Revised from the original on December 31, 2024
You are a nineteen-year-old fool. Playing at manhood. You think yourself so clever. That you can be of both worlds and deceive everyone. But you’re a Bloody American Boy who watched a child die on a dirty Delhi road. And now a second fright has made you piss, ever so slightly, your fine cotton pants. Welcome back to the Desh, you 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 in with Daddy to Chandigargh, to meet your friend Bunny. Your North Star. 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 your father’s rambling tale from the backseat about hitching a ride in the fifties with a drunk trucker at the Phakra Canal. Perhaps Shinda Ji believed in his pathetic karma, that today was not his day. All you could do was stare the 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 horn as the beast blew by. You could almost hear Abbie’s voice above its shriek. You fucking coward.
For a moment, you wished you were safely back at your Bhua’s house in Delhi. You stayed there for the past three days, before the journey into Punjab. The First Class security of the Shatabdi was preferred, of course. But the trusted 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. The chaos of GT traffic was unsettling. She only agreed by arranging for a veteran 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. The child in you wanted to cry into her sari.
Enough. You knew in the way your bony aunt stared, like an owl appraising a rodents’ rubber belly. Here, there is no room for weakness. Everyone speaks with their eyes.
You hid your sorrow behind reassuring humor. “Bhu Ji, 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 to make an engineer’s life in the thermal plants. “Now, go.” She pulled her pallu across her chest and dismissed you. Your Bhua was a tall woman, unusually so for Indians, with silver and black hair that refused to remain drawn back. She wore great black glasses and only blue saris.
The road is quiet again, and Daddy’s story is mercifully done. You cross your legs tightly and sketch the Roadways bus quickly in your notepad, as Mrs. Espinosa taught you in New York at the Art Students League when you were sixteen. Catch the bones first, Vinay. Don’t fear gaps, it’s why we start by pencil. Details come when you see the whole.
You saw the whole of it on the Delhi road yesterday. With your pencil, you have tried to see the bones of the Little Girl.
It was Bunny who first inspired you to draw India. “You have a real eye,” he said, studying your artbook. His proper name was Balbir Singh Girewal. “You may call me Bunny,” he said in 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 a black angular turban with roving, signal eyes. In the two years of his stay to earn an LLM, you never saw the inside of his coveted Alphabet City apartment. But on the third weekend of each month, he claimed your mother’s standing invitation to visit, dine, opine. He called your parents his local guardians. Bunny was his pet name, and he’d invented his own diminutive for you, calling you Munna. He introduced you to Pink Floyd and Malkiat Singh and shared his copies of P.G. Wodehouse. All you had to offer was proud house local DJ Rekha. He was too good at navigating Indian and American worlds.
“Daddy,” you call to the back of the car. “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 gray and henna-dyed hair. “I don’t know his father,” he says. Later that day you would wonder how well you actually knew Bunny.
Daddy has rented a fine room in a fine hotel, choosing not to avail of Bunny’s repeated invitation to stay at his parents’ home. You wondered what offense this might bring to your reunion. There is the deep tradition of hospitality. He 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.”
You had heard it many times. “Your father knows how to move in the world,” Bhua said. When Partition happened, the family lost everything, and he became a man at fourteen, she told you. Their father, a principal and arts teacher, did not work again. From a well-to-do family in Lahore, they became refugees in Delhi. The fourteen-year-old man and his brothers learned to adjust to the new India. They kept the family alive and held their dignity. 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 was proud of him. But she feared for you both on the GT.
“He has low tolerance,” Bhua said the night before. “That highway is fast. You help him now, you watch every lane.”
To your left you observe a Sardar on a pea green Bajaj scooter transport two women in orange and green salwar kameez dresses with ambiyaan-mango embroidery. They self-stack behind him like compressed bogies. The Sardar wears a glass faceplate, held by a large black band that pulps the back of his turban.
“Look at that fool!” Daddy says. “The helmet of his, look at it.”
Shinda Ji caresses his five o’clock. Curled fingers stroke nibs of black moustache. “Here everything goes, Sahb Ji. Jugaad, it is.” The Indian word for the jury-rigged, the mix and match.
“At least he protects his face,” you say. “The bibis behind him have less.”
The three of you laugh, jolly sholly. Good Punjabi humor.
“Beda gark,” your father says. Shinda Ji snorts up a rich dollop of mucus.
Back in Delhi, your Bhua simply called him “Driver.” When she was at a distance, you addressed him by the honorific Ji, as he checked oil in his engine block. He was a stout man in a dark booshirt, and his walrus moustache poised to fall from shame for the humbling respect you gave his low-caste name. He complimented your father. Your son is raised so well. He told you that he came from nothing and now ran four taxis. Daddy liked him. You liked him, too.
You sketch a two-lane highway versus a rotary chowk, that roundabout place where lanes come in to disappear, 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 opportunity.
When a yellow and blue Tempo comes from nowhere and ploughs through to overtake your Ambassador taxi from the right, you shout: “Shinda Ji!”
The driver swears and pumps his brake. “Penh chaud!”
Flimsy Tempo tires ratchet asphalt, pelt stones at your bulky car. Shinda Ji’s window rolls up and rolls down. “Ulu da patha!”
But this is the Desh, and the Desh abides. The Tempo 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 mounted in his steering wheel. Two short horns, one long.
“Arey, Oi!” his head all out the window. “Put your thumb in your ass when you—”
The Tempo tips, scrapes, 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, 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. “Very good, Chotte Sahb.” He compliments you with a classic head wobble.
Your father taps your seat. A cord of muscle buckles a tumble of humid hair along his forearm. “Good job, son.”
You hide in your notepad and study the outline of a chowk. It is not a good job. The sketch is missing the Little Girl. The way you moved yesterday led to her death. You half wobble to Daddy and try to let it rest.
#
A month before leaving for the Desh, you performed your facsimile of the Indian head wobble. You learned it from Bunny, years ago. It was his practiced gesture of evasion, when his words may say one thing, and that cranial tumble might suggest otherwise. Neither your mother nor your father wobbled. They were emigrants from an era removed.
Your girlfriend Abbie snorted and set your steel pestle down. “Honestly? You look like a bobble toy on a dashboard.”
You playfully winced as fingers wandered over her hip. You were making chai in your college dormitory’s communal kitchen.
Abbie snuffled the hollow of your collarbone. “You smell nice, Vinay.” She pronounced your name with nearly the fidelity of your parents’ elegant accents. You never thought a gori girl would try so hard.
“Spicy bodunkadunk, amirite?”
“More exotic fragrance of Dial soap, I’d say.”
You laughed. “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.
Beda gark. You told her how embarrassed you were for the exotic cardamom stink of your spilled concoction in this room. How others might complain.
Abbie threaded her fingers between the buttons of your shirt and asked about your annual visit to India. “What do you love most about Delhi?”
“I can disappear there,” you said. That was a lie. But she bought it.
#
“Vinay!” A strange man in close-cropped hair and Tom Selleck slim-fit moustache intercepts you, in the hotel lobby in Chandigargh, and forces a hug. “Welcome to the Desh.”
You are stunned. Bunny’s beloved beard and turban are gone, he looks like an Italian tourist in straight jeans and worn Reeboks. The AC in the hotel lobby assails you at this moment of recognition.
Your father has great teasing fun. “So, your New York days have changed you!”
Bunny hugs him. “Time for some change.”
You adjust to accommodate. “You look good, my man.” Bunny appears pleased for your comment, even though it is a lie.
Your friend and father perform 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. The driveway to this hotel is very American.
“Bunny.” You try for a head wobble. “Challo, let’s go.”
He wobbles back, sympatico. “Let’s make a move.”
It is as if he no longer belongs here. Yet, he still moves as one of them.
#
Outside Bunny’s gated house, you spy a driver against a 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 and scores of jamun and masambi litter the road.
You think of the Little Girl on the road. Was there a way out of that chowk? To what?
Bunny lets you drop the latch on the gate. You take initiative to greet his father in the driveway. “Sasriakaal, Ji.”
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 small 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.
There is 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. You have barely eaten since yesterday. Rage and sorrow broil in you. But chai, challo then.
A clutch of Uncles talk loud of American fascism, and roar over a sexual 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 wobble. 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 Thums Up soda, to another cup of spicy chai?
Bunny formally waves away the servant. “Chai for the Babu.”
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 on 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 notepad, you finish a thumbnail of the monster you saw this morning on the GT. The Little Girl is unfinished.
“What you up to, Munna?” Bunny swipes the pad from your hand, flips its pages easily. He sees the unfinished portrait and hands it back. “Dispatches from the edge?”
There is no knowing to his eye. He does not remember how he set you on this road, years ago. But he is still your friend. You wink back.
“What do you make of our India, young man?” demands Bunny’s father.
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, wobbles 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. Rich, poor, Brahmin, achhut. Anything happens.”
“But, the chowk,” the MP interrupts. “It’s a genius thing the English gave, haina?”
Nehru-Jacket-Uncle nods wisely. “The chowk is a madhouse. But it does accommodate the chaos of our roads. All the bloody slummies and their jugaad autos. It is a solution.”
Daddy sets his Johnny down. “Adjust karo.”
“That’s it only, Uncle!” Bunny says.
Achhut, slummy, chuhra. Words to denote people born of rank poverty. Dunderhead sets down a plate of triangled pinwheel sandwiches, and the miry disquiet in your gut soon compromises for greedy hunger. You champ on triple-decker bread lathered in everyman Amul tin-cheese, green pudina chutney, red Maggi ketchup pimped to one-up old Heinz. Worlds collide in your mouth.
#
“I don’t hide,” you said to Abbie.
“No? I do.” she replied.
On a grassy bank near campus, you watched a crew of Ivy women coast over a pallid river. Abbie’s family owned a bowling alley in a small Nebraska town. Her grandfather literally grew up with dirt floors. Her parents were so proud of her, of what she had accomplished, coming out East. She pulled her hoodie over entangled hair and studied the tall women on the river in their privileged gear. You learn tricks in the Seven Sisters to fool your classmates, 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.
She asked you what you did that was so different.
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 the germs out. “I can take those mangoes.”
Mangoes were the fruit of knowledge, you added with a coy wink. Claimed by the little elephantine demigod Ganesh in an Indian myth. People called him the remover of obstacles.
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 with everyone?”
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 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 Sikhboy 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.
Bunny pulls at bashful Kuku’s patka. “I have to drop the monsters off at Sanavar.” He turns to you. “Want to see where I studied?”
The Kasauli Hills. A mountain, above the riot. A place from where to see whole. You raise a Thums 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 claims that part of your grandfather was reborn in you. You wonder where the suffering old man will be reborn next.
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. As you once told Ms. Espinosa, your heart is with illustration. Auntie 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 looks you in the eye. “Chal, sit.” She blows a kiss. “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 lathi 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 revolver, surprise inspections as General Manager of a bus transport company, catching half-wit drivers pocket off-peak passenger fare.
You remember him a sick old man, who asked you to sit by his bed at age of ten and recite every Punjabi swear that required fucking a mother or a sister or a donkey to old retired friends. 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, it’s all right,” she said. “It is no thing.”
In the bathroom of this affluent Indian house, you discover a lowly cockroach meditating upon the tip of a toothbrush. The old man had a point. He always did.
You open your notepad. The roach’s antennae twitch in opposition. Yesterday comes back as an unspoiled flood.
#
It started with an old-school haggle. A Delhi auto rickshawalla lying about his broken meter, 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 unrelenting challenge. It was like a mindless chowk, he told you. He had to escape. Yet here he was, laughing with former countrymen over auto fare.
A teenage boy in ragged pink shirt tapped your arm with a severed limb. The atomized smell of soil, choking diesel, acrid smoke of wood-burning chulas from roadside hovels engulfed you. It made it easy to ignore him and his eyes.
In the end, Daddy found his compromise and you both settled into the rickshaw. 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 school of laneless traffic.
The auto strained to climb the mighty incline of a three-lane flyover. You made your devotional offering to the combusting mule, by inhaling its ignited petrol molecules. 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 large chowk, hemmed by tents of soiled canvas and plastic shower curtains. Barbers shaved faces next to boiling tea pots. A lean cow ate placidly from and of plastic bags of trash. Vendors hawked single cigarettes and newspaper-wrapped paan. A BSNL billboard proclaimed a new secular triumvirate of digital gods—broadband, landline, mobile! A sparkly-eyed starlet beckoned to join this brave new technoverse: India is Shining.
Stall.
The lever was cranked, more spit spat. Return to life.
Reverberations wound along your gut, a transverse wave rattling arm’s length as you held a juddering crossbar. At the next light, the sputtering force fell dead again.
Traffic throbbed in the slow flow summer loo. Under an outsized poster 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. She wore a soiled yellow frock and had bare feet. Her amla-oiled short hair refused to remain drawn back. Her brother studied the roundabout for openings. He watched every lane.
You puffed your cheeks and blew at the Little Girl, and she giggled. There were untold tales in her tiny little eyes. You waved and she waved back while your father argued with the rickshawalla over which exit to take.
A woman on a metallic-blue Scooty glided to a stop before the Girl, soles of chappals braking against road. 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.
Scooty-walli 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 her bare legs and feet kick up a clumsy dance and splatter.
The DTC rolled on, its tire drawing a distressed black streak. Its brake lights burned. Horns cried from there, and there, and traffic continued. 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.
You asked your Bhua that night 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. Bunny’s Maruti auto 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.
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.
Snoopy taps your shoulder. “Excuse me. 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, hitched to her mother’s side, looks dazed. There are no clever messages in their eyes. What you see is fear and loss.
“That’s funny,” you say. “Really funny.”
A dimple forms by Bunny’s mouth. He increases the volume on Bad Romance. “Then?”
“Then, what?”
“My nephew has posed a perceptive question,” your friend says. “What’s the answer?”
The woman continues to tap out 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.”
You draw down your window and hand the young mother your hundred Rupee note. A child in the rear gasps. The woman pleads with folded hands. Her baby pulls at your arm.
Challo, you mouth silently to Bunny. His eyelids dim and he turns the clutch to gently pick up. A red sinking sun takes form behind mountains that float on linings of fog. You remember 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. Tiny shorts revealed pale knees bent inward. Unkempt dark curls veiled her face. When she looked up, her eyes were ghostly, holding the sick resonant white of airport light. “What is this?”
An incoming message, sent by your mother. Timed by the little demigod of WhatsApp to arrive as you held your fool self at a urinal. It was a picture of a young Punjabi woman, with tiny nose ring and sharp black bob, in a tight ferozi and blue kurti. 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.
“My mother’s, planning, a fucking. Vegetarian, menu. For your visit.” She wheezed.
You are a fool.
#
In a gravel lot marked by Marutis and SUVs you discover more Desi schoolboys stamped in the form of long-gone Englishmen. They shamble under giant backpacks led by parents who fondle car keys. Gravely aged professors congregate in Catholic cloth, next to older lads who huddle in groups and hold hands.
Bunny orders the boys out. Farewells, four handshakes, and Bunny leads you around the grounds. He tells you of morning PT and an 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.
And then he gently cautions you for your actions at the small outpost town. “Don’t get to the mouths of these slummies, Vinay.”
You feel a chill and finally see the bones of your friend Bunny.
On the ride down the dark mountainside, auto tail-lights 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 pretend to listen. Secretly you think of the Little Girl on the road. How long did it take Brother to pedal back? And what did he find?
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.
Bunny ejects the tape. “What should we hear, next?”
You can hear the mountain. The sounds of the chowk. And you can almost hear the sound of the Little Girl’s laughter as she let go of the bike.
“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.” He 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 of a frail stream. You try to picture it as Bunny undoes two small Bisleris and hands you one. You rinse your mouth. The cool watery trickle draws 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. “Our own made-up snake god, for all the bloody fools who drive up and down this mountain.”
You wipe your face. “Sorry, Bunny. Too much tea.”
“Teekh hai, Munna,” Bunny pumps your shoulder and parks the car. “Takes getting used to. Meet you back here.”
You stand among the peepal trees. You think of the Little Girl’s soiled, stout cheeks. You blundered that Little Girl's life away, you Bloody American Boy.
The unfinished portrait of the lost child is in your notepad with your crude sketch of the chowk. You look down and you see the Traffic Nag. A gimcrack caravan of life. A billion pleading voices traveling up, traveling down. Born and reborn, born and reborn.
The Girl will try, again.
When you return, Bunny is seated 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 wobble your head. “Challo. Let’s make a move.”
Bunny gently applauds. “Damn good. That was pakka Indian.” The bawarchi is preparing a batch of pakoras, 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.”
You have no doubt this Maansi girl will be smart and sexy in that conservative Indian way. She will tug at something inside. Doesn’t matter. You will speak with your eyes and she will see.
“Beda gark,” 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 writer, educator, and former scientist in integrated photonics. He is the education director for the Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing at MIT. He has previously lectured with the writing program at Princeton University, and was a professor with the physics department at Queens College of CUNY (City University of New York). This is his debut short story.
