She Will Build Him a City (38 page)

~

That’s so many places for Orphan to live, they will say.

And if one them asks, Ms Rose, Ms Rose, which is the safest, most secure home of them all, Ms Rose will pause, take a deep breath, think hard before she answers.

WOMAN

Waking Up

This is a summer night, hot, gathering dark, when I will go up the stairs, on tiptoe, walk into your room hoping to find you, curled up, a blue-jeans comma on the white sheet, the room so cold I will shiver before I switch off both fan and air conditioner, banish their noise into a sudden silence in which I will hear you breathe.

The water, condensed, drips down the wall outside.

Soon, it will be morning, I shall open the windows, let the sun in to wake you up – bright and soft before it begins to climb into the hard sky, char and scorch whatever it can see.

You will wake up, on this first day here, you will walk downstairs, sit at the kitchen table, across from me. Of course, you will be awkward, your toes will curl up so that they do not touch the floor because it’s covered with dust of the day and the night gone by. You will despair when you find that you have retraced your steps to the past which you, so boldly, escaped.

You will feel the crushing weight of this despair – the walls will close in on you, squeeze both air and light out so that you will find it harder to see, harder to breathe. And when you watch me in the morning light, you will see your mother but you will also see a woman, very old and very weak, counting the hours, with nothing left to do.

Looking at me, therefore, you will be unsure where to begin, how to begin. But if you do decide to speak, I will help you by looking the other way so that we are not eye to eye. Because, after all, what we need are not eyes to judge but ears to lend. Maybe you will then tell me about the man you love and you will tell me about the baby you have lost. You will tell me about the hurt, cold and knotted, blue and grey and black, that you carry inside and outside. In the severe lines on your face and under your eyes. In all your bruises, in the burn marks across your back and on your arms, in the welts on your wrists and above your knees. So many of them, the hard prints of your pain.

You will tell me, Ma, I am tired, my eyes close, my legs hurt. But I am afraid, my child, I can no longer lift you up, I can no longer carry you or walk with you until you fall asleep but we are lucky the giants are here. Not one, not just the woman, 12 feet tall, but her friends and family, too, and they are going to be here as long as you are. They are very eager to help. They tell me they want to meet you. They are waiting outside.

As for your future, I am not sure if I can help. What I am sure of, however, is that I am your past. And although most of me is over and finished, I am hard and I am solid. I am all that has happened, not what may happen or what should happen. I exist and I am real, I am the ground you can stand on knowing that it is reliable, that I am time-tested. It is in this house where you come home when you are born, where you first find love. And now that you are back, it’s in this house where we will find love again.

As I will tell you and as I will show you, there is enough for both of us and there’s a lot left over for the lost child, we will give him a name and we will bring him home from wherever he is.

Can you hear me? You will wake up, won’t you?

MAN

Falling Man

A
s if drawn by invisible strings, he steps out of the living room onto the verandah, begins to walk towards Balloon Girl, step by heavy step. His left foot has woken up but, in his shoes, he can feel the remnants of the heaviness and pain from his sleep. His arm still hurts, he wants to rest it; he wants to take his shoes off to let his feet breathe. For, barring a few hours at The Leela – where he gave the shoes to Housekeeping to be polished – his feet have been trapped in them, through the heat of the day in the car and outside, the streets of New City and Paris and then Singapore and now, in his own house. But with Balloon Girl now barely a few feet away, dazzling in the dark, light rain falling on her face, his face, the discomfort he feels in his feet soon disappears and a music begins to fill his ears.

It’s a symphony of sounds: the noise her bare feet make when they land on the ledge, the soft swish of her white dress, the wind sliding against the skin of Red Balloon, her breathing, sharp, fast, and, of course, the sounds of his own making, his shoes against the floor, the doors closing behind him – all working in perfect harmony like a piece of music that writes itself and then plays itself as well.

She calls out his name.

He is inches away from her. She sits on the ledge, offers him her hand to hold and once her fingers, soft and cold, curl tight around his, she stands up and begins to rise.

First, imperceptibly, off the ledge, and then the clearing between her feet and the ledge increases, a millimetre each second, so that in five minutes, she is a foot above, in the air, and slowly rising, and it’s when her feet clear his head, it’s then that he begins to rise.

~

They are both off the ledge now, in the air, the night sky waiting to receive them, Red Balloon lifting him and his love higher and higher.

He can see The Leela below, is that his room, the windows fogged, have they discovered Taxi Driver’s body, he can see the highway unspool beneath them like a black ribbon, the mynah birds sleeping in the rafters, to his left is the glass dome of the New City Station in which, reflected, are the headlights of the day’s first Metro getting ready to roll out and they float across the city, hand in hand, until she says, let’s go home now.

And, he says, yes, let’s.

And he marvels at how this little child has taken charge of him and how she will lead him now, from their fleeting present to their enduring future, where they will live happily ever after, and he feels a sudden calm descend over him. They are moving fast now as they come in, faster and faster, pulled down by the earth, the wind whistling across his face, back to where they took off from, he can see the verandah of his apartment and its ledge, a thin strip of red cement on which Balloon Girl danced, in perfect balance. Will she now land feet first? Will she guide him down? Will she walk into his house with him? He asks of himself these questions and then stops worrying about the answers because he knows that Balloon Girl will take care of everything, just as she has done in the past, and that’s why he doesn’t even realise that she has let go.

That she and Red Balloon are flying higher and higher into the dark that drapes New City, and from up above she is watching him, the starlight in both her eyes, and when he looks up, he can see her crying, one tear drops, its wetness brushes his face and it’s only when he brings his hand to his face to wipe it that he realises he is on his own and he is falling.

CHILD

Love Stories

M
s Rose, thank you for telling us where Orphan can be but which is the safest, most secure home of them all? Ms Rose will take a deep breath and say:

~

Beyond The Mall, there’s another place, more secure than any of the ones I have just mentioned. It’s a place where Orphan will always have a home, where he will be sheltered, fed, washed and clothed, where he will be told stories, where he will be taught letters and numbers, how to speak and how to listen, where someone will watch over him as he sleeps, where he will find love whenever he goes looking for it.

Such a place can only be another heart.

And one such heart in New City belongs to a woman named Kalyani Das. For Orphan to always have this place, she will, of course, have to be cured of her illness and united with her dreams.

Which is what I will do, says Ms Rose, give him a love story, which is what only I can do. Because take my name, she says, take all the letters in it, mix them up, throw them up in the air, look where they land, pick them up, one by one, and rearrange them to change my name.

~

Violets Rose.

Love Stories.

MEANWHILE

A Gift For Apartment Complex Security Guard

Light rain drizzles the streets giving New City, baked by sun the entire day, the damp fragrance of dew. Thin sheets of water, blown across by a wind that’s barely there, shimmer like curtains of glass that break, silently, around buildings, their hard angles where mortar and cement, bricks and paint together touch the sky through which he falls, head first.

Balloon Girl watching, her tears falling, he makes contact at the precise moment the front wheels of a giant truck slip into a pothole near the entrance to Apartment Complex. Tipping over its cargo of stone chips weighing almost a ton making a noise so loud that no one hears the thud of his body, the fall of kilograms, sixty, sixty-five, towards the centre of the earth.

No one hears his head open when it hits the concrete, no one watches it explode into streaks of black, red and brown. Hair and blood, tissue, skin, what lies between and beneath, splatter the wall behind the row of parked cars. Shards of his bones skitter away, as if each one were alive.

No one hears this except Security Guard because these sound like a shower of small stones thrown, in mischief, as a prank by boys in some upstairs apartment.

Who’s there, asks Security Guard. Who is awake at this time doing this, he thinks?

He looks up, there is no one, just the faces of sleeping apartments, their window eyes closed.

~

Security Guard finds his body.

The neck has snapped, the face turned at so impossible an angle, it is draped in its own shadow. Security Guard sits down on his haunches, leans forward, crouches, then goes down on all fours, turns the body around to see who he is.

It’s Sir.

Sir, who lives alone. Sir, who, last night, tells him to be more responsible at work, Sir who gives him 500 rupees for not letting the maid disturb him.

Sir, whose body is warm.

Sir, whose shoes are black, made of soft leather. Almost new.

Perfect fit for his son’s feet.

~

His youngest son, who asks him – every time he calls home – for money to buy shoes. His youngest son, who, although Security Guard will never admit it to anybody, he loves the most. More than his other children because the boy works so hard, the boy never complains, the boy never makes his mother angry, the boy has done so well in school that his teacher says, let him study further, he deserves to be the first college graduate in the family.

That boy wants shoes and there’s no use for Sir’s shoes anymore.

Because the police will take Sir’s body to the mortuary where the post-mortem man will throw these shoes away, maybe sell them for scrap.

But, no, he cannot, he will not defile Sir’s body, he will not steal, but this is not stealing. Sir will not mind, Sir is a good man, because even that night when Sir warns of punishment, Sir never tells the estate manager anything.

So Security Guard looks left, Security Guard looks right, he looks over his shoulder, behind and in front, and when he is sure no one in New City is looking except the night and the rain, he sits down and pulls each shoe out, very slowly, just in case there is life still inside Sir, although he can feel the soles of his feet, through the socks, rapidly turning cold. Security Guard puts the shoes in the plastic bag in which he brings his dinner from home, then calls Main Gate of Apartment Complex to report a suicide.

WOMAN

Summer Night

H
e is dead, you do not need to worry any more, you have nothing and nobody to fear.

~

Balloon Girl, too, is safe, as she will fly away, across the night sky, into the star dust where children go once they die, her path lit by the fireflies I told you about, into the dark where Bhow has gone, too, jumping out of the moving van, bounding down the street like a plane taxiing for take-off before she lifts off the ground and enters the clouds.

Red Balloon, its gas slowly draining, weighed down by tiny raindrops, will begin to fall.

A light wind will push it clear of Apartment Complex but it may not be strong enough to take it where it should go.

So let’s wait and watch and, if more force is needed, I shall summon the giants, get them to quickly form a huddle, put their heads together, blow and blow, send out a gust so powerful that it will push Red Balloon across the highway, nudge it into The Mall, through the glass doors, make it float three flights up the escalator, right up to Europa where it will slip in through the metal detector, enter the theatre, seek Orphan out and float down, come to rest, the shy balloon next to the little boy fast asleep, maybe the start of a new friendship.

Watching over both will be Ms Violets Rose, you know how special she is, she has marked out all the places where Orphan can live, in The Mall and outside. But we cannot take any chances.

~

What if Ms Rose leaves him one day, taking all her love stories with her?

What if Kalyani never gets well? What if the police demolish the slum, scatter her family?

What if developers tear down The Mall to build another, convert Europa into a store, wrench all its seats out, leaving Orphan no place to hide? Bhow gone, what if they chase him out of whichever space he slips into, don’t let him sleep even under the highway?