A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar - 2

THREE IN THE MORNING, AND the moon hung alone in the sky, melancholy as a painting in an after-hours gallery. In its light, down on the road, a figure climbed over the gate into Dadu and Ma’s garden. The man was young and lean. After the effort of scaling the gate, its perpetually loose latch unnoticed by him, he paused for a moment and shook out his arms. He hadn’t climbed a tree in a while. His torso was taut in an adolescent’s T-shirt, snatched from a clothesline some days ago. His cheeks were pockmarked, and his hair was thick and stiff as a shoe brush. He took a few tentative steps toward the house. When a hibiscus branch raked his shins, the young man swatted at it in annoyance. Then, reassured by the absence of bright lights and shouting neighbors, he circled the house, quiet as a cat, pressing upon one window and another, his fingers, swollen in the humidity, leaving smears.

None of the windows yielded. The door, of course, remained firmly shut too. He looked at the upper floor, the rain-streaked white wall marked by its own series of windows, and thought he saw one ajar. Hoisting himself upon the water tank, and grasping the pipe going up by the kitchen window, the man braced his feet against the wall, and in this way, climbed up, the minutes of his exertion painfully slow.

At the top, after a moment of relief, he saw: The kitchen window was indeed open, but it had bars. Arms burning with effort, he tried what came to him. Was he skinny enough to—? Here was his body’s deprivation coming to his aid. Here was hunger, his helper. He stepped one foot in, then the other, gripping the top of the window for support, and turned his body so it made a diagonal. The bars bit skin from his torso as he slid himself in, and his ribs stung long after.

Then the city receded, and he was within the only house that mattered. His heart galloped like a hoofed animal given a field in his chest, while his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the interior. He patted the wall until he found the panel of switches. The tube light in the room buzzed on, filling the room with its cold white glow. Then he turned the light off and slapped his own head. Foolish, foolish. Did he have sawdust for brains?

In the dizzying dark, flowers blooming in his eyes, the kitchen smelled of eggs. With excitement that was difficult to distinguish from incomprehension, with fingers that folded and grasped in ways he didn’t mean for them to, he looked in the fridge and on the shelves—nothing. He opened and shut cabinets that revealed only spice jars. Where were the eggs? His nose was sharp from days of protein bars and wrinkling apples at the shelter. He knew he had smelled eggs. And, more to the point, he had seen with his own eyes the manager stealing the eggs from the shelter’s kitchen.

IT HAD HAPPENED TWO DAYS before, on a blazing afternoon when most of the residents who were not out working or looking for work were napping, splayed like starfish on their narrow beds, mosquito nets raised for the passage of air. Those who were not sleeping sat with their babies, several of whom had upset stomachs, rubbing their aching bellies and comforting them. Among the older children, new friends passed ice balloons from hand to hand, then fled to the bathroom to pop them and douse their legs in glacial melt. On that afternoon, a donation of eggs had arrived, ten cartons of a dozen eggs each, not very much in a shelter of three hundred people, and immediately a rumor spread that they were duck eggs, luscious and orange-yolked inside, luxury beyond anybody’s dreaming.

The eggs had been donated by the billionaire who lived on the floating hexagon in the river. Some in the city wondered why the billionaire had not fled in this time of crisis, and some speculated that she was demonstrating her loyalty to her native city in hopes that the regeneration of the city would sooner or later begin and bring her opportunities not only for profit but for political influence. Such was the billionaire’s dedication to the city that her daughter’s upcoming wedding would take place not in Italy nor in South Africa but right on the hexagon. Residents of the shelter saw clues to the celebration to come—some said the feast for the city’s poor, to which families with children would be invited and which would be held a few days before the wedding ceremony, would include duck eggs, and this donation was a clue to drum up chatter on social media.

When word of the eggs reached him, Boomba rose from his dozing and went down the corridor to the kitchen, ambling with all the nonchalance his body could perform, a pillowcase clutched in his hands. He intended to stuff eggs into it. He thought he would then sell the eggs—calling them duck eggs, whether they were or not—for numbers that glimmered like mirages in a desert. But when he arrived at the kitchen, somebody was already opening the cartons and removing eggs: the shelter manager. Or, the former shelter manager, who had recently quit. Boomba watched her, hidden behind the door, his eye to the slit the hinges made, heart kicking as if he were the wrongdoer. The shelter manager put egg after egg in her purse, stacking them with care. Boomba opened his mouth to shout, then shut it. What would he gain from making a fuss? Neither eggs nor what he was truly after.

In the entrance hall of the shelter, when the old manager said goodbye to the new manager and walked home, Boomba followed her and noted the route to the house. He didn’t know yet what he would do, and perhaps that state of unknowing was essential for proceeding with what he wanted to do. It took him two days to make up his mind.

He understood, from everything he had endured in his own life, that the worth of honesty, presented as noble before schoolchildren, was itself a lie. The honest souls who paused to deliberate on morals found, when they made their choice, that the treasure was gone. What was absolutely true and right, and what was absolutely false and wrong, and how could any sane person live without crossing the borders every day? Lies were the lifeblood of the world. Lies activated the menacing truth Boomba now understood, and there was only one, which was, take what you want, or others will take it.

NOW, IN THE NIGHTTIME CORRIDOR of the house, Boomba stepped soundlessly over a toy truck—the manager, he understood, had a child—and though it wasn’t what he was there for, a moment later he returned and knelt to grab it. Its plastic gears and axles emitted a jangle. It was missing a wheel, but his little brother Robi would like it all the same. Down the corridor Boomba continued, peeking in doors, praying he wouldn’t cough or sneeze, until he came to the bedroom, where the air, cold as a mountain breeze, soothed his skin. He heard the snores and exhalations of more than one person, and dared not enter. But right in the doorway was a woman’s purse, zippered shut. It was the manager’s purse, and it was sure to have cash inside. Perhaps even something to eat. A different food that she had stolen from the shelter, most likely. He put his fingers under the drooping arm loops, lifted the purse off the floor, and held it steady as he turned toward the stairs that loomed ahead.

In the dark of the staircase, Boomba unzipped the purse and felt about its interior until his fingers made contact with the smooth surface of a phone. He tapped the screen and shone its faint glow upon the staircase to get his bearings, and saw a child’s drawing framed on the wall. A grown-up had titled it Whale Scratches Mosquito Bites, but there was neither whale nor mosquito to be discerned in the drawing, which was a collection of lines and loops, dense here and sparse there. It had never occurred to him that one could frame a child’s scribbles. Boomba lifted up the frame to see if he could free the drawing inside and keep the frame for Robi. But underneath he saw something odd. A switch. He pressed it, bracing for a loud noise, prepared to flee. But all that happened was, at the bottom of the stairs, on the side, with a squeak, a door swung open.

He froze.

Was it a trap? Or was it a prize? Down the stairs he went, one foot and the other, no tripping allowed, no falling, no failing. He had no weapon with him, but he dropped the phone back into the purse and gripped the toy truck in his dominant hand, its plastic corners sharp enough to startle and unsettle whoever waited in that room. Anything, with sufficient intention, could become a weapon. He raised the hand that held the truck, then looked fearfully into the dark room. With graceless patting on the wall, he turned on the light and prepared for a hidden person to rise from a corner and ambush him.

But what the light showed stunned him. If the whale above the stairs had been real, sun filtering upon the bodily arc of a humpback, ripples of light upon its barnacled skin, the dark gray of greater depths painting the serrated edges of its fins, its eyes might have looked with mercy upon Boomba and said: All this is yours.

Boomba’s hands were cold as he tipped the bin of lentils into the bin of rice, a waterfall, and emptied into the purse bags of cashews and raisins. He ate a few pieces, but, in his nervousness, couldn’t taste them. The cashews may as well have been drips of candle, the raisins cuts of leather. But he knew what they were: They were gold. He took a few hardy carrots, and left the onions alone. He didn’t quite know why. His decision-making was scrambled. He sorted in his mind that he would eat some and sell the rest. When he spotted a tin of milk powder, he put the full thing, heavy as a barbell, into the bin, hoping it wouldn’t spill. New parents, with drawn and desperate faces, would pay anything for milk powder. He looked around the looted room one more time, and trained his ears upon the upstairs floor, like a fox, to catch any movement. There was none. The manager was asleep.

Boomba opened the front door and fled into the night. The purse was slung on his shoulder, and every few steps he shrugged high to keep the straps from slipping. In his ungainly embrace, hard and heavy as a pirate’s treasure chest, was the bin with its varied jewels.

FOR WEEKS, THE NEWS HAD claimed that there was no shortage, that it was all a hoax perpetrated by those who would rejoice at the region’s downfall. Channels had played abundant footage of markets stocked with plums and cucumbers, but nobody could tell where these markets were, or if they were even in this city. Then the community kitchens opened, varying from an old lady boiling milk and handing it out in her garden to operations with men and women stirring ladles like oars in pots of khichuri, two hundred lined before them. Those who waited for the food told the truth with their upturned palms and with their bodies, patient and still.

Boomba came upon one such kitchen, in operation even at four in the morning, out of breath with his haul, and observed a man in front eating dal from a paper cup tipped into his mouth. Boomba’s knees were beginning to bruise from knocking into the bin, and he struggled to refasten his hands around it. He couldn’t return to the shelter with the bin—there was no privacy among the rows of beds, dozens of eyes watching. He needed to sell the food right away.

On he went, slowly past the kitchen, where the man, he now saw, was weeping over his empty cup.

“Uncle,” called Boomba, and the people ladling food at the kitchen looked up. Boomba did not know what to say next. He settled on: “I can give you a good rate.”

They turned back to their task.

“I have milk powder. And fresh carrots. At least take a look.”

“Not interested, brother, move along,” said a bespectacled man with a paperback shoved in his back pocket. “We can’t buy our supplies from any Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes along.”

“What are you calling me?” said Boomba, suspecting he was being insulted.

But, in a moment, he was besieged by those who had been waiting in line. A thin woman with a braid of gray hair bought the lentils and rice, a teenager in home slippers bought the carrots, and a man with a toddler sitting on his shoulders bought the tin of milk powder. As rapidly as the crowd had formed, it dissipated, leaving Boomba holding a roll of cash in his fist. He was rich. The money he now had to his name would let him—so he hoped—begin to fix what he had done to his family. He was a fool. He did have sawdust for brains, as his mother had said. But he could fix it.

On the way back to the shelter, he furtively ate the cashews and raisins, then sat on a tree stump on the sidewalk to inspect Ma’s purse. He pocketed the cell phone and the electrolyte tablets, and drank the remaining water. A spotted insect he had never seen before landed on his knee, and he flicked it away. Then, inside a fluff of plastic wrapping, he found three navy blue booklets. They were not bank booklets. They were not identification cards, as far as he could tell, though they did have pictures of the manager, an old man, and a little girl. He had never seen identification cards like this, with so many pages, and text at the beginning and end. He fanned himself with a booklet to see if it served a cooling purpose, but the whirring pages were neither loose enough nor large enough.

Minutes later, when Boomba passed by a garbage heap, he threw the booklets upon the edge of the enormous mound, kicked some trash over them, and after some thought, kept the purse for his mother.

MISHTI SAT UP IN THE middle of the night, put her face close to Ma’s, inspecting the cliffs and canyons she knew so well, inspecting the mole she believed had been drawn by crayon, and said, “Mama? Are you playing with my twuck?”

Ma, roused from a deep, sticky sleep, sighed, and turned on her side. With a heavy arm, she reached to pat Mishti’s back. “Hmm?” she murmured. “Sleep.”

“My twuck, Mama. I heard it.”

“Okay. Back to sleep.”

IN THE MORNING, MA BATHED Mishti, crouched before the bucket, the meter above watching them as a rope of water from the tap thundered, its music changing as the bucket filled. She dipped a finger in to see how cold, then filled a plastic mug and upturned it gently over Mishti’s head, cool water running over her hair like pond water over a duck’s feathers. Afterward, she bathed herself, and took her seat before the mirror, damp hair soaking her blouse, facing the vanity, which held the modest items she used year after year, never wishing for anything more than the blue tin of Nivea cold cream, the tub of Vaseline, the red-rimmed coin for shidoor, though she no longer applied it—her husband had told her not to; he had read shidoor could contain lead—and the rubber bands pulled from cilantro and parsley bunches that she used to tie her hair. With her head bent to the mirror, she ran a comb down one side and the other. When she was done, she cleaned the comb’s teeth with the edge of a towel. In the corner of the mirror she caught Dadu’s eye.

“What are you looking for?” she said.

He was standing on top of a sturdy chair and patting the dusty top of the wardrobe. He didn’t reply. In his eyes was a blankness that indicated his mind was somewhere else.

“Wait till you fall and break your bones,” said Ma, her tone gentle and mean at once. “All the doctors have left the city. Who will set your fracture? Write a poem about that.”

She sensed Dadu was worried, and his refusal to share the worry with her made her feel petulant.

“Did you put the passports up here?” said Dadu. “I want to put them safely in the wardrobe.”

“They’re in my purse,” said Ma. “On the floor.”

Dadu bent slightly at the knee, then clapped his hands to shake off the dust, held the back of the chair, and lowered himself. “Where?”

Ma gestured with her chin, then rose to her feet and looked around the bed.

“Did you move my purse?” she said, but Dadu had gone to look in the living room. After that, he went slowly down the stairs.

“It’s not downstairs,” Ma called after him. “I brought it up, I remember that. Don’t panic. Are you listening? Don’t panic. It must be here, let me look—”

Dadu shouted something incomprehensible from the bottom of the stairs.

Ma went to the top stair, gripped the banister, and leaned to see. “What happened?”

“The storeroom is—!”

“What are you saying? I can’t hear.”

“The storeroom is open!”

“How can that be? Did you leave it unlocked?”

“I always lock it. Did you open it at night?”

“Why would I open it at night?”

“Where is my twuck?” wailed Mishti, appearing at the top of the stairs in a T-shirt and shorts. “Where is my twuck?”

“Wait, Mishti, wait,” said Ma. Her legs had turned to pillars of ice. With effort, she took Mishti’s hand and climbed with her down the stairs to join Dadu where he stood, in the doorway of the storeroom.

Dadu’s voice could hardly summon itself. He managed to say, “What will we do? What will we do now?”

“Let’s be calm,” said Ma. “Baba, sit here.” She brought him the going-out chair, where they sat to wear shoes, and he fell into its woven seat as if his legs couldn’t hold him up any longer. Together, they looked at the empty bins, stainless steel buckets neither clean nor dirty but marked by long use. All that remained were a few onions. Time moved like the bellow of a harmonium, now squeezed, now elongated, and steadied itself only when Ma felt Mishti’s small hand on her knee.

“Ma?” said Mishti. “You looking for my twuck?”

There was the whine of a mosquito somewhere in the small room, and ordinarily Dadu would have hunted it down and clapped it dead before it bit Mishti, but now Dadu rose, his body heavy as soaked sand.

“Do you have the number for the local police station?” he said grimly. “Let me call them.”

But Ma’s phone had been in her purse. It was gone. Dadu found his walking stick, climbed the stairs, located his own phone, dialed the police main line, and while it rang, made his way around the house, looking for anything else that was missing. The TV was in its place, and the heirlooms from China too. The wardrobe, in the bedroom, continued to home its jewelry boxes, hidden for the time being behind a stack of starched and folded saris that would not be packed. A river of warm air drew his attention to the kitchen, where the window was open, and where, on the floor, were shoe prints.

The phone’s ringing in his ears, loud as a siren, felt unbearable. The ringing ended, and a voice said: “Hello!”

“Hello?” Dadu said. “There was a th-thief—”

“Your call is important to us,” continued the voice, and Dadu understood it was a machine. “Due to a high volume of callers, please be patient…”

Dadu listened to the full message, hoping for a human voice. But there was only the click of the line disconnecting.

Dadu closed the window, pulling each imperfect pane as it needed, gently then hard, to fully shut. The window screeched, and the noise upset him. His face was grave, and he couldn’t bear to turn to Mishti when she appeared behind him, seeking an answer. He heard her ask for cauliflower.

“I left the window open,” said Ma, who had followed Mishti up the stairs. “I left it open last night. Mishti was about to sleep, and I didn’t want to make a noise.” Ma’s face was anguished. “Oh, what did I do? I don’t know how the thieves got in through the bars. Maybe they sent a child in to open the door.”

“The police station didn’t pick up,” said Dadu, raising the phone in his hand. “And whoever it was, they didn’t take anything else. Your mother’s jewelry is still here.”

Ma looked at Dadu for a long minute. “It’s my fault. What will Mishti eat now? And the passports—” Ma felt a strange ache begin in her shoulders and travel down her torso. She put a palm on the counter, next to the stove, to steady herself. “How foolish am I?”

Dadu put a hand on Ma’s head. “Be calm. You will fall sick if you don’t calm yourself. We will manage. At least they didn’t— Let it be. I don’t want to mention it.”

“Hmm?”

“Oh, at least the thieves didn’t spray something to make us unconscious—thieves do that, you don’t know. Mishti, are you feeling all right?”

Ma knelt to look in Mishti’s eyes, and laid the back of her hand on Mishti’s forehead.

“I have fever?” said Mishti, puzzled.

“No, Mishti, I’m only checking.”

Ma held Mishti to her chest, smelled her baby shampoo and kissed her plump cheek, and felt her body calm.

Dadu watched the two of them and silently berated himself: How had he slept through a break-in? If only he were still thirty, still forty, still fifty, if only he’d heard the window opening, the footsteps in the corridor, seen the hand reaching in to take the purse, his body able to burst out of bed and spring upon the intruder, his full-throated shout alerting the neighborhood, calling all who were willing to come with cricket bats and rolling pins. Together, they would have—what? Spoken sense into the thieves? Urged them to reflect on their wrongdoing? Given them jobs at the shelter? Shared the rice and lentils? No, Dadu knew, for all his gentleness and cheer, his attention to birds and clouds and street-side jokes, he would have been no different from a vicious owner of a house, and with his neighbors, he would have frightened the thieves until they begged to be allowed to run away with no loot other than their own wretched lives.

AT THE POLICE STATION, THE officer who let ma and Dadu sit down at his desk opened a tiffin box stuffed with cheese sandwiches, and took a bite. Bits of yellow cheese clung to his teeth, and he worked his tongue to remove them. “My shift ended ten minutes ago,” he said. “But you, sir, are my father’s age, so I am staying out of respect. You have come to file a report?”

Ma sat at the edge of her plastic molded seat, with Mishti on her lap. “We have been robbed,” she began. She told him everything, and in the end, she couldn’t stop herself from saying: “Please, we are leaving for America in five days—please help us get our passports back. That is the most important thing. Without our passports—”

The officer chewed, and rooted about in his tiffin box until he retrieved a stick of cucumber. “So,” he began slowly, “a band of thieves—took—your—passports. Correct?”

“And some food,” Ma said.

“Some food,” repeated the officer. Now he was intrigued. “You were doing a little bit of hoarding?”

“Nothing like that,” said Dadu. “We had some rice and lentils. We had a few measly carrots and some milk powder. My granddaughter is only two years old. We can survive on gels and bars, but she cannot. Who hasn’t been saving food for their children?”

“Now, no need to be offended. It is a question; it is not a personal attack. No, I understand. But I am trying to help you. You see, if you tell me the honest truth, it will help us understand who could be behind this robbery. Were you selling the food from your house? Little bit on the side, little bit illegally?”

“No,” said Ma at the same time as Dadu shook his head. “As we said, it was a small amount of food, for her.”

Ma’s frustration, honestly felt, got the better of her. She had buried knowledge of her own—borrowings—from the shelter so deep that she nearly did not have access to it herself. “Do we look like we’re running some—some bizarre operation? We have come to you for help, and you are interrogating us?”

“One thing I have learned in my line of work is that criminals come in all types.” The officer gave them a stern look, then decided to move on to a different line of questioning. “Any idea who it was? Your house help? Sweetie baby’s nanny?”

“Nobody comes to the house,” said Ma. “It’s only us.”

The officer sat back and made eye contact with his assistant, who was seated at a table behind Ma and Dadu. A private look passed between them. “Sir, I will be frank,” said the officer. “You are not really helping me. How am I supposed to find someone if you say no, no, no to everything. You are not giving me any useful information. If you don’t help me, how will I help you?”

Dadu hesitated, then said, “Maybe you have heard about thieves operating in that neighborhood—”

The officer interrupted. “One thing I am failing to understand. You were really sleeping so deeply you didn’t hear thieves breaking down your door and taking a purse from your bedroom? Myself, I wake up three times a night to go to the bathroom. And you didn’t—?”

At this they sat silently facing one another, until Ma said, “The door wasn’t broken.”

The officer spoke. “The door was not broken?”

“No. It was unlocked, not broken.”

“I thought you said it was broken.” The officer sounded irritated. “So someone had the key?”

“There’s no way; we only have two copies. And one spare with our neighbor, like everyone does.”

“So you have three copies?”

“Yes.”

“Is it someone you hired to break in and do—do this?”

“Why on earth—we have a child in the house! We’re not that kind of people. You’re not listening—”

“I am listening with extreme attention, actually. Let me be direct. Now that the city is going to pot, we are seeing all kinds of insurance fraud. Everybody wants to claim their property insurance money and run away. The insurance companies are getting tougher, and the customers are getting cleverer. You are leaving soon, so I see your angle. Do you see the angle, Bhola?”

The assistant nodded gravely.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” muttered Ma.

“Hmm?” said the officer. “What did you say?”

“My phone,” said Ma. “Can you track it? I called it many times, but it’s off.”

The policeman finished the first sandwich and started on another. When he began looking about on his desk, the assistant sprang up and brought him a napkin, with which he wiped crumbs off his face.

“I can’t go around tracking lost phones. What is this, Sherlock Holmes? We are seeing violent crimes now. Yesterday two truck drivers got into a fight—I mean, a real fight, one of them fractured his ribs—over some sacks of millets. Today a fellow came in complaining that somebody stole all the electrolyte tablets from his pharmacy, and beat up his employee also. There was that other chap who had flooded his own house for the insurance—remember that chap?” He looked at his assistant and they laughed, a private joke. “I have to consider that you are the crooks, pulling some kind of scheme.”

“What about the passports?” said Ma. “Can you at least take down our complaint, then we will see if the consulate—”

The policeman put down his sandwich, delicately brushed his hands above his tiffin box, and said, “What will you do with some words on letterhead? My suggestion is, lock your door better. And move on with your life. Go to a ration shop and find some rice for the sweetie.”

“But we need to file the report. Without the report, the consulate will say—”

“Times have changed, madam. We don’t file reports for these things anymore. We don’t have the manpower, or the womanpower.” He laughed heartily. Without giving them a chance to reply, he turned to the assistant and said, “Bhola, bring a Good Day biscuit for the sweetie.”

The assistant jumped up and disappeared out the doorway, and the policeman called, “Bring some for grandfather and mother also!”

“Sir,” tried Dadu. “You’re not understanding. We are a simple family. We urgently need our passports, because our flight—”

“Go to the passport office. I can’t do anything about that.”

“Even if we get new passports, the visas—”

“Then go to the consulate,” said the officer, angry now. “You people don’t guard your own things, and then you expect we will make your items reappear, like magic! I have much more important cases to handle. I am dealing with fifty assaults per day. I don’t have time for your lost and found.”

OUTSIDE THE POLICE STATION, IN the white light of noon, under shade-giving trees and beach umbrellas, sat photocopiers, fruit-juice sellers selling questionable fluids, and bail bonds-people. One woman, sitting in front of her copy machine, with nothing to copy at that moment, played a flute, her fingers moving delicately along the bamboo. Mishti ate her biscuit, holding it with both hands, crumbs falling down the front of her T-shirt, and while she ate, she took tentative steps toward the woman. The flautist’s eyes were closed. Her brows were furrowed. She swayed in her seat, lost in the divinity of her own playing, until Mishti patted her knee. The flautist opened her eyes and laughed. “You want to play this?” she said, and glancing at Ma for permission, lifted Mishti onto her lap. “Let me show you how the air makes the music.”

AT THE CONSULATE, THE GUARD refused to let them in.

“We were here yesterday,” Dadu pleaded.

“Yesterday’s appointment is not today’s appointment,” said the guard. In his hand was another Asterix & Obelix. “Please move, all these people have appointments right now.”

For a few minutes, Ma and Dadu stood off to the side, regarded with curiosity by the dozen people who clutched their appointment letters in plastic folders. They averted their eyes, feeling an odd shame, and watched instead the shopkeeper across the street at his visa photo business. It was a quiet moment for him, and he was sweeping dried leaves and branches away from the entrance of his shop. Soon others would come, with their printouts of consulate requirements, their folded cash, no haggling at all for the price of the special photo, unusually sized at two inches by two inches. Some things cost a lot. That was how it was.

When the street cleared, and the guard looked ready to turn to his comic book once more, Ma unfolded a five hundred rupee note from the pocket of her jeans, and held it out to him.

“That was too much,” Dadu whispered to her as they joined the line to enter the consulate. “Wasn’t it too much?”

“It’s what we should have done at the police station,” said Ma. “We were being too simpleminded. Haven’t we lived here our whole lives? Don’t we know what it’s like?”

An hour passed in the heat, near the end of which a young man near the back of the line fainted. Strangers around him sprinkled water from their bottles on his face, and waved handkerchiefs above him, until he revived and sat up on the sidewalk. Ma looked at him. She had a soaked handkerchief she could offer him, but he was far and being taken care of already. Besides, what if Mishti needed the handkerchief? It was another of the minor calculations she made each day.

When close to another hour had passed, a woman from the front of the line shared a bag of fruit jellies, and Mishti took two, gripping one in each hand.

“Let me show you how to eat them,” said Ma.

Mishti watched attentively as Ma tore the packaging. Then Mishti opened her mouth wide as a hippo to accept the strawberry-flavored jelly, smooth and cold and sweet.

At last, a guard appeared from within the consulate, signaling the end of the lunch break. He wrapped a towel around the overheated doorknob and held the door open.

Finally, at the window where the blond officer appeared once more, Ma and Dadu began their story. The woman cut them off.

“Police report?” she said.

“We went to the police station, but they didn’t take our report. He told us—”

“You don’t have a police report?”

“We tried, but he said—”

“Yes or no?”

Dadu held up his empty hands.

“Well,” she said, drawing out the word as she typed at her keyboard. “I have to make a note in the system. You can reapply for a new visa.”

“Reapply! My god, that will take too long! Can’t you reissue—? We just got—only yesterday, we—!” Ma’s words tumbled over each other.

“We don’t have time to reapply,” said Dadu, distress on his face but his voice calm. “We are leaving in a matter of days. Please understand. Please think about all the arrangements we have made.”

Hadn’t this been the primary plea of their immigration journey? Please understand. Please understand that our lives are fuller, more bursting, more replete, than is possible for your documents and questionnaires to contain. Please understand that we are moving for our child. Please understand that we love our child as you love yours. Wouldn’t you do anything for your child? Wouldn’t you plead before an officer, very much like this, for your child?

“Our flight,” Ma said, “is in five days.”

“The next available appointment…” the officer spoke over Ma. “I don’t see anything until September.”

“Will the consulate be open after four months? The way things are going…” Dadu spoke with a feeble smile, trying to regain his footing on the precipice where he found himself, but the blond officer’s face was hard as stone. He had a feeling then that she knew the consulate would close, and perhaps the closure would occur sooner than in four months’ time. America would retrieve its valued citizens from their foreign positions, hardship pay no longer sufficient compensation for the crisis in which they found themselves. The officer knew her Indian adventures were ending. Her apartment, inherited from a colleague and tastefully furnished, with Madhubani art on the wall and a dokra elephant on the coffee table, stocked with the foreign conveniences she liked, from jars of peanut butter to a pasta maker in the kitchen, was nevertheless as small before the sun and rain as the city’s humblest dwelling.

“Let’s think for a moment,” said Ma. “Can you give us a letter? A piece of paper? Maybe you have pictures of our visas, and we can show—”

“Ma’am.” A note of impatience entered the officer’s voice. “This is not a matter of improvisation. There are rules. If your visa is stolen, we are to make a note in the system, and you are to reapply if you wish. Without a police report, even that would be a courtesy.”

“And what if we, somehow, find the passports tomorrow?”

“Once I make a note, the visa is canceled. Even if you find the passports tomorrow, you have to reapply for new visas.”

“I have a thought,” said Dadu. His hand was cold as it gripped his walking stick. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish gulping air. His mind grasped for a way out. Before this young woman, a third of his age, posted to this faraway place that likely baffled her, whose true customs eluded her, artifacts like Bollywood persuading her she knew more than she did, who were Ma and Dadu and Mishti? They were ants before the almighty. Unless—

“I’m a writer.” He laid a hand on his chest and bluffed with the most sincerity he could muster. He called into presence his most dignified self, the one who rejected the idea that his daughter could steal from the shelter, the one who dreamed of the city’s collective future triumph. “I am known in the community, and people know me. I will ask around and find the passports. Maybe it’s just a mistake by a petty thief in our neighborhood. Please, I’m requesting you, don’t cancel the visas. I have my granddaughter to take care of. She is only—here she is”—and Ma lifted her up by the armpits to show the officer, while Mishti wriggled to be set free—“two years old. Forget we came. We thought you could give us a letter, or a copy of the visa. No, forget we came.”

“What kind of writer?” said the woman. She looked at him, trying to tell if he was truly renowned or a local loudmouth. “You write professionally?”

“He writes op-eds,” said Ma, recalling a letter to the editor Dadu had written the year before, about the local garbage heap and the municipality’s failure to clean up the surrounding streets. “For The Times of India. We will talk to our journalist friends.”

They had no journalist friends.

The woman paused. She was not ignorant of the consequences of public shaming, and now she considered how it would look if she canceled the climate visas of an elderly writer and his preschool-aged granddaughter. The woman had accepted this posting largely for the hardship bonus only ten months ago, when the longtime foreign service staff had begun to decline postings in places where the heat was becoming dangerous. She had left behind a mother in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. The officer imagined her mother in their backyard, filling syrup in the pair of cylinders that, she continued to hope, would be visited by hummingbirds. The mother sat on the cane chair some distance from the cylinders and read the news on her tablet, keen for items pertaining to India, keen for some comprehension of the place where her daughter had gone. The officer imagined her mother reading a short column about the relatively new American consular officer canceled on the internet for invalidating the climate visas of a famous Indian writer and his grandchild.

“Well,” she said, thinking aloud, “since you don’t have an appointment, you’re not in the system, so I don’t have to make an update. Who let you in?” She looked cross at the computer. “If you find your passports, fine. If you don’t, you can’t get on the plane anyway. Next.”

Ma and Dadu shuffled away from the window, Mishti hopping before them, and another applicant rose and hovered before the window, smile on his face, blue plastic folder in his hands, setting himself apart from them with his good cheer.

A BUS ARRIVED. THE CONDUCTOR leaned streetward, calling the route in a flawless recitation, its own poem of the city, and Ma, Dadu, and Mishti climbed in, mouths parched, shoulders drooping, the afternoon pressing upon them. In their seats, Mishti squirming on Dadu’s lap, they had nothing to say, each feeling the defeat as they might the presence of a fellow passenger. He sat in front of them. At any moment he might turn around and ask them for the time.

Ma thought: Here was another instance of the American consulate believing itself an emperor’s court. Could they really not reissue visas that were available in their systems? Could they really not provide a letter of explanation? Of course they could. They did not want to. Such a denial was how the court generated fear and retained its power. She recalled the many stories of visa denials that she had heard. Encountering those stories, she had believed herself different, and differently fated. Now she saw that she had been a character in such a story all along. Now she felt the might of the kingdom against her, the might of the years of floods and droughts imposing their new rules, allowing the emperor to erect insurmountable walls, not only upon territory but also upon the futures of ordinary people the emperor would never know.

Dadu thought: They would find their passports on their own. The benevolent city, the city that had embraced him all his life, would return the passports to them.