Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

Her son shrieks and leans out over the tower. A man behind him grabs his T-shirt and swoops him up. The boy kicks and punches until the man passes him to another stranger, all talking, all trying to get at the boy or get off the platform. Suriya juts her hand in the air and repeats a loud, clear sentence until a pathway clears for her. She kneels before the wailing boy, then takes his hand and leads him toward the stairs. Does she know him? I follow a few paces behind. The crowd is thick. I have to wait for minutes like years on each step before moving to the lower one. I lose sight of Suriya. It doesn’t matter. Nothing I do matters at all.

At the base of the stairs, Suriya is speaking to the ticket collector, still clutching his tickets in one hand, the other hand empty, open, resting on the banister. If I don’t move, the hands are thinking, I will not exist. If I stay very still, waiting, something else will happen. The door to the arena is opened. A clot of men with their hands in their pockets, one of them silently weeping, obscures the view of the mother. Suriya feels me beside her, turns. Her face is soft, contourless, merging with the sweet, greasy air, as if she has abandoned herself in order to be present inside this hell. “I do not know this boy, but I tell the people I am his auntie,” she whispers, answering the questions I cannot formulate. “He needs one grown-up, not all the grown-ups.”

She lifts the boy on her hip and moves toward the open door of the plywood hole. No longer crying, close enough to his mother to see her, the boy becomes afraid and burrows into Suriya’s shoulder. I don’t want to see, either. A man emerges from the crowd as we approach and gestures Suriya back outside. They whisper. Suriya addresses the boy, beams, jostles his leg. “Mother is alive,” she tells me. “But she is not awake. We do not want the boy to see her and believe she is dead.”

“That’s great,” I say, barely registering my own idiocy.

For a long time, nothing seems to change. Then a white truck approaches, honking its way across the sand, scattering the frozen onlookers. It parks just outside the arena. Men — no, these are boys — jump out of the truck, open its back doors, pull out a stretcher. Everyone begins moving at once then — the crowd on the stairs surging downward, the people on the outskirts of the field closing in around the tower. And here is Ayya, pale, out of breath, nodding harshly in response to Suriya’s questions. He begins walking away from the tower, against the crowd closing in. Suriya follows him. I follow Suriya. She murmurs something to the little boy. A friend of Ayya’s will drive us to the hospital in his truck. Why are we at the center of this drama? How does Suriya know exactly what to do?

We wedge ourselves onto the front seat of the truck, my thigh mashed against Suriya’s, the boy’s weight shared between us. His leg pours heat into mine. He’s probably about five. His hair smells like fried food, not unpleasantly. I have the urge to wrap my arm around his waist, cuddle him to me. But I make myself follow Suriya’s example: committed but distant.

—

The hospital is a sunny building with open-air corridors and stairs that wrap around the outside of cavernous rooms. The waiting area is made of stone, one wall open to the bright, smoggy air outside. A young woman brings us tea and cookies on a plastic tray. The boy looks away from the food. Suriya presses cookies on me. They taste good. I reach for another. Suriya tries to play with the boy, hiding behind the chair and hoping he’ll find her, pointing at me and saying, “America” and “New York.” He watches Suriya closely, expressionless.

Sometime later, a middle-age doctor with reassuringly severe cheekbones joins us. Suriya hops up and smooths back her hair. “The mother is okay,” Suriya tells me after the doctor leaves. “Broken hip and broken leg. But her head is okay because she dressed a helmet.” This seems like a miracle to me, and I tell Suriya so. “Lord Buddha helped her,” she says. “So she can take care for her child.” The boy’s body is light and motile now. He hops from one foot to the next, biting down on his thumbs.

Now that he has relaxed, Suriya kneels down and asks him serious questions. He answers seriously: “Rajith. Ha. Ne. Ha. Ha. Ne.” Rajith is six years old. His father is a bus driver so he is not at home very much. An auntie in his village takes care of him when his mum is busy, so he can stay with her while his mother recovers in the hospital. “We must visit him in his auntie’s home,” Suriya says to me. “He will be sad without his amma.”

Suriya does not lie awake at night wondering whether or not her life has a purpose.

The boy peers out a window, turns his head side to side, sings. Suriya translates his song for me: “Trucks trucks TRUCKS trucks trucks TRUCKS…”

—

After we have a meal in town, we are permitted to see Rajith’s mother. Suriya and I stand outside, letting Rajith enter alone. The sounds of their reunion are stifled and unsatisfying — a surfeit of feeling trapped in timidity and weakness. A doctor pokes her head out the door and gestures us in with aggressive hand movements. Rajith’s mother is prone on a stretcher, her right leg in a cast from toes to hip. Rajith kneels at the top of the bed, leaning over his mother’s face, pointing to Suriya and me, bouncing lightly on his bent calves. “She must not sit up,” Suriya tells me, “so we must come near to her face.”

We stand over her. Her eyes look queerly small and bewildered, just as they did before the motorbike lost its grip on the wall. She stares at us, unblinking, then turns to her son, says a short sentence about the sudhu. Rajith lowers himself off the bed — slowly, slowly, lest he disturb his mother. He kneels in front of me and touches my feet. “He worships you because you help to save his mum,” Suriya says.

“But it was you who helped. I didn’t do anything.” I would never get involved in a stranger’s problem. I might cry over it, but I would not take action. I stare at my clasped hands.

“Yes, you helped, El,” Suriya says. “Rajith waits for you to touch his head.” I smooth my hand over his head just so that he’ll stand up, worship Suriya too, return to his mother’s side. But the doctors are standing before me now as well, thanking me again and again in English. “You are the hero of today,” one of them says, long spaces between each of her words.

“Suriya did everything,” I say. “I didn’t do anything. Suriya deserves the praise, not me.” But they don’t understand me and Suriya is content to stand silently beside the American witness to her goodness.

Before we leave, she writes down Rajith’s address and mobile number. Rajith will stay at the hospital with his mother tonight. In the morning, he will go back to his village to stay with his neighbor until his father comes back from work or his mother gets out of the hospital. “Rajith will be all alone,” Suriya says. “So I promise that we will visit him and play.”

Only once we’re on the bus back to Suriya’s house does she voice the thought that’s been a wordless hum in my head all day, one I’ve been struggling not to hear. “A mother must not have a danger job. A mother must stay with her child in the home.”

—

Even Suriya sleeps late the next morning. I’m awake when she rolls up her mat and begins sweeping, but I keep my eyes shut until she leaves the room. I need aloneness. The day has the obligatory tone of a winter morning in New York, I don’t know why. It’s as if I were standing for a long time with my hand on the doorknob before heading out to work my shift at the bookstore. Wind, people, cars, bikes, rats, ice, trains, hats, horns, beggars, trash, millions of tiny movements required to get from A to B and back again; no reasons, just thoughts and steps, thoughts and steps. I have to wait for the oddly conflicting strands of my personality to braid into a generic staunchness — weary, then stiff. I have become a part, apart. A breeze crests the windowsill and I lift my sticky shirt up to my collarbone. I long for Jared, as I always do when I feel this way — the strength of his desires steamrolling the productive world, his loud commitment to squashing immediate suffering by any means at hand, even those that will make him suffer more later.