Joseph McElroy: Taken From Him

It had been a laugh, hers if you wanted to hear it, near and material, sociable, ghostly, and in an original thread young. Among all the would-be professional bodies and voices, here again, not ancient, the Indian girl: so show you know her. An intern maybe, who’s found an everyday home, standing like a guest which she wasn’t, cordially near the Americans, the architects, the pros, and the visiting design students loading up on cashews, carrots and cheese, olives, best of all crisp pakora, drinking from plastic cups all somehow associated with the girl, he would understand in a moment.

Both men, if nobody else, had felt the girl’s laugh, and the American architect, the host, with a pretty big if puppet operation here, snapping his fingers pointed her to some task she needed to attend to, small is beautiful. When she moved, a familiar earring, some silvery shape with a shining jet dot of eye in it perhaps, and she was gone; as the visitor, the writer, the also amateur tagging along with his professional friends, grasping at it all (who had everything, even unto being an amateur), added (for her to hear), “It takes me even longer” — though not without a slant at the host, though himself for the moment old; and watched her go and actually disappear, swaying as she went, a life-form in a silver-mirrored blue tunic and jeans, taking time with her: reappear and fling open a fridge and its interior lights that itself seemed to appear out of a wall that hadn’t been there. Which man had she been laughing with? Was there any doubt? A microwave saving time.

“ What stories?” tonight’s host puts it to you but maybe not; growling like quick-sketching a Greco-Roman façade for India’s future. But, turned to by him whom he has challenged, big man nods agreeably elsewhere to the Americans as if they have spoken to him, and maybe one of the gals is looking for a job over here designing campuses or atrium décor — or slum-rises.

Yet presently at the far end where an Indian gentleman is telling us who would listen what the anthropology of the slum-family’s field of planning and structure implies, and the deceptive drums and tailgate Ganesh festival you have seen out your cab window coming from the airport, the girl is not at this end now, she’s passed through the fridge and the microwave into the distant front end of the studio. Transferring from cardboard boxes to platters potato and fried eggplant pakoras, only to interrupt herself and answer, with quick, aroused steps toward him, the big man, her employer. Who has something to say to her, and she to him — they have words — when he points toward the back now fifty feet away — it’s the mystery guest surely he points to — and she does not look, she’s having a discreet row with her boss, who cools, shakes his head as she speaks, and again shakes perhaps more than his head — who just maybe reprimands her not to fire her but to keep her, holding her by the shoulders not quite to shake her, as anyone can see who misses nothing.

The anthropologist asked his question again, the leader elbowed you gently, his overflow of pleasure in others as fluid surprises almost in themselves — and mystery guest obliges in kind: So now your citizens are to carry hammers to break car windows if high water floods automatic systems. The terrible swift floods of July 2005, as one understands it, blamed your poor little fucked-up River Mithi, which even more is now to be fixed in a predictable map of city planning procedure in fact a centuries’-old war against water, which is not what an estuary’s aqueous terrain demands. Likewise one’s family asks access each member to each across creeks flowing in more than one direction, elastic spaces to be improvised with, lived with, mudflats our in-between resources for overflows or high tides not to be erased by reclam— … (you seem to tell a story, what was the original question anthropologist asked? — for people are nodding alertly — an Asian woman writing in a notebook)… family you arrive at is like water and will be given its various motions, its gradients and fields of porous holdings not dammed and master-planned.

The wife in all her radiant wit and responsibility her lightly brocaded kurti, her senses of others, also her genius, takes your arm, “You see! It was an amazing answer to the question how economics, landscape, everyday life and storytelling coincide!”

And your laugh at this — and not drunk at least on the wine — though breathless seeing then your Indian girl at the other end — has she lost her job? got even? — stride across to find her bag behind a stack of office things — will cover other reasons to laugh, as you reluctantly excuse yourself. (“Remember Worli Fort tomorrow,” words follow perhaps from what has been said.) The girl has taken a medium notebook from a precarious stack of folders and books — a plastic wine glass takes a tumble — the red notebook recalled from the Fort she slips into her bag looking only to her exit yet seemingly everywhere, a god unknown to herself, if the amazing answer to an almost unknown question could be written down in a letter to her.

At the door mystery guest will not hearken to the host’s call, the presiding American thug architect’s Hey where you goin’? — but outside in the evening established before you, are dark edifices built by the British in this professional neighborhood of is it south central Mumbai darkened even in daytime by great imported trees now in the half-light the bark alive with an India foreigned of such profit-sharing distances as New York and London offer and those half-knowns we make into knowns, a warped and gall-bulging raintree scale of trunk not for all the poor all of the time, and there are many trees but not clear what they are doing.

Where is this? Across the street a man sits the seat of a Vespa, the girl her hand on its near handlebar angry and exact. A pose that says Family but says to the forty-year-old man who sits the seat poised to spring grimly mechanized wholly from here that she will not be tolerated by him . Angrier and more the two of them, her hand on the Vespa says to herself she has a stake in this Vespa through the body of the man who owns it and even her at times; who shakes her hand off so he can get going — she could wrench the angled right-side mirror right away from its base.

In angry argument with the man, her father doubtless, now (as if one hadn’t seen it happen) not on the Vespa but standing on the curb beside her and you’d cruelly like to hear what they are saying; it was English, now not.

She’s told him she quit her job. Or told him nothing, or will go on with could-be nonpaying internship — or she has said nothing new. And “tomorrow” is heard, and “day after tomorrow” in English, then as she turns away from her father, for it must be him, or her prideful uncle, and has seen a man she knows of a certain age in a rainjacket with an umbrella, and the anger growing as words sink away from it inhabits the man’s eyes which are his daughter’s eyes and wishing to hear what they’ve been saying about what will happen tomorrow and tomorrow in a place, the American has been noticed…

The man with his daughter’s eyes sees him and does not look away for a moment. One might have said, Your father … thinking also, has an instinct.

She wouldn’t quite touch him, she’s going to walk. He swings his leg through and settles on the seat, reaches for the starter button. He tries, he’s absent, absorbed, male, grim, humiliated again, looking ahead and speaking; he jiggles the button, she points somewhere and he finds an aerosol can of contact cleaner with a straw coming out the top, and she berates him and then he has got the Vespa going. He swings the back of his right hand hard across her face cleverly enough to nearly knock her down.