The Girl in the Road (21 page)

I insert the sphincter into the pod's skin, making sure the lining makes a seal with the rest of the skin, and then thread the cord through. No time to think. I take a deep breath and slip into the water with all my clothes on, holding the other end of the cord, and swim down under the scale deep enough where the water gets cold to make sure I'm clearing the scales by a good meter, because if they knock together while my head's between them, this adventure will be over. I clear them and surface on the other side and heave myself back up, having made a loop underneath, and tie it around the hinge assembly.

Now the wind is blowing rain into my eyes and it's hard to see. I hold one arm up against the wind and nudge the pod to the edge of the platform. I slice it open and crawl inside it with all my things and then pinch the skin closed. I take off my wet clothes and wrap them up and set them aside to deal with later. I'm naked in an orb. Typical. The new oxygen extraction setting isn't completely clear; it's translucent, like seeing the outside through a filmy window. Rain begins to come in sideways.

Nothing left to do but go down. I rock forward. No luck. I have to be more forceful, but not enough to break the skin. I rock again and feel a sickening dropping movement and overcorrect back in terror, but it's too late. My pod rolls on the surface of the water and bobs in the waves. Then I begin to sink.

The water rises like a stage curtain. It's already a third of the way up my pod. I can see drifting gold dust in the gray water. I tell myself this is exactly what's supposed to happen. Though now I feel certain that this pod wasn't made for the open ocean, but calm ponds and reefs off of Goa. I curl up at the bottom of my pod, wishing I were lighter, if that would make a difference. I reread the instructions. It might take a minute for the pod to begin to sink completely, it says. So I have to wait. I fight the urge to unseal the pod and scramble back out onto the Trail. The storm would be much worse on the Trail.

Slowly, the water level rises farther. It's halfway up. Then there's only a circle of sky above me, rain drumming hard, and then the circle is gone. My world is blue-gray with yellow crumbs floating by. Getting darker. The air inside the pod becomes cooler and wetter. I force myself to take deep, calm breaths. It's almost as if the pod isn't sinking at all, but rather that the world is flooding. This is my new state now. The air is fresh. The oxygen extraction seems to be working. I examine the seal that the cord makes with the lining of the sphincter, which itself bonds with the skin of the pod—all seem to be holding. I realize I've been clenching all my muscles and try to relax. The pod becomes still as it sinks. Then there's a gentle tug from the top. I've descended three meters, which I set as my initial stop point.

I'm not sure I could sleep even if I wanted to. According to the Established Routine, this is the time of day when I read, but it seems ridiculous to read when I just dropped myself into the ocean like a tea ball. I can't reconcile the absurdity of that idea with the mundane reality of it. How I'm lying on my back naked with my legs crossed and my backpack in my lap. How it feels like I'm sitting on a waterbed. How the orb around me is colored a perfect gradient of light to dark.

I try to get comfortable. Being in neutral buoyancy, the pod has assumed a more spherical shape than it does on the Trail, where it sags from gravity. I try to spread my weight around because I still don't trust the pod skin to hold me. I keep my eyes trained on the light color above and sing through the twelve or thirteen kritis I know by heart. I may be agnostic but I know my people's songs.

I've been lying in the pod looking up for maybe fifteen minutes when I trust that, since I haven't suffocated so far, and my knot seems to be holding, and the pod skin hasn't split, I can give myself permission to move. I pull up a baggie of food I brought down—a couple of idlee discs without sauce—and eat them, still staring up. They settle my stomach.

I pull out my manual and read it again. It says that, to pull myself up, I have to take the cable in through the sphincter and basically pull myself up like pulling myself up a rope. As of now, the cord is letting out bit by bit on its own, which means that the scale it's tied to is bucking in the waves. The storm must have really arrived now. I just have to wait it out.

I go through my kritis again.

I hold out the last note of the last song until I run out of breath.

I take out my scroll. I reread the section on underwater survival. In theory, I can stay down here for a few days—the pod's skin has molecular pumps for both oxygen (in) and carbon dioxide (out). I'm beginning to actually feel comfortable. But sleep is still inconceivable. I turn my head to look down and there's only darkness. How many meters to the bottom, I wonder. Probably two or three thousand.

I tell my scroll to play the essays of Reshmi West, the writer-guru I first started reading after I dropped out of college. I close my eyes and listen. She was born in Dubai but went to India for college. Then she retraced Gandhi's travels by train. Then she lost touch with her parents. She traveled, not begging, but eating very little and filling whole journals, each of which she mailed to a friend in Trivandrum when finished. She carried only one salwar kameez and one sari ensemble, which she wore on alternating days, and washed herself on the ghats of whatever village she was in. I've seen holos of her from this period: light, fragile, skinny. She was a tiny woman to begin with, but here she looked like a marmoset.

She came to Madurai, the temple town that's home to the Sri Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple. The gods there are Meenakshi (mine and my mother's namesake) and Shiva. The priests bring Shiva to Meenakshi's bedchambers every night, sing them lullabies, and then leave them alone for their cosmic lovemaking. No one is allowed to see it.

Reshmi spent the entire day in the temple complex. After all the pilgrims left, after the priests had put Meenakshi and Shiva to bed and gone to bed themselves, she remained. She was so quiet that no one noticed her. She sat on the floor, with her back to a pillar by the Golden Lotus Tank, and strained to listen for the sounds of lovemaking. She claims she heard them. She heard panting and whimpering and gasping, sounds that one makes when one's finger is struck with a hammer. On through the whole night it went, and she sat still and observed her reactions to it. At first she was delighted and felt especially blessed, that she'd been allowed not only to catch a glimpse of the gods, but to hear them at night. She closed her eyes and pictured them: water-blue Shiva and fish-eyed Meenakshi, the lovely warrior. She pictured them entwining. She moved from delight to tears at the beauty of it. But the tears were not entirely happy. She was jealous, too. She realized she'd been alone for three years, not allowing anyone to touch her, and she was jealous that Shiva and Meenakshi had found each other, and flaunted it every night. Their sounds echoing through the pillars became not beautiful, but ugly. As if she were being forced to witness something unbearable, the embarrassing, sordid coupling of strangers. The gods were merely animals in heat. Can't they control themselves? she thought. And then the sky began to lighten, and the rapacious moaning finally, slowly, lessened with the coming dawn.

Reshmi found a group of women pilgrims camping in the street. She sat with them and tried to sleep, but the city was already awake, so she spent the day wandering far afield, across the river and back, before collapsing from fatigue in the street. This episode in Madurai became central to her literary imagination. How beautiful and revolting sex was. How its juices are both nectar and poison. For a year afterward she eschewed “shadow languages” and spoke only Sanskrit because she was convinced it was the fundamental mother language, the language that most closely reflected divine order, where each word was synonymous with its meaning and could, in theory, be regenerated ex nihilo by an infant who grew up in a natural paradise devoid of linguistic influence. She argued that Sanskrit words arose spontaneously in the mouths of babes all over the world. Her favorite mantra was the Sahanavavatu because her favorite time of day was morning.

I start singing it because it's morning. The first two syllables, “saha,” remind me of the sound the barefoot girl made. I don't know if she was real, but my glotti responded as if she was, so that's a point toward her actuality. My glotti couldn't recognize it only because Sanskrit isn't spoken anymore.

I pull out my scroll and look up “saha.” It has two contextual meanings.

One is
powerful.

One is part of the construction
let us be together,
or simply,
with.

It's funny that this cyclone is named Geeta. That's my Muthashi's name. I remember when I first told her I was dating Mohini. It was the dry season, hot, right before the monsoon, in the last week of May. I was standing on the footpath by the Manimala River downhill from the clinic. The river was just a colloid of algae and pollen. Trees dropped their seeds into the dark green emulsion, which, suspended, would send out roots, and soon the river would become a movable garden.

Muthashi came down the ghats, holding up her peacock-blue sari by the hem. Her hair was white and pulled back in a bun, and she insisted on wearing gigantic square glasses instead of getting corrective laser surgery, which was the only thing I'd ever known her to be irrational about. Something about a fear of not being able to blink. Around her neck was a thin silver chain with a small silver cross. Her nod to her Catholic mother, though her husband was Hindu, as her father had been.

When Muthashi joined me, we didn't kiss or embrace. We were still in the early stages of our reconciliation.

You're home, she said.

Just for a few days. I wanted to surprise you.

Muthashan said you had something to tell me.

Yes. I've met a woman named Mohini. She's a hijra. We're going to live together.

Muthashi shook her head in slow assent. Are you going to get married? she asked.

Maybe. I haven't asked her yet.

You're too young, she said.

I'm twenty-four.

Too young, she repeated. I married your grandfather at age twenty-nine. You should wait, Meena.

I looked out over the river. I'm ready for the monsoon, I said.

So are the patients, said Muthashi. The heat is terrible for them. We're almost out of turmeric.

I'll go get more, I said. I knew Muthashi hated patronizing the nearest source, a big air-conditioned market called SpyceWallah. The place she liked to go was all the way in Kozhencherry. And she was almost eighty years old.

That would be a big help, Meena, she said. Then again: You're too young to marry. How well do you know Mohini? Do you know her family?

I've met her mother, Seeta. She's great. She owns a beauty salon.

I saw this register on her face: NB, Not Brahmin. She ventured, And her father?

Died on a construction site when Mohini was three.

(DNB, Definitely Not Brahmin. But she wasn't going to say anything, because she knew it wasn't politically correct anymore.) Where is the rest of her family?

Her grandmother lives in Chennai, I said.

How do you know Mohini will be faithful to you? You know her kind.

I focused on the river and counted to ten. This was an emotional management technique I had learned as a trainee at the women's clinic.

What kind do you mean, Muthashi?

Hijras.

So despite all political progress, social advancement and appearance of acceptance, here was my grandmother speaking the voice of prejudice. It had to be something. If not caste, if not class, then gender. Children must un-train their elders over and over again.

I forced my voice to remain calm: That's a misconception, Muthashi. Hijras used to be sex workers because they were outcasts. They weren't allowed to live as other people do or work jobs like other people worked.

They could sing, said Muthashi. At the birth of boys.

But that opportunity didn't come often. And then there was lots of competition for those opportunities and most were shut out.

Muthashi was silent for a while. She did that when I out-argued her.

Then she said, A hijra came to sing at Gabriel's birth.

She waited for me to object to her saying his name. I didn't. This was also a feature of the reconciliation: that we could begin to mention the names of the unmentionable.

She said, We held the ceremony outside, on a field where boys used to play cricket. Your Muthashan was holding the baby when one of my friends came to tell me that there was a hijra outside asking to give praises. I would have dismissed him but Muthashan said, Geeta, let him come. I told my friend OK and then Muthashan gave me the baby and went to the microphone and said, Now we're going to hear a song. And the hijra came into our midst. Everyone got very quiet. Even Gabriel got quiet. The hijra was dressed in a bright orange sari with gold edging. He turned out to be quite good. He sang a beautiful song to bless Gabriel and then he came forth to kiss him, which Muthashan instructed me to allow. I was happy with him then, and we paid him. But then he continued near the fringes of the party asking men if they wanted to take him home, and it upset quite a few people. I had to ask him to leave. I think he had been drinking.