Meera Rohit Kumbhani is a writer and actor based in Los Angeles. She has degrees in neurobiology from UC Berkeley and acting from Columbia University. She lives with her husband, toddler, and maniacal dog.
There the worm lay, nestled neatly in a crack in the sidewalk. A crack only just as big as the worm, unnatural in both shape and depth, as though its sole purpose was to hold the useless creature as it said goodnight to the too-hot world.
They’re falling from the sky, Shantaben thought, her tired old body smothered by the windless Mumbai heat. It was the sixth worm lying in a strange pockmark Shantaben had seen that day, eighteenth this week. Maybe they weigh more than anyone gives them credit for. And crack the pavement upon impact.
Or maybe they live in the center of the earth and are, one by one, being ejected to face sun-drenched death. It seemed possible, she thought, her moist salwar kameez sticking to her skin. Tiny rivulets of sweat criss-crossed the terrain of her wrinkled face. Something is happening in the center of the earth. Shantaben spotted the first worm one day after Neelamjit, ever the dutiful messenger, had told her about Meeta, ever the near-forgotten daughter.
“Mansi and Rupa saw her walking in Nappu Gardens with him,” Neelamjit had said matter-of-factly, standing in the middle of her saree shop, pencil in her mouth, glasses nearly falling off her face. Shantaben hadn’t asked for this bit of news. “They both described him the same—mirrored sunglasses and slicked back hair, gold chain around his neck, and head held so high it almost popped off his neck. Walking around like Shahrukh Khan himself.”
Then Neelamjit brought up his arm. She took the pencil out of her mouth for this part.
“A whole arm around her neck, auntie, pulling her head onto his shoulder. And she—a grown woman! With a university education! What if she wanted to look away? Or stand upright? What if she needed to stretch?” Neelamjit asked, genuinely confused.
Shantaben rarely concerned herself with what Meeta was up to, and shrugged, more concerned with the angle the arm would have to be at to exert such control than her own daughter’s neck. But then, the day after Neelamjit’s report, Shantaben spotted the first worm, its shriveled body snug inside an anomalous crack. Later that afternoon, she saw the oversized sand granules at Juhu Beach. The next morning, the dogs. Now, five days later, she had a whole list, sitting like sludge at the bottom of her mind. It had been forty-five years since she had made such a list.
This morning, Shantaben realized her home phone wasn’t working. Who knew how long it hadn’t been working for.
This particular worm Shantaben now looked down at, blissfully unaware of its own worthlessness, was the same one she had seen on her doorstep earlier. She was sure of it—she remembered its distinct reddish head, the callow way it zigzagged towards her, as though entitled to gathiya and chai. How gleefully she had slammed the door on it. Now, an hour later, ten steps from her flat, her left sandal had just barely missed its carcass. She sighed, stepped over it, and carried on. She hoped the street cleaners would get rid of it by evening.
Her heart began racing for little to no reason and fresh sweat dripped down her chest and back. Five blocks and a sixteen-minute train ride later, she knocked as hard as she could on a blue building’s door. When nobody answered, she searched the door frame for a buzzer and pressed her finger into it until it hurt. Nobody answered.
“Meeta!!!” she shouted up to the third floor. Shantaben was allowed to be there. “Meeta! My phone is not working. Have you called me??”
But nobody came. And unless there was a nearby ladder that led to an open window, she had no other ideas but to turn back.
Shantaben thought back to the last time she saw Meeta—perhaps a month or so ago at an unremarkable cousin’s wedding. They sat at separate tables, but she made a point to tell Meeta to eat a ladoo before she left so she wouldn’t look like someone who didn’t appreciate ladoos. Shantaben tried to remember what color Meeta wore to the event, but drew a blank.
On the train home, Shantaben ran the list through her head, to keep her mind alert. The sand grains at Juhu are now the size of marbles. Stray dogs are marching single file. Rain can be heard but not seen. Flies are wholly uninterested in meat. Eighteen worms just this week. A familiar feeling of disappearance crept up her legs. It was the same feeling she had over four decades ago. Again, her heart raced, her face flushed, and the upper belly of her kameez soaked through with sweat. She pretended she was dry.
She got off at Matunga Circle and instead of walking home, she turned left towards King’s Circle. The overcrowded shopping district blared into her. Horns of several hundred cars competed for housing in her ears. Smells of cow shit, pav bhaji, body odor, and flowering jasmine hung next to each other in ever-stagnant air. Hungry children and pigeons alike pecked at the bottom of her salwar. She pulled open a glass door embossed in gold with the name NK’s Saree Centre where Neelamjit held court inside, squatting over a pile of yellow and green fabric like a hen over its nest of eggs. Neelamjit’s eyes squinted over the rim of her glasses at a measuring tape with numbers too small to command.
“She’s not home. And I have no phone anymore. What am I supposed to do?” Shantaben sat on a folding chair in front of the dress platform, her face reaching up towards an air-conditioning vent.
“That’s why I never had kids, auntie,” Neelamjit responded without breaking her concentration. “Too much worry. Are they okay? Are they hungry? Are they disappointing me?”
Shantaben wondered if she could lay claim to that last question. Or whether disappointment in general counted, too, regardless of the direction it pointed. She grunted, deflecting a microscopic wave of feeling. Neelamjit clocked this rare glimpse of maternal attention.
Shantaben and Meeta had long ago come to the unspoken agreement that there was no need to have much to do with each other at all. When Meeta’s father died, she came home from boarding school on the weekends, likely out of courtesy or a nudge from a kind teacher. But the two days she and Shantaben had together were spent staring each other in the face, daring each other to come up with something that might move their lips. Sometimes Meeta still came over for a night or two, but there were three bedrooms in the flat and little need to cross between them.
“What happens if she calls and I don’t have a phone?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where does it go?”
Neelamjit shrugged, unversed in the bygone language of landlines.
“What if she leaves a message? Where am I supposed to go to find that message?”
Neelamjit gave up on her fabrics, too elusive for measurement today. She searched Shantaben’s face. “I suppose you look for it in the sky, auntie.” She stood up and stretched her cramping legs. Shantaben looked at Neelamjit with pity. What a life, she thought, to surround yourself with desperately adorned fabric and call it a future. Neelamjit poured two cups of water from the pitcher set aside for customers.
“Tell me if you see her, okay?” Shantaben drank her water and stood up to leave. “But don’t call and leave a message. I don’t have time to go looking for it in the sky.”
The heat bath engulfed her within seconds of opening the door. In front of her, a puff of black steam burst out of a gutter. Her sandaled foot fell into a puddle and four distinct bugs crawled onto her toes. Shantaben looked up to see if there was anything worth seeing.
Thick sprawls of pink and iron-gray clouds loomed low, threatening suffocation. Black crows flew up into their darkest shades and never emerged. The traffic lights blinked yellow again and again, too fast and bright to have anything anymore to do with traffic. Likely they had given up taming the city a long time ago. Maybe they were tapping out an S.O.S. code, Shantaben thought. A whole city calling for help.
Shantaben tried to catch the eyes of passersby to see if anyone else was noticing what she was. They all averted her stares. Finally, she demanded of a small boy chewing through a frankie half-wrapped in foil: “Do you see the crows?” The boy looked up at her with a sauce-covered mouth and shook his head “no” and ran away. “HAVE YOU NOTICED THE DOGS MARCHING?!?” she yelled after him. She looked to her left and saw a street sign for Rhinoceros Way. Maybe Meeta was free, bathing in a water hole. Splashing a giraffe. Free from what, though?
Birds are being consumed by clouds, she added to her list.
Too agitated to return home, Shantaben returned to the train station. It was tiring and sad to look for messages in the sky. She hopped on the next train back to the blue building and rang the doorbell for several uninterrupted minutes.
“Meeta!! I came back!”
Perhaps Meeta had taken a weekend trip. Perhaps she had girlfriends to travel with. Or, perhaps she went to Goa with Shahrukh Khan. After all, she had a lover now, it seemed. The thought filled her with revulsion. It wasn’t the sex she was upset about. She had little to no feelings about sex one way or another. Sex was a necessary task to keep things moving. To get to the other side. Shantaben sniffed the air, wondering if it smelled sour. She lost hope in the unanswered door.
But Meeta had to come home at some point. And Shantaben was tired, in many different ways. So, she took off her dupatta and lay it on the stoop of the blue building. She would stay, no matter how long it took. She scrunched her thick body on a middle step and lay back against the railing. She added ‘sour air’ to her list. She looked up at the egomaniacal sun, the bird-eating clouds having parted, and grew drowsy with want. Within minutes, her head bobbed in and out of sleep.
She would not see Meeta tonight, she was sure of it. But at least the street cleaners had more time to clean up the worms.
. . .
When Shantaben first made a list, some forty-five years ago, it began with cows. It was in her village of Dahanu and she noticed them a day after her father, late one evening, walked warily into the corner of the house she slept in and sat on her cot while she sewed together a stuffed chicken. Unsure of what to do next, he stammered and cleared his throat repeatedly. Eventually he croaked out the information that a family was coming by to visit. To be on her best behavior. She nodded, elated by what was the longest conversation she had ever had with him. She was fourteen years old.
The next morning, the brown and tan speckled cow that smelled of roti and made its home in the tall grass in front of their bamboo home looked at her, angrily, as it brushed its front left hoof heavily along the ground. Then, after a whole day of school, Shantaben came home and there it was, still brushing, still angry. It had not moved an inch and Shantaben suspected it couldn’t. Concerned, she walked down the dirt road to check on the neighboring cows. None of them were moving. All of them brushing one foot against the ground, frustrated and tired. One of them looked up at her, desperate for help.
The next day she noticed the peepal trees had all gotten shorter. Two days later, the dry lightning storms began. By the end of the week, all the houses around her were suffering leaks, even though no rain had come, an entire barrel of peanut shells was cracked to reveal no peanuts, and everything Shantaben ate tasted like boiled potato. Finally, on Sunday evening, a shining black city-man’s car wobbled up the uneven road to their house and a family of four emerged: a mother, a father, a daughter twice Shantaben’s age, and a son ten years older than that.
All four looked Shantaben up and down as they made their way inside. Then, drinking sweetened lemon water Shantaben served to them, head down, the adults discussed at length topics like the disconcerting impact of waterlogging, the science behind television sets. By evening, Shantaben was engaged to be married, and a week later, she was a wife living in Mumbai.
. . .
“You can’t stay here.” A young flamboyant man stood above Shantaben’s peacefully sleeping body, two crutches bearing his weight. The sun had melted into the horizon and the mosquitos were snacking. The satiated clouds rolled over each other, dipping themselves in purples, blues, red. “You can’t stay here.” He nudged her with the bottom of a crutch, stirring her like nearly-spoiled milk.
“Have you seen my daughter? Meeta Bhimani, third floor. I have to tell her some things.”
He retracted the crutch. “I thought you were homeless.” He paused, his expression blank. “I don’t know any Meeta, but it’s good to know you aren’t homeless.”
He hobbled past her and opened the blue building’s heavy door. “Actually, is she short, plump, and has green hair?”
Shantaben thought of her daughter: tall, lanky, quiet eyes buried in a book or searching carpets for new bugs.
“Maybe,” she replied. Then: “Yes.”
“I have seen her. I like her a lot.” He walked into the building and shut the door behind him. Shantaben smiled, proud. She leaned back, fell back to sleep, and dreamed of peepal trees, shrinking and shrinking, until they were just ordinary grass.
. . .
In the morning, Shantaben’s back woke her by tying itself in a sailor’s knot. She groaned and twisted and pounded out what she could reach. Her eyes hurt and she wanted to wash her face in a sink. She took stock around her and wondered briefly if Meeta had come home last night, seen Shantaben asleep in her own perspiration, and stepped over her with no thought at all.
She stood up, hungry for breakfast.
On her way home, she stopped at Mehul Mobile Corner, pausing in front of a door plastered in old film pictures. Preity and Madhuri stared helplessly at her, their mouths open seductively, their bare bellies cold and sunken. Water dripped from the ends of their hair. Shantaben looked at them curiously, mesmerized by their predicament: There they lay, trapped in their flawless youth, left to eternally field a whole culture’s insatiable thirst.
Nobody was inside except for a small man and a smaller customer buried in a heated exchange. Shantaben called out to the man from across the store.
“How much for five minutes of talking a day?”
Nobody responded. Shantaben ran her hands along every box as she walked through the overcrowded shelves—dusty, taped, repackaged boxes daring the customer to trust the contents inside. She walked to the back, stood directly behind the small man, and rapped him on the shoulder, ending his meaningless debate.
“I need a phone to talk to my daughter. How much for five minutes of talking a day?”
After a quick and practical exchange of needs, she left with dust in her nostrils and a bright pink phone in her hands. Enamored, she touched all the buttons, not caring what any of them were for. So this is what the world has gone giddy for. Her cheeks lit up to match the rosy phone and she felt twenty years old.
. . .
“Neelamjit, I can now call her anytime I want. Look!” She didn’t know Meeta’s phone number, but it didn’t seem to matter. Neelamjit looked up from her scissors with the face of someone who had just made a wrong cut.
“It’s very nice, auntie. I like the color.”
“It has a sim card inside of it.”
“Auntie, I spoke with Varshaben next door, and she said the last time she saw Meeta, she looked radiant. Isn’t that nice?”
Shantaben froze with this tissue paper-sized piece of news. She had no desire to talk about radiance. She pictured her bookish daughter, wearing a too-tight dress made of sequins, oil in her hair, her braids let loose around the frame of her face, her crooked teeth poking out of her lips in a forced smile.
Shantaben tried to remember the last time she saw Meeta smile. Perhaps it was decades. Perhaps not. How much time she had had to know her own daughter. A stack of years, now sitting in a wastebasket. A bin full of wanting that Meeta would now willingly hand over to the nearest Shahrukh Khan.
Shantaben clutched her phone and thought of her list. She wondered if Meeta had a pretty phone. If Meeta understood the value of a pretty pink phone. Shantaben hadn’t, until perhaps now.
“Auntie? Are you crying?” Shantaben was not crying. She was two or more breaths away from crying. “You will find her! It’s only been four to five weeks since you last saw her. She is an independent woman!”
Neelamjit’s stupid words were of no comfort. Meeta had always been independent, that was the problem. If Meeta never saw her mother again, she would be fine. Shantaben was fine. Meeta’s one-day unwanted daughter would be fine, too. It’s how this went.
Neelamjit went upstairs to make a cup of chai for Shantaben. Shantaben stared at the phone, waiting for somebody, anybody to call. The color once again brought a smile to her face. Shantaben thought of Preity and Madhuri, and the sweet girls in the TV serials she’d spent most afternoons with for the past twenty years. Simple feeble girls tyrannized by their own beauty. No aches, no confusions, no hunger, only beauty. And evil mothers-in-law who once had beauty. Shantaben wanted to be one of those girls. To start over as a Madhuri. Just as the heat rose to her chest again, she clutched the pink phone and left before Neelamjit returned.
. . .
Shantaben’s first weeks of marriage were filled with excitement, the thrill of adventure. She was lavished with jewelry and brightly-colored dresses. She lived on a top floor with a terrace and a swing that overlooked rows of banyan trees and a man in a red hat who walked his monkey on a leash each morning. She knew her marital duties and, though old, her husband was nice. She poured everything she had always wanted into their life together.
But not understanding the rules of their arrangement, she found herself crossing lines she didn’t know were there. She overheard her sister-in-law calling her “a child,” asking her disappointed father-in-law what any of them had expected. Her husband began avoiding her and leaving most rooms she entered. She was labeled a nuisance. She spent more time cleaning, took extra care with the cooking, pressed everyone’s shirts until they were stiff, and kept quiet with her head down. But eventually, as she was indeed just a child, she found reasons to spend long hours hiding in the bathroom.
But, though the other women in the neighborhood looked down on her young age and halted education and village demeanor, she knew some things the city-girls did not. For instance, she knew the value of the wild carrots that grew like weeds on the side of her building. She knew how to preserve the seeds of these plants in airtight jars with just drops of vinegar and sugar. She also knew she could hide things, like small jars, behind the Ganesh idols in the family room that nobody else would dare touch. And thus, of all the women on her street, she was the only one able to keep herself from becoming pregnant for some fifteen years of marriage.
But the tides changed, as she knew they would. It was a slow years-long change. Her in-laws began to leer at her aging body. Her husband’s eyes grew slanted with suspicion and the air tensed between them. Subtle edges of cruelty and disregard entered the bedroom. She saw the dejected look on the walls and the houseplants and the marble goddesses that could no longer protect her. She had Meeta to secure a place for herself in the world. Nothing more, nothing less.
. . .
Meeta’s phone number was frozen inside the mechanisms of speed dial within Shantaben’s home phone. She pressed “M1” and then “1” and heard the melody of numbers play into her ear. Then echoing silence, as the line was still broken. She picked up her pink mobile phone and wondered how to translate the song back into numbers. She repeated the tune again and again and imitated it on the pink phone’s keypad. Docile housekeepers like “Deepa” and “Anju” and gruff men like “Ashok” and “You tell me who you are!” answered. She left the same message with all of them and then stared at the useless device when her five minutes a day of talking were up. She couldn’t go another night like this.
But she would go several more nights. She spent one in bed, lying in a pool of perspiration under a fan that wouldn’t spin fast enough. Another walking up and down Meeta’s street, wondering if it was even Meeta’s street. And a third visiting each of Meeta’s schools and the playgrounds where she used to play. Shantaben kept her eyes peeled for a plump little toddler, digging through tanbark and laughing for no reason. How many times Meeta had asked to go to the zoo or whether dirt particles had souls.
Shantaben counted twelve more worms, watched a gray papaya fall from the sky to her feet, and ate her morning tea, after it—with no warning at all—solidified.
On day six of her search, Shantaben purchased a sparkly lip gloss from a man at a convenience shop and lathered it on her dry lips. She smiled in an oval mirror and felt fifteen years old.
. . .
When she was a little girl, Shantaben took a dance class. Her masi took her—the cool one from Kolkata. Her mother and father didn’t know anything about the plan and thankfully never learned otherwise.
But when they arrived and the music started—its swells and drips all at once pouring from the speakers on the ceiling—something lodged itself inside Shantaben’s small heart and she began to sob inconsolably. Her masi had to apologize and bring her straight home, wondering what she had done wrong. To this day, Shantaben wished she had at least seen the other kids dance. Only decades later did she understand—as clearly as one does their own name—that when the music began, her whole four-year-old body filled with the overwhelming fear she would never hear anything as wonderful again.
. . .
Shantaben sat down for a slice of pizza at the new place across from Neelamjit’s shop. She hated pizza. She wondered if Meeta hated pizza. If she didn’t yet, she would soon. It’s how this went.
When she finished her slice, she asked the cashier to pack away the biggest pizza they could make, with every topping they had. She carried it over her head five blocks and a sixteen-minute train ride and waited outside the blue building, knocking and buzzing to her heart’s content.
Eventually, the boy with crutches came out.
“If Meeta Bhimani, third floor, is here, I will give you half of this pizza and you can eat it here with Meeta and me.”
He skipped steps as he ran up. Meeta wasn’t there.
But after three, maybe more, sleepless nights, Shantaben was unwilling to be a lone woman with a pizza for nobody. So, she invited the boy and whoever he lived with to sit on the stoop and eat it with her. The boy and three university friends swooped down like vultures to devour the free lunch. Shantaben had not bathed in days and dirt and dried sweat created tiny muffins inside each of her pores.
A plum-shaped boy named Aakash felt obligated to return the favor of a meal with inane conversation. “I look forward to getting old because then I can stare at anything I want for as long as I want, and nobody will say anything!” The other boys roared with laughter and playfully shoved him. One tossed tomato at his face. A quiet one unknowingly had pepperoni on his chest. They all hurled inside jokes at each other and waved their hands as though ridding the air of gas when Shantaben asked, unsmiling, what each of the jokes meant. They periodically turned towards each other with a look that asked, How long do we have to talk to her? Shantaben made no attempt to leave.
The plum-shaped boy taught her how to arm wrestle.
The meaty boy asked her if she liked meat.
The quiet one told her he was afraid of death.
They were children. Boys. Shantaben wanted to be a child that was a boy.
Shantaben willed herself to love the pizza.
. . .
Meeta belonged to her mother for the first six months of her life. A tiny ball of flesh, too small to be corrupted. Too helpless to pick sides. When Shantaben lowered her face down to Meeta’s, she would close her eyes and not know where one body ended and the other began. For six straight months, they were one.
Then Meeta’s face elongated. Her nose sharpened. Her cheeks sunk. With every passing day she morphed into him. And he beamed, swooping her up, bouncing her on his knee, throwing her into the air with a promise to always meet her on the way down.
Every nerve of Shantaben began to clench, tying themselves into knots they would never undo. How embarrassing, she thought, such open fatherly devotion. How ugly! Improper! Soon, they both looked at her with slanted eyes, and she at them. It was impossible for Meeta to be both her mother’s and her father’s. She had to choose one, and she had, so easily. Meeta’s father whispered things into her ears and the two of them would laugh on and on, and look at Shantaben wondering why she was still there. Shantaben watched bitterly at the way other children clung to their mothers when they were lonely or tired or sick in their stomachs. She waited. Let her come crawling back. Let her see I am not there. She retreated to her bedroom and spent her days immersed in serials and commercials for American lunchmeat. She counted the days until something good came along.
. . .
Cheese and bread sitting at the pit of her stomach, Shantaben decided to test how far her tennis shoes could take her and walked home instead of riding the train. She clung to her pink phone and three blocks from the blue building, she purchased a pair of matching pink sunglasses from a bald man on the street. She would give these sunglasses to Meeta when she saw her, and wear them in the meantime.
She walked south and west, her new glasses guarding her eyes from the late-afternoon sun. She cut through neighborhoods and tore across busy streets, impervious to anything around her. Eventually, she hit Mithi River, having long forgotten it was even there.
She stood over the rusted turquoise railing and looked down, wondering if there was any water at all underneath the menagerie of bottles and malformed plastic bags. She imagined Meeta on the other side of the river and wondered if she would wave at her daughter if she saw her there. If she would do everything she could to find a paddleboat or just walk on by and shrug. I couldn’t find a paddleboat, Meeta.
Shantaben sat on a bench and stared into where Meeta was not. She counted how many Parle G wrappers she could pick out in the river. She wondered how long each piece of garbage had been sitting there and if they were bored of where they lay. An entire bin of wanting.
If only she had sat down one time with Meeta to explain: want—no matter where it originated—belonged to the earth. That the deer and daisies and bee stings and forgotten rivers would absorb whatever was too big to be contained in a single small body. It’s what she had tried to tell Meeta that day at the Kanheri caves. Something budged in the center of the river, and out from under a framed baby Krishna, an otter popped its head.
It stared at her, overjoyed with the fresh air. It splashed at the water with its short nubby paw. It jumped up and pointed to a patch of white on its golden-brown stomach. Hello. I’m free! Play with me? Shantaben smiled, delighted.
It didn’t take much convincing. She hurled her legs over the turquoise pillars and sat on the top of the railing looking down, wondering if she could float on the warped air-conditioning filter directly below her. Entirely unafraid, she jumped.
She wasn’t a great swimmer. She plunged far below the surface. The cool water soaked through her pores, sloughing off the grime on her arms and oily crust on her face. Days of weariness melted into the murk. Her saree and tennis shoes pulled her down and she sank slowly. She felt eight years old.
She thrashed her way to the surface, beating back uncountable layers of plastic filth. She looked for the otter, overjoyed to share in its breath, but it was gone. She pushed through bottles upon buckets upon shards of clay pots upon a half-full tube of rat poison to see if her friend had gotten stuck. It had swam away. Perhaps it wanted Shantaben to follow. Perhaps there was a whole underwater world it wanted to show her. Maybe Meeta was there, queen of the river, holding a trident.
She plunged back underwater, forcing her eyes open in the muck to see what she could see. At first, nothing. But one by one, a whole flock of thin, glowing, electric-blue needlefish showed themselves to her. They looked up at her from every direction, concerned by her intrusion. She asked them where her daughter was and they all looked at each other to see if anyone could answer. None of them could. They shook their heads. Slowly at first, then maniacally. They undulated their whole bodies side-to-side, smacking each other in lamentation. They wept for her. She wept for them. Then all at once, they disappeared and black filled her stinging eyes. She splashed back up to the surface where a crowd had gathered at the turquoise pillars, pointing at her and calling out.
In the center of them, a young man with slicked back hair, white teeth, and a gold chain stood at attention, likely having waited his whole life for this exact moment. He pulled his white v-neck over his head, let the sun sneak a glimmer upon his chest, and leapt over the railing as the crowd cheered him on, their phone cameras fighting for the best view. Shantaben sighed, irritated, as she watched this hero swim toward her. Here comes Shahrukh, she thought. There was always a Shahrukh. Any way you turn, you could bump into a Shahrukh.
There was no point in making this easy for him. How unsatisfied he would be if it were easy. “Crazy old bat,” they could all say after they were sure she’d be okay.
As the hero swooped her into his arms, she closed her eyes and let her whole body go limp as though she were half-dead. His oversized hands grabbed her around the stomach, pushed up against her butt, clenched the sides of her breast, consumed her inner thigh. A used pig being taken to the dumpster. She was surprised his tongue wasn’t down her throat in the name of resurrection. How selfish a hero must be, Shantaben thought, to take the entirety of a moment and claim it as his own.
Somebody in the crowd had recognized her and called Neelamjit. She came immediately to pick her up, out of the hands of Shahrukh, and drove her back to the shop.
. . .
When Meeta turned fourteen, she was enrolled in boarding school by her father. Though nobody asked or expected it of her, Shantaben insisted on coming along for the drive. She told her husband she wanted to see the monkeys at the Kanheri caves along the way. That she wanted to take pictures of them with her new disposable camera.
Her husband parked the car in the lot downhill from where the caves began. As Shantaben hoisted herself out, she opened the door to Meeta’s side, too. “Come. Go to the toilets. It will be your last chance for some time.”
As Meeta used the public washroom, Shantaben took a picture of a baby monkey licking an older monkey’s arm. Twenty or so other monkeys were scattered amongst the branches of a silk cotton tree in the background, each screaming a life’s credo into the wind. When Meeta traipsed up behind her, Shantaben scolded her for scaring away her subjects mid-picture.
“Go back in the car if you are going to step so loudly.”
Meeta’s face reddened, her breath stopping in her throat. It was not lost on Shantaben how quiet Meeta had been over the last few weeks. How she only packed four shirts and two pants and had no appetite for dinner or dessert. But when Meeta’s father would come home from work and ask her if she was excited for the semester to begin, like a wind-up toy, she smiled from ear-to-ear and squealed in a voice that wasn’t hers.
Meeta headed to the car.
“You don’t have to go to this school if you don’t want to.”
Meeta turned back, waiting for more.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” Shantaben took in the field of monkeys. Two were copulating now and another three ran off with an unseen woman’s purse. “You could run away. Look at these rascals. They don’t go to school. They don’t have dormitories. They are free.” Then: “Join them. You would have to throw your shit into the air and steal tourists’ lunches, but you would be free.”
Though she tried holding it in, Meeta began to cry.
“Would you like to hold my hand?” Shantaben offered.
They stood side by side, dry hand scratching dry hand. Both overly aware of any unintended movement. They watched the monkeys and the monkeys watched them back. Meeta seemed to be sculpting a thought into words. Shantaben understood.
“Run away,” Shantaben whispered. “It is the only solution.” Before Meeta could decide how to respond: “And no, I won’t miss you. Not if I knew you were never coming back.”
The car horn blared from below. Meeta’s father’s voice admonished them both for wasting so much time. Meeta’s hand was already pulled away. Before obediently turning back to the car, she scowled at her mother’s insensitivity.
Shantaben wondered what was so insensitive. She rubbed her dry hand and hoped Meeta would use more lotion once she lived on her own. The copulating monkeys began screeching at an old man stupidly eating lunch.
. . .
“Look, auntie. You destroyed your phone!” Neelamjit scolded, a fire in her eyes. Shantaben was bent over in her folding chair. Water seemed to shake around in her head with her every move. “What were you thinking? That river is practically a septic tank! You could have caught any number of diseases from it!”
Shantaben had no need to respond. What was the point? Neelamjit hung her head, defeated. When she lifted it up again, tears clung to her eyes. She washed Shantaben’s feet, arms, face with a towel and bowl of water. She begged Shantaben to go upstairs to bathe. To change into a dry salwar kameez she pulled off the shelf. Shantaben was sure it was three sizes too large and refused.
“I would like a boyfriend, I think. And maybe to have another baby.” Shantaben stared at the ground.
“Okay, auntie.” Then, gently: “Auntie, I saw a brochure for painting classes and jewelry making over by Five Gardens. Would you like me to enroll you?” Neelamjit pressed her knuckles into Shantaben’s feet. A cup of chai was sitting next to her, untouched. Neelamjit’s glasses were hanging on the bridge of her nose. Any second now, they would fall down. How could she not know they were about to fall? What would she do if they fell? Stupidly say, “Oh, my glasses fell!”
Suddenly, Shantaben kicked Neelamjit off of her.
“Auntie—!”
“You are not my daughter! I don’t want your chai or massages or classes. If I take a class, Meeta will enroll me! Not you!”
Shantaben pushed herself out of her chair, knocking it backwards; she slid her feet back in her soaked tennis shoes and walked back into the steam bath outside.
Shantaben wanted to take an art class. How dare Neelamjit guess that. She wanted a boyfriend. She wanted a new baby. She wanted to be a boy. Where was Meeta to make all that happen for her?
She pulled her phone out of her wet pocketbook. When she saw it would not turn on, she threw it into the nearest trash can.
She can find me. It’s her responsibility now. Shantaben pictured her short, fat, green-haired, thin, bookish, sequin-clad, pudgy, happy baby of a daughter. She saw Meeta in every person she passed and hated them all for it.
Neelamjit watched her from a distance, making sure she was headed home.
Shantaben took off her shoes at her own building’s doorstep. They were soaked, as was she. She wrung out the bottom of her saree and watched water saturate the concrete. Then, she walked to the side of the building, pulled a hose out of its reel, turned it on, and dragged it to the front. She left water to leak all over the sidewalk. There is no reason for worms to die so easily, she thought, angrily. No reason at all. She left her shoes on the stoop. A home for them to crawl into if they were hot. It was us who decided they were worthless. She let herself in the building.
Gayatri—the old woman who had cleaned the building since she was a teenager—toddled toward her, her back bent so far over it was parallel to the ground. She smiled with whatever teeth remained in her mouth.
“Meetu come here. Visit you. But you not here, so I say go away, Meetu! Go away! I say. And she goes.”
Shantaben wanted to wring the poor woman’s neck. She felt the air go out of her waterlogged lungs. Meeta! Shantaben smelled like sewage. She touched the stair railing, searching for a handprint on the wood. She squinted her eyes to see if anything looked out of place. She heaved herself up the stairs, half-guessing Gayatri’s mind was long broken and invented the whole story. Or maybe Meeta had come. If so, maybe she had left something for Shantaben, like a smiley face in the dust on her door.
After far too many stairs, she coughed out water. She fanned her forehead and pulled at the railing to hoist herself up the last three steps. She looked up from her spongy sneakers, and there was Meeta. Down at the end of the hall. Her thin frame ever so slightly hunched in front of the apartment door.
Meeta looked back at her, caught, small things in her small hands. They stared at each other, neither prepared. Silence expanded the corridor. Eventually, Shantaben decided she could walk down the hall towards the door. It was her home after all. She was allowed to walk down the hall towards her own door. She stopped less than three feet away from Meeta. Tall and lanky and short and plump. The whole person Shantaben created by carving out her insides and throwing them at the wind.
Meeta handed Shantaben what was crumpled in her hands. A piece of paper with a strip of tape attached at the back. Shantaben smiled without showing it. Meeta is the kind of person who carries tape in her handbag. She held the paper in front of her face and read: Your phone is not working. Get it fixed. I heard you fell into the river.
Shantaben looked at Meeta and nodded.
“I...am glad to see you radiant,” Shantaben croaked.
Then she paused. She couldn’t remember the word for worms. She couldn’t remember the word for sand. She couldn’t remember the words for rain or dogs or husbands or crows or potatoes.
Something had happened to a dirt road full of cows so long ago. At this moment, she couldn’t think what. But she knew she had hoped for the best. For so many years after leaving, she had hoped for their best. So she turned the key into the doorknob of the flat and pushed. She waited until Meeta walked in, and then followed.
