She Will Build Him a City (5 page)

He doesn’t have a florist as in Park Slope, its rows of peonies, lilies, dahlias, red, white and purple, under the azure Brooklyn sky, waterdrops like pearls sitting on petals; golden-skinned women pushing strollers, pregnant; hearts, newly formed, beating under blue dresses.

There’s no river beside his street, as in Paris, no beautiful Algerian woman wrapping oven-fresh croissants in butter paper, no tiny cars scurrying around like bugs in picturebooks, no evening light dappling the tall glass windows.

There’s no manicured rainforest as in Singapore, leaves draped over flyovers like thick green curtains. Spotless quadrangles on Orchard Road, odour-free toilets in Sentosa, a little corner to wash the sand off your feet. Women, slender, in beige and black, their skin smooth and white as steamed fish, the scales removed.

What’s here, instead, outside Apartment Complex, in New City?

Garbage the size of a hill.

Six giant sewer pipes, waiting for almost a year to be installed Godknowswhere. These serve as homes for mothers and babies who sleep after their day’s work at a nearby construction site.

There are six security guards huddled at the gate, forced to wear long-sleeved shirts and ties in this heat. Two are from Bihar, the other four from Uttar Pradesh, all leaving behind fathers with cancer, mothers with TB, wives with uterine cysts, children who have dropped out of school, all waiting for Rs 4,000 to come every month.

They carry disease and death, grief and rage.

Yes, there is a florist, right next to The Mall, but the shop is wet, you walk through mud to reach flowers that wilt. The man who prepares the bouquet sprays his hollow cough on the plastic wrap.

No florist, no river, no rainforest.

But his is the biggest house of them all.

~

Six rooms (6,275 square feet carpet area, Rs 5 crore cost price, market value Rs 12 crore, $2 million). Great community, peer comfort, barely a mile from The Leela, the seven-star hotel (rack rate for Single Deluxe Suite: Rs 32,540 per night, drop-off and pick-up from Indira Gandhi International Airport in a BMW 6i), half a mile from The Mall (4.3 million square feet of retail space). The apartment is his, he owes nothing to no one. He spent Rs 1.5 crore on its interiors, double-glazed Fenestra windows imported from Bangkok, false ceiling for air-conditioned vents, rafters for special energy-saving fluorescent lights the contractor said he got from Belgium. He spent so much because they pay him so much. Why, he doesn’t know. He has stopped asking this question. What does he do to get paid so much? He once knew but now isn’t sure. What he knows, for sure, is that he is going to kill – and get away.

~

Because quite a few get caught these days. Even the rich ones because you can no longer buy your way out of everything. Because there’s no stopping the lynch mob, hungry and thirsty, fed and watered by TV. He has seen their victims, checked towels covering the face, herded into Tis Hazari Court by dirty cops in dirty uniform. Chased by reporters. There’s one reporter he loves to look at. Every time she comes on, he spreads her legs inside his head, he pushes the microphone deep inside her, switches off all the lights, lies down on the sofa to listen to her spasm magnified through his home theatre. He saw her first when she was reporting on the Rahul Malhotra case: Malhotra, the grandson of a former chief of the Air Force, visiting home from Stanford, driving a Ferrari on his way home after a party, ran over six people sleeping on the street, got away because the witnesses turned hostile, one by one. One said it was a truck that ran them over, not a car; another said the car had wings and flew away.

Malhotra was convicted, let off on good conduct.

He isn’t Rahul Malhotra, he can’t pull strings, he knows no one powerful.

His father is a simple man.

Like the man in that Gieve Patel painting, the old man wearing old glasses, in the rain with bread and bananas.

~

Race Course gone.

Next station Jor Bagh.

Next station INA.

Only two other passengers in his coach now.

An elderly man with a woman, much younger, both with their eyes closed as if in invitation, to let him look at them. Perhaps, a father and daughter, he thinks, but the way her head rests on his shoulder, their fingers lock, they may be man and wife. For a moment, he’s tempted to sit next to her, smell the heat from her hair, but, no, he won’t because he likes standing, the train rocking him, the knowledge that he, and steel and glass, and these two lovers on board, old and young, are all hurtling, together, through the blackness beneath the city.

~

Next station is AIIMS. Doors will open to the left.

11.49 p.m.

This isn’t his stop but he steps off the train.

~

All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

1.5 million patients, 100,000 surgical operations a year, over a thousand doctors and nurses, tons and tons of white cotton wool. Bloodstains, cancer, tumours, trauma, tubes, monitors, oscilloscopes, MRI plates against light frosted white, beeps, blood, IV drips, men, women and children, some newborn, some dead, some dying. He walks towards the hospital, the heatwave so thick it’s like walking through sludge. At the entrance, right next to security, there’s a girl selling a red balloon, with a woman, apparently her mother.

The balloon stains the night like a drop of blood on a slide.

~

Albert Lamorisse, 1956, Paris,
Le Ballon Rouge,
he bought the movie DVD via Amazon.com, got it delivered to Aatish’s apartment in New York, Fedexed to him on his birthday. His favourite is the last scene in which a cluster of countless coloured balloons carry the boy across the sky above the city.

~

He asks, ‘How much?’

Balloon Girl and her mother walk towards him.

The night is silent except for the light fall of their footsteps. He sees wary smiles in their eyes, trusting in the dark.

Looks like Red Balloon is leading the girl on.

‘Only ten rupees,’ says Balloon Girl.

CHILD

City Route

Orphan’s first day out is planned as an event, carefully choreographed by Kalyani Das and Dr Chatterjee, that begins with an email the doctor drafts and redrafts, at least six times, before sending it to the director, Mr Sharma, requesting that he be allowed to take Orphan out for an hour or so.

Sir, with all due respect, may I suggest, in the spirit of freedom that you have so carefully nurtured in Little House, that Orphan be allowed to choose the route we take on his first day out? Let’s give him a map of the National Capital Region, let’s give him a pen, let Orphan trace a line, a curve, whatever. And that’s the route we shall take him on
.

Three days later, comes the reply:

Dear Dr Chatterjee, normally I wouldn’t say this to a staffer but you are a student to me, you are learning. So let me tell you that rules in the government are like lines drawn in stone. All children here are in our custody as per a solemn, binding commitment to the honourable court. So, just like everybody else, Orphan has to wait until we plan a field trip for his cohort but I am going to make an exception. I like your innovative idea of letting him choose his route. Such things build individualism
,
something for which we have so little regard in our culture. In other words, you may start planning. I would like to be there when Orphan chooses his route.

Dr Chatterjee’s first instinct is to doubt Mr Sharma’s motive behind this acceptance: is he trying to reach out to his powerful, influential father, the VVIP friend of the Chief Minister, who, once he knows that Mr Sharma has been nice to his son, may pull wheels and levers, move cranks and shafts in the government’s machinery to help Mr Sharma move up? From this sinecure at an obscure orphanage to the rarer echelons of the State Secretariat? Maybe yes, maybe no, but so what, Dr Chatterjee tells himself. Mr Sharma has approved his request, cleared the trip, that’s all that matters.

‘
Sir, thank you so much, I will always be grateful
,’ he replies.

~

At exactly 5 p.m. – an hour before he begins to wind down, turning in for the day – when Orphan is at his most alert and agile, he is brought to Mr Sharma’s office and seated on his desk. Mr Sharma, Mrs Chopra, nurses and attendants watching silently, Dr Chatterjee spreads the map of the entire National Capital Region, all its twelve flaps, prises open Orphan’s little fingers, gently wraps them around a pen.

Twice, the pen slips out; once, it falls to the floor.

‘Here, give it to me,’ says Kalyani, and she holds Orphan’s hand, guides him to the exact spot on the map where Little House is.

‘This is Little House, this is from where we start,’ Kalyani says, ‘now I am letting go, Orphan, you move the pen.’

The child’s hand moves.

From Little House, down the road, past the garbage heap at the entrance, onto Ring Road in a winding line that curves sharply, the pen takes a sprawling arc that cuts across the southern part of the city, becomes straight again for what seems like six kilometres or so, loops around the railway station, zigzags across the forested Ridge, heads for the highway where it meanders towards New City, comes to a stop right at the city’s border, where the highway touches The Mall.

It’s there that Orphan lets go of the pen.

‘Thank you, Orphan,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘Quite a long route, the entire thing will take many days, so let Dr Chatterjee choose which section you will take.’

Everyone cheers.

The noise makes Orphan cry.

The gathered crowd tries to make sense of the scrawl Orphan has left on the map.

‘Very adventurous,’ says Mr Sharma.

Mrs Chopra says, ‘It looks like the city’s Metro map, Yellow and Blue lines.’

A nurse, in charge of laundry, says it reminds her of a hair-ribbon blowing in the wind.

The transport supervisor says it’s similar to the route taken by two Delhi Transport Corporation buses, Route Nos. 414 and 527.

~

Late that night, the first part of their mission accomplished – the route plotted – and Orphan fast asleep, Kalyani and Dr Chatterjee sit together and look at the line that the child’s pen has drawn.

‘Look, sir,’ says Kalyani, ‘it ends very near where I live. We can take him to The Mall.’

‘A mall is no place for a baby. His line also touches the railway station, that’s a much better place for him to spend the day,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘We will arrive early, get a place on the overbridge from where Orphan can watch the trains, porters, passengers.’

‘Yes, weighing machines with coloured spinning dials, blinking lights. We can buy a ticket and board a local train, travel up and down three or four trips, give Orphan his first view from a train window,’ says Kalyani.

‘In the afternoon, we will take him to Platforms 12 and 13, from where the Rajdhanis leave, show him their red-and-white coaches, some imported from Germany, with their sealed glass windows. Ticket examiners in black coats.’

‘But have you seen, sir, how Orphan’s line, before it travels across the city, takes a break just outside Little House? A short gap. Means there is someone outside Little House he wants to go with? He wants to spend some time at the entrance?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ says Dr Chatterjee, ‘you are reading too much into this line.’

~

And so they go on, into the late hours, trying to make sense of this child’s drawing, how and why it curls around the highway before it enters The Mall, why it goes this way and not that, how it shows a steady hand and a uniform pressure that you do not usually see from fingers so small and so young. Both unaware, of course, that Orphan, in that ink scrawl, may have actually foreshadowed the route he will take, not with the kind nurse and the good doctor, but, yes, with someone else when he leaves Little House for the world outside – in search of his home.

WOMAN

Henri Bergson

You may ask me when you wake up, Ma, why did you put all these soft toys in my room, cluttering my bed? I am almost forty, Ma, you may say, I don’t need these to go to sleep, but look carefully, you may very well ask me, where did you get such an amazing variety of toys? Not at all like when I was a kid, when I had only one bear. Brown and shapeless, stuffed with cotton wool that leaked in many places, its whiskers so hard they pricked like needles, its skin painted yellow that ran with each wash until it turned grey, then white.

But look at these, Ma, you will say, there are giraffes with hats, mice going to school, with bags, lunchboxes, water-bottles. Bears with umbrellas, elephants with scarves. Are all of these for me?

I will then tell you, yes, there is a little plan behind these toys.

I don’t know if it will work but it’s an idea I got reading the book by Henri Bergson I told you about.

~

Henri Bergson. Born in Paris, 1859. Very strong in mathematics as a child, he first works as a schoolteacher, then goes on to teach philosophy in college. He writes many books, even on religion, the appeal of Christianity over Buddhism, but the one I am reading is about what happens inside our heads when we sleep.