All at once the foreman got up from his chair, took a step down the embankment, and raised his stick over Soumya’s father. “Pay attention, I said.” He brought his stick down.
Soumya shut her eyes and turned away.
The workers had returned to their tents, which were scattered about the open field around the dark, half-demolished house. Soumya’s father was lying on his blue mat, apart from everyone else; he was snoring already, his hands over his eyes. In the old days she would have gone to him and snuggled against his side.
Soumya went up to her father. She shook him by his big toe, but he did not respond. She went to where her mother was making rice, and lay down beside her.
Mallets and sledgehammers woke her up in the morning.
She ran to her mother and cried:
“Daddy’s working again!”
Her mother was with the other women; they were coming down from the house, carrying large metal saucers on their heads filled to the brim with rubble. “Make sure Raju doesn’t get wet,” she said as she passed Soumya.
Only then did Soumya notice it was drizzling.
Raju was lying on the blanket where his mother had been; Soumya woke him up, and took him into one of the tents. Raju began whimpering, saying he wanted to sleep some more. She went to the blue mat; her father had not touched the rice from last night. Mixing the dry rice with the rainwater, she squeezed it into a gruel, and stuffed morsels into Raju’s mouth. He said he didn’t like it, and bit her fingers each time.
The rain fell harder, and she heard the foreman roar, “You sons of bald women, don’t slow down!”
The moment the rain stopped, Raju wanted to be pushed on the swing. “It’s going to start raining again,” she said, but he wouldn’t change his mind. She carried him in her arms to the old truck- tire swing near the compound wall, and put him on it, and gave him a push, shouting, “One! Two!”
As she pushed, a man appeared before her.
His dark, wet skin was coated in white dust, and it took an instant for her to recognize him.
“Sweetie,” he said, “you must do something for Daddy.”
Her heart was beating too fast for her to say a word. She wanted him to say “sweetie,” not like he was saying it now-as if it were just a word, air that he was breathing out-but like before, when it came from his heart, when it was accompanied by his pulling her to his chest and hugging her deeply and whispering madly into her ear.
He went on speaking, in the same strange, slow, slurred way, and told her what he wanted her to do; then he walked back to the house.
She found Raju, who was cutting an earthworm into smaller bits with a piece of glass he had stolen from the demolition site, and said, “We have to go.”
Raju could not be left alone, even though he would be a real nuisance on a trip like this. Once she had left him alone and he had swallowed a piece of glass.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To the Bunder.”
“Why?”
“There is a place by the Bunder, a garden, where Daddy’s friends are waiting for him to come. Daddy cannot go there-because the foreman will hit him again. You don’t want the foreman to beat Daddy again in front of all the world, do you?”
“No,” Raju said. “And when we get to this garden, what do we do?”
“We give Daddy’s friends at this garden ten rupees, and they will give us something Daddy
“What?”
She told him.
Raju, already shrewd with money, asked, “How much will it cost?”
“Ten rupees, he said.”
“Did he give you ten rupees?”
“No. Daddy said we’ll have to get it ourselves. We’ll have to beg.”
As the two of them walked down Rose Lane, she kept her eyes on the ground. Once she had found five rupees on the ground-yes, five! You never knew what you’d find in a place where rich people live.
They moved to the side of the lane; a white car paused for a moment to go over a bump on the road, and she shouted at the driver:
“Where is the port, uncle?”
“Far from here,” he shouted back. “Go to the main road, and take a left.”
The tinted windows in the back of the car were rolled up, but through the driver’s window Soumya caught a glimpse of a passenger’s hand covered with gold bangles; she wanted to knock on the window. But she remembered the rule that the foreman had laid down for all the workers’ children. No begging in Rose Lane. Only on the main road. She controlled herself.
All the houses were being demolished and rebuilt in Rose Lane. Soumya wondered why people wanted to tear down these fine, large, whitewashed houses. Maybe houses became uninhabitable after some time, like shoes.
When the lights on the main road turned red, she went from autorickshaw to autorickshaw, opening and closing her fingers.
“Uncle, have pity, I’m starving.”
Her technique was solid. She had gotten it from her mother. It went like this: Even as she begged, for three seconds she kept eye contact; then her eye would begin to wander to the next autorickshaw. “Mother, I’m hungry”-rubbing her tummy-“give me food”-closing her fingers and bringing them to her mouth.
“Big brother, I’m hungry.”
“Grandpa, even a small coin would…”
While she did the road, Raju sat on the ground and was meant to whimper when anyone well dressed passed by. She did not count on him to do much; at least if he sat down he would stay out of other kinds of trouble, like running after cats, or trying to pet stray dogs that might be rabid.
Toward noon, the roads filled with cars. The windows had been rolled up against the rain, and she had to raise both her hands to the glass and scratch like a cat to get attention. The windows in one car were rolled down, and she thought her luck had improved.
A woman in one of the cars had beautiful patterns of gold painted on her hands, and Soumya gaped at them. She heard the woman with the gold hands say to someone else in the car:
“There are beggars everywhere these days in the town. It never used to be like this.”
The other person leaned forward and stared for a moment. “They’re so
“Who knows?”
Only fifty paise, after an hour.
Next she tried to get on the bus when it stopped at the red light, and beg there, but the conductor saw her coming and stood at the door: “Nothing doing.”
“Why not, uncle?”
“Who do you think I am, a rich man like Mr. Engineer? Go ask someone else, you brat!”
Glaring at her, he raised the red cord of his whistle over his head as if it were a whip. She scrambled out.
“He was a real cocksucker,” she told Raju, who had something to show her: a sheet of wrapping plastic, full of round buttons of air that could be popped.
Making sure the conductor couldn’t see, she got down on her knees and put it on the road right in front of the wheel. Raju crouched. “No, it’s not right. The wheels won’t go over it,” he said. “Push it to the right a little.”
When the bus moved again, the wheels ran over the plastic sheets and the buttons exploded, startling the passengers; the conductor poked his head out of the window to see what had happened. The two children ran away.
It began raining again. The two of them crouched under a tree; coconuts came crashing down, and a man who had been standing next to them with an umbrella jumped up, and swore at the tree, and ran. She giggled, but Raju was worried they would get hit by a falling coconut.
When the rain stopped, she found a twig and scratched on the ground, drawing a map of the city, as she imagined it. Here was Rose Lane. Here was where they had come, still close to Rose Lane. Here…was the Bunder. And here-the garden inside the Bunder that they were looking for.
“Do you understand all of this?” she asked Raju. He nodded, excited by the map.
“To get to the Bunder, we have to go”-she drew another arrow-“through the big hotel.”
“And then?”
“And then we go to the garden inside the Bunder…”
“And then?”
“We find the thing Daddy wants us to get.”
“And then?”
The truth was, she had no idea if the hotel was on the way to the port or not: but the rain had driven the vehicles away from the road, and the hotel was the only place where she might be able to beg for the money right now.
“You have to ask for money in English from the tourists,” she teased Raju as they walked to the hotel. “Do you know what to say in English?”
They stopped outside the hotel to watch a group of crows bathing in a puddle of water. The sun was shining on the water, and the black coats of the crows turned glossy as scintillas of water flew from their shaking bodies; Raju declared it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
The man with no arms and legs was sitting in front of the hotel; he yelled curses from the other side of the road.
“Go away, you devil’s children! I told you never to come back here!”
She shouted back, “To hell with you, monster! We told
He was sitting on a wooden board with wheels. Whenever a car slowed down at the traffic light in front of the hotel, he rolled up on his wooden board and begged from one side; she begged from the other side of the car.
Raju, sitting on the pavement, yawned.
