Trains came in and trains went out. She saw some men she recognized: friends of her father who worked in Mumbai proper, who would have recognized her if she hadn’t been wearing her hijab pulled up to her nose and pinned there. She was acutely aware of the Hindu boys’ stares. Hindus and Muslims didn’t get along, officially. Unofficially, of course, she knew as many Hindus as Muslims in Dharavi, in the army, in school. But on the impersonal, grand scale, she was always other. They were “Mumbaikars”—“real” people from Mumbai. Her parents insisted on calling the city “Bombay,” the old name of the city from before the fierce Hindu nationalists had changed it, proclaiming that India was for Hindus and Hindus alone. She and her people could go back to Bangladesh, to Pakistan, to one of the Muslim strongholds where they were in the majority, and leave India to the real Indians.
Mostly, it didn’t touch her, because mostly, she only met people who knew her and whom she knew—or people who were entirely virtual and who cared more about whether she was an Orc or a Fire Elf than whether she was a Muslim. But here, on the edge of the known world, she was a girl in a hijab, an eye-slit, a long, modest dress, and a stout stick, and they were all staring at her.
She kept herself amused by thinking about how she would attack or defend the station using a variety of games’ weapons systems. If they were all zombies, she’d array the mecha here, here and here, using the railway bed as a channel to lure combatants into flamethrower range. If they were fighting on motorcycles, she’d circle that way with her cars, this way with her motorcycles, and pull the death-lorry in there. It brought a smile to her face, safely hidden behind the hijab.
And here was the man, pulling into the lot on his green motorcycle, wiping the road dust off his glasses with his shirt tail before tucking it back into his jacket. He looked around nervously at the people outside the station—working people streaming back and forth, badmashes and beggars loitering and sauntering and getting in everyone’s way. Several beggars were headed toward him now, children with their hands outstretched, some of them carrying smaller children on their hips. Even over the crowd noises, Yasmin could hear their sad, practiced cries.
She reached under her chin and checked the pin holding her hijab in place, then approached the rider, moving through the beggars as though they weren’t there. They shied away from her lathi like flies dodging a raised hand. He was so disconcerted by the beggars that it took him a minute to notice the veiled young girl standing in front of him, clutching an iron-bound stick a meter and a half long.
“Yasmin?” His Hindi was like a fillum star’s. Up close, he was very handsome, with straight teeth and a neatly trimmed little mustache and a strong nose and chin.
She nodded.
He looked at her lathi. “I have some bungee cables,” he said. “I think we can attach that to the side of the bike. And I brought you a helmet.”
She nodded again. She didn’t know what to say. He moved to the locked carrier-box on the back of his bike, pushing away a little beggar-boy who’d been fingering the lock, and pushed his thumb into the locking mechanism’s print-reader. It sprang open and he fished inside, coming up with a helmet that looked like something out of a manga cartoon, streamlined, with intricate designs etched into its surface in hot yellow and pink. On the front of the helmet was a sticker depicting Sai Baba, the saint that both Muslims and Hindus agreed on. Yasmin thought this was a good omen—even if he was a Hindu boy, he’d brought her a helmet that she could wear without defiling Islam.
She took the manga Sai Baba helmet from him, noting that the sticker was holographic and that Sai Baba turned to look her straight in the eye as she hefted it. It was heavier than it looked, with thick padding inside. No one in Dharavi wore crash helmets on motorcycles—and the boy wasn’t wearing one, either. But as she contemplated the narrow saddle, she thought about falling off at 70 kilometers per hour on some Mumbai road and decided that she was glad he’d brought it. So she nodded a third time and lifted it over her head. It went on slowly, her head pushing its way in like a hand caught in a tangled sleeve, pushing to displace the fabric, which slowly gave way. Then she was inside it, and the sounds around her were dead and distant, the sights all tinted yellow through the one-way mirrored eye-visor. She felt tentatively at her head—which felt like it would loll forward under the helmet’s weight if she turned her face too quickly—and found the visor’s catch and lifted it up. The sound got a little brighter and sharper.
Meanwhile, the boy had been affixing the lathi along the bike’s length, to the amusement of the beggar children, who offered laughing advice and mockery. He had a handful of bungee cords that he’d extracted from the bike’s box, and he wrapped them again and again around the pole, finding places on the bike’s skeletal chrome to fix the hooks, testing the handlebars to ensure that he could still steer. At last he grunted, stood, dusted his hands off on his jeans and turned to her.
“Ready?”
She drew in a deep breath, spoke at last. “Where are we going?”
“Andheri,” he said. “Near the film studios.”
She nodded as though she knew where that was. In a way, of course, she did: there were plenty of movies about, well, the golden age of making movies, when Andheri had been the place to be, glamorous and bustling. But most of those movies had been about how Andheri’s sun had set, with all the big filmi production places moving away. What would it be like today?
“And when will we come back?”
He waggled his chin, thinking. “Tonight, certainly. I’ll make sure of that. And some union people can come back with us and make sure you get to your door safely. I’ve thought of everything.”
“And what is your name?”
He stared at her for a moment, his jaw hanging open in surprise. “Okay, I didn’t think of everything! I’m Ashok. Do you know how to ride a scooter?”
She shook her head. She’d seen plenty of people riding on motorcycles and scooters, in twos and even in threes and fours—sometimes a whole family, with children on mothers’ laps on the back—but she’d never gotten on one. Standing next to it now, it seemed insubstantial and, well, slippery, the kind of thing that was easier to fall off of than to stay on.
“Okay,” he said, waggling his chin, considering her clothing. “It’s harder with the dress,” he said. “You’ll have to sit sidesaddle.” He climbed up on the bike’s saddle and demonstrated, keeping his knees together and pressed against the bike’s side, twisting his body around. “You’ll have to hold onto me very tight.” He grinned his movie-star grin.
Yasmin realized what a mistake this had all been. This strange man. His motorcycle. Going off to Mumbai, away from Dharavi, to a strange place, for a strange reason. And he had her lathi, which wasn’t even hers, and if she turned on her heel and went back into Dharavi, she’d still have to explain the missing lathi to her brother, and the note to her mother. And now she was going to get killed in Mumbai traffic with a total stranger on the way to Bollywood’s favorite ghost town.
But as hopeless as it was, it wasn’t as hopeless as being alone, not in the army, not in school, not in the Webblies. Not as hopeless as being poor Yasmin, the Dharavi girl, born in Dharavi, bred in Dharavi.
She levered herself sidesaddle onto the bike and Ashok climbed over the saddle and sat down, his leather jacket pressed up against her side. She tried to square her hips to face forward, and found herself in such a precarious position that she nearly tipped over backwards.
“You have to hold on,” Ashok said, and the beggar children jeered and made rude gestures. Shutting her eyes, she put her arms around his waist, feeling how skinny he was under that fancy jacket, and interlaced her fingers around his stomach. It was less precarious now, but she still felt as though she would fall at any second—and they weren’t even moving yet!
Ashok kicked back the bike’s stand and revved the engine. A cloud of biodiesel exhaust escaped from the tailpipe, smelling like old cooking oil—it probably started out as old cooking oil, of
course—spicy and stale. Yasmin’s stomach gurgled and she blushed beneath her hijab, sure he could feel the churning of her empty stomach. But he just turned his head and said, “Ready?”
“Yes,” she said, but her voice came out in a squeak.
They barely made it fifty meters before she shouted “Stop! Stop!” in his ear. She had never been more afraid in all her life. She forced her fingers to unlace themselves and drew her trembling hands back into her lap.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to die!” she shouted. “I don’t want to die on your maniac bike in this maniac traffic!”
He waggled his chin. “It’s the dress,” he said. “If you could only straddle the seat.”
Yasmin patted her thighs miserably, then she hiked up her dress, revealing the salwar—loose trousers—she wore beneath it. Ashok nodded. “That’ll do,” he said. “But you need to tie up the legs, so they don’t get caught in the wheel.” He flipped open his cargo box again and passed her two plastic zip-strips which she used to tie up each ankle.
“Right, off we go,” he said, and she straddled the bike, putting her arms around his waist again. He smelled of his hair gel and of leather, and of sweat from the road. She felt like she’d gone to another planet now, even though she could still see Mahim Junction behind her. She squeezed his waist for dear life as he revved the engine and maneuvered the bike back into traffic.
She realized that he’d been taking it easy for her sake before, driving relatively slowly and evenly in deference to her precarious position. Now that she was more secure, he drove like the baddest badmash she’d ever seen in any action film. He gunned the little bike up the edge of the ditch, beside the jerky, slow traffic, always on the brink of tipping into the stinking ditch, being killed by a swerving driver or a door opening suddenly so the driver could spit out a stream of betel; or running over one of the beggars who lined the road’s edge, tapping on the windows and making sad faces at the trapped motorists.
She’d piloted a million virtual vehicles in her career as a gamer, at high speeds, through dangerous terrain. It wasn’t remotely the same, even with the helmet’s reality-filtering padding and visor. She could hear her own whimpering in her head. Every nerve in her body was screaming Get off this thing while you can! But her rational mind kept on insisting that this boy clearly rode his bike through Mumbai every day and managed to survive.
And besides, there was so much Mumbai to see as they sped down the road, and that was much more interesting than worrying about imminent death. As they sped down the causeway, they neared a huge suspension bridge, eight lanes wide, all white concrete and steel cables, proudly proclaimed to be the Bandra-Worli Sea Link by an intricate sign in Hindi and English. They sped up the ramp to it, riding close to the steel girders that lined the bridge’s edge, and beneath them, the sea sparkled blue and seemed so close that she could reach down and skim her fingertips in the waves. The air smelled of salt and the sea, the choking traffic fumes whipped away by a wind that ruffled her dress and trousers, pasting them to her body. Her fear ebbed away as they crossed the bridge, and did not come back as they rolled off of it, back into Mumbai, back into the streets all choked with traffic and people. They swerved around saddhus, naked holy men covered in paint. They swerved around dabbawallahs, men who delivered home-cooked lunches from wives to husbands all over the city, in tiffin pails arranged in huge wooden frames, balanced upon their heads.
She knew they were almost at Andheri when they passed the gigantic Infinity Mall, and then turned alongside a high, ancient brick wall that ran for hundreds of meters, fencing in a huge estate that had to be one of the film studios. Outside the wall, along the drainage ditch, was a bustling market of hawkers, open-air restaurants, beggars, craftsmen, and, among them, film-makers in smart suits with dark glasses, clutching mobile phones as they picked their way along. The bike swerved through all this, avoiding a long line of expensive, spotless dark cars that ran the length of the wall in an endless queue to pass through the security checkpoint at the gate house.
She took all this in as they sped down the length of the wall, cornering sharply at the end, following it along to a much narrower gate. Two guards with rifles attached to their belts by chains stood before it, and they hefted their guns as Ashok drew nearer. Then he drew closer still and the guards recognized him and stepped away, revealing the narrow gap in the wall that was barely wide enough for the bike to pass through, though Ashok took it at speed, and Yasmin gasped when her billowing sleeves rasped against the ancient, pitted brick.
Passing through the gate was like passing into another world. Before them, the studios spread forever, the farthest edge lost in the pollution haze. Roads and pathways mazed the grounds, detouring around the biggest buildings Yasmin had ever seen, huge buildings that looked like train stations or airplane hangars from war films. The grounds were all manicured grass, orderly fruit trees, and workmen going back and forth on mysterious errands with toolbelts jangling around their waists, carrying huge bundles of pipe and lumber and cloth.
Ashok drove them past the hangars—those must be the sound-stages where they shot the movies; there was a good studio-map in Zombie Mecha where you could fight zombies through a series of wood-backed film scenery—and toward a series of low-slung trailers that hugged the wall to their left. Each one had a miniature fence in front of it, and a small flower-garden, so neat and tidy that at first she thought the flowers must be fake.
Finally, Ashok slowed the bike and then coasted to a stop, killing the engine. The engine noise still hummed in her ears, though, and she continued to feel the thrum of the bike in her legs and bum. She unlocked her hands from around Ashok’s waist, prying her fingers apart, and stepped off the bike, catching her toe on the lathi and falling to the grass. Blushing, she got to her feet, unsteady but upright.
Ashok grinned at her. “You all right there, sister?”
She wanted to say something sharp and cutting in response, but nothing came. The words had been beaten out of her by the ride. Suddenly, she felt as though she could hardly breathe, and the fabric of her hijab seemed filled with road dust that it released into her nose and mouth with every inhalation. She carefully undid the pin and moved her hijab so that it no longer covered her face.
Ashok stared at her in horror. “You—you’re just a little girl!”
She bridled and the words came to her again. “I am fourteen—there are girls my age with husbands and babies in Dharavi! I’m a skilled fighter and commander. I’m no little girl!”
He blushed a purple color and clasped his hands at his chest apologetically. “Forgive me,” he said. “But—well, I assumed you were eighteen or nineteen. You’re tall. I’ve brought you all this way and you’re, well, you’re a child! Your parents will be mad with worry!”
She gave him her best steely glare, the one she used to make the boys in the army behave when they were getting too, well, boyish. “I left them a note. And I’ll be back tonight. And I’m old enough to worry about this sort of thing on my own account, thank you very much. Now, you’ve dragged me halfway across India for some mysterious purpose, and I’m sure that it wasn’t just to have me stand around here talking about my family life.”
He recovered himself and grinned again. “Sorry, sorry. Right, we’re here for a meeting. It’s important. The Webblies have never had much contact with real unions, but now that Nor is in trouble, she’s asked me to take up her cause with the unions here. There’s meetings like this happening all over the world today—in China and Indonesia, in Pakistan and Mexico and Guatemala. The people waiting for us inside—they’re labor leaders, representatives of the garment-workers’ union, the steelworkers’ union, even the Transport and Dock Workers’ union—the biggest unions in Mumbai. With their support, the Webblies can have access to money, warm bodies for picket lines, influence and power. But they don’t know anything about what you do—they’ve never played a game. They think that the internet is for email and pornog
raphy. So you’re here—we’re here—to explain this to them.”
She swallowed a few times. There was so much in all that she didn’t understand—and what she did understand, she wasn’t very happy about. For example, this real union business—the Webblies were a real union! But there was more pressing business than her irritation, for example: “What do you mean, we’re here to explain? Are you a gamer?”
He shook his head ruefully. “Haven’t got the patience for it. I’m an economist. Labor economist. I’ve spent a lot of time with BSN, working out strategy with her.”
She wasn’t exactly certain what an economist was, but she also felt that admitting this might further undermine her credibility with this man who had called her a child. “I need my lathi,” she said.
“You don’t need a lathi in this meeting,” he said. “No one will attack us.”
“Someone will steal it,” she said.
“This isn’t Dharavi,” he said. “No one will steal it.”
That did it. She could talk about the problems in Dharavi. She was a Dharavi girl. But this stranger had no business saying bad things about her home. “I need my lathi in case I have to beat your brains out with it for rubbishing my home,” she said, between gritted teeth.
“Sorry, sorry.” He squatted down beside the bike and began to unravel the bungee cords from around the lathi. She also went down on one knee and began to worry at the zipstraps that tied up her trouser legs at the ankles, but they only went in one direction, and once they’d locked tight, they wouldn’t loosen. Ashok looked up from the bungee cords.
“You need to cut them off,” he said. “Here, one moment.” He fished in his trouser-pocket and came up with a wicked flick-knife that he snapped open. He took gentle hold of the strap on her right ankle and slid the blade between it and her leg. She held her breath as he sliced through the strap, then flicked the knife closed, turned to her other leg, and, grasping her ankle, cut away the other strap. He looked up at her. Their eyes met, then she looked away.