a kitchen drawer – there was very little left in the account but it hadn’t expired and it had a credit line with just enough for a plane ticket from Lusaka to Chennai via Dubai.
Naila stepped out of the freezing hotel lobby into the steaming hot night. She checked Tweather for Tirupati. 97°F. Jeez. She clicked ‘like’ to confirm the temperature with her Bead’s own measurement. As she made her way to the busy main drag, Tirupati glowed around her, as if lit with burning crops. Chitemene. Did farmers still do that? Burn it all down to start over? Tracing her route to the well-rated restaurant she’d found online, Naila came to a big, white building with an electric sign that said HANK YO. It looked colonial – columns and balustrades and palm trees and a fountain – but it was strung with gaudy lights. She heard drumming and saw people in traditional garb, their Bead lights dancing. A wedding? A wake? Bodies were being lifted and carried. It felt human and alive and just out of reach.
She opened her Maps app but the location service wasn’t working – the blue circle kept drifting across the lines in her palm. She stared blankly at a road sign. She was lost again. She was on a bridge, in the middle of a crowded pedestrian path, autorickshaws buzzing past like flies. She slung her rucksack down and knelt to dig inside it, searching for the printout of her hotel reservation, which had a tiny map on it. She stood and aimed her Bead at the rumpled paper, looking up now and then to orient herself. There. She had found herself. The restaurant was a few yards away. When she reached down to pick up her rucksack, it was gone.
* * *
Sitting in the Tiruchanoor police station, a yellow building with a clutter of motorbikes parked outside, Naila bowed to her fate. She put her elbows on her knees, her bald head in her hands, and whispered to the floor. You win, Mother. The place was full of police officers – men wearing tan uniforms with short-sleeved shirts, big black belts, and bulky caps. They all had moustaches and nothing to do. A lipsticked grandmother sat on a bench, weeping, dabbing her eyes with the edge of her periwinkle sari. A man in a loincloth lay on another bench, passed out.
The woman behind the counter called her name and Naila approached the glass window. She was handed a registration form on a clipboard with a chewed corner. She looked it over.
‘Ya, I don’t know my passport number,’ she said. ‘My passport’s in the safe at my hotel.’
‘We can quite simply scan your Bead, Miss,’ the woman said. Naila stuck her finger under the glass and the woman touched her own Bead to it. As both Beads beeped, Naila thought, as she always did, of Adam and God in the Sistine Chapel.
‘The officer will be with you shortly.’ The woman gestured for her to sit again.
Naila slumped back onto the bench next to the dhoti man. Glances hovered around her like bugs. Naila was used to this by now. She was mixed and itinerant; she was Zambian here, Indian there, foreign and uncomfortably female everywhere. The weeping grandmother rose to her feet and shuffled to the glass window. After an exchange in Hindi, the official handed the old woman a key with a dented Coke can for a key ring. She shuffled over to a door in the corner and let herself in.
Naila had made this trip to fulfill the promise Daddiji had made to Sri Venkateswara when she had fallen from the jacaranda tree in Kalingalinga. Before he had arrived at UTH and learned that she had only a fractured wrist, Daddiji had bargained for her life with mokku, the hair on his head. But he had never returned to India to bequeath it, even though he had worked all his life precisely to afford luxuries like international air travel. In the end his bank card had paid for a plane to circle his ashes up and down in the air, for a Lexus to drive them up and down a mountain. The one thing it could not pay to do was to bring them back to life, restore what was lost.
The grandmother shuffled out of the bathroom and shut it behind her. She was no longer weeping. She returned the key and headed straight for the exit, her nose lifted imperiously.