Mrs. Dotta’s cafe was locked up tight, shutters drawn over the windows and doors.
“Hey!” called Ashok, rapping on the door. “Hey, Mrs. Dotta! It’s Ashok! Hey!” It was nearly 7AM, and Mrs. Dotta always had the cafe open by 6:30, catching some of the early morning trade as the workers who had jobs outside of Dharavi walked to their bus-stops or the train station. It was unheard of for her to be this late. “Hey!” he called again and used his key-ring to rap on the metal shutter, the sound echoing through the tin frame of the building.
“Go away!” called a male voice. At first Ashok assumed it came from one of the two rooms above the cafe, where Mrs. Dotta rented to a dozen boarders—two big families crammed into the small spaces. He craned his neck up, but the windows there were shuttered too.
“Hey!” he banged on the door again, loud in the early morning street.
Someone threw the bolts on the other side of the door and pushed it open so hard it bounced off his toe and the tip of his nose, making both sting. He jumped back out of the way and the door opened again. There was a boy, seventeen or eighteen, with a huge pitted machete the length of his forearm. The boy was skinny to the point of starvation, bare-chested, with ribs that stood out like a xylophone. He stared at Ashok from red-rimmed, stoned eyes, pushed lanky, greasy hair off his forehead with the back of the hand that wasn’t holding the machete. He brandished it in Ashok’s face.
“Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “Are you deaf? Go away!” The machete wobbled in his hand, dancing in the air before his face, so close it made him cross his eyes.
He stepped back and the boy held his arm out further, keeping the machete close to his face.
“Where’s Mrs. Dotta?” Ashok said, keeping his voice as calm as he could, which wasn’t very. It cracked.
“She’s gone. Back to the village.” The boy smiled a crazy, evil smile. “Cafe is closed.”
“But—” he started. The boy took another step forward, and a wave of alcohol and sweat-smell came with him, a strong smell even amid Dharavi’s stew of smells. “I have papers in there,” Ashok said. “They’re mine. In the back room.”
There were other stirring sounds from the cafe now, more skinny boys showing up in the doorway. More machetes. “You go now,” the lead boy said, and he spat a stream of pink betel-stained saliva at Ashok’s feet, staining the cuffs of his jeans. “You go while you can go.”
Ashok took another step back. “I want to speak to Mrs. Dotta. I want to speak to the owner!” he said, mustering all the courage he could not to turn on his heel and run. The boys were filing out into the little sheltered area in front of the doorway now. They were smiling.
“The owner?” the boy said. “I’m his representative. You can tell me.”
“I want my papers.”
“My papers,” the boy said. “You want to buy them?”
The other boys were chuckling now, hyena sounds. Predator sounds. All those machetes. Every nerve in Ashok’s body screaming go. “I want to speak with the owner. You tell him. I’ll be back this afternoon. To talk with him.”
The bravado was unconvincing even to him and to these street hoods it must have sounded like a fart in a windstorm. They laughed louder, and louder still when the boy took another rushing step toward him, swinging the machete, just missing him, blade whistling past him with a terrifying whoosh as he backpedaled another step, bumped into a man carrying a home-made sledgehammer on his way to work, squeaked, actually squeaked, and ran.
Mala’s mother answered his knock after a long delay, eyeing him suspiciously. She’d met him on two other occasions, when he’d walked “the General” home from a late battle, and she hadn’t liked him either time. Now she glared openly and blocked the doorway. “She’s not dressed,” she said. “Give her a moment.”
Mala pushed past her, hair caught in a loose ponytail, her gait an assertive, angry limp. She aimed a perfunctory kiss at her mother’s cheek, missing by several centimeters, and gestured brusquely down the stairs. Ashok hurried down, through the lower room with its own family, bustling about and getting ready for work, then down another flight to the factory floor, and then out into the stinging Dharavi air. Someone was burning plastic nearby, the stench stronger than usual, an instant headache of a smell.
“What?” she said, all business.
He told her about the cafe.
“Banerjee,” she said. “I wondered if he’d try this.” She got out her phone and began sending out texts. Ashok stood beside her, a head taller than her, but feeling somehow smaller than this girl, this ball of talent and anger in girl form. Dharavi was waking now, and the muezzin’s call to prayer from the big mosque wafted over the shacks and factories. Livestock sounds—roosters, goats, a cowbell and a big bovine sneeze. Babies crying. Women struggled past with their water jugs.
He thought about how unreal all this was for most of the people he knew, the union leaders he’d grown up with, his own family. When he talked with them about Webbly business, they mocked the unreality of life in games, but what about the unreality of life in Dharavi? Here were a million people living a life that many others couldn’t even conceive of.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re meeting at the Hotel U.P.”
When he’d come to Dharavi, the “hotels” on the main road in the Kumbharwada neighborhood had puzzled him, until he found out that “hotel” was just another word for restaurant. The Webblies liked the Hotel U.P., a workers’ co-op staffed entirely by women who’d come from villages in the poor state of Uttar Pradesh. It was mutual, the women enjoying the chance to mother these serious children while they spoke in their impenetrable jargon, a blend of Indian English, gamerspeak, Chinese curses, and Hindi, the curious dialect that he thought of as Webbli, as in Hindi.
The Webblies, roused from their beds early in the morning, crowded in sleepily, demanding chai and masala Cokes and dhosas and aloo poories. The ladies who owned the restaurant shuttled pancakes and fried potato popovers to them in great heaps, Mala paying for them from a wad of greasy rupees she kept in a small purse before her. Ashok sat beside her on her left hand, and Yasmin sat on her right, eyes half-lidded. The army had been out late the night before, on a group trip to a little filmi palace in the heart of Dharavi, to see three movies in a row as a reward for a run of genuinely excellent play. Ashok had begged off, even though he’d been training with the army on Mala’s orders. He liked the Webblies, but he wasn’t quite like them. He wasn’t a gamer, and it would ever be thus, no matter how much fighting he did.
“Okay,” Mala said. “Options. We can find another cafe. There is the 1000 Palms, where we used to fight—” she nodded at Yasmin, leaving the rest unsaid, when we were still Pinkertons, still against the Webblies. “But Banerjee has something on the owner there, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“Banerjee has something on every cafe in Dharavi,” Sushant said. He had been very adventurous in scouting around for other places for them to play, on Yasmin’s orders. Everyone in the army knew that he had a crush on Yasmin, except Yasmin, who was seemingly oblivious to it.
“And what about Mrs. Dotta?” Yasmin said. “What about her business, all the work she put into it?”
Mala nodded. “I’ve called her three times. She doesn’t answer. Perhaps they scared her, or took her phone off of her. Or…” Again, she didn’t need to say it, or she is dead. The stakes were high, Ashok knew. Very high. “And there’s something else. The strike has started.”
Ashok jumped a little. What? It was too early—weeks too early! There was still so much planning to do! He pulled out his phone, realized that he’d left it switched off, powered it up, stared impatiently at the boot-screen, listening to the hubbub of soldiers around him. There were dozens of messages waiting for him, from Big Sister Nor and her lieutenants, from the special operatives who’d been working on the scam with him, from the American boy who’d been coordinating with the Mechanical Turks. There had been fighting online and off, through the night, and th
e Chinese were thronging the streets, running from cops, regrouping. Gamespace was in chaos. And he’d been arguing with drunken thug-boys at the cafe, eating aloo poories and guzzling chai as though it was just another day. His heart began to race.
“We need to get online,” he said. “Urgently.”
Mala broke off an intense discussion of the possibility of getting PCs into a flat somewhere and bringing in a network link to look at him. “Bad as that?”
He held up his phone. “You’ve seen, you know.”
“I haven’t looked since you came to my place. I knew that there was nothing we could do until we found a place to work. It is bad, then.” It wasn’t a question.
They were all hanging on him. “They need our help,” he said.
“All right,” Mala said. “All right. So. We go and we take over Mrs. Dotta’s place again. Banerjee doesn’t own it. Everyone in her road knows that. They will take our side. They must.”
Ashok gulped. “Force?” He remembered the boy: drunk or high on inhalants, fearless, eyes flat, the sharp machete trembling.
The gaze Mala turned on him was every bit as flat. She could transform like that, in a second, in an instant. She could go from pretty young girl, charismatic, open, clever and laughing to stone-faced General Robotwallah, ferocious and uncompromising. Her flat eyes glittered.
“Force if necessary, always,” she said. “Force. Enough force that they go away and don’t come back. Hit them hard, scare them back to their holes.” Around the table, thirty-some Webblies stared at her, their expressions mirrors of hers. She was their general, and before she came into their lives, they had been Dharavi rats, working in factories sorting plastic, going to school for a few hours every day to share books with four other students. Now they were royalty, with more money than their parents earned, jobs and respect. They’d follow her off a cliff. They’d follow her into the Sun.
But Yasmin cleared her throat. “Force if we must,” she said. “But surely no more than is necessary, and not even that if we can help it.”
Mala turned to her, back rigid, neck corded, jaw set. Yasmin met her gaze with calm eyes and then…smiled, a small and sweet and genuine smile. “If the General agrees, of course.”
And Mala melted, the tension going out of her, and she returned Yasmin’s smile. Something had changed between them since the night Mala had attacked them, something had changed for the better. Now Yasmin could defuse Mala with a look, a smile, a touch, and the army respected it, treating Yasmin with reverence, sometimes going to her with their grievances.
“Of course,” Mala said. “No more force than is absolutely necessary.” She picked up her cane—topped with a silver skull, a gift from her troops—and made a few vicious swipes in the air, executed with the grace of a fencer. He knew that there was a lead weight in the foot of the cane, and he’d seen her knock holes in brick with a swing. Her densely muscled forearms hardly trembled as she wielded the cane. Behind her, one of the ladies who ran the restaurant looked on with heartbreaking sorrow, and Ashok wondered how many young people she’d seen ruined in her village and here in the city.
“We go,” Mala said, and scraped her chair back. Ashok fell in beside her and the army marched down the main road three abreast, causing scooters and motorcycles and goats and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws to part around them. Many times Ashok had seen swaggering gangs of badmashes on the street, had gotten out of their way. Now he was in one, a collection of kids, just kids, the youngest a mere 13, the eldest not yet 20, led by a limping girl with a long neck and hair in a loose ponytail, and around them, people reacted with just the same fear. It swelled Ashok’s heart, the power and the fear, and he felt ashamed and exhilarated.
Before the door of Mrs. Dotta, Mala stooped and pried a rock from the crumbling pavement with her fingers, unmindful of the filth that slimed it. She threw it with incredible accuracy, bowling it like a cricket ball, crash, into the sheet-tin door of the cafe. Immediately, she bent to pick up another rock, prying it loose before the echoes of the first one had died down. Around them, in the narrow street, heads appeared from windows and doorways, and curious pedestrians stopped to look on.
The door banged open and there was the boy who had threatened Ashok earlier, eyes bloodshot and pink even from a safe distance. He held his machete up like a sword, a snarl on his lips. It died as he contemplated the thirty soldiers arrayed before him. Many had produced lengths of wood or iron, or picked up rocks of their own. They stared, unwavering, at the boy.
“What is it?” He was trying for bravado, but it came out with a squeak at the end. The machete trembled.
“Careful,” whispered Ashok, to himself, to Mala, to anyone who would listen. A scared bully was even less predictable than a confident one.
“Mrs. Dotta asked us to come re-open her cafe for her,” Mala said, gesturing with her phone, held in her free hand. “You can go now.”
“The new owner asked us to watch his cafe,” the boy said, and everyone on the street heard both lies, Mala’s and the boy’s. Ashok tried to figure out how old the boy was. Fourteen? Fifteen? Young, dumb, drunk, angry, and armed.
“Careful,” he whispered again.
Mala pocketed her phone and hefted her rock, eyes never leaving the boy.
“Five,” she said.
He grinned at her and spat a stream of pink, betel saliva toward her feet. She didn’t move. No one moved.
“Four.”
He raised the machete, point aimed straight at her. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Three.”
Silence rang over the alley. Someone on a motorbike tried to push through the crowd, then stopped, cutting the engine.
“Two.”
The boy’s eyes cut left, right, left again. He whistled then, hard and loud, and there was a scrabble of bare feet from the cafe behind him.
“One,” Mala said. and raised the rock, winding up like a cricket bowler again, whole body coiled, and Ashok thought, I have to do something. Have to stop them. It’s insane. But his mouth and his hands and his feet had other ideas. He remained frozen in place.
The boy raised his machete across his chest, and the hand that held it trembled even more. Abruptly, Mala threw. The rock flew so fast it made a sizzling sound in the hot, wet morning air, but it didn’t smash the boy’s head in, but rather dashed itself to pieces against the door-frame behind him, visibly denting it. The boy flinched as shattered rock bounced off his bare face and chest and arm and back, a few stray pieces pinging off the machete.
“Leave,” Mala said. Behind the boy, five more boys, crowding out of the doorway, each with his machete. They raised their arms.
“Fight!” hissed one of the boys, the smallest one. There was something wrong with his head, a web of scar and patchy hair running down the left side as though he’d had his head bashed in or been dragged. Ashok couldn’t look away from this little boy. He had a cousin that size, a little boy who liked to play games in the living room and run around with his friends. A little boy with shoes and clear eyes and three meals a day and a mother who would tuck him up every night with a kiss on the forehead.
Mala fixed the boy with her gaze. “Don’t fight,” she said. “If you fight, you lose. Get hurt. Run.” The army raised their weapons, made a low rumbling sound that raised to a growl. One of the boys was on his phone, whispering urgently into it. Ashok saw their fear and felt a featherweight of relief, these ones would go, not fight. “Run!” Mala said, and stamped forward. The boys all flinched.
And some of the army snickered at them, a hateful sound that he’d heard a thousand times while in-game, a taunting sound that spread through the ranks like a snake slithering around their feet, and the fear in the boys’ faces changed. Became anger.
The moment balanced on a thread as fine as spider’s silk, the snickering soldiers, the boiling boys, the machetes, the clubs and sticks, the rocks—
The moment broke. The smallest boy held his machete over his head and charged them, scr
eaming something wordless, howling, really, a sound Ashok had never heard a boy make. He got three steps before two rocks caught him, one in the arm and the second in the face, a spray of blood and a crunch of bone and a tooth that flew high in the air as the boy fell backwards as if poleaxed.
And the moment shattered. Machetes raised, the remaining five boys ran for the army, a crazy look in their faces. Ashok had time to wonder if the little boy lying motionless on the ground was the smaller brother of one of the remaining badmashes and then the fight was joined. The tallest boy, the one who’d answered the door that morning and spat at him, hacked his way through two soldiers, dealing out deep cuts to their chests and arms—Ashok’s face coated with a fine mist of geysering arterial blood—face contorted with rage. He was coming for Mala, standing centimeters from Ashok, and the blood ran off his machete and down his arm.
Mala seemed frozen in place, and Ashok thought that he was about to die, to watch her die first, and he tensed, blood roaring in his ears so loudly it drowned out the terrible screams of the fighters around him, desperate and about to grab for the boy. But as he shifted his weight, Mala barked “No!” at him, never shifting her eyes from the leader, and he checked himself, stumbling a half-step forward. The boy with the machete looked at him for the briefest of instants and Mala whirled, uncoiling herself, using the weighted skull-tipped cane to push herself off, then whipping out the arm, the gesture he’d seen her mime countless times in battle lessons, and the weighted tip crashed into the boy’s forearm with a crack he heard over the battle-sounds, a crack that he’d last heard that night so many months before, when Mala and her army had come for him and Yasmin in the night. Ashok the doctor’s son knew exactly what that crack meant.
A blur of fabric as Yasmin danced before him, stooping gracefully to take the machete up, and the boy just watched, eyes glazed, shock setting in already. Yasmin delicately and deliberately kicked him in the kneecap, a well-aimed kick with the toe of her sandal, coming in from the side, and the boy went down, crying in a little boy’s voice, calling out for his mother with a sound as plaintive as a baby bird that’s fallen from the nest.