A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar - 12

THE MORNING BEGAN WITH A dance party. There was no music, but the excitement of the journey ahead was music enough for Mishti.

“Today we go on the plane, Mama?” said Mishti as soon as she woke up. “Today we see Baba?”

By today Mishti meant not that day but that moment, the daylong future too extensive for her to comprehend, and Ma bent to kiss her cheek. “Soon,” she said.

Mishti fell over with delight then, and when she roused herself, she stuck her arms out like a robot’s, body whirling, legs marching to their own vigorous rhythm. “Dance party!” she called, holding her hands up for Ma to hold. “Dance party, Mama!”

Ma emerged from the bathroom, where she had washed her eyes, and tried on a smile. She accepted Mishti’s hands and swayed, tentatively at first, then with more of her body capitulating, her limbs discovering—if not pleasure, then amusement—in the movement they knew. She jumped when Mishti told her to, and skipped on one leg when Mishti demanded that instead. She turned her arms into snakes and her hands into butterflies.

“Can Baba dance like this?” asked Mishti. She assumed a flamingo pose. “Can Baba do this?”

“You can ask him when you see him.”

“Today?”

“Very soon.”

“Today we will go, Mama?”

Ma had to repeat everything to Mishti, and ordinarily it irritated her, but now she wondered: Why? Repetition—the reappearance of questions and answers, the rehearsal of movements—w as how Mishti absorbed the elements of her life. These elements would soon be wholly new.

In Michigan, once more they would be a family, in their own new apartment. It would be small, but what had the proportions of this house given them lately? Ma cared not a bit about square footage. She cared about seeing her husband’s shoes by the door, his face in the morning, feeling the warmth of his arms around her at the end of the day, after Mishti fell asleep. Once more there would be a tempered sun, and once more a table laden with food.

Ma dreamed of a new kitchen. Ma dreamed of a large pot of dal, its surface as thick with cilantro as a pond with lotus, and a bowl of crisp fried potato, the root first given hard angles by the peeler, and soaked for an hour in cold water like shore rocks in high tide. She dreamed of golden cauliflower, like clouds at sunrise, and perhaps—this was her dream, and why couldn’t she include it?—triangles of ilish fish procured from a Bengali market in a strip mall, plump eggs like poppy seed in the belly, cooked with the sweetness of pumpkin.

But though Ma anticipated—and had anticipated, for months—the moment of arriving in America and seeing her husband again, there was an opacity to the fated reconciliation, too. She had heard of families who had experienced disunity instead of loving reunion, demeanors prickly from separation, marriages shredded from the necessity of months apart. Had these months of absence made them soft toward each other, or sore?

The daytime disco continued until Mishti, tired now of dancing, raised her arms in wordless request, and as soon as Ma lifted her up, the child wrapped her legs about Ma’s hips like a koala’s around a eucalyptus. Ma swayed back and forth, a pirate ship at a carnival, much like in the earliest days of Mishti’s life, when Ma was not yet mother, only a character in a hospital gown mimicking what she had seen the nurses do. From that moment until this one, the sturdy shelter of Mishti’s life had been neither house nor city but her mother’s body. As long as Ma remained strong, Mishti would be all right.

MA FLIPPED THROUGH THE PASSPORTS one more time, reassuring herself that the documents were convincing. Then, on Mishti’s visa sticker, she spotted something strange. Where all had looked precise and clean, now Mishti’s name was a blur, as was her date of birth. The last few digits of the serial number were indecipherable. The ink was running.

Mishti’s voice, as she sang, receded. Ma felt lightheaded as she located Dadu’s phone, and called the forger. How had she fallen for it? She had resisted for months; for months she had known it to be a scam. But the forger had gripped her in his claws the moment she had left behind her rational self and succumbed to fear. He preyed not on individuals but on moments of terror. Now, the phone ringing in her ear, its dull repetition confirming what she already knew, that the forger would not pick up, Ma understood that even if she sped to the photocopy shop and knocked at the back door, there would be nobody to receive her but the devotee of comedies. The old woman would rise from her show and grumble about being interrupted. Now Ma wondered if the pair had made a fool of her, if the devotee of comedies was the mastermind, playing a joke upon her customers that she alone relished.

Outside the window, the life of the city continued, indifferent to Ma’s fate. A vendor of lemon tea walked by with a kettle and a pillar of cups. A vendor of magazines and comics walked in the opposite direction. When a sparrow flew to a roof laid with seed, a girl emerged from a neighboring house with a slingshot in her hand. A cluster of people idled by a lamppost and shared rumors of the billionaire’s whereabouts. Ma dialed again and again, while America slipped through her fingers.

SOON AFTER, THERE WAS A banging at the door. Ma startled. She took Mishti’s hand, and tiptoed downstairs.

“Dadu?” said a male voice Ma couldn’t place. “I have these papers—are they yours?”

Ma opened the door, and there, before her, stacked in the ironing man’s hand, were the three original passports.

“A ragpicker came around, looking for this address. Said she found them in a garbage dump. I said, I know where this Dadu lives, I will give them to him. Can’t be losing such important documents—can’t you people be careful with your things? Now, in the middle of my working time, I had to close my shop to come here—”

The ironing man continued grumbling, and Ma accepted the passports in disbelief. She looked through the old visas, the old entry and exit stamps, and noted the pages wavy from water damage but intact. She inspected the United States visas, with their secret numbers and colors that revealed themselves at this angle or that.

This was Dadu’s doing, from the place where he had gone. Once more she looked at the passport pages, afraid that a flaw would reveal itself and render the documents unusable. But they were as they had always been. When she searched for words, she found only clumsy gratitude that sounded false for how overwhelmingly sincere it was. The ironing man was already retreating.

MA TRANSFERRED DADU’S ASHES INTO an undignified ziplock bag, folded the bag inside a tiffin box, and hid the box deep in her purse. She sucked a bit of protein paste to quell the fatigue in her body, packed the rest for Mishti, and collected two empty bottles that she would fill with water at the airport. Rolled within her underwear, she packed the cash she had saved over the past few months. And every few minutes, she reached into the zippered pocket of her pants to touch the passports for assurance. Then there came a moment in which there were no more tasks to be done. She simply had to look around at the house, silent vessel of her life, vessel of her mother’s and father’s lives, and bid it goodbye. She believed it would be a moment of practicality. She turned off switches. She dragged the suitcases down the stairs. But then, feeling a wave of guilt crash over her, an awareness of great betrayal—she was leaving her father behind, for the final time—she took the stairs two at a time, pulling herself up by the railing, short of breath, to see once more the pillow that held the stain of Dadu’s head, a trace of the coconut oil he had applied every day. Making sure Mishti was not watching, she held the pillow to her chest. It was only a minute before she laid it back on the bed, but the minute allowed in a texture of time, soaked in the past, uneven and wrinkled as fingertips after a bath, that she had been rejecting all day. At the sink, she washed her face and looked at the mirror. Nobody but Ma could now see, in that face, all the other ages she had been. She looked at the folds that marked themselves when she tried to smile, and she bent over the sink in the posture that she had once seen Dadu in, and she let a sparse few tears find the valleys and ruts of her face until they fell. The shelter of her last living parent was gone. The shelter of the home she knew would soon be gone. She knew that Dadu had hoped, against all logic, that Mishti would return, someday, and live in this house, in the grand new city of the future where (and here his imagination had failed to conjure anything truly new, anything that hadn’t already been beautiful once) flower markets lined the riverbank again and neighbors shared limes from their balcony gardens and mansions hosted film shoots. Dadu, she knew, could not bear the thought of the city surrendering to the river and the bay, his beloved house losing its bones to storms and intruders, and for what? For Mishti to live, riven from her past, in America, a country that was half dreamworld, half hell?

Then she gathered herself. On the way out the door, she made sounds of agreement in response to all of Mishti’s questions: “Our plane is yellow? Is Scooby living in Mitchigun? We coming home tomorrow?”

THE WORLD WAS NEVER A dire place, dadu had said when Ma had shared with him, years ago, that she was not certain she wanted to have a child in a drowning city. The world was never a dire place. Even in difficult times, there was beauty; there was joy; there was laughter.

For example, the cormorants that lived in the wetlands of the city.

For example, the white flowers that grew, untended and nearly unseen, by the road.

For example, the seller of belts in New Market who grumbled about making extra notches.

For example, clouds like black shoes, with golden buckles of lightning, that would drift away with no rain.

Ma saw all from the taxi as it sped toward the airport. Mishti saw all from the rear window, her hands grasping the back of the seat, her tongue tasting the headrest. She had asked a dozen times about Dadu, until Ma had said, agitated from the emotional turbulence of the day, fatigue weighing her body down, hunger a nail driven through her stomach, wanting nothing more than to be seated on the plane and receive a tray of food, “Enough, Mishti! Dadu will come later!”

Now the pair shared the silence that followed.

AT THE AIRPORT, A GUARD glanced at the two passports ma put before him, shined a tiny flashlight at one of the pages, and waved her on. The journey had begun. Soon the city would fall away, a region of bog and swamp and marsh that had long ago been claimed as land to be owned, sold, and inherited, though, in truth, the metropolis had been no more than riverine silt all along, no more than a densely populated fiction whose pages Ma would soon exit. In the window as the plane rose from the runway would appear the blocks of apartments built on reclaimed wetland, the rows of trees with their necks snapped by storms, the cars traveling cracked roads, the sun beating its fist upon the heads of those who walked, looking up at the jet overhead and dreaming of escape.

But inside the terminal, there was a crowd in front of the departures board, and from their faces, shorn of eagerness or anticipation, bereft of the glow of the future, Ma knew what had happened.

Had they all been scammed? In a way. The flight was canceled. The following day’s flight was canceled too. There would be no more flights to America for the next week, the next month, or, in truth, the foreseeable future.

Ma’s throat constricted. She opened her mouth wide to gulp air. She reached an uncertain arm for the solid ground, and lowered herself to a seated position.

“Let’s go, Mama!” shouted Mishti. “We catch the plane!”

But there was no plane to catch. For weeks, some Americans had protested against the flights bringing climate immigrants, and the latest catastrophe—the looting of the hexagon—which had made news around the world, was the last straw. Unnerved constituents put tremendous pressure on their politicians to halt the flights bringing over robbers and looters. So they had.

Other Americans had gathered at their home airports, urging politicians to reverse the measure, to allow lifesaving flights to continue, to think of the families awaiting reuniting, to think of the pain of children who were waiting to see their mother or father. These Americans urged their representatives to remember that all immigrants underwent thorough background checks; that applicants supplied stacks of documents to prove who they were and what their life had been; that the consulates examined bank statements, tax returns, pay stubs, employment history, education history, family history, property ownership; that they were fingerprinted, and their eyes scanned; that nobody who had even dreamed of violent behavior was issued a visa. But it was a time of anger and outcry, not of reason, nor compassion.

All that meant for Ma and Mishti was this moment in the afternoon at the airport, three wheeled suitcases paused. With Mishti tugging at her arm, Ma struggled to her feet. She took in the sight before them: hundreds of passengers, some quarreling with the airline’s employees, some resignedly seated on their suitcases, hearts sunk, the glass and shine of the airport backdrop for all the human varieties of desperation, some noisy, some hushed.

Ma joined those at the airline’s check-in counter—a troupe, a throng, a horde, a mob? What did she have to lose?—until the distressed employee’s reply shifted from I don’t know more than this; go home and call the helpline to solutions of a more religious character, invoking divinities and higher powers, and Ma understood that there was nothing to be done. She extracted a spoken promise from the employee that she and Mishti would be booked on the next available flight, but the ease with which this promise was given told her that it was meaningless. There would be no flight in the next year. There would perhaps be no flight until the American elections, three and a half years in the future.

Mishti, who understood that something had gone very wrong, had effortfully exerted control over herself. Now she said, meekly, intuiting that her mother could not bear any more demands upon her, “What happened, Mama?”

When her mother did not reply, Mishti considered the varieties of calamity that might have befallen a flying vehicle. “Is the plane stuck in a tree?”

AFTER AN HOUR OF FUTILE arguing, pleading, and waiting, once more the passengers, no longer passengers, resumed the local lives they had been relieved to leave behind. The life they picked up and swung upon their backs was heavier than it had been before.

The exodus away from the airport began, though neither taxi nor bus nor rickshaw proved available by the time Ma emerged, pushing an airport trolley holding their three suitcases, Mishti seated on top and saying, “We taking the plane tomorrow!”

The guard called at her to demand she return the trolley, but Ma refused to look at him, and he threw up his hands and let her be.

The streets held a coursing stream of humanity, people in their best clothes bowed under the burden of suitcases, sacks, parcels, boxes, children sitting on shoulders. Each piece of luggage displayed stenciled names and phone numbers and addresses, ready for tossing into the belly of a plane, ready for handlers’ neglect, once ready for reuniting on the other side of the world.

Past Ma and Mishti sped three young men in torn jeans, shoving an airline trolley of prepared meal trays. They wove through the crowd and disappeared, their flip-flops slapping the road. Ma watched these men, cleverer than she, feeling her stomach carved hollower by the sight of the frozen meals.

HERE WAS THE CITY ONCE more. At a bus stop occupied by a family, their bedding rolled in a corner, two children slept on a hard bench, arranged side by side, head next to foot, unheeding of the air, hot as a blanket, that lay atop them. The stream of travelers coursed past them, trolleys rattling, suitcases clattering upon the pavement, arguments erupting within families who could not bear the turn the day had taken. The children did not stir.