listlessly at an ancient calculator, its buttons squeaking feebly.
‘You know your Bead has a calculator, right?’ Naila pulled up a chair.
Mother turned her hand over with a faint frown. ‘I hate this thing.’ The Bead in her finger and the circuit in her palm looked purple under her skin. ‘Your father hated his too. He insisted that we pay full price to get them right away – “technology-technology!” – but his Bead always just got in his way.’
Naila’s mind reached for him, sending seeking tendrils into the rooms of the house. Where’s Daddiji? This was the feeling now. Not the anguish that had wrenched her when Mother had called to say he was dead. Just: Where is he? Where? thrumming over her skin…
‘When they set him on fire,’ Mother was saying, ‘his Bead didn’t even burn. The crematorium gave it to me in a baggie – black bits and bobs. Like some kind of refund.’ She glanced at the box of ashes sitting on the side table beside a bowl of Madrasi mix. ‘And now Beads are free anyway.’
‘Mother,’ Naila urged softly. ‘He wanted for us to take his ashes home.’
Mother’s eyes silvered. She turned back to her calculator. Her hands grew busy again. ‘The dead do not want for anything,’ she said.
* * *
In the taxi to the train station, Naila wrapped her arms around her rucksack and saw the driver’s eyes harden in the rearview mirror. No, she wanted to explain, the precious cargo she clutched was not money. She put on her chattiest face and asked him questions to even the scales: You, me. Brown, brown. But the questions he returned – about her family, her education – unbalanced them again. Her discomfort at answering him disturbed her. According to Marx, the money form is an illusion – she ought to be able to talk frankly about it, no? The driver’s eyes flashed from their caves. She was rich and female and African and he resented her. No doubt he would charge an unreasonably high fare. But then he didn’t, and in her haste to catch her train, she forgot to tip him.
Naila and the dawn arrived at the train station at the same time. The sky looked battered, like beaten tin. It was ten to six but the station was already crowded. Voices scurried, rickshaw bells and car horns jangled, smells smoked through the gritty air. Knowing her Bead wouldn’t work without Wi-Fi, Naila had printed her ticket in advance. Clutching it – the flag of a tourist, if ever there was one – she raced to the platform, brushing off the porters, her rucksack tucked under her arm, her roller suitcase bumping behind her over the uneven ground. With ten minutes to spare, she clambered aboard her train and panted her way to her seat.
The other passengers were mostly families: unsmiling fathers, doting mothers, children like small gods – smooth-skinned, bright-eyed, quietly aware of their power. No one spoke to her. Her ripped jeans and silver hair set her apart from them. Chai wallahs marched the aisles, croaking out their wares and fares. At exactly 6.25 a.m., the train jerked and slugged forward. This didn’t feel like the India she’d read about in the news: authoritarian measures, class tensions, poor amenities, the threat of rape hanging everywhere.
The conductor strutted down the aisle, using his Bead to scan the tickets projected on passengers’ palms. When he reached her, Naila handed over her printout, its corners curling in the humidity. He lifted his chin and refused it. Naila blinked at his rapid Hindi, helplessness sticking in her throat. The ticket had cost less than a meal at the uni canteen but TripAdvisor had said that it was essential to have a reserved seat. Finally, ‘Bead, Bead,’ the conductor said in English and she shook her head and turned hers on to show him that it didn’t work here – but then of course it did. He rolled his eyes, scanned the QR code in her palm, and marched off.
That her Bead worked in India was a relief – it would be much easier to get around. She should have known her SIM would sync automatically with a local network. After all, developing countries had all got Bead-fever first. Digit-All had been savvy. Instead of calling these technological gadgets chips, the company had marketed them as beads, which sounded smooth and round and ever so ‘cultural’. After an initial high-cost roll-out to spark interest, Digit-All had partnered with