Read Migrations, Volume I : Don't Forget to Breathe Page 24
III.
The four men reached the top of the stairs to find the bodies of Untouchable children strewn about the streets. The addicts had mauled them and taken the syringes, leaving them to die. The sacks that the children had used for collecting had now been emptied onto the street next to them in piles. From the sky, it began to rain garbanzo beans—the first garbanzo rain of the year. The beans fell with little plip-plipping sounds amidst the backlight of the glowing streetlamps—which had recently been installed as a part of an urban renewal project to clean up the Dowa Districts, as a result of recent criticism from activist groups that the social mobility and conditions of living of Untouchables, since the caste system was abolished, had not at all changed. Huddled together nearby, in the shadow of a lamp post, were three addicts, bug-eyed and stooping over a fourth man, who was sitting on his knees, draining the syringes into an empty tin can. One caught Bunnu’s eye and, seeing that he was being escorted by the police, smiled and nodded, as though to indicate in a friendly manner that the two of them were somehow in the same situation, though it was difficult to understand how he might have arrived at this conclusion. And yet, Bunnu couldn’t help but feel it too and he found himself empathizing with the addicts.
On some level, he and the addicts: they had both been betrayed.
Bunnu brushed by the body of a little girl who had been laying facedown on the street and suddenly she seemed to come back to life, struggling to respire. Her breaths were shallow and congested as though her lungs were completely filled with fluid. She was drowning. As her face slowly rose and her chin rested against the street, she shivered as blood poured from her mouth and she made this horrible guttural sound with her eyes closed, like she wanted to say something.
Bunnu heard the bird’s song again. He looked up. An enormous metal crane towered at an angle into the evening sky so high it nearly broke the clouds. It droned and squeaked endlessly, puffing out steam in whistles as it labored to build a new housing project.
Atop it, a tiny bird was perched singing a curious song to the surrounding nature.