Joseph McElroy: Taken From Him

Alex and Alexis zooming near and far, respectively, one can tell. A craggy guy, you think his name is Alex — quite patient, or something else, like one of one’s own kids coping in San Diego, Cincinnati, New York — lowers his camera, and here is this abandoned cracked-concrete booth and counter open for unimaginable business months maybe years ago open to the wind he’s been shooting with a corrugated lean-to roof pinned to a couple of beams; over the counter on the right wall hanging by nails two chipped reddish-clay tantrics also a goddess chart like an ad faded with many robed yet exposed folded legs and slender feet poly-positioned. On the front support beam are chalked, “Rock on Boy” — and “FUCK 9:00 PM TEAM.” Did that mean a gang? (Yes, Alex thought so.) Showing up at nine? Alexis, who will be half Filipino, that taut, still soft terrain around the eyes, who’s lowered her camera, smiles on it, happy with what is about to happen. In the depths of the camera what is looked at changes, is that it? Alex screens back to shots taken. Is it to his friends or, half, to you he’s speaking in this sea-stilled place? “We’re taught to design for access, maximum access to activities and other people in a place, a material place connected to the next place, right? Materiality; access, and so on. We intervene. But look at this broken concrete, it’s nice. We’re supposed to consider everything. Look at the family fish baskets on the boat ramp. What was the question?” The third colleague laughs. “Whatever,” he murmurs, still within earshot. The Sea Link anchored above his red hair: “Whatever,” he’s heard to say, he’s focused on a long, inexpressibly graceful skiff in emergency need of total repair overturned near two children sorting shrimp. Alexis, behind her extra-large sunglasses, asks, because it is a question, “We looked for you last night.”

They did?

“Where did you go in such a hurry? That was some answer you gave. It made me think.”

“Me too.”

“I could tell. It’s … who you are. We went to Worli.” “Food run out?” Alexis’s high laugh, “Yeah, those pakora”—.

Worli? A club in Worli. The music? Alex lets his camera dangle. Some Fusion.

“No Daft Punk?”

“You know them?” Alex asks.

They had something coming out. Random Access Memory” (?) you thought it would be called — those underwater voices. “Whoa,” Alex will look at you like a prophet. “You know them?” He means the band members. It’s just from one of your grown kids, in the business — whom you never see. Never? says Alexis. One not for many years… “The music one?” “I go back to Talking Heads, Alex.” “Daft Punk, man. You went in Mahim Fort, right? Saw you go in. ” Alex holds Alexis’s hand, here at Worli Fort. She reaches for yours. “Tonight?” “We’ll see. I’m taking the afternoon off.” Alexis squeezes your hand, reading your thought. “Hey,” their friend calls from the far side of the ramp, a blue net with a catch of small silvery fish, he’s drawing rapidly in his book, eat them bones and all. “Hey I read they kidnap kids for their kidneys.”

Late, late in the day, the leaders waiting unexpectedly the far side of Marine Drive, clouds coming in. And what they see unexpected for them too, and not only the end of the monsoon but what happens in the human world.

He could not live here but he is finally here. Coming up Veer Nariman Road happily alone, so late in the afternoon it is practically evening, the shops, the coconut water stand beside a great dilapidated tree, its roots reaching up out of the ground. Now coming home on his own. The end of the afternoon his, what common thing has happened? A minute child in a sari sticking with two tourists crossing even against the light to get away from her, her hand touching a shopping bag, touching a wrist. It was the street, the mentality here where they could know anything; the begging now touching thought.

Right here on the sidewalk, ensconced between a palm he passes and a battered tree with a swollen trunk, two little ones on a thin blanket, patterned, faded, no more than a sheet. A girl bending over them then knelt to play with them, the two-year-old who sat, so straight of spine, next to a baby on the pavement. Could they be hers?

And the two women there, darker, were talking to her, squatting in their saris, or however their legs were arranged under their pink and black-and-rose dyed saris, something was going on and the girl, it seemed, had just arrived, playing with the two tiny ones, as he approached and heard the women at her, one of them familiar.

When the girl turns, it is his friend — here again. Is it the same? Always pretty nicely gotten up in her blue tunic and bluejeans. More than a girl, and with that bearing, that urgency — it was the girl from last night and the Fort and the viewfinder, the studio, the fridge, the Vespa father. How could he pass by?

He had to hear what they said to her. She was of them but not; and they were on not even a blanket, or very light blanket perhaps, which they might sleep on at night, you could feel the pavement soften. Yet had he seen them here early this morning near the tree? He knew the name of this tree, he thought.

Passersby all but stepped over the family. Of them also now a boy approaching two women tourists, asking for spare rupees, asking and asking, hand like a ghostly touch upon the forearm — barefoot, only in shorts — falling back, to approach somebody else, and then a severe elderly gentleman with gold-rimmed eyeglasses who interested the boy for the cage in which a young red-breasted macaw swung.

Up through the trees light ripening or whatever it was doing upon the coastal boulevard ahead as if whatever it was came from land as well as from the sea, this more than peopled City, its southern sector. And if, as he passed the family, part of it, he half hesitated to hear what the two women were saying to the younger one in evident irritation or worse — “even stay,” he thought he heard (so he felt for the camera he wasn’t used to on a shoulder strap, realizing they weren’t speaking English) — she turned from the little one she was playing with, joking with her, petting her, and was in profile and knew he was there, he believed, this pedestrian passing, and she looked toward him, looking through him like a flicker to yell at the boy down the street doing his job, quick, thin, at home. Faces that want something or are ready to from you, or nothing, and if nothing, what then?

Thinking he shouldn’t recognize her here, his heart split its threads of dumbness but all he could do was be ignored: “You laughed last night? Who were you laughing at?” But here he was lurid to himself, the girl on the sidewalk beneath him. One of the women he knew from Mahim Fort. Who were they all? The girl’s less educated family? Not only. And close and not close. One spoke: Who is he? he imagined she said.

He was gone, her voice behind him then, “I know why you pass by here. You know I know.” He was at the sidewalk stand buying water ignominiously, thinking about his umbrella, fleeing an enchanter, but listening.

And with all this he arrived at the curb where V N Road came out into elegant, breakneck Marine Drive, and to his surprise saw, past the cars, carriages, motorbikes, vans, and against the backdrop of South Bay and the Arabian Sea out beyond them, his friends, the leaders of the research trip, this couple seeing him as if they had been waiting for him or thinking about it, having missed him this afternoon, but no. The traffic lights had not quite turned, one set for crossing, one for cars violently turning in to V N, but you don’t know these lights, and over on the far side of the boulevard his friends are waving, and along the promenade, couples perched on the barrier looking out at the empty bay, their backs to him as he has set off still against the light to cross Marine Drive.