A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar - 13

“Baba!”

“Hello, Mishti! Have you boarded?”

“Um. The plane is—in a tree.”

“You see a tree? That’s very nice. Can you give Mama the phone? Yes, how was it? Passport control and security? Smooth?”

“Everything was easy.”

“What is she saying about a tree?”

“Just a cartoon she’s watching.”

“Are the seats good?”

“They’re good.”

“Did you say they’re good? It’s a bit noisy around you. Sounds like a full flight, hmm? Anyway, what do you want to eat for your first meal here? I will not sleep until you are here, so I’ll cook. I’ve been shopping. Cauliflower with potato and peas, the way you like? Cheesy mushrooms on toast? Pasta? I watched a video on how to make lasagna. And I got more chairs for our dining table. I got sneakers for Mishti, they’re—oh you’ll see—Scooby-Doo sneakers—she’ll love them. I am counting the hours. I’ll be at the airport so early. You are almost here.”

“We are almost there.”

“Baba! Hey, Baba! We going home again!”

“What’s that, Mishti?”

“They’re saying to switch our phones off.”

“We going home!”

SOON AFTER BEING DRIVEN OUT of ma’s house, boomba had climbed through an open window in Mrs. Sen’s house. It was too easy. As soon as he entered, he understood why the window was open—the house was hot as a frying pan. He glanced at Mrs. Sen, asleep in a shirt and underwear on her bed, hair glued to her forehead with sweat, a snore sounding every now and then, arhythmically, like waves in a bay hurling themselves at a cliff. He crept down the corridor from room to room, nook to nook—how many unused rooms did this house have?—until he found a closet full of sweaters, a faint scent of mothballs about them, sure to be left alone until winter. There, he hid, moving about the house only when Mrs. Sen slept her sleep of the dead.

THE CHILD HAD MENTIONED SUNDAY. On saturday, hoping and trusting that she had been correct in naming the day of their departure, Boomba told his family to come. Sunday morning, they were on the bus.

In the smothering heat of the closet, he dozed for hours. Elsewhere in the house, the parrots shrieked—perhaps, Boomba thought, upon discovering that their stores of seed and fruit were mysteriously diminished. Once, a parrot tiptoed into the room Boomba was in, as if searching for the intruder, but all it found was a shriveled fruit of some sort, rolled under a chair and forgotten, flavored now with dust. With a look of thrill in its beady eye, the parrot took the fruit in its beak.

Finally, when he peeked out the window, Boomba saw the manager with the child. Dadu was absent. Boomba wondered what had happened to the nasty old man. He hoped, passively, that the old man was in hospital with malaria. That was what he deserved. He wondered, too, if the old man was dead. Hesitatingly, he touched the spot on his back where he had been struck. The bruise was painful. His knee was still a lump of agony.

Soon his mother would be seated behind him, putting on his purpling bruise with her tough yet gentle fingertips the arnica gel she trusted. When Boomba imagined such a scene, he imagined her forgiveness. I am so proud of you, Boomba, she might say. You were always a clever one. You found a way to fix everything. Not only fix, she might correct herself, you found a way to make our lives better than I could have imagined.

A taxi arrived, and a driver arranged the suitcases in the back. Mother and daughter rode away. Boomba watched, disbelieving, then raised both arms in the air in a gesture of victory, stretching his elbows, opening his chest, like he had seen footballers do, and finishers of races, feeling the triumph of this moment in his body. The house was his. The house was his!

But he knew there was a problem. He couldn’t simply unlock the door and walk in. The house was locked, more securely than it had been before. There were no inhabitants inside, and no window left ajar. How would he get in?

THINK, BOOMBA EXHORTED HIMSELF. PLAN , boomba, plan.

He could not climb to the kitchen window, as he had before. In the daylight, his intrusion would be too noticeable, and what if a busybody called the police? That left the windows on the ground floor. These, Boomba saw as he circled the house, were shut tight. He would simply have to risk smashing one open—with what?—and squeezing in before anybody spotted him.

He had left that pressure cooker in the bin in the storeroom, and now he wished he had it with him. With the heavy instrument, he could have tried bashing the glass. But it was not an option.

What he did have was the jeweled globe, stuffed in his pocket. He had to act quickly. Already a hawker, a seller of tastes with her taste machine upon her shoulder, striding down the lane, had given him a strange look. Boomba removed his shirt, wrapped it around the globe, held the ball in his fist, then struck the glass once, twice, thrice, until the glass gave. Boomba grabbed a twig from the soil, cleared the jagged glass at the edges, and prepared to step in. His battered knee protested. His back pulsed with pain.

But there was an additional obstacle. With a foot on the windowsill, and arms grabbing the bars, Boomba saw something that made him pause. The window was blocked from the inside. The object looked like a table, stood on its side, its wooden surface preventing entry. Boomba reached an arm in and pushed. The table didn’t move. He hopped down to the ground, reached both arms in, and with a new cut bleeding where his arm had found an edge of glass, pushed again with all his might. The table budged only a little bit, opening a crack at the corner of the window. Boomba heard something delicate crash—a teacup, maybe. He stepped back, took stock of the situation, and shook his arms loose. He didn’t want to acknowledge it, but it was true that his injured back, made to strain, was rioting. He could push no farther. He needed to find a way to make that small breach work. If only Boomba had been pocket-sized. If only he had been a squirrel, or a snake, or—

ABBA THE PARROT SQUAWKED IN angry dissent when Boomba grabbed it.

“Shh,” he said, putting a finger to his lips. Perhaps the parrot had been trained, and would know to be silent.

But the parrot knew no such training. It continued to squawk, and perhaps even to speak, though Boomba couldn’t tell what the bird was saying. Its companion, a second parrot, joined the uproar.

“Why can’t you be quiet,” he whispered. “I’m not going to eat you!”

For a moment, he considered a different route: If he assumed, as he did, that a neighbor friendly enough to share her security video with the manager was also a neighbor who possibly held a spare key for the family, then Boomba could let go of the fussy bird and comb through the house himself for the spare key. But it was an enormous house with many rooms. What if he failed to find the key? What if the key was in the bedroom, impossible to retrieve without waking Mrs. Sen? No. His intuition told him that this plan was the better one.

Abba quieted down, temporarily, and looked scornfully at Boomba. Bee Gees pecked at Boomba’s arm.

Boomba slipped out the door of Mrs. Sen’s house. Outside, passersby glanced at the man holding a parrot, but nobody stopped him when he entered the garden once again. He coaxed the parrot to walk through the bars of the open window, through the gap at the corner, and into the house.

Then, a keen ear upon Abba, who was voicing indignation from inside the house, Boomba went to the back of the house and waited. He had never visited this small patch of soil and pavement before, an anomaly in his picture of the property. Back here, it was ugly—red ants at their tedious industry crawled across a piece of rusting metal. A boxy air-conditioning unit dripped brown water. Perched upon it was a crow, common and unlovely, its feathers uninspiring, a mean glint in its eye while it searched for materials for its nest, its call harsh as a road’s repair. For a moment, Boomba faltered. This was the house he had set his heart upon? This was the castle he had fought to claim? Soon he would see, he feared, its bricks coming loose, vines growing in the cracks, mold casting its black veil on the walls, rain heckling the roof and seeping through its fractures, plump rats in the gutters, solar panels cracking, paint curling, electricity lines gnashing and sparking. Would this be the true face of the house? Was this what the house had been all along?

There came the sound of shoes advancing up the garden. Mrs. Sen, alerted by one parrot’s calling and the other parrot’s pecking, finally woken from her sleep of the dead, had come around with her spare key to open the door and rescue Abba.

“How did you get here, darling?” she called, trying one key and another from the large ring that chimed in her hand. Then she was in the house, the door ajar behind her, and Boomba dashed, quick as a spider, from the back of the house to the very front, where he slipped in. Hiding in the dark storeroom, he hardly breathed while Mrs. Sen soothed the distressed bird, who was offended at its treatment and resisted Mrs. Sen’s lovingly outstretched arm. But soon Abba acquiesced. Mrs. Sen laid smacking kisses upon the bird and left, shutting the door behind her.

Boomba emerged from his hiding spot. He was alone in the house. He was alone in his house. He was alone in the house in which his family would be safe, and dry, and together, the house in which Robi would be granted health, and schooling, and all the opportunities of the city.

HAVING SLAPPED THE TELEVISION ON , the sound filling the eerily vacant house with reminders of life, Boomba set about removing the piles of furniture from before each window, each topped with a cup, or a saucer, or a large plate. What guerrilla warfare had Ma been preparing for? Light coursed into the house once more, and in this light, Boomba wiped with a broom the shards of glass that had spread far and wide from the broken window and its teacup.

Once the task was done, Boomba sauntered from room to room, trying each space as if he was trying on a new outfit. In the living room, he sat briefly on the daybed to see how soft it was. In the bedroom, he opened the closet and observed the stack of saris that would now belong to his mother, and a few shirts that would now belong to himself and to his father. He plucked one and buttoned it over his torso. In the bathroom, he turned on all the taps and filled two buckets, just in case the water supply failed. From the storeroom, he retrieved his belongings and took them upstairs, where they would live with honor. His peerless globe and his magnetic snakes-and-ladders board now sat upon the dining table, awaiting players and admirers.

IT WAS AFTERNOON WHEN BOOMBA’S family arrived. The gate at the bottom of the garden rattled, their voices came low to the bedroom where Boomba was standing in front of the AC unit, doing nothing but savoring its frosty output, and then, when he flew down the stairs and opened the door, there they stood. He looked, disbelieving, at his family, more youthful than he had feared they would be. The journey to the city had invigorated them. So what if his father’s stubble was white? So what if his mother’s hand, when she touched his cheek, was blistered and peeling? Robi hid behind his mother, complaining that his nose was stuffy, and shrank when Boomba attempted to embrace him. Though he had spoken of nothing other than seeing his beloved brother all day, now Robi felt shy and irritable. He sat upon the soil of the garden, and looked at a line of ants, until Boomba said, “See what I have for you.”

Slowly, gripping the banister with one hand like an old man, and holding his mother’s index finger with the other, Robi climbed the stairs.

“Is this Dada’s house?” he said.

When he made it to the top, and located the living room, he walked in amazement with a hand touching the wall. Tentatively, he reached for the jeweled globe on the dining table. After two tries, he spun it.

“Is this for me?” said Robi. “For me?”

“It’s for you.”

“Don’t give him such valuable things,” said Robi’s mother. “Are those diamonds?”

In any case, Robi was too overwhelmed by the gift to play with it. He handled it as carefully as if it were alive, a rare animal sighted outside its known habitat. At Robi’s own pace, he wandered down the corridor, mouth agape, as he took in the bedroom with vanity and mirror, the spotless bathroom, the one remaining magnet on the fridge in the kitchen, and returned to the living room. He crossed his legs on the floor next to the vacuum cleaner, which he inspected with interest. Its pipe turned, easily, into a story-time python.

Boomba’s father paced after his younger son, disappearing into different rooms and emerging as he wished.

“How was the bus?” called Boomba.

“Forget all that,” replied the older man. “Tell me again about this magical house.”

Boomba told him again the story of how he had been gifted this house by his former boss, the boat owner, who had left for America, with none of the family remaining in this city. An abandoned house would become a ruined house. Who wanted such a future for a house they loved? So he had made this most generous gift to his adored employee.

“All this from owning boats?” marveled Boomba’s mother, who was pressing buttons on the TV.

“He must really love you,” reflected Boomba’s father. “He must be like another father to you.” He looked as if there was more he wanted to say. But after a moment, he concluded, “Isn’t that so?”

Boomba didn’t reply.

His father continued his perambulations, and paused in the kitchen to glance out of the kitchen window. Had a man-eating tiger come prowling down the lane now, ravenous for the pleasure of sinking its teeth into him, red around the mouth, freshly enraged by the hunters who sought to defeat it from their tree platforms in the jungle, Boomba’s father sensed in himself the strength, in this wondrous moment, to lead such a tiger away, to dangle before it a smashed rat that the old and weak animal would be compelled to follow. He was such a man now. This house made him such a man. He felt it in his body. There was no other man but he who was his son’s true father.

Boomba’s mother drank the clean, cold water stored in a two-liter bottle on the dining table. She tipped her head back and poured, from a distance, into her mouth, declining to stain the bottle with her body. When she had had her fill, she said, “This house is too big for us. And the plot in front too. With some work, it could be a garden of fruits and vegetables, don’t you think, Boomba?”

She spoke timidly, ownership of the house not yet in her blood, but her mind was weaving designs at its own loom. Couldn’t there be a thriving garden for the neighborhood? Couldn’t there be—instead of hibiscus and marigold—gourds, okra, tomatoes, and eggplants? Boomba’s mother dreamed of good soil, air, water, worms, earth which was organism, not substance, which cultivated and was not only a medium of cultivation. The garden could supply ingredients she could cook for anybody who needed to be fed.

Boomba felt a flicker of irritation. This was like his mother, to seek purpose in work once more. But, in order to be worthy of this house, did they need to execute grand ideas of gardens and kitchens, of feeding neighbors and uplifting strangers? Would the victory of the house be inadequate if it did not provide food for hundreds? What if it only remained a home for four, a home in which Robi grew healthy and strong, a man of his own intentions? That was the only miraculous transformation Boomba wanted to pursue.

After modest explorations, and some play with the pipe python, Robi lay on the bare mattress in the bedroom, and called, “Dada? Can you sit with me?”

Boomba sat next to him and gently stroked his hair for a few minutes. Then Robi said, with both eyes closed, “Dada, I can’t sleep here. I like the other room. Can I sleep there?”

“Which room?”

“Down the stairs.”

“The storeroom?”

“Yes, that one.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s small, like home. Dada, can I sleep in that room?”

WHEN MA STEPPED FOOT IN the garden, what made her pause was a shimmer of light and movement in the kitchen window upstairs. She observed for a minute, and thought she saw a figure, or perhaps two figures, shadows behind the glass like the flutter of curtains where she knew there were none. That windowsill had once held a skyline of jars. She knew precisely what ought to be visible from this spot in the garden, and what ought not to be present at all. Boomba had returned.

Now she understood that the house was a battlefield, and she was a warrior, leading the charge with three suitcases and a child at her side. She lifted Mishti off the suitcases and onto the ground. She knelt and held the child’s arm.

“Mishti,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something very important. I have to—talk to someone—before we can enter the house. Do you understand? And while I do that, can you play with the parrots? I’m going to take you next door, to the parrots, all right?”

Mishti looked seriously at her mother, dug her shoe in the dirt, and nodded. She hopped and twirled on the way to Mrs. Sen’s door. When Mrs. Sen didn’t open—she was out—Ma instructed Mishti to wait in the garden with the parrots. Through a lattice of branches and leaves, Mishti watched her mother turn around and walk away. An instinctive fear overcame her.

“Mama!” she whispered. “I come with you!”

Ma turned around and put a finger to her lips. “Stay here,” she said. “Play.”

Back in her own garden, Ma unloaded Dadu’s suitcase from the trolley. On the soil, she flung it open. His neatly packed stacks of clothes still held the smell of him. Ma felt around the borders with her fingers until she touched it. She knew he had packed one, a memento of his life of work—a secateur.

With the secateur clamped in her hand, Ma stepped up to the house and unlocked the front door.

“Come out!” she shouted in the mightiest voice she could summon. “I know you’re here, Boomba. Show your face.”

Ma loosened and tightened her grip on the secateur. In the gloom of the stairs appeared Boomba’s father, wearing a button-down shirt belonging to Dadu, his feet slow from one step to the next, as if he had just woken from deep slumber and was being unfairly interrupted before his breakfast.

“Who are you?” Ma said to him. “What are you doing in my house? Get out, all of you.”

Boomba’s father drew close to her and put a hand on the door. He looked clean and, when he smiled, he looked rested. At peace. He smelled of the soap Dadu had used, palming old sliver to new bar, decade after decade.

“What is this ruckus?” he said. “You have the wrong house.”

Ma laughed a hollow laugh. “Let’s go get a policeman, and see who has the wrong house. This is my house.”

Two or three passersby had paused on the street to see what the fuss was about. They were men with frowns and teeth gone brown from tobacco. One had lifted his shirt and was scratching his belly button. For this audience, Boomba’s father said, “Anyone can come and say this is their house, isn’t that so? What a joke! We live here. Look at who is inside and who is outside. You are looking for shelter, so you’re making up this story?”

When the passersby lost interest and went on their way, Boomba’s father said, “I will only say this one more time. Leave our property.”

There was the voice. There were the eyes. Ma understood who he was. He was the father of the man who had kidnapped Mishti, forcibly taken her somewhere by boat for reasons of his own, and harmed her in some unspeakable way the child could not fathom. Ma suspected that it would take years and decades for the child’s suffering at Boomba’s hands to rise to grown Mishti’s consciousness. Now Boomba had brought his family to the house, as he had threatened he would. More of them, against her. Ma recalled the policeman, chewing his sandwich and chiding them. Ma recalled the consular officer, asking who had let them in. Ma recalled Boomba leading her to the hillock of garbage, and vanishing like a coward, while she continued to search for the passports. Ma gripped the secateur. She had seen the jaws of this secateur snap tough stems. What was a soft belly before it? Ma lifted her hand and prepared to plunge it into this man, who was, as she looked at him, no man at all but a collection of obstacles, a bundle of threats, a compilation of miseries, a nuisance—

“Baba?” came a boy’s voice from the storeroom. “Who is over there?”

Ma startled. There was a child in the house. She hesitated, and dropped her hand, which was shaking like a leaf in a storm. The secateur fell.

“Nobody,” said Boomba’s father. “Go upstairs.”

When Ma lowered herself to the ground to pick up the secateur, Boomba’s father noticed the weapon. He looked around wildly for a shield to defend himself with, and picked up the pressure cooker, just inside the storeroom. As Ma raised the secateur once more, Boomba’s father, with a grunt, brought the pressure cooker down upon her arm. All he wanted was to knock the secateur from her grip, but Ma stumbled and fell. Pain coursed like electricity down her arm and up her shoulder. Struggling to sit up, the secateur now in her weak left hand, Ma swung in his direction. Boomba’s father raised the pressure cooker with both hands, and brought it down once more upon where her hand was, but Ma had lunged forward, and the vessel landed instead on her neck, at the base of her skull. She slumped, her body losing its tone and collapsing like a marionette whose master had stepped away. Boomba’s father took a step back in fear. Though he was righteous with the certainty that his son was the owner and she the intruder, he did not know how to proceed with the wretched figure before him who lay still on the ground, as still as if her spine was maimed.

“Get up,” he demanded. “Get up!”

But the only response came from next door, where the parrots chattered.

Ma uttered not a sound. Air struggled to pass through passages in her throat now filling with blood. With the trace of consciousness still within her, Ma resolved that Mishti needed to hear nothing. Only Ma’s fingers burrowed in the soil, speaking for her, seeking a route to remain among the living. Perhaps her skin sensed the approach of worms slithering toward her body, the entirety of who she had been now nothing more than their feast in this famine. A pair of flies, drawn to the smell, hovered over her.

Here at last was the moment she had known was coming, from the day of Mishti’s birth. In those early days, she had sat cross-legged on the bed, squeezed a drop of formula on her wrist to feel for temperature, then, when it was cool enough, held the bottle to Mishti’s mouth, watching her eyes grow big with pleasure, legs kicking. The folds in her arms, plump. Her chin with its own sweet wobble of chin. A thousand feedings, a thousand moments of leaning down to kiss her cheek, breathing her caramel scent. When baby Mishti’s eyes closed and opened, closed and opened, in slow blinks, her world of milk dreams calling to her as much as her mother’s face, which loomed like a moon in her own brief nighttime, Ma wanted to sing her a lullaby. She whispered it, the only lullaby she knew, and played her fingertips upon her toes, her ankles, her knees, until she smiled. Ma wished to remember that smile for as long as she possessed memory. She leaned over Mishti like a river-fed tree to its river, though who was river and who was tree?

Even then, she knew that this day was approaching, the day on which she would have to leave Mishti behind, in a savage world, among strangers of the future who neither knew nor loved her, the river eating the city morsel by morsel. This was the cruel rule of time: Ma would vanish, and Mishti would continue, alone.

Ma thought, though she could no longer voice: Spare Mishti, spare Mishti. Mishti, don’t come here.

One day, when Mishti would be a hundred years old, upon her own deathbed, perhaps in Michigan, she would remember her mother, and see her at the foot of the bed. She would say, Ma? Is that you, Ma?

And those around elderly Mishti, her own grandchildren perhaps, would wonder: Could such an old woman have had a mother of her own? Who had that mother been?

IT WAS ONLY WHEN BOOMBA rushed down the stairs and wrested the weapon away that Boomba’s father regained comprehension. His face was streaked. His toes were cut and bleeding where Ma had managed to strike them. They stung.

“What have you done?” whispered Boomba’s mother, who had appeared behind him, stunned in the doorway. She looked at her husband with horror. “Are you in your senses?”

Boomba’s father said nothing. He looked at Boomba, who sat on the pads of his feet, his head in his hands. He felt himself seated before a house that had itself caved. Each strike upon Ma had been a swing of a mighty ax upon the brick. The house was only debris now, the front door loosening off its hinges, behind it only electrical cables and sewage pipes and rebar.

“Where is the child?” said Boomba finally, his eyes still upon the ground.

“Who?” said Boomba’s mother.

“The little girl. Jhimli.”

“You know this person?” said Boomba’s mother in a feeble voice. “Who is she?”

“A dangerous crook,” said Boomba’s father. His voice was hoarse. He pointed a shaking finger at her body. “That’s what she is. A thief—look—she was going to attack us—she was going to attack us with—”

Boomba, still seated on the pads of his feet, closed his eyes.

Now, perhaps, his mother and father, and even Robi—who had descended the stairs once more and was standing behind his mother’s legs—understood that the house had been no gift. Though the older man’s explanation continued, he understood that Boomba was not his family’s savior. Boomba was a destroyer, exactly the same person he had been when he burned down their house in the village, and perhaps all the two men had done was condemn the family to the impoverishment of the life that would follow.

WHEN BOOMBA FINALLY ROSE FROM the ground, he called for the child.

“Jhimli, where are you?” he said. He spoke tenderly, afraid that the child was lost, and afraid that he would find her. Then he would be compelled to meet her eyes. “Are you hiding?”

He was at the gate when he heard her voice from the garden next door. He glanced back at his mother and father, who were dragging Ma’s body to the back of the house. He waited until his mother fetched a bucket of water and splashed it upon the earth. Then he took one step, and another, toward the neighbor’s house. There she was, the child, holding a leaf in her palm while a parrot pecked at the stem. It tickled, and she laughed.

“Jhimli?” Boomba said. He cleared his throat. “There you are. Ready to come home?”

The child turned away from the parrot and looked at him.

“Mama?” she said.

“Yes. Mama said, come home, Jhimli.”

The child looked a little perplexed, but calmly took his hand.