Skinner (2 page)

And his friend. Or, rather,
the friend
.
Skinner’s only friend.

With great suddenness, Skinner wants horribly not to kill his friend.

He loses his footing, feels the upward tug of the sky as a physical thing in his chest. All it manages to tear from him is his breath, but it is no less shocking a sensation than if his heart had been ripped free by the gravity of the sun.

Life,
he thinks,
was much easier in the box.

He blinks the sun from his eyes, mounts the final step, feels that he is unwatched, and fits himself into the flow of the sidewalks, eyes flicking upward, setting forth on a course plotted along the axis of one of the contrails that scar the otherwise perfect sky.

It is only after several days have passed and none of the people who were involved in the Montmartre Incident have died that they realize the truth.

Skinner has disappeared.

A fact that leaves none of them at ease.

ALL RAJ WANTS
to do is go outside and play soccer with the other boys.

He kicks the ball, toes it, centimeters at a time, closer to the door. As if he is merely following where it leads. The leather shiny, new, white that reflects the brightly colored light filtering through curtains his mother has made from a sari worn too thin for decency. The color shifts as he nudges the ball again. The leather will never be this bright again. Outside it will be coated in dust in the dry months, mud in the rains, dung always. Scuffed, scratched, patched after it is inevitably kicked against an edge of sharp, rusted steel protruding from the roofline of a shanty or booted into a scatter of freshly broken glass shards that no one has yet scavenged.

Only now is it new and clean. Only now can he take it outside, trophy, to show the other boys. Shine in their eyes as bright as the ball.

The ball thumps against the open door, mahogany planks his father has cut from a tabletop salvaged in the city center, rejoined, cloth-hinged, and hung. A door. Such a luxury in Dharavi. Open now, only halfway, stopped by wall-mounted shelves, vertically slotted to hold his mother’s plates and pans. In a one-room home, space allowing a door to open flush to its wall is an impossible waste.

The men and women crowded inside the single room of their home, packed around the small table, do not look up. Their conversation continues. His father is showing the others something on the screen of his laptop. An Acer Aspire with rubber guards, hand-cut from old car tires, epoxied at the corners to protect it from drops. On the screen, a diagram, electrical. Color-coded lines running in parallel, making abrupt right-angle turns, knotting themselves, unspooling, streaking to another page. His father has played games with him using diagrams like these.

Follow the green line, Rajiv, use your finger, find where it ends. Yes, yes. Oh! But now there are two green lines. Which is the right one? Follow it, follow it.

When he was five, the games became lessons. Positive, negative, erg, watt, voltage, amp. Now, at twelve, Raj can look at a diagram without knowing what it is for and determine its purpose on his first try. Or his second try, sometimes his third. And he can also rewire any of the slum’s rat’s-nest circuit boxes all by himself. Or with only a little help from his father. The diagram on the laptop screen is for something large. A fragment of something massive. The lines draw him almost more than the ball. Almost. But he has seen them before. Watched as his father used the software on his laptop to design that massive maze of circuits. Old hat. The ball is new.

He kicks it against the door again. And again no one looks up.

His mother kneels next to the bright orange Envirofit cookstove. Envy of the neighbors. A bed of wood-chip coals glowing in the base of the small cylinder; on the cooktop, a kettle coming to the boil. Tea soon. She arranges cups on a brass-colored tin tray.

Another kick. Thump of the ball against hardwood.

Only two eyes turn his way. The baby, Tajma, nestled in another of his mother’s retired saris, at the foot of the cot that mother, father, and baby all share. Too big now to have a place on the cot, Raj has a mat and blanket.
No problem,
he says. A mat and a blanket, more than so many boys his age.

The baby’s eyes are on the ball. Raj kicks it once more, her eyes dart to follow it, her mouth opening in surprise when it bounces sharply off the door.

It goes this way, and then that way!

She waits for more.

Raj kicks again, a little more force, a little backspin, a slightly different angle; the ball skips to a stop just against the door frame, half its circumference exposed to the sun.

Taji’s eyes widen, her mouth an O.

Outside the door, dirt packed hard against the hump of an enormous water main running half-buried down the middle of the narrow lane between the shanties and their patchwork walls of cinderblock, corrugated steel, scrap wood, waddling, tin, and cardboard. At the far end, a scrum of filthy boys passing in and out of sight where the street opens onto a small square in front of the great shed that serves as shared factory space for the many industries of Dharavi Nagar, in the heart of Dharavi slum.

Raj’s gaze travels from the boys to the ball at his feet. With his toe he scuffs the dust just inside the door on his mother’s otherwise spotless floor. Fighting the dirt and mud, an endless task, like keeping her family fed. He brings his foot back; a light kick, an accident, will send the ball outside. What choice but to follow? And once outside. Well, he will deal later with the consequences of not returning immediately. When he returns, hero to the boys. Bringer of the ball.

“Rajiv.”

He jerks his head around at the sound of his father’s voice, his bare toe stubbing against the tile.

“Close the door.”

He hops, lifting his throbbing foot from the ground.

His father snaps his fingers.

“Now, now.”

On one foot, Raj bends, picks up his ball, the sun falling full on his face as he does so, the screams of the boys in the square coming to his ears clearly.

“Inside, Rajiv.”

His mother, hooking the collar of his overwashed
Transformers
t-shirt, pulling him inside as she swings the door closed and seats the latch.

“Sit with your sister.”

Raj, looking at the door, ball tight to his stomach.

His mother yanks his collar again.

“Later, later. Sit, sit.”

Raj backs away from the door, limping slightly on his bruised toe. Eight steps to cross the room, this tiny journey an epic today because of all the guests he must edge around and squeeze between, his path taking him past the little table and its mismatch of chairs filled with the most senior and honored of their visitors.

His father grabs his arm.

“Come see.”

Raj’s mother, the rattling tray of tiny cups in her hands.

“Aasif.”

His father looks at her.

“I want him to see.”

“Let him play with Taj.”

His father still with a grip on the boy’s arm.

“He should see. Why else if not for him? He should see.”

She sets the tray suddenly on the table, one of the men pulling the laptop out of the way.

“Yes, yes. For him.”

Without serving, she takes three steps to the cot and scoops up Taj.

“And also for her.”

Aasif raises a hand.

“For her also, yes, Damini. Bring her here.”

One of the men at the table is staring at Raj. The one who brought him the ball. He also brought a stuffed tiger for Taj, almost as big as her. And a bag of aavakaaya for his mother. Pickled mangoes from his home to the east in Gadchiroli district, now heaped in a bowl on the tea tray. Small, dark, hair cropped close; hands calloused thick and smooth, compact muscles suggesting years swinging a hammer or an axe, but a potbelly at his middle. A voice, Hindi accented by the forests. They call him Naxalite sometimes, but Raj knows that his real name is Sudhir.

“Like the ball, little Raj, for you.”

He holds up his hands, ready to catch. Raj tosses the ball and it smacks into the easterner’s hard hands. He spins it between his fingers.

“Someone will tell you that it’s not real. They’ll say,
There’s no hologram, Rajiv. How can it be real if there’s no hologram.
As if the only way we know a real thing is if it has a sticker. A hologram that says FIFA. But don’t believe them. The ball is real. It was made by real hands. Feel.”

He throws the ball, shoving it two-handed so that it sends the boy back a step when he catches it.

“Real?”

Raj nods.

The man reaches for the teapot, using a small square of clean rag to pick it up by its wire handle so as not to be burned by the heat conducted by the cheap tin. He begins to pour, filling the cups one by one, setting the pot aside, adding the milk and sugar he also brought, making thick chai, passing the cups to the others at the table, Raj’s mother first. There are some mutters from the old men of the nagar panchayat, the informal local council and arbiters of disputes:
Should they not be served first, and by the hostess rather than this jungle communist?
But Sudhir seems not to notice, pouring tea as if he were a wallah in an office, passing the cups to the women of the Social Ills Assistance Foundation, the representative of the Dharavi Business Is Booming Board, the boss of the electricity goons whom Raj’s father has known for many years, a Bombay Municipal Corporation man who has something to do with water treatment, the heads of the potters’ and tanners’ guilds, and also men speaking for the welders and recyclers, a smalltime boss from the gangwar, a woman from a Muslim microbank that loans tiny sums to women of all religions to start small businesses, and a young policeman. These, and several other dignitaries and lowlifes of the slum, are packed into Raj’s home, being served tea by this outsider, Naxalite. Not here are any of the water goons or men from the Shiv Sena or the Congress party. The water goons have threatened the entire proceeding and pledged their noncooperation unless they are paid an ungodly sum. The Sena were approached, but communications broke down. And the local Congress man seems most content to pretend nothing is happening.

Raj has seen all of them here at one time or another, but never all at once. Things are happening, exciting things, but still he only wants to go play with his new ball.

Sudhir passes the last of the cups, many of them borrowed from neighbors to accommodate such a large gathering.

“People will tell you, Raj, your whole life, what is real and what is not. What you can believe in and what you can’t.  Don’t let them say,
This is something you don’t think it is. You don’t understand, you couldn’t understand.
It is what you think it is, you do understand it. Believe me.”

He smiles.

“Or don’t believe me. You decide.”

He sips his chai.

“Rajiv.”

A whisper.

“Rajiv, if I tell you that your father is a very rich man, do you believe me?”

Raj looks at his father, the educated outcast of Dharavi. Madman of the wires. His quest to bring the wire to every home of the nagar, safely engineered. His family lacks for nothing that can be had in the slum, but rich?

He shakes his head.

The man puts a hand on Raj’s father’s shoulder.

“But he is. He’s rich. He owns a castle, Rajiv, in this wealthy land.”

He gestures with his other arm, taking in the hut and its contents, drawing some laughter and some discontent from the gathering. This is serious business they are here for, not games.

Aasif touches Sudhir’s hand with his own, brushing it off his shoulder.

“Don’t confuse him.”

The man stares at Raj, brown eyes, jungle green in their depths.

“I’m not teasing him. I’m telling him the future.”

Raj’s father looks into his teacup.

“It is
his
future. If there are riches, they are not mine. Here.”

His fingers dip into the breast pocket of his loose orange short-sleeved collared shirt, coming out holding a Nokia 1100. Indestructible brick phone of the slums. He looks at the screen of his laptop, his thumb working the phone’s rubberized buttons. He studies the tiny LED screen, his lips moving as he reads something, reads it over again, and once more.

“Yes. Correct.”

He weighs the phone on his palm, looks around the room.

“This. And then after. I don’t know.”

Some of them nod, some don’t move.

Raj’s father looks at his wife and his baby girl, then at his son.

“Rajiv.”

He offers the phone.

“Take it.”

Raj tucks his ball under one arm, scooping the Nokia from his father’s hand. He looks at the screen. A string of letters, numbers, and symbols. He tries to let it translate itself into something intelligible. Some lengthy equivalent to
lol
or
;(
.
Sees only randomness.

He looks from the screen to the others in the room. More than one set of lips is moving in silent prayer to one of many gods. He looks at the one they call Naxalite, sees the forest in his eyes. Trees, tall and green, creaking in a breeze, footsteps muffled by layered mulch and deadfall, single-file, booted feet. Guns.

He looks at his mother and sister, his father. The family it will be his job to provide for one day when he is older.

His father touches his shoulder, light press, then gone.

“Send it, Rajiv.”

Raj rests his thumb on the large select button marked with a short green horizontal line. On the screen,
SEND
,
highlighted. Waiting for the button. He presses down, satisfying firm click of sturdy technology, slight give of the button’s thin rubber cover. The message on the screen blinks; a little bar, empty of color, appears, quickly filling, liquid crystal gray.

MESSAGE SENT

There are many exhalations in the room, more prayers, a few laughs, someone is crying.

His father takes the phone and drops it back in his pocket.

Sudhir rubs his palms together, wood on wood.

“They will say it is not the future, Rajiv. But do not believe them. It is the future. You have touched it with your own hands. You have made it.”

Aasif places a hand on his son’s head, pushes him gently.

“Go play with your ball.”

Raj turns, five steps to the door, snagged by his mother’s finger, held as she bends and kisses his cheek.

“Play, Rajiv.”

She unlatches the door, sending him sprinting into the light, ball held tight to his chest, bare feet slapping the curve of the water main, hot metal. The boys, seeing him from the square, the ball, starting to scream his name. He runs to glory, raising the ball high, as if it is the future the man they call Naxalite has said is his.