Joseph McElroy: Taken From Him

One morning this tightly scheduled group of visiting designers, privileged young nomads buying bottles of water as they go, passing grand old homes made grander by banyans, by old trees once imported, and now passing down a street towards temple buildings, are to discover a many-headed Doum palm and suddenly around a corner of six-storey flats (in one of them a Hindi movie-music genius trained at Juilliard in New York one has forgotten to look up) on Malabar Hill — a great long tank of water, huge stone tranquil tank, legendary Banganga (“arrow shot into the Ganges” it was created by, once if not now). Sixty by one hundred fifty feet at a guess, sacred, flower-and bread-strewn waters, offerings laid out along the steps for purchase, stone steps on all four sides of the tank, at festivals hundreds here; beside the temple a Peepal tree, its figs sacred but not visible, a few hundred feet from the hidden sea this tank surrounded by slum voters in the midst of the City and still supplied by distant springs, an old man bathing, two boys in a small canoe chilling.

Remote one is, yet near another. As hundreds, thousands, of monks up among their rockbound caves sleeping each upon his plinth practiced water management two thousand years ago by simple overflow of seasonal monsoon into small rock cisterns at their thresholds one down to the one below, or side by side overflow, many to many, cracks in the rock, channels made by hand and weather to catch rain little by little thoughtfully — thoughtful rain — from high to lower as if it were also from low to high . That deeply remote sector of the reservoired and forested, vast hard-to-grasp National Park bordering the mind as it borders Mumbai — in fact is in, or you could say of , Mumbai. To be there, what would it cost? you plot your question to be real with help. A guide already valued on such fugitive acquaintance who is not at Banganga nor at the caves nor to be found in the viewfinder will be paid somehow, and now like many places at once turning away from you almost unnoticed, quite far from here how does she bring home what the monks left? Which was enough if we would grasp to take away with us not just the monks’ sensible conservation but what came with it. Is it the monkeys, the macaques, that multiply near the caves and nearer the visitors and their lunch? No. Is it other animals in the forests — sequestered, it is said, if imperfectly fenced?

The girl knows. How is she near? For she is.

Somewhere near the National Park, its lands for all its mountains, or we would say high hills, its lands also bordered by everyday Mumbai avenues, a slum resettlement 20-square-meter flats incorporated into what foots the bill for the rehab high-rise — or was it in Worli sector? — who of us can tell in this estuarial Bombay / Mumbai / anciently offshore island of islands — but a deal in multirational syntax undertaken jointly with a local firm by a global American. Three dozen folding chairs one especially welcome for a foot-weary tourist facing in lowered light a large projection screen, the handsome working space beyond occupying a handsome ground-floor like a London or New York loft and above it an open upper level reached by stairs or ladder, your call.

What is wrong, with everything so right? A still larger architect studio tonight, is it mad easygoing? — after this evening’s presentation of recent completed institutional work by the firm’s representative head architect here. Weighty college campuses outside Mumbai (you had to wonder watching slides slide by), seeing double the neoclassical banal. Young Asian from Cornell sitting in the next seat, her foot comfortably under her, asks, all by herself, “Why this?” Others equally young murmur sort of wordlessly like a so soft ululation, but her elbow jabs you by mistake, as, equally astute, she whispers she is sorry like a silent, sweet-breathed snicker and her neighbor hears himself say quite out loud to the very big, still unknown man at the projector, “How does it change you to walk into a set of buildings like that?”

“Have ya never been to college? Well, good luck finding landscape clients,” the host replies, not knowing the questioner.

Presently, lights up upon the erosion of the evening still waiting for the meaning to coalesce amid a constant, virtually structural smiling. One takes in the place without looking too closely out of one’s curious curiosity. Against the walls formica surfaces, stacks of drawings, tracings, invoices, books, black and white, or planed precariously like a fanciful mock-up a fugitive red notebook perched under an anglepoise — three dozen anglepoise lamps continuous with the tilt of drafting tables either side of a median spread of light refreshments. And the jovial host weightily big but with the athletic timing of certain also shaved-bald holy men, “originally” from Sacramento, once a flood risk, now a drought, here in his office grinning upon being introduced by leader and friend to the mystery visitor: “— giving us his take on our—” “What?” “— our coastal interventions and you know terracing up in the —” “His take ?” “— up in the valleys.” “Ah.” “Outlet channels in the reservoir valleys turn them into —”

“Holdings,” special guest intervenes on his own on his leader and kind friend’s behalf — “Ah, yeah, yo’ water-lovin’ gig up there in the Naeetional Park.” The two architects laugh. “Good luck with that stuff, buddy, that’s your kind of uh —”

“— like a field ,” mystery guest intervenes again, “rather than channel, as I understand it, spreading the monsoon waters, even terracing as sewage filters (?), as I under —” “Ah, you’ve experienced the monsoon?” resident Yank to a visiting — who now, as if it were all natural — spots the girl the girl.

“But he is an economist,” intervenes your leader politely adding (using, including, surely not almost needing you), “aren’t you, and” (to the host) “a poet quite well- known.” “A real writer,” the radiant Indian wife adds / offers / corrects / adroitly perhaps peace-makes (?), “oh a real —”

“— story teller !” comes a voice that stills it seems the whole place for a moment, familiar voice: astonishingly it is the Mahim Fort guide and companion photo-op girl who has been here all the time, unseen for a moment behind the boss’s retorting bulk. Or earlier at large in the studio. Mingling in an efficiency of overhead floods and designer guests. Her contribution to this joint introduction inserts too much clarity, for already the host, overlapping her, as he turned to reveal her behind him, addressing the visitor but not quite contemplating him, “Well, you’re going to have to start telling the truth now” — grins all around.

“About the work we’ve seen tonight?” mystery guest returns the point point-and-click. Host turns slowly, the girl behind him brushed by her employer’s elbow, even the back of his hand? (a pet?) — for you’ve said your say; for what is at stake? Yet her laugh, so exact, is heard equally now by the host who must speak to it as well: “Oh I’ve done that for you in the slide lecture, pics worth a thousand words,” host fixes his cordial aim like a corbelled balcony pushed out over everyone threatened.

“Then why the lecture?” you have to wonder; yet host-employer turning to the girl, for it is she, the Fort girl, astonishingly, but of course! and as before with eye makeup but not lipstick, it seems, and, if heard by anyone else, only by you by some state-of-the-art device his words to her are grasped — “The mystery guest, I gather,” ignoring your “It takes me so long to learn.”

“You have so much at stake,” the girl said then as clearly as words could describe it, “take it from me,” whatever in the world she could mean, though she swept her look between the two men; and the leader-friend and his wife, and the younger Americans, all together for a moment in her knowledge of how far out of it she in her state might be, yet no special comradeship for the older woman to be sensed in the girl. The maturity of women not an act, the storyteller hopes.