Joseph McElroy: Taken From Him

All, as you retreat down the sticky rungs, a mess of intricacy making a monumental warren hard to view, greater than its idea, than the close flickering, draining places he must get himself out of now but stops. The girl at ease looking up at him when he twists around to look at her, carries a shoulder bag he had not seen and she has understood better than he why he’s stopped on the ladder. “You know,” he begins — and before you know it, paused on the ladder, he has told a story of milking the cow in Devon when he was eight when two people, wrestling above the stall in the haymow tumbled out not silently and fell ten feet to the cement floor of the barn and scraped their cheeks, girl and guy, who hit his head. The Guernsey with her great head and giant neck looked around and there was blood on the cement and saw the boy rip his shirt and take a strip of it and tie it around his brother’s temples like an Indian… “I’ve lost track of the time,” he added, turning to face the ladder he’s on.

“They will wait. I will show you still more, suhrr. I know what you want to see.”

“I’m a special case.” “Just wait and see, special-case.” An infant crying like a newborn piercingly, unusual for India, far inside the fort — or is it India? — you take the hand that takes yours for a moment. Built by the British centuries ago to protect against the Portuguese, what have we? “Some stories not for telling,” said the girl — “What the Cow Saw.” A passageway turns slightly uphill, and a corridor taken without thinking, “I lost track of the time.” “You have me.” And then that which is lost finds relief in light and, thinking her father must drive a taxi, maybe just a scooting three-wheeler, a motor rickshaw wallah cutting it so close, you ask, “Is he hard to live with?”

“He is driver in the National Park” covers that one.

“The National Park.” “You have seen the caves.” She looks inside her bag, a flash of dusky red in there, a woman’s bag. “Why, yes — not all three thousand.” “Yesterday.” “Yes.” How does she know? They have been there once to see the overflow water system down the rocks from basin to basin, channeled, through cracks, and dating from the first century, it is said, the monks, their water catchment system. “Climbed to the top” — deep at the center of the National Park; and will go again, it was said. “You will go again to National Park,” said the girl. How would she know that?

“Here they use the west wall for their toil et ,” again she answers not the question but still a question — water — meaning where the beach has eroded there beside the fort into a ditch filling and emptying twice a day, tidal toilet. “And if you get evicted?”

A ghostly push, a turn, and two easy boys on their way out bringing somehow light in on bare feet, and the threshold is blinking what the hell at the hard beach and a scoured-out ditch along the foundations where erosion came and went. Leaning as if he were running, and looked for his people around the corner of the fort. This girl, tunic with the silver mirrors — who had said she knew what he wanted to see, was probably twenty or older and he took the camera and asked who they paid rent to , but she wasn’t behind him — and what in the National Park did her father drive? Cab? Truck? But she wasn’t there. He had her voice down.

In front of him, an American voice, about to be interrupted, part of the design discussion, thinking for herself (or us all), asks Will this “intervention” get done ? sketchbook under the point of her pencil. But “Build in the sea what you can’t on land,” the leader sweeps an arm half in irony, excited or is it irked by the Sea Link bypass, “out at sea, and over it !” — noticing now that the explorer has returned. From the beginning he could come with them or not — had he other Mumbai appointments? In fact a total stranger here. Recurred to by the girl with the sketchbook, it comes back to you, the proposal — a major creek dug to bypass causeway, encourage mangroves, provide “axis” for fishing vessels, as for market “access” (the vocabulary again), communal connection, recreation, link sea with river, much with much.

Sewage pumping station further north? Possibly counterproductive there in the light of reclamation: It’s not so hard to reclaim land from sea but is it what you want to do? And re -? As if land never belonged in sea? and now leader and his wife, equal leader, instructing design people what we are looking at in the project, how groves of coconut palms, the primordial settlements here, may eventually again protect the shore, facilitate docking of imagined biotreatment barges visitable as facilities that would “improve life” for families lodged in the Fort. Deservedly famous couple pause to “welcome back” journeyman guest, ask a question somehow jointly framed. How do they do that? It’s not simply in unison, it’s sensually prefabricated, psychic, curious — Indian? lovable? — and understood, though, that the question, “Did you make any friends in the Fort?” doesn’t need to be answered. He absorbs what’s asked without always hearing it — look ahead, and others in the circle on the beach half turn as if they have not been where he has. Something has changed. To belong as a guest, was that it? What the girl has taken from him did he give? Will he pay?

In transit now through the days from Fort to volcanic City dump and along its smoking composite shores fenced off from the street and a going Muslim economy cosm we move with, glimpse the functioning of in its walking discreteness, almost know and leave, with the thought that we do not only describe like snaps to show that you were there. The leaders inspire the group, with further thoughts about their related project at the ancient fishing community out there scheduled tomorrow by Worli Fort at the entrance to the bay still closer to Sea Link but postponed, you hear.

Another day unfolds recycling communities their hidden, jammed nakedness, nearby the smallest indoor/outdoor pottery factories, city folk eyeing visitors even momentarily to inquire all and nothing of them, street footpaths, puddles long as sourceless runnels, ladders always like propped permanence up to small clothing-factory stitcheries, whatever is holding them stacked with expectations one room above another three, four, a period room of manual typists, and this is nothing; and goats quite at home with you of such many-god-given saffrons and browns, black and white — navy blue streak? — and you’d swear of certain grays a dusty green less likely the breeder’s idea than goat’s diarrhea ultimately.

Yet winding among waiting hours, taken to a scintillating developer’s real-time office early one evening, to virtually witness the mysteriously subsidized spirit of almost seven hundred low-cost slum rehab units jointly spread-sheeted against possibly literal explosion of population (forty million in twenty years), lower-rise, and plotted about a 24-storey upper sailing-ship-shaped structure stepped profile due to terracing — the words thought themselves again to the girl as if she weren’t always in his mind — “in essence” housing for the poor “funded by the speculative market” by means of this “commercially viable component.”

The deal, in short.

You can feel her here, is she on the way up or nowhere? His appointment in Mumbai.

Interesting duplexes for lap-swimmers above with high views of sea and golf course — voices everywhere informed as the talents are cobbled together — embedded in which even in a computer slideshow is to be seen for those on whom nothing funny is wasted a real hand, the developer’s young assistant (on the slide? or between slide and screen?) signaling in memory another lensed hand two, three days ago. Getting in your way, like you putting yourself at least in the way of experience.