A Guardian and a Thief By Megha Majumdar - 9

MA HAD PLANNED TO STAY awake all night. But her eyes surrendered to sleep, and she knew as soon as she woke, neck stiff and shoulders sore against the headboard, quiet prevailing in the morning’s stillness, no chimpanzee enrobed in the curtains, no fingers playing with Ma’s toes, no mouth drooling upon her cheek, that Mishti was not there. Her mind leaped from sleep to panic.

“Mishti? O Mishti!” called her cracked voice after taking a look at the unlocked bedroom door, a pair of crayons on the mattress, and the vacant bathroom, which she checked even though she knew that Mishti never went into that dim room, abode of ghosts, alone.

“Mishti? O Mishti!” called her voice down the corridor, in the kitchen, and down the stairs into the storeroom, which, the sun not having found its way there yet, was still sheathed in its own night. She flicked the light on. Other than Boomba’s belongings, all of which repelled her, including her own purse, on which he had laid his head, the storeroom was empty.

Ma threw open the front door, and called for Mishti once more. The garden made no reply. Out in the lane, those who were passing by looked at her as she ran, concern playing on their faces. Ma didn’t notice them; they may as well have been stick figures for all they mattered. The world was revolving away from her, and after a few minutes, she saw the ironing man shake his head, and the barber, too, though she couldn’t recall having asked them a question. The city was a wilderness before her. She called her daughter’s name in anguish, like she herself was trapped in the woodland, and her daughter was the only one who could locate her and offer rescue.

Ma’s feet returned her to the house, where she held the doorframe and, feeling her head spin, closed her eyes. The sun painted itself in her eyelids. When she opened her eyes, she sensed the colors around her—the green of the neem tree, the pink and yellow paints on film posters shredded to bits on a wall opposite, the silver of a lamppost—shimmer and shift. There was nowhere the sun wasn’t, and yet all of this light failed to reveal Mishti. In Ma’s body, air forgot to travel its routine paths, blood resisted its own currents.

Upstairs, Dadu was sitting awake, buttoning his shirt, and as soon as Ma returned to the room, too lost within herself to speak the words, he took his walking stick, and said, “I’m going to see if Mrs. Sen’s camera caught anything.”

In the empty house, Ma stood before the bathroom sink and washed her face, at first to inquire if she was still present, and then, when she had seen her own face as she would a stranger’s— its moles, lines, curvature—and affirmed she was present, she washed her face to regain control of this body. Here, water. Here, skin. She needed to be calm. Where had Boomba taken Mishti? And how? She knew she had latched the bedroom door. When the water felt like mud in her eyes, when her hair was soaked and her collar, too, Ma brought a towel, damp, smelly, improperly aired, to her face, then closed the bathroom door behind her.

MRS. SEN’S CAMERA LOG REVEALED, IN its halting way, the clear moments of action in which Boomba climbed aboard a rickshaw and lifted Mishti up, an object in her hand too fuzzy to discern.

“O Ma,” Mrs. Sen said, her face crumpling as the scenes played. “O Ma. What has that thief done now? Why does he keep targeting you? If my darlings were any good at guarding property, I would have them stay at your house for a bit—like Dobermans. But we are worthless neighbors. Who will track this kidnapper now? Who will find him?”

Dadu and Ma only thanked her. They left her holding her front door, a parrot climbing sideways up her arm, and rushed toward the nearest rickshaw stand. They walked as swiftly as they could, and had no breath to spare for speaking. But they knew they each had the same thought pushing them forward. They needed to find the rickshaw driver who had picked up Boomba and Mishti. If they could not find the rickshaw driver who had taken Boomba’s fare, and learn where he had taken them, they would not have another chance to bring Mishti back. The only consolation was that Boomba’s things were still in the storeroom, and it appeared that he wanted to return—after all, he wanted the house. But in the meantime, what did he want with Mishti?

The question tormented Ma. A girl child, in the hands of a crook. A two-year-old who would not be able to name her mother or grandfather, even if a good-hearted stranger found her and rescued her. Ma, Mishti would say. Dadu, she would say, in a city of a million mothers and grandfathers. Why hadn’t Ma pinned a piece of paper to her clothes with Dadu’s phone number? Why hadn’t Ma written their address in pen on her arm? Why hadn’t Ma, for that matter, barricaded Mishti in the bedroom by lodging furniture in front of the door? The questions, dark and slippery as oil, would not stop. She felt afraid that her questioning of self would destabilize her beyond recovery. But, somewhere in the city, Mishti waited, trusting with her child’s absolute trust that her mother would come to fetch her. In whichever crowd or room Mishti was, she was searching for the face she loved most. Ma pressed on.

UPON A STAGE NEAR THE rickshaw stand proceeded a play, its audience consisting of forty rickshaw drivers, a few of whom clapped with devotion at intervals known only to them. One whistled as an actor onstage, a woman in makeup and jasmine blossoms in her hair performed an elaborate swoon before fainting, the point being that this was a consequence of her having consumed only water and no electrolytes.

It was a drab educational play, but the rickshaw drivers were rapt, and Ma’s and Dadu’s frantic questions—

“This morning, did you take a small girl—”

“A man with a small girl. He has taken my grandchild. Do you remember—”

—received little attention.

Then a voice said, “Cold water Dadu! This way. It’s me, discount Uber, don’t you recognize me?”

It was the driver who had taken them to the consulate. He had just returned from dropping off a fare, and his white shirt stuck to his torso, gone as translucent with sweat as a page dropped in a puddle. He listened to them, then took long strides to the stage where he interrupted the actor, commandeered the sole microphone available, and said, “Hello hello, one two three testing! Brothers, who took a young man with a little girl this morning? Would have been five or five thirty. Shombhu? Pintu? Who was out on routes then?”

His voice boomed over the crowd before he lowered the microphone and squinted, shading his eyes with a hand.

“Nobody was there? I see. What if your child disappeared and everybody you asked looked least interested? Come on! Have a heart!”

The driver gave it another minute.

Then a man with a stooped back, wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat as if he were on vacation, and rain boots painted with unicorns, sighed and rose from the ground next to his rickshaw.

“I don’t want to be mixed up in any trouble,” he grumbled. “And if you involve the police, I’m out.”

Then he told them what he recalled. “The little girl was holding a toy truck, and speaking nonstop, and the young man—her uncle, or what?—lifted her into the rickshaw.”

Ma’s heart clenched.

“She was laughing. I thought she was going out with her uncle, honestly. But they didn’t go far. He wanted to go to the jetty.”

“The jetty?” said Dadu.

“I mean, yes. Where is everybody taking a boat today? To the hexagon, where else?”

“The hexagon?”

“For the feast. I should have gone myself—now I’m caught up in this—is he not her uncle, then? Whatever you all are doing, it’s your family problem. Don’t involve—”

“What feast?”

“What feast? You don’t watch tellybhishon? The rich lady’s daughter? Her wedding? Her wedding feast?”

“Take us there,” said Ma.

ONCE, THE JETTY HAD BEEN a venue for couples who snuck away from nosy families to sit next to each other, bodies gently touching, desirous of nothing more than the linking of hands, the shared viewing of a sunset. In those days, a cigarette shop and a restaurant—whose main offering was french fries reverently and gratefully transported from freezer to fryer—did steady business, but they were long closed, and the row where sellers of chaat and chanachur once sat was vacant too. Now, as Ma and Dadu arrived, the jetty was a thicket of shoves and shouts, the stench of people too close to one another, their elbows and knees jabbing, their hands grasping, feet stepping on feet. The last ferry to the hexagon was pulling back, its motor rumbling, hundreds holding on to its railings, a few brave souls grasping the tires that hung from its side, their bodies afloat in the murky water. But every minute more people arrived from the city, and from the surrounding suburbs and villages, adding to the dozens on the jetty. A pair of guards raised their palms and called, “Be calm! Keep order! This was the last ferry, we told you. There have been nine other ferries already! If you didn’t get on, go home. Don’t crowd this area.”

“Add more ferries,” yelled somebody in the crowd. “Can’t you see we need more ferries?”

“Just let people on,” called somebody else. “That ferry can take fifty more people. It’s basically empty!”

“Please,” Ma begged of a guard, ignoring the complaints of those she had pushed past to stand in front of him. “Someone kidnapped my child and took her on a ferry. Please let me on. I only need to find my child; I am not interested in the feast—”

“Hmm,” said the imperturbable guard. “I have heard many stories today, but this is a very good one.” Then, his tone harsher, he said, “Go back home. Nobody else is getting on a ferry.”

The river lapped at the base of the jetty, opaque as a pearl. In the water, swinging back and forth in the departed ferry’s wake, was a patchwork of trash. Before anybody could stop her, Ma climbed off the jetty and into the murk. If no boat would take her, then she would swim. But she had always been a poor swimmer, and as soon as the warm water invaded her eyes and nose, as soon as the current met the feeble motion of her arms and legs, she realized she had made a mistake. Her body afloat in barely five feet of water, thrashing about, grasping at the exposed mud at the base of the jetty, Dadu shouting for help above her, Ma finally climbed out, a subject of derision. A voice asked if she was mad, and another laughed at her desperation to make it to the feast. The guards yelled at her and fretted that they would get in trouble. Dadu said nothing. He took off his shirt, put it on her shoulders, and took her back to the rickshaw.

At the back of the crowd, two teenagers climbed a tree to survey the scene. The teenagers were sisters. They had traveled from a faraway village where they sewed dry leaf plates for income, where pests were now destroying the trees that sustained them, where the local school principal, known for stretching the school’s midday meals as far as the supplies would go, doled out some dal to them every now and then. They clambered down the tree, one skinning her elbow, the other holding a dragonfly in her palm, and prepared to return to their village, where their parents were waiting eagerly to hear about the feast. In the sisters’ tales of eating, their parents would be sated.

EARLY IN THE MORNING, WHILE ma and dadu slept, Mishti had unlatched the bedroom door and gone to look at the stranger in the storeroom. She had heard him walking during the night, and she had understood that Ma had let him in. But if he was Ma’s friend, why was Ma upset at his visit? And why had Dadu refused to answer questions about him? For a while she had stood silently on the bottom stair, watching Boomba.

Boomba, who had been awake all night, sat up on the floor and stretched his limbs. He needed the child on this day, and miraculously, she was now before him. From within a bin, he retrieved the toy truck he had taken, some days ago.

“I didn’t know you were sleeping here, mister truck,” said Boomba. “How did you get here?”

He looked around innocently. “Oh, I see. You are a baby truck, and you want to play. Well, I know a little boy who would love your lights. Would you like to play with him?”

Boomba waited some more.

“His name is Robi. I can take you to him. He would have so much fun playing with you.”

“That’s my twuck!” said Mishti, unable to bear it.

Then she had gone to him, and he, gentle with her as he was with his own brother, had sat her next to him and rolled the truck ten times, twenty times. It revved. It flashed its lights. Shyly, Mishti fetched the truck from its varied destinations and returned it to Boomba’s hands for further racing. When he rolled it up a bin and into its depth, making it vanish, she giggled.

“I have an idea,” said Boomba. “Do you want to go on a boat?”

“Where?” said Mishti, looking around.

“It’s not here. It’s on the river. And if we go on the boat together, we will get many things to eat.”

“Eat?”

“Yes.” He ticked off the probable items on his fingers. “Potatoes, duck eggs, spinach, cauliflower—”

“Flowerflower?”

“Mm-hmm. And then, ice cream, jilipi—”

“Ice cream?”

“Only if you come quietly with me.”

Mishti looked uncertain.

Boomba waited a moment, then showed her the sheet of stickers he had taken. “Look, we can do stickers on the boat. Do you want to put stickers on my arm?”

“Is not allowed!” said Mishti. “Mama says no stickers on her!”

“Is that so? Well, you can do it to me. I don’t mind.”

Fifteen minutes later, when they left the house, Mishti gripped the truck in one hand and the sheet of stickers in the other.

“No, wait!” she said as Boomba opened the door. “Mama?”

“Mama’s sleeping,” he said. “Let’s go. Don’t you want to eat?”

He gently tugged on her arm, nervous for a moment that she would scream. Her body was small, but her will was immense.

“Mama!” said Mishti. “Dadu!”

“I promise,” Boomba begged, “we will bring food back for them. We will give them a cauliflower surprise. How about that?”

At that, Mishti nodded a big nod. Boomba put both hands on her torso and lifted her onto a rickshaw that had slowed and then stopped. It was a blessing that Mishti had appeared before him at dawn—he could not dismiss that perhaps it was his mother’s hand that had brought her down the stairs, operating in the universe as mothers’ hands do.

He had heard that he would need a child to gain entry to the billionaire’s daughter’s wedding feast. Nobody in this society had very much sympathy for solo men. Solo men like him were suspect entities. But a man accompanying a child—such a man was a different species. In the eyes of others, such a man was the most kingly of beings, a guardian.

On the seat next to him, his hand across her lap to keep her from falling, Mishti found that her resolve failed as the house disappeared from view. Turning around in the rickshaw, she cried until her cheeks turned red, her nose blew snot bubbles, her tears dripped off her chin. She cried with the desolation of one who understood that the world was cleaving in two, like a tree struck by lightning—she on one side, her mother on the other. It was an unendurable world.

Boomba had seen Robi cry like that. His heart began to ache. He was a thief and a blackmailer, but he was not a monster. She was only a child. What did she know of the ways in which people made instruments of one another?

“Don’t cry,” he said in her ear so that she would hear him. “I will bring you back to your Ma. We will go eat a lot of food, and then I will bring you back.”

When at last she stopped crying and took big, jagged breaths, he asked her, “What’s your name, then?”

SINCE ARRIVING IN THE CITY , Boomba had heard stories of the floating home, the hexagon, where the shelter’s major donor, the city’s only remaining billionaire, lived. In his boatman days, he had seen it from a distance. It was a river island situated where the river had grown wide as the sea, its banks gray lines on the horizon. The artificial island was rigged to the riverbed, a fanciful experiment of the billionaire’s, which generated rumors aplenty. Rumor was that the hexagon contained a mansion whose solar panels moved to catch the sun where it hung in the sky. Rumor was that the hexagon scheduled its own rain on Fridays. Rumor was that the hexagon contained cabins whose paints cooled the interior, rooms whose walls and carpets watched and measured and alerted, roads that made efforts to repair themselves. Some spoke of doctors who were not people but machine intelligence in the living room, and others spoke of children who wore clothing that detected germs. But nobody really knew. All the city dwellers knew was what the billionaire chose to share—her generosity to the poor, her kind heart for rural immigrants in the city, her soft spot for children. This control of information, too, was a form of her wealth.

On this morning, days before the billionaire’s daughter’s wedding, there was a feast for the poor of the city, limited to children and their guardians. In batches, nearly twenty thousand would be seated on the floor of an auditorium in the hexagon, and given a hot meal. In addition, food for fifty thousand more would be distributed in the city. But everybody knew that the best food— perhaps luchi made from real flour, perhaps five kinds of fresh vegetables, perhaps even real fish—would be at the hexagon.

Boomba arrived early at the jetty, and caught a ferry—a massive ferry, with room for two thousand—steered by none other than Shanto, who let him cut the line and climb aboard.

“Never knew you had a daughter,” said Shanto, who had just received a haircut and still had clippings on his shoulders. He smelled of aftershave.

“Looking nice for the feast?” said Boomba.

“Why not,” said Shanto. “Big day.” Then he turned to Mishti. “Hello, girl, what’s your name?”

Mishti whispered her name.

“Jhimli? All right, Jhimli, sit here, and you will be able to see.”

Shanto held Mishti by the armpits and put her on a bench atop which were already seated a small boy and a white rooster.

“Where’s he?” said Boomba. “Your boy?”

Shanto looked straight ahead at the wide expanse of river upon which a gaudy sun played. He said, “Cerebral malaria.”

“Cerebral malaria?” demanded Boomba, afraid of what he was hearing. “Meaning—meaning what exactly?”

“He needed injections,” said Shanto in his quiet voice. “Artesunate. But the price the hospital told me… I looked everywhere for cheaper artesunate. I begged at pharmacies. In the end, he said, ‘Baba, can you bring me some sugar water? Can you put some sugar water on my lips?’ And I couldn’t even afford sugar for him.”

For everybody watching, Shanto kept his eyes upon the river and lifted a hand to wave at a small boat that passed in the opposite direction, but in his own mind, in an infinite loop, he took off his shoes and went into a room with fourteen beds where his boy lay, and though there was a note taped to the wall that said not to touch the patient or the bed, Shanto asked a nurse in his low voice if he could, and then he raised an arm over the railing and touched with the tips of his crooked fingers the boy’s arm, below the nook of the elbow where, from days of syringes that gave him not the medicine he needed but only saline, the skin had bruised the color of storm clouds. Shanto touched the thin blanket on his son’s chest, then took the boy’s arm, that known hand in his own, soon to be free of the wires and syringes and machines he had suffered in the last days of his life.

Few knew that, on this day, Shanto was traveling to the country where his son was.

The rooster cast its red eyes upon Mishti, and allowed her, a few minutes into the journey, to put a tentative palm on its back.

UPON ARRIVING AT THE HEXAGON , the first thing Boomba noticed was that there was no buzzing in his ear. The air was clear and fragrant with flowers. Copying him, Mishti turned her face to the sky and took a gulp of air. Having befriended the rooster on the ferry, she remained calm, and gained some cheer as the boy allowed Mishti to hold the rooster in her arms, the bird’s feet tied in string the boy clutched. The boy had faced plenty of strangers who wanted to eat his beloved rooster, and he never lowered his guard. But he trusted Mishti with the trust children had in one another. Together, they walked on a roped-off path on the built ground of the hexagon, not earth but its kin, dewy green grass, ferns luscious as those that might be found in a rain forest, followed soon by a paved lane that led to a gigantic dome, the auditorium. The walls of the dome played pictures of the couple, screening a love story that included, as its plot points, evenings at a British university library and days of backpacking in Norway. The lovers’ journey was of great sentimental value to the billionaire’s family, but it was merely comedic material to everybody who had come for the food. It would soon become a matter of jokes on the internet.

Though much of the hexagon was roped off, and security guards lined the path, regions of this mysterious land were visible to the passersby. Far off the path, four children played, the river breeze permitting a shuttlecock’s arc. Watching them for a moment, Boomba returned to his village, to the swept yard in front of his family’s house, winter sunshine warming his back as he spun the racquet in his hands.

“What are they doing?” said Mishti, watching them too.

“Playing,” was all Boomba said.

“It’s called basketball,” said the boy with the rooster. They were the first words he had spoken. “Don’t you see the ball they are hitting with the basket in their hands?”

Mishti nodded seriously. “I see,” she said, like a grown-up. “What this hen name?” she continued, asking about the rooster.

“Titanic,” said the boy.

“Tiger Nick?”

In the auditorium, lit by chandeliers from a false ceiling, the air cooled, the floor spotless, Boomba and Mishti sat on lengths of carpet long as football fields, and looked at the banana leaf plates and stainless steel glasses laid before them. Boomba felt disoriented by everything—the layout of the hexagon, the size of it, the clean and foreign texture of it, with none of the mainland’s moods. He saw it, but he couldn’t see it. All he could tell was that everybody gathered in the space was accompanying a child, and Boomba thanked the universe once more that it had been possible to bring Mishti.

Then came the food, vessel after copper vessel, each atop wheels, with two men steering and a third acting as a server, a ladling spoon in his hand. There were vegetables pulled freshly from earth, carrots with green tops and lifelines drawn on their bodies, oblong potatoes, sweet pumpkin, eggplant. There was rice, each long grain perfectly steamed. There were cuts of bhetki fish fried in crisp batter, a shatter of shell followed by salt and silk and silt of a stream on the tongue at once. There was rui fish in a curry.

“Why not ilish?” said Boomba to the server. “Will the rich people get ilish?”

When the server gave him a look, Boomba cackled. “It’s just a question. Just because you work for a rich person, it doesn’t make you a rich person yourself, have you thought about that?”

The boy with the rooster ate with morsels pressed in his fist, jaws open like those of an anaconda devouring deer, and Mishti ate too. Boomba had stuffed plastic bags inside his pockets to take food off her plate and save it for himself, but now he watched the child eat, unable to bring himself to intervene. When Mishti had trouble with the rui fish, she turned to Boomba with mouth open like a baby bird, and Boomba understood and took the bones out. He pinched the clean white fish between his fingers and put the pieces back on her tongue. Then came cups of chocolate ice cream, and Boomba gave her spoonfuls, keeping her from dripping ice cream on her shirt. When platters of fruit came around, fruit Boomba loved—especially the lychees, with hedgehog skin and mineral meat—Boomba peeled them for Mishti. She sat obediently beside him, mouth smeared, hands slick with ghee, and when she coughed from a bite stuck in her throat, Boomba patted her back.

“Is it better?” he said. “Have water.”

No, Boomba was no monster. All Boomba was, was a man whose moral compass pointed toward the north of his own family. Wasn’t that the most ordinary thing in the world?

Elsewhere in the great hall, guardians pleaded with their distracted children to eat some more. A little boy with heaps of food in front of him played with lychee seeds. A little girl whined that her fish was the wrong shape.

As the meal wound down, Mishti dipped a pitted cherry in a puddle of chocolate ice cream, and the imprecise movement of her hand became the wick upon which a small flame inside Boomba caught. From satiety, and satisfaction, his mood grew sorrowful. Had Robi ever eaten food like this? Would he ever have an opportunity to? A different toss of the die, and Robi would have had Mishti’s life, a life of health and comfort. A different toss of the die, and Robi would have had the billionaire’s child’s life. A different toss of the die, and Robi would have been the billionaire, looming over Boomba, the beggar.

As it was, the billionaire paused before Boomba and Mishti. She was in her sixties, and her feet—the first glimpse Boomba had of her—were in embroidered slippers. She wore a sari aglitter with crystals. When she spoke, it was in the softest voice Boomba had ever heard. “Your daughter has a lovely smile. How old is she?”

Boomba looked at her face, light skinned, as if the sun grew reverent before her wealth; kind eyes; earlobes heavy with diamonds so large they looked like they were glass carved out of a mirror.

How old was this girl, anyway? Two? Three? Boomba had not given much thought to it.

“I am eleven,” said Mishti. “And my birthday is December.”

The billionaire laughed, and bent to touch Mishti’s chin with affection.

“All of December?”

Mishti didn’t understand the question. “This my ice cream,” she said, pointing at her bowl.

The billionaire turned to a server who was hovering nearby. “Can you bring the ice cream back? Make sure all the children get more ice cream if they want.”

After the meal, the guests sat through a filmed lecture about hope, hard work, and national resilience by the billionaire’s husband, the bride’s father, while a placid rain fell upon the dome of the auditorium. Boomba fidgeted with his fingers, wondering if he could explore the hexagon and find the stores of food. But guards watched the visitors with unflagging focus, and then, with only a half hour left before the return ferry—which was running late, it was announced—the children were invited to play in the garden surrounding the auditorium. Workers swiftly removed the rope boundaries, and children scattered like blown bubbles, shrieking, overwhelmed by the garden bathed in sun even as it drizzled, rain like a shower of silver-wrapped candies that touched them so gently it was as if the drops sought permission. There was no sign of a building that Boomba could enter. When he looked over his shoulder, a guard with a rifle looked directly at him.

The garden, in its own dome of atmosphere, was a child’s dream. There were regions green with trellises of flowering vines and rosebushes, shrubs sculpted into mazes, fountains surrounded by lotuses, and tall fruit trees that grew freely, rows of cashew, mango, grapefruit, and the skinny trunks and split leaves of papaya. Coconut palms towered over patches of chili plants with their red fruit like perked up ears, and bougainvillea climbed over structures.

Boomba followed Mishti as Mishti tracked a squirrel, his shoulders bent to avoid being struck by branches. Dried leaves crumpled like old documents under his shoes. Not so long ago, the city had held forests like this, where herds of monkeys rampaged, galloping like horses over rooftops and swinging from trees, devouring young mango until a tree’s dozens were fully bitten and chewed, then throwing the fruit imperiously to ground. Neither Mishti nor Boomba had seen that iteration of the city, but they each, in their own way, liked a garden that recalled such a forest, a garden whose growth compelled them to become smaller and humbler, whose shades of green focused their eyes and called to their hands, and every now and then rewarded them with the folding of the shy fern, the mimosa pudica.

“Will it be like this where you’ll go?” said Boomba.

“Where?” said Mishti.

“I don’t know. Where are you going, anyway?”

“Mitchigun.”

“Is that in England?”

Mishti thought for a while, then spoke in a voice thin as a flute. “No, it’s in Sunday.”

THE RETURN FERRY APPROACHED THE hexagon and sounded its horn, a blast that frightened a band of sparrows. A hedge shivered and a dozen of them scattered to the safety of the sky. Boomba held Mishti’s hand, which she now gave him willingly, and left the garden to find the path they had taken that morning, preparing to climb the ramp on board. The boy with the rooster had gone his own way. With their stomachs aching, eyes drowsy, the spell of the day broken, all that was left was to sit aboard the ferry and return to the city.

A few minutes later, a siren caused Boomba to look about with alarm. Shanto, with a dozen men and women, had evaded the guards and had stormed the hexagon’s interior, where buildings housed clinics and medical supplies, and pantries stocked with food. Security guards in vests and helmets sprinted past Boomba, chasing Shanto and his allies. In the chaos, the intruders grew in number. While some guests, now grateful to the billionaire, comprehended what was happening and refused to join the looting—they stood by the side of the road, holding their children by the shoulders—others who felt infuriated by the crumbs they had received followed Shanto. They needed the food more than the billionaire did. They needed the medicines more than the billionaire did. Thousands, seeing an opportunity they would never have again, threw themselves into the moment. They gathered in their arms all the foods cooling in the massive fridges— whole ilish fish, buckets of shrimp as large as lobsters, vibrant fruits and vegetables organized by color, gulab jamun adorned with gold leaf. Guards, awaiting instructions from the billionaire, held their fire. The billionaire debated options with those closest to her, their chief concern being the unsalvageably awful press that would result from violence visited upon her guests. If the crowd wanted more food, the billionaire could tolerate that. She could even, in the future, spin the narrative to her benefit. But the greater the mob grew, the more its attention dispersed. Some formed a human ladder and tugged at a chandelier. Others scattered around the hexagon, leaping over the rope boundaries to arrive at small structures—an office, a library, a four-car garage, a movie theater, a gym, a bowling alley, a spa—where they gathered everything that appeared valuable. Older children, following their parents, emptied the theater of its candy and popcorn. Some took oils from the spa, gold letter openers from the office, gin from a shelf in the library. Some took portable fans and cooling vests. One took a raincoat off its bench in the bowling alley. Five bold children struggled to move an elliptical, which they thought was an electricity generator. The main residence remained guarded by uniformed men who did not move an inch. But the other structures yielded to frenzied hands, big and small, greedy and gleeful.

Boomba rushed into the first structure that caught his eye. It was a library. He tugged at a computer monitor on a desk, but the machine made neither response nor movement. He glanced at oversize books jutting out of the shelves like mismatched tiles, and armchairs on which one could comfortably recline. Wild with the need to make the most of the moment, Boomba looked around for anything valuable. Then, on a small side table tucked into a corner of the library, Boomba spied a globe. It was the size of a Ping-Pong ball, but when he picked it up, it sat heavy as rock in his palm. Its oceans, made of lapis lazuli, shimmered. Its countries glittered with gemstones: diamonds and emeralds and rubies and sapphires. Seams of silver marked the latitudes and longitudes. It was the most beautiful globe Boomba had seen, and it returned him right away to his boyhood self, which was, though long left behind, not that far away. He wanted that globe. He shoved it into the plastic bag in his pocket, wrapping the plastic around it several times to dull its gleam, then tied the bag to his belt loop.

With this treasure, Boomba joined the near stampede of those looting the kitchen. But he was late, and there was a massive crowd already fleeing with their loot. Mishti’s hand gripped in his, Boomba looked about at the emptied shelves, until Mishti said, “Flowerflower!”

Fallen under an appliance Boomba did not recognize, in the dark space between its bottom and the floor, was a ten-kilogram sack of rice. On the sack, a picture of steamed rice served with a medley of vegetables. Boomba grabbed it and joined those who were fleeing. But in the meantime, urged by her daughter’s anger at her wedding festivities being ruined, the billionaire had changed her mind. She had ordered her guards to fire, but only to frighten, not to injure. The crowd panicked and rushed onto the ferry, and Shanto, with no gains in his hands save a bag of ibuprofen and vitamin supplements, took his place at the steering wheel once more. Over a loudspeaker, as he allowed people time to board, Shanto finally spoke his mind. “Remember this day, madam, as a demonstration of what happens when you hoard food and give us crumbs. This is what happens when you hoard medicines while our children are dying. This feast is nothing but an insult to the people of the city. No more! No more!”

Boomba listened in fear and amazement. Such public courage was alien to him. Now he looked at Shanto as if the two had never known each other, as if they were strangers, so small did he feel before the vastness of Shanto’s act. Like a coward, Boomba watched from a distance at the back of the ferry, afraid of the moment in which the police would surround the ferry and arrest Shanto. Or, perhaps, the guards would decide to dispense their own justice. Never again would he see open sky, Boomba feared on his friend’s behalf.

But only meters from the hexagon’s shore, the overloaded ferry, carrying hundreds beyond capacity who hung off its sides with desperate arms, its own poorly maintained body shot at by the guards, began to sink. The guards watched from the hexagon, rifles finally lowered. First, only the back of the ferry listed a little, nothing that might not have been caused by the river’s movement. Then, within minutes, the ferry tilted to its left and upturned, like a toy in a child’s bath. Boomba grasped the sack of rice and Mishti’s hand, and—there was nothing else to do—allowed the water to take them. Above them, a helicopter carrying the billionaire and her family rose and vanished from sight.

Ten feet and twenty feet and thirty feet from the collapsed edge of the ferry, swimming with all his strength, water churned by the frenzied activity of passengers thrashing, stinging his nose, fouling his mouth, spray in Mishti’s eyes as she cried, her body suspended in water with nothing solid to hold but Boomba’s arm, his effort the only thing keeping her head above water while she desperately kicked her legs in motions she intuited, in and out like a frog, surrounded by others whose shirts were ballooning around them, whose arms were letting go of the treasures they had taken in ecstasy only moments ago, whose voices were calling for loved ones wrestled and pinned by the muscular river, Boomba felt the immensity of the water to be crossed.

He would have an easier time if he let go of one of his two burdens—the sack of rice, soaked and heavy as an anchor, or the terrified child, who gripped him with extraordinary strength. Her strength was such that she could drown both of them. He knew what he would do: He watched the sack of rice vanish in the muddy churn of water.

Something hard hit his elbow. It was an oar. Above it loomed a boat that looked familiar, though overloaded as well, and Boomba clung to the oar with colossal determination. Had he not been holding Mishti, he had no doubt that the oarsman would have shaken him off. As it was, a voice he knew said, “Get them, get them!” and arms reached down and pulled the two of them up through the invasion of water that seemed to soar and slam from every direction, mud and froth the entire composition of the world. When he was slumped on the floor of the boat, he realized this was the boat he once ferried. There was the owner, the oarsman. The owner made eye contact with him and said, “I always knew you were a greedy one. Always wanting more, more, more.”

Boomba said nothing. Holding Mishti’s hand, patting her head, drying her shivering body with the rag somebody pressed into his hand, he crouched in the boat for an eternity. When she cried for her mother, inconsolable, Boomba whispered in her ear, “Don’t cry. We’re going home to Ma. We will be there in one minute.” In the river the ferry fully sank, taking with it Shanto, who helped hundreds of children climb into rescue boats with an uncanny sense of peace, then let himself join his son. Soon they were back at the jetty, and those on the boat began to jump into knee-deep water and pull the boat closer.

Boomba and Mishti jumped, too, scraping their knees and shins. Mishti’s toes hit pebbles. Her toes hit coarse sand. She had fallen silent. Her face was puffy from crying, and solemn. In shock, clothes soaked, shoes lost, teeth chattering, she held on to Boomba’s hand while he lifted the weight of himself out. Then he remembered and patted his waist. There was the globe. Water streamed off his body in minor tributaries.

IT WAS LATE IN THE afternoon, nearly evening, when Boomba and Mishti returned to the house.

Ma had been waiting. She grabbed the girl—her clothes soaking through Ma’s right away, cold and soiled feet upon Ma’s legs—and fled up the stairs. All the questions on her mind—had he hurt her? Had he truly taken her to the hexagon? Why?— expressed themselves as forceful embrace in the bathroom. Ma took her dripping clothes off and ran the hot water for a bath, and the drum of water concealed all that occurred on the floor below.

Behind Mishti came Boomba, and Dadu, trembling with anguish, in a moment of swift decisiveness, raised his walking stick and brought it down upon Boomba’s knees. With a look of amazement, Boomba fell.

“Get out,” said Dadu, his voice hoarse. “How dare you kidnap the child—”

“Kidnap? I brought her back!”

“If you lay a finger on her ever again—”

“Ask her,” said Boomba. “Ask her what she ate today. I took her to the feast, that’s all I did!”

But Dadu wasn’t listening. Once more he raised his walking stick and brought it down upon Boomba’s back, as he lay clutching his knees.

“I took her to the feast!” Boomba wailed. “They would not have let me go without—”

Again, Dadu raised the walking stick.

“Stop,” Boomba pleaded. “Stop! No more!”

“Get out,” said Dadu. “If I see your face again—”

“Let me get my—”

“Out.”

Boomba crawled out the door and down the garden path, hobbling. When he wasn’t touching his painful back, he touched the small bag that swung from his belt loop. It appeared to steady him. He opened and shut the garden gate, then stood, grasping the gate on the other side. His mouth pulled into a sad smile.

“Dadu, you turned out to be a villain,” he called. Drenched, Boomba looked like a different person. “I took your grandchild to a feast, and you beat me for it? Shame on me for not seeing who you all really are. You are not decent people. You are villains, like every other city dweller with a house.” Boomba sneezed. “But you can’t defeat me, and you can’t get rid of me. I will be back.”

With that, he turned away, snapping a stem off a hibiscus as he did so. Underfoot, he ground the flower into the pavement.

DADU STOOD AT THE DOOR , watching the road as boomba retreated. Pain from the back of his head radiated to the front, and he felt pressure behind his eyes, as if his skull was a dam holding back a surging river. He shook his head to clear the feeling, but it only made him dizzy.

Before his eyes, a sparrow fell from the sky, and a few people turned to look, but nearly everybody had encountered overheated and exhausted birds in recent years, and the crowd flowed swiftly around the sparrow’s body, a tiny roundabout.

On the floor above, Ma asked Mishti, “Did he take you on a boat? Did he take you to a place with a lot of food? Did you eat?”

“No,” said Mishti.

Ma’s heart sank.

“I ate itchy,” said Mishti.

“You were itchy?”

“I ate itchy!”

“Where, Mishti?”

“Near the hen.”

“There was a hen? Did he take you to someone’s house, then?”

“The hen name Tiger Nick.”

“Is that a cartoon? You went to somebody’s house and watched a cartoon?”

“No cartoons!”

“How did you get soaked?”

“I don’t know. Where did Tiger Nick go?”

And that was all Mishti would say before the misery of what she had been through overcame her. Then, rejecting Ma’s questions, Mishti threw a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo on the floor, and stomped on the toilet seat lid, and scratched at Ma’s arms, and lay on the floor and screamed, while Ma, fearful and bewildered, attempted to put a towel on her and embrace her again.

LATER THAT NIGHT, DADU SAT at the table, forearms upon the known slope of wood, and tried to write in his notebook. Strangely, he could not recall with much precision the moments in which he had struck Boomba. His body shook. His hands struggled to hold the pen. Bells rung in his ears. Boomba writhed before him, a sickening sight that had made him feel not assured in his power but revolted by it.

Together with Ma, he had gone around the house and barricaded every window with closets, tables, desks, and stacks of chairs. Atop each stack, they had placed a Chinese teacup or saucer so that, if Boomba returned at night and tried to force a window, the porcelain would crash and alert them. The heirlooms had been largely worthless until this moment, when they had found their function in their willingness to break.

THEN CAME THE SOUND. MA was returning upstairs, having triple-checked the locks, when she heard. She grasped the banister and took the last two steps at once, unwisely, nearly slipping off, twisting her ankle, then saw Dadu’s head upon the table. The pen had slid off the page and drawn a line in ballpoint on the table. His eyes were closed, and his hand was limp, dispossessed of intention.

Mishti leaped up from the floor. She put her face close to Dadu’s, inspecting the familiar terrain, the cliff of his nose, the valley of his cheek. It was a game! It was a game! Wasn’t it?

Ma, frightened, laid a hand on the wall, as if it was the arm of a loved one. The wall knew the floor and could bear her to Dadu’s side if only she held fast.

“Water!” cried Ma. Her ankle throbbed with pain. She spoke to Mishti, who, frantic in her desire to help, ran to the kitchen and jumped up and down. Ma dragged her foot to the bathroom, which was closer to her than the kitchen, and, realizing she had forgotten to get a glass, spilled the chewed toothbrushes from their holding cup into the sink. She rinsed the cup, filled it with cold water, and hurried to the dining table, where she sprinkled drops upon Dadu’s face. It was only then, with the faucet running and the water meter beeping, that Dadu made a great effort to open his eyes. When he did, eyelids slow to blink, he looked more aged and frail than he had minutes ago.

Eventually, Dadu lifted his head and breathed noisily. His eyes, Ma saw, were unfocused as a baby’s. At the corner of his mouth, a spot of saliva. Mishti, who had zoomed back from the kitchen, grabbed Dadu’s hand and yanked at his fingers, unaware of how strong her child’s grasp was, tickled by the game in which Dadu had pretended to sleep—on the table!—and had needed to be woken with water.

“We watered Dadu!” said Mishti, giggling. “He’s a plant!”

“Gentle, Mishti,” said Ma. “Let your Dadu rest.”

To her father, Ma said, “Did you have water? Are you feeling hot?”

Dadu remained quiet, unable to summon his voice.

“Is it your—does your head hurt?”

Dadu only pointed to where he wanted to go, then leaned on Ma all the way across the living room, Mishti underfoot, past the shelves of hardbound classics with termite-bitten pages that they would not pack; past the two snails that had somehow crept in from the exterior wall, seeking shade; past the center table with its dish of almonds filled instead with paper clips; past the baby lizard on the floor, which stealthily approached a small flying insect; to the bedroom. It was a tiny distance turned vast.

Ma fretted. “Did you eat enough? And let me see that cut— should I call an ambulance?”

But Dadu did not want to spend the night lying on a sheet in a hospital reception, surrounded by the cries of the infected and the injured, waiting for a minute’s attention from an overwhelmed doctor. More, he did not want to be admitted into a hospital for days. What if the doctors kept him indefinitely, suggesting scan after scan, test after test, as they often did, the better to rack up a satisfying bill, and what if the day of the flight arrived, and what if Ma found herself in the position of having to choose between her father’s health and her daughter’s safety? No, Dadu could not do that to his child.

The sight of the made bed, blankets folded at the foot, pillows plumped at the top, a faded but clean cotton sheet stretched taut and tucked at the corners such that no crease remained, filled Dadu with desperation to lie down. His legs shook, uncertain of the floor, and though he felt Mishti’s crayons rolling under his toes, nothing in him wanted to bend, pick them up, and put them where they belonged. He let them be. Then his feet touched Mishti’s sheets, slipping off the mattress and forming their own creek on the floor, and he let that be, too. When his head was on the pillow, he spoke. He was all right, he told Ma, it wasn’t an empty stomach, nor was it thirst, just a dizzy spell that was common enough at his age. All he needed to feel better was to lie down.

“Have some water,” said Ma, holding out the cup. Then she remembered. “No, no, this is not drinking water. Wait, let me bring—drinking water—”

Ma turned around and stood still for a moment. Confusion filled her mind like a mist. What had she meant to do? Slowly, leaning on the wall, she went to the kitchen, opening this cabinet and that until she found two steel glasses they had not yet packed. At the dining table, she uncapped a two-liter soda bottle and poured water into the glass.

In the bedroom, Dadu sat up slowly and took the glass from her, the linen skin of his hands wrapped around it, his face lowered to drink like the patriarch of a herd at a rain-filled pond. Then, while Ma stood over her father, and Mishti played puppets with his toes at the foot of the bed, Dadu withdrew into sleep, moment by moment becoming a composition of elements no viewer was meant to know—lips slightly parted, whistle at the top of some exhalations, eyebrows wild, hair spread upon the pillow like a lion’s mane, and a frown on his face, as if what he perceived, with the unreal eye of his receded consciousness, frightened him.