You are a nineteen year old fool. Playing at manhood with a white girl. You think yourself so clever. That you can be of both worlds and deceive everyone. You’re a Bloody American boy who watched a child die on a dirty Delhi road. And now a second fright has made you pee, ever so slightly, into fine cotton pants. Welcome back to the Desh, little bitch.
The Punjab Roadways bus came head-on. The Grand Trunk highway is two lanes—one into Punjab, one out, and you were headed with Daddy to Chandigargh to meet your friend Bunny. The Roadways monster hauled past an ambling Sandhu Transport lorry, honking and accelerating into your oncoming lane.
Your driver Shinda Ji seemed oblivious, more interested in some rambling tale of your father’s from the backseat, about hitching a ride in the Fifties with a drunk Sikh trucker at the Phakra Canal. Perhaps Shinda Ji believed in his pathetic karma and that today was not his day. All you could do was stare the Roadways bus down. Just as you did the day before, when you watched a similar bus kill a little girl.
You squeezed your eyes and listened for the Doppler burst of the horn as the beast blew by. You could hear Abbie’s voice above the horn’s shriek. Fucking coward, your girlfriend said.
You thought you were something else.
It’s the fourth day of your visit back to India. You stayed at your Bhua’s house in Delhi for the first three, before the journey into the ancestral Land of the Five Rivers. The Shatabdi train was sold out for the week.
“We’ll go the way as I and your mother’s brothers would do, so many times,” Daddy said. Your Bhua, the experienced sibling, raised great protest. She finally agreed and arranged for a driver to take you along the ancient road.
“Boy, stay in your Father’s shadow,” your aunt said, affixing a hundred-Rupee note to your breast pocket. She was the only one you told of the death on the Delhi road. How it happened. Most of it. The little child in you wanted to cry into her sari.
Enough of that, you knew. You knew in the way your bony aunt stared at you, like an owl appraising a rodents’ rubber belly. You are unseasoned. Keep your mouth shut, say only the needed. Here, everyone speaks with their eyes.
“Bhu Ji.” You offered a teasing reassurance. “With a little love, say it?”
The old matriarch’s eyes both crinkled and twinkled. She was ten years older than your father. She abandoned a husband who beat her and made an engineer’s life in the thermal plants. She had no children. Your Bhua pulled her pallu across her chest and dismissed you. “Now, go.”
Daddy’s road story is mercifully over. The men laugh. You pretend to join and cross your legs tightly.
Finally, some loving salve: What you cherish of this country takes form like a magical vision. It is a milk tank truck, hauling gallons of hormone-free bovine love, mixed with swamp-water, no doubt. Back home, tankers carry diesel. Here, milk is the Indian lifeblood. The beastly vehicle has a hand-painted notice instructing all to Turn Dipper on at Night and to Horn Please. The rusty vehicle sports print mud flaps with stenciled advice encouraging everyone to RELAX.
You sketch it quickly in your notepad, as Mrs. Espinosa taught you to do in New York at the Art Students League. Catch the bones first, Vinay. Don’t fear gaps, it’s why we start by pencil. Details come when you see the whole, when you can see how it moves.
You saw the whole of it on the Delhi road, but there was no time to draw the Little Girl. Your friend inspired you to draw the people of India. “You have a real eye,” he said.
“You may call me Bunny,” was how Balbir Singh Girewal announced himself at your Kew Gardens home, four years ago, springing from a coiled recline on living room carpet to present a crisp handshake. He was your mother’s best friend’s son, seven years your senior. And the half-planet distance from New York to Chandigargh meant you had never before met this clever man in black angular turban and slim Gap pullover. He boarded with your parents for a month as he sought NYU accommodations, where he would earn his LLM. In the two years of his American stay, you never saw the inside of the coveted bachelor pad he shared with an Argentinian roommate in Alphabet City. But on the third weekend of every month, he always claimed your mother’s standing invitation to visit, dine, opine. He called your parents his local guardians. He was so very good at navigating both worlds.
“Dad,” you call to the back. “Why aren’t we staying with Bunny?”
The ends of your father’s Polo shirt neatly pack tummy under polished black belt. Deep lines under his dark eyes pucker before white stubble. His large, wheat-stain forehead curves back into wavy grey and henna-dyed hair. “I don’t know his father,” he says.
You have rented a fine room in a fine hotel, and not availed of Bunny’s repeated invitations to stay at his parents’ home. You wonder what offense this may bring to your reunion. There is the deep tradition of hospitality. Daddy knows better.
“His mother is your Mummy’s friend,” Daddy continues. “I don’t know this family. I won’t stay under some unknown man’s thumb. You have to watch yourself and walk, Vinay.”
“Your father knows how to move in the world, Vinay,” Bhua has said, many times. When Partition happened, and the family lost everything, he became a man at fourteen, she told you. Their father, a principal and arts teacher, did not work again. But the fourteen year old man and his brothers learned to adjust to the New India. They kept the family alive. Because of them, your Bhua stayed in college and became an engineer. Your father waited his own turn for higher education, until almost thirty. She is proud of him. But she feared for you both on the GT.
“He is very principled, like our father,” Bhua said the night before. “He has low tolerance. That highway is fast. You help him now, you watch every lane.”
“Look at that fool!” Daddy says. To your left you observe a Sardar on a pea green Bajaj scooter as he transports two women in orange and green salwar kameez dresses with ambiyaan-mango embroidery. They are self-stacked behind him, like compressed bogies. The Sardar wears a glass faceplate, held by a large black band that pulps the back of his turban. “The helmet of his,” Daddy says. “Look at it.”
Shinda Ji caresses his five o’clock. Curled fingers stroke nibs of black mustache. “Here everything goes, Sahb Ji. Jugaad, it is.” The Indian word for the jury-rigged. The mantra for the slap-dash, the mix and match. Get by till tomorrow.
“At least he protects his face,” you say. “The two bibis behind him have less.”
The three of you laugh, jolly sholly. Good Punjabi humor.
In your notepad, you sketch a two lane highway versus a rotary chowk, that place where lanes come in to disappear, and new lanes appear to leave. It was in a chowk where the Little Girl died. Your Bhua is right to be fast on a highway. But in the chaos of a chowk, it is more jugaad, you begin to suspect. You have to be smart, to adjust. Grab an opportunity.
“Bedha-gardkh,” your father concludes.
Shinda Ji admires your rendition of the milk tanker. “Beh, vah! Sahb Ji,” he calls to your father in the back. “Chotte Sahb draws excellent!”
“He’s very talented,” Daddy proudly agrees. “It is his good hobby. He learned from copying comics. But he’s going to be an engineer.”
Your remind your father that you took an art class.
Say only the needed.
And that’s when a yellow and blue Tempo manifests from nowhere and ploughs to overtake your Ambassador from the right.
“Shinda Ji!” you shout. Just like the Little Girl, again. Playing her nose.
The driver swears and pumps the brake. “Oh, penh chaud!”
The flimsy Tempo tires ratchet asphalt and pelt stones at your bulky car. Shinda Ji’s window rolls up and rolls down. “Ulu da patha!” he shouts.
“Gaddha!” Daddy barks.
But this is the Desh, and the Desh abides. The Tempo’s bravura bid for Self and Country yields to an unseen pothole. Its left wheel runs aground in a grinding jerk, its undercarriage tears black road. Shinda Ji pumps the brake and bangs the concentric steel ring. Two short horns, one long. He engages the clutch and jogs to overtake the overtaker.
“Arey—Oi!” his head all for out the window. “Put your thumb in your ass when you—”
The Tempo tips, scrapes and twists free. It pulls away at a ragged diagonal. Shinda Ji’s gross palm ladles warm air and drums the door’s plating.
“That Tempo-wallah, if I find at the next dhaba,” he growls, “His legs I’ll break.”
“You drive the car, and look ahead,” Daddy orders.
“Hanh, Ji. Yes, Sahb.” Shinda Ji’s greased mustachio banks in your grace. He smiles. “Very good, Chotte Sahb.” He compliments. “You will master these roads.”
“Good job, Vinay.” Your father taps your seat. A cord of muscle buckles the tumble of hair along his forearm. “Good job, son.”
You nod to him. With your pencil, you outline the sketch of a chowk.
No. It is not enough.
#
“It’s the ultimate gesture,” you had said to Abbie, a month before leaving for the Desh. You performed your facsimile of the Indian head shake, holy invocation of the spirit of Jugaad, to signal at once yes, all good, can be done, will be done—and, most important—can’t and yet will be done.
Abbie snorted. She set your steel pestle on the college kitchen table. “Four out of five times there, you look like a bobble toy on a dashboard.”
“Ouch. Tell it, sister,” you let your hand stay on her hip. “How ‘bout that fifth time?”
Her lips were like foreign fanaa. “Like you know what you’re doing,” she said.
A tall runner with smarmed hair came in to fetch Tupperware. “Smells delicious, guys.”
Abbie thread her fingers between the buttons of your shirt.
“Thanks,” you offered. “Making chai-tea, from scratch.”
“So aromatic,” the runner added. She headed for the door. “Love the cardamom. Cheers.”
Your girlfriend rolled her eyes. “Asshole.” And then, in your ear she whispered: “You’re so aromatic.”
“Aromatic and colorful,” you laughed. “I get it all the time.” Say only the needed. “Well, y’know. Don’t all white girls want spicy bodunkadunk?”
Abbie snuffled the hollow of your collarbone. “More exotic fragrance of Dial soap.”
“Call me an imposter.”
The chai convulsed and erupted, coating the outer skin of your steel pot in a sad bloated muck of Taj Mahal tea grinds and bubbling fatty suds of milk. Before you could turn down the range, the tan chimera tamped and killed its burner flame in sick, spluttering pops and sizzles.
In your dorm room, Abbie discovered your hand-drawn poster of a sci-fi hero of two strange worlds, taped to the back of your door. He is Mister Spock, your Global Guardian Guru, you chose to reveal. You wondered what she might say, if a cheap joke must follow. Her bare behind resembled tiny Chinese baos.
“You draw so beautifully, Vinay.”
She pronounced your name with nearly the fidelity of your parents’ elegant accents. It frightened you. You never thought a gori girl would ever try so hard.
“Come here,” you demanded.
As she crawled over your bed, Abbie asked about visiting India. “Do you feel OK, there?”
“I can disappear there,” you said. That was a lie. But she bought it.
#
“Vinay!” A strange man in close-cropped hair and a Tom Selleck slim-fit moustache intercepts you in the hotel lobby in Chandigargh and forces a hug. You are stunned. Bunny’s beloved beard and turban are gone, he looks like an Italian tourist in straight jeans and worn Reeboks. “Welcome to the Desh.”
“Dad’s upstairs,” you say.
Your father has great teasing fun. “So, your New York days have changed you!”
Bunny embraces and guffaws. “Time for some change.”
You adjust to accommodate. “You look good, my man.” Bunny appears pleased for your comment, even though it is not true.
As your friend and father reenact an act they have already rehearsed on the phone about not opting to stay in a proper Chandigargh home, you study the artificial arrangement of lined trees outside, proclaiming the driveway to this hotel as entry to a safe space, a space more controlled, more American. The AC of this room assails you.
“Bunny,” you try for a head bobble. “Challo, let’s go.”
He bobbles back, sympatico. “Let’s make a move.”
It is as if he no longer belongs here, yet he still moves as one of them.
#
In New York, Bunny introduced you to Pink Floyd and Malkiat Singh; you burnt him CDs of proud house local DJ Rekha. When you revealed to him your sketchbooks, and your illustrations of sci-fi heroes and India’s little gods, he suggested a punk rendition of Roly-Poly Ganesh.
“You know what you should draw, Munna?” Bunny had invented his own diminutive nickname for you. “The people of India. You have a real eye.”
“The people and the streets,” you added. “To see the whole story.” Your friend gave you only a strange regard.
When you took him on the Staten Island ferry, Bunny studied New York’s high rises, and declared the place a veritable science-fiction city. He told you what a young woman in his seminar let slip about his turban. You could only point to the Financial District and its unfinished Tower. “What to do? Kobayashi Maru.” For one rare moment, the younger protégé became senior authority, as you explained obscure, venerable Star Trek lore: the no-win, the test that demands to reckon with one of two losses. To measure how one chooses to lose.
Bunny tsk-tsk clucked with his tongue. “India’s too bloody big for your science-fiction, Munna.” He called you a nurhd, and you mocked his upper-class pseudo-Britisher accent for its awkward sounding of a simple American word.
“India eats nurhds alive,” he huffed.
#
Outside Bunny’s gated house, you spy a driver against an open car door, his unbuttoned shirt channels vintage Angry Man Amitabh Bachchan. An old woman with a straw basket on her head keeps asking him for something. He turns on her and whacks the basket in a clean badminton-caliber hand stroke. Scores of jamun and masambi litter the ground.
There was a way out of that chowk for that Little Girl. To what.
Bunny lets you drop the latch on the gate. Car horns far away cry like angry young gods for some new claim of the sky. Their noise grows with every minute.
“Sasriakaal, Ji.” You take the initiative to greet Bunny’s father in the family driveway. The old Sikh winds around a volley of rusting scooters. He wears a rumpled kurta-pajama and a finely starched pink turban. A ragged beard of grays hang slack from a stiff moustache of staunch black.
“Vaah, Oi!” Bunny’s father points and looks about to a virtual posse greater than the present gathering of folk and friend. “I say,” he says to your grinning father. “Boy of New York, greets in our speak!”
Everyone laughs and Bunny claps your shoulder.
You must watch this man’s eyes.
The press of Punjabi tea: Cups of sugared chai, milkcakes, Chaska crackers, accusations of being skinny. Samosas are frying. Take more chai, the elders order. A clutch of Uncles talk loud of American fascism, roar over a joke about Musharraf and Vaypayee on a train entering a tunnel.
Bunny’s father challenges you. “Did you understand the joke?”
You’re certain you understand how to be a man with women better than the old crone. But that isn’t the answer. Neither is pretending to be a child, even if your father is watching you. You try the Indian head bobble. You fuck it up this time.
The Old Sikh sniggers. So does your father. Bunny fakes obedient laugh behind sealed lips.
“This young generation, Kohli sahb.” He leans into your father, and pings Bunny with laser-beam eyes. “They’re too straight-shaight. Not like our rascal youth, henh Ji?”
Your father grabs hold of his hand. “Our generation was different. It was a different India.” They brag of physical punishments their fathers put to them, to turn them street-smart men.
You look to Bunny and spot the end of an eyebrow bullwhip. Solid B, Munna. Good job.
You are sad for how much you miss his gentle turban and soft beard.
A dunderhead servant from Bhutan undoes your hard work thus far and innocently asks again and again if you wouldn’t prefer Thum’s Up soda, to another cup of spicy chai?
“Chai for the Babu, Parikh.” Bunny formally waves away the servant.
Giant coolers spray cool mist before a flatscreen TV playing silenced Star Network serials about scheming daughters-in-law. Outside, two dogs wander from shade to shade, hiding from the pelt of sunlight. Bunny’s father thanks Daddy for your New York hospitality, giving his son a home away from home and good Punjabi food to sustain him in his time abroad. An elderly IAS officer with a superb, articulate silver-grey moustache sets down his paper and reminisces with Daddy of a visit to Queens for the 1964 World’s Fair. He dresses in fitted Nehru Jacket with cream-threaded kurta and foreign sandals. Across from him, you document the tea-consuming capacity of a Member-Parliament who looks like an aged, plumped, hair-dyed riff of 1970s movie-star stud Vinod Khanna. He smiles like a buffoon.
The Punjabi Men boast of much Indian progress: Computers at airport customs, satellite TV, Great Mall megaplexes with first-run American movies. McDonald’s in Amritsar, for Sister-Fucking Sake. A clean subway, in Delhi! Light rails for Bombay, even Bangalore. New superhighways linking the Metros that make the GT look, provincial.
“It’s a New India,” waxes Nehru-Jacket-Uncle. His Cremica glucose energy biscuit thoughtfully disintegrates into steaming chai. In your notebook, you finish a thumbnail of the monster you saw this morning.
“What you up to, Munna?” Bunny swipes the pad from your hand, flips its pages easily. He hands it back. “Dispatches from the edge?”
He does not remember how he set you on this road years ago. He is still your friend. You wink back. You accommodate.
“What do you make of our India, young man?” demands Bunny’s father.
Kobayashi Maru. You remember a billboard in Delhi. “Shining,” you say.
The old patriarch erupts in laughter and passes gas. He grabs your grinning father’s wrist. “Boy is sharp.” He turns to you and squints like an Eastwood, bobbles his head. “Very good.”
“New York has raised him,” Bunny quips from behind a ceramic cup. A-plus.
“Fantas-tic city,” the old man bellows, tapping a large watch. He makes like a conspirator to Daddy, miming shot glass shots. “Little non-veg, Kohli Sahb? Johnny Walker hojaye?” He points at Nehru-Jacket-Uncle, accusatory. “Doctor Sahb tho won’t join. He’s a teetotaler, only!”
“India’s real problems today,” opines Nehru-Jacket-Uncle, “are the fatalities of her roads.”
Everyone agrees. Bunny’s father tells of a beloved neighbor, an economist at the University, whose beautiful Citroën came to an end twenty years ago in a dreadful encounter with an Ashok Leyland carrier, taking him, his wife, and their recently engaged daughter from this turbid plane. “On these damn roads.” The old man pulls hardened fixo from the tip of his moustache, working the micro-curd of grease with thumbnail and calloused index tip. He flicks it into the room. “We have no standing. Anything happens.”
“But, the chowk,” the MP interrupts. “It’s a genius thing the British gave, haina?”
Nehru-Jacket-Uncle nods wisely. “The chowk is a madhouse. But it does accommodate the chaos of our roads. It is a solution”
Daddy sets his Johnny down. “Adjust karo.”
“That’s it only, Uncle!” Bunny says.
These are men who dismiss the poor on India’s roads as cheap slummies. You chomp on a triangle of pinwheel sandwich. It is lathered in everyman Amul tin-cheese, green pudina chutney, red Maggi ketchup pimped to one-up old Heinz. The world is in your mouth. You will not let it go.
#
“I don’t hide,” you had said to Abbie.
“No? I do.” she replied.
On a grassy bank near campus, you both sat and watched a crew of Ivy women coast over a pallid river. Abbie’s parents were working class owners of a bowling alley in a small Nebraska town. They were so proud of her. She studied the tall women on the river in their privileged gear. You learn tricks in the Seven Sisters to fool your sisters, she said. Dress in classy turtlenecks and Allbirds, balanced by worn jeans. Learn chopsticks to eat sushi, even though the Japanese really use their fingers. Work study sorted everyone, regardless.
“Girls remembered which girls worked the House cafeteria for some side hustle.” She pulled her hoodie over entangled hair. The rowers heeled for the shallow arch of a footbridge. “But they’ll accommodate you, much as they need you. See, they gotta fake rap with some knowing girlfriend back-up, at the frat parties.”
She asked you what you did that was so different.
It was May, and Abbie was already suggesting uncertain plans to take you home for Thanksgiving. She didn’t know you hadn’t told your parents of her, that you lied when she asked. She could not understand how you could feel with her the way you felt, yet keep this separate from those who brought you to this world. It was your alien heritage: the best Indian gods were the little ones, especially the ones with many little heads to accommodate many little perils, devise countless jugaad solutions. When she would remove her top, Abbie revealed to you her hidden silver chain, its end marked by a narrow cross. How to interpret the many truths of many gods for one raised under a lone, hulking Capital G divinity?
You had worlds to navigate.
You told Abbie about the mangoes. Piled in humid heaps on carts cantered off the edge of city roads, manned by men with dirty hands who cut the pulp fruit with large black knives. In India, All Creatures Great and Small were out to get you, but you could adjust. The Desh’s divine, suffocating mantra: adjust karo. Just do it.
It was in how the cleaved fruit’s juice wet the knife, you explained. “The guy then dips it into this gunny sack of salt and masalas, they coat up the blade.” You mimed the movement. “And he smears it into the mango slit. But the key’s the juice. It opens a window.” The fruit’s fresh unadulterated extract coated the blade, you proclaimed with your hands, it slicked back the mother world’s virulent germs with a momentary, viscous barrier. Then you had to be fast, to quickly claim the next fruit, before the microscopic predators fully tainted the blade. “I’ve done it,” you said. You could fake them out. “I can take those mangoes.”
Your girlfriend stared as if you were a starlit being of two heads. “Why don’t you take the mango to your aunt’s home, and wash it with your precious bottled water?”
“Why would I take it home, when I can eat it on the road?”
The shade of hood cut Abbie’s face at a diagonal. “To be safe? You know?”
You could only turn away. The clouded sky seemed a trammeled sheet of dull, dirty glass.
#
In the kitchen, Bunny’s four nephews eat their Last Meal before a return to boarding school. Scalding bowls of toor daal lentils sprinkled with green coriander stems steam unclaimed, as they make quick of masala chicken legs with tawa rotis. Archie, Secret Seven, Harry Potter paperbacks flock at little arms’ reach. The boys are garbed in identical cotton shirts with navy blue shorts, striped ties, polished shoes. Their Sikh boy topknots bind up in patka baby turbans—in smothering colors of gold, green, burgundy, orange. Their names are Randy, Sandy, Kuku, and Snoopy.
An elderly man ties tuck boxes, his actions dictated by two mothers sipping hot tea. Bunny introduces you to his sisters and you pretend to laugh at their flirting comments.
“A train of pretty goris must trail you back home,” the older one teases.
Your friend Bunny pulls at bashful Kuku’s patka. “I have to drop the monsters off at Sanavar.” In the Kasauli Hills. “Want to see where I studied?”
A mountain, above the riot. A place from where to see whole. You raise a Thumb’s Up bottle.
Bunny’s mother descends from upstairs. “Vinay, beta, you’ve come!” She embraces and assails you with questions.
“Beta, you’ve grown so tall and handsome, na? Just like your grandfather!”
You perform a little mischief. “Arey Auntie. Even taller.”
She likes that answer. She takes you by the arm and leads you to the dining room. “What degree will you do in college?”
Engineering, you say. It does not matter what field. She squeezes your arm.
“We must find you a good Punjabi girl. Do you like Punjabi girls?” When she smiles, her lip catches on a crooked incisor.
You poke the hoary north-south divide. “Maybe a South Indian girl, Auntie?”
“Arey!” She says to Bunny. “He’s fast!” She pets your scalp and blows a kiss. “Chal, sit. We have a special meeting for you, tomorrow.”
At lunch, the men recall the 1950s tyranny of Partap Singh Kairon, and how your mother’s father opposed him.
“Kairon hated your Nana,” Bunny’s father says.
“It’s true,” Daddy confirms proudly.
Bunny’s mother tells you a man is measured by how many come to see his pyre lit, not the Rupees hidden in his Godrej. “Your education will keep you free.”
You reach for a third green chili and Bunny’s father catches you in the act. “Baiy, ka-mal haiga.” He extends a showman’s hand. “Boy from New York eats more hari mirch than me!”
“Sheila has raised a beautiful boy,” Bunny’s mother says.
Her husband performs a mock half-salute. “We’ll make an Indian of you, yet.”
You agree and soon after excuse yourself to the loo.
Your mother told stories of your grandfather’s heroism in the revolution, how he took Britisher latthi sticks to his head, went to jails in non-violent protest. And after, how he wielded his power to beat Punjab into something more honorable: his midnight raids on the GT with a gun, surprise inspections as General Manager of a bus transport company, catching half-wit drivers pocket off-peak passenger fare. He never fired them, Mummy would say. He ordered them to his office and shouted and slapped them. End of year, he rated them A-1 and increased their salaries.
You remember him a sick old man, who asked you to sit at his bed and recite every Punjabi swear that involved fucking a mother or a sister or a donkey to old retired friends. Master of mimicry, you mother would say. You also remember the one angry time, when the Parkinson’s had its hold, and he shook with anger at the knowledge of all his grandchildren lost to emigration and dissolution in a white man’s world.
“Look at him!” He shouted at you. “Bloody American boy, pretending to be one of us.”
Oh-hoh-hohhh, your grandmother shushed him and his pain. “It’s all right, all right,” she said. “It is no thing.”
In the bathroom of this upper middle-class Indian house, you discover a cockroach meditating upon the tip of a toothbrush. The old man had a point. He always did.
You open your notebook. The roach’s antennae twitch in opposition.
“You and me, both,” you reply.
#
This is what the Desh showed you the day before.
It started with an old-school haggle. A Delhi auto rickshawalla lying about his broken meter, and offering only a flat rate to your Bhua’s kotih in Defense Colony.
“Three hundred Rupees!” Daddy laughed in the driver’s face. “Jaane bhi dho!”
These desperate men could always tell your father was secretly charmed by their moxie. Your Bhua couldn’t stand it. She would ruthlessly negotiate.
“You have lived too long over there,” she would say to Daddy.
You asked your father why he left India in the Sixties. He tired of the corruption, he said. And the mediocre jugaad solutions to every endless challenge. It was like an endless chowk, he told you. He needed to escape. Yet here he was, laughing with former countrymen over auto fare.
You studied the dogs, curled in retiring islands of brown and blonde fuzz amidst broken sidewalk blocks. Dog shit was ingeniously tucked between concrete cracks in these disjoint slabs. You had to be very, very careful in your American shoes.
A teenage boy in ragged pink shirt tapped your arm with a severed limb. You ignored him and studied a stack of aging Amar Chitra Katha comics, between towers of piled books in a shopfront that was the size of your bedroom door, back home. The atomized smell of soil, choking diesel, acrid smoke of wood-burning chulas from roadside hovels flooded your nostrils.
The ACK comics gave you a pantheon of little gods for every sundry phenomena to navigate the powers of the world and journey of your family. But it vexed you to reconcile these lesser titans with the One True Divine. There are the little gods, Mummy would say, and inside of each of us is the Big God. Both are true. We can adjust.
Daddy found some compromise with the rickshawalla and you both settled into the auto. The driver cranked a lever running the length of his ride. He leaned out and spat tobacco paan. The engine engaged and an old filmi song from Muquaddar ka Sikandar crackled past the dynamic range of a tiny speaker. The taxi circuited an errant tubewell and entered a mess of laneless traffic.
The auto strained to climb the incline of a three-lane flyover. Among low rooftops adorned by rigged phone and clotheslines, slim minarets upheld a white mosque. Young men in skullcaps leaned from a balcony, waving empty hellos.
At the stoplight the auto stalled, the driver cranked and spat.
The road came to a chowk, its asphalt boundary hemmed by tents of soiled canvas and plastic shower curtains. Barbers shaved faces next to boiling tea pots. A lean, lone cow ate placidly from a plastic bag of trash. Vendors sold cigarettes or newspaper-wrapped paan. Scaffolding on the center island elevated BSNL placards, proclaiming a new secular triumvirate: broadband, landline, mobile! A sparkly-eyed starlet beckoned to join a brave new technoverse: India is Shining.
Stall.
The lever was cranked, more spit spat.
Reverberations wound along your gut, a transverse wave rattling arm’s length as you held a trembling crossbar. At the next light, the sputtering force fell dead again.
Traffic throbbed in the slow flow summer loo. Under an outsized billboard of Sania Mirza, belting tennis racket in short skirt, you found the Little Girl watching you. She sat on the carrier of her brother’s black bicycle, holding his seat. Her brother studied the roundabout for openings. He watched every lane.
You puffed your cheeks and blew at the Little Girl, and she giggled. You waved to her and the Little Girl waved back.
A woman on a metallic-blue Scooty glided to a stop before the Girl, soles of chappals braking against road. And behind her arrived the grill of a Delhi Transport Corporation bus. A slogan along the green giant’s side declared it the world’s largest friendly CNG service.
The light changed and car horns sang. You thumbed your nose at the Little Girl. Her brother made his bid for the inner lane and she let go of the seat and played her nose back like an imaginary flute. She tumbled off the carrier, fell on her back on the gray asphalt, and the DTC’s tire rolled over her little body. It was done before you reclaimed the juddering crossbar.
That night after Daddy went to sleep, you asked your Bhua if she had ever seen such a thing? Her face thrummed with ancient energy. “It happens all the time,” she said.
You did not tell her the whole truth. You did not tell her the child died because of you.
#
In the mountains, mist rolls down steep climbs onto narrow roads that wind and re-wind. A girls’ hostel bus drones its horn continuously, pitching side to side like the best of Old India’s carriers. Bunny overtakes a Volvo bus sailing on massive Michelin tires, scoots about a dog lying on its side in the middle of the road. The boys are a gaggle of mayhem in the backseat, but they line up on tiny knees to observe the prone animal.
“Is he dead?” Sandy asks.
At a last outpost lined by a lane strangled with dust, children knock cricket balls and gulli sticks from alleys, run forth like savage springs. A shop manning trays of sweets boxed in glass cases co-habited by black flies plays backdrop to a disheveled woman who sings softly to a crying toddler. She presses her forehead against her boy’s head and props his trembling legs. He is naked at the waist. Runny feces dribbles down dark-skinned thigh to a soppy brown pool.
“Puttar.” Your father held your back, before you left for the mountains. “Drive well.”
Bunny makes merry fun of selecting a new cassette. The boys demand Lady Gaga, your friend makes grand defense for The Carpenters, and finally feigns defeat.
“Excuse me,” Snoopy taps your shoulder.
“Yes?”
“Have you always lived in New York City?”
“I’ve always lived there. I go to school in Boston, now.”
Awesome! I would love to see New York City,” he says. “Do you have a blonde girlfriend?”
Bunny tabla-thumps the steering. “Ex-cellent, question, Snoops. Vinay?”
At a crossing of cows, a young beggar and her baby girl discover you and Bunny and this car of well-heeled children. She taps your window, makes motions of scooping rice to her mouth and to her daughter’s mouth. The baby hitches to her mother’s side. She looks dazed.
“That’s funny,” you say. “Really funny.”
Bunny’s eyelids dim as he increases the volume on Bad Romance. “Then?” he says.
“Then, what?”
“My nephew has posed a perceptive question. What’s the answer?”
The woman continues to tap and tell her silent story. Her baby girl leans in with intrigue and taps your window a quarter-beat after her mother, keeping musical pace.
“Oi!” Randy angrily shoos at the mechanical AC air between him and the begging duo.
“I think blonde girls are hot,” says Snoopy. “I like when they wear tank-tops.”
Sandy and Kuku titter. The cows have cleared. Bunny gently picks up, and the double-tapping mother-daughter are gone.
“I think you should go back to your books,” you inform Mr. Snoopy Singh.
“Do you have a girlfriend, Uncle?” Sandy and Kuku sweetly pipe.
Now you’re an Uncle. “Cir-cuits are busy,” you quip in Desi accent.
“Hey, now,” Bunny lowers the music and wags his finger. “That’s-not-fair! He’s not answering the question! Is that fair, Randy?”
“No-it’s-not,” Randy says.
A red sinking sun takes form behind mountains that float on linings of fog. You see a pot of tea exploding in your face.
#
Abbie came to the airport arrivals with you at Logan, to see you off on your journey. She held onto your phone to look at photos while you went to the Men’s Room. She was bent forward, fingers scrolling the device, when you returned. Her tiny shorts exposed pale pink knees bent inward. Her copy of Ha Jin lay on the airport floor.
Unkempt darkened blonde curls veiled her face. When she looked up, her eyes were ghostly, holding the sick resonant white of airport light. “What is this?”
It was an incoming message, sent by your mother. Timed by the little god of WhatsApp to arrive as you were holding your fool self at a urinal. It was a picture of a young Punjabi girl, with tiny nose ring and sharp black bob, in a tight red and pink salwar kameez. A message from your mother below declared: Puttar, this is MAANSI. She is my friend’s niece. You will meet her in Chandigargh. She is a good MATCH. Meet her and be nice. She likes your photo. LOVE, Mummy.
Tears made the ends of Abbie’s face. “You haven’t told them. You lied to me.”
You took your phone from her, and she started to back away.
“My mother’s, planning, a fucking. Vegetarian, menu. For your visit.” She wheezed.
The little gods were Dionysian, you liked to tell yourself. Fool full of shit.
#
In a gravel lot marked by Marutis and SUVs, with stained glass English buildings perched at far perimeter, you discover Desi schoolboys stamped in the form of long-gone Englishmen. They shamble under giant backpacks led by parents who fondle their car keys. Gravely aged professors congregate in Catholic cloth, next to older lads who huddle in groups and hold hands.
“Goodness, Jeeves,” you murmur as Bunny orders the boys out. “Is this where P.G. Wodehouse came to die?” He doesn’t hear you.
Farewells, four handshakes, and Bunny leads you around the grounds. He tells you of morning PT and the awful incline he and his mates were forced to mount on empty stomachs. He elaborates on plans to move to Singapore and join his brother-in-law’s law office. He will return to the Desh after a three-year adventure. You agree it will be exciting.
#
The Little Girl was excited. Brother made his bid for the inner lane, and she played her nose, the way Spongebob Squarepants might on Nickelodeon. Daddy argued with the rickshaw driver for which exit to take.
Scooty-walli à la chappals cut the siblings and their cycle nearly toppled. The Little Girl tumbled off its carrier and fell on her back onto the gray asphalt. The DTC’s tire rolled over her little body. You watched as her bare legs and feet kicked up some clumsy dance.
The DTC rolled on, its tire drawing a distressed black streak. Its brake lights burned. Horns cried from there, and there, and traffic continued. A man in an orange shirt leaned from the rear to throw up. On the back of the accelerating vehicle read the advisory “Keep Your Distance.”
“That one is our exit,” Daddy commanded the driver, and your auto pulled away. The orbit of cars and scooters and cycles and trucks held. Where she was, where her brother was, you could no more guess. Above the motley mash of vehicles spanned a periodic array of Vodafone/Airtel banners, hung on inert poles girding the chowk’s outer ring, running round to no end.
#
Evening darkness comes, and you and Bunny return to the unlit road. A wild dog charges your headlights, its eyes disorienting reflectors of terror. “They always do that,” Bunny grumbles. Further down, a scarce spray-paint message greets you against a tall cliff: Jesus Never Fails.
Tail-lights along the mountainside create an erratic link of whites, reds, yellows. They extinguish and reignite behind and beyond unseeable bends. Bunny explains the flickering pattern helps judge how hard to hold the brake at each blind turn.
You think of the Little Girl on the road. How long did it take Brother to pedal back.
You roll down the window to contact air.
“No AC?” Bunny asks.
A scatter of oncoming lights, high and wide, falls against trees marking steep fall. The black grill of a lorry rounds the curve and its tanker wheels roil past you. Stink bomb of diesel and cloud of sediment. You roll the window up. They drive too close, is what you say.
“Teaches us to not fear the future,” Bunny ejects the tape. “What should we hear, next?”
You can hear the mountain. Lies don’t matter. Nothing does.
“Bunny, can we pull over?”
“Sab teekh?” Bunny asks. You politely nod. He points ahead. “There’s a Lover’s Point in five minutes, I’ll stop there.” Bunny places his palm on the dashboard. “Put your hand here.”
Below the Point’s parking lane lies a shallow gulch of peepal trees, hiding the tip-tip-tip of a frail stream. Bunny undoes two small Bisleris and hands you one. “Vinay, you okay?”
You rinse your mouth. The moist anion-rich air, cool watery trickle, narrow and draw your focus—to the automotive transition of silent blinking lights, far down the hill. You breathe deep, hold it in your stomach, and exhale a low hiss.
“It’s like a slithering snake,” you say.
“We called it Traffic Nag, in seventh standard,” Bunny says in a mock common prayer. “Our own made-up snake god, for all the bloody fools who drive up and down this mountain.”
You wipe your face. “Sorry, Bunny. I’m an idiot.”
You lie one more time.
“Too much tea.”
“Teekh hai, Munna,” Bunny pumps your shoulder. “Takes getting used to. More paani?”
You shake your head. “What if my bladder goes in your car.”
Bunny snaps his finger and points to a high bush. “On that issue, you go there.” His hand trails a half-circle away. “I’ll be over there. Meet you back here.”
You expose yourself among bramble. A hot throttle of urine confirms India got you, once more. A fever will come tonight. You watch the Nag.
You are tired of hiding. You want to travel to Abbie and tell her you love her, and that you can’t be of any of these worlds, but want to be with her. And tell her what you did, what you saw. You think of the Little Girl’s soiled, stout cheeks.
You should never have waved. Never.
Say only the needed.
It doesn’t matter, the blinking lights sigh. It never mattered.
The mountain relief yawns of celestial power. Its vertical, heedless drag impresses soughing dread; yet, down the hill, an apparition comes into form. You are struck pure dumb. The Traffic Nag winks, it is a gimcrack caravan of lit and unlit life. It comes and it goes, and its gaps are the very contours you have sought. Without them, without the extinction, there is no slither, no accommodating of a way down the mountain. A billion pleading voices diffusing away, diffusing back, traveling up, traveling down. You open your notebook to inspect your crude sketch of the chowk. You look down, and you see the Nag see you. Capital G Big God.
Your notebook falls into the bushes of the dark gulch. The tip-tip-tip of a stream continues.
Bunny sits on his bonnet texting the family cook. “Can you believe there’s signal up here? A-ma-zing!” He is renewed, all smirks and dimples. “Halke hogaye? Feeling lighter?”
You bobble your head. “Challo. Let’s make a move.”
Bunny gently applauds. “Damn good. That was pakkha Indian.” The bawarchi is preparing a batch of pakoras for you both, he says, with cold beer. He reverses the car. “What’re we listening to, Munna?” You insert Physical Graffiti and turn up the volume. Bunny gives the gas a light touch. “Excelsior. All right, young man, let’s get you home in one piece. You have a little coffee date with my cousin, tomorrow.”
“Bedha-gardkh,” you say. You both laugh, and the Maruti is off.
But in your ear, the Traffic Nag has found you, and he tells it different.
Not at all. It is all Jugaad, Vinay Kohli. Watch every lane. You will find your road.
Contributor Notes
Sajan Saini is a research scientist, writer, lecturer, and education specialist with more than 20 years of experience in the fields of silicon and integrated photonics. He is the education director for the AIM Photonics Academy program and the Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing (IKIM) at MIT. Dr Saini earned his PhD at MIT in 2004 and has worked with the MIT Microphotonics Center, been a professor with the physics department at Queens College of CUNY (City University of New York), and lectured with the writing program at Princeton University. At AIM Academy and IKIM, he oversees the production of all teaching and learning materials, including online courses, VR-simulation training, certification courses, summer academy and bootcamp training, technician training, and education roadmapping.
