The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (74 page)

“That is a matter for the Board to decide,” said Vice-Principal Mehta. “I see that you are upset. Take time to think over the matter before you make a final decision we might all regret. Now if you will excuse me; I have another appointment. I came here only as a courtesy.” He attempted to step around Amrit, but she blocked his way.

“Where is she? Where is my daughter now?”

“Mrs Chaudhury, calm yourself.” The supervisor had risen. Her quiet voice cut through Amrit’s mind-whirl. Tossing her head, she stepped aside to let the Vice-Principal pass. Mehta bowed to Mrs Singh and paused, his hand on the office doorknob.

“I apologize again for having interrupted you ladies’ workday. Mrs Chaudhury’s daughter should by now have arrived at their place of residence. I instructed the Assistant Vice-Principal to shepherd her safely home. And I am afraid that is where she must stay until such time as other arrangements can be agreed upon.” He smiled again at Amrit. “If you change your mind about the chip, do ring me up, Mrs Chaudhury. That ought not to be difficult for you to do, now that you have your cell phone back.” And with that he closed the door behind him.

When Amrit got home that night to the apartment she shared with the elder Mrs Chaudhury (her late husband’s mother), Amrit’s paternal uncle Saavit, his far-too-young-of-a-wife Gloria, their six-year-old son Dakota, Dakota’s pregnant and gender-inappropriately named rat-shrew Ganesa, and Amrit’s criminal progeny Meera, Amrit was in no mood for compromise. She marched right past her mother-in-law’s squawking complaints; through Uncle Saavit’s cloud of in-the-process-of-being-hurriedly-extinguished cigar-smoke (Gloria was still crosstown, at the Internet cafe where she worked long hours); pushed open without knocking the door to Meera’s little room (not much more than a converted closet, really); tore the earphones off the head of the closed-eyed, finger-tapping, unread-schoolbook-open-before-her fourteen-year-old, and said, “Meera. Put on your coat. We’re going out.”

“Ma!”

“Now.”

And then reversed the process, this time with Meera in tow (earphone-less, eyes now fully open, shrugging into her Adidas knock-off, still wearing her school uniform underneath), past Ganesa (who waffled her nose at them as they went by), past Dakota (who was plugged into his M-box and wouldn’t have noticed an atomic bomb if it had exploded under his nose), past Uncle Saavit (who had once been a professional boxer but now was huffing, “What is the fire alarm now, Amrit?”), past the elder Mrs Chaudhury, whose complaint-squawking had not slowed one monosyllable either in Hindi or English, and out the apartment door again, nearly slamming it shut on Meera’s braid.

“Ma! Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

And then down the six flights to the busy Mumbai street, where Amrit stopped to get her bearings. Around them, cars honked, bicyclists careered, motorized rickshaws put-putted, chapati sellers waved fragrant pancakes and called out to passersby, signs advertising Microsoft computers, Toshiba implants, and permanent waves (“Be mistaken for a film star!”) blinked on and off, and skinny pickpockets trailed camera-festooned Brazilian tourists. In the far distance, she could hear the rumble from the Mahim Railway Station. “This way,” she said.

“Ma, I won’t do it again! I promise!”

The fear in her daughter’s voice brought Amrit up short. The child was looking at her the way a mongoose observes a cobra that is beginning to rear. Amrit felt a pang. She did not wish her own daughter to fear her – not beautiful, bright, long-fingered Meera, remnant of her brief happy marriage, her only concrete contribution to the world’s future. But if fear was what it took to stop the child from throwing her life away, Amrit would harden her heart and use that fear for the child’s own good until she could find something better with which to motivate her. So all she replied was, “I want to show you something, Meera.”

They walked to the bus stop past beggars, businessmen, newspaper vendors, police. On the bus, which was nearly filled with after-work shoppers and evening-shift workers headed for cleaning jobs in the offices and apartment buildings round about, they sat side by side, Amrit still holding tight to Meera’s hand, as though she feared losing her, as though any moment she might declare her independence, run off to a party, get drunk, get her face pierced, take drugs, enter upon a life of prostitution. At the Mahim Railway Station, they got off the bus. As they mounted the steps into the station, still hand-in-hand, Meera asked, “Are you sending me away?”

“Don’t be foolish. Of course not. I said I wanted to show you something.”

“She started it!” The girl planted her feet, stared up at her mother (up? no, truth be told, only very slightly up, they were nearly of a height now; how could Amrit have not noticed that before?). “She called me a thief, Ma! She said I stole the cell phone, that it was her phone, that it could not possibly be my phone because we could not possibly afford anything so toff, and that I must give it back at once or she would tell the Vice-Principal. I told her it was not her cell phone, that it was our cell phone, that I was not a thief, and that Mother Kali could pluck out her lying tongue and feed it to her for breakfast, for all that she was of the Kshatriyas and very nearly a Brahman.” Her daughter gulped, caught her breath. “And then she slapped me. So I struck her the way Uncle Saavit showed me.”

“Are you finished?”

Meera nodded. There were tears in the corners of her big eyes, and her cheeks were flushed with passion, but there was no remorse at the corners of her mouth at all. “Then come,” said Amrit. “It’s only a little farther, this thing that I wish to show you.”

There were high brick walls between the back of the railway station and the thing Amrit wished to show her daughter, but Amrit knew every square inch of this area from childhood hours spent staring up at it from the other side. They threaded their way unnoticed through the knots of waiting commuters, sellers, and alms-seekers, past a group of saffron-clad Buddhist monks wearing sunglasses (at seven o’clock at night?), past a magazine rack sporting lurid film-star magazines, and finally to the spot she had remembered: a narrow doorway with a chain across it saying
ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY
in seven languages. “We are going up there?” inquired her daughter querulously, peering up into the dimness.

“We are,” said her mother firmly, and lifted the chain. “For what I have to show you may only be viewed conveniently from the top of this stair.”

“But,” said Meera, and that is all she said, for Amrit was half-pulling, half-pushing her onto the staircase with her.

The stairs were made of wood and smelled of old urine, chapati grease, stale cigarettes, and ancient durian. A faint light filtered down the stairwell from someplace high above, but it was very dark, and the stairs were littered with trash left by squatters down through the years. Twice Meera stumbled. The first time her mother was able to arrest her fall, but the second, Meera ended up on one knee on the stair, narrowly escaping being stuck with a discarded hypodermic needle. In later years she would recall this upward passage as the most horrific experience of her young life, yet in the end they attained the top of the stair and emerged onto an open causeway under a Mumbai night sky that had somehow become overcast during their million years in the dark.

The women paused to catch their breaths. Meera was surprised to realize how far they had climbed. Behind and below them through pollution haze stretched the Mumbai they had just left: the railway station, apartment buildings, office blocks, tooting thoroughfares. Meera could see the tracks for the Western Railway stretching away into the distance, where they crossed the Mahim Sion Link Road; beyond that, she could see the filthy black waters of Mahim Bay. “Turn around,” said her mother. Her voice sounded distant, like a goddess’s. Meera turned, and found herself looking down onto a vast, confusing jungle of silent, swampy slum. “Do you know what this is?” her mother asked, sweeping her arm outward to encompass the world before them.

“Of course, Ma. Dharavi.” She could not keep the contempt from her voice.

“And what is it, this Dharavi? What do you know of it?”

“It is where the poor people dwell.” The wind picked up, bringing with it from Dharavi the scent of sewage.

“What sorts of poor people? Specify.”

“Well, potters,” she said. “Furniture makers. People from the provinces who can’t afford to live anywhere else. Tailors, people like that.” Meera found the contrast between the hooting hum of the Mumbai behind them and the deep quiet of the slum before them deeply unsettling, and she looked uncomfortably around her. They were alone on the causeway. “They all look dead from up here,” she said.

“They are not dead, child. They are resting, those who are not sewing garments all night for less income than the beggar outside our sweetshop makes in three hours. One and a half million persons living in a reclaimed mangrove swamp. No sewage treatment facilities. Uncertain electricity. Water of such poor quality that one considers oneself fortunate merely to contract dysentery from it.” Amrit looked thoughtfully out over the maze of little lanes and thoroughfares. “But see the temple, there? And the mosque? And those buildings, that school, there? Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jains. Recycling everything, because one cannot afford to buy anything new. Your father was born there” – she stabbed the dark with her chin – “off Ninety Feet Road, not far from Kumbharwada.”

“My father? Born in Dharavi?” She could not believe what she was hearing. Meera did not remember her father; she knew him only from the holos on her mother’s old e-album, a small man, small like her mother, with ropy-muscled arms, large knuckles, and intense dark features. “You said he was from Rajasthan!” Meera’s tone was accusatory.

“I never did. I said his people were from Rajasthan. They were weavers and textile-painters. His parents came to Mumbai after the great famines, and settled in the Potters’ District. When I met your father, he was living with ten other young men in a garage, refitting automobiles for resale.” She had literally run into him, having ducked into the garage in an attempt to evade an irate fruit vendor from whom she had swiped three small green mangoes and a bar of chocolate. She had been eleven, a little girl; he, fifteen, nearly a man; out of pity he and the boys had hidden her, and afterward he had walked her home. When next she had encountered him, at a Kumbharwada street festival, nearly three years had passed, and neither he nor she had thought of her as a little girl any longer. He had known her at once. “Why, it’s the little thief!” he had cried upon seeing her again.

She had laughed in his face, giddy with the news she had just received in the post: that she, youngest daughter of a factory worker and a dockhand, had been the first female student to be accepted as a trainee computer specialist at the newly revamped and expanded Bandra-Kurla Complex. He had bought her sugared wafers, under the watchful eye of her three older sisters; and that summer, at the height of the worst dysentery outbreak Dharavi had endured in several years, they had kissed for the first time in the pouring rain.

Standing with her daughter on the border between light and darkness, Amrit turned to Meera and said, “Listen to me, girl. No, listen. The Kshatriya girl? The one who called you a thief? She was speaking the truth.”

“No, Ma!”

“The cell phone was not yours to borrow. Nor was it mine to loan, though had it been I would have loaned it to you for the asking. It belonged to the company for which I work. Today I had to purchase another cell phone to replace the one that was broken in the altercation between you and the Kshatriya. The cost of that phone will be deducted from my wages.”

“I’m sorry!”

“It is too late for sorrow.” Harden your heart, she reminded herself “The Vice-Principal from your school came to see me at work today. I suppose you know this?” The girl nodded miserably. “Do you know what he said to me?” Meera shook her head. “He told me that in light of the four violent quarrels in which you have been engaged this term, unless I agree to have you outfitted with a nanny chip to curb your aggressive response tendencies, he will see that you are expelled from the Academy.”

Having hurled her bomb, Amrit watched it hit home and burst behind the girl’s eyes. She had not let go of her daughter’s hand the entire time they had been in the street, and it was well that she had not, for the moment comprehension dawned in Meera’s young face, the child turned and lunged for the nearest guard-rail.

Amrit yanked her, pulled her back. “What are you doing?” she cried. “What are you doing?”

“Let me go! A nannychip? I would die, rather!” Her mouth was an open wound. Howling, Meera reversed direction and barreled into her mother, sending her staggering backward. “I hate you! A nannychip? I hate you, I hate you!”

“Stop it! I did not say that I had agreed!” Amrit slapped the girl’s face. Meera cried out, once; then stood stock-still, hands over her eyes, thin shoulders shuddering in the thin jacket of pirated ripstop nylon, sobbing raggedly.

“What is going on up here?”

Amrit turned, clutching Meera to her protectively. A man had come up the stair and was shining a flashlight in their faces. “You are not permitted on this causeway! Did you not observe the sign below? What is going on here?”

“We were just,” said Amrit, and for some reason she was having a hard time summoning enough breath to form the words, so that they came out in puffs, like Uncle Saavit’s cigar-smoke, “we were just, just, seeking the, view!” And then she was pushing past the man, half-carrying her daughter, half-dragging her, tumbling down the stair as fast as she could, while the man shouted, “You are not permitted! You are not permitted!” over and over again.