The Girl in the Road (24 page)

But in the second semester everything started catching up with me. Munny and Ying started dating and shunned me. Krishna started slapping harder than I wanted and so I kicked him out. Ahmed was religiously repressed and stopped calling me back.

Meanwhile, though my first yoni-love Ajantha had been expelled from Soman International, she'd enrolled somewhere else and gotten into IIT-Bombay two years ahead of me. She generally tried to avoid me, but I was still in love with her. One night I saw her on Fashion Street in the company of a young man and I called out to her and she saw me but pretended not to, whereupon in my last greatest act of self-destructive conflagration, I started screaming in the middle of the street and beating my fists on the asphalt until I'd attracted a crowd, including a pharmacy attendant who drew me in and calmed me down and took care of me, for hours.

And then recognized me nine years later.

I reach the halfway point of the Trail, which is 1,610 kilometers. Everything will be easier from here. Everything is downhill, so to speak. And to mark the occasion there's a lump on the Trail that turns out to be a body.

Mohini still talks to me, as do Muthashi and Muthashan. They're joined by others who all sit enthroned in a ring around my skull and advise me or comment upon the sights. Ajantha is there, and so are Ameem and Padma (though curiously not Rana), and Navid and Mohsen, and the two little girls I met on Marine Drive who directed me to Koliwada, and so are various people from my life whom I respect, and others I don't respect but think are sexy, like Anwar, Dilip, and Rafael aka Rahul. They're the comic relief.

They all say different things about the body I found on the Trail. It was human, certainly. I have no sense of bodily decay rate but I thought she might have died recently. No birds had disturbed her yet. Her face was turned south, away from me, and I didn't look. I went on quickly. The first time I thought maybe I should have lingered and determined cause of death, or pushed her over into the sea so that no other traveler would have to see her and suffer some kind of despair-attack that I miraculously had not, I was two kilometers away.

Muthashi-in-my-head again insists it was a stress hallucination.

MUTHASHI:
Admittedly it's a more sinister one than you've been having up to this point, but consider that you've been on the Trail for almost eight weeks now, and surely you're suffering from the Ganzfeld effect. Extended sensory deprivation results in hallucinations, including threatening ones.

ANWAR:
Dear bitch!—

ELDER LITTLE GIRL:
My amma says that people die on the Trail all the time. They run out of food or they lose their water filters.

YOUNGER LITTLE GIRL:
Or they just lie down because they don't want to live anymore.

DILIP:
Have you ever thought about, like …
not living?

AJANTHA:
You've fucked some winners.

Ajantha, I realize that. But I'm asking you whether you think the body was real.

AJANTHA
:
Did you touch it?

Only with my foot.

AJANTHA
:
Was it solid?

Seemed so. Looked Desi. She was wearing a golden sari.

AJANTHA
:
Do you trust your senses?

Not really. Muthashi keeps bringing up the Ganzfeld effect. And I've seen other things I can't explain. Like the little naked woman and the handprint, when I was underwater. Those seem like textbook hallucinations. And the fact that anyone would wear a sari on the Trail is bizarre. I can't even walk in those things on land.

ANWAR:
Fifty percent!—

AMEEM:
I'd say it was probably another traveler from another seastead who got unlucky. Lost her filter somehow and didn't know whether she should crawl forward in the hopes of finding another seastead, or back, to reach one she knew was there, even though it was kilometers away. She must have tried to go forward because she knew it was her only chance.

But she could see all the ship crossings just like I am. She could have flagged one of them down and bartered for a new filter.

PADMA
:
Perhaps she was running from the law. Do you have enough fish?

I ate all the ones you gave me.

PADMA
:
Onions keep at sea. I should have given you onions.

I'm all right for food.

PADMA
:
You need a mother.

Fuck you.

AMMA
:
Molay, I'm right here.

I stop.

I say “What?” to the open air.

The voice unfolds in my head once again.

AMMA
:
Yes, molay, I'm here. And your father, too.

I take a few long breaths.

It's the first time I've ever heard that voice.

If I do something wrong it might scare it. It might go away again for good. So I don't say anything.

I just keep walking but not hoping. I can't allow myself to hope.

Then I realize my chest wounds are infected again and so I stop and reapply dressing.

I don't know what day of the week it is anymore. When I try to figure it out I get snarled at the point where I started marking nights instead of days. It's either a Sunday or a Monday night.

The moon is waxing. I know that much.

Now that I'm halfway through I break my usual rule of not thinking more than two days ahead and start fantasizing about what the end of the Trail will look like. Whether it'll just end in the middle of the water, or extend all the way to a dock. Whether there will be police waiting for me, or a flotilla of happy Djiboutians. Whether the Djibouti shore is even swimmable, or if I'll get dashed against a breakwater.

I break another of my rules and start ideating suicide. It's not that I want to kill myself. It's just another thing to fantasize about when walking. I keep it light and comical. I didn't know my mind was so inventive. It generates categories for different types of death, and even prizes for superlatives. Most Awful (guinea worm). Most Fun (heroin).

I tell all these things to Mohini-in-my-head, in our own language. We could begin a conversation one day and pick it up again four days later, keyed in by a word, both knowing exactly where we'd left off. As if we existed outside of time. As if parts of us were carrying on conversations on other planes, with other organs; not just the skin and the brain, but our livers and noses and kneecaps, conversing about whatever they converse about.

Now I tell her I've been thinking about what it would be like to not exist.

She says, Walking in front of a train would accomplish that.

I knew you'd bring that up someday.

It didn't work.

No. People pulled me over, which was lucky.

But still, you tried.

What's your point?

The act splits the soul. You're haunted by the part of you that tried.

I feel like I'm whole.

Oh, really? she says. Were you not at first followed by a barefoot girl?

Yemaya, you may not believe me, but even as a child, I immediately understood what had happened. Lalibela really
was
the doorstep to heaven, and at the moment of baptism, you had transcended, dissolved in bliss, passed into the spirit world—whatever religious image one could use, you had done it! And of course, I hadn't gone with you because I wasn't ready. I had to understand you better. In the days before we reached Lalibela, I had become proud, stubborn and—worst of all—possessive of you. But you belong to no one, and come and go as you please, which is how you are able to love so intensely. Over the long years, now, I have come to understand: you held nothing back from me: you revealed your golden meaning right away. But I wasn't ready to receive it.

I certainly felt affection for other people over the years. I felt gratitude to Muhammed, who was still at the trucks when I wandered back from Lalibela town, who asked me what had happened and, when I said that you had disappeared, swore (which startled me!) and shook his head. He didn't understand, as I did. But he took me down through Addis, after all, and then finally to Hawassa, to the orphanage to which he had first promised me. I was too old to be adopted, but I was happy about that, because I'd already been on such a long journey and Ethiopia was my long-promised home. I didn't want to go anywhere else. Muhammed went back to his wife and his daughters, Fatima and Rahel, and he came to visit me once a month until I turned twelve and then he told me he didn't feel it was appropriate anymore. I heard he died from brain cancer a few years later.

I felt affection for the nuns who ran my orphanage, Sisters of Mercy Home for Children in Hawassa. I never misbehaved. The nuns noticed that I did all my assigned tasks with quietness and diligence because everything I did, I secretly did for you. They put me in charge of the library. We had such an odd assortment of books! There were pulpy comic books in Amharic, and dictionaries of Hindi and Mandarin, and flat hard squares of Japanese picture books showing albino children playing with cats. I was in charge of keeping records on the computer. With the help of the nuns, and other tutors and volunteers, I built on the Amharic that Francis had taught me. It was difficult at the beginning—and the other children called me Ghana Gorilla—but they left me alone once I commanded them to, in the voice of the kreen.

The kreen never went away. I had become used to its presence during our odyssey across the Sahara, and now that I was safely in residence at my destination, the kreen took up permanent residence in my chest. It always hurt a little, true, but only as a faint soreness. And it was a source of power when I needed it to be.

During the years of managing the library, I tried learning other languages in addition to Amharic. I memorized other alphabets, each of which had a distinctive look. Mandarin looked like ten thousand tiny houses. Hindi looked like the curls of grapevines hanging down from a trellis. Whereas Amharic, now my adopted mother tongue, looked like naked desert trees reaching from earth to sky.

In school, a frequent assignment was to compose hymns and psalms. I got good at them, and once I even won a national prize in the age-ten-to-twelve category, and got to read my poem in Addis with the minister of education sitting right behind me, to five hundred people in an auditorium as well as millions of people across the country who had tuned in on their radios and computers and televisions to watch the newly minted, first-annual Pan-Ethiopian Pageant. I even won ten thousand birr, which the nuns helped me put into a savings account. After I won the prize, I kept composing poems, to Jesus, or Mary, or God—but to me, the golden meaning lay underneath; which is, I was praising you all along.

So there was none that I loved as I love you.

But I must confess myself. Yemaya, you know all that is within my heart. I know you've been watching me. I was young, only twenty years old, the age you were when you rose to heaven, studying political science at the university on a scholarship sponsored by the Chinese government, and active in the new anti-Indian ARAP Party. See? I had always remembered what you'd said to me:
You'll become educated and you'll be one of the ones to fight back
.

But also, I had begun to look elsewhere for comfort and meaning without even realizing it. It hurts to admit this to you, but I'd begun to wonder whether you weren't just a girlish fantasy. The strange thing is, Gabriel appeared to me in Addis exactly the way you did in Dakar, and on Timket, no less. So I was deceived.

On that particular day, I was standing at the top of the steps of the university library, waiting for a student demonstration to start. We'd begun to hold them every weekend in the run-up to that year's election, the first election in which ARAP might have a chance, now that the UN had cracked down on election transparency because it didn't need Ethiopia's help in the region since the dawns of oil in Somalia, solar in Sudan, and hydro in Kenya. We wanted to unseat the ruling Pan-Ethiopian Party, which had done great good by uniting Ethiopia to unseat the EPRDF in 2025, but retained the EPRDF's too-friendly relations with foreign investors.

That day, we were to march from the library steps to Sidist Kilo, where we would circle the roundabout once, stopping traffic; then down Entoto Avenue to Arat Kilo, where we would circle again; then all the way down to Meskel Square (we would be gathering crowds along the way, but especially at Meskel), and then down Bole Road to Embassy Row, where the Indian embassy sat behind high iron fences, secured with a laser perimeter and shards of broken glass glued to the ramparts. We were marching to kick out Indian farmers who had bought land from our government in the 2010s at cheap prices, not to grow food for Ethiopians, but for Indians. Activists had posted pictures of the ships that departed from Djibouti City, heavy with grain, while Ethiopian children still starved waiting for international aid. Anti-foreigner feeling was swelling across the country; indeed, across all of North Africa. So it was all the more remarkable that, that day, while I was standing at the top of the library steps waiting for my fellow students, I saw a young Indian man from a very long way off, who made straight for me as if led on a path by the divine, carrying a handmade sign that read
quit ethiopia
.

He stopped at the foot of the steps and looked up at me. I'd noticed that I had this power, to silence people, to stop them in their tracks. I think it was the kreen, looking out through my eyes even when it wasn't speaking with my tongue. But though this young Indian had stopped, he stared right back at me as if he knew he had power to match my own, a power of joy. He was golden. He glowed. I don't know how else to describe it. He said,

Salaam-nesh!—yikerta?—meuche … meutash?

I answered in Amharic: I came about ten minutes ago. I'm early.

Ishi, ishi, he said. Ke Hend naw … yemeta- … Hend neng.

I can see that, I said in Hindi. You have quite the accent.

He seemed relieved to not have to speak Amharic. Is this where we're gathering for the march? he said.

Yes, I said. How did you hear about it?

The student newsfeed, he said.

Are you a student here?

No, he said. He had come a few steps farther up now, and we never broke eye contact. He continued, I'm a resident at the medical school. I work at Our Lady of Entoto.

I noticed that he seemed eager to please me, to win approval from me, even though he himself was (I could tell on sight) never the sort who would need to seek approval. He had dark golden skin and thick smears of eyebrow, his glossy hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and his earlobes were long and round like a Buddha's. He stood, waiting for me to say something, wavering slightly in place.

So where are you from? I said. Delhi? Mumbai?

Keralam in the deep south, he said. It's God's Own Country.

Why is it God's Own Country?

He had not expected to be questioned on this. He stammered to justify himself. Well, that's what the Brits called it, he said. But they were right. It's very beautiful. It's green and lush and full of colors and spices and rivers.

He could see that I remained unconvinced.

I said, I think Ethiopia is God's Own Country.

Tell me why you think that! he said, boyish, eager, open.

Human civilization began here, I said. In the north of the country is the home of Dinkenesh.

You mean Lucy, he said.

Her name is Dinkenesh. It means “You are wonderful.”

Understood, he said. Maybe you'll take me to see her someday?

I smiled slightly.

He asked me, then, if he could approach.

I nodded yes, and sat down on the steps.

He climbed the few remaining steps and sat down next to me.

“Quit Ethiopia”? I said. That's bold.

I thought it would lend legitimacy to the cause, he said.

You think we need legitimacy?

That's not what I meant, he said. (Oh, Yemaya, he was trying so hard to impress me, to communicate his good intentions effectively, to not embarrass himself.) He said, I meant, in the eyes of the Indian government. They've become so arrogant. They think that, because we're the most populous nation on Earth, that we're entitled to seize whatever land is necessary in order to feed all our people.

I nodded. It was a beautiful, clear day in the dry season. The hyacinth trees were budding all over the city.

So what do you study? he said.

Political science, I said. And some religion.

Religion and culture are one and the same in Ethiopia, no?

That's changing. Are they not also in India?

That's changing too, he said.

What are you?

Catholic mother, Hindu father, he said. That's why my name is Ramachandran Gabriel. I celebrate both and practice neither!

He laughed at himself. Then he asked, What are you?

It was always difficult for me to answer that question, Yemaya, because my religion was you. I had never felt anything more true or perfect than the time during which you walked on this earth. But how could I explain that to a stranger? That was
my
golden meaning, my semena werk, my true religion—and no one else knew it. No one, yet, had been worthy of knowing.

So instead I said, I'm a student of religion.

(Which was also true.)

He understood my subtext and dropped the line of questioning.

Thank you for speaking Hindi, he said. My Amharic is still terrible.

How long have you been here?

Only two weeks, he said. I just finished medical school. And then I go to Ayurveda school. But before that, I wanted to see the world. I wanted to help. In some way. In as many ways as I could.

So you're carrying a sign that says
quit ethiopia
through the streets of Addis Ababa.

Do you think its meaning will be understood?

Well enough, by those who need to. Indian nationalists in India, certainly.

Do you think ARAP has a chance of winning?

Sure. As long as Somalia stays quiet and the PEP doesn't whip up an emergency requiring martial law.

PEP could whip up an emergency involving Somalia, he said.

I gave him a Look.

Then he tried to guess at my ethnicity. He said, you look Oromo, but your hair is done in Tigrayan style, and you wear an old-fashioned Amhara dress.

(This was true. I was one of the activists reclaiming native Ethiopian fashion, which meant reimaginings of traditional dresses—white cotton with bright embroidered edges, just like the one you had bought me in Lalibela. Once I outgrew it, I wore it as a headwrap. See this cloth I carry? This is the very last bit of it!)

I didn't tell him what I “was,” but only shook my head whenever he was wrong. So no, I was not Tigrayan, nor Amhara, nor Oromo. I was not Somali or Harari or Eritrean or Dinka. I was content to remain a mystery to him. In my own heart, I didn't identify with any tribe; I only knew I belonged to you.

We stayed in a loose orbit that entire day. We marched together. We initiated slogans and heard them spread through the crowd. We arrived at the Indian embassy, which had been anticipating us; they had sent servants to meet us at the gate, to serve ladoos. We did not expect that! We didn't know whether to eat them (as Ethiopians are, above all, a polite people) or throw them against the stucco walls of the embassy (as Ethiopians are, above all, a proud people). So we refused them and then chanted for a few hours. The media came. Dispatches and photos of the event were posted all over the world. We made Al Jazeera. Gabriel's sign,
quit ethiopia,
made it onto the front page of the
Times of India
.

Darkness had fallen by the time the crowd dispersed. I saw the organizers shaking hands with individual protestors, slapping them on their backs, kissing cheeks. The march had gone well. We were dispersing back into the city. Gabriel said to me, Is there any seafood here? It's like mother's milk in Keralam. I miss the ocean.