The Girl in the Road (14 page)

She gave me a sly look. How do you know I'm not? she said.

It's not as if I were actually protesting. I liked watching her, always. She looked like a royal courtesan every day, and I loved her for the care she put in to her appearance, but also for the moment in the morning when she woke up, bare-faced, sleepy-eyed, hair-mussed, un-made.

I turn over and look at Rana, lying on his back. He also has that nude look to his face, lips the same color as his skin. I wonder whether he really only likes men or whether he just told me that to trick me into showing him my breasts. I choose to believe the latter, right now, for my purposes. I think about spreading my hips astride him, and grinding down on him until he's hard, and then pulling down his pants until his cock springs free, and then holding him in place and then sinking down on top of him like depressing the plunger of a syringe. His skin is bare. Why would he do that if he didn't want to flirt with me? Did he even ask me if I liked men? Why would he torture me like this? Yes, these are the same courses of thought that rapists have. Yes, I want to have sex with Rana even if he doesn't want to have sex with me. I want to swallow him.

I touch his arm. He opens his eyes and sits up.

I don't say anything. But he sees something in my eyes, and he sees that my nipples are hard.

He gets up without a word and leaves the pod. From the circle of sky I see, dawn is near.

When I emerge, Rana is nowhere to be seen. But Ameem is crouched over the fish cage.

“Good morning,” he says.

“Good morning. Sorry I fainted.”

“You scared us. But you seem all right now.”

“I think I was just dehydrated. I got up and had some water just now.”

“Mmm,” says Ameem, still looking down at the water. I realize he's a stranger. Everyone here is a stranger. They don't really care about me because they know they'll never see me again.

Now I'm frantic to go, to be by myself again.

“I have to go,” I say. “I need to get on the road, so to speak.”

“All right then,” he says. “But go see Padma first. She feels terrible. She thinks she made you faint with all of her questions.”

She fucking did, I think.

When I go to Padma, she doesn't apologize, but instead asks to see my food supply, and picks through my provisions, reading ingredient lists. She then starts packing more food for me, including two dozen dried fish filets. She wants to give me more but I insist it's all I can carry.

“You need more variety. When do you have your lunch?” she asks.

“Around midnight,” I say, remembering my schedule. I long to return to my schedule. But I let her mother me. Because, having heard I have no mother, she thinks that this is the cure: to become mine, even if just for a time. It's not for my sake that I let her go on. It's for hers.

Rana is still nowhere to be seen. I swallow down my vicious emasculating thoughts and tell Padma to say good-bye to him for me. I give her one of my extra tongue scrapers as a thank-you. She seems glad for it. She also makes sure I have their coordinates and aadhaars and cloud names, if I should need anything. I'm beginning to feel impatient but I remind myself that I'm in no position to refuse help of any kind. Suri and Sita dawdle at the mouth of their pod, watching me. We never got to know each other. I wave at them. Suri waves back but Sita crawls back into the pod as if she didn't see me.

During the day, I watched you.

And I watched Francis watch you.

You had a collection of four bright caftans that you wore over your jeans: cerulean, indigo, tangerine, violet. You were a peacock in the company of pigeons.

One morning Francis asked you, So, Yemaya. What kind of name is that?

You looked at him sharply. An African name, you said.

Wolof? Fula?

Yoruba.

Yoruba!

Yes.

I could see Francis was trying not to laugh. Why do you have a Yoruba name?

I chose it for myself, you said.

Yemaya isn't your birth name?

No.

I could tell that Francis wanted to ask you what your birth name was. But your tone was forbidding. So instead he pretended disaffection and said, Too bad we're not stopping in Yorubaland. They'd seduce you right off the truck with all their woo-woo.

Woo-woo? (Oh, no, there was that tone again. In my mind I warned Francis to stop it right there.)

But he said, We have them in Ethiopia, too. Superstitious religions, not Christian, not Muslim, just worshipping nature.

You turned on him and said: They came before Christ. They came before Muhammed. Yemaya is the goddess of the sea. The sea used to cover everything. She's spread throughout the world. She's in Senegal now. She's in Brazil. She's in the Pacific. She's rising. She's arriving. She's coming onshore all over the world now.

I was waiting for a witty comeback from Francis, but he had none. Instead he said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend, mademoiselle Yemaya. It is a very beautiful name.

His apology disarmed you. You sat back on your feet and straightened your caftan and said, Thank you, and then, with nowhere else to go on a moving truck, went up front to sit with Samson again, and slammed the window rather hard. Through the slats of a crate I could see you rest your chin on your elegant wrist and look out onto the desert.

After I learned to write and sound out each letter, you and Francis took turns writing new words in my notebook, making me pronounce them, and teaching me their meanings. I still remember those early words: Sea, Sky, Moon. Soon we filled up the little notebook with the albino woman on the cover (you made me find her name on the inside cover, written in English, and sound it out—Sa-ra-swa-ti, who you said was from India, a country even farther away than Ethiopia). You had to buy me another notebook when we stopped in Bamako, a windy city sprawled on the banks of a river the color of steel.

Now we slept together every night. My body could tell when we had come to a stop. I would wake up, turn beneath your arm, and look up at the stars. They were so near in the desert. They blazed close to my face. Then, when we were safely rumbling along again, I could fall back asleep.

Whenever we stopped for any length of time, you took me looking for a shop that sold Indian sweets. It became our little tradition. If I could sound out the words on the label, you would buy it for me. The ladoos were still my favorite, even though you kept telling me that they weren't fresh, they were the kind you find at a Lebanese truck stop instead of the fresh ones in Little India, et cetera. How you lamented! But they tasted wonderful to me.

I began thinking about them all the time. Some days, when there were no sweets, after I was done with my reading, I just sat on a crate and stared out into the desert, imagining an infinite Lebanese store with aisles full of every kind of Indian sweet. Balls and bars and brittles. And I could just stay there and eat however much I wanted.

Sometimes you told me stories about your former life in Dakar, where you lived at home, but were an artist and dancer. You'd belonged to a troupe that performed dances about African rebirth. You asked me what I knew about African rebirth, but I didn't know anything.

You said, Well, in Ethiopia you'll go to school. A good school, from what Muhammed tells me. The nuns know what they're doing. You'll get better at Amharic and English, and they may teach you Mandarin or Hindi, too. You'll come to understand what's happening in Africa. How the weather is changing, the seas are rising, the peoples are moving. How foreigners are coming in to steal our land and our resources. Did you know the Chinese and Indians have taken more land than exists in all of Sudan? None of Africa will belong to Africans anymore. But you'll become educated and you'll be one of the ones to fight back.

What will you do? I asked.

I'm going to fight back too.

How?

By being alive. By speaking out. By making art.

You mean like drawing?

No, I'm going to study dance, you said. The Ethiopians dance like this—

And then you sat up and twitched your neck back and forth, like your jaw was tied to a string that people to your left and right were jerking on. I giggled.

It looks crazy, you said, but it takes so much muscle control. I taught myself a little bit from videos. Addis has the best dance school in Africa, with teachers from Ghana and Benin. And there's a new jazz institute that's opened up right next to it. They host poetry slams at the cafés on Bole Road. There's a special kind of poem in Amharic called a kinae, where the words themselves mean one thing, but a deeper meaning is hidden underneath—a golden meaning.

Semena werk, said Francis, looking up from his sirius.

What? you said.

Semena werk is “golden meaning” in Amharic.

But it refers to a kinae.

Yes.

You turned back to me and said, Do you understand what we mean?

No.

Well, if a boy says to you: The stars are reflected in your eyes, what do you think he means? That the stars are reflected in your eyes, yes? That's true. But what he's really trying to say is that he loves you. That's the golden meaning.

Will he open my legs, then?

You slapped me on my arm so hard it stung.

Where did you hear that? you said.

I didn't answer. I was about to cry because I didn't understand why you'd slapped me.

You looked at Francis and seemed to gather yourself. You said, It's not proper for a little girl to talk about things like that.

I'm sorry, I said.

But you were upset. You sent me away to do my letters, even though I was well past doing letters now. I was reading whole sentences and understanding some of their meanings. So I sat in a corner and tried not to cry, and instead, to practice my English, sounded out whatever signs we passed. I focused hard so that I wouldn't feel the kreen.

heineken namaste india.

solaire afrique.

nutelecom.

jumbO.

sm!le.

We started and stopped, stopped and started. I had been keeping careful count of every stop, but then one day I lost it and never got back on track.

We spent a whole day at the Burkina Faso–Niger border and there was nothing to see for miles and so we just sat there doing nothing, and both you and Francis seemed moody and dispirited, and stared into your siriuses, and didn't want to play or help me with my reading. Those were my least favorite times. It seemed that you, me, and Francis—and even Samson, who had taken to playing Teddy Afro CDs on the old sound deck in the cab—were the most energized and high-spirited when we were on the move. So my favorite times were when the convoy was proceeding smoothly through the desert, and I could just kneel by the side with you both behind me, and the wind in my hair, and watch the country pass.

The easterly wind was blowing hard when we came to Ouagadougou. It drove dust into my eyes and I had to blink the crusts away. So at one of the gas stations, you got me a pair of tiny pink sunglasses with frames shaped like hearts. I loved those sunglasses. No one could see where my eyes were looking. I used them to look out at Ouagadougou, which seemed warm and cozy, less like a city than a very big village.

You took me by the hand and we walked through the alleys to a main thoroughfare, and on the corner there was a huge Lebanese supermarket, bigger than any I'd yet seen. The doors swooshed open and closed behind us, and frigid cold enveloped us. I'd never been that cold. I sneezed four times in a row.

Cold in here, yeah? you said. Feels good though. Air conditioning comes to the Sahel. Masha'Allah.

We got glucose biscuits, instant noodles, and packets of black chai. You took me to the sweets display and let me pick out what I wanted. They had ladoos and silver-foil pistachio bars and I said, I want one of each. But you said to the clerk, We'll take
two
of each.

Then we sat on a bench across from a big intersection with a metal sphere in an island in the center. You told me that the metal sphere was our planet. Yemaya, when I was that young I didn't understand that you meant it was only a sculpture of the planet. I thought that somehow the soul of the planet was enshrined in that sphere. And that the sphere itself was enshrined at the exact center of the earth, which was symbolized by all the traffic swarming around it, minivans and trucks and bikes and motorbikes sling-shooting around the center and taking off in another direction. We were at the heart of the heart of the world. We watched the people in silence. I wondered where they were all coming from and where they were all going. I wondered where I was going too. I hoped it would be where you were going.

So you really don't remember your family? you said at last.

My pistachio bar was melting faster than I could put it in my mouth. I concentrated on peeling the silver foil.

Did you have any sisters? Or brothers?

I shook my head.

No other children your age?

I shrugged.

Who is your father?

I didn't answer.

And you don't have a chip? …

No. Do you have a chip? I asked, happy that I knew what a chip was.

You pulled up the sleeve of your violet caftan and showed me a scar in your upper arm, the size and shape of an almond.

So my father could keep track of me, you said. He works for oil. My mother works for … well, nothing. She serves on the board of an NGO. Which amounts to nothing. But she lives most of the time in Johannesburg. She gave me my name and not much more.