Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“Ayya is so strong. Sometime it makes me afraid to see that,” Suriya says. “He wants the money for my family. I hope he will get it.”

“I hope he lives. This seems dangerous.”

“Very danger, yes. Boys have crazy games. You want to see the lady games?” She leads me to a group of women furiously weaving palm fronds into large, tight squares, sweating, grimacing, licking their lips. A fat woman in a white cotton dress finishes first, shoots her hand into the air. A man blows into a whistle. He inspects her work, pulling at the corners, turning it over to check for holes in the weave. The woman stands aside, panting, beaming, hands on hips, chin high. Her pride breaks my heart. Condescension, yes, but the sorrow is real. All I can know of this woman’s life is what I can imagine.

“You need ice cream?” Suriya asks me.

“No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”

“Small one,” she says, and orders vanilla cones from the metal box passing by. She allows me to pay. We stand still, licking balls of sugary ice atop cardboardy cones.

A group of boys walks past, holding hands in a tight chain, whispering. “Boys from my school,” Suriya says.

“Hello,” I say, loud, bright, hoping to make a good impression for Suriya.

“Hello,” one of the boys mocks me. “Hello, hello,” the others echo, loud, bright. They skirt away, cackling.

“Stupid boys,” Suriya says. “I think this festival is boring for you.”

“Is it boring for you?”

“Yes.” She laughs. “I did not know the festival is boring until I bring — bringed—

“Brought.”

“Thank you, El. Until I brought you here. There are some rides.”

“I love rides!” This is true, but mostly I want Suriya to believe we are having the good time she needed us to have.

The Ferris wheel is powered by teenage boys in flip-flops and blue jeans, who run around like hamsters on a wheel, jumping into the air to grip the metal spokes and pull the giant wheel down to earth, then heaving themselves up and over the bar just before it skirts the ground, riding the spoke to the top, then dangling to pull the tiny cars filled with shrieking families earthward once again, jumping to the ground, grabbing a new spoke, beginning again, cheering one another on, moving faster and faster. A girl of about twelve or thirteen is crying when she gets off, gripping her father’s hand and wailing without apology.

Our turn. I shriek as we whoosh toward the ground. Suriya crushes my hand in hers. At the top, we can see the whole sandy field, crawling with crude human colors and noises and bodies. We spin around and around, propelled by skinny boys in sandals.

When the ride ends, Suriya leads me to a tall, cylindrical tower. I give a man two hundred rupees and we climb a staircase about twice as high as the Ferris wheel. At the top is a doughnut-shaped platform; in the center, a hole with plywood walls; at the bottom of the hole, a man and a motorbike. “What will happen?” I ask Suriya.

The man will ride his motorbike to the top. The plywood walls are perpendicular to the ground. The man looks up at the people crowded around the fence at the top of the hole. His face is a blur. He starts clapping his hands, loud and slow at first, then fast, hard, frantic, psyching himself up to risk his life for a few dollars. I grow nervous and hateful of fairs, spectacles, people crammed into small spaces, trying to have fun. “I don’t want to see this,” I say. But the platform is packed with spectators whistling and clapping, peering over the fence around the top of the hole, watching the man mount his bike. He revs the engine twice, three times, four times. How is it even physically possible to scale these walls with that heavy machine? I’m sickened that my money has supported this wasteful risk.

He starts riding circles on the ground, building speed, taking the walls with his front tire and then crashing back to earth. He rides around the bottom for so long that the crowd jeers. At last, the bike grips the wall and keeps going, making a blurred circle of the man’s body, his head a child’s toy top in the center of the hole. No helmet. He stays low, a few feet off the ground, until the crowd once again taunts and whistles. In a nasty act of the will, he shoots all the way to the top of the fence. Suriya grabs my hand. A teenage girl cries out. Her boyfriend puts his arm over her shoulder and laughs. The man on the motorbike spins and spins below our transfixed faces, moving so fast he has to raise himself up on his legs and grip the hateful machine between his thighs, the wind pushing his lips out in a gummy rectangle around his gritted teeth. His eyes are huge and unblinking. No thoughts — just action, will, wordless prayer. How will he get back to earth, three stories below? He begins spiraling downward, slowing with each revolution. His body knows the exact speed that will maintain friction, yet give him enough time to slam on the brakes when his tires touch ground again, stopping just short of the opposite wall, just short of toppling this entire makeshift structure, killing us all. He dismounts and raises a hand in the air, looking at the ground. We clap. People toss bills and coins into the hole. A grinning father holds his toddler over the abyss. The child’s small hand releases a fifty-rupee note. It takes the money a long time to float to the sand below.

“Do you like, El?” Suriya asks, which is when I realize that my jaw is clenched, my sphincter contracted heart-ward. “It made me scared,” I say. “People should not risk their life for a trick.” As if I know what people should do.

“Let’s leave this place,” Suriya says. But when we try to make our way to the stairs we are pushed back by an opposing force. The stairs are packed with families, talking, shoving. Suriya learns that a woman rider is up next. People are thrilled to see a lady risk her life on a motorbike. Suriya and I are mashed against the back rim of the platform, along with fathers holding children on their shoulders. A young man at the front of the crowd points to me and beckons, inviting the sudhu to join him at the edge of the hole. “Come and see, come and see.” I turn away. Menacing words blare out of loudspeakers. The crowd settles and quiets.

A wail pierces the hush. At the base of the stairs leading up to the platform, a small boy is shrieking and beating the thighs of the ticket collector, who blocks the stairs with his wide stance. “Poor boy,” Suriya says. “There is no room for him.” But then a couple comes by and hands the ticket collector a bill. As he moves aside to let the customers pass, the little boy ducks under his arm and bounds up the stairs. He reaches the top just as the crowd starts clapping and cheering.

The woman rider — chunky and short, wearing a solid maroon salwar kameez — has entered the arena. The boy resumes wailing, pushing his way through the crowd. “Amma,” he shrieks, “Amma.”

“My god,” Suriya says. “That is the son of the woman on the motorbike.”

Strangers reach out to him, murmur gently, or grin and offer to lift him, probably drunk and glad to be involved in anything that seems to matter at all. The boy slaps the hands away, pushing to the front of the platform as the woman below revs the engine. His eyes are red slits. Suriya moans quietly. “I have fear for that boy.” I grip her hand. How stupid this drama is. I could pay that woman right now more than she’ll make for this stunt, spare her son this terror.

The woman rides circles around the perimeter of the sandy hole, speeding up much more quickly than the man before her. Within a minute, she is suspended from a machine whose tires grip a vertical surface, churning the woman in circles so fast I get dizzy watching. The boy is silent now at the front of the platform, gripping the top of the fence. I can’t see his face, just the skin stretched taut over his knuckles, his greasy brown hair smoothed down the back of his head. A woman next to him murmurs and tries to remove his hands from the flimsy barricade, tries to lift him up. He grips and stares. The woman doesn’t want to miss the show, either, and gasps with the rest of us as the rider traces a large figure eight across the walls, zooming down dangerously close to the ground, reversing direction at the last second and speeding upward until her front tire is inches from the spectators’ waists. She is wearing a helmet. Scant reassurance. Her body is alarmingly calm. She doesn’t grip the machine with her legs as the man did. She moves too casually, almost pausing at the end of each of her trips earthward. On one of her trips up, she stops just below the little boy. “Amma!” he cries. She cranes her neck back to see his face. Her front tires leave the wall. She returns her eyes to the bike, revs, revs, revs. Too late. The tires paw the air. She seems poised for a long moment before gravity takes her. I lose sight of her before she hits the ground. The thud is not as loud as it should be.