A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar - 6

IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT, AND the rain and wind had renewed, trees heaving, lightning cracking its whip among the clouds, when Boomba led Ma to the garbage heap where he had thrown away the passports. To Ma, the flooded road was endless, turning and turning again, its curves menacing like the tail of an animal waiting for prey. What if the passports were soaked, or stomped on, or soiled beyond recovery? Boomba walked rapidly, his body leaning forward, water sloshing around his shins, annoyance etched in the lines on his face though he was not annoyed. He was confident the passports would be there—passports, as far as he understood, were neither food nor money, so why would anybody bother with them?

They arrived at an empty lot that had sprouted a hill. It was a hill of computer parts, boards and chips and keys of disordered alphabet, old machines taken apart, and hidden within this mechanical hill, it seemed, were things that one could eat, too. Ma shaded her eyes from the rain and looked up at the hill, smelled the reek of rot, yet on her tongue appeared the faint taste of a plate of cut fruit. For a moment Ma saw herself upon that hill, hands on her waist, and it was the position that shook her, because she often stood in that posture. But it was somebody else, halfway up the hill surveying loaves, wrappers, spoiled cabbages and bananas whose sweetness was the sweetness of decomposition, dirt smeared, slime growing, scarred, bruised. In that person’s gait as she climbed a frail path around the hill, arms often outstretched for balance, once kneeling for stability, Ma continued to see herself, a sign of what her life could yet become.

Boomba looked uncertain. His delight at his own cleverness had soured as he asked himself: Why had he discarded valuable papers? Was his mind composed of moldy vegetables? Why hadn’t he understood that the booklets were currency? Why couldn’t he do anything correctly? He kicked at the edges of the hill, speaking to himself. Ma followed him for a while, training her eyes upon the chaos of the mound. Then, when it became clear that Boomba wasn’t sure where the passports might be, Ma took a tentative step up on the mound of garbage, then another, and soon she was taking long strides up.

It smelled like fish, though that couldn’t be true, because ordinary people had not had access to fish in decades. The fish were migrating north, seeking refuge from warming waters. Her heart pumping, breath hard, Ma looked up and saw she was still only at the base of the hill, her feet slipping on cables. With stained hands she lifted what she could, looking for a flash of navy blue, beating back the fear in her gut: What if the passports could not be found?

Partway up the slope, there was a scramble for something shiny held aloft, six and seven and eight figures in a scuffle growing bigger, and the shiny item tumbled down suddenly to where she was. It was a package of pound cake. The figures from above looked down at Ma, and for a moment she was not an anxious woman in search of documents but the god who governed their fate. She bent, head to the smells of garbage, something slippery under her shoes, and thought she saw a mouse tilt its body up and then down, traversing its own landscape. She picked up the package, her foot slipping for a moment. She could have put it in her bag and run, and it was not her innate moral compass but her fear of being chased by people who would not hesitate to fight that made her toss it up to them.

Ma continued her search. There were polythene bags of spinach, leaves going brown and liquid. Jars upon empty jars. Cardboard boxes. Chargers and bundled cables, slick as eels. Onions with outer peels gone and mold growing.

After an hour of scouring, Ma paused and considered the slime and smear on her fingers. She thought of how Dadu would have felt, watching her searching in a heap of garbage like a mean-eyed bird. She had cast all dignity away, her clothes drenched, her hair pasted to her neck, reduced to naked need, and yet her need was the need of a lucky one. She was not yet the man who slid down the slope, a filthy cabbage in the crook of his elbow like a baby.

The passports were nowhere to be seen. The only thing she found that was close to treasure was a package of Gems, untouched, their insides no longer chocolate but something synthetic like it, the feel of a hard candy shell in her hands under the glossy plastic. She slipped it quickly in her bag and zippered the bag shut.

Down the lane, when she continued on, looking for Boomba and comprehending that he had fled, people were eating, an eating of desperation and swiftness, chewing with an eye upon the surroundings to see who was approaching and what their intentions might be. Ma wasn’t yet one of them.

THAT NIGHT, MISHTI CRIED, REFUSING to eat onions until an elaborate game with her toy sloth persuaded her to have a few, just to show the sloth, and then she ate more, her mood still dark. Then, a lethargic surrender to her mattress on the floor, which unsettled Dadu. For a long time he lay next to her, a hand patting her back. Though her body was still, her eyes were open. “Dadu, flowerflower,” she whispered. “Dadu, rice.”

Dadu couldn’t bear it. As soon as Ma returned, at nearly four in the morning, he listened to her gloomy summary of the events, slung a bag on his shoulder, and prepared to put on his rainboots once again.

“Where are you going?” said Ma.

“Mishti is not sleeping well,” he said. He pointed a trembling finger toward where she lay on the mattress, still for the moment. “There is hunger in her stomach.”

Ma went into the room to give Mishti the Gems if she woke, and Dadu stepped out the door. Candy would not do. He needed to find Mishti nutritious food to eat.

Finding the market vacant—all vendors gone, only a lone man in sight who brushed his teeth above the gutter—Dadu briefly considered a community kitchen. But he could not bring himself to stand in line at a community kitchen. Aid services, he still believed, were for people in greater peril than he. Off he went to the ration shop instead, where, in exchange for prints collected by a fingerprint reader, the government sold discounted rice and dal. On the road, busy with the restless movement of those who could not sleep, there was the cry of a cat, and a scrabble on a roof. Strays yowled. A truck rumbled by, spraying pesticide to kill mosquito larvae, and Dadu covered his nose with a cupped palm. A fellow pedestrian shouted, “Stop spraying this poison! It’s giving us a rash!”

“Better rash than dengue,” muttered somebody else.

“Better dengue than cancer,” pointed out a third person.

Dadu heard all of it, but noted none of it with pleasure. Though the rain had stopped, he moved through the streets in a private storm, a gale blowing through his mind. It was unbearable to him that his granddaughter was hungry, and more, it was unbelievable. This was not the agreement he had had with his beloved city.

THE RATION SHOP OWNER, A man with a cigarette in his mouth and love for nobody but the two dogs that followed him about, was fending off a crowd, mostly women, agitating before the half-drawn shutters. “You want me to personally grow rice for you?” barked the owner. “Why don’t you go throw these stones at the criminals you voted for?”

At the rickshaw stand opposite, men sat, knees up, turbans loosened, watching. A crow, its feathers gray and black as smog and soot, landed on the roof of a house nearby, awake at this lonely hour and cawing perhaps to see if anybody replied. The bird was shooed away by a rickshaw driver who jumped to his feet, afraid of being splattered.

Dadu thumped his walking stick on the ground and forced his way to the front of the shop, where empty sacks slouched. “O brother,” he called. “Can I call you brother? Please, will you check in the back if there are any fruits, any rice, any—?”

“What back!” said the owner. “There is no back!”

“I have a young grandchild at home. She is going to fall sick. She has not eaten.”

“Look at this old man, acting like he’s the only one in this city with a child to feed.”

“She has diabetes,” Dadu lied, with the eyes of strangers upon him. It was as easy as plucking the next line of a rhyme from the air. “She needs to eat.”

A murmur of sympathy went through those nearest him. Many in the crowd looked at him with stony faces underneath which sentiment moved, the horror of his situation speaking to them. Dadu knew, of course, that in this very crowd were likely the mothers of children who really did have diabetes, who truly needed to eat. But the needs of others were always smaller than the needs of one’s own child. Perhaps it was the strange distortion of the crisis, or perhaps it was simply human nature, that the pain of others was never as acute or compelling as one’s own pain.

The owner made no response. He knelt to lock the shutter. At his mouth, a lit cigarette dimmed and flared. Then the man stood, tall and well-fed, no doubt off the grains he had skimmed from the supply sacks, a small belly content against his clean undershirt, collarbones hidden under months of butter and rice. Dadu’s stomach made a sound. When the man took a phone out of his pocket and held it to his ear, Dadu wanted to lift his walking stick and swipe the phone away, enact a small revenge upon this man. But he wavered, and in his moment of wavering, now, the crowd, given permission, somehow, with knowledge of the owner’s plain villainy, his refusal to provide food to a sick child all they needed to know about the substance of his character, pounced upon him, shoved him so that his phone fell to the ground. The owner retrieved the phone before others could stomp on it. He held his arms out, a barrier between himself and the crowd, wiped the phone on his pants, found that it still worked, gave thanks to a deity, and put it away in his pocket.

“Are you mad?” he shouted. “You have all gone mad! City full of lunatics! If you weren’t women—”

But they shoved him so he staggered, and shoved him again, while the two dogs who loved him growled.

If the ration shop owner had been better at speaking his thoughts, he might have told the crowd: There are two selves who occupy this body. There is who I am to strangers, and there is who I am to the people who saw me grow up. There is who I am to those who knew me as a boy. I played cricket with one. Now he walks slow as a cow, but at one time he ran like the wind. His mother grew mosambi as big as watermelons. I grew up on that juice. I grew up knowing my wife’s uncle. He ran a hardware shop where we hid from rain, and if there was an old wrench nobody bought, he gave it to us to play with. During the board exams, one morning, I twisted my ankle, and a mashi gave me a ride on her bicycle, otherwise I would have missed my biology final. Aren’t you different before different people? Aren’t you sometimes harsh, and sometimes kind? That is how I am. And which do you feel I will be with people throwing stones at my shop? It wasn’t easy to get a license to run the shop. I put a lot of money in it. I borrowed, and I am still paying it back. If I tell you how much debt I have, you would be frightened on my behalf. And the people in this neighborhood call me a thief. Have I ever stolen for myself? No. Never. Have I taken some rice, some wheat, some oranges, for the people of my village, the people who knew my boyhood self? I can’t say. I really can’t say. You can guess.

Dadu hurried out of the crowd and down the street, then paused next to a tree whose roots were stout as a wrestler’s arms. Sweat dripped down his forehead and into his eyes, burning like a scrape. It gave him a reason to close his eyes.

FAR FROM THE RATION SHOP , as dadu wandered from shop front to shop front, seeking an alley or a doorway that might yield something for Mishti to eat, he began to comprehend what the darkness was telling him. When he passed by a group of boys playing chess at the corner, two seated at an upturned cardboard box and more hovering over them, an emergency lantern lighting their board, they may as well have turned their faces to him and chorused: That old city is gone.

Dadu turned right, and left, and right again, going from intuition and memory, his skin alert to every grain of the city as it changed around him. Around the next corner, a man was strapping dismantled ceiling fans to the top of a van that already held a mattress and a small fridge. The man paused in his task to watch, with some suspicion, as Dadu passed.

After a few more turns, the sky above no longer navy but cobalt, thatched by the bowing heads of trees, past the hand-painted signs of small businesses— Sari Palace, Tinku Roll Corner —and past the awnings under which people slept, some with one eye open, glancing at Dadu as he thumped by, there appeared a woman with chapped lips and glittering eye shadow who sat astride a parked motorcycle with a large IKEA bag at her feet. When Dadu approached, she waved a rolled canvas in the air.

“Grandpa, please buy a painting! I have dolphin; I have rhino. I don’t know where else to go, where to sell them.”

She unrolled one, holding its edges with her hands so it wouldn’t return to its rolled position. Dadu looked at the animal, a rhino with skin like armor, one horn taller than the other, ready for charging, but its eyes gentle as a child’s, its belly rounded like the animal had eaten the earth.

“Buy for your grandchildren, otherwise how will they know?” said the painter. Dadu felt sorry for her, perhaps an arts graduate looking desperately for a job, coming to the wrenching realization that she wasn’t good enough, that she was only mediocre, and there were tens of thousands like her. Or perhaps she was a proud artist, firm in convictions that could be shaken by neither water rise nor collapse, the kind of person the city needed. The canvas wavered in the painter’s hand, and the rhino looked, for a moment, like it was moving toward Dadu.

“You like it, I can tell,” said the painter. “How much can you do? Tell me a price, and we can start there.”

Dadu dithered.

“Not today,” he said. “I mean—I’m not saying—the truth is, that is a beautiful painting. You have talent. But we have a small child at home. I need to buy something for her to eat first. Then maybe I can find you again.”

But having spoken, Dadu felt himself questioning his own words. He did not, he understood moments after uttering them, believe those words. As a participant in the city he loved, it was up to him to insist on the value of a painter’s work—not the value of a famous painter’s work, the kind of work now being traded for rice and sugar—but the value of an unknown painter’s work. It was up to him to secure the meaning of the kind of work that existed not for investment potential but only for the eye’s momentary pleasure, only for the mind’s door to be left, for a small while, ajar. What was the value of that?

The painter saw Dadu’s indecision, and waited.

“Actually, let me see,” said Dadu. He took a little of the cash he had brought for the ration shop, and when he held out two notes to the painter, she took one.

The painter rolled up the rhino and slid a rubber band around it. She held it to her chest for a moment, as if bidding it farewell, then offered it to Dadu.

The painting would easily fit between their folded clothes in the suitcase. In Mishti’s Michigan room, it would go on a wall, and perhaps, one day, when Mishti was older and caring for her own child, that child would ask, “Mama, where is that painting from?” and Mishti would answer, “My Dadu got it for me. I had a Dadu once, whom you never met.”

Dadu knew he was close—closer than he had ever been—to his own vanishing from earth. It was a matter of time. But perhaps he would live in Mishti’s recollections of the life she had had as a child in this city, a place glorious and abundant in every corner, even in this time of peculiar crisis. He would have contributed to making these years of Mishti’s life a little beautiful. That would be his mode of immortality.

WHEN AN OLD BANK APPEARED , one that dadu was familiar with, he slipped inside to rest for a moment, and the desolation of the office building—he couldn’t tell if it was in use during the day, or fully abandoned—cast a shroud between interior and exterior. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was an elevator door, so he pressed the button and waited, gradually beginning to see the dust, thick as foam, on the gate. He took the stairs.

Dadu knew this kind of bank well, where it was one employee’s job to give the line of elderly customers their monthly statements printed on paper, all other customers having switched to some zip-zap internet method people like Dadu didn’t understand or want to understand. Upstairs, there were rows of desks buried under ledgers, monitors, and paperweights. Dadu brushed a seat clean with his palm, and sat to catch his breath. When a bright object on a table caught his eye, he got up on stiff knees. His walking stick struck the floor with loud violence upon each step. Then he saw what the object was—an orange. A whole marvelous orange, with a small leaf on the stem like a flag of discovery planted upon a planet’s pole. As soon as he seized it, a small voice from under the desk cried, “Stop!”

Dadu startled. He took a step back, tripped over the leg of a chair, and caught a cubicle divider to keep himself from falling. He turned toward a shape as it emerged from under the desk. It was a child, a boy of five or six, wearing a T-shirt with glow-in-the-dark fish on it. “Hands up!” said the boy, pointing a finger gun. “Put it back!”

But Dadu had steadied himself, and his hands were already working to peel the orange, its skin loose as a large winter jacket on a thin person. He popped one segment in his mouth to be sure it was fresh, and the pulp burst on his tongue, acid and sugar and brightness. He chewed, his stomach beginning to hurt, until his teeth were left working the white membrane. He had to get the rest of the orange to Mishti. He put it in his bag.

“Give it back!” shrieked the boy. Dadu looked at the boy’s thin legs emerging from baggy shorts. His knees were crisscrossed with Band-Aids. His hair was overgrown, at that stage where it was impossible to keep strands out of the eyes, and he tried in vain to tuck it behind his ears, employing a whole palm to mash the hair against his face, while the other hand directed Dadu to return the orange to the desk.

“Where is your Ma?” said Dadu.

The boy took a moment to decide whether he would tell him. “She has gone to poo.”

Dadu froze. Then he scanned the surrounding walls, searching for an indication of the bathroom door, but there were various doors—managers’ offices, storerooms, a door to a vault—and behind each was silence. He went quickly from desk to desk, looking in each drawer for a snack left behind, hoping to find a stash of crackers or a bag of raisins forgotten. Every few seconds, he glanced up for any sign of the mother’s return. Each drawer showed folders, ripped envelopes, staplers, and faded receipts. While there was still no sign of the mother, Dadu exited the office, stubbing his toes on the heavy lock that lay, forcibly cracked, on the floor, which he hadn’t seen before, then hurried down the stairs, ears pricked for the sound of the mother approaching. The child stood in the doorway and watched him, then looked at the stairs going up. Perhaps the bathroom was on an upper floor.

“That was our orange,” he called when Dadu was nearly out the door. “Ma told me to hold it. I only put it down for one minute.”

He began to cry.

He began to cry, and Dadu heard Mishti crying, all the instances of sorrow consolidated in the haze of months—Mishti bullied off a slide by a bigger child, Mishti refusing to eat green beans, Mishti upset about wearing a sweater, Mishti exhausted and ready to sleep, unable to simply close her eyes and be still. Dadu heard Mishti crying, child of his child, pulse of his heart, and stomped down the part of himself that wanted to turn around and return the orange. There was such a part.

THE VICTORY OF THE ORANGE was greater than the orange itself, Dadu knew as he walked away, past a woman with an umbrella, past an old fishpond covered with nets, past where the lane began to sprout patches of grass at its unpaved edges, and when his chest was painful from breathing the dawn’s heated air, throat dry as bark, Dadu paused to orient himself, raised a fist to his mouth, and in the tunnel of his palm, coughed and coughed. A policeman in a cooling vest who was leaning against a lamppost, looking at his phone, glanced at Dadu.

“What are you doing running around at this hour?” he said. “Go home!”

Dadu nodded. It was best to remain silent before questions or instructions from policemen. Any challenge to their authority unsettled them, leading them to draw their weapons, which sometimes worked and sometimes malfunctioned, both equally dangerous. But Dadu’s coughing continued, his throat hostile to the rest of himself, eyes tearing up with the turbulence of the spasms, and the policeman continued to watch him, so he hurried out of sight, into a lane that was unfamiliar.

His eyes fell upon a door with a steel plaque next to it. The plaque bore the name of the house in Bengali script, legible now in the light of dawn. Dadu read through the haze of tears in his eyes: Ashirbad. He laid a palm on the wall next to the door, hoping the residents might be generous enough to offer an old man a glass of drinking water. There was still that decency among the city’s people, wasn’t there? Who would deny an old man with a coughing fit some water? Nobody would stoop so low, he hoped, though it was true that he now lived in a world in which old men stole fruit from children. He had brought into being such a world.

Dadu knocked on the door, and knocked again. “Is anyone— awake? Can I have—some—water?”

The door opened a crack. Dadu saw a young man in pajama pants.

“I was—walking—by—and this cough—won’t stop—please, son—”

“Wait,” said the young man, somewhat irritably yet kindly. “I’ll bring you a glass of water.”

The man shut the door but didn’t lock it, and Dadu peeped in. When the man returned, a steel glass of water in his hand, he saw Dadu looking in the door. He flew down the stairs, dropped the glass, and pressed the two halves of the door together. But Dadu found that his hand had flown up. With all his strength, he was pushing the door open because he had spotted, next to the staircase, in the low light of a lamp, a stack of cans, and beside them, five or six white clouds, gently blemished here and there, green leaves and stems snapped and drooping, yet their wilt proof of their having once thrived. From what fertile paradise had the man retrieved these whole cauliflowers? Recalling the sweet edges of slow-cooked florets, gentle with oil and fire and salt, a heap on Mishti’s plate, Dadu felt wild with determination. He lunged inside and grabbed, and the young man yelled somebody’s name.

Lata, Dadu thought it sounded like, perhaps the young man’s wife, though it could have been Baba or Dada or Mama, any of those simple sounds for one’s earliest family. The man was only in his thirties. He tried to force Dadu out the door, and Dadu’s hand hit his flesh. How soft and well-fed he was. How much food did this house have? Dadu was elbow and knee, bone and nail, and though the walking stick had fallen from his grip, he fought with the ferocity of his hunger. No, he fought with the ferocity of his daughter’s and granddaughter’s hunger. He would not, could not, return to Mishti with only segments of orange to share. He would not eat seaweed, like a fish climbed out of the ocean and acquired arms and a dining table. He would not compel her to eat fried onions, more absence than meal. He would bring a cauliflower home—oh, Ma’s and Mishti’s faces, he could see their delight—and then he would sit near Mishti as she ate. Ma would say she wasn’t hungry, he knew. And he would say he wasn’t hungry either. Together, they would watch Mishti eat, glee in her eyes, greed in her mouth, a little creature glorious in her wanting.

“Stop fighting,” said Dadu, gasping. “I—can—pay.”

But the man didn’t believe Dadu. He was strong, and it cost him little to fight, because he was confident he would win. His fingers were sharp with rings whose stones scraped Dadu’s skin.

Dadu felt he was almost inside the door, his hand nearly grasping a cauliflower, when he fell backward, the man’s wife having appeared and lobbed the steel glass at his forehead. The glass missed, but in the effort to protect his face, Dadu lost his balance. On the road, the motion of falling too sudden to arrest with his slow hands, the asphalt uneven underneath him, cracked pavement hit the back of his head. Dadu lay stupefied, his eyes upon a gray cloud that drifted doubly and triply in his changing vision. For a moment, he was Mishti, able to see prowling cats and hopping kangaroos, smiling faces in the fluff of clouds, and then he was himself and he felt, without touching, wet on the back of his head, blood where there had never been blood before.

The woman’s eyes were on him. The man’s eyes were on him. They had attacked him. He held that thought in his mind, as simple and outrageous a thought as he had ever encountered. Never had he met such undisguised hostility. What was this new variety of cruelty? What remained after the bonds between city dwellers were severed? But even in the feeling of injury, Dadu knew he wasn’t being truthful to himself. He knew exactly what that cruelty was. By accepting what his daughter had brought home from the shelter, he, too, had enacted it upon others.

When Dadu sat up, slowly, his head throbbing, he saw that the man and woman had turned away for a moment—there was something wrong with the latch on the door, it seemed, and they were looking for an object to push up against the door. The woman disappeared up the stairs, taking two at a time, and Dadu knew what he was going to do. He crept forward and pulled the man’s ankle out from under him. The man fell hard, his chin on the floor. Dadu let the sound, the crack of bone on floor, pass through him. He could not let this man’s injury cause him distress. He hobbled up and into the house, grabbed what his hand touched, his vision still showing blurry duplicates. Then he was holding two cans filled with something heavy, and two cauliflowers, which immediately shed a few florets. He gathered up his bag and walking stick and fled as the woman appeared at the top of the stairs, holding a chair, her voice hoarse, asking a question he couldn’t comprehend. Though his legs couldn’t bear the motion anymore, he ran. Like Mishti at a playground, ecstatic at being chased, he ran, hearing behind him a commotion of people arriving, drawn to the trouble like jackals to tamed dogs. Now he understood why the woman didn’t try to stop him—the thieves at her door had multiplied. The strangers who had spotted the hoarded food burst through the open door. The woman shouted, the man cried, and then all was silent in Dadu’s ears. Dadu ran, head pounding, eyes burning, arms pumping, walking stick ungainly in his armpit, with him now several things to eat, and a painting for Mishti’s new room in America.

The policeman, who was only around the corner, did not make an appearance. He continued in his idle patrol, playing a game on his phone, serenely collecting overtime.

AT HOME, MA GOT UP from sleep, bewildered, when dadu touched her shoulder.

“Did you just come back?” she whispered. “Why are you breathing like that? I mean, how far did you go?”

Dadu unzipped the bag and laid each prize on the bed before Ma. The cauliflowers made Ma laugh, and she cupped a hand over her mouth as she did when she was a child. Dadu saw her as she had never seen herself, and he wanted to kiss her, his child. But he only laid a hand on her head.

“He hasn’t come back, has he?” Dadu whispered.

“I was trying to stay awake, just in case. But no—he’s gone. Tell me honestly, where did you get these? Did you find a different market?”

Dadu put a finger to his lips as Mishti, on the floor mattress next to the bed, sighed deeply and turned from her side to her tummy. The sun had risen, and soon she would wake.

He went quietly to the kitchen, where he checked that the window was securely locked, then found a clean spoon next to the sink. Back in the bedroom—because they were reluctant to leave Mishti alone, in case Boomba reappeared—he hooked a finger through the ring on the first can, then pulled, the ring digging into his finger, and scooped what was inside, false fish, flakes of fish-flavored protein, and handed the spoon to Ma.

“Eat right now?” she whispered. “Why don’t we save it?”

But Dadu, suddenly impatient, took the spoon and put it in his own mouth, fingers gripped around the handle the way Mishti gripped crayon, all four fingers and thumb engaged. He felt the taste on his tongue, once strange and inferior, now majestic. He closed his eyes. Oil rolled down his chin, and he caught the drop with his forefinger and licked it. Ma ate with her fingers, the oil dripping down her wrist, soon at her elbow.

Ma felt a little nauseated, but only said, “Did you get hurt?”

When Dadu didn’t reply, she said, “What happened there?”

She was looking at the matted hair on the back of his head, the glisten in the light from the street when he turned. Now she grew frightened. “Tell me, what did you do?”

“Nothing,” said Dadu.

“Then what happened to your—”

“Oh, so many questions!” said Dadu. The food was making his stomach hurt, and he was suddenly irritable. Could nothing be good anymore? “I tripped. Eat quickly. If that thief comes back, which he will, we will have to be ready. Didn’t you say he demanded to stay here? A man like that doesn’t give up so easily. Eat. Get your strength back.”

They ate from the cans in the darkness. The two heads of cauliflower they saved for Mishti’s breakfast.

THEN, A GOOD THING. IN the morning, on the floor of the kitchen, Mishti grabbed florets in her palm and crammed them into her mouth, her face radiant with oil, and when she caught Dadu’s eye, she laughed, her mouth falling open, half-eaten cauliflower inside, and Ma told her not to laugh while eating, but she was laughing too, and there they were, the three of them, orbiting Mishti’s joy. Was there anything as gorgeous as a child’s uninhibited, tipping-over, eyes-shut laughter? When Mishti calmed, Ma held her on her lap and kissed her head.

In the peace that followed, Mishti sang the alphabet song— h i j k ello mello p —and Ma sang with her, in love each moment with her voice, changing every week, so it seemed; her emerging dimple; her eyes blazing with delight; her ideas, surprising and funny when she voiced them.

“More,” said Mishti. “Mama, more!”

And she meant more cauliflower, more singing, more dancing, a day in which there were no tasks to be done or fears to be faced, only hours of her mother’s adoring gaze upon her.

When Dadu slipped away to replace the bandage on the back of his head, and to take a new dose of a painkiller that had, thus far, only muted the relentless throbbing, Ma didn’t ask where he was going.

MA WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR PRESERVING the hope that mishti did not know enough to claim or relinquish or even recognize. It was Ma’s responsibility to be cognizant of the many faces of hope. So she went along with it when Dadu wrote a reward poster with his phone number on it, offering money for the safe return of the passports. Ma made photocopies at the local shop—ignoring the man with a tricolor pen in his shirt pocket, no doubt a scammer, who asked her if she needed assistance—and carried the stack all the way to the vicinity of the garbage hill. There, she stuck the posters to lampposts and electricity poles and walls that warned, Stick no bills. Perhaps somebody who had idly picked up the passports would decide, upon encountering the promise of reward, to return them. Such a person’s eternal question— What’s in it for me? —would be answered. The narrowness of the task— corner, corner, tape, tape—kept her from thinking about what came after. What if nobody called? What if the passports were gone? What if they could not get on the plane?

On the bus back, a seller of tastes hauled herself up onto the bus, dupatta wound around her body and tied at her hips, cracked heels showing in flip-flops, machine hoisted upon her shoulder. She called, in a voice that projected as if the bus was a theater, and she the star onstage, “Taste, taste, buy a taste! Our stomachs are empty, so why not make our mouths happy? Caramel, chocolate, orange, I have all tastes. Buy a taste!” After a moment of hesitation, she added, “Love it or your money back!”

“Do you have peppermint?” asked a young woman, hopefully, from her nook behind the driver’s seat, where she sat with a stack of exam prep books on her lap.

The seller made a face. “What kind of fake taste is that?”

“No, I mean,” said the woman, raising a water bottle in the air, “if you drink hot water after peppermint, it becomes cold water. That’s why.”

“I’ll look into it,” said the seller in a tone that indicated she would not spend even a moment looking into it.

Ma raised a hand and called the seller to herself. “You go from bus to bus?” she said. She gave the woman a hundred rupees. “Can you put these posters up on ten other buses?”

The seller read the poster.

“There’s no way,” she said, “you’ll get your passports back like this. Somebody has probably taken them, put their own pictures in them, and used them to fly to England. They are already taking pictures in front of Big Ben. And here you are, putting posters up. Some people really have endless hope!”

With that insult, she pocketed the money.

Ma knew she had made a mistake. The bus continued on, and the seller of tastes climbed off, and if Ma had followed the seller, she might have seen her tear up the posters and throw them by the side of the road.

STILL, THE SELLER OF TASTES had given ma an idea. It was an alluring idea, and a frightening one. It drew and repelled her in equal measure. If she followed its beckoning, she would need to find the city beneath the one where she had lived all her life, and she would need to do so alone. Once she found that subterranean city, would she ever be able to return to the one she knew?

But the more Ma thought about it—that evening, in front of the local office of a TV station, where a spiritual guru wearing diamond earrings claimed hunger was the path to salvation; in front of the national radio station office, where a crowd of petitioners made a hullabaloo to get their grievances on the air—the more she felt it was her only choice. If she could assemble the courage, this could fix everything.

THE PHOTOCOPY SHOP, WHERE MA had been before, was dominated by two bulky machines, but behind them lurked the man with the tricolor pen in his shirt pocket who had asked her, several times in the recent past, if she needed help. What kind of help, he had not specified, and each of those times, she had dismissed him as a scammer preying on the desperate. Now she met his eyes and greeted him.

Ma did not know how to word her query, but the man was accustomed to the reluctant approach of the confused and conflicted. The man led her to the back of the photocopy shop, and as Ma followed, she felt the city warp underneath her. Here were its pipes and tunnels, its unsunned bedrock, the inherent darkness of this substratum sheltering unheralded inventors and entrepreneurs. Here were those who saw creative if sly solutions where others saw impossible problems. What were official channels compared to the unfeted yet imaginative thousands who audaciously sought to subvert those channels?

Ma scanned the faces of the other customers seated on narrow benches against the walls, though all wore pollution masks. She recognized nobody, and nobody looked at her. In their downcast eyes, she saw only a familiar surrender, and a familiar conviction.

Then, at the man’s push, a door covered in sheets of paper that were, perhaps, forgotten photocopies—tax forms, a school admission form—swung open. On the other side was a windowless space with deep shelves holding ledgers, and a small television that was playing a comedy show. Ma heard a laugh track as she stepped into the space, nearly colliding with a chair upon which was seated an old woman who was watching the comedy show. The old woman’s dentures were in a cup of water on her lap. She looked irritated at the intrusion.

“Mummy!” snarled the man. “Move!”

The old woman mumbled a reply.

“What?”

“I’m watching Friends —‘The One with Ross’s Teeth’!”

“What new garbage is that?”

“If you don’t know, you don’t know.”

When the old woman rose and shuffled a few inches away, the man pulled her chair aside and removed a tile in the floor. Underneath was a safe. An actor on the show brightened his teeth to glowing; an audience laughed over him; the odor of the man’s sweat filled the closed space; and Ma waited with cold hands. In this unlikely place she remembered waiting for the epidural when Mishti was to be born—the same cold lights, the same dread, the same absolute exposure before a stranger. Then, from deep within the safe, the man retrieved a bunch of passports, bound by string. He opened one and fanned the pages, showing Ma how real the document looked, then turned to a visa page and slid it to Ma atop the seat of the chair. “Full passport plus Schengen,” he said.

He opened another and put it on top of the first one. “Australia.”

He opened a third and put it on top of the first two. “USA.”

Ma lifted this last to her eyes. She turned the page this way and that and saw the colors mutate, and numbers shine upon the sticker. She glanced at a serial number, which looked authentic enough. Then she flipped through the rest of the passport, noting the official language at the front— allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance —and the page for one’s address at the back. The man anticipated Ma’s question. “We’ve had more than seventy, seventy-five customers go through in the past two months. Nobody had any problem. These scan like the real things at the airports, don’t worry. Where are you going? Boston Logan? O’Hare? Dallas Fort Worth? We had customers go through all of those airports. Zero problems. I told them—Mummy! Where is the volume button on this remote? Can you, I mean, I have a customer standing here!—I told them, here is my personal cell phone number. You call me, day or night, if there is any issue. You need what, student visa, work visa, climate visa? It’s no problem. We have done it all.”

“Isn’t—” said Ma, and cleared her throat. “Isn’t it necessary for the visas to show in their internal system, at the—destination? Even if you make a good document, what if there is no record in their internal system? How can you ensure—?”

“Imagine,” said the man, with a demeanor of infinite patience. “Imagine, for one minute, a pipe. It has two ends, and that is how the water flows. Right? Right. So this is one end of the pipe. There is another end. In fact, there are multiple other ends. It’s a complicated pipe.”

“Meaning what?” said Ma.

“Let me worry about that.”

“You have somebody at the consulate? Somebody at the passport office?” Ma pressed.

“It’s like the American presidents like to say. I cannot confirm, and I cannot unconfirm.”

The man waited in silence, allowing Ma to consider. This was the moment, he knew, in which customers either mumbled that they would think about it, and fled the shop, or launched into the practical questions: How long would it take? How much did it cost? If they began to ask the practical questions, no matter the answers, they were in. When Ma asked, he told her that the speediest option took forty-eight hours, so she would have passports with visas in hand in two nights. It would be the night before the flight. And, finally, he told her that the business had a strict payment policy. He accepted only gold.

“Why don’t you bring two or three bangles, or necklaces,” he said. “Whatever you have. We are very flexible. We will see what we can do.”