Joseph McElroy: Taken From Him

And he is gone. Is she his wife? Not likely, he looks like her, acts like her, doesn’t he? — will look ahead and claim things are true. Is still a father. Like day laborers, three men watch her get herself together, she is adjusting her nose it seems.

“It is only family,” were stiff words later remembered, like a precise demeanor embracing their history in the Fort and in the handsome ground-floor studio just now and her estimate of people, if not of him, officially greeting him at the curb, “You see what becomes of me if I speak about a bridge in the National Park and a reservoir if there was a canoe for you the best entrance along the east road.” To one’s longing she speaks.

Yes, that was her father and not a bad man, though wild, she grants.

Wild?

See what he drives, she shakes her head not like a young fan of the motor trade. He knows all kinds of things in the National Park, he knows his job. He knows what happens every day.

What is that?

“Do you doubt me?” The umbrella gathered in her hand she is glad of, her nose not bleeding. “What has happened will happen. But that is not all. That is what he says.”

She both prolongs her stay on the curb of the sidewalk and does not. Why must you go everywhere with this group? she wants to know. Because they were smart, because he has a job to do really, though it is not spoken of. A sprinkle of rain seems to pass but doesn’t. Water in Mumbai holds us together. She has charmingly taken from him his compact umbrella, holds it tight. She looks O.K. What did she take from him in the Fort?

She had stuck to you and surely not by your following her. Day after tomorrow the best entrance to the National Park — she mentions a street. Why day after tomorrow?

She has turned away. “But what are you?” she’s back without having gone. Her hands are free-looking as if she weren’t holding the umbrella, a fighter. “I could walk away from this. There are enough bad architects — it is like that global education center down South” — her phrase strange — “with marble everywhere and informal seating around the grand staircase like those big dams the man once called temples.” Nehru she meant, centuries of planetariums ago it seems, who could not love India so much loved he not the future more. Two women stopped without quite stopping, speaking in undertones as if you had stopped for them, and the girl produced a few coins, muttering reproachfully, “And why you say it takes you so long to learn? You said that in there. It was him or you.”

And, while he looked in his pockets, thinking he’d probably never see her again, “Well did you make any friends in there tonight?” she said, she might have heard the question asked him two days ago when he came out of the fort apparently without her, the compacted existence and rank thought inside, and raw dwelling, relations and underfed energy, almost impassable corridors by turns distant-daylight or lightbulb dusk, that late Mahim beach morning, And then, with the group, a change of itinerary outside the Fort that morning, and then another, and the girl all but forgotten. Yet she had described an architect she would take him to visit. “But your group is already going — it is Novi Mumbai — New Mumbai — a studio for many thinking people to work and live, he says, ‘Space we subconsciously create’ — and a filler of in-between spaces, between your home and a warehouse for instance, a place sandwiched” (she had laughed, taking them down a corridor holding out her hand to a woman who passed as if she passed through them, so close).

And now tonight he thought Who was the architect she had meant, who also had built a summer house very open with a secret room beneath for water fed from an aquifer still further below, sustainable, he had thought she said, though which aquifer and how could it be privately sourced? So that now in the narrow street of a professional neighborhood that her father had just departed, a taxi like a question slowed, then accelerated, and the two women moved on fluidly or doing their job. And the girl said, hearing his thought, “You remember the man I told you of, his secret water room, his in-between architecture, I could take you to him. Planted trellises, wood screens filter out what you need not turn away from. But you will make something better, or you already have, at your age.” Could she have meant something already achieved? — for she had muttered, he would swear, “They will look up to you,” swear later, at home in a fifth-floor B&B with antique bureaus and is it mahogany the wardrobe, and a casement looking out on the spectacular promenade of Marine Drive at night and bordering it a bay and Arabian Sea, the view nothing like Mahim Fort’s bay three miles away on this islanded terrain, three mornings ago — for what has changed?

Two Vespas one after the other senselessly close to the curb as if this were a once-cobbled puddle path in a teeming market street. And she was still here. He could not give her money. He could get her a visa, the thought found him like a wild and insidious friend in himself who would walk away unnoticed; later an idea he might have bought her a meal after all those hors d’oeuvres. “You are like a flurr y of rain,” she turned to leave him here knowing he could use a guide to get home, “end of the monsoon, you know? That final sweep coming in from the sea across Marine Drive,” she spoke so, “you know where that is, I know you know, even the weight of it at the very end of the mon soon, you will see it tomorrow. You come and you go.” Her voice holds its own music. With her free hand she picked from her hair the jasmine sprig before it fell.

“I hear you,” her American ventures, “but there is a day after tomorrow?” What had she and her father spoken of? Between them, father and daughter whatever is shared awkward ongoing, stupid yet raw, not fixed.

A mark on her nose, a fine bruise her hard-worked beauty, imperfect, had contempt for, like the fleck, infinitesimal crack on her lip, not old lipstick but surely not blood. Character. For she let him go by going herself without a word more except what she left him with to recall — did he hear her say, “Not gonna take it”?

Yet to cross the path of such a person and not know what it was — an interesting danger? some access traded to him for what? And later imagine that she who might prove as impossible as a Mumbai girl begging persistently on the street had stuck to him of all people, And beginning when? For he, a brief visitor in the City, was hardly here, he felt the borrowed camera at his rib as if he would catch as catch can what this girl took from him, which was some ID he had as a guest, it came to him, appropriated by her for the moment. At least see her home wherever she lived. She was gone with the umbrella.

And so it was that what was to happen, or nothing, on that day after tomorrow, might happen where her father, of course, was a driver. Three scheduled trips left for the group of landscape architects. Two, as it fell out, but in the end, one that the visiting amateur strangely settling in was able to join, or so it would seem. A humid early morning that began along the densely inhabited, slow promontory track at Worli of low slum dwellings infinitely unalike crammed together like caves of a village open to sea light and ancient activity, the small Fort at the end where the boat ramps and the blue nets and, everywhere, drying fish — what kind? — kept one there like a settler; the Sea Link bypass bridging so near now out to the left in one direction as to be on top of you, the bay of fishing boats in the other, the low Fort a pivotal monitor host once, now antique outpost fortified with the habits of people bypassed by a greater scale which is motion, distance, traffic, even talk, he’s telling three fellow-tripping photographers — who’re shooting fast yet, so young, still listen, to almost an elder or equal: what he is looking at out there and sort of questioning them, these landscape architects — at least Alex and Alexis (though a preoccupied sound from the third, the red-haired one, of agreement, or what ever), not just the mysterious geology of it all or the hidden flows of volcanic event that shaped this west coast, horizons that dip beneath the sea now and again as if to afford entry for the great creeks of fluid estuary terrain threatened with wholesale reclamation — imagine barges out under the Sea Link biotreating the future or right here a walkway anchoring stepped terraces to be enlarged for markets, fishing, and it is said theatrical performances part of a loose generous circulation over the bay to Mahim and the vast micro economy of slum industrial Dharavi, for one, that through contact they all — several more “stations,” these professionals say in their language, is it Sewri? — may become what they are.