The Girl in the Road (3 page)

The bartender says, “Arjuna! I was just telling—what is your name?”

I need to be careful. I lie again. “Durga.”

“I'm Sandeep,” says the bartender, and plants a clear shot in front of Arjuna, who takes a seat next to me and rolls up his sleeves. His hands are huge. His fingers are muscular. I can see the veins snaking up his forearms. “I was just telling Durga about the Trail. Didn't someone try to walk it last monsoon?”

“Oh yes, people try. They're crazy. Mostly poor kids who hear they can make a living from fishing and so they swim out to it and no one ever hears from them again.”

“Arjuna should know,” Sandeep says to me. “He works for HydraCorp.”

“Do you work on the Trail?”

“No. But I can see it from my office window pretty far into the distance. Every now and then you can see a blur against the sea, so you know someone's camping, because they get special camouflage pods. They only walk at night.”

“So they don't get caught.”

“I imagine.”

“What's the penalty if they do?”

“A night in jail, a month in jail, whatever the police feel like. It's corporate trespassing. But we don't have the resources to patrol it all the time. If you want to just feel what it's like, you can—”

Sandeep snaps his fingers in Arjuna's face. “Don't tell her!”

“Don't tell her what, chutiya?”

“I told her she has to go see for herself.”

Then Sandeep leaves to help someone else and Arjuna turns to me, opening his body to face mine, spreading his legs, smooth, guileless. “He means the museum,” he says. “I can get you free tickets.”

On another night, his moves would tempt me to mock him, if I were feeling sporty. But he's sexy, despite himself. This is a familiar sequence: see someone with potential, want to fuck them, fuck them. It is such a clean exercise of power, such a simple application of effort, leading to a desired result. He hasn't asked about my aadhaar. He didn't even check. I appreciate that.

I keep looking at the floor. Sometimes I can only talk to other people if I can make myself believe I'm talking to myself. “Would you go walk on the Trail, if you could?”

He shakes his head, Western-style. “No, I don't see why. It's like kids who ride the tops of trains. A thrill for thrill-seekers, but that's not me. I have a nice enough life.”

And I can tell he does. I can tell he's a tech prince, an unmarried Third Culture playboy with a modern flat and a few servants. He's an only child. His parents are divorced. He works out every morning in his tower's basement gym. I can picture the wings of his iliac crest.

“Who needs thrills?” I say.

He smiles, leans back. “You remind me of someone I used to know,” he says, “a girl at college. She wore heavy boots and a scarf around her neck, even in monsoon. She never looked anyone in the eye. She came to class alone and she never spoke.”

I think: I didn't make eye contact because eye contact is too intense for daily use and I didn't speak because nothing would ever fucking come out of my mouth right. Sex was how I said what I wanted to say.

“I heard she dropped out,” he continues. “But I remembered her. Fierce, but shy, like a femme trapped in a butch body.”

I think: How perceptive of you.

But I don't say that. Right now I'm playing Durga, so I say what Durga would say. “What would you say, if you saw her today?”

“Probably? … I would ask her for a kiss.”

Now my whole loin area is burning. The conversation goes on but the goal is secured, so it's all filler, now, and my mind sustains small talk with Arjuna as I'm having another conversation with myself: I need a place to sleep for the night. He's smarmy but my body needs this. I need the flavor of someone else in my mouth besides Mohini. I can delay planning for my journey or even better, consider this a part of it. I assure myself it makes sense that a day including an assassination attempt and a terrorist attack would end in the urgent need to fuck. In fact I can't even think about anything else right now but fucking this man.

When we leave the nightclub and mount his scooter, before we pull away, I scan the waterfront for the barefoot girl, sitting and looking at the bay, her headscarf rippling along the rampart. I don't see her.

I wake up alone in a pool of sunlight.

I'm lying in a wad of white sheets. I've slept maybe two hours. I'm still too wound up. The mattress sheet came off in the night and the pillows are all on the floor except the one we used to prop up each other's hips at various points. There are stiff spots in the fabric where our juices dried and left solids behind. I'd forgotten what it was like to have sex with a man. Mohini, by the time I left, had fully changed into a woman with woman-parts. We celebrated with a rosewater cake. I'm a good cook when I want to be. There's so rarely an occasion that merits my talents. But I was so happy to love her, finally, as she wanted to be loved and in the body she wanted.

But when a man is inside me, I feel like the eye of my body is held open, and I'm not allowed to blink.

And how is it possible that … Anwar? I can't believe this but I can't remember his name. My mind is blank. I'm sure it started with an A. This is ridiculous. But regardless of his name, why didn't he recognize me from college? Maybe he does, and he just never said so. Maybe we had sex and now he's going out to get the police, who are looking for me, a Malayalee on the run, nursing a snakebite to the solar plexus. Maybe he was filing away the information to use against me later.

This might be a trap. In fact I'm sure it is.

I can't run out of the room this second. I have to think. I sit down. I use the breathing exercises Muthashan taught me when I was little, but they fail.

I find the bathroom, get in the shower, and turn it on icy-cold. I count to ten.

When I get out of the shower I at least have the illusion that I can think more rationally. I run my fingers over the patch covering my wounds. When I took off my shirt last night, he—
Arjuna,
for fuck's sake,
Arjuna
—didn't even acknowledge it was there. He wasn't really present, in general: a vigorous lover, but too aware of himself, parroting endearments from Bollywood films, never having broken the surface and learned the real language.

I find a towel and spread it on the floor. I sit and lean back against the shower door, naked, dewy bush out. I haven't had five minutes in the last eighteen hours to just sit and plan my next move. I close my eyes and try to remember the flavor of my life one day ago.

It was an overcast morning in Thrissur.

The neighbor's dog wouldn't stop barking.

We had a breakfast of chai and leftover Chinese.

Mohini and I had been planning a trip to Africa to try to understand My Family History, which I knew the facts of, but had never really tried to understand. But Mohini felt this was the root of my restlessness. My parents were murdered by a young woman who'd been their friend, an Ethiopian dissident. My mother was only six months pregnant. They were killed in the hospital where they both worked as doctors. I was saved by the nurses who found them.

So an atlas of the Horn of Africa was open on our kitchen table. I wanted to go right away, but Mohini stalled, because she was slower, more careful, the means of transportation important, given her awareness of energy, responsible usage, modes of travel, better and worse, pros and cons. Meanwhile the map became a tablecloth. Africa was obscured by takeout boxes.

I spot two paper tickets stuck in the bathroom mirror. They're white with silver lettering in a slender font:
Admit One to the Museum.
On the other side is the HydraCorp logo, a stylized multiheaded snake. On one ticket is written,
Wait for me
.

I don't fucking wait for anyone. I used to, for Mohini. She was the only one.

There's a knock at the door. I wrap a towel around my body and look through the eyehole. It's the dhobi with laundry. He looks Ethiopian. I open the door.

“I'm sorry, he's not here,” I say.

“That's all right ma'am,” he says, looking down. “We settle up weekly.” He hands me a stack of shirts, ironed and starched.

I close the door without thanking him.

I drop the stack by the door and press my ear to it. He might be a member of Semena Werk. He might be gathering information on me. I probably shouldn't stay here. At the very least I should leave before Arjuna gets back. Now I remember he climbed over me and pressed his body down and whispered in my ear that he was going to get me my breakfast and to make myself at home before dismounting and dressing and leaving. A door shut, a lock turned, and footsteps faded to silence.

I'll get my own breakfast. But I can use the ticket for the research I need to do.

Two hours later I'm back on Marine Drive, standing in front of the HydraCorp Museum. White seabirds are dipping and wheeling overhead. The museum is eleven stories tall and shaped like an eight-pointed star. The outer walls are transparent so I can see the exhibits bunched up inside like intestines.

The lobby is hung with flags representing the consortium of participant nations and corporations. India and Djibouti are prominent. I walk to a sickle-shaped desk and hand over my ticket. The attendant, seeing no aadhaar, hands me a map of the museum and a glossy pamphlet about HydraCorp's many projects.

I can see he's unnerved by my not meeting his eye so I try to put him at ease. I wave the pamphlet. “HydraCorp. Funny name for a company with lots of projects,” I say.

He smiles, but I can tell he doesn't know what I mean. It's my fault. My jokes aren't really jokes. They're oblique and not funny to anyone but Mohini. We had a shared language. No one else speaks it. I have to remember that. It seems like my suavity from last night wore off and I'm beached again on the shore of awkwardness.

The attendant tells me to start on the top floor, so I get in the Lucite elevator and say, “Eleven.” The car begins a smooth ascent. I rise higher and higher above Back Bay, the curve of Mumbai. I see a silver thread bobbing on the surface of the water, stretching toward a hazy horizon. That's that famous Trail, then. I stare at it all the way up.

Once on the eleventh floor I walk in the direction of a black doorway that says
cinema
in silver lettering. The word is comforting. I feel good. I'd like to sit still and watch an educational film. I enter a black velvet room shaped like a half-circle. When I sit, the room senses my presence and the screen springs to life. I'm relieved it's not an immersive theater where the images get into your head and cup your eyeballs. I like there to be a distance between me and art. Mohini and I argued about that, with her feeling that I was being a Luddite on par with Luddites who impugned film as a valid art form in the early twentieth century. I disagreed. I still do.

The film begins. It's beautifully produced. The narrator is a woman speaking in English with a north Indian lilt and for once it doesn't annoy me. She tells me about the history of artificial energy on our planet. Wood. Water. Coal. Oil. Nuclear. Geothermal. Wind. Solar. The twins Fusion and Fission, both functional in laboratories, but still too expensive to be scaled up. And lastly Wave, which I think is what the Trail is. They call it Blue Energy, the successor to Green Energy. I'm excited for whatever Red Energy and Purple Energy and Orange Energy will turn out to be. I'm starting to feel euphoric.

The narrator doesn't call it the Trail. She calls it the Trans-Arabian Linear Generator, or TALG. She presents a succession of pleasing metaphors: that its technology draws from ancient pontoon bridges which, though remarkable for their time, only spanned distances of a few kilometers, like the Bosporus or the Hellespont, in times of war. And then they were discarded, more easily disassembled than assembled. The narrator emphasizes that the TALG only resembles a pontoon bridge, as its overall shape is more like that of an upside-down caterpillar. Each segment is a hollow, inverted pyramid made of aluminum, and each sunward surface is faced with solar paneling, which seems brilliant to me, makes me want to applaud. Between the segments are hinge arrays called nonlinear compliant connectors, each of which contains a dynamo, in each of which is suspended an egg of steel that bobs up and down as the wave does. This generates energy, as does the solar paneling, making the TALG a dual-action apparatus. Mohini would love this—I wonder if she knew about this. And then the energy is imported to its recipient plant in Djibouti—there is an image of a house in Djibouti lighting up, and a Djiboutian family rejoicing—via superconductor threads made of metallic hydrogen, a controversial material whose manufacturing process was perfected ten years ago. Despite its history of catastrophic accidents, metallic hydrogen is metastable, the narrator assures me; structurally sound, like an artificial diamond. She explains how the TALG was also a breakthrough in intelligent self-assembly on a mass scale, because every component of the TALG has an intelligent chip that, like a human cell, “understands” where it goes and what it's supposed to do and can monitor and repair itself.