iterative. I keep count on the plastic surface of my medical kit by scratching marks with my filet knife. Keeping count is a way to prove to myself that time is both passing and moving in one linear direction. According to my pozit, I'm six percent of the way to Djibouti. And I'm still alive. Apparently, a certain throughput of water, protein, and rice is all that's required to keep my body functional. Why did no one tell me that before? All of human interaction can be reduced to matter and energy transfers. Speaking of human interaction, I don't know where all these settlements are that Ameem was talking about. I've run into zero. But I've had eight more close encounters with intercepting ships and lots more sighted on the horizon—aircraft carriers, oil tankers, and cruise ships parked on the horizon like wedding cakes. This is not an idle sea.

At night the galaxy is a rent overhead, with the greatest concentration of light in the center slit. Yes, it looks like a yoni. Must I relate everything to yonis? I can't help it. I'm a fan. I loved Mohini's. She was in the last stages of her changing when we were first together. We had sex as woman and man only once, because though Mohini was still transitioning, we couldn't wait. So in the afternoon sunlight filtering through a pink curtain in her old flat, I bared my breasts, and she kissed them both. I slid down onto her. She leaked tears from the corners of her eyes, let me come quickly and then gently palmed my belly up and off of her, and held me close while my passage still pulsed, trying to embrace an empty space. We didn't make love again until she was ready. When she was fully transitioned, her yoni was like a new bud. I was careful with it. Every night I came up with a new name for it and it made her laugh. Sometimes because it was funny (Prime Minister) and sometimes because she was embarrassed (Harvest Moon). I loved her too much, she said. Too much for who? I said. For me? I'm just having fun. I get to be with you all the time. And there's always something new to explore. Childhood! Religion! Schooling! Politics! Mother! Father! Queer identity in rural Tamilnadu! We had so much to tell each other, we never stopped talking, and everything was new. When I brought her to climax, she would go limp and fall back like a button-eyed string doll. And then I would just rest my head on her stomach and listen to her breathe and we'd fall asleep like that.

I think of Mohini because I still adore her. Because there's nothing else to do while I'm walking but think about people I know. They sit arrayed in a circle in the chamber of my head and talk to me. This is my life now. I struggle to pass time.

On the way back from the beauty contest near Agadez, Francis got a call from Muhammed telling him that one of their engines was damaged. When we arrived, we learned we'd have to wait for an automotive part inbound to Lagos Port, but that the ship itself was delayed by a horrendous storm, even though it was supposed to be the dry season. It could take days.

This news had an effect on me I didn't anticipate. Because we weren't moving toward our final destination, I felt restless. I became moody and irritable. Francis tried to sway me by saying, You know what they speak here? Hausa. So if they march into Addis Ababa demanding to be part of the new world language, we'll all be speaking Somamhinglimandarabicausa.

But the joke was wasted. I just got angrier that he was trying to cheer me up. He saw the look on my face and made a show of slinking away.

Francis, Muhammed, and the other drivers were content to sleep on the trucks. You were less so, because you could afford to rent a hotel room, but didn't want to break solidarity with the men, or with me. So we slept together on our pallet as usual. I traced your face with my finger until you slapped my hand away in your sleep, and turned over.

The novelty of Kano wore off. We went into the city, but it felt boxy and claustrophobic to me. Any city that wasn't Addis Ababa felt inadequate now. There were supermarkets with sweets, for sure, and we followed our little ritual of buying a supply, but one night I found the stash you'd been saving and ate too many of them and became sick, and made you angry. So I lost my appetite for a while. The kreen became very active, like a writhing ball of yarn. I stopped thumping it. I just let it writhe.

When we finally got under way again, we'd been in Kano for a week. I was happy to be moving and watched the sand rush out from under our tires and waited for the kreen to dissipate. But the malaise was hard to shake. My soul had gone dry and it took days of moving to moisten it again.

Because we'd been delayed in Kano, we had to move much more quickly across Nigeria, and into Cameroon, where the road wound through a dense forest along the Chari, a rich brown river I traced on our map. At sunset we three knelt at the side of the truck. You pointed out things for me to pronounce in English, and Francis pointed out things for me to pronounce in Amharic.

River … wenz.

Fish … asa.

Beautiful … konjo.

We were in Cameroon only a few hours before we reached Kousséri, the site of the crossing into Chad. But because of extended drought, the river was too low for the ferry. In its place was a pontoon bridge. It was very new and the Sahara sun made it shine bright like the wristband of a watch. I thought of Doctor Moctar Brahim just then. It was the first time I'd thought of him in a long time. The kreen sprouted knives and dug into the wall of my chest from the inside.

At the entrance to the bridge was a sign painted in green, white, and orange. Since we had to wait to cross, you took me off the truck to stand in front of it and read. You told me the same thing was printed in four languages—Arabic, French, English, and Hindi. The fact that there was no Mandarin version, you told me, was meant to be an insult to the Chinese.

I sounded out the English:

we the people of india

do present this bridge

to the desert peoples of

cameroun and chad

as a gift of goodwill

between our nations

for this century

and for all time

til the ocean come again

namaste

A bit dramatic, you said.

Then you explained to me what all the words meant. You said that India is where ladoos came from. For a while, Yemaya, it was the only thing I knew about India. I thought of it as a factory that made sweet milk balls and shipped them all over the world, and who, with the profits, made gifts of bridges. How wrong I turned out to be, for best and worst!

The crossing into Chad, and the entry into the capital N'Djamena, was very difficult. We were stopped for hours at police checkpoints, five within a kilometer, all for different things. You and Francis huddled together and talked, and when I wormed my way under your arm by your side, I heard everything Francis said: that the situation in Chad was very bad. That we'd had to bribe the Chadian border police three times as much as last year, that the usual documents were not sufficient. Muhammed had never even heard of the documents the Chadian police were asking for. He said they were making them up and laughing about it because they were drunk. Right now Muhammed was drinking with them, in fact, because the police had forced him to at gunpoint, and it was best to simply placate them. And in the east, the situation was even worse—water had grown so scarce that the nomads and villagers were on the brink of war, just as had happened in Darfur at the turn of the century.

What about Mariama? you asked Francis. Without papers, will they try to detain her?

They'll respond to money. Just don't show them how much you have. That assumes we only run into Chadian military police. If we run into the militias in the east, who knows.

What would they do? you asked.

Francis said, Not good things. They're bad people.

Why are we going through Chad at all?

You can only get to Addis through Khartoum. And you can only get to Khartoum through Abéché. Otherwise you have to go down south through Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and then finally up into Ethiopia—it's a mess. We wouldn't get to Addis until Easter.

Francis turned to me. If things get rough, Mariama, you know where to hide, right?

I nodded. Twice so far, when Francis had had a feeling that a situation might get dangerous, he told me to go to my hiding place, which was an empty oil barrel. They always kept one empty, just in case. Francis explained to me that my presence was a liability, because there was “traffic” that consisted entirely of children, and other countries were paying African governments so much money to stop it that they needed bigger bribes to stay quiet about it. Now I know what this “traffic” means, but back then, I just imagined long threads of girls and boys on motorbikes, interweaving across the desert.

We made stops in Chad only when necessary. After the episode at the border, Muhammed wanted to get through the country as fast as possible.

In N'Djamena, you'd managed to pick up a secondhand book in English, so we read it together on those marathon driving days. Funnily enough, it was an Indian story—I had to pronounce it several times before I got it right—the Children's Illustrated Mahabharata. The men were very beautiful, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. They wore green jewels and rode purple horses. Francis teased us that you were cheating because he couldn't buy any Amharic books to teach me with. It was true that I was progressing faster in English than in Amharic. When we reach Ethiopia, he said, I'll buy you Amharic books so pretty it'll be the only language you ever want to speak. You shook your head at him, but you were smiling. It was like a little competition between him and you.

Just then, we felt the truck slowing to a stop. I hated that feeling because it felt like my spirit yearned to continue while my body was stuck. Francis climbed up front to take in the scene, and when he turned back, his eyes were wide.

Mariama, hide now.

I had never heard him use that tone before. I went straight for my empty barrel but before I climbed in I caught a glimpse through the front window of a row of men on horseback, each with a rifle across his chest.

Francis sealed the top and I was in darkness, but I could still hear and feel. When the truck finally stopped it seemed like a cruel joke that our favorite Angélique Kidjo song, “Afrika,” was pumping joyously from the speakers.

I tried not to move. But I was very uncomfortable. It seemed like there was far less room inside the barrel than usual, and I felt cold, like I was in air conditioning. Had Francis hid something else in here?—I felt around for my usual air hole. But I didn't feel it.

And then I realized I was in the wrong barrel.

There was a sharp clang and shudder on the outside of the truck. The music stopped. I heard shouting in Arabic, but I couldn't recognize more than a few words. There seemed to be an argument. There were many voices speaking over one another, interrupting each other. I heard Muhammed's voice drowning in their midst. I heard booted feet ascend onto our flatbed. And then I heard you, very near, very close, say softly and almost singsong in my own language, Little girl, be brave, they're coming. They might want to take you. Do not let them take you. Run away into the desert.

That's what my mother had told me, Yemaya. For a moment I felt angry at you both: Why were you telling me to run? Why were you telling me what was best? Couldn't I just decide for myself whether to stay?

I heard a clang, and then another, and then another, getting nearer. Someone was rapping their fist on each barrel. When he rapped on mine, it must have sounded different to him, because he demanded that it be opened. I didn't know what to do so I just stayed where I was.

Air and light opened above me. Staring down at me was a man with his head wrapped, and only his eyes showing.

He laughed. He called to his friends. Then two more men with their heads wrapped were standing over me. They pulled me up by my armpits and lifted me, bodily, and set me on the ground. I saw you, wavering on your feet, blinking, trying to keep your eyes open, like you were sleepy. I tried to go to you, but I was nudged back gently with the butt of a gun.

I heard Muhammed calling. He asked to approach his own truck. Permission was granted. He mounted the flatbed and held up his hands in a sign of peace. I couldn't understand his Arabic. But he beseeched them and gestured to me. Finally something was decided and Muhammed pressed his palms together in front of his face.

The men smiled at me in a way that seemed unkind. Then they filed off the truck, one by one. You were standing in the space they had left, shivering in the heat. When the last one departed, your knees buckled and you fell.

I ran to you. I didn't cry because I knew I needed to be strong for you.

I asked, What happened?

You said, They wanted to take you. In exchange for passing through. Muhammed promised them you were a Muslim, so they let you go.

Why did they want to take me?

They wanted to hurt you.

Why did they want to hurt me?

Because someone hurt them. So all they know how to do is hurt someone else.

I could tell how furious you were. But you never cried either, not once. You just swallowed it down.