She will see him now, and all will be well. They will see him. His mother and his sister. And what else? His mother was pregnant as he left his old life, but he has lost this fact, just as he has lost the memory of pain. What will they say? In truth he has not considered what he will find when he finds home. He hasn’t imagined anything save the broad lines—for himself he keeps it simple: they are alive, they exist. I exist. I am going home. I am returning just as I said I would, as was foretold. I am returning as a big man, a man of means, a success. Even as he imagines this homecoming, a dark part of him knows it is a lie.
The bus he is traveling in breaks down in the evening.
The passengers sit groaning in their sleep, wrapped in shawls, waiting for something to change. Nothing changes. Soon everyone is told to climb off. Most sit on the roadside, huddled against the creeping cold. Some who know the way begin to walk.
He climbs out with his bag and begins to walk too, hails a truck.
* * *
—
He sits in the cab beside the driver, careering into the night. They have been going an hour now, barely sharing ten words. He is studying the road ahead by the sweep of the lights. He begins, so he thinks, to recognize landmarks, monuments to the embedded memories of exodus.
The truck driver, a stout, bearded man in his fifties, chain-smoking beedis, studies the reverence in the boy’s face.
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“Delhi,” Ajay says.
Time passes.
“But you know these roads.”
Ajay doesn’t reply.
“What do you do?”
“Kaam.” Work.
The trucker laughs. “We all work.” He pauses. “What kind of work?”
Ajay unbuttons his suit, lets the chill draft of air from the night pour over his chest.
“Accha kaam.” Good work.
They drive on with this phrase in the air, ambiguous and strange.
“There’s been trouble this month,” the trucker finally says. “Gangs fighting. Lots of hijackings. Maybe it’s not safe.”
Ajay turns toward him. “For me?”
Ajay’s gun hangs in its holster inside his jacket.
The trucker averts his eyes.
For a moment Ajay has forgotten why he’s there.
He leans back, closes his eyes, shivers, basks in his power.
“Who do you work for?” the driver asks.
His voice is flat, lacking pretense.
He wants to know.
“Vicky Wadia.”
The driver’s precipitous silence says it all.
* * *
—
They stop at a dhaba deep into the night. The glow of hypnotic striplights lashed to trees. Ajay sits alone at an outdoor table in the far corner, the legs of his plastic chair bowing under his weight. Steaming pots of food and drunken nocturnal voices reverberating with drunken desires.
He sees the truck driver watching from the other table, can guess the conversation with other drivers, with dhaba workers. Discussing him, pointing out the Wadia man, the one in the nice suit, carrying the pukka gun.
Debating his intentions.
He can’t help but feel pride.
Feared, respected.
Unassailable.
He casts his eyes over the other men, truck drivers mostly. A handful of families, minding their own business. His gaze moves slowly through the dhaba. And then stops.
A dhaba boy, a worker. Big ears, a mop of black hair, painfully thin, twelve or thirteen years old. He’s working the tandoor, sweat pooling on his forehead, a grimace on his face. Ajay scans his body, all the way to his feet. The chain. One bony ankle, shackled to the base of the oven. His eyes are glazed with the reflection of the flames flickering inside the pit.
Another memory resurrected. The dhaba, the fields behind it, lined with garbage. The concrete wall that hides the toilet ditch. How could he forget? The boy leaping from the cage that held them all, running from the Tempo into the misted fields, chased by the thekedar’s assistant. The howl at the end of it. The bloodied knife. For a moment Ajay thinks he is there. That this, now, is then. The world unstable.
Is he? Is that the boy? Did they bring him back? Did he never get away?
He stands and walks slowly through the dhaba crowd, around the tables, all the way inside, knowing everyone is watching him. He passes the threshold of the kitchen, ignores the protests of the workers, and comes to a stop before the boy. The boy stops his work and looks at him, trembling like a whipped dog. A voice behind Ajay says, “Behenchod.” He turns to find a potbellied cook with a cleaver in his hand. “What are you doing?” The cook raises the cleaver dramatically, but Ajay doesn’t flinch, and another worker hurries to hiss something in his ear, pull him back. The cook lowers his cleaver and lowers his gaze and turns away, leaving Ajay alone.