Wreck and Order (21 page)

The man will ride his motorbike to the top. The plywood walls are perpendicular to the ground. The man looks up at the people crowded around the fence at the top of the hole. His face is a blur. He starts clapping his hands, loud and slow at first, then fast, hard, frantic, psyching himself up to risk his life for a few dollars. I grow nervous and hateful of fairs, spectacles, people crammed into small spaces, trying to have fun. “I don't want to see this,” I say. But the platform is packed with spectators whistling and clapping, peering over the fence around the top of the hole, watching the man mount his bike. He revs the engine twice, three times, four times. How is it even physically possible to scale these walls with that heavy machine? I'm sickened that my money has supported this wasteful risk.

He starts riding circles on the ground, building speed, taking the walls with his front tire and then crashing back to earth. He rides around the bottom for so long that the crowd jeers. At last, the bike grips the wall and keeps going, making a blurred circle of the man's body, his head a child's toy top in the center of the hole. No helmet. He stays low, a few feet off the ground, until the crowd once again taunts and whistles. In a nasty act of the will, he shoots all the way to the top of the fence. Suriya grabs my hand. A teenage girl cries out. Her boyfriend puts his arm over her shoulder and laughs. The man on the motorbike spins and spins below our transfixed faces, moving so fast he has to raise himself up on his legs and grip the hateful machine between his thighs, the wind pushing his lips out in a gummy rectangle around his gritted teeth. His eyes are huge and unblinking. No thoughts—just action, will, wordless prayer. How will he get back to earth, three stories below? He begins spiraling downward, slowing with each revolution. His body knows the exact speed that will maintain friction, yet give him enough time to slam on the brakes when his tires touch ground again, stopping just short of the opposite wall, just short of toppling this entire makeshift structure, killing us all. He dismounts and raises a hand in the air, looking at the ground. We clap. People toss bills and coins into the hole. A grinning father holds his toddler over the abyss. The child's small hand releases a fifty-rupee note. It takes the money a long time to float to the sand below.

“Do you like, El?” Suriya asks, which is when I realize that my jaw is clenched, my sphincter contracted heart-ward. “It made me scared,” I say. “People should not risk their life for a trick.” As if I know what people should do.

“Let's leave this place,” Suriya says. But when we try to make our way to the stairs we are pushed back by an opposing force. The stairs are packed with families, talking, shoving. Suriya learns that a woman rider is up next. People are thrilled to see a lady risk her life on a motorbike. Suriya and I are mashed against the back rim of the platform, along with fathers holding children on their shoulders. A young man at the front of the crowd points to me and beckons, inviting the sudhu to join him at the edge of the hole. “Come and see, come and see.” I turn away. Menacing words blare out of loudspeakers. The crowd settles and quiets.

A wail pierces the hush. At the base of the stairs leading up to the platform, a small boy is shrieking and beating the thighs of the ticket collector, who blocks the stairs with his wide stance. “Poor boy,” Suriya says. “There is no room for him.” But then a couple comes by and hands the ticket collector a bill. As he moves aside to let the customers pass, the little boy ducks under his arm and bounds up the stairs. He reaches the top just as the crowd starts clapping and cheering.

The woman rider—chunky and short, wearing a solid maroon salwar kameez—has entered the arena. The boy resumes wailing, pushing his way through the crowd. “Amma,” he shrieks, “Amma.”

“My god,” Suriya says. “That is the son of the woman on the motorbike.”

Strangers reach out to him, murmur gently, or grin and offer to lift him, probably drunk and glad to be involved in anything that seems to matter at all. The boy slaps the hands away, pushing to the front of the platform as the woman below revs the engine. His eyes are red slits. Suriya moans quietly. “I have fear for that boy.” I grip her hand. How stupid this drama is. I could pay that woman right now more than she'll make for this stunt, spare her son this terror.

The woman rides circles around the perimeter of the sandy hole, speeding up much more quickly than the man before her. Within a minute, she is suspended from a machine whose tires grip a vertical surface, churning the woman in circles so fast I get dizzy watching. The boy is silent now at the front of the platform, gripping the top of the fence. I can't see his face, just the skin stretched taut over his knuckles, his greasy brown hair smoothed down the back of his head. A woman next to him murmurs and tries to remove his hands from the flimsy barricade, tries to lift him up. He grips and stares. The woman doesn't want to miss the show, either, and gasps with the rest of us as the rider traces a large figure eight across the walls, zooming down dangerously close to the ground, reversing direction at the last second and speeding upward until her front tire is inches from the spectators' waists. She is wearing a helmet. Scant reassurance. Her body is alarmingly calm. She doesn't grip the machine with her legs as the man did. She moves too casually, almost pausing at the end of each of her trips earthward. On one of her trips up, she stops just below the little boy. “Amma!” he cries. She cranes her neck back to see his face. Her front tires leave the wall. She returns her eyes to the bike, revs, revs, revs. Too late. The tires paw the air. She seems poised for a long moment before gravity takes her. I lose sight of her before she hits the ground. The thud is not as loud as it should be.

Her son shrieks and leans out over the tower. A man behind him grabs his T-shirt and swoops him up. The boy kicks and punches until the man passes him to another stranger, all talking, all trying to get at the boy or get off the platform. Suriya juts her hand in the air and repeats a loud, clear sentence until a pathway clears for her. She kneels before the wailing boy, then takes his hand and leads him toward the stairs. Does she know him? I follow a few paces behind. The crowd is thick. I have to wait for minutes like years on each step before moving to the lower one. I lose sight of Suriya. It doesn't matter. Nothing I do matters at all.

At the base of the stairs, Suriya is speaking to the ticket collector, still clutching his tickets in one hand, the other hand empty, open, resting on the banister. If I don't move, the hands are thinking, I will not exist. If I stay very still, waiting, something else will happen. The door to the arena is opened. A clot of men with their hands in their pockets, one of them silently weeping, obscures the view of the mother. Suriya feels me beside her, turns. Her face is soft, contourless, merging with the sweet, greasy air, as if she has abandoned herself in order to be present inside this hell. “I do not know this boy, but I tell the people I am his auntie,” she whispers, answering the questions I cannot formulate. “He needs one grown-up, not all the grown-ups.”

She lifts the boy on her hip and moves toward the open door of the plywood hole. No longer crying, close enough to his mother to see her, the boy becomes afraid and burrows into Suriya's shoulder. I don't want to see, either. A man emerges from the crowd as we approach and gestures Suriya back outside. They whisper. Suriya addresses the boy, beams, jostles his leg. “Mother is alive,” she tells me. “But she is not awake. We do not want the boy to see her and believe she is dead.”

“That's great,” I say, barely registering my own idiocy.

For a long time, nothing seems to change. Then a white truck approaches, honking its way across the sand, scattering the frozen onlookers. It parks just outside the arena. Men—no, these are boys—jump out of the truck, open its back doors, pull out a stretcher. Everyone begins moving at once then—the crowd on the stairs surging downward, the people on the outskirts of the field closing in around the tower. And here is Ayya, pale, out of breath, nodding harshly in response to Suriya's questions. He begins walking away from the tower, against the crowd closing in. Suriya follows him. I follow Suriya. She murmurs something to the little boy. A friend of Ayya's will drive us to the hospital in his truck. Why are we at the center of this drama? How does Suriya know exactly what to do?

We wedge ourselves onto the front seat of the truck, my thigh mashed against Suriya's, the boy's weight shared between us. His leg pours heat into mine. He's probably about five. His hair smells like fried food, not unpleasantly. I have the urge to wrap my arm around his waist, cuddle him to me. But I make myself follow Suriya's example: committed but distant.

The hospital is a sunny building with open-air corridors and stairs that wrap around the outside of cavernous rooms. The waiting area is made of stone, one wall open to the bright, smoggy air outside. A young woman brings us tea and cookies on a plastic tray. The boy looks away from the food. Suriya presses cookies on me. They taste good. I reach for another. Suriya tries to play with the boy, hiding behind the chair and hoping he'll find her, pointing at me and saying, “America” and “New York.” He watches Suriya closely, expressionless.

Sometime later, a middle-age doctor with reassuringly severe cheekbones joins us. Suriya hops up and smooths back her hair. “The mother is okay,” Suriya tells me after the doctor leaves. “Broken hip and broken leg. But her head is okay because she dressed a helmet.” This seems like a miracle to me, and I tell Suriya so. “Lord Buddha helped her,” she says. “So she can take care for her child.” The boy's body is light and motile now. He hops from one foot to the next, biting down on his thumbs.

Now that he has relaxed, Suriya kneels down and asks him serious questions. He answers seriously: “Rajith. Ha. Ne. Ha. Ha. Ne.” Rajith is six years old. His father is a bus driver so he is not at home very much. An auntie in his village takes care of him when his mum is busy, so he can stay with her while his mother recovers in the hospital. “We must visit him in his auntie's home,” Suriya says to me. “He will be sad without his amma.”

Suriya does not lie awake at night wondering whether or not her life has a purpose.

The boy peers out a window, turns his head side to side, sings. Suriya translates his song for me: “Trucks trucks TRUCKS trucks trucks TRUCKS…”

After we have a meal in town, we are permitted to see Rajith's mother. Suriya and I stand outside, letting Rajith enter alone. The sounds of their reunion are stifled and unsatisfying—a surfeit of feeling trapped in timidity and weakness. A doctor pokes her head out the door and gestures us in with aggressive hand movements. Rajith's mother is prone on a stretcher, her right leg in a cast from toes to hip. Rajith kneels at the top of the bed, leaning over his mother's face, pointing to Suriya and me, bouncing lightly on his bent calves. “She must not sit up,” Suriya tells me, “so we must come near to her face.”

We stand over her. Her eyes look queerly small and bewildered, just as they did before the motorbike lost its grip on the wall. She stares at us, unblinking, then turns to her son, says a short sentence about the sudhu. Rajith lowers himself off the bed—slowly, slowly, lest he disturb his mother. He kneels in front of me and touches my feet. “He worships you because you help to save his mum,” Suriya says.

“But it was you who helped. I didn't do anything.” I would never get involved in a stranger's problem. I might cry over it, but I would not take action. I stare at my clasped hands.

“Yes, you helped, El,” Suriya says. “Rajith waits for you to touch his head.” I smooth my hand over his head just so that he'll stand up, worship Suriya too, return to his mother's side. But the doctors are standing before me now as well, thanking me again and again in English. “You are the hero of today,” one of them says, long spaces between each of her words.

“Suriya did everything,” I say. “I didn't do anything. Suriya deserves the praise, not me.” But they don't understand me and Suriya is content to stand silently beside the American witness to her goodness.

Before we leave, she writes down Rajith's address and mobile number. Rajith will stay at the hospital with his mother tonight. In the morning, he will go back to his village to stay with his neighbor until his father comes back from work or his mother gets out of the hospital. “Rajith will be all alone,” Suriya says. “So I promise that we will visit him and play.”

Only once we're on the bus back to Suriya's house does she voice the thought that's been a wordless hum in my head all day, one I've been struggling not to hear. “A mother must not have a danger job. A mother must stay with her child in the home.”

Even Suriya sleeps late the next morning. I'm awake when she rolls up her mat and begins sweeping, but I keep my eyes shut until she leaves the room. I need aloneness. The day has the obligatory tone of a winter morning in New York, I don't know why. It's as if I were standing for a long time with my hand on the doorknob before heading out to work my shift at the bookstore. Wind, people, cars, bikes, rats, ice, trains, hats, horns, beggars, trash, millions of tiny movements required to get from A to B and back again; no reasons, just thoughts and steps, thoughts and steps. I have to wait for the oddly conflicting strands of my personality to braid into a generic staunchness—weary, then stiff. I have become a part, apart. A breeze crests the windowsill and I lift my sticky shirt up to my collarbone. I long for Jared, as I always do when I feel this way—the strength of his desires steamrolling the productive world, his loud commitment to squashing immediate suffering by any means at hand, even those that will make him suffer more later.

I don't want to be a part of Suriya's world anymore, this village where the only action available to me is to eat food prepared by poor people. I need to get to a computer—see if the publisher wrote me back, look up other publishers if she didn't, write to Jared, plan my next move. But I cannot leave without some gesture of real thanks.