Skinner (22 page)

He taps the barrel of the gun on the table, once, twice, thrice.

“I have seen their plan.”

He rises, gun in hand.

“And it is not for me and my family, their future.”

He offers his son the gun.

“So we will make another.”

Raj looks at the gun.

His father pushes it at him.

“Take it, take it. Go to Sudhir. He will show you what comes next. I will not have the time, Raj. This little gun. You need to know how it works. That is the world now.”

He looks angry. Tired and angry, his father.

Raj takes the gun.

His father covers his face, there may be tears behind his hands, Raj is not sure.

“Children with guns. That is the world now. What we made for you.”

He lowers his hands.

“And now I must go and work on our big weapon. To get their attention we must be loud. We want maximum attention.
See what we can do. We do not need you. See.
”

His voice is raised, something rare. His father raises his voice for cricket matches, to tell a joke in a loud room, to call his son home. This angry loud voice, these tears, Raj has never seen them.

He looks at the gun in his hand, sets it on the table.

“I don’t want a gun.”

“Then I will carry it.”

They both look. Raj’s father, yelling, he has been so loud that they did not hear the door open. And now here is Raj’s mother. Taji in her arms, picked up from David’s shanty, where his big sister has been watching several of the neighborhood babies, the mothers working at #1 and #2 Sheds. Modernity, the women working. And here is his mother, coming inside, picking up the gun.

“I will carry it.”

Raj’s father has four fingers pressed to his cheek, as if propping up his own tired flesh.

“Damini.”

But her name is the only word he can muster for whatever argument he may have wanted to mount against this new abomination. His wife with a gun in her hand. She steps near to him, presses Taj against him and lets her go. His hands come up and take her without thought, his baby daughter. He puts his face against the top of her head, thin black hair, closes his eyes.

Raj’s mother looks at her son.

“Go to the shed and tell them your father is coming soon. Go, go. He needs a little rest but will be there soon.”

Raj nods, goes to the door, stops to watch his father holding his baby sister, and his mother starting to clean up the plates and glasses from lunch, one-handed, the gun in her free hand, where she usually carries her child.

Outside it wants to rain. Sky bulging down over everyone’s heads. A desire to stoop. There is activity everywhere. Well, every day in Dharavi is like this, full of activity, energy, the frantic scramble to survive, improve, climb. But it is different. Some people are packing their things to leave. Others are closing up the many openings in their homes, cardboard and corrugated steel over windows, tin, plastic bags. Some of the shop men, the welders and carpenters and lathe operators from the industrial sectors at the southern tip of the slum, are working on the wire, stringing it as high as they can on the walls, running it through shrouds of cut-up bicycle tires, taking it to everyone. Electricity humming.

The tires remind him that he needs to check the computer. Classicsteelbikes.com. The message he left. There has been no reply. Not yet. His father wants him to look at other things now. News sites. Indiatimes.com. Aljazeera.net. CNN. Mumbaibrunch blog. Twitter streams for President Patil, her brief messages always focused on the economy. The GOC in Chief for the Southern Command. Bombay commissioner of police. Some others. Tedious. Raj does as he’s been asked, but he also looks at what Salman Khan has to say to his fans, and also Kareena Kapoor, and Kalki, whom he is a little in love with.

So he hurries to #1 Shed. It was once home to many tiny factories. Plastic recycler, potters, readymade rain ponchos, hairpins, glass tinting. Others. All shut down and moved out, making room for the truck trailer and its contents. And more, much more. There has been another truck, down the 90 Feet Road. Contents offloaded to smaller trucks, rickshaws, human backs. Crates, nothing but crates. All of them heavy. The contents. Old. So much work just to make these things work. Can it be done? Yes, his father says, yes. But in time? His father shakes his head when asked.

Raj does not believe his father.

He does not believe what his father says about people.
Only for themselves
.
He does not believe that his father thinks this way. Because
he
cares for other people. He is working for the whole slum.
This
is why they are there. Living in the slum. Yes, Raj sometimes thinks his father is selfish, but he
knows
it is not true. It is just that he thinks of so many people other than his family. Planning for them.

How long?

Raj knows that his grandparents struggled to push his father from the slum and into an education. But for how long did Raj’s father know he would never leave? For how long did he have this plan? Their own plan, Raj’s paternal grandparents’ plan for his father, began before he was born. When Grandfather made daily sojourns to the suburb of Anushakti Nagar, township home of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center. Twelve kilometers, hazards of highway traffic that must be crossed on foot while pushing his rusty Hero Roadster bike on its much-patched tires. And then, in the suburbs, the hazards of private security and police, recognizing a Dalit from the slums when they saw one and eager to send him back where he came from. A journey that ended in the dormitory kitchens that served the Atomic Energy Junior College, working in the place of his cousin Harish, whose intestine was occupied by a pork tapeworm that was revealed to be nearly four meters in length when it was finally purged. A detail in the family mythology that was always related by Grandmother with a grimace of disgusted relish. Once fit to return to work, cousin Harish kept his promise to do everything in his power to get Grandfather a job at the college or anywhere else within the Department of Atomic Energy facilities that dominated all of Anushakti Nagar. A plan that could only be faulted in that Harish, scullery boy, had no power whatsoever.

In the kitchen a blind eye had been turned to the sudden physical transformation of Harish from a skinny boy of fifteen into a stocky man of nearly twenty. These things happened. India, country of miracles. No less miraculous, when Harish transformed back into himself after several months. All that had been required for this transformation to be universally accepted was a large tithe on Harish’s small wages. With the much-depleted net amount delivered dutifully by Grandfather into the hands of his aunt, Harish’s mother, with none of it sticking to his own. The promise of future employment had been the only profit of his labor. A promise that could not be kept. But his hard work did not go unnoticed by the man who oversaw the kitchens and catering facilities on the DAE campus. Nor did he fail to notice Grandfather’s willingness to part with a large measure of his earnings without raising a stink like so many of the filthy kitchen wallahs.

And so Grandfather and Grandmother’s plan for their yet to be conceived children was advanced by Grandfather’s purchase of a job cleaning the toilets in the Nilgiri Canteen on the DAE campus, bought for the price of half of all his future earnings. A price they reckoned a bargain as it included the guaranteed acceptance to the Atomic Energy Central School that was granted to the children of all DAE employees. Toilet wallahs included. And even though only one of their four children lived long enough to enjoy that privilege, Grandfather and Grandmother never voiced any regret at the years of indentured servitude that followed. When Grandfather’s pay effectively doubled after the facilities manager died in the twentieth year of this arrangement, they spent a portion of the windfall on temple gifts for the man’s remembrance. The rest they put in a hole in the floor of their shanty to save for their son. However, the newly inflated paychecks lasted only a few months, as Grandfather finally paid for two decades of close calls crossing the Eastern Express Highway with his Hero bicycle, when he was run over by a flatbed Tata painted in vibrant orange, blue, yellow, and red, hauling a tarp-covered load of fertilizer. Part of the cost of the job, his life. He’d never been willing to spare the price of a bus ticket for his daily commute. Tickets for his son when he began school, yes, but not for himself. Details that Grandmother considered essential to communicating the scope of God’s sense of humor in these things. A man’s working life spent cleaning toilets, ended by a truck loaded with shit. The reward, an educated son, electrical engineer, degree from University of Bombay, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute. A degree her son then refused to put to work. Refused to take into the world to find a job suitable to such a well-educated young man. Refused to leave the slum at all. Married a local girl from around the corner. A dark girl! Began birthing a new generation of slummies almost instantly. And though she died in her sleep, a ripe fifty-five, one son, one grandson, cause of death, heart failure, she felt very much as if she, too, had been flattened by a truck loaded with shit. This one driven by her inexplicably ungrateful son, who had always been the light of her eye and a perfect model of obedience and effort until his great betrayal of her and of his father’s memory.

Thinking of this story that Grandmother had told him, not infrequently, before her death, Raj wonders again,
How long?
How long had his father planned to keep his knowledge in the slum? To live here doing small jobs, rewiring the tiny factories for greater efficiency, bringing the current from the lines that crazed through the slum into the shanties of his neighbors, cutting deals with the electricity goons to make the haphazard exposed wiring harnesses they ran from their generators and power line taps marginally safer. He was on constant call to the goons, servicing the generators, bringing them back online when there was an outage, rerouting their taps when the Maharashtra State Electricity Board linemen found and disconnected them. Receiving, in exchange, some cooperation and extra hands as he made their infrastructure more robust and less likely to short-circuit and start fires, or fry anyone who might brush an exposed wire with his fingertip. His father, the electrician of Dharavi, handyman, appreciated for his skills and generosity by almost all, respected by those who did not account him a fool. Fool or sage, he was known throughout the slum, could talk to anyone, and he did talk. For years, his mantra of change and independence. Power was what was needed. Nothing more.

Was he planning all that time? Did he already know Sudhir? Did it begin in school when he first had access to the Internet? Slow to come to India, wholly adopted, like all modern things, once it arrived. Did he find Sudhir himself? The ship breakers?  Did he begin this plan? Or did the plan find him?

Or was there no plan?

Just his father’s love of the slum and desire to make it better. Safer. And the rest happening as life happens. A truck loaded with shit.

Raj is hurrying to the shed through his neighborhood, changing so fast in these few days. Populations shifting, the wires spreading. The electricity goons his father has been slowly educating over the years, slipping it into their ears like gentle poison, the safe essentials of their racket, are doing much of that work now. Plan or happenstance? And this neighborhood of his, Dharavi Nagar, a little more than six hectares of squalor and enterprise and shoddy construction and disease and color and filth and children playing in the streets and dirty water and bare feet and the stink that never goes away, Sector Six in the Redevelopment Project, home to more than two hundred thousand people. Is it plan or chance that it is just north of Sector Five, where the developers who bought the first DRP contracts have already begun to clear shanties in preparation for building the first phase?

Close to #1 Shed now, jungle men in their harnesses of weapons. More of them. Women, too. Tamil spoken with rural accents. Well schooled in walking silently, creeping around corners, sitting still in muddy ditches, waiting for days without food, sleeping on rocks, schooled also in guns and explosives. Here to bring their jungle fight to the city. The slum. They know Raj, a small shrug of acknowledgment, hands never leaving weapons. Mostly AK-47s. Jungle gun. Raj has seen them so many times in movies. Usually the gun the badguys are using.

More guards outside the shed. One of them smiles.

“Rajiv. Little engineer.”

He lays out his palm and Raj slaps it, following with a fist bump.

The guard bangs on the shed door.

“Rain. We’re all gonna get wet.”

Raj looks up at the low sky.

“Not yet.”

The guard looks up, nods.

“Not yet. But soon, little engineer. Very wet, very soon.”

The door swings open, unlocked and pushed outward by one of the guards inside. Activity within, under the bright fluorescents his father installed after they covered the skylights with boards and tarps just before the truck arrived. The diesel tractor is gone, being put to other uses, but the container that was hauled by hand and rope through the rain and mud is still here, though cut down. That had been the only way to get access to the load. They didn’t have the equipment or manpower to take it off the truck. It rests on now on railroad ties, waiting to be more firmly seated before it can be fired.

Soon.

It will happen soon.

Like the rain.

So much happening at once. The new machinery, rusty, seized up, liters of solvent and grease and oil are being applied. Coils of wire, great pythons of it, are being woven by hand from the cables that the electricity goons have been cutting down on nighttime raids in the suburbs. Gun classes, larger versions of the tutorial his father gave him at home. There, far end of the shed, jungle fighters, and slummies who have, almost to a man, never held a gun. David’s father is there. His faith in the DRP is great, his faith in Raj’s father is greater. His best friend from childhood, his educated friend who could have gone on to
such very big things
but stayed in his shanty down the street instead. How not to follow him where he is leading?