She Will Build Him a City

By Raj Kamal Jha

As night falls in Delhi, a mother spins tales from her past for her sleeping daughter. Now grown up, her child is a puzzle with a million pieces, whom she hopes, through her words and her love, to somehow make whole again.

Meanwhile, a young man rides the last train from Rajiv Chowk Station and dreams of murder.

In another corner of the city, a newborn wrapped in a blood-red towel lies on the steps of an orphanage as his mother walks away.

There are twenty million bodies in this city, but the stories of this woman, man, and child--of a secret love that blossoms in the shadows of grief, of a corrosive guilt that taints the soul, and of a boy who maps his own destiny--weave in and out of the lives of those around them to form a dazzling kaleidoscope of a novel.

Beautiful, beguiling, and audacious, this is the story of a city and its people, of love and horror, of belonging and forgiveness: a powerful and unforgettable tale of modern India.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Release date: Mar 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781620409053

Raj Kamal Jha

Raj Kamal Jha is a mechanical engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, and has a Master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He lives in New Delhi, where he is executive editor of the Indian Express.

Book preview

Author

WOMAN

Winter Afternoon

This, tonight, is a summer night, hot, gathering dark, and that is a winter afternoon, cold, falling light, when you are eight years nine years old, when you come running to me, jumping commas skipping breath, and you say, Ma, may I ask you something may I ask you something and I say, of course, baby, you may ask me anything and you say, Ma, when I am tired, when my legs hurt, when my eyes begin to close, I only need to call you, I only need to say, Ma, and you appear instantly, like magic, from wherever you are you set aside whatever you’re doing you come running to me you lift me up you carry me you walk with me you.

Slow down, slow down, I tell you, but, of course, you don’t, you say if it’s sleep time, you place pillows on either side of me, you fluff them up, you switch off the light, you wait outside my room and only when you don’t hear me move do you walk away, Ma, my question is.

And you pause.

You breathe in, deep.

You toe-tap the floor, the earth spins underneath, your eyes look into mine as if you are the mother and I am the child and you ask:

Ma, is there someone who can do the same with you?

What do you mean? I ask.

Ma, is there someone you can call when you are tired? Someone who can lift you up, carry you around until you fall asleep?

Is there someone like that, Ma? A man?

A woman?

Is there?

Is there? So many questions.

So many question marks, their dots and their hooks float in the air, block my view of your beautiful face.

And I say, yes, maybe there is.

~

Tonight is thirty years forty years later.

So quiet is this little house that I can hear, from upstairs, through the walls of the room in which you are lying, the drop of your tear, the rush of your breath.

One’s like rain, the other wind, they both make me shiver.

~

And I say yes that summer afternoon, yes, maybe there is. Maybe there is a man or a woman who can lift me up although I will be much more comfortable if it is a woman because the only man I will let myself be carried by is your father and he is no longer with us and when I say this, a little cloud, cold and wet and dark, slips in through the window, hovers over our shadows on the floor before we both blow it back into the sky where it must have come from and when we do that, I feel your breath and I remember that it is warmer than mine.

The cloud gone, you ask, Ma, doesn’t the woman who will carry you, just like you carry me, have to be tall? Very, very tall? More than twice your height? Like you are more than twice mine so that when she lifts you up, carries you around, your feet don’t drag along the floor?

I guess so, I say.

How tall should she then be, Ma? you ask.

You tell me, baby.

You think for ten seconds, twenty thirty, your lips move, numbers small and big dance inside your head – multiplying? dividing? – and you say, at least 12 feet tall, a giant, like in Gulliver’s Travels, Ma, in the land that comes after Lilliput, in which the little girl, nine years old, just like me, carries him like he were her doll. And to show what you mean, you raise both your arms, you stand on your toes, just over 3 feet in your socks, you try to stretch to 12, and you ask, Ma, how do we go looking for her?

Don’t you worry, I say, we will meet her. Some day some night, I am sure, because how can you keep someone so tall hidden for so long?

Ma, if she is there, will she love you like you love me?

I don’t know about that, baby, I say, maybe she will if you want her to.

Ma, will she have a mother and a father? Brothers and sisters? Friends? Will she live in a very tall house with many, many tall people?

Maybe, I say, but maybe she lives all by herself.

Let me know when you meet her, Ma, promise me that you will let me know, I want to see her carry you, I want to see you fall asleep on her shoulder.

Of course, I will, I say. Promise.

And, thus assured, you run away, leaving a hole in the air, shimmering, through which afternoon leaks away and evening drips in, mixes, dissolves the scents you leave behind.

Of winter cream and red wool.

Girl skin and baby shampoo, one night old.

~

Last night, I meet this woman.

This very, very tall woman. In this house, right here, where I stand, and, just as I promise you, I am now letting you know.

~

Have you fallen asleep?

May I lie down by your side, just for a while?

I won’t wake you up, I will walk up the stairs on tiptoe, I will wipe all my sweat away so that not one drop falls, makes a noise.

If it helps, I will whisper each word I need to tell you, I will hold my breath ­– as if I am dead.

MAN

Night Metro

He is going to kill and he is going to die.

That’s all we know for now, let’s see what happens in between.

~

He waits to board the last train at Rajiv Chowk Station, the central hub of the Delhi Metro, crossover for Yellow and Blue Lines, through which move half-a-million passengers each day of whom he is one.

Nobody in this city notices one.

He is thirty years, thirty-five years old, 5' 10'', 5' 11'', his wrist so slim his watch slides halfway to his elbow when he raises his arm to brush back his hair. It’s over 40 degrees but there’s not a single bead of sweat on his face as if an invisible layer of ice-cold air sticks to him like cling film. Both hands free, he holds no bag, no phone as he waits at the platform, two levels below the street, next to Café Coffee Day under the Metro Clock whose hand shudders each time it moves a second.

Passengers ride escalators like toy men, toy women in a Shanghai factory he once saw on the Discovery channel: small and stiff, gliding up the belt, emerging face first. Followed by neck, chest, waist, legs, and, in the end, feet.That topple into a box to be hot-sealed closed, shipped across the ocean. To cities where there are more toys than children.

Next train 02 min.

The station is crowded, he closes his eyes, sees everyone naked and bruised.

Deep gashes scour bare stomachs and thighs like mouths of brown bags slit open.

Women squat on haunches blowing air into wrinkled penises.

Like children with balloons.

One is red, a womb floating in blood, inside which a foetus glows.

He feels an erection coming.

He opens his eyes, his heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, John Keats.

~

He likes poetry, he doesn’t like wet, he doesn’t like spray or spatter. No knife, no thick rope, no iron rods, the most popular weapons behind the headline murders in this city. Of Aarushi, the schoolgirl; mother Gurpreet and daughter Jasmeen; French tourist Lauren; Afghan woman Paimana and the elderly couple in Greater Kailash I, most of them stabbed, cut in many places. Or strangled, bludgeoned. Won’t work for him because he knows his arms lack strength and even if he gathers enough force to hit, it’s unlikely he will kill with the first blow which means he will have to keep hitting and, in the process, smear and stain larger areas. Perhaps, provoke a scream. There are 29,468 people per square kilometre in this city (Census 2011), twice that many is the number of ears.

Someone is bound to hear.

He could use a gun with a silencer, quiet and quick. As in movies he’s watched, books he’s read. Murder in Echo Park, Los Angeles, rain sliding down car windows, fogged in the cold. A park in Asker, near Oslo, a politician found in an empty swimming pool, a white tennis ball hammered deep into her throat. But this is fact, not fiction.

There are 20 million bodies in this city and then there is the heat.

Each body softened, warmed throughout the day in a marinade of its sweat and odours, hair oil, dust thrown up by diggers, cement mixers, earthmovers, dumptrucks. All tearing down, building up. New station, new flyover, new apartment block, new mall, new street, New City. Where everyone rubs against you, stands so close you hear their blood flow, skin crawl, hearts pump. Like the sound of trains running at night. You see remnants of meals lodged in teeth, trapped under nails stained yellow; cellphone screens smudged with wax from ears, flecked with flakes of dead skin.

Late at night, just before they close, eyes gleam with greed; during the day, they dim with despair.

~

He read a poem in school, On Killing a Tree by Gieve Patel, a doctor who lives in Mumbai. He has some lines by heart.

It takes much time to kill a tree,

Not a simple jab of the knife

Will do it . . .

. . . So hack and chop

But this alone won’t do it . . .

. . . The bleeding bark will heal

And from close to the ground

Will rise curled green twigs . . .

No,

The root is to be pulled out –

. . . Out from the earth cave,

And the strength of the tree exposed,

The source, white and wet . . .

. . .Then the matter

Of scorching and choking

In sun and air,

Browning, hardening,

Twisting, withering.

And then it is done.

End of poem, he’s never killed a human being. Only once, he has killed – a dog.

~

He hears the train.

He loves the Metro from the bottom of his heart, the place where he knows bad blood turns into good. He loves each train with its four, sometimes six, some have eight, Bombardier coaches. That’s why, on nights like this one, he leaves his car at home to take the train back from wherever he is.

~

When he is nine years ten years old, he has a severe stomach ache, fierce spasms twist and crush his insides, make him cry into his pillow every night for a week. Father takes him to hospital where they make him swallow barium sulphate, then track its movement by taking X-ray pictures every half-hour until they have an entire album of black, translucent plates which, when held against the light, show the barium travelling through his body.

He holds that last image in his head: that of a thin, white trace moving straight down in the black, through the cloudy haze of organs, knotting into whorls and loops where the ulcers are, then travelling clear again, uninterrupted.

Like the Metro.

Each train a glowing pill swallowed, coursing through the dark insides of this sick city.

On the way home from hospital, Father buys him a cricket bat and a roll of Poppins hard-boiled candy to take the barium’s taste away.

~

The train pulls in, pushing, in front, a wave of warm air from the tunnel to the platform. Doors open, people spill. A smell like rotting vegetables, bread and bananas gone bad.

Dead and damp.

Poet Gieve Patel is a painter, too. He did Man in the Rain with Bread and Bananas. (Oil on canvas, 2001.) That’s his favourite because the man in the painting looks like his father. The same sad eyes, the same old glasses.

Next station is Patel Chowk, doors will open to the right, mind the gap.

Twelve stops before he reaches home in Apartment Complex, New City.

Standing, he closes his eyes.

CHILD

Little House

The night is so hot the moon shines like the sun, its light as bloodless white as bone, casting a cold shadow of a woman as she steps off an autorickshaw, carrying her newborn wrapped in a thin, blood-red towel, tells its driver to wait, walks up to Little House, a home for children, orphaned and destitute, leaves the baby on its doorstep, turns and walks away into a wind, slight but searing, that slaps her in the face and fills her eyes with water.

The only eyewitness to this abandonment is Bhow, a black-and-white dog, surprisingly clean given the garbage heap she’s sitting on. She watches the woman leave the child, she watches her get back into the autorickshaw which drives away, the vehicle and its shadow both swallowed by the night heat rolling in from across the scorched bed of the Yamuna, the river with no water.

By night’s end, this heat pushes the temperature to a few points above 40, the highest minimum in the city’s recorded history.

It kills twelve people, seven over sixty, five under six.

The city’s two night shelters, mandated to be kept open by the Delhi High Court during winter, turn into makeshift clinics to treat those with dehydration and heat stroke. These shelters, however, soon run out of beds, food and water, forcing hundreds to sleep on pavements, many on street dividers fanned by exhaust from passing vehicles. Some find spaces in the shells of broken-down buses, some at the entrance to Metro stations where, if they are lucky, they catch whatever they can of the air-conditioned draught that escapes from inside a coach when its doors open, when a train stops.

~

At nine the next morning, by which time the temperature has already touched 45, Mrs Usha Chopra, the conscientious receptionist and secretary to the director of Little House – she takes the Metro from her home in Dwarka and, underground, the air conditioning works – discovers the baby, its eyes closed, its pulse jumpy, and when she touches the tip of its wrinkled nose, its heat almost scalds her finger.

Hurriedly draping her dupatta over the bundle, Mrs Chopra carries the baby inside, sits down at her desk, pulls her chair closer to the aircooler and when she peels away the towel’s layers, she almost cries out aloud as if she has witnessed a miracle unfold.

For, this is a boy.

Only the second boy in the orphanage – there are seventy-eight girls – and a boy with no visible disability, a fact of no small import since the only other boy in Little House is Sunil, no last name, five years old and still unadopted because he has Down’s syndrome.

The new baby begins to cry.

~

‘Let me look, Didi, let me look,’ says Asma Khatoon, the janitor, running, almost tripping over the bucket of Dettol water she is mopping the floor with. ‘Masha Allah,’ she says, wiping her hands on her sari, torn in too many places to count, ‘so beautiful is this child, may I hold him?’

‘No, no, nothing doing,’ says Mrs Chopra, ‘your hands are wet, we can’t let anything happen to him. He doesn’t look more than a day old, look at the red patches on his head, the skin peeling off his fingers. You go tell the day nurse to prepare some milk, God knows how long he’s been unfed, we need to clean him up, we need to fill him up with water. Imagine, this poor child, left alone in this heat. What if a dog from the garbage heap had scented him out, attacked him last night.’

According to the rules of Little House, Mrs Chopra’s first task is to report this new entry so she walks to the director’s office but not before she has recorded a clip of the baby on her phone, the blink of one eye, the slight wiggle of one toe, and checked the boxes in the form: ‘normal, male, infant’.

~

In his thirteen years as director of Little House, Rajat Sharma – Indian Administrative Service, 1988; MPA, Kennedy School, Harvard, 2000 – has never seen a ‘normal male infant’ being left on his doorstep.

‘Who lets go of a boy, Mrs Chopra, tell me who? Which mother has done this? And, that too, in so killing a heat wave? Which father’s heart is so hard?’ says Mr Sharma, himself the father of a son. ‘Let’s immediately get his files in order, I want all paperwork done before I leave for home today. And if we get this right, Mrs Chopra, I, you, all of us, will be on TV. English, Hindi, all channels. Boy deserted on the hottest night since Independence. I can already see the ticker: Breaking News, Coldheart Mother Dumps Baby In Record Heat.’

‘Of course, sir,’ says Mrs Chopra. ‘What name should we enter in the file?’

‘Name?’ He pauses but only for a second. ‘Call him Orphan. That’s it, Orphan. It’s an unusual name, that’s what TV people want.’

‘Yes, sir,’ says Mrs Chopra.

‘Also, it’s a common noun,’ says Mr Sharma, ‘like a blank. Like Baby. Any family which adopts him can fill in their own, whatever name they like.’

~

Over the next hour, Orphan is fed, changed, washed, all the while lying next to the red towel he has been found in.

‘This must carry the smell of his mother,’ Mrs Chopra tells Asma, ‘until Kalyani the night nurse comes, this will help calm him down.’ And help it does. His hunger fed, his thirst quenched by milk and water spooned into him, his body cooled by a sponge-wash and wind from the aircooler through which running water gurgles like a stream, the sound of a lullaby, Orphan slips in and out of sleep, his head resting on the red towel left behind by his mother.

Where is his mother?

Where’s Bhow, that first eyewitness?

The dog has watched it all and although, in the normal course of things, her little head and heart should not register any of this, they do, and so she finds a cool corner in the garbage heap to sit where she sheds a drop of dog-tear that no one but herself can see.

WOMAN

Old Child

I speak so softly I wonder whether my words carry to you. Up the stairs, so weak, do they slip under your door, climb into your bed, reach your ears? Because if they don’t, please let me know. I will retell this story, of the giant, the very tall woman.

~

Last night, I hear nothing. I am in bed, tired, my legs hurt, my eyes begin to close, I hear neither the door knock nor the window rattle. Or the sound of her footsteps up the stairs, her fidgeting with the lock, her walking into the house, all 12 feet of her. She knows where I am, she knows where everything in my house is because she walks without disturbing a thing, no tripping, no stumbling, she walks into the bedroom, to the edge of my bed from where she lifts me up, she carries me out of the room, she walks with me and the strange thing is that I am not aware of any of this because I have fallen asleep, I don’t know when exactly, and it’s only when my eyes open that I realise I am not in bed, the floor is at least 9 feet, 10 feet below me and it’s clear this is the woman you asked me about that winter afternoon thirty years forty years ago.

She is here.

The woman, at least 12 feet tall.

~

The last time I am lifted so high off the ground, it’s on the Ferris wheel in the park with you and your father. We are on our way back from the Zoo. You are six years seven years old, I get so dizzy I close my eyes. Your father laughs, look, she’s so scared, he says. That dizziness returns last night although I have no reason to be afraid: she holds me firm, my chin rests comfortably on her shoulder, I smell the cotton fabric of her sari, bright yellow, I feel her hair, black and glossy, brush my face. I wish to see what she looks like, for that I need to turn my head but I prefer to stay still. Once, twice, she bends, tries to avoid grazing the ceiling. I try to speak but fear, like someone or something, has pushed its way into my mouth, caught my tongue between its fingers. So, my lips part but no words come as she pats me on the back like I am a baby she is trying to help fall asleep.

~

Close your eyes, she says, close your eyes.

Her face is inches from mine but her voice comes from some place far away like the rolling of distant thunder, cold and wet.

Let’s go out, you need some fresh air, she says, stooping to walk through the door, the weight of her palm gentle on my back.

I pretend I am asleep, her heart beats against mine. I feel the street below, through each of her footsteps, precise and heavy. I am fully awake now, perched on her, my entire body tense.

What do I look like if somebody sees us?

A bug in the rain that flies into you, by accident, clasps your dress and then doesn’t let go.

My head so close to the tops of trees, I hear telegraph wires sing, crows flap in their nests as they begin to wake up, wait for the first light of day. There is no one out at this darkest of hours except the boldest of fireflies and with nothing to constrain her movement, she walks upright now, no crouch, no bend. A light wind has begun to blow, it fans my face. She walks as if she knows this neighbourhood, all its lanes and bylanes, its open hydrants, the tar of the street long gone, baby pigs playing with trash, dirt-tracks that twist in and out of empty plots with half-built houses.

How long she walks I am not sure because my eyes close again, on their own, and I never know when I go back to sleep or when she turns to walk home, when and how she places me back on the bed until the morning when I wake up to see, for the first time, that pillows are propped up on either side of me.

Exactly as I do with you.

There are scratch marks on the ceiling where her head must have scraped the plaster. And a strand of her hair, more than 6 feet long, lies on my bedspread. Like a line drawn with a felt-tipped pen.

~

She may return, maybe by the end of this night.

She knows where I live, I think she has marked me out. The next time, instead of placing me back in the bed, she may take me away to where she lives, where giants live, in hiding in this city. Where there will be others like her, young and old, tall and very, very tall, who will play with me.

Your mother, this old child.

They will pass me, as loving adults do with a baby, from one pair of hands to another. And although I never thought I would tell you this – no child should ever have to hear this from her parent – I have to tell you: I am afraid.

That’s why I won’t sleep, I won’t switch off the lights tonight.

MAN

Flying Dog

Diwali evening, there is a terror alert across the city: security agencies suspect an attack by the Lashkar-e-Toiba, a spectacular hit, say the men and women on TV, bigger than the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, this time they may come by air, breach the no-fly zone, glide down from the sky in parachutes filled with poison gas. The alarming word has spread, he sees policemen at every street corner, they prop themselves against lamp-posts. In dirty brown uniforms, they look like straggly plants in clay flowerpots. He wants to walk up to them, tear their limbs, pluck their leaves.

One by one.

~

He, Sukrit, Arsh and Aatish. Four friends and one dog, too. Black-and-white. The dog is a bitch, teats swollen but pups missing.

Brave Dog.

Homeless in this city, day and night, Dog hears trucks thunder by, she hears the cough of the sick and the old, she breathes exhaust, in and out. But that evening, the Diwali fireworks reduce her to a scaredy-cat, make her stray into Apartment Complex where fountains and sparklers whistling from earth to sky, hissing rattlesnakes on fire, twinkling lights strung across balconies force her to squeeze herself flat under a blue Porsche Cayenne (Rs 1.2 crore) in Visitors’ Parking. Right next to a sprawling concrete quadrangle fringed by five apartment towers that glow in the night sky, towering lamps of glass and steel.

(They love this game, putting the price of everything they see in brackets.)

He stands and watches as, crouching on all fours, craning their necks to see under this car, Aatish and Sukrit dangle one Kentucky Fried Chicken leg each (Rs 119 for half a bucket). Part chewed, mustard-ketchup-mayo smeared like ointment on an open wound. Dog is frightened but she is hungry, too. She trusts the four, so she crawls out, even lets Sukrit clamp her jaws with both his hands, lets Arsh grip both her front legs, lets Aatish lift her tail, tie four rockets (Rs 245 for a packet of six) to it with a plastic string.

Dog lunges for the chicken leg which has fallen to the ground now but Arsh kicks it away, Aatish pulls her tail hard, she pulls, she pushes, she strains against hands and fingers that hold her down, she tries to wriggle out but with her jaws forcibly shut she can only twitch, muffle her bark.

In one deft flick, Aatish lights the four rocket wicks with his cigarette lighter. The first sparks sputter, they let Dog go, they watch.

Flames leap, saffron, green and white, a bit of blue, colours of the flag.

Dog makes a sound.

~

It is a sound he has never heard before. It comes from Dog all right but it is more than just sound, it has a shape and texture too, hard edges that scrape his skin like a knife. He smells flesh burn. Dog runs but she can go only a few yards before she trips. One by one, each of the four rockets rips the plastic string, embeds into Dog’s back, a jet of fire that gouges a hole in her black fur, mats its fringe with charred skin and blood. Three clear holes, the fourth one bleeds into them.

Dog crumples like a balloon, its gas draining out.

~

My turn, says Sukrit.

He opens Dog’s mouth, parts her jaws, she offers no resistance, he lights a chocolate bomb and drops it inside. This is how they do it in Iraq, Sukrit says, they do this to people, with real bombs, I watched it in a documentary.

Arsh flicks his cellphone (Rs 41,245), records the explosion, its aftermath. Seventeen seconds.

Bitch, Arsh says.

Like the dogs in Amores Perros, Sukrit says.

They like movies, they run backwards, Dog pieces raining on all four.

~

Past midnight.

He showers and scrubs with a Body Shop seaweed sponge he bought as part of a special Diwali hamper (Rs 5,657), he stands under the shower, steams Dog’s singed flesh and fur out of the pores of his skin, coats himself with Buriti Baby Body Butter (Rs 795), and lies down. He switches the air conditioner (Rs 62,550) on although it is cold but he wants to shiver under his blanket. He tries to sleep but can’t, he wonders what Sukrit, Arsh and Aatish are doing.

Lying in bed, he turns around to look at the sky through the window, thick with smog. Most of the revellers have gone home, there is a no-fireworks midnight deadline set by the court to cut down on noise levels and pollution. But fireworks are still going off far away, their noise,