The Girl in the Road (7 page)

A special weather-resistant scroll pre-loaded with medical and survival information. I load everything from my old scroll, which holds the complete works of Reshmi West, Muhammad Licht, Anuradha Sarang, Wen Huang, Gregory Mbachu, Laura Prufrock Jameson, Gaudi Al-Qaddafi, Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Rush, Federico García Lorca, Nora Chu, Mary Renault, Thomas Mulamba, Kim Stanley Robinson, Sun Yoo, Rodrigo Jimez, Rainer Maria Rilke, Toni Morrison, Fatima Perez-Marquez, Enid Chung, Arundhati Roy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, Jia-Chien Liang, Josefina Paz, Kuta Sesay, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Tori Biswas, Haruki Murakami, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Homer, Confucius, Shakespeare, Rikhi, Nambiar, Nilambar, Shukla, Jain, Tharoor, Narayan, Desani, Ambedkar, Gupta, Tagore, Gandhiji, Valmiki, and Vyasa.

Six flares.

A pozit, a global positioning tag with a simple digital display.

I pick out models of clothing I want and Misbah prints them out of quick-drying, salt-resistant synth in the far corner, all in white or camo: two pairs of loose pants, a tank top, a T-shirt, a hooded long-sleeved shirt, a sun cap, two pairs of underwear, and two bras. One pair of thong sandals, one pair of canvas shoes, and one pair of second skins.

Wraparound sunglasses and a collapsible broad hat.

Mehrdad pulls out sunscreen, but I tell him I don't need it. I try not to see the look in his eyes. Only the very wealthy or very connected have access to elective gene therapy. He's wondering which I am.

Mehrdad and Misbah steer me through toilet matters. I don't mind squatting over the ocean, but wiping is something else. The brothers have considered this. They show me a special kind of diaper that releases fecal matter after exposure to light. Ergo, I have to keep it out of the light before using it. That seems like something I can expect of myself.

After an hour, I sit with Mehrdad, drinking more tea, while Misbah packs all my items into my new backpack, save for one full outfit of new clothes I'd picked out.

“When are you leaving?” he asks.

“Tonight,” I say. “There's nothing left to do here.”

“Where is ‘here'?”

It takes me a while to answer this. Mumbai? India? Asia?

“Solid ground,” I say.

He nods. “You'll find like-minded souls out there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Travelers. They're all searching for something.”

I think this is shitty and simplistic but I don't say so. “Have you heard any stories about Bloody Mary?”

Misbah and Mehrdad exchange a look. “Jinn,” says Misbah.

“What?” I say.

“He's saying Bloody Mary is a spirit,” says Mehrdad. “Yes, I've heard of her. The graving docks of the Trail were in Djibouti, not Mumbai, and apparently one of the construction workers died while the Trail was being laid out. So they claim her ghost haunts the Trail now.” He waves his hand. “African superstition.”

I see that Misbah has finished. He presents my full backpack like a wedding cake, then bids me turn around and hold out my arms so that he can thread the straps around them. They have me walk around the store with it on. They want to make sure I'm happy with my purchase. I am.

So Misbah gestures to my outfit, laid out. I go behind the curtain and dress in a white tank top, white drawstring pants, and second skins on my feet. I also take the opportunity to change my bandage. The wounds have stopped bleeding and are five maroon dots, now, like five bindis, each with a halo of red infection.

I come out in my new outfit and now there's only one thing left to do. I hold out my wrist to Mehrdad. My mitter glows. Once the money transfers, anyone can know where I am, if they want to.

He smiles and holds his wrist to mine. His mitter pings and glows green. He says, “Khuda Hafiz.”

My glotti says,

URDU
: Go with God.

So now the proverbial clock is ticking.

First I leave my bundle of old clothes in the street in Dharavi. They'll get used. Then I use more of my cash to buy a ride back to Marine Drive, this time with a driver, a taciturn African man. I have mixed feelings toward him. I suppress the urge to tell him I'm going to Africa. I don't want to be That Indian Woman.

I get out near Nariman Point and walk to the very end of the seawall, a tourist spot with lots of people at this hour, scanning for any sign of the barefoot girl or any other pursuer. I see none. I shade my eyes from the sunlight until I see the Trail. It lies on the surface of the sea like a white garland.

I can't go in the daylight. My plan is to hide nearby until nightfall and then swim out to the head of the Trail. I don't know where I'll hide and I don't know where I'll enter the water. I'm just making up a plan, trusting that, in its execution, all basic physical principles will hold, like the yield of seawater to the force of my hands.

I sit on the edge of the seawall like a dozen other Mumbaikars, looking south toward the multibillion-dollar high-rises across the break. Looking casual. I look down and it's a two-meter drop to the breakwater, a tumble of slimy concrete jacks. The two meters were added to deal with the ocean rising. When I bend over to examine the seawall, for the first time I see that there are squares cut into the stone to dissipate the surf, like the jacks do. If I can climb down, I can sit inside one of the squares until night falls. No one will be able to see me unless they crawl down onto the jacks, and what are they going to do? I look like a sadhvi. They'll leave me alone.

So I have a plan.

Should I do a puja? Maybe I should do a puja. I'm not a very religious person. I celebrate whatever parts of religion give me an excuse to eat and dance. Mohini was much more solemn, a mystic, a contemplative. She tried to get me to take it seriously. She went to temple in the morning to get her forehead smeared, and when she came home, I let her smear my forehead in turn, because she had more authority to me than any priest.

But I think this occasion warrants a puja. For a safe passage to Africa. If I'm really doing this. Which it seems I am.

I drop down onto the jacks and pick through them for trash. I find seashells, a blue and silver Nordi bottle wrapper, and a gnawed Parle-G glucose biscuit, perfect for offering. Now I just need something to be a murti. There has to be a murti submerged somewhere.

I pick through the jacks for dolls or crustaceans or keychain souvenirs but find nothing that could be a murti. I actually feel panicked. I can't begin my journey without this puja. All of a sudden it seems I'm devout, even superstitious. But isn't the point of Hinduism that God is manifest everywhere, repeating Godself in endless aspects, so the specific object to which we direct puja doesn't matter? But still, it wouldn't feel right to pray to a greasy napkin. Would that be okay? I realize I know nothing about the religion in which I was supposedly brought up. This is what I get for being a nominal Hindu. I don't know how to make it real.

I decide the closest thing to a murti I have in my backpack is the tongue scraper. I'll just make it a sanctified tongue scraper.

Now I have all the elements of a puja gathered. I just have to wait for night to fall. I approach the hollow square in the seawall, and for the benefit of anyone watching, act as though I'd just discovered it, making gestures of surprise, curiosity. It's about a meter on all sides and a meter deep, which, I remember, are the dimensions of each Trail scale. I climb in. It's midday, so it's hot and wet. I lie on my back with my knees bent and look up at my concrete ceiling. I put my backpack under my head as a pillow. I look out over the jacks, across the water, toward the Tata complex. I close my eyes. I haven't really slept in days. The voices of those above me, calling in Marathi, Chinese, Hindi, English, and Urdu begin to blend in the heat and make a sunlight lullaby.

The Trail becomes sentient, like a great sea snake, and wants to know how it was made.

The Trail wrangles itself out of the bay and onto land, blocking traffic on Marine Drive, slithering like a steel dragon to the doors of HydraCorp, which panics and calls the military, which drops in with helicopters and guns and shoots at it, calling for it to desist. It's a disaster. The Trail, badly wounded, retreats back into the ocean and disappears beneath the waves.

The engineers at HydraCorp hold a press conference, looking tired. They announce they've decided not to make efforts to catch it. It has its own life now. It just wants to be left alone.

So the Trail travels all the world's oceans, deep as the undersea shipping routes, where it causes some disruption, but the world is gently disposed toward the Trail and so its bumblings are tolerated. It's just lonely, they say.

The Trail becomes an object of lore. There are sightings reported off the coast of Japan. Fishwaalas wake up in the cold star glimmer and where there had been nothing the night before, there's the Trail, a long skinny tongue splayed in the harbor. Some consider it a blessing and others, an omen. One day a segment gets trapped in Sydney Harbor and picnickers gather to watch maintenance crews untangle and reassemble it. The Trail bears this indignity and, once whole again, retreats into the deep.

Some who see it can't shake it from their minds. They become obsessed. They push pins onto a map and hold conventions at hotels in small cities. And then there's a rumor of a young grieving woman who swims out to meet it and is received. She becomes the mother of the race of the drowned.

From then on, the Trail goes from shore to shore and more people come. They form towns and then entire cities along its length. The city at the end of the tail is used to being thrashed, like the tip of a whip. It's where the most fashionably drowned spend their nights, among bright colored lights, watching the ocean floor flick by, gossiping about the residents at the head of the Trail, which is the seat of government.

But even the race of the drowned outgrows their host. They depart for other adventures—condos in calderas, or houseboats on the moon. The Trail becomes a ghost of its former self, and when the last inhabitant finally departs, the Trail swims to the deepest North Pacific and there, lets itself come apart and be scattered to the currents, the parts finding their own way and settling in separate beds of mud where they felt no more.

When I wake, the sun is setting. The high-rises across the water are faced in orange.

I feel energized. It's a good time to perform my puja. I try to remember the correct steps. Mohini knew them all. She would do a simple puja every day, but there can be twelve or thirteen steps, with special steps just for offering the murti water to brush its teeth. This won't be as elaborate.

I spread the Nordi wrapper on the concrete between my legs, anchor it with shells all around its perimeter, dribble a pile of sand in the center, and stick the tongue scraper into it so that it stands upright in an arch. Here's where I should offer something liquid to the murti. It seems obvious to offer seawater, so I bend down to cup from the surf, and pour it back and forth over my arrangement. But it doesn't seem like enough. So I reach under the bandage under my shirt and push one of the scabs until I feel wetness, and then paint the tongue scraper with that little bit of blood, for ten seconds, to make it real, and then I feel something at rest in my body that wasn't, before.

In fact there's more to be done.

I get out the filet knife and some topical anesthetic, which I apply with gauze. Then I lift my left arm until my hand is grasping the right side of my throat, for purchase. I dig in my fingernails so that I don't lose my grip.

I angle the knife towards my exposed armpit. My flesh is matter, and responsive to physical principles, just like water is. I make a first incision, feeling no pain but a faint tug, and then another incision at an angle to the first, so now there's a bleeding V in my skin. I have to work fast before I start bleeding too much. I dig the tip of the filet knife under the point of the V and work it up, tearing up a flap of skin, and there are few notes of pain, which without anesthesia would be a blinding white soprano pain. I nudge my aadhaar with the tip of the knife and it moves under another layer of dermis. I make a deeper cut. The tip of the almond is exposed now. It's even colored like an almond. Now it slips out easily and I hold it in between slippery fingers. I place it in the little pile of sand under the arch of the tongue scraper and then I place the biscuit in front of the tongue scraper and light it on fire.