Joseph McElroy

Taken From Him

Turn away from the arguing voices, be a guest unnoticed, the issue on this slum beach the ancient fort and your group you’re not wholly of — the leader your friend who won’t take No from a gold-badged Mumbai functionary, who swings a hand out like a traffic cop, chops it downward: the fort is off-limits. Hindi translates well into prophetic gestures. He and his two men, uniformly moustached, police the shore, the dubious beach, the huts, the area of the old fort, the view. While in the viewfinder of one’s borrowed camera, distinguished but never to be made friends with, is found the flared gunwale of a skiff, a flash of water light, a patchwork square of yellow-and-gray sail out there for an instant.

Off-limits, the police are saying to our leader, who is not to be taken lightly. Centuries old, its walls stained now, dilapidated, a sight, this fort abandoned but not abandoned, commanding the bay once — now repurposed. A democracy of voices raised, is it India, is that all? — the sheer agitation? Cannot go in there! body language itself warns; while for the visitors, their mentor, an overseas visitor himself this trip, Indian he and his wife, brilliant, famous, quite evidently answers the entrenched official, Nothing says we can’t.

In English, catching the eye of his friend now, who is a sort of special guest tagging along, he tells his people that these guys don’t know what they are doing, though what they are doing saying No to us is finding something to do. While the lead officer, interrupting, has switched to English, yet even now and with this contingent of visiting landscape design specialists from the States, how do you tell if this irate debate is serious? The leader not giving up, his friend the special guest can turn away unnoticed in all probability, the diamond-cable Sea Link bridge a huge sail-shaped glint of it in the camera viewfinder bypassing us to connect North and South Mumbai — Arabian Sea — beyond; the bay this side; and then on a near corner of this shore in the privacy of this lens is found between a jaundiced rampart and you a hand. And a shining profile waiting to go somewhere, a slender shoulder, hopeful, a palpable neck, a comb lifting and gathering a fall of abundant hair. This borrowed lens at a tilt now wide-angling a corner of the fort, when aimed a degree to the left seems followed by the person who then is lost. A degree further, she’s there again, then gone: her hand signaling, it seems, to come in.

Is it the viewfinder of an expensive camera one would never buy that asks the eye to shoot, to click? Instead see with your own eyes a trace of color vanish at the nondescript entrance to the fort, blue gone about its business, hints of silver reflection — yes, a fold in the tunic across the chest young and brave. Perhaps there isn’t time. Look back, remember these young companions you count on to get you from one place to another, the next stop in a metropolis of mapless alleys and slum lanes, Vespas bearing whole families, democracy overlap, ghostly caresses of hands out, begging. No architect, or planner or graduate landscape designer or even taker of snapshots, the mystery guest taken care of, a joke, really. And the person entering the viewfinder, what has she seen, or why?

A pale and speckled dog skittered along the strand looking over his shoulder. Men in shorts wandered the sands. Where are the shells? Historical ground underfoot, befouled beside the waters of Mahim Bay where under the sun a lot is almost happening, fishing boats, an anchored dredger far out near a reclamation dock confirmed on the map, beyond it another of those forts, Worli, on a peninsula, one of two like crab pincers that grasp the bay; or nothing is happening, shaped by some delay in history itself, which is meaningless accelerations. Here, once marked by the Mahim Fort or held by it you could say, sand and coral from the sea met silt and clay from the creek. A shear between materials later confounded by the British with a causeway built across the connecting creek in the 1840s blocking most of the creek deposits. Without them, the sea slowly prevailed, some foundations of the fort eroded, the beach wore away and this whole corner of shore inched north, we’re told. The visitors with a view now to intervention in this landscape, the municipal authority has such projects on hold.

Our leader was talking local Maharathi to the guards now, you’re certain of it at a guess. The guards overmatched by our leader? That’s not quite it. They perhaps do not wish the fort seen inside, the darkness of its population experienced, you could say. But the day has been carried, those who want to go inside the fort, may go, if any after all do. Already at the doorway, camera cased, beware the narrowest passages into what? — hundreds of families housed in a small fort.

It is a plunge like nothing but the stench. In a foreign sea, when will diver descending come back up, breath and heartbeat mortal noise. A faint catch in the chest. Who is here? At once inside the entrance a bend of passageway, in a corner a person shelling or preparing something, from a sack into a pan. Further in, like the City, a ladder to a second floor — a third? — scaffolds up there, the light real — each level four feet or maybe five headroom, sitting-down room. A bent old person in a sari can just lift her pot, a sense of others crouched, seated, maybe busy. Two women speaking of this visitor below, old men lurk. “Ah, you see?” a girl said. “I knew you would come.”

“What do you mean you knew?” It was she from the viewfinder. “You are not one of these architects,” said the girl.

He had smelled her before she spoke standing beside him now (tunic, bluejeans) and knew the smell. Not the breathtaking stench living around them and of waste established suffocating at first and humanly familiar from other stops on the itinerary, but her scent, a plant scent, a distance maybe not hers at all, the intruder into the camera. Water dripping from above, “Careful you will soil your shirt.” It was she for sure. Feel for the camera. She had taken something from him, or would. He did not think of himself. Face, shoulder, glinting comb she’d sent his way in the viewfinder. She was serious about something, she had taken something from him, taken it on or meant to.

This twenty-year-old? She was giving a tour perhaps that he must pay for? She talked from the heart not loudly, like low laughing. “They built this place to last,” she said. A sudden inside of life brushed close as the ladder and the ghost of someone’s elbow bumped, and above, life on a rickety second tier like a loft; then a tunnel almost a rough, coolly crumbling-feeling but established passage ahead cramped to connect or for escape, rutted, a future, smotheringly narrow. He thought she would say something that would strike him and if one can’t wholly listen (even to a strange compliment), the place asks everything.

“Hang onto your camera.” “It’s not mine.” “All the more.” “Don’t really know how to use it.” “That is irresponsible.” “Worse if I misused it.” “I saw you taking a picture of me.” “I didn’t take it.” “You should have.” “Not the first I haven’t taken.” The girl laughed. “It was a photo opportunity, suhrr.” She held up to him, but to do what with, a bar of soap that smelled. “God is in the details,” he was inspired to say. “You mean everywhere?” “Only sometimes.” “You are not a cruel person, but…” — absorb her talk — “you are not here for long. I am an intern. I can drive a scooter. I have two sisters. You understand that.” “I what?” “Here is a boy, he works for the metal recycling over by the river (?).” Scarcely to be seen, a child grins, glad to see you. “The Mithi?” “Precisely.” “Is it really a river?” “Ah, you see that is why I am here.” Who would say such things? But this is what she thinks of the overseas visitor.

Look. In the amber, gray, or angular light everywhere, alcoves, nooks, people by twos or ones, like shrines. Underfoot hard ground pushed up, and rock, concrete, broken and worn smooth and yet uneven, the original undissolved lime showing through a glimmer of puddle (can it be true?). Light ahead outlined a man and a boy in the passage, little room to pass. A ladder rung fingered, see what’s up here. Set foot on a ladder and find the floor above lined in slumwall-like cardboard. A cot occupied by three children and a man with one leg, another actual alcove space set off, a small TV, a toy cricket bat — a stool like a carton is a carton. Eyes of adults, the darkest of foreheads measuring headroom. A poster of a shining celebrity bare to the waist. What looked to be cloth hangings, wash. Between buckets of wash an electrical cord leading under rubbish. No one up here with the hand out. “Can you see the whole place — can you walk everywhere up here?” he asked (though among all these murmurings where was the girl below and why did he ask? About an intricate, compartmented slum?). “Come,” she calls, “the way through is down here.”

Only the passage still, this hacked, shaped, even natural and practically pretending to be ancient corridor and several feet away lighted by a bulb, or, now, a fork in the passage. “It’s a very pricey camera,” her hand on it. “It’s very borrowed,” you say. “Very borrowed,” she took his arm but nowhere to guide — “someone made you take it!” she hits on the explanation. The jasmine, a faint scent, shadows her, it is thin like her young nose, a stud in one nostril. “It’s my sister’s.”

“I knew it. I have a sister.”

The girl was somewhat educated, maybe more.

“Did anyone else come in after me?” “They are ahead of us.” “I don’t see how.” “You don’t have to.” “I need a compass now.” “You have your compass.” “I’m here.” The girl made a warm sound, like a thought. “Inside” — insaieed, she said. “To be inside,” she said. He felt for the camera.

“You have an instinct,” she said, a hint pretentious, this young one.

“Well, didn’t I hear them speaking Marathi?” “Yes, at the end, you knew.” “How can you believe that?” “I will keep you in suspense.” “Was it Marathi?” “It was.” Two little girls were whispering, murmuring seriously; women in saris smiled hello. “You know this place well.” Was she insulted? He looks her in the face, not knowing her name, her forthrightness in the dusk democratic and more; he hadn’t meant Does your family live here; but he had. Presently the girl said, “My grandfather was a magistrate.” “And your family?” Chatter erupting above, she is definitely educated. “And your family?” asked again. Odor like animal hide close, rank, and another question drifts in. “You speak all these languages?” She understood some. “I have a picture of him,” she says of her grandfather.

Ladders, one with a railing, and here are two missing middle rungs leading to how many families — which families?

Up, rung by rung, slipping, to find the girl right behind him, her knuckles on the small of his back, holding onto his belt. “Your sister knows you have an instinct.” “For what?” “For what? It is only what she thinks. To be the welcome guest,” words came back at a slant. Near the top the girl hops magically around the considerably older man with her, the jasmine scent her, a thread along the rank hide smell; or a reminder of some part of her that secretes the jasmine. She addresses two women squatting behind a drape of wash; a third, a wisp of nearly bald old lady, her knees drawn up to her chin under a luminous-pearl sari. Dried here, what will wash smell like? She did the talking it seemed, the women hidden, soft-spoken. Unconvinced by her? How did he know she had spoken of him? Hunched down, on this second level, seeing into another space he felt the overhead on his shoulders. He has only a knack for languages — nothing serious, inherently lazy and older, dreamt conceivably, and now American after so many years. “How did you like that?” “Like a mattress balanced on a bottle of wine.” “You are funny.”

“Grandfather on your father’s side?” is the way to ask the question — as frontways he precedes her down the narrow ladder, heeling the rungs, and the smell was of ordure enriched by charcoal burning all day and rice, historic urine, life a considered hum of humans not entirely their voices. “My father?” she says abruptly above him. “He is a driver.” “He has” — you ask as much as tell her — “encyclopedic knowledge.” “You know he has,” she’s at you oddly. “Is he his daughter’s father?” “Everywhere he goes, he knows everything, he thinks, but only two roads he drives,” her voice, ignoring the question, a hidden edge. “Where he works?”

Light swims through a green cloth hanging, it’s in the beholder. “You spoke of me to those ladies.” “Nothing you don’t know.” “I know nothing.” “He is occasionally humble, he thinks he has everything, I said, and asks for nothing. I told them far from it.” “What did you mean?” “They do not like it here. It is closed in.” “That it is.” “That it is,” the girl he will remember — and knows there’ll be cause to remember — has said caustically, admiringly.

Two (can they be) water pipes, run along the corridor taped together. To get through one stretch of passageway go sideways? Which then intersected with another yet narrowed with effort and familiarity, a more than physical squeeze to get through though more spacious. A man in basketball shorts long on him brushes by, looking down; suddenly he targets man and girl darkly, much of that here. He had no smell himself, in contrast to, it’s worth telling her, the encompassing liquid silage smell recalled from a cow farm he knew once, a story he can tell her in a minute, richer though than this acid trashy garbage going nowhere. She has been looking at him in the dusk, which is no less morning.

“How do you get to live here?” all he could say, with a wave of his hand.

“They pay rent.” “Who do they pay?” “If you don’t pay you are evicted.” “From here” — his words final in the half-light and business as usual. Busy here. But at what?

The girl seemed to think. “You never know when you will have to fight. You know that. I know you do, I have always known you did. What are you but that?” she presumed to say.

“Is this slum rehabilitation like they talk about?” he has weighed her words, is she disturbed? “This? This?” the words incredulous in themselves from her, yet again this view of him: “I could walk away, like you.”

“To a high-rise with a toilet?”

She chuckles, with all of herself. “Plans afoot you know of.” He did. “You know the deal.” He did, having been told by someone important. “Some few lucky ones who get to move, but are they?” he acts her equal. She means that the new high-rises are convenient for women, they have toilets — but are a far cry from the low, sociable shacks interconnecting with hand-improvised shelters folks were supposedly used to. “You will hear from the horse’s mouth,” she went on, her strange foretelling like something she might know but really didn’t; and stranger still, “They look up to you.” Who? he wondered. A pretty sibyl; no more. She was not a beggar, was she? Or not here.

The camera in its case, they have been in the fort too long, and she’s been telling about a handsome sustainable architect he will meet who builds in spaces between buildings but that’s not all. Halfway up the ladder a space up beyond opens a third level on top of the second, like scaffolding held by what look like sugarcane stalks, and two guys stand one above the other up there, high up buried, hands on their hips looking down at you, shining with sweat on their necks and narrow chests. Probably eyeing the girl waiting below.

All, as you retreat down the sticky rungs, a mess of intricacy making a monumental warren hard to view, greater than its idea, than the close flickering, draining places he must get himself out of now but stops. The girl at ease looking up at him when he twists around to look at her, carries a shoulder bag he had not seen and she has understood better than he why he’s stopped on the ladder. “You know,” he begins — and before you know it, paused on the ladder, he has told a story of milking the cow in Devon when he was eight when two people, wrestling above the stall in the haymow tumbled out not silently and fell ten feet to the cement floor of the barn and scraped their cheeks, girl and guy, who hit his head. The Guernsey with her great head and giant neck looked around and there was blood on the cement and saw the boy rip his shirt and take a strip of it and tie it around his brother’s temples like an Indian… “I’ve lost track of the time,” he added, turning to face the ladder he’s on.

“They will wait. I will show you still more, suhrr. I know what you want to see.”

“I’m a special case.” “Just wait and see, special-case.” An infant crying like a newborn piercingly, unusual for India, far inside the fort — or is it India? — you take the hand that takes yours for a moment. Built by the British centuries ago to protect against the Portuguese, what have we? “Some stories not for telling,” said the girl — “What the Cow Saw.” A passageway turns slightly uphill, and a corridor taken without thinking, “I lost track of the time.” “You have me.” And then that which is lost finds relief in light and, thinking her father must drive a taxi, maybe just a scooting three-wheeler, a motor rickshaw wallah cutting it so close, you ask, “Is he hard to live with?”

“He is driver in the National Park” covers that one.

“The National Park.” “You have seen the caves.” She looks inside her bag, a flash of dusky red in there, a woman’s bag. “Why, yes — not all three thousand.” “Yesterday.” “Yes.” How does she know? They have been there once to see the overflow water system down the rocks from basin to basin, channeled, through cracks, and dating from the first century, it is said, the monks, their water catchment system. “Climbed to the top” — deep at the center of the National Park; and will go again, it was said. “You will go again to National Park,” said the girl. How would she know that?

“Here they use the west wall for their toilet,” again she answers not the question but still a question — water — meaning where the beach has eroded there beside the fort into a ditch filling and emptying twice a day, tidal toilet. “And if you get evicted?”

A ghostly push, a turn, and two easy boys on their way out bringing somehow light in on bare feet, and the threshold is blinking what the hell at the hard beach and a scoured-out ditch along the foundations where erosion came and went. Leaning as if he were running, and looked for his people around the corner of the fort. This girl, tunic with the silver mirrors — who had said she knew what he wanted to see, was probably twenty or older and he took the camera and asked who they paid rent to, but she wasn’t behind him — and what in the National Park did her father drive? Cab? Truck? But she wasn’t there. He had her voice down.

In front of him, an American voice, about to be interrupted, part of the design discussion, thinking for herself (or us all), asks Will this “intervention” get done? sketchbook under the point of her pencil. But “Build in the sea what you can’t on land,” the leader sweeps an arm half in irony, excited or is it irked by the Sea Link bypass, “out at sea, and over it!” — noticing now that the explorer has returned. From the beginning he could come with them or not — had he other Mumbai appointments? In fact a total stranger here. Recurred to by the girl with the sketchbook, it comes back to you, the proposal — a major creek dug to bypass causeway, encourage mangroves, provide “axis” for fishing vessels, as for market “access” (the vocabulary again), communal connection, recreation, link sea with river, much with much.

Sewage pumping station further north? Possibly counterproductive there in the light of reclamation: It’s not so hard to reclaim land from sea but is it what you want to do? And re-? As if land never belonged in sea? and now leader and his wife, equal leader, instructing design people what we are looking at in the project, how groves of coconut palms, the primordial settlements here, may eventually again protect the shore, facilitate docking of imagined biotreatment barges visitable as facilities that would “improve life” for families lodged in the Fort. Deservedly famous couple pause to “welcome back” journeyman guest, ask a question somehow jointly framed. How do they do that? It’s not simply in unison, it’s sensually prefabricated, psychic, curious — Indian? lovable? — and understood, though, that the question, “Did you make any friends in the Fort?” doesn’t need to be answered. He absorbs what’s asked without always hearing it — look ahead, and others in the circle on the beach half turn as if they have not been where he has. Something has changed. To belong as a guest, was that it? What the girl has taken from him did he give? Will he pay?

In transit now through the days from Fort to volcanic City dump and along its smoking composite shores fenced off from the street and a going Muslim economy cosm we move with, glimpse the functioning of in its walking discreteness, almost know and leave, with the thought that we do not only describe like snaps to show that you were there. The leaders inspire the group, with further thoughts about their related project at the ancient fishing community out there scheduled tomorrow by Worli Fort at the entrance to the bay still closer to Sea Link but postponed, you hear.

Another day unfolds recycling communities their hidden, jammed nakedness, nearby the smallest indoor/outdoor pottery factories, city folk eyeing visitors even momentarily to inquire all and nothing of them, street footpaths, puddles long as sourceless runnels, ladders always like propped permanence up to small clothing-factory stitcheries, whatever is holding them stacked with expectations one room above another three, four, a period room of manual typists, and this is nothing; and goats quite at home with you of such many-god-given saffrons and browns, black and white — navy blue streak? — and you’d swear of certain grays a dusty green less likely the breeder’s idea than goat’s diarrhea ultimately.

Yet winding among waiting hours, taken to a scintillating developer’s real-time office early one evening, to virtually witness the mysteriously subsidized spirit of almost seven hundred low-cost slum rehab units jointly spread-sheeted against possibly literal explosion of population (forty million in twenty years), lower-rise, and plotted about a 24-storey upper sailing-ship-shaped structure stepped profile due to terracing — the words thought themselves again to the girl as if she weren’t always in his mind — “in essence” housing for the poor “funded by the speculative market” by means of this “commercially viable component.”

The deal, in short.

You can feel her here, is she on the way up or nowhere? His appointment in Mumbai.

Interesting duplexes for lap-swimmers above with high views of sea and golf course — voices everywhere informed as the talents are cobbled together — embedded in which even in a computer slideshow is to be seen for those on whom nothing funny is wasted a real hand, the developer’s young assistant (on the slide? or between slide and screen?) signaling in memory another lensed hand two, three days ago. Getting in your way, like you putting yourself at least in the way of experience.

One morning this tightly scheduled group of visiting designers, privileged young nomads buying bottles of water as they go, passing grand old homes made grander by banyans, by old trees once imported, and now passing down a street towards temple buildings, are to discover a many-headed Doum palm and suddenly around a corner of six-storey flats (in one of them a Hindi movie-music genius trained at Juilliard in New York one has forgotten to look up) on Malabar Hill — a great long tank of water, huge stone tranquil tank, legendary Banganga (“arrow shot into the Ganges” it was created by, once if not now). Sixty by one hundred fifty feet at a guess, sacred, flower-and bread-strewn waters, offerings laid out along the steps for purchase, stone steps on all four sides of the tank, at festivals hundreds here; beside the temple a Peepal tree, its figs sacred but not visible, a few hundred feet from the hidden sea this tank surrounded by slum voters in the midst of the City and still supplied by distant springs, an old man bathing, two boys in a small canoe chilling.

Remote one is, yet near another. As hundreds, thousands, of monks up among their rockbound caves sleeping each upon his plinth practiced water management two thousand years ago by simple overflow of seasonal monsoon into small rock cisterns at their thresholds one down to the one below, or side by side overflow, many to many, cracks in the rock, channels made by hand and weather to catch rain little by little thoughtfully — thoughtful rain — from high to lower as if it were also from low to high. That deeply remote sector of the reservoired and forested, vast hard-to-grasp National Park bordering the mind as it borders Mumbai — in fact is in, or you could say of, Mumbai. To be there, what would it cost? you plot your question to be real with help. A guide already valued on such fugitive acquaintance who is not at Banganga nor at the caves nor to be found in the viewfinder will be paid somehow, and now like many places at once turning away from you almost unnoticed, quite far from here how does she bring home what the monks left? Which was enough if we would grasp to take away with us not just the monks’ sensible conservation but what came with it. Is it the monkeys, the macaques, that multiply near the caves and nearer the visitors and their lunch? No. Is it other animals in the forests — sequestered, it is said, if imperfectly fenced?

The girl knows. How is she near? For she is.

Somewhere near the National Park, its lands for all its mountains, or we would say high hills, its lands also bordered by everyday Mumbai avenues, a slum resettlement 20-square-meter flats incorporated into what foots the bill for the rehab high-rise — or was it in Worli sector? — who of us can tell in this estuarial Bombay / Mumbai / anciently offshore island of islands — but a deal in multirational syntax undertaken jointly with a local firm by a global American. Three dozen folding chairs one especially welcome for a foot-weary tourist facing in lowered light a large projection screen, the handsome working space beyond occupying a handsome ground-floor like a London or New York loft and above it an open upper level reached by stairs or ladder, your call.

What is wrong, with everything so right? A still larger architect studio tonight, is it mad easygoing? — after this evening’s presentation of recent completed institutional work by the firm’s representative head architect here. Weighty college campuses outside Mumbai (you had to wonder watching slides slide by), seeing double the neoclassical banal. Young Asian from Cornell sitting in the next seat, her foot comfortably under her, asks, all by herself, “Why this?” Others equally young murmur sort of wordlessly like a so soft ululation, but her elbow jabs you by mistake, as, equally astute, she whispers she is sorry like a silent, sweet-breathed snicker and her neighbor hears himself say quite out loud to the very big, still unknown man at the projector, “How does it change you to walk into a set of buildings like that?”

“Have ya never been to college? Well, good luck finding landscape clients,” the host replies, not knowing the questioner.

Presently, lights up upon the erosion of the evening still waiting for the meaning to coalesce amid a constant, virtually structural smiling. One takes in the place without looking too closely out of one’s curious curiosity. Against the walls formica surfaces, stacks of drawings, tracings, invoices, books, black and white, or planed precariously like a fanciful mock-up a fugitive red notebook perched under an anglepoise — three dozen anglepoise lamps continuous with the tilt of drafting tables either side of a median spread of light refreshments. And the jovial host weightily big but with the athletic timing of certain also shaved-bald holy men, “originally” from Sacramento, once a flood risk, now a drought, here in his office grinning upon being introduced by leader and friend to the mystery visitor: “— giving us his take on our—” “What?” “— our coastal interventions and you know terracing up in the —” “His take?” “— up in the valleys.” “Ah.” “Outlet channels in the reservoir valleys turn them into —”

“Holdings,” special guest intervenes on his own on his leader and kind friend’s behalf — “Ah, yeah, yo’ water-lovin’ gig up there in the Naeetional Park.” The two architects laugh. “Good luck with that stuff, buddy, that’s your kind of uh —”

“— like a field,” mystery guest intervenes again, “rather than channel, as I understand it, spreading the monsoon waters, even terracing as sewage filters (?), as I under —” “Ah, you’ve experienced the monsoon?” resident Yank to a visiting — who now, as if it were all natural — spots the girl the girl.

“But he is an economist,” intervenes your leader politely adding (using, including, surely not almost needing you), “aren’t you, and” (to the host) “a poet quite well-known.” “A real writer,” the radiant Indian wife adds / offers / corrects / adroitly perhaps peace-makes (?), “oh a real —”

“— story teller!” comes a voice that stills it seems the whole place for a moment, familiar voice: astonishingly it is the Mahim Fort guide and companion photo-op girl who has been here all the time, unseen for a moment behind the boss’s retorting bulk. Or earlier at large in the studio. Mingling in an efficiency of overhead floods and designer guests. Her contribution to this joint introduction inserts too much clarity, for already the host, overlapping her, as he turned to reveal her behind him, addressing the visitor but not quite contemplating him, “Well, you’re going to have to start telling the truth now” — grins all around.

“About the work we’ve seen tonight?” mystery guest returns the point point-and-click. Host turns slowly, the girl behind him brushed by her employer’s elbow, even the back of his hand? (a pet?) — for you’ve said your say; for what is at stake? Yet her laugh, so exact, is heard equally now by the host who must speak to it as well: “Oh I’ve done that for you in the slide lecture, pics worth a thousand words,” host fixes his cordial aim like a corbelled balcony pushed out over everyone threatened.

“Then why the lecture?” you have to wonder; yet host-employer turning to the girl, for it is she, the Fort girl, astonishingly, but of course! and as before with eye makeup but not lipstick, it seems, and, if heard by anyone else, only by you by some state-of-the-art device his words to her are grasped — “The mystery guest, I gather,” ignoring your “It takes me so long to learn.”

“You have so much at stake,” the girl said then as clearly as words could describe it, “take it from me,” whatever in the world she could mean, though she swept her look between the two men; and the leader-friend and his wife, and the younger Americans, all together for a moment in her knowledge of how far out of it she in her state might be, yet no special comradeship for the older woman to be sensed in the girl. The maturity of women not an act, the storyteller hopes.

It had been a laugh, hers if you wanted to hear it, near and material, sociable, ghostly, and in an original thread young. Among all the would-be professional bodies and voices, here again, not ancient, the Indian girl: so show you know her. An intern maybe, who’s found an everyday home, standing like a guest which she wasn’t, cordially near the Americans, the architects, the pros, and the visiting design students loading up on cashews, carrots and cheese, olives, best of all crisp pakora, drinking from plastic cups all somehow associated with the girl, he would understand in a moment.

Both men, if nobody else, had felt the girl’s laugh, and the American architect, the host, with a pretty big if puppet operation here, snapping his fingers pointed her to some task she needed to attend to, small is beautiful. When she moved, a familiar earring, some silvery shape with a shining jet dot of eye in it perhaps, and she was gone; as the visitor, the writer, the also amateur tagging along with his professional friends, grasping at it all (who had everything, even unto being an amateur), added (for her to hear), “It takes me even longer” — though not without a slant at the host, though himself for the moment old; and watched her go and actually disappear, swaying as she went, a life-form in a silver-mirrored blue tunic and jeans, taking time with her: reappear and fling open a fridge and its interior lights that itself seemed to appear out of a wall that hadn’t been there. Which man had she been laughing with? Was there any doubt? A microwave saving time.

“What stories?” tonight’s host puts it to you but maybe not; growling like quick-sketching a Greco-Roman façade for India’s future. But, turned to by him whom he has challenged, big man nods agreeably elsewhere to the Americans as if they have spoken to him, and maybe one of the gals is looking for a job over here designing campuses or atrium décor — or slum-rises.

Yet presently at the far end where an Indian gentleman is telling us who would listen what the anthropology of the slum-family’s field of planning and structure implies, and the deceptive drums and tailgate Ganesh festival you have seen out your cab window coming from the airport, the girl is not at this end now, she’s passed through the fridge and the microwave into the distant front end of the studio. Transferring from cardboard boxes to platters potato and fried eggplant pakoras, only to interrupt herself and answer, with quick, aroused steps toward him, the big man, her employer. Who has something to say to her, and she to him — they have words — when he points toward the back now fifty feet away — it’s the mystery guest surely he points to — and she does not look, she’s having a discreet row with her boss, who cools, shakes his head as she speaks, and again shakes perhaps more than his head — who just maybe reprimands her not to fire her but to keep her, holding her by the shoulders not quite to shake her, as anyone can see who misses nothing.

The anthropologist asked his question again, the leader elbowed you gently, his overflow of pleasure in others as fluid surprises almost in themselves — and mystery guest obliges in kind: So now your citizens are to carry hammers to break car windows if high water floods automatic systems. The terrible swift floods of July 2005, as one understands it, blamed your poor little fucked-up River Mithi, which even more is now to be fixed in a predictable map of city planning procedure in fact a centuries’-old war against water, which is not what an estuary’s aqueous terrain demands. Likewise one’s family asks access each member to each across creeks flowing in more than one direction, elastic spaces to be improvised with, lived with, mudflats our in-between resources for overflows or high tides not to be erased by reclam— … (you seem to tell a story, what was the original question anthropologist asked? — for people are nodding alertly — an Asian woman writing in a notebook)… family you arrive at is like water and will be given its various motions, its gradients and fields of porous holdings not dammed and master-planned.

The wife in all her radiant wit and responsibility her lightly brocaded kurti, her senses of others, also her genius, takes your arm, “You see! It was an amazing answer to the question how economics, landscape, everyday life and storytelling coincide!”

And your laugh at this — and not drunk at least on the wine — though breathless seeing then your Indian girl at the other end — has she lost her job? got even? — stride across to find her bag behind a stack of office things — will cover other reasons to laugh, as you reluctantly excuse yourself. (“Remember Worli Fort tomorrow,” words follow perhaps from what has been said.) The girl has taken a medium notebook from a precarious stack of folders and books — a plastic wine glass takes a tumble — the red notebook recalled from the Fort she slips into her bag looking only to her exit yet seemingly everywhere, a god unknown to herself, if the amazing answer to an almost unknown question could be written down in a letter to her.

At the door mystery guest will not hearken to the host’s call, the presiding American thug architect’s Hey where you goin’? — but outside in the evening established before you, are dark edifices built by the British in this professional neighborhood of is it south central Mumbai darkened even in daytime by great imported trees now in the half-light the bark alive with an India foreigned of such profit-sharing distances as New York and London offer and those half-knowns we make into knowns, a warped and gall-bulging raintree scale of trunk not for all the poor all of the time, and there are many trees but not clear what they are doing.

Where is this? Across the street a man sits the seat of a Vespa, the girl her hand on its near handlebar angry and exact. A pose that says Family but says to the forty-year-old man who sits the seat poised to spring grimly mechanized wholly from here that she will not be tolerated by him. Angrier and more the two of them, her hand on the Vespa says to herself she has a stake in this Vespa through the body of the man who owns it and even her at times; who shakes her hand off so he can get going — she could wrench the angled right-side mirror right away from its base.

In angry argument with the man, her father doubtless, now (as if one hadn’t seen it happen) not on the Vespa but standing on the curb beside her and you’d cruelly like to hear what they are saying; it was English, now not.

She’s told him she quit her job. Or told him nothing, or will go on with could-be nonpaying internship — or she has said nothing new. And “tomorrow” is heard, and “day after tomorrow” in English, then as she turns away from her father, for it must be him, or her prideful uncle, and has seen a man she knows of a certain age in a rainjacket with an umbrella, and the anger growing as words sink away from it inhabits the man’s eyes which are his daughter’s eyes and wishing to hear what they’ve been saying about what will happen tomorrow and tomorrow in a place, the American has been noticed…

The man with his daughter’s eyes sees him and does not look away for a moment. One might have said, Your father… thinking also, has an instinct.

She wouldn’t quite touch him, she’s going to walk. He swings his leg through and settles on the seat, reaches for the starter button. He tries, he’s absent, absorbed, male, grim, humiliated again, looking ahead and speaking; he jiggles the button, she points somewhere and he finds an aerosol can of contact cleaner with a straw coming out the top, and she berates him and then he has got the Vespa going. He swings the back of his right hand hard across her face cleverly enough to nearly knock her down.

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 flurry 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 monsoon, 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 whatever), 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.

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.

Shouts somewhere in the early evening traffic bearing down on you — you do not think sometimes what’s behind as you in your sometime job must know what’s ahead — out and to the northeast the slender arc of the island city once several islands reclaimed from the supposed waste of sea but there curving finely in profile now, hopelessly to mark, though only fractionally or suggestively, the bay, much less the sea it’s part of and the silvery vast light darkening now with sudden acceleration. Vespas and two quite brisk horse-drawn carriages, the body home-fabricated silver, seem to be in a race — the noise here, this country where you can raise your voice in a dispute if you know how, and the nicely protective Indian landscape designer who with his partner one was apparently crossing this grand, insane boulevard to meet joked that it was the only thing he liked about India now.

And as the girl’s call sounded behind somewhere close as one could bear, and with it for the first time the given name called, and “suhrr,” like an intimacy — begging, was it at last? — a job to do, a poorly defined job perhaps even this lissom, persistent person should show him; and as he felt her hand on his arm, there darted out from the far curb a black-and-tan-speckled dog, mongrel or a breed hard to say in this city, and, running to intercept the animal that now veered off out of reach up to the left toward oncoming traffic and the scream behind you was the girl, waving something as the rain in a dark, huge breath and steep commotion swept the coast with the sound of wings, one could wonder if the scream was for the speckled dog already leaping struck by a motorbike and rolling through the air in your face almost to land beyond them and skid splayed in the intersection, the light now having changed; or for herself nearly run down by a blinkered horse and its silver carriage, colored decorations all over it, painted plywood — no, laminated cardboard! — silver-painted Victorias for tourists — an umbrella in her hand. “I have nothing to keep from you,” the girl cried behind him, as his friends, at the approaching curb called to him. Yet when he turned to answer the girl, as he must always do — for some people you can take or leave, some you can miss — she was running back where she’d come from, umbrella unopened, her tunic drenched a blue dark as her jeans, like even these joggers along the seafront undeterred by the downpour, given a rhythm by it, the monsoon engine not finished, our loyalty to it.

One tomorrow of two or three. Sounds in a morning solitude tomorrow one could not have foreseen. Sounds so differently surrounded by sunlight and silence and so distinct they are thoughts. So welcome as, coming round a curve in the Gandhi National Park road — a burst of voices arguing wild among the cylinders of the engine of the yellow van or bus as it nearly runs you down — through those side windows it might be difficult to see quite clearly. Yet two voices almost known in this remarkable land, an almost empty vehicle it seemed, though three or four passengers — what could the voices be so exercised about? — though suspended a second or two, as he got out of the way.

The driver surely was the man from night before last; and someone shouting Stop, Stop — standing beside him one could tell, after the bus had passed — must be the girl, here a long way from the east entrance she had perhaps forgotten she had once specified, not used to being listened to.

Stop it did not, the bus its own thing here in the forest, shadowy heads looking back as it plunged away into a curve, like another language. Speaking to one — to him, to you — it came to you, of a person out here in a forty-square-mile protected area nonetheless near suburban Mumbai who had no business hiking alone. He had no words for it now.

The hopeless hue and cry he still could hear as he walked on or in his memory he understood he had been hearing also for a moment or two before the bus first came into view. It wasn’t only him the shouts were about. If him at all.

A hundred yards up the road according to the crude map, he would come to what looked like a bridge and a stream, a reservoir off to his left. An insignificant stream under the bridge hardly readable.

A trip home out of India approaching but safely at a distance. Not here for long, the girl had said of you. Presently, sure enough the road narrowed across a brief bridge with low guard barriers of cement and old stone. To be alone here at a bridge, the reservoir off somewhere through the trees to the left, which would be west.

How long could it have been before he saw the animal stretched along a tree bough some ten feet above the ground even with the bridge? Couched absorbed in the forest yet in plain view even at this distance not twenty feet off the road a fawn buff coat densely belonging to its strength; off the road yet so near where the road crossed the bridge it might easily have been visible from a passing van, if you were looking for it; visible from the road, lying along a long-elbowed bough, its eyes almost shut, one back leg coming off the branch hung halfway out easily ten feet above the ground where giant leaves and bush and some blow-down and some fugitive tall grasses kept the depth uncertain. In fact, as the strangeness issuing from the Park bus careering through the forest and the angry commotion inside it had faded a hundred yards down, hadn’t there been a blurred look to the bus in memory the sense of which now brings into focus, though it needed no greater clarity against the tangle of underbrush beyond with no clear stand of trees but some old growth and hollowing snags, the leopard there in the tree? Its presence more size than scale as one did not take one’s eyes off it in the next few moments — minutes — so relaxed its length in truth, six feet perhaps, belonging and at large here miles possibly from where it might be sometime kept, a leopard, call it a leopard, a big one, cheetah sometimes in this part of the world, but a leopard.

What was it watching?

As quick as it was strong enough to haul its kill up into a tree if it has to. A pig, a young antelope, a chital spotted deer in these woods, a barking deer said to have been heard. A hornbill’s call then, low and then low and faintly raucous; a flash of blue and yellow looked for in vain with what must be peripheral vision, commonly two birds together A hand now on the bridge cement in this direction — where the leopard lies. Move hardly at all yet you can. The cat is still, but, six feet or five and a half, it will move soon. Has it fed?

If solitary, will this one keep it that way by taking care of what else living is here, or by departing?

Alone, no guest, with no thought except not to make a move, not up the road or back down where you came from, to run away or stand the ground which is not yours. Seeing the leopard, its shoulder, its flank at rest, its three-foot tail curved not stirring above a half-hanging rear leg and spotted like the back, the haunch with a crowd of small imperfect black rings, the person thinks to step away from the bridge stone, to be further away yet without this low wall between; or to stay. To be not with the animal, but be what? The stream moving below could scarcely be heard. No sound of voice or car in the late-morning humidity.

And now, drawing its forelegs under, the leopard dropped down into underbrush out of sight along the stream, below the level of the bridge, the road. A path of half-seen leaf and bush swayings to be traced where for a moment or two one can even see yet not, and so it is time to move back from the low wall. Not to be looking directly down at the head, the hide, the eyes, the round pupils. Where is the leopard? What would it hear under the bridge? Where does it place its feet? Its sudden paws.

Has it lain in the sun right here on the bridge wall another day? Today? What is fear, intervening upon time so time is gone, is it even fear turning to softly tread the dirt road between the two low walls of the brief bridge? Does it eat your heart? Does what eat your heart? Tear your shirt; eat your clothes, like a goat — even, in one’s own experience, a dog obsessed with the smell of a sweater? The leopard likes blood, we know that. Even ours.

Experience alive, yet nothing. The reservoir in the other direction behind you, The camera must not click. An alarm intervening to make another time from this, though what? The visitor has crossed slowly the little roadway of the bridge, looking back also and around, around, fear welcoming curiosity stupidly. Reaching the other low wall reluctant to look down on the far side — but now to find, ten yards beyond — so a hand reaches for the cement, interrupts the camera swinging forward on its strap, leaves the camera somehow even more useless — the rust-reddish back of the animal in shadow, a white mark visible on the rump, its tail up, which might mean it has fed. On its way, already gone. Toward the reservoir out there glimpsed. On the move, in the viewfinder, the leopard scarcely stirs leaves it passes under toward the reservoir not a hundred yards off the road. This leopard has passed from beneath the bridge you stand on and along the hardly visible glint of the stream. We had to keep the creature in our sights or it’s gone, like a deer, and like its tread following its made path.

Will the ears hear, will the brain of the cat hear and take action, turn back, seeing us come down from the bridge near the stream? or be gone sooner, knowing a man follows it? Leopards will swim but when? There was a path, some packed earth half-hidden by arching ferns, a large, isolated basaltic rock in the way to make us forget the leopard might be coming back, the clumsy noise we make.

The light is of the clearing and the wide water. At the shore this is like a lake we know. Is the leopard suddenly forgotten? How is that possible? A long, low, modest dam one might walk along carefully while on the down side falling water precipitated into a stream turning off into the forest.

Leopards will swim. Up the shore on the right, the lone head, the ears, of the still great and heavy cat above the water, black markings behind the ears, centerless rosettes — as steady as an eight-point buck swimming a New Hampshire lake at dawn or across the tidal strait of Arthur Kill from Perth Amboy to Staten Island: a predator, though, and, no, the head does move, the shoulders surge with intent.

The engine coming without warning you try to see through the woods between here and the bridge. And find through some moment of time framed by branches, trunks, leaves of silence a yellow fragment in sunlight of the bus and hear nothing else as the motor cuts off. Straining with memory, too, to see who it is, you find a scrap of blue you know, And hear no talk, no strife, and think.

Yet then, for we’ve lost touch, the leopard is gone, gone ashore somewhere known further up the forest shore. This is not the reservoir where a crocodile was seen. That would be a larger lake also supplying water for the City.

The bus parked diagonally blocking the little bridge, you could smell it and see now what had been recalled as some speeding opaqueness, the side windows tightly fenced from outside to protect the passengers, not built-in wire in shatterproof glass, nor finely barred, though like a Corrections van in New York. The girl is alone. “I took the bus,” she said, perhaps hearing the joke but it is more. “I thought he would follow me. It was an emergency, I never did this before.” In a near whisper, “You will tell me what happened, I know you have been with the leopard. They saw it lying on the wall of the bridge in the sun one day.” Looking at her watch, “You have time to catch a taxi and meet your people, they are visiting the architect I told you of right downtown in New Mumbai.” She names him, an important name. “It is almost your last stop in India.”

She was telling him what he knew but had nearly lost interest in, listening for a Vespa, feeling the weight of the camera. Her eyes are brave. Her body. What will happen to her? “Tell me what happened,” she says. “Tell me.”

Content

Joseph McElroy
Taken From Him