She Will Build Him a City (33 page)

The way you describe it, you make me want to go to sleep right here, right now, he says, and they laugh over that.

Kahini, you are such a story, he says.

And one morning, six months, seven months later, Kahini runs away from her house to come and live with him.

In Apartment Complex, New City.

CHILD

Cycle Rickshaw

There is a knock on her tarpaulin door.

‘Kalyani?’

She knows the voice. It’s Dr Chatterjee.

‘Are you there, may I come in?’

She doesn’t reply, she cannot reply, she is lying down on the floor, she tries to speak but each word tears at her insides in a fit of coughing so fierce it pulls her up, forces her to support herself by holding the wall next to her bed. Her head swims, she covers her mouth with a towel which only muffles the noise, brings tears to her eyes. He doesn’t wait for her, he parts the sheet and steps inside. She raises her head to look at him but that hurts, so weak she is.

‘You lie down,’ he says, ‘you don’t need to get up.’

~

He sits on the floor next to her.

‘I got your message,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘I tried calling you but no one was picking up. Remember I told you that you needed to see the doctor but you didn’t listen. But you don’t worry, I am here to help. Mrs Chopra said you called her and said it was TB. Can I take a look at the doctor’s papers?’

Kalyani points to the plastic bag on the floor, propped up against the wall, which has all her reports, the prescription, the record of her medication.

Dr Chatterjee goes through her records. ‘Seems all is on course,’ he says. ‘You just have to keep taking your medicine and wait for it to work.’

Kalyani has gone back to sleep.

Her eyes closed, he can hear her breathe. Shrivelled, she almost disappears under her thin white sheet.

He looks around the house.

~

The last time he was here – and he’s embarrassed remembering that – he was only interested in letting her know how he felt about her. He came with a proposition of sorts but his words got all mixed up, he never says them, and the moment passes. That’s why he keeps avoiding her and it’s only when she calls saying she is not well that he knows he has to see her again, help her in whichever way he can. That’s the only way he can make up for the selfishness that brought him here last time, help him salve his guilt.

Next to a tiny gas stove and a kerosene lamp, squats a small pile of aluminium utensils, bowls, saucers, spoons, each one turned upside down to drain the water in which it was rinsed.

Where do the other four members of the family sleep?

The room is so small Dr Chatterjee cannot imagine the space he thinks they need. For, across from where Kalyani lies, barely four, five steps away, the floor ends in another corner of the room where there’s a quilt wrapped around a pillow. Above it, on the wall, a row of nails is hammered into the cement, these serve as hooks from which clothes hang: two thin red towels, one yellow shirt, a girl’s dress. From one nail hangs a calendar with a picture of a bunch of flowers, the only splash of colour in the room. An incense stick has burnt to its end, dropping a heap of ash on the floor, filling the room with the whiff of a sweetness that mixes with the odours of Kalyani’s medicine.

~

‘You must be Pinki,’ he says to a girl who stands at the entrance, a look of shock and surprise on her face.

She is little more than a child.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I am Kalyani’s sister.’

‘She told me about you, I worked with her in Little House,’ he says, getting up, stepping out of the house.

‘I will wait outside, you go in,’ he says. ‘I just came to check on her.’

‘She stopped going to Little House long ago,’ says the child.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Are you Doctor Babu? She talks about you.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And where do you work, Pinki?’

‘Across the Metro line.’

‘And what do you do?

‘I look after a child, a four-year-old boy.’

Dr Chatterjee watching, Pinki walks to Kalyani’s bed, touches her forehead to check if she has fever, arranges her quilt and her sheet, pats them down, gets a glass of water, helps her sister to get up, helps her with the pills and then, with her thin, small arm behind Kalyani’s neck, helps her lie down again.

‘I am going for a walk in the neighbourhood, I will be back soon, I need to speak with your father,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ she says. And Pinki gets back to work, her elder sister fast asleep, preparing her home for the night ahead.

~

The sun is setting, the first residents are returning home, maids and gardeners, nannies and cooks, most of them women and children. Most of the men will return later in the night, from their daily-wage factories off the highway or construction sites scattered across New City, driven home by trucks or hanging from footboards of buses crammed beyond capacity. Children play with mosquitoes in black-brown puddles of water that’s leaked or dripped from no one knows where. Smoke rises from coal ovens being lit for the evening’s cooking. Standing on the raised verandah, outside Kalyani’s room, that runs all along the row of houses in this part of the slum, Dr Chatterjee is aware that he gets a second glance from almost everyone coming into the colony. Of course, he is not unwelcome. For there’s not the slightest hint of hostility or menace in any eye, just the awareness, cold and clear, that he is only a transient who has strayed into their space. That he belongs to the world that exists across the street that skirts their slum, beyond the dumpster that’s not been cleared in a month, beyond the Metro line, where restaurants and apartments, villas and condominiums are. Where CCTVs record entry and exit to check for all suspicious movement, where laminated IDs screen suspects.

~

‘Doctor Babu.’ It’s Baba, Kalyani’s father. He has wheeled his rickshaw in, right up to the entrance to his house.

‘Pinki told me you have been waiting. My shift is still on but I returned to check on Kalyani. She speaks a lot about you.’

‘We all miss her at Little House,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘I heard she is not well.’

‘Please come inside. Have some tea, Pinki says you have been here for a long time.’

‘No need for any tea, I just wanted to find out how she’s doing.’

‘You have seen it for yourself, Doctor Babu, what can I say?’

‘She will be all right. Her TB is the type that can be cured but it will take time and a lot of care.’

‘That’s what the doctor says.’

‘Take my number,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘Call me any time if you have a problem.’

‘There is only one problem, Doctor Babu,’ says Baba.‘Money is always the problem. I have saved some but I don’t know how long that will last. Kalyani’s TB medicine I get for free but I have to buy fruits, fish every day. You have seen how she has become, as thin as a ghost. I don’t know how long I can manage this. You know how it is, I drive a rickshaw, how much can I make? Pinki, you have seen her, she should be in school, but what can I do? We need her money too. Ma and Bhai bring in something but all of us are working very hard and I am frightened that one of us will fall ill.’

His words come in a rush, almost breathless, as if Dr Chatterjee, by his mere presence outside his house, has brought all the hope he needs.

‘Here’s some money for the fruit.’ Dr Chatterjee hands him a 500-rupee note. ‘This should take care of her share for a few weeks, buy fruit for everyone in the family. Let Pinki eat some, too, she is a child, she needs that.’

Baba doesn’t know what to say, how to say it.

He reaches out to touch Dr Chatterjee’s feet.

‘No, no, no,’ says Dr Chatterjee. ‘You take care of Kalyani, I will keep sending you money for the fruit and the fish.’

‘Please come in, please see Kalyani one time before you leave,’ says Baba.

‘I have seen her, she is sleeping.’

‘No, please come in and take a look.’

~

The room is dark.

Pinki has lit an incense stick, its glowing tip the only light in the room. Kalyani lies in the shadows.

Dr Chatterjee sits down on the floor again, takes Kalyani’s hand in his. It’s cool, damp to the touch. There is no fever, he can smell sweat and sleep on her skin and in her clothes. Her wrist is so thin he’s afraid the bones inside may break under pressure from his fingers. He gently lowers it, lets it rest on the bed. He feels a slight movement of her fingers.

Kalyani is awake, her eyes are open, she is looking at him. He smiles at her, unsure if she can see him in the dark. He covers her hand with his and she lets him, too weak to draw her hand back.

~

‘Doctor Babu, let me drop you off at the Metro station in my rickshaw,’ says Baba.

‘No need, you go ahead, I will walk.’

‘No, Doctor Babu, I won’t let you,’ says Baba. ‘Please get in, I am going that way.’

Pinki is at the door, she smiles at him, he smiles back as the rickshaw begins to move.

It wends its way through the narrow lanes in the slum, almost scraping the walls on either side, sending dogs and chickens scurrying away. They are out on the street now, Baba says something but Dr Chatterjee cannot hear above the sound of the traffic. This is the evening rush-hour, cars headed for Delhi are backed up almost a mile, crawling to enter the highway. As Baba pedals the cycle rickshaw, Dr Chatterjee can see his thin shoulders strain and stretch under his thin vest, the veins in his calves distended under the skin, sweat dripping down his back, his entire frame balanced on the seat, pushing his slight weight forward, as frail as his daughter who lies in the dark.

MEANWHILE

At the Protest Not Far from the AIIMS Mortuary

H
e is eighteen and he loves her.

She is eighteen, too, and, of course, like anybody else in love anywhere in the world, he loves everything he sees in her.

The way she looks she talks she walks she turns she eats she bends she sits she writes she reads she lifts she carries the world she does anything. And, again, like anybody else in love anywhere, he loves everything about her that he cannot see and because they are both first-year medical students at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, the country’s finest medical college, ranked No. 1 in all college surveys, 200,000 taking the test for fewer than forty seats each year, when he thinks of what he cannot see, the first thing he thinks of is what lies inside her.

He loves her capillaries, blood flowing, red blood cells, layers of tissue, blue, red, white, dermis, bones, heart, which is very obvious, ribs, the pineal gland that regulates her waking and her sleeping, her uterus where he hopes one day there will be someone, his or her little heart beating because of their love, even her large intestine holding her waste, honey brown, her kidneys that keep her clean. Every Anatomy class, he thinks of her, sees something entirely new inside her, learns its name, falls in love with it. Looks it up on YouTube or Google Images and finds someone somewhere in the world has taken a close-up picture with a sophisticated microscope-equipped camera that has enlarged the surface of the organ to make it appear like flowers, candy loops, sometimes a sea, roiling, blue-black, sometimes like the dust of stars blown across space.

~

Sitting behind her in class this morning, he falls in love with the lines she has drawn in her yellow exercise book, the cord of her phone charger that peeps out of a corner of her soft leather bag, a pen drive which she carries around her neck, the power button of her MacBook, its silver matching the collar of her white shirt, one end turned more sharply than the other.

He loves the way she raises her hand in class to speak because he can then see the skin around her elbow, hear her voice. He knows that each word she speaks is born inside her skull, in the folds of her brain, it touches her tongue, scrapes the roof of her mouth, her teeth, then travels, through her lips, parted, a hint of red, to reach his ears and his brain and tracing this journey inside his head makes him hard and this is a class, what if he is called on to stand up, to answer a question, and to distract his brain, to make the blood rush back, he looks out of the window and sees there is a crowd on campus, near the main entrance.

About fifty to hundred people, he counts six OB vans, one blue police van, several policemen with riot shields.

This is a protest against the government’s move to bring a law to reserve seats for other backward castes, he reads placards, ‘No to Quota, Yes to Merit’
,
he softens, his eyes return to the blackboard, to her back, the crease in her shirt below the shoulder moving as she writes.

~

That afternoon, on his way to his hostel room, he discovers that she has joined the protesters and because she is the youngest and, by far, the most beautiful and because of the way her upturned collar moves as she raises her beautiful hand and because it leaves exposed her beautiful neck and the beautiful hair that falls over it, because of her shirt and how it clings to her, all the TV cameras are recording her, ensuring that her breasts, small and firm, are in the centre of the frame, being broadcast across the country.