A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar - 4

IN THE HOUSE NEXT TO dadu and ma’s lived a professor called Mrs. Sen by all in the neighborhood, though she had never married, a woman who wore tie-dye shirts and wraparound skirts, and shared her home with two parrots.

The first parrot had arrived at her door one morning while the city was still thriving, each crisis receding in a reassuring rhythm, its tea shops busy with customers who lingered on unsteady benches and blew on their cups, rippling the milk skin on the surface, its malls alive with teenagers who chased each other, school bags bouncing on their backs, its homes animated by the usual bickering. The parrot was injured after an encounter with a crow, or a kite, thought Mrs. Sen, and though she didn’t know anything about caring for birds, she sensed the parrot’s immense fear as she approached. The bird, she comprehended with a shared animal consciousness, had felt its own death appear in the doorway. She took the bird in, silencing her nervousness as she handled it, wondering mildly if there were parasites in its feathers that were, at that moment, seeking new sanctuary under her fingernails. But the bird was soft and small. Its heart beat in her hands. She named it Abba, for the band she had been listening to that morning.

Each day as the sun rose, Abba promptly woke, and, regaining strength after weeks of rest and food, began to loudly demand that Mrs. Sen wake too. Let out of its cage each dawn, Abba flew from cabinet to desk to bedpost. Ma and Dadu sometimes heard, from next door: “Ai, Abba! Again on the ceiling fan! You will die one day!”

One morning a few months later, Mrs. Sen found a second parrot at her doorstep. This one came in a box scored with holes, with a letter sellotaped to the top, and a heap of lettuce inside. After this, Mrs. Sen mounted a door camera to immediately spot any other parrot-abandoners and deter them. Her house wasn’t a zoo. Two were enough. “Too noisy for our house,” said the letter. “My children need to study and we can’t tolerate the noise anymore. Likes green chilis very much,” with very much underlined twice. Something about the parrot’s unperturbed demeanor reminded Mrs. Sen of that old song about being alive, or not dying yet, or something in that vein, and she named the new arrival Bee Gees. Bee Gees and Abba grew inseparable. They sat close to each other, feathers touching, heads angled to survey, with some skepticism, the life they had been given. When Mrs. Sen sprawled on the floor, grading exam papers, they perched on her shoulders and inspected the papers too. When Mrs. Sen hung laundry to dry on lines strung on her verandah, the birds brought her clothes clips in their beaks, or so she reported to neighbors. When Mrs. Sen left her water heater on for too long, they gathered in the bathroom and said, “Water, water!”

Some of these anecdotes were made fun of around the neighborhood. Some said solemnly that the parrots kept track of when Mrs. Sen’s electricity bill was due. But, in general, everybody agreed that it was more enjoyable to believe than to question.

When a third parrot arrived in a cardboard box, in the dead of night, Mrs. Sen took one look at the footage and hauled the parrot back to its owners, whom she had recognized on her camera—three of her former students, roommates, who sheepishly accepted her scolding.

Then came the seasons of the city’s burning, and the city’s submergence. Crop fields in the region turned black in the sun, or were flooded with salt water, invaded by unlikely pests, and went to ruin. Food for the parrots became hard to find.

Mrs. Sen turned to her internet-savvy college students to learn about new underground markets that sold imported foods, albeit at high prices. In those markets, which were no more than tarp and burlap in a corner of a metro station, or a heaped table in the back of a clothing store, Mrs. Sen hunted for fresh apples, green chilis, and lettuce. The shop owners were bewildered. “Apples?” they said. “Apples from where? The floods in the north wiped out the crop this season.”

On an online forum for bird owners, some suggested boiled mushrooms, but Abba and Bee Gees had sophisticated tastes and refused to touch the unfamiliar food.

“Eat, darling, eat a little,” pleaded Mrs. Sen, weeks into the shortage, when a steady trickle of emigration had already begun, a rise in scams and trick businesses evident on the streets, and if somebody had spied on her in such a moment, they might have assumed she was speaking with offspring spoiled rotten.

“Why don’t you sell those loud birds?” said her cousins, who donated some of their furniture to her before leaving the city behind for Australia. They told her about pet markets where ring-necked parakeets were in high demand, especially ones as beautifully colored as Abba and Bee Gees, with their green feathers luminous as rain-washed leaves, a touch of peach about their necks, and beaks bright as cherries. Their eyes, all knowing in the manner of elephants. But Mrs. Sen refused to consider such crude advice. After the door closed on those cousins, she thought: Why don’t you sell Pikoo, who is sprouting a mustache and still can’t make toast?

MA AND DADU LAY AWAKE in their beds, ships sailing across the sea of night, until birds called from their hanger-and-stick nests in ledges and trees up and down the street. Then they rested their eyes for a moment, and when they woke, the sun was blazing, the call of a knife sharpener rousing the drowsy, and they could wait no longer. They fed Mishti fried onions turned sweet, which she ate after much protest, put her feet in shoes, tamped down the uneasiness in their own stomachs with glasses of water, and rang the bell next door, at Mrs. Sen’s house.

After three rings of the bell, Mrs. Sen appeared with uncombed hair, in a housecoat, one of the parrots squawking on her shoulder. In her hand, a newspaper she had only recently shaken open.

“Oh, why am I pretending?” she said. She threw the newspaper aside. “I was sleeping. I take these pills and sleep like an ogre in some storybook. And this heat—”

Her house was hot as an oven. The air conditioner had been broken for days, and there was no mechanic to be found. She apologized for the temperature, and for the fact that her living room sofa was covered in a bedsheet and damp from sprinkled water. She offered them snacks she did not have, and when they said no, they were not hungry, they had just eaten, she brought them cups of weak tea, with Darjeeling estate leaves used and reused, and a few grains of sugar at the bottom. From her store of fruit for the birds, Mrs. Sen brought Mishti a whole apple, flecked with brown, cut into moons. With the apple, to make up for its poor taste, she offered a dipping bowl of cinnamon and sugar, which Mishti ate with her tongue like a cow at a trough. Then Mrs. Sen sat, and waited, knowing from Dadu’s and Ma’s faces that they were in trouble.

When Ma and Dadu had told the whole story and arrived at the end, which was not the end at all, Mrs. Sen got up and left the room. She made her way to the back of the house, past several shut doors of rooms that were more or less storage spaces for winter clothes, stacks of exam papers, and unused furniture, and when she returned, it was with a laptop encased in clear plastic that she unzipped and plucked off the machine. “You will like this,” she said. “I have a security camera above the door. Did you ever notice it? You can see the street—see? And the logs store the past forty-eight hours. So we should be able to—”

She opened the recent files from her camera, and they saw the view from above her front door, facing the street. There passed an umbrella repairman, a seller of cooling vests, a plumber, a series of taxis and rickshaws, and then, just past the timestamp of three o’clock at night, a figure crept down the street, struggling to hold a bin as he walked, turning once to look at Ma and Dadu’s house. On his shoulder, unmistakable, was Ma’s purse. He moved across the screen like a Claymation figure as they exercised the only power they had over him—watching him over and over. They could tell little about him other than that he was skinny, and he was alone.

This was progress. They knew that. But the sight of the thief made their hearts stop in fear.

In one act, he had restored every childhood fear to real-world possibility. Here was the shadow that loomed over the mosquito net as one fell asleep. Here were the eyes that hovered at the nighttime window after one’s mother left the room.

Mrs. Sen magnified the image, trying to discern his face, but the thief became less man, more pixel.

“If only…” she said. “These cameras are no good when you need them.”

“Maybe we can take this video to the police,” said Dadu.

“They will only interrogate us again,” said Ma.

“Don’t they have experts—who know how to read these images—?”

“Are you a CEO? Or do you have a cousin who is a politician? Only then do the police care that much,” said Mrs. Sen.

The three of them looked at the screen, uncertain of where the day was taking them.

“Mishti,” said Dadu after a few minutes, turning to the child. “How do you like the apple?”

Mishti looked at them. She had eaten her fill and had then been feeding a slice to Abba and Bee Gees, who sat patiently before her like disciples. She giggled to see that she had been caught. But now the video on the screen drew her attention, and she hopped over, grasped the edge of the table, stood on tiptoe, and gazed up at the screen. Abba and Bee Gees followed her.

“Scooby-Doo!” she said.

“Hmm?” said Ma. “No cartoons. Not right now. We are doing some work, all right?”

“Scooby-Doo! Scooby-Doo!” Mishti shouted, pointing, and everybody saw what Mishti had seen, that the thief was wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt.

WITH A COPY OF THE image, ma, dadu, and Mishti left Mrs. Sen’s house. They stopped briefly at their own house to collect what they would need—umbrellas, water, electrolyte tablets, and a ziplock bag into which they put the printed image—and set out with determination.

It was nine o’clock in the morning. Soon, like white paper receiving crayons gripped in a child’s fist, the bright sky darkened to gray. In the minutes that followed, a cold light fell upon the agitating trees, and an intent rain began, curtains of water in which descent may have been ascent, fall may have been stasis.

Up and working through it was the ironing man, a man known to all who lived in the neighborhood, in his shed, his torso folded over a board, on one side a heap of wrinkled garments, on the other a stack of pressed ones, his hand upon the carved wooden handle of an iron, its chamber loaded with hot coals. In the small awning of his shed, Dadu, Ma, and Mishti paused, their umbrellas feeble against the rain.

“Who is bringing you clothes to iron in this time?” said Dadu. He said it familiarly, with a smile, neighbor to neighbor, but it was possible that the man, bent to his task, did not see his face, nor hear his smile.

“Why shouldn’t they?” demanded the man. His own shirt, a blue button-down, was perfectly pressed, untucked above loose pants that brushed the dirt of the sidewalk. He did not pause in his work, his forearm drawing the iron back and forth, his weight bearing down upon a collar. “These problems have been happening for a long time, but you people did not notice. We are used to living this way. One shortage, another shortage, another shortage. One rain, another rain, another rain. A roof falls here, a farm floods there—”

The man kept talking, only pausing to shake his head at the picture of the thief, and continued even when the rain slowed and Ma, Dadu, and Mishti crept out and began walking away.

The ironing man grumbled, unheeding of his audience’s loss of interest, and indeed of their vanishing in the rain. “Why shouldn’t I have clothes to iron? Many people are still working, even if you people aren’t. You people think a shortage is only a shortage if it reduces your Sunday lunch? You people think a flood is only a flood if it comes into your house?”

But Ma and Dadu were mired in their own experience of catastrophe, private and particular as it was. The ironing man’s words reached them as complaint, as provocation. They would not respond. Perhaps they would not even hear it. Instead, they heard the melody of a piano coming from an upstairs window. The pianist made mistakes, and began over and over. Ma said, half to herself, “Isn’t it…”

And they named the song, from a movie they had watched together many years ago. Over Mishti’s head, Dadu laid a gentle hand, a hand of reassurance, upon Ma’s shoulder.

The picture had given them hope—it was a little bit of light where there had been none, a beam that shone upon a way forward. They felt themselves a little stronger than they had been the previous panic-struck day. And Ma, though she didn’t put it into words, felt, uneasily, that she had seen that Scooby-Doo T-shirt somewhere. All she needed was one more piece of information to jolt it loose. All of it felt like progress.

THEIR UMBRELLAS HELD THE SPIT and spat of the raindrops, the water’s rhythm uneven as it encountered roofs and trees, some drops soft and some loud as thrown pebbles.

“What’s that?” said Mishti, cupping a hand to her ear theatrically when rain fell on her small orange umbrella, and no amount of explanation could convince her that every pitter and patter constituted the same event of rainfall.

They walked once more to Lord’s More, where the barber, who was running his skilled fingers on a customer’s scalp, silently shook his head at the picture. They walked to Golf Green, where an auto mechanic at a repair garage emerged from under a truck and shook his head at the picture. They walked to Golf Garden, where a gardener rose from a nascent vegetable patch by the cemetery and shook his head at the picture. “Go home,” added the gardener, “don’t you see how red the child’s face is? That child needs rest. Don’t drag her around the city in your wild search.”

But the heat was soothed, to some degree, by the rain, and Ma and Dadu could not bear to stop. When Mishti began to whine, they promised her a prize at the end of the day if she listened and walked calmly.

“What prize?” she squealed. “Puppy?”

“No puppy,” said Ma. “How about—”

“Cartoons!”

“No. Maybe—”

“Crayons!”

Ma agreed. “If we can find a shop with crayons, then yes, crayons.”

“Blue crayons? Or green?”

“All the colors.”

“Orange too?”

They changed direction and walked toward Dakshinapan, where college students cutting class and gossiping shook their heads at the picture. Over the bridge they went to Golpark, and everybody at the busy bus stop there shook their heads at the picture. They continued onward to Deshopriyo Park, and along the way, everybody they asked shook their heads too.

Nobody recalled having seen the thief, and Ma and Dadu began to wonder what they would do if the picture turned out to be not a source of light but a cave, within which they could advance to some degree, but not far enough. They paused then, and drank water, which was warm in their throats. They took electrolytes. Neither Ma nor Dadu spoke of the hollow feeling in their stomachs. Nor did they speak of the way in which their legs felt less sturdy, their vision less certain.

“Crayons?” asked Mishti. “Can we get crayons now?”

But the rain carried on, harder now than it had been before. It fell upon the road like a banner held by an advancing army, as constant and as loud.

And, in fact, within it, a different march emerged, a phalanx of drenched activists. Behind them crawled honking buses, but the activists were not flustered. They held signs that said Right to shade! Right to shelter! Among the last few straggling marchers, their glasses spotted with rain, their hair pasted to their foreheads, their raincoats beaded with drops, was a woman who looked closely at Dadu’s face when shown the picture.

“Aren’t you…?” she said. “Excuse me, but aren’t you…?”

She had been his editor for the op-ed he had published a while ago. When she took the photo from him, her wrist was bony enough that a rubber band hung loose from it. But she smiled, listening to his account with an expression that found the problem eminently solvable, and said, “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

She told two of her fellow marchers, who were waiting in the rain, to continue on. Then she asked for the original video from Mrs. Sen’s camera, and promised to take it to her colleague in the video department at the newspaper. This colleague would be able to enhance it. Maybe that way, the thief’s face would become clearer. Would that be acceptable, she asked, and looked at Dadu for approval.

Dadu felt glad for the rain because he felt tears pricking his eyes. It surprised him, and made him feel small as a child. Dadu had believed himself a nobody, long forgotten by the editor, who, he felt, had done an old man a kindness by publishing his modest op-ed. What could an op-ed do in these times of catastrophe? It lifted a burden from the writer, perhaps that was all. The young editor had been generous to him already, and now, here she was, offering sincere help. She was even tucking a ziplock of rolled ruti and jam, and a small bag of peanuts, in Dadu’s shirt pocket.

“For your grandchild,” she said, recalling the child mentioned in the op-ed, and before Dadu could tell her that Mishti was allergic, that she didn’t need to part with the precious peanuts, she had run away to catch up with the march, the back of her legs splattered with mud as she went, figure growing indistinct in the downpour.

Dadu raised a hand to his eyes and wiped, as if the rain had irritated them.

This was the city he believed in, the city in which knowing somebody once was knowing them forever. The city in which knowing somebody meant laying claim to their time, and expecting them to lay claim to one’s own time. Everything beautiful, and everything useful, about the city could be found in these relationships of dependence—with one’s barber, one’s rickshaw driver, one’s editor, one’s neighbor. How had Dadu forgotten that?

IN THE OLD DAYS, PRIYA cinema had shown upon its single screen an assortment of Bengali and Hindi films, and Oscar contenders in English, months after the nominations were announced in Los Angeles. Ma and Dadu had gone to the theater many times, and even purchased paper tubs of popcorn, the top lavishly buttered and the kernels beneath dry as Styrofoam in the usual fashion of theaters.

Now, while Dadu spoke to the editor, Ma and Mishti retreated to the movie theater.

“We buy a crayon here?” said Mishti.

Inside rested dozens of men and women, all waiting for the rain to subside. Some looked like they had been waiting for a long time. They combed their children’s hair, or snored with sheets pulled up to their chins. Ma watched them, aware of the dirty work underway, a silent appraisal, a scanning of class and need through clothes, haircuts, phones, faces grown weary or granted rejuvenation, while Mishti joined two children who were running, a game of catch that expanded to include her, all three children shrieking, the joy of the chase joy enough. Ma showed the picture to two people who peered at it and made no further response. A woman asked Ma what had happened, and why she was looking for this person, and Ma said simply, “He’s a thief.”

The woman looked with open curiosity at Ma, seeking more of the story, but Ma was unwilling to become the assembly’s source of entertainment.

Mishti continued to play catch. When the children all tumbled in a heap to the floor, the one pinned to the bottom now screaming and upset, Ma worried that the children could give Mishti lice. There had been a lice outbreak at the shelter a few months ago. It was common. But her suppressed agitation as the children continued to play showed her, moment by moment, who she was. A mother with no generosity, mother to nobody but her own child, her love showing how mother was the opposite of motherly.

DADU WAS INVIGORATED BY THE encounter with the editor and Ma shared silently in his hope when they turned back toward Mrs. Sen’s house, where they would take the video file. They had shared the rolled ruti with jam, and the sweet treat had lifted their spirits too.

On the way, in the dim interior of a stationery shop sat a shopkeeper, a middle-aged, bespectacled man, in Captain Planet T-shirt, combed hair aflutter from a small fan mounted to the shelf behind him. The rain had stopped, and the shopkeeper was wiping the countertop in front of him, which was damp from water that had encroached, aslant. Once, a shop like his would have been busy at this afternoon hour, attending to throngs of customers requesting maps, compasses, notebooks, erasers. Now it was empty, and the shopkeeper looked glum. His daughter sat next to him, coloring. When Ma and Dadu asked for a box of crayons— Mishti heard them and shouted, “Orange! Orange one!”—the shopkeeper rose with lethargy, expression unchanged, fetched the box from an upper shelf, and read the price from a sticker.

It was too high.

Mishti reached her arms up for the box.

“What if,” said Dadu, “we gave you salted peanuts for the crayons?”

Ma looked at him. Why was he offering it to these strangers? Ma wanted those peanuts for herself. She felt a spark of anger at Dadu’s mischievous barter. He was given to odd bouts of generosity and play. The other day they had parted with a precious bottle of cold water, and she had gone along with it. But couldn’t they have eaten the peanuts themselves, or at least traded these precious peanuts in a market for food Mishti would eat? The child hadn’t eaten much of the ruti, and though the excitement of the day’s adventure had kept her going, soon there would be an hour of tantrums. Ma knew it, and it seemed Dadu did not.

The shopkeeper looked uncertain.

His daughter, coloring an outlined deer, looked up eagerly, and grabbed the bag as soon as it was offered.

“It’s salted peanut, Baba,” she said. “It’s really salted peanut! Do you remember when we—”

The girl reminisced—though she was small, she already had her own past, and her own nostalgia—about park vendors who used to sell peanuts in their shell, toasting them in sand, and in her reminiscence she became, for a moment, closer to the old woman she would one day be.

Touched by his daughter’s excitement, the shopkeeper grew curious. “Where did you get it?”

“A marcher gave it to me.” Dadu pointed down the street. “The march that way.”

“The right to shade march? You were part of it?”

Dadu smiled and indicated his walking stick, to say that he couldn’t, though he concealed that he had been walking since the morning. “I spoke to them. They are nice people.”

“You’re a reporter? Or what are you?”

Dadu retrieved the photo from his pocket and told the shopkeeper the story, leaving out the part about the video enhancement that would soon be in progress. Then he said, “Who knows if we will ever find this man? I’m beginning to think—”

The shopkeeper lifted the photo close to his eyes.

“I don’t know him,” he said, “but I know that T-shirt. It’s my son’s.”

The girl agreed. “It’s Dada’s,” she said.

“Somebody took clothes off our clothesline some days ago, and it must have been this fellow.” The shopkeeper grew animated. His voice had shed its neutrality and was now agitated. “I saw him, actually. It was in the middle of the day, and this fellow looked so young. I thought, what age are we in that children are doing the thieving?”

“You were coming out of your bath,” prompted the girl.

“Yes, and I saw this fellow pulling clothes from our clothesline downstairs, and immediately I said, Thief, thief! I shouted, just like that. I put on a pair of shorts and I ran downstairs. I didn’t even take the time to put on a shirt. But he fled, and anyway, my wife did not want me to chase him. She said, Have you lost your mind, you’re chasing a thief for clothes? What if he turns around and beats you up? My wife, she thinks everybody goes around beating each other up now, that’s what the city has become. She’s not wrong. Anyway, I wanted to chase him. It’s not about the clothes, but why should this fellow go around believing he can do anything he wants? He’s probably not even from Kolkata. He’s probably from—”

“Okay, all right,” said Ma. She was ungenerous, but not hateful. “So did you see him after that?”

“No, how would I? You think fellows like this ever come back? He’s long gone. And my wife said to let it go, he had only taken two T-shirts, though this Scooby-Doo one, it was a gift from my sister in Canada. The tag said Made in Canada, like that, not your typical Made in Bangladesh and Made in Vietnam . It was an expensive shirt.”

“And Ma found the…” prompted the girl once more.

“Oh, yes, my wife told me later that she found a handkerchief he had dropped when he was running away.”

“Printed,” the girl added, “with a hooligan in the corner—”

“A what?”

“A hexagon, she means. That rich lady who lives on the hexagon is always making donations, isn’t it, from her skyscraper or earthscraper or riverscraper, whatever it is? Especially these days, with the wedding coming up. Appeasing the poor so they don’t feel angry about all the photos that will emerge. Her daughter will be wearing diamonds as big as the palm of my hand, and whatnot. That’s what I heard. I wonder if I am poor enough to qualify for the feast, ha ha! I heard anyone with a child can try lining up. Anyway. It’s a nice handkerchief, high quality. My wife said she read in the news that it’s some new kind of cotton fiber that the billionaire is developing. It holds cold water for a long time. First handkerchiefs, then wristbands and headbands. All kinds of cooling product ideas. As if she needs more money?”

“Ma soaks it and keeps it in the fridge,” said the girl solemnly.

“The thief stole from us, so we stole from him. Tit for tat. That’s the only justice we can have these days, don’t you think?”

Ma kept her face neutral, but she knew exactly the kind of handkerchief they meant. She had one herself. The hexagon had donated boxes of these to the shelter. The thief, she understood, was, or had been, a shelter resident.

IT WAS NIGHT WHEN THE newspaper editor sent over an enhancement from her colleague, and Ma set out, in dry clothes, for the shelter, carrying with her Dadu’s phone with the video on it. Alone in the dark of the city, its roads now her future, now her past, Ma felt like a schoolgirl again. On these roads, she had been followed by men thrice her age, men who walked outside the light cast by streetlamps, men who merged with the corners, becoming slightly visible as arms swinging in the dark, and audible as a shuffle of shoes. She had experienced in those instances a stunning clarity beyond the known senses that there was a person of malice just outside what her eyes could see.

For a few minutes, she missed her father.

But perhaps it was her mind mixing up varieties of fear, and what she truly felt now was not fear of the strangers in the past but fear of this one man, a young man, it appeared from the enhanced video, a thief who had stepped out from the shadows and revealed himself, an intruder who had molested the peace of her house, a crook who had taken what she most prized. But why would she fear him now? Wasn’t the worst of his harm in the past?

No, perhaps it was yet another variety of fear her mind apprehended—who she might become when she confronted him.

THE SHELTER HAD ONCE BEEN a post office, and it retained a mailbox in the entrance hall, its belly open for the protein bars that had, for a week, been stored there. Ma watched several people put their hands in the cavity, hoping for treasure. Around them, dozens of new arrivals clamored to be given beds. The new manager, a woman with white hair and glasses, was calling, in a voice more sonorous than her petite body implied, “We don’t have enough space, baba, what do you want me to do? Don’t start telling me all your problems, I’m not a judge! Take a ticket and wait. I don’t want to listen to your problems, I’ve said that a thousand times!”

One by one, an assistant called ticket numbers, and shelter applicants entered the hall, dragging their feet. Ma found her way to the front, greeted the assistant and the new manager, and showed them the video.

“Has this person—”

The new manager interrupted. She had no time to waste on complete sentences. “What has Boomba done?” she called, unable to lower her voice, though Ma was standing before her.

“Boomba. Is he here?”

“Upstairs,” she said, and ran a finger down a sheet of foolscap paper pinned to the wall. “Bed 223. Go see if he’s here. He comes and goes as he wishes. Is everything all right? What has he done, though?”

THAT WAS HIS NAME, THEN . Boomba. It was a nickname, given in babyhood by those who loved him. How odd, thought Ma, to know this thief by his nickname, abraded now of adoration. When she faced him, she would—

She climbed the stairs, faintly greeted five or six residents who greeted her, and made her way to the room. The floor was largely quiet at this time of night. She heard snores and shuffles, and the wail of a child. The doorway to Boomba’s room was covered with a new curtain, she noted, likely stitched by a resident who enjoyed sewing. She lifted the thin curtain, and there he was.

Boomba lay on his tidy bed with his hands under his head, contemplating the mosquito net above. He looked like a child. In fact, laying eyes on him now, Ma recalled admitting him to the shelter. In a moment, her mind plucked his identity from a ledger of thousands, remembering that he had posed as an unaccompanied child and begged for a place to sleep.

“Boomba?” she said.

Hearing the strangeness of her voice, she realized she was shaking, perhaps from anger, or from not having eaten more than a bit of ruti all day. “You are Boomba, aren’t you?”

Boomba rose. He swung his legs to the floor.

“This is you,” said Ma. “Isn’t it?”

Boomba squinted at the security video of himself that played on the phone in Ma’s hand. There was a neighboring house, he understood, whose camera had caught him. From the angle, he could tell that it was the house to the left of Ma’s.

“Oh,” he said.

The blank canvas of his face stirred Ma to fury. She found herself speaking loudly, so that others in the room would hear. There could be nothing private between them. Let everybody know who he truly was; let everybody see him cower in shame. “That’s all you have to say for yourself?” she said. “Do all the people in this room know who you are? A thief, that’s what you are. You broke into my house. You took food from my child. You—you—” The rage grew greater than what her body could contain, and Ma felt herself faltering.

“There are children sleeping,” somebody hissed.

“Shut up, madam!” somebody else said.

Ma set her jaws and lowered her voice. She took a long breath to calm herself. “Return what you took, and I will let you go. Otherwise, I will take you to the police right this minute. See how you like answering their questions. See how you like being thrown in jail.”

Though some had protested, most of the grown residents in the room watched with interest. They were all awake—one with a paperback in his hands, one with a xylophone, one sucking a gel from a pouch. Who had hissed at Ma to be quiet, and who had demanded that she shut up, she did not know. They existed as a blur in the periphery of the scene, and it was all Ma could do not to reach over and shake this boy—he could not be older than twenty—and grab what fell from his pockets, seize what hid under his bed.

Boomba had unfolded himself from the bed and was standing up. He looked directly at Ma and stretched his arms toward the ceiling. “You don’t want to hear what I have to say.”

Ma wanted to pick up his slippers, next to the bed, and smack him. Instead, she grabbed his wrist and led him out of the room to the empty stairway.

“Manager madam,” said Boomba in a low voice before Ma could speak again. “ You are the thief, isn’t that so? You have been taking from the shelter supplies. I know. I saw. So what will you do? If you take me to the police, I will tell them about you. I will tell them, so what if this manager madam speaks nice English and looks so decent? She is a filthy thief also! You arrest her now! You put her in jail along with me! That’s what I will say.”

Boomba grinned.

Ma pressed her teeth together because there was nowhere else in her body that her anger and despair could reside. She hated this fool with a vehemence that made her afraid. Putting aside the truth or falsity of what he was saying—she could not allow herself to be waylaid by that question—there was no way she could afford an entanglement with the police. What if the police took Boomba seriously and examined Ma’s tenure at the shelter? After all, the billionaire funded the shelter, and would be keen to know about misallocations. What if, in the investigation, it was revealed that she had taken not only food but also steady drips of money from the shelter budget, saving for an uncertain future in Michigan? She truly hadn’t taken much. Enough for a month of rent. Enough for a few weeks’ worth of groceries for a family of four getting by on one income. Perhaps enough for purchases of winter clothing for Mishti, too. Never had she taken from the funds for children’s medicines and formula; not once had she touched anything other than the repairs and maintenance budget. But now that she began to add them up, Ma felt a cold panic wash over her. The new shelter manager did not yet know—but she would begin to examine the books in the next month or two. Not even Dadu knew. Dadu believed she had only taken food. If there was a police case, it would disastrously complicate, and likely prevent, her departure. The officers at the airport’s emigration desk would detain anybody with a police case lodged against them. Barred from leaving the country, Ma would have to remain in Kolkata for years awaiting trial. The billionaire, with her power, her influence, her lawyers, would easily wreck her life. Worse, Ma could see that the billionaire would try to make an example of her, a thief stealing from her philanthropic venture. Her punishment—in the media, and in the courts—would be severe. No, she could not risk that at all. She would have to keep Boomba quiet.

“Lies,” said Ma in a whisper. “But fine. Keep the food. Only return our passports. We need them. They are useless to you. Where are the passports?”

Boomba looked confused.

“Passports!” demanded Ma, and she saw that he wasn’t pretending. He was genuinely unsure.

“Little books?” she went on. “That were in the purse? Three little books. Give them to me, and we can be done. No police, no nothing.”

“Bank books?” he said hesitantly.

“No!” Ma whispered fiercely. “They have nothing to do with money.”

“Then why do you need them?”

Ma did not want to tell him anything, but he waited, grinning widely as he had for much of the conversation, smug with his power in the moment.

“My child has to get on a plane,” she said finally. “She needs the booklet to get on a plane.”

“Are you leaving? On an aeroplane?” Now sorrow drew at the curve of his mouth. Emigrating was a fantasy for him. Ma’s troubled reality was beyond his wildest dreaming. “Then go. Go on your aeroplane. Why are you here in the middle of the night, harassing me?”

Ma made to return to his bed. She had wasted enough time trying to reason with him. Now she would take his sheet and pillow apart; she would turn the mattress upside down; she would find the cursed passports.

“You won’t find anything,” he said. “I threw them away.”

Boomba looked at his corner of the room and saw the skinny bed, fit for him alone. And now a grander vision appeared.

“I threw away the passbooklets.”

For a moment, he observed the shock on Ma’s face. Then he continued, “I remember where I threw them. I can take you there. But I have one condition. When you go away on your plane, I’m going to live in your house. My mother, my father, my little brother, and I. We will live in your house, undisturbed by any of your family here, undisturbed by police or anybody else. You will tell them the house is mine. You will give me the keys. You will write the papers to the house in my name. Why are you looking at me like that? You feel I’m asking for something impossible? Then you will never get your passbooklets back. It’s your choice. Give me the house, and I will take you to your passbooklets.”