A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar - 5

WHEN BOOMBA WAS TEN, HE told his parents he wanted to be an explorer, like Ibn Battuta and Vasco da Gama. These were two people his parents had never heard of, so they said all right, and Boomba returned to his evening’s task, in an undershirt pocked with holes and shorts that slipped down his narrow waist and showed his behind until he tugged them up again, holding them with one hand at his hip while with the other he mopped up the water remaining in his family’s home, in a village two hours from Kolkata.

The high tide had come in again, and slowly receded. For the duration, with their home flooded, they had retreated to their other home on higher ground, a shed made of bamboo and tarp on stilts. Now they were newly returned to a house in need of draining.

Boomba wanted to be like Ibn Battuta, he continued to his captive audience, so that he could climb aboard a boat and sail far, very far, down the Nile River and down the coast of Somalia, to look for a new land in which to make a home for his family. The real Ibn Battuta, he had read in a comic book, had left his family far behind. This he could not fathom. How could anybody leave their mother and father behind? What was the point of adventure if you didn’t take those you loved with you?

In this new land, he told his parents, they would once again have a small plot for growing betel. In this new land, they would not fear the tide; they would not fear crocodiles. They would live peacefully, in a perpetually dry house, and in the mornings they would eat jilipi for breakfast. Only one jilipi for his mother, though, he added, because he knew she had a problem with her blood sugar.

“Who made you my mother?” said his mother, pinching his cheek though his cheek had long lost its baby plumpness and was now sunken. His teeth, large for his mouth, appeared readily when he grinned. His hair, cut unevenly by his father, descended from left to right across his forehead. His mother bent to kiss him, but he wriggled away, so she called after him, “All these worries in your small head. Just go to school and study hard.”

Boomba leaned out of the doorway and wrung out the rag he had used to mop the floor, then called, “I’m coming soon,” by which he meant he was leaving, and kicked the stand on the bicycle that leaned against the exterior wall. He pushed it up through mud until its wheels found the paved road at the top of a failing embankment, then swung his leg over the bar and pedaled, leaning from foot to foot, mud drying and cracking on his shins. He arrived at a house where rows of soaked and stinking clothes sat on the porch waiting for the sun to work on them. Seated in the doorway, an old woman, cheeks collapsed without her dentures, was dozing.

“Is it here?” called Boomba loudly. “Didimoni! No sleeping!”

When he knelt next to her, she opened her eyes, murmured, and handed him a small box. Then she cleared her throat, and began, “They came back from the city yesterday, only yesterday, and your father said—anyway, open it and see, because in my day, the bus from the city—”

She launched into a long story about the journey of the box from city to village. But Boomba was not listening. He was tearing the cardboard open, and pulling out the folded board inside, a magnetic snakes-and-ladders board with a forest painted upon it, the previous year’s birthday gift, promised and promised again, finally delivered to him by the old woman’s son, who traveled for his job to the city. The game included blue, green, red, and orange pieces, and a die that was golden with black spots. He had never seen such a thing in his life, and he wondered what other magic the city contained, if it could contain one such as this.

“Magmetic!” said Boomba, delighting in the sound of pieces that snapped to the board.

“Magmetic,” agreed the old woman. “How much did it cost your father?”

“Why do you need to know?” said Boomba defensively. “It’s my gift.”

“Don’t drop it in the mud,” warned the old woman when he rose to leave. “It looks costly.” Then she reached her bony hand up and clutched his wrist.

“Can you bring me an omelet?” she asked him.

He would ask his mother, he mumbled.

“Tell her to make it with onions,” she said as he pedaled away. “Bit of salt, not a lot. Green chili, if she has any.”

At home, he played with the board on their high bed, next to a stack of blankets and thin pillows, and when his mother asked after the old woman, he said, “She’s asking for omelets again.”

“I don’t think she will ever stop,” said his mother. “In a way, I understand. Who can forget how good eggs were? In our childhood, we used to get one egg from school every other day. They weren’t so costly then. Many people kept chickens at that time too. We would never get sick on egg day.”

“In the city, do they still have eggs?” said Boomba.

“I think so. They probably do.” Then she paused, lost in her thoughts, seeing the moments from her girlhood only she could see. “Start then,” she said, sitting down opposite him on the bed. “You take blue, I’ll take red.”

When Boomba was twelve, the house flooded again, and this time the water rose to the top of the bed. The river flooded the betel orchard, the family’s main source of income, and the schoolhouse, and Boomba’s mother and father had hushed nighttime conversations about what to do, which Boomba listened to with his eyes pressed shut and his breathing even, pretending he was asleep. He comprehended not their words but their tone—not their plans but their worry.

On a day off from school he accompanied his father to the forestry office for a boat license to go into the forest and collect honey. This would be his father’s new trade. Boomba stood in line, holding his father’s hand, his feet in shoes that were too small and hurt his toes, until his father led him into an office where, despite the important talk carried on by the adults, all Boomba noticed was the globe atop the officer’s table. He had never seen anything like it, and on the way home he asked his father what it was called, that round thing on the table, but his father couldn’t recollect any round thing on the officer’s table. A week later, the village rejoiced as his father joined a team of honey collectors who would go deep into the forest, with masks on the back of their heads to frighten tigers, and torches that would emit smoke. A patrol boat would accompany them for part of the journey. Honey gathered from this particular forest had gained some currency in national markets, and, if all looked satisfactory in the quality of the collection, the village would earn a good deal of money for the honey the men retrieved. For two weeks, Boomba’s father wrapped a scarf around his face and tracked bees encumbered with honey. He knew these bees by how they did not zigzag but flew straight to the honeycombs that hung heavy as filled goblets from trees. Despite the precautions, it was dangerous work. One man’s calves swelled from a snakebite. Another man’s ears grew bulbous with bee stings. And, on the last day of work, Boomba’s father fell under the paws of a tiger whom he never saw approaching, rib thin, shoulders rolling like river over rock, hungry enough to attack a human.

While his father recovered, in silence, never speaking of his injury beyond what was apparent, never speaking of the fear that made it difficult for him to sleep and difficult for him to wake, never speaking of the tiger’s stench, which he sensed with alarm around the house, his mother looked for work to sustain them. She joined a local group that planted mangrove trees in an effort to calm the storms and flooding. Early mornings, she went out to the field where she nurtured saplings, then went by boat to the outer edges of the forest, where the water was eating islands whole, to plant saplings in the mud. She did this in heat and rain, an ache developing in her back, hands cramping, legs rigid. Sometimes the activity alarmed the crabs who lived there, and they scampered away, unless Boomba’s mother caught them and brought them home in a bucket. Boomba and his father loved eating the crabs, his father putting stiff shoulders and fingers to work as well as they could. And Boomba’s mother loved the dignity she found in her work.

When Boomba was fourteen, he had an idea. He set out to harvest, on his own, the small crabs that lived in the mangroves. Rather than being his mother’s peripheral duty, it could be his chief contribution. After school, Boomba bicycled to the area where his mother was working and set to work himself, digging crabs from the mud and climbing trees to chase them when they fled. But a man who controlled the crab pots in the area appeared, and threatened to beat him up unless he got lost.

Boomba wasn’t one to give up easily. Explorations were never without risk. He returned with his own bait and loop, aiming to catch crabs more efficiently, one by one from their intertidal burrows, but this time the crabman threatened to get his mother and father in trouble with the local administration. The crabman said he knew exactly where Boomba lived, and whose son he was.

Taking his mother’s advice, Boomba backed down. He began helping a neighbor farm shrimp instead, in the standing water of the neighbor’s paddy field. For a while the year looked bright, until all the shrimp died from a fast-spreading disease, and the neighbor gave up on his venture. In frustration, and driven by a hungry stomach, Boomba returned to hunting crabs.

When Boomba turned sixteen, his mother made him birthday malpoa, his favorite sweet, and told him he would have a baby brother soon. Not many teenagers would have received this news with joy, but Boomba did. Later in the year, the baby arrived, looking like a disgruntled gent, and Boomba sped home from school each day—some of the teachers had vanished, in any case, gone from the region and its repeated floods—to hover anxiously around the baby, whom he wasn’t allowed to touch, until he was, and then he was responsible for holding the baby for hours, rocking him around the house, giving him a thin finger at his lips to soothe him, making faces with him at the base of the krishnochura tree in their yard, the baby drooling upon the red flowers that made a carpet for him. In the deepest portions of night, when the baby cried, his father turned over in his sleep and coughed, his mother sat up on her elbows with bleary eyes, pointing at the boxes filled with formula from the local hospital, and Boomba threw the sheet off his torso, found his slippers, mixed the water and formula, shook the bottle, and took the baby, Robi, onto his lap to feed. Robi, fragile as a puppet, looked at Boomba more intently and trustingly than anybody ever had. This gaze made Boomba, who knew that he was also a child, feel instead like a guardian.

When Boomba was seventeen, his mother and father went to a ceremony to celebrate a million new mangrove trees planted—so said the organization, and its leaders from Kolkata, who had come to the village for the occasion. But the leaders also shared, with regretful expressions, that they had received complaints about the workers interrupting the crab harvest—one of the leaders looked directly at Boomba’s mother—which had been escalated to local administration, and the project would need to pause.

“All the crabs you were bringing home…” Ma said to Boomba in a questioning voice later. “You said you found them in a different area…”

Boomba said nothing. Though his mother did not interrogate him, nor scold him, he knew that she was in turmoil.

With his mother occupied looking for new work, his father began to seek a desk job for himself, seized by a fear that his body would never heal to its original capacities, that it would always be a body of lesser ability, that this physiological frailty would be taken for psychological meekness, and further, that this state of being lesser than would be his to bear in its encompassing loneliness. All he feared, he made true. The fear curdled to frustration and surrender, days during which he failed to show up to positions and sulked while walking the neighborhood, hands clasped behind his back, or else brooded at home, Robi’s small defiances and oppositions putting him in dark moods, broken only when Boomba’s mother returned, weary and expecting peace. Boomba watched his father retreat, unsure how to bring him back and remind him who he was. Instead, Boomba became Robi’s mother, father, and brother. He let the one-year-old cling to his fingers and attempt to walk, and tried to teach him to climb trees. He washed the child’s clothes by slapping them on rock. And one afternoon, while attempting to dry Robi’s clothes atop a lidded pot of boiling water, Boomba failed to notice when a tiny shirt slipped off the lid and fell into the flames.

In the fire, the shirt curled. From the fabric, to the wood and tarp of the hut, the flames caught. Boomba heard the crackling ascending to a roar before he understood what was happening. In a movement of time that he experienced as chopped and diced, one discrete moment followed by another with no flow in between, Boomba lifted Robi in his arm, and rushed about the house, selecting what he could salvage and kicking the items to just outside the door. What was valuable, and what disposable? He kicked pots and clothes and the crab bucket and a polythene bag of documents. He grabbed foolishly at the bed, until smoke stung his eyes and invaded his throat. He bent low to the ground and coughed, overcome. For one terrifying moment, he felt himself grow dizzy, his arm losing its grip on Robi. Then he recovered, and fled out the door, to the shade of the krishnochura tree, far enough from the house, where he called for help, knees buckling, Robi watching in silence. Though neighbors arrived swiftly, and poured buckets of water and sand and mud on the flames, it took what felt like hours for the flames to be quelled. What little there was left only frightened Boomba.

That night, the family rested under the krishnochura tree.

“Does your son have sawdust for brains?” said Boomba’s mother to his father, as if Boomba wasn’t hers anymore. “What fool sets fire to his own house?”

Robi cried to see his mother’s anger, and all Boomba could do was say, “It’s all right, Robi, don’t cry.”

There was nothing for the family to do but move to their other house on higher ground, which was hardly a house at all. It was a shed meant for temporary inhabitation, a structure besieged by mosquitoes, frail before the rain and damp, with mats for a bed.

Boomba couldn’t stand to be there for long. Most days, he slunk away on his bicycle, pedaling upon the embankment, past the old woman’s house, past the mangroves, past his abandoned school, and found himself at the bus stop where buses for the city waited. He watched men and women boarding the buses, bent under their belongings but free of the captivity of the village, bigger than who they had been in this small place.

“Let me go,” said Boomba one night a few months later, when he was eighteen, when only he and his mother were awake. “Let me go to the city.”

The depth of night always felt adjacent to real life, a fourth dimension of the world that allowed the honesty and courage that daylight forbade. Perhaps it was that the moon and stars reminded people of their finite lives in the margins of the universe’s story—what did it matter what human beings did or didn’t do? Or perhaps it was only the clock losing its tether to the day’s routines and yielding to pure time. Boomba felt bold. “Let me find a job there, and find a house. Then we can leave all this behind.”

“You?”

Mother and son paused. The question suggested many interpretations. Then she clarified, with more generosity than she felt, “You alone?”

“Why not? I’m old enough. There are more jobs in the city. Many more than here. Then we can find a good house and a good school for Robi too.”

“The city is difficult these days. People are leaving.”

“Then they are leaving their jobs too.”

“But the shortage—”

“The shortage is an opportunity !”

“Is that what you heard on the radio?”

Boomba was silent for a long time. A mosquito whined in his ear, and he slapped it, then examined the spot of blood on his palm. “We don’t have a home here anymore,” he said finally. “How long can we live like this? Let me try. It’s time for me to try.”

So it was that Boomba left, on his back a fraying schoolbag, zipper stuck halfway, stuffed with clothes, cooked rice and pickles, and his cherished magnetic snakes-and-ladders board. Robi, comprehending his departure, screamed with such desperation that his mother had to take him inside and soothe him. The moment of goodbye passed underneath Boomba’s feet as he pedaled to the stop for the bus that would take him to the train station.

“Ask your mother to make me an omelet,” called the old woman. When Boomba said nothing, the old woman continued, “Is that brother of yours any use yet? Or is he still—” She made a crawling motion in a rude imitation. “Then tell him to bring me an omelet. Where are you going anyway?”

Boomba hoisted his bicycle onto the roof of a bus, then sat in its interior, sweating with fifty others, listening to the melodic horn the driver blew.

Then, in the distance, he heard an improbable sound. It sounded like the call of a mighty animal, a call of distress, of warning and command. When he saw a clearing laid with train tracks, he knew that he had indeed heard the distant blast of a train’s horn. He knelt on the dry ground, grass imprinting in his palms, and smelled the rails, and for the first time he thought: There could yet be notes of adventure in his journey of survival.

A train station materialized in the heat. Even before Boomba reached the platform, bicycle unwieldy at his side, he saw a long train standing still, and thousands of people trying to climb in. There was a man in a reflective vest who was standing back and watching with an expression of peace. Once, it had been his job to urge order. Now who really knew? Upon the platform, Boomba elbowed and jostled, a needle sticking in his chest as he sucked in more of the day’s heated air, its arid quality making him aware of the tissue of his throat, and then for a moment the thought crossed his mind—did he need a ticket? And he laughed, feeling no longer like an obedient boy but like a man, a breaker of rules, and felt the push of the crowd on his back, elbows and hands on him, mouths screaming in his ears the names of others who were not precious to him—

“Rina! Get in, get in!”

He didn’t know who Rina was, but he let himself be forced forward, shoes on shoes, hair on hair, hands on hands, moving with the knowledge that the city was on the other side of this train’s motion, until his stretched arm touched the edge of the door, his fingers closed around the bar and he lifted himself up, then hoisted his bicycle, somebody yelling at him, “No cycles! No cycles!” but he didn’t care. The world outside would not permit that gentle boy, that foolish maker of mistakes, to go on. That boy had ruined Robi’s life. Of what use was he?

“Watch it,” said Boomba.

“Or what?” said the man who was angry about the space occupied by the bicycle.

“Or there will be a spoke around your neck.”

It was a line taken from movie dialogue, and Boomba wasn’t himself when he spoke it, but changing, and he smiled when he saw fear flash on the man’s face. Away from his parents and his brother, he could be anybody. He could be, temporarily, free of his wrongs, and free of his guilt. He did not have to cower in shame. He could be prideful, or harsh, or aloof, or a person others listened to. Upon those others he could release the anger he had for himself. Perhaps the true adventure was not only in seeing the world but also in seeing the versions of one’s own self that the journey revealed.

Then the door closed, and Boomba, the victor of the moment, felt the sway of the train in his body and watched the crowd of those who had failed to climb aboard accept that the train was pulling away. They had lost. Boomba had won.

On board, a woman noticed his grasp on the bicycle and asked if he was looking for delivery work in the city. A few hours later, she led him off the train. The city presented itself as a collection of peculiarities that Boomba gathered despite his overwhelm—on the street, a trash bag moved in the hot wind as if there was a creature inside; a mob tried to wrench open the door to a building they called a farm, though by that word Boomba knew only stubble and stalks in regions of rice, orchards of banana plants with their gigantic leaves, birds on wires, leaning poles, the muck of a green pond; a woman walked by with a baby in her arms, telling a story of kings and tree spirits; a smell of smoke drifted down the street, which alarmed Boomba but nobody else; a man carried a fish tank with a small collection of coral inside. The movement of people around him was such that Boomba kept his eyes on the feet of the woman, following her intently through the crowds to the restaurant where she worked.

It was a hole in the wall kept afloat by the wealthy, who sought deliveries in the cover of night. The restaurant had only one item still available on the menu—paneer roll, churned out three at a time by an indifferent cook who rotated parathas on a black pan as large as the steering wheel of the bus Boomba had been on. His teenage assistant chopped onions and chili. The assistant was an uncommon sight, a seventeen-year-old girl with a baby bound to her chest, and out of pity some of the recipients of the food who spotted her at work gave generous tips. But pity was not a relationship. It was the rejection of a relationship. Boomba vowed he would not make a living through pity. Like his mother, planting saplings until a million were in the soil, he would find freedom in his work.

Hardly two months into Boomba’s stay in the city, when he slept five hours a day in a corner of the restaurant with several of the other workers, and rode his bicycle to deliveries the rest of the hours, working his way up to savings that would let him rent an apartment for his family, a pair of policemen raided the restaurant, claiming the establishment illegally employed citizens of neighboring countries. Though the workers argued and pleaded, none of them had papers to prove what they said. The policemen took everything they had, including Boomba’s bicycle, and the small roll of cash in the bottom of his backpack, all he had saved.

Boomba staggered out of the restaurant, escaping the fisticuffs that had broken out among a few of the workers after the policemen’s departure. One was saying that the pair of men hadn’t been policemen at all; they’d simply been robbers. His savings were back to zero. He was alone in the city, its buildings with closed eyes declining to bear witness, the sky not the thorough dark of his village but the haze of this particular place, the night as uncertain of itself and devoid of wisdom as he had ever seen. It was dawn when he turned back toward the restaurant, which was no home but a place to put his body. Everybody else on the street passed by as if behind a veil—only Boomba knew the terror of what was possible, and he alone lived in this new version of the city, its eyes now open and glowing, its teeth bared at him.

Could nobody else tell what had happened? There walked a man scratching his beard ferociously. There walked a woman with peacocks embroidered on her sari. There passed the sound of a bag being unzipped, heels on the pavement, a fragrance of jasmine, a shape behind a tree, which frightened Boomba for a moment before he understood that it was a person holding a small dog in his arms.

Maybe, if he had had somebody caring for him in the city, he would not have surrendered his bicycle and his money so easily to the policemen or the robbers, whoever they were. Now he felt ashamed, and resentful. Where was the new person he had vowed to be, mean and free? He had retreated, conceding to the person he always had been, gentle and grinning, baffled before the barbed edges of the world. That person would not survive in the city.

Soon Boomba got a job delivering for an online shop that provided its own cart for transport. It was a giant operation that didn’t, for a while, care very much that some of Boomba’s deliveries were earning upset reviews online. Customers complained that their packages had been opened, the contents exchanged for worthless items—one man who ordered a phone received a spray of leaves instead. For a while Boomba got away with it, reselling what he procured at the Chandni electronics market. He had seen, from his days of food delivery, what others possessed— homes that appeared as if from some other echelon of existence, with sofas and daybeds that looked so soft they must have been filled with birds’ feathers, furniture in the doorway simply for storing shoes, doorknobs with flowers carved in them. Didn’t Boomba’s family deserve the smallest part of such a life, which was to say, a home that allowed neither mosquito nor rainwater nor robber to assault them?

After a few months, with bad reviews growing too numerous to ignore, the company fired him. During his last week of employment, a customer he had stolen a laptop from tracked him down and threatened to beat him up unless the customer got a refund for the price of the laptop. This customer had been going from helpline to helpline, office to office, and now he appeared along Boomba’s route with manic eyes. Frightened, Boomba gave him the price of the laptop from his own pocket. It was nearly all he had. For the second time, the city took from Boomba.

By this time, stormwater was turning lanes into canals— Kolkata was at last Venice, some joked—and Boomba returned his delivery cart and found work as a boatman. Part of him waited to be robbed once more. But, instead, he found the opposite. He encountered a friendly soul. Another boatman who plied the same routes had a son, Robi’s age, who took to Boomba because Boomba knew how to talk to him, and how to play with him. On occasion, Boomba let the child play with the magnetic snakes-and-ladders board, moving the pieces for the pleasure of their snapping to attention, the rules of the game irrelevant. Weeks went by, and the boy, gladly surrendered by his tired father, a reticent man who went by Shanto, sat in the meager shade of Boomba’s boat, changing positions as the sun and the direction of shadows did. Where Boomba went, there Shanto’s son followed. Day after day, Boomba dug his oar into the water, the empty jerricans roped to the side of the boat knocked about, and the boy carried on his own chatter.

When Boomba, seeing Robi in the boy, tried to teach him what he could—“Sing me the alphabet, can you? Then tell me what comes after one, two, three”—the boy shouted his made-up syllables and leaned over the side of the boat to gather the floating sticks and wrappers that held greater appeal.

From the lanes of the city, Boomba graduated to plying routes on the river. He spent days straining against the flow of the mighty river, Ganga’s distributary, its hundred meters moving underneath them like an elephant crashing through jungle. Garlands swirled in eddies, far from their day of ceremony. On the far banks, trees and pastel houses passed, a mirror or a solar-paneled roof flashing now and then like a camera. Ferries loaded with passengers passed the opposite way, their motors loud, and the people seated at the perimeter of the ferries frowned at the small boat. Shanto had been trying to get a job motoring a ferry, with no luck.

Once, taking care to avoid the boundary of the hexagon, where armed guards kept watch at all hours of the day and night, Boomba and Shanto’s son went close to the opposite bank and saw a kingfisher. They drifted by the tree where it sat, small and alive, blue as a peacock’s neck, an avid eye not upon the river, which had long lost its fish, but upon the soil at the base of the tree, where worms still lived. Boomba tried to recall what he knew about kingfishers. He had some sense that these things were good to teach children, but in this upside-down city, what was truly important was no longer apparent.

Every night he returned the boat to the owner, who kept it tied at a dock. Then Boomba collected a box of food at a charity kitchen, and went to bed under the awning of a stationery shop. Many nights, he lay awake, wondering what his family in the village were doing, if Robi was forgetting his older brother, if he would ever be able to bring them to the city. When he called them from a booth that rented cell phones by the minute, he said none of that. Instead, he stuck to the basics: He was eating; work was steady; he was keeping to himself and staying safe.

After a year of this, when Boomba was twenty, he had saved enough to rent a small room with enough space for a double mattress to be shared by the whole family. It was a room in a house of paying guests—families of four or five stuffed into rooms meant for one, intended originally for out-of-town college students. It would be an improvement over the hut on stilts where his family was now living. Despite his parents’ calm reports of life in the shed, Boomba knew what it was like to sleep in that damp dwelling with swarms of mosquitoes that were not frightened in the least by the smoking coils Boomba’s mother lit. The mosquitoes carried malaria and dengue, and the villagers feared the most barbaric illness those tiny drones could give them—cerebral malaria, which most often afflicted children. If anything happened to Robi, Boomba would no longer be able to live with himself.

The small window of the paying guest room looked out onto a krishnochura tree, its head aflame with red flowers, which returned Boomba, when he was in the mood, to his childhood. Once, early in the morning, he climbed partway up the tree, enjoying the opportunity to be agile upon a tree trunk once more, and surveyed his new neighborhood. From that place, the city looked comfortingly familiar—the roadside marked by weeds, tenting erected at the corner under which a vendor sold cooling collars, low houses with clothes slung over lines on the roof.

“Come as soon as you can,” Boomba told his family on a rented phone. “I found a good, dry place for us to stay.”

The family, hardly able to believe their luck, prepared to move.

“We are going to Dada’s house?” said Robi, now four years old, each morning and each night, to be certain of the new reality. His brother’s departure had been a rift in the world, which he had accepted with sorrow beyond his years. Now the joy of knowing they would be together again overwhelmed him. “Will Dada play football with me? Will Dada teach me to draw? Will Dada buy me”—and here he mentioned his obsession—“a new mosquito net?”

In the days following, Boomba prepared the rented room. He lined the edges of the mattress with rolled clothes so that Robi would not bump his head as he moved like a wheel during the night. From the trash swirling in the river, Boomba constructed a lampshade for the bare bulb that illuminated the room. More, with what he had saved, and with pride in his securing of the room, he purchased a small portable air-conditioning unit, and the first night in the cold breeze felt like a miracle. The vent swung from right to left, sweeping over the small space, supplying a breeze to his hair, then his bare stomach, then his toes, causing a shiver in the huddle of spiderwebs at the corner of the room. When, on the third night, the power went out, Boomba bore it with the calm of knowing it was a minor annoyance in the renewed context of his life: No longer was he a solitary young man seeking a way forward in the city but a man with the resilience of his family beside him. When he found a discarded poster on the street, a portrait of a scientist called Albert Einstein, he took it to the room and sellotaped it to the wall. Perhaps it would provide Robi with inspiration.

Then, a few nights later, the krishnochura tree, its roots assaulted by years of poor roadwork and repeated flooding, lost its hold on the soil and came crashing down on the one-story house. The trunk filled the doorway, and a branch sharp as a spear slashed through the room, missing Boomba by a few astonishing feet, the difference between bodily integrity and injury no more than a chair draped with clothes.

On the mattress, Boomba startled awake. His first thought, as the floor shook beneath him and the air conditioner tipped over, helpless as a mannequin, was: Earthquake. Then his mind made sense of the tree’s limbs inside his room, blocking the door. He climbed out through a window, in the panic painfully pulling a muscle behind his knee, his arms now trembling, a loud silence keening in his ears, sweat in his armpits. He flapped a weak hand before his face to get rid of the mosquitoes that descended upon him. Outside, though it was past midnight, there were plenty of passersby. The passersby paused to look at what had happened, some of them wearing pollution masks, others with bare faces gulping air, and one of them shouted: “Give him shoes! He doesn’t have shoes, and there’s broken glass—!”

Home slippers appeared, and Boomba wriggled his feet into them. It took a while. His feet were large, and the slippers were small, and it was difficult to work his big toe around the separator. When voices asked if there were others in the house, he said he didn’t know, though that answer seemed to intrigue the crowd, who were looking for what every crowd looks for—drama!— and within a few minutes, when the other residents had stumbled outside in their nighttime undress, bellies and underwear and bare toes, the passersby concluded this was a dull event after all, and began to leave, dragging their feet. Soon there came down the lane, licking a salt bracelet and clutching a half loaf of bread to her chest, the landlady. She stopped before the house and looked at the house opposite, as if she might have forgotten her own address. Without a word to anybody she clambered in through a window, scraping her elbows, looking for a way to secure the house before burglars arrived to rob what was now defenseless, nobody to save it save her own self. Her tenants, various and anxious, were of no use. It was then that Boomba heard her laugh. No, that wasn’t right; it was that her crying sounded like laughter.

“Wicked tree, what have you done?” she wailed. “This house is all I have. Where are you sending me? Where will I live?”

Boomba sat on the road and wrapped his arms about his knees. Before him stood the cracked house, no longer able to provide shelter. Now and then, he turned his attention to the landlady moving through the structure, a ghost in her ruined castle. What Boomba couldn’t know was that she was moving slowly through the house in a trance, distracted every moment from her task of gathering valuables because she was encountering, in each object, her own particular knowledge of it. How the doors had been painted this pink that she once loved but now loathed. How that drawer held old garments torn up to be used as cleaning cloths. How brown water had once climbed the first stair, and the second stair, and the third stair, until it had slipped under the door. How the wardrobes had long been ready to topple under the weight of the table fans, blankets, and folders heaped on top of them. How the stand fan in the living room began each swing with a squeak, then slowed as the electricity fluctuated. Boomba knew the house, and it meant a great deal to him, but it meant to him not even a fragment of what it meant to the landlady.

He heard, after a while, the landlady speaking on the phone with the electricity company, arguing with them to come look at the downed lines right away, no, not the next day, right away, to send somebody to cut the branches.

Boomba peeked in the window. “Mashi? What will I do now? My family will come in a few days—”

The landlady pinched her nose with her fingers, and flung the snot onto the road. “Don’t come in here. Bricks will fall on your head.”

“Where will we go? My family—”

The landlady looked at him. “Where will you go?” she repeated. “Where will I go? How will I fix this roof, and these walls? Where will I find the workers and the money?”

Now the landlady charged toward Boomba. “You are asking me twenty questions, but you haven’t even paid me rent this week. Do you remember that, or have you forgotten? I treat you like my younger brother. Really, I am so lenient. But since the deposit, you have been giving me sad stories about your family. No rent. You know what I should do? I should take you to claims court—”

Boomba gathered what of his possessions he could find, and fled. The air-conditioning unit on which he had spent a chunk of his savings was crushed plastic. The deposit on the room was lost. In exhaustion, Boomba found that he could not bring himself to return to the store stoop that had previously been his bed. He went instead to the boat he ferried during the day. But the owner of the boat, seated on it with his friends, a game of cards ongoing, refused his docile request.

“Once I let people like you sleep on the boat, that’s it! You’ll start saying you live here! After that how will I get my boat back?” His tongue loosened by a few drinks, he went on, “I know people like you very well. First you are a humble employee. Then you want to own the business. Then you want to make the business your home, and your thirty-five kins’ home as well. Not a chance! Try some other fool!”

And so it was that twelve days before Ma and Dadu were robbed, Boomba arrived at the shelter. It was a shelter for adults with children only, but Boomba said, panic unmistakable in his voice, that he was only fifteen, and didn’t know where else to go.

“I said, adults with children only!” barked the new manager, an elderly woman with a braid of white hair. “Go somewhere else.”

“Where will I go?” said Boomba. “I don’t know anyone in this city. My mother and father are in my village.”

“Don’t you have ears? What did I just say?”

“If you agree,” interrupted a different woman, a phone held to her ear. She was on a conference call in its second hour. “Bed 223 has opened up. He can sleep there for the night, and then we can see in the morning, maybe? The rules are the rules, I know, but he looks so young—just a child, himself—”

This was Ma. She made an exception, tenderhearted in her time of departure, and let him in. Boomba joined his hands before her. He bowed his head. He couldn’t bear to look this woman in the eye. His gratitude would overwhelm him. She had opened a door for him. She had found him a bed upon which he could rest, free of the fear of assault. That was all the home he could ask for. In that moment, he felt that this woman was perhaps another incarnation of his mother.

Ma simply said, “Come this way.”

She barely glanced at him, distracted by a question somebody had asked on her call.

Later, she reflected: Someday, if Mishti needed a place to rest her head, wouldn’t Ma wish this for her child? In her more magnanimous moments, she had believed, and expressed, that the shelter’s children were all her children.

Even in the middle of the night, the shelter was humming with activity. Assigned a bed, Boomba climbed up the stairs, the smell of cleaning liquid binding itself with the memory of the ascent. The building had walls the color of butter, clean enough, though some handprints appeared as haunted impressions on the paint. One of the other residents, there for so long she had become something of a manager herself, spoke nonstop to all who were climbing the stairs, boasting as if she had purchased and installed each amenity: “We have hot water. We have cooking oil. We have clean sheets on the beds, and mosquito nets. We have one big AC and many fans. Tell me, what else do you need?”

The men’s quarters were separated from the women’s. Boomba sat on one of fifteen beds clustered in a large room, a few of them draped in mosquito nets, the others bare, with thin pillows and sheets whose holes became apparent on examination, and looked at the room around him. This was luxury, but the luxury was lost on him. After relief, all he felt was despair: This place was too tightly run; there was no way he would be able to sneak his family in. He knew what he had to do, though he could not bear the thought of his family’s disappointment.

Borrowing a phone and gathering his courage, he called his family and told them what had happened. There was silence on the other end, followed by his mother saying, somewhat blankly, he thought, “These things happen, Boomba.”

“I will fix it.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Give me just a few more weeks.”

“All right.”

“Don’t you have anything else you want to say?”

“What else can I say? At least you are safe.”

Boomba’s father took the phone. “You’re doing what you can. Who can control these things? If I had my strength, and if I could have gone with you, maybe this would not have happened. There is too much relying on your young shoulders. You need your father’s support. And look at me. Useless, in this leaking house. Killing one mosquito, then another mosquito, and that’s all I can do, while my son struggles alone in the big city.”

In the background, Boomba heard Robi ask, “Is that Dada? Tell him I am bringing two toys, one for me and one for him!”

Boomba listened, watching the residents and their children around him. Some had moved their beds to create patches of floor that could be play spaces. Some pooled their toys, and those who didn’t have any sat on the floor with the children and supplied as playthings their arms, their hair, their chewable hems.

After he had lain in his misfortune for two days, Boomba half-heartedly sought to know his roommates. Perhaps they knew how to find a different job, and a better place to stay. One of the men in the room was an influencer who was planning to fly to Guatemala, then travel to the United States with his six-month-old. He was planning to film his journey and put the video online. He wanted to help others make the journey, he said, and what better way to do it than use his own journey as a resource? There was little left for him here, and he encouraged Boomba to leave with him. But Boomba had no idea where or what Guatemala or the United States were—anything west of Morocco was a bit of a mystery to him—nor would he leave without his family. Perhaps, Boomba thought, the influencer was the real explorer, and he himself was no explorer at all. The influencer had turned his life toward a journey, and what had Boomba turned his life toward? The search for a foothold in the city.

“As you wish,” said the influencer. It mattered little to him whether Boomba came along. Boomba didn’t even have a phone. The influencer had six hundred thousand followers on the internet already. In the jungle, they would be with him, cheering him on, rooting for his baby, through the mud, the insects, the smugglers, the robbers, the roaring rivers and treacherous rocks. Everybody’s journey was theirs alone, but the influencer’s was also six hundred thousand others’.

One morning, after twelve days at the shelter, the influencer’s baby woke up with a fever. Later in the day, four more children developed fevers. That night, word in the shelter was a quarter of the children had dengue. They lay in their parents’ laps, sheets pulled up to their chests as they shivered, torsos aching, faces drawn with agony. Everybody knew that there was a reason this was called the breakbone fever. The influencer filmed constantly, unafraid of sharing his tears, and indeed called to do so.

That night, afraid of catching the disease, and tired of his indecision, Boomba left the shelter and broke into Ma and Dadu’s house.