The Girl in the Road (30 page)

Didn't see that coming.

“Look at my hand. I'm real.”

I shake my head in assent.

He pokes me in the shoulder. “Feel that. You're real.”

I assent again.

“Good. Now take another look at this glass of water.”

I do. I place my hands around it to steady it so that the water doesn't slosh out to either side.

“Now just put your lips to it. Don't drink yet.”

I do. I have the same feeling as I did when I descended down from the mountain to the plain. What have I been doing.

I fall asleep at the counter.

When I wake up it's bright afternoon. It doesn't feel right. I should be asleep.

Subu is lying in his boat, hands folded across his stomach, with his hat over his face.

Mohini, I don't know what I expected the Trail to be like when I began. But I don't think I thought it'd be like this.

I put my head back down.

I wake up to Subu's voice.

“All right then, let's see how we do with the water this time.”

I raise my head to see him throw out the old glass. I feel an impulse to stop him, but I don't have the strength, and so I just watch him do it.

He pours a fresh glass and puts it on the counter. “Just a little sip now,” he says.

I take a sip. After the brine of seawater, it tastes like sugar.

“Slow, now.”

I take another sip. I drink a third of it. And then I drink the whole thing.

I rest, this time in my own pod.

I wake at sunset and drink some more.

I can start to whisper words and, with practice, even put a little voice to them.

I start to return to the world. I hadn't even noticed I'd gone.

The third night, Subu judges I'm in good enough shape to try a hot dog.

Again he assures me they're kosher. I make the gesture to say, It's okay, I don't mind either way.

He claps the metal tongs a few times and then reaches into the steamer and pulls out a thick, pale hot dog. He puts it in a bun.

“What would you like on it?”

I sweep my hands wide, which I hope conveys The Works. So he adds curry sauce, sugary ketchup, mango pickle relish, onions, tomatoes, thick dal, and crumbled paneer. He makes one for himself, too, and I wait. Then he says, Let's eat, and we both take up the overflowing oblongities and chew, looking back east, where the dusk is pink and blue.

“So, where are you from?” he says.

I point east. “Keralam,” I whisper.

“What's your name?”

I begin to say Durga. But that name seems to belong to another, delusional self. I'm like a snake that keeps shedding skins. Every time I shed a new one, I think it's the last one, and I can't believe there could ever be a new one to shed.

“Meena,” I say. “Named after my mother.”

“Is she in Kerala?”

“No. She's dead.”

“I'm very sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“I bet your walking has something to do with her dying.”

A former self would have taken offense at this. But I just say, “Yeah.”

“Looking for her.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you hope to find?”

Well, I hope to find some ancient matron on the street in Addis who'll see me and jump up and cry out, Miss Meenakshi Mehta, can it be you?—even though I look so much more like my father. She'll see something in me that I can't see. Some evidence that my mother existed. Some evidence of her regard for me. Someone who knew her while she was in Ethiopia. A lost diary. Her flat in Addis. Her favorite restaurant in Addis. A photograph where she holds a stethoscope to a smiling patient's chest, smiling. Records of her visa application. The gardens she used to stroll with my father. Our Lady of Entoto Hospital. The clinic inside Our Lady of Entoto Hospital. The room inside the clinic inside Our Lady of Entoto Hospital, where she died.

The woman who killed her.

I answer, “The innermost chamber, whatever that is.”

He's Hindu. Culturally, at least. He gets it. “Do you have anyone at home?”

“Yes,” I say. And then I say, “No.”

“I see.”

“I did, but I left her. Even though she'd been attacked.”

“Attacked by what?”

“A snake. The snake bit me, too.” I parted my robe to show him the five scabs, which have become like overlapping red moons and their penumbrae.

“Who put the snake there?”

“I don't know.”

“What did the snake look like?”

“It was golden.”

“What was his name?”

“Sunny,” I said.

“Ah,” he says.

I concentrate on watching the dusk. I count to ten, then to twenty, then to a hundred. The colors turn to red and violet.

“So,” says Subu. “In the interest of empiricism, what really happened?”

“He was the spicewaala I went to for cardamom,” I say. “He'd broken in.” And he was folded over Mohini like a frog, with a hand at her throat, and her eyes looking upside down at me, tired.

“What did you do?”

“Same thing. I ran away.”

I stay at Witness Dogs for two more days. I drink the water Subu gives me, and for every meal, I have his vitamin-fortified hot dogs. Always with everything on it.

When I'm healthy enough to go, he checks my kiln to make sure it's working properly, and then uploads his special hot-dog program. He also gives me two desalinator bottles. “Don't lose these,” he says. “You want to make it.”

“I do,” I say, and I mean it truthfully.

“Good luck,” he says. “But I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“If there was no snake in your bed, then where did the bite marks in your chest come from?”

My mind compiles the explanation. “There was still a snake there. Sunny was using it as a weapon.”

“But how many fangs does a snake have?”

“Two.”

“Then tell me, why are there only five bite marks in your chest, and not six?”

That night, Gabriel and I couldn't let go of each other. It was like our hands had magnets in them. And not just one pair, but both, which sometimes made it hard to walk forward! Outside the Sheraton we boarded the el train for Medhane Alem. We sat on the roof deck, not speaking, faceup to the stars. Our hands fumbled for one another in the dark until the foursome lay at rest.

When we came to his flat, he became nervous. He turned on the light overhead, but it was garish and fluorescent, illuminating everything. He locked the door behind us, saying, I have to make sure I do that because I always forget to lock the door. Amma says I'm too trusting. He apologized for the mess, though everything looked tidy to me. We both stood there, not knowing what to do.

Then the kreen itself whispered into my ear: turn the light back off.

So I reached behind us and turned off the light again. And in the dark, I felt for his face, and my hand found the curve of his jaw as if I knew it by heart, and I opened my mouth to kiss him.

All the nervousness went out of him. I could feel it draining from his body. He caved to me, cupping the back of my head and pushing his fingers into my hair. When we drew apart and tented our foreheads together, we knew what to do again.

I'll make better light, he said, but he couldn't see in the dark. So he turned on his sirius and we both laughed, and I cupped his head in my hand and pressed my lips to his temple. Our bodies could not separate. He had me sit down on the same couch he'd sat on before, during the jazz-listening party. But now it was just me here alone. With him.

Using his sirius as a light, he found matches, and lit candles. By the light, I saw pictures of his parents on the table, his mother stern and handsome with large square glasses and salt-and-pepper hair bound low at the nape of her neck; his father sweet and guileless, with caved-in shoulders and the smile of an embarrassed schoolboy.

When Gabriel was done, there were twelve points of golden light glowing around the room. He saw me getting up but he told me to wait. He disappeared into the back room, his bedroom. Golden light began to glow from that room too.

I became aware that soft music had begun to play, of a nature I'd never heard before, gentle and spectral, with sparkles of sitar against a drone, a woman's voice sliding up and down a scale that felt at once ancient and familiar. Gabriel reemerged from the bedroom, and put his sirius down on the table, and then offered me his hand.

Yemaya, where is it written that virgins are shy? And where does it say that they are unskilled? Gabriel undressed me and I undressed him as if we had shared a bed for all time past, and would, for all time to come. I ran my hands down his throat like a potter shaping clay, then down farther, one hand along his spine and the other passing through his solar plexus. I thought his body was much bigger than mine, but with our clothes off, we seemed to be the same size.

He laid me down on peacock-blue sheets like a baby, and covered me with his body like a blanket. And into that space where only you had been before, he came, bringing necessary pain, feeling like the burn of cayenne I remembered from your finger, but wider and hotter. He saw the look on my face and moved very slowly. He rained my face with kisses. And as I willed my body to accept him, the cayenne burn melted into something else, like honey.

The kreen uncurled from its lair in my solar plexus and descended down to meet him.

Gabriel was completing what you had begun.

In the morning, I was woken by a ray of sunlight that fell across our chests and warmed our bodies. Gabriel was sleeping like a child. His black hair was loose. In the sunlight I could see the reddish tone underlying the black. Strands waved in the air like live wires.

I felt that the moment was so perfect, I didn't want to even take the chance of ruining it. I would see him again soon. I would send a message to him later. But right now, oh, I wanted to step back into Creation as the changed woman I was! Gabriel didn't stop slumbering even as I dressed and let myself out. Not even the doorman's condescending look could dampen my spirits. Outside, the blue vaults above Addis were scented with eucalyptus smoke, a salt-and-pepper incense I still miss. I didn't take the train. I wanted to walk everywhere. I saw ARAP posters and PEP posters and students marching in the street, though I didn't join them. It wasn't that I believed any differently. It's just that my constitution was bigger now, and given to joy, a new garden of feelings I wanted to explore. The movement could do without me for a while.

I told myself, surely things between Gabriel and me are altered now, and I mustn't pretend otherwise. But I knew, just as surely, that I wanted to see him again. I waited a day for the exhilaration to settle, and then, standing by a lamppost in Arat Kilo, sent him a message in Amharic saying Hello and The Sky Is Full of Eucalyptus Incense, which I hoped would at least inspire him to study the translation on his glotti and educate himself, so that he could respond in Amharic, the tongue of his new home.

But there was no reply that night. Nor the next morning.

I told myself: you're learning a new person and his singular ways! He is Other, he is a mystery, he is a delicate puzzle not to be rushed. Was not Yemaya Herself temperamental at times? You must have patience. Or perhaps he was put off by my use of Amharic? It was rude of me to presume.

So later that day, I sent another message, this time in Hindi. Greetings Friend and I Hope You Are Well.

There was no reply to that, either.

Oh, Yemaya, the kreen began to stir within me.

But then I cupped the embers of that night again: the stars: the candles: the sitar: the rain of kisses. Such beauty cannot amount to nothing or the universe would not cohere.

The hours turned into days. The kreen had stirred, before, but now it began to writhe in its nest.

I began to look up Gabriel in the cloud, even though his aadhaar was limited; he was not very active. This made sense to me. He wasn't the sort of person to groom a public profile. So I looked at past pictures of him, taken by other people. Gabriel at university, president of the Society for Bioethics. Gabriel in secondary school, running backward in a red cricket jersey. Gabriel as an adolescent, not long after the incident with the snake, I imagined, posing in the brown-and-khaki uniform of his new private school in Madurai.

I began to blame myself. I realized it was because I'd left in the morning, not saying good-bye, just slipping out—my intentions had been good, but what if that had been an unforgivably rude gesture? I didn't know what Indians were like. I didn't know what they expected. I was so inexperienced.

So I sent him another message, again in Hindi, that said: I'm So Sorry I Left. Spend Time Together Soon?

And again, there was no reply.

The days turned into weeks. I kept thinking, Surely there must be a mistake, an explanation. I found myself loitering in favorite places of his, or places dear to his friends, or places frequented by medical students. But it was as if he'd disappeared from the earth. The kreen made it difficult for me to sleep. I had little appetite because the kreen took up so much room.

Then one day, I realized: a family emergency must have occurred. His dear father had fallen ill, or his brilliant mother had broken a leg, and he'd had to vacate Addis suddenly, too suddenly to send me a note. I decided that this must be the case and so I sent him another message: I Hope You and All of Your Loved Ones Are Well. I considered my interpretation of his situation as good as confirmed when I received no reply to that, either. After all, the alternative was not possible, not from the sweet golden boy who'd cried about injustice to a snake.

For the next few months I threw myself back into the election. I made calls for ARAP. I drew posters and canvassed and organized street teams. I rode the train south to camp at the reservoir near Koka Gidib, recently taken over by Indian contractors. We sat in a human chain in the soil, linking our arms in the face of an oncoming tractor. Again, Al Jazeera was there. Again, the pictures went viral all over the world. I sent one of them to Gabriel to remind him of how we met on the march through Addis but again there was no reply.

Poor boy, I thought. I hope he and his whole family are all right.

Then we learned of an all-new travesty: an Indian corporation's plan to build a wave array across the entire Arabian Sea, which would ostensibly benefit Djibouti. But how was India going to benefit, in ways it wouldn't say? How was Djibouti going to suffer, in ways that wouldn't be made clear to them? They wanted to use metallic hydrogen, that mysterious substance I remembered from our journey, Yemaya. How much clearer that whole situation, including Muhammed's moral quandary, became to me in retrospect! Metallic hydrogen was known to be an unstable substance, introduced by Indian contractors before being properly vetted, and had resulted in African deaths, most notably when it escaped containment in a Zambian plant and killed two hundred workers in 2035. If metallic hydrogen could cause such destruction on land, what would it do in the ocean?

Oh, I wanted to talk to Gabriel about these things! For me, he was the human face of India. I felt that the answers to everything, even international peace, lay in a loving and rigorous dialogue between the two of us. I cast us as the heroes of warring cultures. I wanted to understand his country, so I began reading everything I could about India; I even sat in on a special seminar called “The Indian Mind-Set.” I started watching streams of Indian dancers: Bharatanatyam, Theyyattam, and Mohiniyattam. I found a program to teach me Malayalam, which was Gabriel's mother tongue. I learned a few words so that I could surprise him when he came back. I even learned how to say
I love you,
so that I'd be ready when the moment came.

What an odd feeling: that India had invaded my country and oppressed it, but as I read more about them, Yemaya, part of me wanted it to happen! Just as easily as I had identified with Ethiopian culture when I was a young girl, I was beginning to dis-identify with it. Though I believed in fighting the exercise of the strong over the weak, I came to feel that one cultural identity was as arbitrary as another. Maybe I was really Indian. Maybe I was transracial, like the transsexuals who underwent expensive treatments to change their body to reflect their soul. Maybe I was beginning my slow transformation into an Indian woman.