She Will Build Him a City Read online

  To Rain,

  his mother, his grandparents

  &

  Max Schneid (1898–1944)

  Yasmin Malek (1996–2002)

  Midnight had come upon the crowded city. The palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the Madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all.

  Oliver Twist

  Charles Dickens, 1837

  Contents

  WOMAN: Winter Afternoon

  MAN: Night Metro

  CHILD: Little House

  WOMAN: Old Child

  MAN: Flying Dog

  CHILD: Kalyani Das

  MEANWHILE: Babies Walk Through Doors Made of Glass

  WOMAN: Nobel Prize

  MAN: Google Maps

  CHILD: City Route

  WOMAN: Henri Bergson

  MAN: House Guests

  CHILD: Enter Bhow

  MEANWHILE: Two Lovers On-Board the Night Metro

  WOMAN: Kindergarten Teacher

  MAN: New City

  CHILD: Camera India

  WOMAN: Your Birth

  MAN: Highway Mynahs

  CHILD: Priscilla Thomas

  MEANWHILE: The Magnificent Cockroach in the Swimming Pool

  WOMAN: Village Opaar

  MAN: Balloon Girl

  CHILD: The Separation

  WOMAN: Iron & Ice

  MAN: Kahini’s Clothes

  CHILD: Wall Collapse

  MEANWHILE: Mr Sharma’s Son and the Camera Phone

  WOMAN: Witches Dance

  MAN: Protest Rally

  CHILD: Orphan Escapes

  WOMAN: Father's Students

  MAN: Water Cannons

  CHILD: Traffic Signal

  MEANWHILE: An Evening in the Life of Kalyani’s Sister

  WOMAN: The Accident

  MAN: Paris Walk

  CHILD: City Lights

  WOMAN: Last Rites

  MAN: Penguins, Pelicans

  CHILD: Uncle, Aunty

  MEANWHILE: Mrs Usha Chopra Babysits in Mumbai

  WOMAN: Drinking Water

  MAN: Breaking News

  CHILD: The Mall

  WOMAN: Lecture Notes

  MAN: Train Fear

  CHILD: Neel Chatterjee

  MEANWHILE: Reporter from Little House at Her Child’s Nursery School

  WOMAN: Shaving Blade

  MAN: News Ticker

  CHILD: Night Playground

  WOMAN: Johnny’s Movie

  MAN: Four Bodies

  CHILD: Violets Rose

  MEANWHILE: A Day in the Life of Kalyani’s Mother

  WOMAN: Shortest Story

  MAN: The Flies

  CHILD: Flicker, Tremble

  WOMAN: Diary Entries

  MAN: The Leela

  CHILD: Cinema Theatre

  MEANWHILE: A Day in the Life of Kalyani’s Brother

  WOMAN: Night Laugh

  MAN: Good Advice

  CHILD: Tuberculosis Report

  WOMAN: Patrick White

  MAN: Freeze Frame

  CHILD: Blood River

  MEANWHILE: Where Was Red Balloon Before Balloon Girl?

  WOMAN: Asiatic Lion

  MAN: Taxi Driver

  CHILD: Cinema School

  WOMAN: Photo Album

  MAN: Love Letter

  CHILD: Cycle Rickshaw

  MEANWHILE: At the Protest Not Far from the AIIMS Mortuary

  WOMAN: Running Away

  MAN: New Baby

  CHILD: Movie Scene

  WOMAN: Giants Waiting

  MAN: Red Towel

  CHILD: Exit Bhow

  MEANWHILE: Hulking Black Mitsubishi Pajero at the Leela

  WOMAN: Gabriela Mistral

  MAN: Ballerina Girl

  CHILD: Orphans Home

  WOMAN: Waking Up

  MAN: Falling Man

  CHILD: Love Stories

  MEANWHILE: A Gift For Apartment Complex Security Guard

  WOMAN: Summer Night

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  WOMAN

  Winter Afternoon

  This, tonight, is a summer night, hot, gathering dark, and that is a winter afternoon, cold, falling light, when you are eight years nine years old, when you come running to me, jumping commas skipping breath, and you say, Ma, may I ask you something may I ask you something and I say, of course, baby, you may ask me anything and you say, Ma, when I am tired, when my legs hurt, when my eyes begin to close, I only need to call you, I only need to say, Ma, and you appear instantly, like magic, from wherever you are you set aside whatever you’re doing you come running to me you lift me up you carry me you walk with me you.

  Slow down, slow down, I tell you, but, of course, you don’t, you say if it’s sleep time, you place pillows on either side of me, you fluff them up, you switch off the light, you wait outside my room and only when you don’t hear me move do you walk away, Ma, my question is.

  And you pause.

  You breathe in, deep.

  You toe-tap the floor, the earth spins underneath, your eyes look into mine as if you are the mother and I am the child and you ask:

  Ma, is there someone who can do the same with you?

  What do you mean? I ask.

  Ma, is there someone you can call when you are tired? Someone who can lift you up, carry you around until you fall asleep?

  Is there someone like that, Ma? A man?

  A woman?

  Is there?

  Is there? So many questions.

  So many question marks, their dots and their hooks float in the air, block my view of your beautiful face.

  And I say, yes, maybe there is.

  ~

  Tonight is thirty years forty years later.

  So quiet is this little house that I can hear, from upstairs, through the walls of the room in which you are lying, the drop of your tear, the rush of your breath.

  One’s like rain, the other wind, they both make me shiver.

  ~

  And I say yes that summer afternoon, yes, maybe there is. Maybe there is a man or a woman who can lift me up although I will be much more comfortable if it is a woman because the only man I will let myself be carried by is your father and he is no longer with us and when I say this, a little cloud, cold and wet and dark, slips in through the window, hovers over our shadows on the floor before we both blow it back into the sky where it must have come from and when we do that, I feel your breath and I remember that it is warmer than mine.

  The cloud gone, you ask, Ma, doesn’t the woman who will carry you, just like you carry me, have to be tall? Very, very tall? More than twice your height? Like you are more than twice mine so that when she lifts you up, carries you around, your feet don’t drag along the floor?

  I guess so, I say.

  How tall should she then be, Ma? you ask.

  You tell me, baby.

  You think for ten seconds, twenty thirty, your lips move, numbers small and big dance inside your head – multiplying? dividing? – and you say, at least 12 feet tall, a giant, like in Gulliver’s Travels, Ma, in the land that comes after Lilliput, in which the little girl, nine years old, just like me, carries him like he were her doll. And to show what you mean, you raise both your arms, you stand on your toes, just over 3 feet in your socks, you try to stretch to 12, and you ask, Ma, how do we go looking for her?

  Don’t you worry, I say, we will meet her. Some day some night, I am sure, because how can you keep someone so tall hidden for so long?

  Ma, if she is there, will she love you like you love me?

  I don’t know about that, ba
by, I say, maybe she will if you want her to.

  Ma, will she have a mother and a father? Brothers and sisters? Friends? Will she live in a very tall house with many, many tall people?

  Maybe, I say, but maybe she lives all by herself.

  Let me know when you meet her, Ma, promise me that you will let me know, I want to see her carry you, I want to see you fall asleep on her shoulder.

  Of course, I will, I say. Promise.

  And, thus assured, you run away, leaving a hole in the air, shimmering, through which afternoon leaks away and evening drips in, mixes, dissolves the scents you leave behind.

  Of winter cream and red wool.

  Girl skin and baby shampoo, one night old.

  ~

  Last night, I meet this woman.

  This very, very tall woman. In this house, right here, where I stand, and, just as I promise you, I am now letting you know.

  ~

  Have you fallen asleep?

  May I lie down by your side, just for a while?

  I won’t wake you up, I will walk up the stairs on tiptoe, I will wipe all my sweat away so that not one drop falls, makes a noise.

  If it helps, I will whisper each word I need to tell you, I will hold my breath ­– as if I am dead.

  MAN

  Night Metro

  He is going to kill and he is going to die.

  That’s all we know for now, let’s see what happens in between.

  ~

  He waits to board the last train at Rajiv Chowk Station, the central hub of the Delhi Metro, crossover for Yellow and Blue Lines, through which move half-a-million passengers each day of whom he is one.

  Nobody in this city notices one.

  He is thirty years, thirty-five years old, 5' 10'', 5' 11'', his wrist so slim his watch slides halfway to his elbow when he raises his arm to brush back his hair. It’s over 40 degrees but there’s not a single bead of sweat on his face as if an invisible layer of ice-cold air sticks to him like cling film. Both hands free, he holds no bag, no phone as he waits at the platform, two levels below the street, next to Café Coffee Day under the Metro Clock whose hand shudders each time it moves a second.

  Passengers ride escalators like toy men, toy women in a Shanghai factory he once saw on the Discovery channel: small and stiff, gliding up the belt, emerging face first. Followed by neck, chest, waist, legs, and, in the end, feet.That topple into a box to be hot-sealed closed, shipped across the ocean. To cities where there are more toys than children.

  Next train 02 min.

  The station is crowded, he closes his eyes, sees everyone naked and bruised.

  Deep gashes scour bare stomachs and thighs like mouths of brown bags slit open.

  Women squat on haunches blowing air into wrinkled penises.

  Like children with balloons.

  One is red, a womb floating in blood, inside which a foetus glows.

  He feels an erection coming.

  He opens his eyes, his heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, John Keats.

  ~

  He likes poetry, he doesn’t like wet, he doesn’t like spray or spatter. No knife, no thick rope, no iron rods, the most popular weapons behind the headline murders in this city. Of Aarushi, the schoolgirl; mother Gurpreet and daughter Jasmeen; French tourist Lauren; Afghan woman Paimana and the elderly couple in Greater Kailash I, most of them stabbed, cut in many places. Or strangled, bludgeoned. Won’t work for him because he knows his arms lack strength and even if he gathers enough force to hit, it’s unlikely he will kill with the first blow which means he will have to keep hitting and, in the process, smear and stain larger areas. Perhaps, provoke a scream. There are 29,468 people per square kilometre in this city (Census 2011), twice that many is the number of ears.

  Someone is bound to hear.

  He could use a gun with a silencer, quiet and quick. As in movies he’s watched, books he’s read. Murder in Echo Park, Los Angeles, rain sliding down car windows, fogged in the cold. A park in Asker, near Oslo, a politician found in an empty swimming pool, a white tennis ball hammered deep into her throat. But this is fact, not fiction.

  There are 20 million bodies in this city and then there is the heat.

  Each body softened, warmed throughout the day in a marinade of its sweat and odours, hair oil, dust thrown up by diggers, cement mixers, earthmovers, dumptrucks. All tearing down, building up. New station, new flyover, new apartment block, new mall, new street, New City. Where everyone rubs against you, stands so close you hear their blood flow, skin crawl, hearts pump. Like the sound of trains running at night. You see remnants of meals lodged in teeth, trapped under nails stained yellow; cellphone screens smudged with wax from ears, flecked with flakes of dead skin.

  Late at night, just before they close, eyes gleam with greed; during the day, they dim with despair.

  ~

  He read a poem in school, On Killing a Tree by Gieve Patel, a doctor who lives in Mumbai. He has some lines by heart.

  It takes much time to kill a tree,

  Not a simple jab of the knife

  Will do it . . .

  . . . So hack and chop

  But this alone won’t do it . . .

  . . . The bleeding bark will heal

  And from close to the ground

  Will rise curled green twigs . . .

  No,

  The root is to be pulled out –

  . . . Out from the earth cave,

  And the strength of the tree exposed,

  The source, white and wet . . .

  . . .Then the matter

  Of scorching and choking

  In sun and air,

  Browning, hardening,

  Twisting, withering.

  And then it is done.

  End of poem, he’s never killed a human being. Only once, he has killed – a dog.

  ~

  He hears the train.

  He loves the Metro from the bottom of his heart, the place where he knows bad blood turns into good. He loves each train with its four, sometimes six, some have eight, Bombardier coaches. That’s why, on nights like this one, he leaves his car at home to take the train back from wherever he is.

  ~

  When he is nine years ten years old, he has a severe stomach ache, fierce spasms twist and crush his insides, make him cry into his pillow every night for a week. Father takes him to hospital where they make him swallow barium sulphate, then track its movement by taking X-ray pictures every half-hour until they have an entire album of black, translucent plates which, when held against the light, show the barium travelling through his body.

  He holds that last image in his head: that of a thin, white trace moving straight down in the black, through the cloudy haze of organs, knotting into whorls and loops where the ulcers are, then travelling clear again, uninterrupted.

  Like the Metro.

  Each train a glowing pill swallowed, coursing through the dark insides of this sick city.

  On the way home from hospital, Father buys him a cricket bat and a roll of Poppins hard-boiled candy to take the barium’s taste away.

  ~

  The train pulls in, pushing, in front, a wave of warm air from the tunnel to the platform. Doors open, people spill. A smell like rotting vegetables, bread and bananas gone bad.

  Dead and damp.

  Poet Gieve Patel is a painter, too. He did Man in the Rain with Bread and Bananas. (Oil on canvas, 2001.) That’s his favourite because the man in the painting looks like his father. The same sad eyes, the same old glasses.

  Next station is Patel Chowk, doors will open to the right, mind the gap.

  Twelve stops before he reaches home in Apartment Complex, New City.

  Standing, he closes his eyes.

  CHILD

  Little House

  The night is so hot the moon shines like the sun, its light as bloodless white as bone, casting a cold shadow of a woman as she steps off an autorickshaw, carrying her newborn wrapped in a thin, blood-red towel, tells its d
river to wait, walks up to Little House, a home for children, orphaned and destitute, leaves the baby on its doorstep, turns and walks away into a wind, slight but searing, that slaps her in the face and fills her eyes with water.

  The only eyewitness to this abandonment is Bhow, a black-and-white dog, surprisingly clean given the garbage heap she’s sitting on. She watches the woman leave the child, she watches her get back into the autorickshaw which drives away, the vehicle and its shadow both swallowed by the night heat rolling in from across the scorched bed of the Yamuna, the river with no water.

  By night’s end, this heat pushes the temperature to a few points above 40, the highest minimum in the city’s recorded history.

  It kills twelve people, seven over sixty, five under six.

  The city’s two night shelters, mandated to be kept open by the Delhi High Court during winter, turn into makeshift clinics to treat those with dehydration and heat stroke. These shelters, however, soon run out of beds, food and water, forcing hundreds to sleep on pavements, many on street dividers fanned by exhaust from passing vehicles. Some find spaces in the shells of broken-down buses, some at the entrance to Metro stations where, if they are lucky, they catch whatever they can of the air-conditioned draught that escapes from inside a coach when its doors open, when a train stops.

  ~

  At nine the next morning, by which time the temperature has already touched 45, Mrs Usha Chopra, the conscientious receptionist and secretary to the director of Little House – she takes the Metro from her home in Dwarka and, underground, the air conditioning works – discovers the baby, its eyes closed, its pulse jumpy, and when she touches the tip of its wrinkled nose, its heat almost scalds her finger.

  Hurriedly draping her dupatta over the bundle, Mrs Chopra carries the baby inside, sits down at her desk, pulls her chair closer to the aircooler and when she peels away the towel’s layers, she almost cries out aloud as if she has witnessed a miracle unfold.

  For, this is a boy.

  Only the second boy in the orphanage – there are seventy-eight girls – and a boy with no visible disability, a fact of no small import since the only other boy in Little House is Sunil, no last name, five years old and still unadopted because he has Down’s syndrome.

  The new baby begins to cry.

  ~

  ‘Let me look, Didi, let me look,’ says Asma Khatoon, the janitor, running, almost tripping over the bucket of Dettol water she is mopping the floor with. ‘Masha Allah,’ she says, wiping her hands on her sari, torn in too many places to count, ‘so beautiful is this child, may I hold him?’