Joseph McElroy: Taken From Him

Look. In the amber, gray, or angular light everywhere, alcoves, nooks, people by twos or ones, like shrines. Underfoot hard ground pushed up, and rock, concrete, broken and worn smooth and yet uneven, the original undissolved lime showing through a glimmer of puddle (can it be true?). Light ahead outlined a man and a boy in the passage, little room to pass. A ladder rung fingered, see what’s up here. Set foot on a ladder and find the floor above lined in slumwall-like cardboard. A cot occupied by three children and a man with one leg, another actual alcove space set off, a small TV, a toy cricket bat — a stool like a carton is a carton. Eyes of adults, the darkest of foreheads measuring headroom. A poster of a shining celebrity bare to the waist. What looked to be cloth hangings, wash. Between buckets of wash an electrical cord leading under rubbish. No one up here with the hand out. “Can you see the whole place — can you walk everywhere up here?” he asked (though among all these murmurings where was the girl below and why did he ask? About an intricate, compartmented slum?). “Come,” she calls, “the way through is down here.”

Only the passage still, this hacked, shaped, even natural and practically pretending to be ancient corridor and several feet away lighted by a bulb, or, now, a fork in the passage. “It’s a very pricey camera,” her hand on it. “It’s very borrowed,” you say. “Very bor row ed,” she took his arm but nowhere to guide — “someone made you take it!” she hits on the explanation. The jasmine, a faint scent, shadows her, it is thin like her young nose, a stud in one nostril. “It’s my sister’s.”

“I knew it. I have a sister.”

The girl was somewhat educated, maybe more.

“Did anyone else come in after me?” “They are ahead of us.” “I don’t see how.” “You don’t have to.” “I need a compass now.” “You have your compass.” “I’m here.” The girl made a warm sound, like a thought. “Inside” — insaieed , she said. “ To be inside,” she said. He felt for the camera.

“You have an instinct,” she said, a hint pretentious, this young one.

“Well, didn’t I hear them speaking Marathi?” “Yes, at the end, you knew.” “How can you believe that?” “I will keep you in suspense.” “ Was it Marathi?” “It was.” Two little girls were whispering, murmuring seriously; women in saris smiled hello. “You know this place well.” Was she insulted? He looks her in the face, not knowing her name, her forthrightness in the dusk democratic and more; he hadn’t meant Does your family live here; but he had. Presently the girl said, “My grandfather was a magistrate.” “And your family?” Chatter erupting above, she is definitely educated. “And your family?” asked again. Odor like animal hide close, rank, and another question drifts in. “You speak all these languages?” She understood some. “I have a picture of him,” she says of her grandfather.

Ladders, one with a railing, and here are two missing middle rungs leading to how many families — which families?

Up, rung by rung, slipping, to find the girl right behind him, her knuckles on the small of his back, holding onto his belt. “Your sister knows you have an instinct.” “For what?” “For what? It is only what she thinks. To be the welcome guest,” words came back at a slant. Near the top the girl hops magically around the considerably older man with her, the jasmine scent her, a thread along the rank hide smell; or a reminder of some part of her that secretes the jasmine. She addresses two women squatting behind a drape of wash; a third, a wisp of nearly bald old lady, her knees drawn up to her chin under a luminous-pearl sari. Dried here, what will wash smell like? She did the talking it seemed, the women hidden, soft-spoken. Unconvinced by her? How did he know she had spoken of him? Hunched down, on this second level, seeing into another space he felt the overhead on his shoulders. He has only a knack for languages — nothing serious, inherently lazy and older, dreamt conceivably, and now American after so many years. “How did you like that?” “Like a mattress balanced on a bottle of wine.” “You are funny.”

“Grandfather on your father’s side?” is the way to ask the question — as frontways he precedes her down the narrow ladder, heeling the rungs, and the smell was of ordure enriched by charcoal burning all day and rice, historic urine, life a considered hum of humans not entirely their voices. “My father?” she says abruptly above him. “He is a driver.” “He has” — you ask as much as tell her — “encyclopedic knowledge.” “You know he has,” she’s at you oddly. “Is he his daughter’s father?” “Everywhere he goes, he knows everything, he thinks, but only two roads he drives,” her voice, ignoring the question, a hidden edge. “Where he works?”

Light swims through a green cloth hanging, it’s in the beholder. “You spoke of me to those ladies.” “Nothing you don’t know.” “I know nothing.” “He is occasionally humble, he thinks he has everything, I said, and asks for nothing. I told them far from it.” “What did you mean?” “They do not like it here. It is closed in.” “That it is.” “That it is,” the girl he will remember — and knows there’ll be cause to remember — has said caustically, admiringly.

Two (can they be) water pipes, run along the corridor taped together. To get through one stretch of passageway go sideways? Which then intersected with another yet narrowed with effort and familiarity, a more than physical squeeze to get through though more spacious. A man in basketball shorts long on him brushes by, looking down; suddenly he targets man and girl darkly, much of that here. He had no smell himself, in contrast to, it’s worth telling her, the encompassing liquid silage smell recalled from a cow farm he knew once, a story he can tell her in a minute, richer though than this acid trashy garbage going nowhere. She has been looking at him in the dusk, which is no less morning.

“How do you get to live here?” all he could say, with a wave of his hand.

“They pay rent.” “ Who do they pay?” “If you don’t pay you are evicted.” “From here” — his words final in the half-light and business as usual. Busy here. But at what?

The girl seemed to think. “You never know when you will have to fight. You know that. I know you do, I have always known you did. What are you but that?” she presumed to say.

“Is this slum rehabilitation like they talk about?” he has weighed her words, is she disturbed? “This? This?” the words incredulous in themselves from her, yet again this view of him: “I could walk away, like you.”

“To a high-rise with a toilet?”

She chuckles, with all of herself. “Plans a foot you know of.” He did. “You know the deal.” He did, having been told by someone important. “Some few lucky ones who get to move, but are they?” he acts her equal. She means that the new high-rises are convenient for women, they have toilets — but are a far cry from the low, sociable shacks interconnecting with hand-improvised shelters folks were supposedly used to. “You will hear from the horse’s mouth,” she went on, her strange foretelling like something she might know but really didn’t; and stranger still, “They look up to you.” Who? he wondered. A pretty sibyl; no more. She was not a beggar, was she? Or not here.

The camera in its case, they have been in the fort too long, and she’s been telling about a handsome sustainable architect he will meet who builds in spaces between buildings but that’s not all. Halfway up the ladder a space up beyond opens a third level on top of the second, like scaffolding held by what look like sugarcane stalks, and two guys stand one above the other up there, high up buried, hands on their hips looking down at you, shining with sweat on their necks and narrow chests. Probably eyeing the girl waiting below.