Taken From Him (Kindle Single) (3 page)

“Holdings,” special guest intervenes on his own on his leader and kind friend’s behalf — “Ah, yeah, yo’ water-lovin’ gig up there in the Naeetional Park.”  The two architects laugh.  “Good luck with that stuff, buddy, that’s your kind of uh —”

“— like a
field
,” mystery guest intervenes again, “rather than  channel, as I understand it, spreading the monsoon waters, even terracing as sewage filters (?),  as I under —”  “Ah, you’ve experienced the monsoon?” resident Yank to a visiting — who now, as if it were all natural — spots the girl the girl.

“But he is an economist,” intervenes your leader politely adding (using, including, surely not almost needing you), “aren’t you, and” (to the host) “a
poet
quite
well-
known.”  “A real writer,” the radiant Indian wife adds / offers / corrects / adroitly perhaps peace-makes (?), “oh a real —”

“—
story teller
!” comes a  voice that stills it seems the whole place for a moment, familiar voice: astonishingly it is the Mahim Fort guide and companion photo-op girl who has been here all the time, unseen for a moment behind the boss’s retorting bulk.  Or earlier at large in the studio.  Mingling in an efficiency of overhead floods and designer guests.  Her contribution to this joint introduction inserts too much clarity, for already the host, overlapping her, as he turned to reveal her behind him, addressing the visitor but not quite contemplating him, “Well, you’re going to have to start telling the truth now” — grins all around.

“About the work we’ve seen tonight?” mystery guest returns the point point-and-click.  Host turns slowly, the girl behind him brushed by her employer’s elbow, even the back of his hand? (a pet?) — for you’ve said your say; for what is at stake? Yet her laugh, so exact, is heard equally now by the host who must speak to it as well:  “Oh I’ve done that for you in the slide lecture, pics worth a thousand words,” host fixes his cordial aim like a corbelled balcony pushed out over everyone threatened.

“Then why the lecture?” you have to wonder; yet host-employer turning to the girl, for it is she, the Fort girl, astonishingly, but of course! and as before with eye makeup but not lipstick, it seems, and, if heard by anyone else,  only by you by some state-of-the-art device his words to her are grasped — “The mystery guest, I gather,” ignoring your “It takes me so long to learn.”

“You have so much at stake,” the girl said then as clearly as words could describe it, “take it from me,” whatever in the world she could mean, though she swept her look between the two men; and the leader-friend and his wife, and the younger Americans, all together for a moment in her knowledge of how far out of it she in her state might be, yet no special comradeship for the older woman to be sensed in the girl.  The maturity of women not an act, the storyteller hopes.

It had been a laugh, hers if you wanted to hear it, near and material, sociable, ghostly, and in an original thread young.  Among all the would-be professional bodies and voices, here again, not ancient, the Indian girl: so show you know her.  An intern maybe, who’s found an everyday home, standing like a guest which she wasn’t, cordially near the Americans, the architects, the pros, and the visiting design students  loading up on cashews, carrots and  cheese, olives, best of all crisp pakora, drinking from plastic cups all somehow associated with the girl, he would understand in a moment.

Both men, if nobody else, had felt the girl’s laugh, and the American architect, the host, with a pretty big if puppet operation here, snapping his fingers pointed her to some task she needed to attend to, small is beautiful.  When she moved, a familiar earring, some silvery shape with a shining jet dot of  eye in it perhaps, and she was gone; as the visitor, the writer, the also amateur tagging along with his professional friends, grasping at it all (who had everything, even unto being an amateur), added (for her to hear), “It takes me even longer” — though not without a slant at the host, though himself for the moment old; and watched her  go and actually disappear, swaying as she went, a life-form in a silver-mirrored blue tunic and jeans, taking time
with
her:  reappear and fling open a fridge and its interior lights that itself seemed to appear out of a wall that hadn’t been there.  Which man had she been laughing with?  Was there any doubt?  A microwave saving time.

“
What
stories?” tonight’s host puts it to you but maybe not; growling like quick-sketching a Greco-Roman façade for India’s future. But, turned to by him whom he has challenged, big man nods agreeably elsewhere to the Americans as if
they
have spoken to him, and maybe one of the gals is looking for a job over here designing campuses or atrium décor — or slum-rises.

Yet presently at the far end where an Indian gentleman is telling us who would listen what the anthropology of the slum-family’s field of planning and structure implies, and the deceptive drums and tailgate Ganesh festival you have seen out your cab window coming from the airport, the girl is not
at
this end now, she’s passed through the fridge and the microwave into the distant
front
end of the studio. Transferring from cardboard boxes to platters potato and fried eggplant pakoras, only to interrupt herself and answer, with quick, aroused steps toward him, the big man, her employer.  Who has something to say to her, and she to him — they have words — when
he
points toward the
back
now fifty feet away — it’s the mystery guest surely he points to — and she does not look, she’s having a discreet row with her boss, who cools, shakes his head as she speaks, and again shakes perhaps more than his head — who just maybe reprimands her not to fire her but to keep her, holding her by the shoulders not quite to shake her, as anyone can see who misses nothing.

The anthropologist asked his question again, the leader elbowed you gently, his overflow of pleasure in others as fluid surprises almost in themselves — and mystery guest obliges in kind: So now your citizens are to carry hammers to break car windows if high water floods automatic systems.  The terrible swift floods of July 2005, as one understands it, blamed your poor little fucked-up River Mithi, which even more is now to be fixed in a predictable map of city planning procedure in fact a centuries’-old war against water, which is not what an estuary’s aqueous terrain demands.  Likewise one’s family asks access each member to each across creeks flowing in more than one direction, elastic spaces to be improvised with, lived with, mudflats our in-between resources for overflows or high tides not to be erased by reclam— … (you seem to tell a story, what was the original question anthropologist asked? — for people are nodding alertly — an Asian woman writing in a notebook)… family you arrive at is like water and will be given its various motions, its gradients and fields of porous holdings not dammed and master-planned.

The wife in all her radiant wit and responsibility her lightly brocaded kurti, her senses of others, also her genius, takes your arm, “You see!  It was an amazing answer to the question how economics, landscape, everyday life and storytelling coincide!”

And your laugh at this — and not drunk at least on the wine — though breathless seeing then your Indian girl at the other end — has she lost her job? got even? — stride across to find her bag behind a stack of office things — will cover other reasons to laugh, as you reluctantly excuse yourself.  (“Remember Worli Fort tomorrow,” words follow perhaps from what has been said.)  The girl has taken a medium notebook from a precarious stack of folders and books — a plastic wine glass takes a tumble — the red notebook recalled from the Fort she slips into her bag looking only to her exit yet seemingly everywhere, a god unknown to herself, if the amazing answer to an almost unknown question could be written down in a letter to her.

 At the door mystery guest will not hearken to the host’s call, the presiding American thug architect’s
Hey where you goin’?
— but outside in the evening established before you, are dark edifices built by the British in this professional neighborhood of is it south central Mumbai darkened even in daytime by great imported trees now in the half-light the bark alive with an India foreigned of such profit-sharing distances as New York and London offer and those half-knowns we make into knowns, a warped and gall-bulging raintree scale of trunk not for all the poor all of the time, and there are many trees but not clear what they are doing.

    Where is this?  Across the street a man sits the seat of a Vespa, the girl her hand on its near handlebar angry and exact.  A pose that says Family but says to the forty-year-old man who sits the seat poised to spring grimly mechanized wholly from here that she will not be tolerated by
him
. Angrier and more the two of them, her hand on the Vespa says to herself she has a stake in this Vespa through the body of the man who owns it and even her at times; who shakes her hand off so he can get going — she could wrench the angled right-side mirror  right away from its base.

In angry argument with the man, her father doubtless, now (as if one hadn’t seen it happen) not on the Vespa but standing on the curb beside her and you’d cruelly like to hear what they are saying; it was English, now not.

She’s told him she quit her job.  Or told him nothing, or will go on with could-be nonpaying internship — or she has said nothing new.  And “tomorrow” is heard, and “day
after
tomorrow” in English, then as she turns away from her father, for it must be him, or her prideful uncle, and has seen a man she knows of a certain age in a rainjacket with an umbrella, and the anger growing as words sink away from it inhabits the man’s eyes which are his daughter’s eyes and wishing to hear what they’ve been saying about what will happen tomorrow and tomorrow in a place, the American has been noticed…

The man with his daughter’s eyes sees him and does not look away for a moment.  One might have said,
Your father
…  thinking also,
has an instinct.

She wouldn’t quite touch him, she’s going to walk.  He swings his leg through and settles on the seat, reaches for the starter button. He tries, he’s absent, absorbed, male, grim, humiliated again, looking ahead and speaking; he jiggles the button, she points somewhere and he finds an aerosol can of contact cleaner with a straw coming out the top, and she berates him and then he has got the Vespa going.  He swings the back of his right hand hard across her face cleverly enough to nearly knock her down.

And he is gone.  Is she his wife?  Not likely, he looks like her, acts like her, doesn’t he? — will look ahead and claim things are true.  Is still a father. Like day laborers, three men watch her get herself together, she is adjusting her nose it seems.

“It is only family,” were stiff words later remembered, like a precise demeanor embracing their history in the Fort and in the handsome ground-floor studio just now and her estimate of people, if not of him, officially greeting him at the curb, “You see what becomes of me if I speak about a bridge in the National Park and a reservoir if there was a canoe for you the best entrance along the east road.”  To one’s longing she speaks.

Yes, that was her father and not a bad man, though wild, she grants.

Wild?

See what he drives, she shakes her head not like a young fan of the motor trade.  He knows all kinds of things in the National Park, he knows his job.  He knows what happens every day.

What is that?

“Do you doubt me?”  The umbrella gathered in her hand she is glad of, her nose not bleeding.  “What has happened will happen.  But that is not all.  That is what he says.”

She both prolongs her stay on the curb of the sidewalk and does not.  Why must you go everywhere with this group? she wants to know.  Because they were smart, because he has a job to do really, though it is not spoken of.  A sprinkle of rain seems to pass but doesn’t.  Water in Mumbai holds us together.  She has charmingly taken from him his compact umbrella, holds it tight.  She looks O.K.  What did she take from him in the Fort?

She had stuck to you and surely not by your following her.  Day after tomorrow the best entrance to the National Park — she mentions a street.  Why day after tomorrow?

She has turned away.  “But what are you?” she’s back without having gone.  Her hands are free-looking as if she weren’t holding the umbrella, a fighter.  “I could walk away from this.  There are enough bad architects — it is like that global education center
down
South” — her phrase strange — “with marble everywhere and informal seating around the grand staircase like those big dams the man once called temples.”  Nehru she meant, centuries of planetariums ago it seems, who could not love India so much loved he not the future more.  Two women stopped without quite stopping, speaking in undertones as if you had stopped for them, and the girl produced a few coins, muttering reproachfully, “And why you say it takes you so long to learn?  You said that in there.  It was him or you.”

And, while he looked in his pockets, thinking he’d probably never see her again, “Well did you make any friends in there tonight?” she said, she might have heard the question asked him two days ago when he came out of the fort apparently without her, the compacted existence and rank thought inside, and raw dwelling, relations and underfed energy, almost impassable corridors by turns distant-daylight or lightbulb dusk, that late Mahim beach morning, And then, with the group, a change of itinerary outside the Fort that morning, and then another, and the girl all but forgotten.  Yet she had described an architect she would take him to visit.  “But your group is already going — it is Novi Mumbai — New Mumbai — a studio for many thinking people to work and live, he says, ‘Space we subconsciously create’ — and a filler of in-between spaces, between your home and a warehouse for instance, a place sandwiched” (she had laughed, taking them down a corridor holding out her hand to a woman who passed as if she passed through them, so close).

And now tonight he thought Who was the architect she had meant, who also had built a summer house very open with a secret room beneath for water fed from an aquifer still further below, sustainable, he had thought she said, though which aquifer and how could it be privately sourced?  So that now in the narrow street of a professional neighborhood that her father had just departed, a taxi like a question slowed, then accelerated, and the two women moved on fluidly or doing their job.  And the girl said, hearing his thought, “You remember the man I told you of, his secret water room, his in-between architecture, I could take you to him.  Planted trellises, wood screens filter out what you need not turn away from.  But you will make something better, or you already have,
at
your age.”  Could she have meant something already achieved? — for she had muttered, he would swear, “They will look up to you,” swear later, at home in a fifth-floor B&B with antique bureaus and is it mahogany the wardrobe, and a casement looking out on the spectacular promenade of Marine Drive at night and bordering it a bay and Arabian Sea, the view nothing like Mahim Fort’s bay three miles away on this islanded terrain, three mornings ago — for what has changed?