In Step

In the city, he is a short, brown, bow-legged man who walks slowly. A regular Sunday ka driver, as her father would say. But in the forest, he fits, like trees or roots. He moves fast. She has never seen him move this fast. She follows.

The backpack she carries is heavy and lashed so tightly around her hips that the flesh bunches up around the straps.

‘It’s better for your balance this way,’ he tells her.

Twice she has asked him to slow down and twice he has listened.

But even when he walks slowly, he is faster than her.

Even when she tells herself, ‘This is my own pace; just keep this pace; don’t worry about him,’ still, she feels she must catch up.

If your husband cannot or will not walk in step beside you, says a voice in her head, what does that say about the future of your marriage? Especially a day-old marriage.

But listen, she replies to the voice, he knows this place.

In his other life – which is what he calls his life before she came into it – in his other life, he has spent hours and weeks in this landscape. Why, he grew up in it, he says, pointing to where this happened or that.

Usually, she is jealous when hearing about this other life. Usually, he mentions other women.

But this time, he does not.

He tells her he wants the first hours of their new life together to be in this landscape.

He tells her that she has nothing to worry about, that the only predators – ‘besides me, of course,’ he bares his teeth, smiling – that the only predators are wild dogs that no one ever sees.

He tells her that it will change their lives, that it will scoop the city out of her, that it will connect her to the essence of him.

Three days out of time, free from both their families, in this wild place.

She kisses him. She agrees.

Now and then, he breaks off overhanging branches and stamps on them. Now and then, he stops and waits for her to catch up. Then he is moving. She follows him up and down hills, labouring with large useless feet. When they reach a shallow green valley, he stops.

‘Good space for lunch, isn’t it?’ He smiles. His teeth are what her family would call American teeth, meaning they have been tended to since he was born.

‘Indian boy lekin American teeth,’ she had overheard her mother say to her aunt one day. ’Straight teeth.’

‘Acha,’ her aunt had replied.

‘Yes, not like ours.’ her mother said. ‘Arey, the amount we have spent on our teeth since coming to the States. Hamare dentist, voh family friend ban gaya.’

She had heard them both laughing but it was true. The dentist was now a family friend, getting to know them one after the other as they had gone in for cavities or root canals.

And the truth was, she herself had made an appointment to get her teeth whitened right after he proposed.

That was before they eloped, before everyone got so angry at them for disrupting the chaos of a week-long wedding, before he said to her, ‘fuck it, let’s go to city hall,’ and then, ‘I have a place I want to show you.’

His wildness matched hers. His longing matched hers. Never mind the teeth. She had said yes to the idea at once.

Now they are in the place, in the landscape he knows and he is speaking to her. He comes close to her, his face soft and open.

‘Wasn’t it lovely,’ he says, his voice low, ‘to walk and listen to the sounds of the forest?’

‘Yes,’ she relents. ‘It was lovely.’

He sits down, and speaks of what they have walked past. He points to things and names them. This is my husband, she thinks. Now she is proud as she recalls the ease with which he moved. It is all she can do to not stop his mouth with hers. But she lets him speak and lets the feeling grow strong in her and she names this feeling love.

He takes out a small stove and boils water. He makes tea. He gives her sandwiches that he made himself before they left at dawn. They eat slowly and as soon as she is done, he draws her onto his lap. He bites gently at her lips. His beard scratches her cheeks. She is a soft animal in the hot sun.

‘I feel I’ve known you forever,’ he says.

‘They’re all so mad at us…’ She threads her fingers through his hair.’ I love how you can shrug it off. I love how we escaped that madness.’

‘That was a mess. This is madness, my kind of madness.’ His lips are warm.

’Happy honeymoon,’ he says between breaths. The sex is fierce and fast. Almost immediately afterwards, he checks his watch. ‘We should get going.’ He stands. He buttons his shirt quickly.

They begin walking again. She dreads the inevitable change, and watches it happen.

He is closed to her, focussed forward, self-contained. She is scattered, conscious of too many things – roots waiting to trip her, rocks waiting to be dislodged, logs waiting to roll over.

She is walking dead smack into his other life, his very recent other life and she does not know him at all. How many times has he walked this way with friends, with lovers, with other people who are not her? So many people with more knowledge of him. Still, he has committed himself to a lifetime with her. And she has committed herself to this excursion as irrevocably as, one day ago, she committed herself to him.

She walks with all these things pricking at her. She is careless. As she is crossing over a wide log, her backpack pulls her down and she falls back. She lies there, a beetle, legs in the air. He is too far ahead to hear and does not turn.

She forces herself upright and continues walking. She knows that on the ground, along with the indentation of her ass and the tip of her elbow, she has left something else behind.

But she doesn’t know what this is.

She doesn’t know her own myth. He does. He has his shape, his form, his epithet. Swift-footed, like Peleus’ son, his tale has been sung. It has been drawn onto walls of caves by men who sketch out his prowess and marvel at it. They have not drawn her. They are waiting for her to create herself.

He knows this. Sometimes, when he looks back at her, she sees a cool appraisal that registers her gait, her out of shape endurance, her city roots and her connection to a country that he technically belongs to. But he doesn’t really know it or want to. He grew up udhar, as her grandmother had said when she called to tell her about the wedding.

‘Udhar, that Amrika place, and from what you are telling me, not even a city, some forest, hill bill, place. Of course it’s your choice. But will you remember that there is a difference in how you were raised and by rushing into all this, you don’t really know if the difference will matter.’

‘Naanee,’ she had drawn out the word, ‘Naanee, I can’t wait to marry him.’ Her grandmother had started laughing.

She sees her now, a thin, tall, woman, hair streaked with henna, sitting very straight on the eighth-floor terrace of an apartment overlooking the Arabian sea.

‘Hey, hey, come on back.’ He is smiling at her now. ‘Come on back. Present tense only, remember. No past.’

Everything in him is focussed on her. At moments like this, she shrugs off the way he looks back and appraises her. But she doesn’t forget the gaze.

She walks. The forest feels quieter now. Ahead, a dark slope rises to a summit of black rocks. It is a hill of brown loose earth. Nothing in which to anchor your feet.

Her husband clambers up quickly, slipping every now and then but generating enough momentum that he continues going upward. When he is halfway up, he begins to slide down fast. She doesn’t know how to help. His body swerves wildly before he regains his footing and stops.

‘It’s okay,’ he laughs as he finds his balance. ‘It’s not that bad. Just be careful, okay?’

The ‘okay’ echoes down the slope at her while his legs move up and out of sight into the forest above. It is quiet at the base of the hill. Soil he has dislodged trickles down to her feet. She stares at the top, at the empty space where his legs were before they moved forward without her. She fills up that space with the image of those legs, clad in dark pants, legs that he wraps around her, legs that have preceded her for miles, legs that decide the pace, the path, her destiny, legs that were once in sight and now are not.

Maybe later, she will give a name to the feeling. But in the moment, she lives it as something inevitable, a step, and then another and before she knows it, she has turned away from him and is walking another way.

*

Tall thin trees sway and creak. Once she thinks she hears her name but now that she has no one to follow, she is walking faster and does not want to break the momentum. She walks along a river they have passed before, a river that winds away from him. It is good to have that river beside her. At least, it is spitting out sounds for her. At least, it is engaging her in conversation. At least, it is beside her.

For once in her life, she has moved faster than her brain. She realises this later. Now her brain catches up. Now she is in a strange forest, hours from civilisation, on unmarked trails that she does not know. She has, in her backpack, one sandwich, one bottle of water, one change of clothes and one sleeping bag. Today is the first day of a three-day excursion. Today is also the first day of her honeymoon. She who knows concrete and cities has wilfully abandoned her husband and her guide. She has deliberately misled herself.

She stops. The river is dark, muddy and moving swiftly downhill. In the distance, it rounds a curve and disappears. The shore is pebbly, with masses of wet logs and thick mud and here and there are patches of green and pink moss. The moss reminds her of stories she read as a child about the soft hearts of forests.

There is a sudden declamation of chirping. Then silence. The wind begins to gust.

When the storm breaks, she tries to be unafraid. But she fails. The rain batters the trees. Heavy cold drops pelt the river, creating small circles that are broken as soon as they appear by other drops that create other circles that are also broken: an endless cycle of impact after impact. She stands below a wide branched tree, hugging the trunk, flat against it, her hood pulled over her face. Rain drips from the edge of her hood onto her toes. Thunder sounds close, followed by scars of lightning. She knows enough to leave the tree. She pulls her hood tightly over her face and runs into the storm.

Just as she is thanking god for the cover of trees, the trees end. The wind hits her with full force. The rain is in her eyes, in her hair. It is hard to stand upright. The wind prefers her supine.

She is at the edge of a vast treeless expanse – a russet coloured marsh. She takes a step and sinks down to her ankles. Another step and she sinks up to her calves. Her feet make gulping sounds.

Through the rain, she thinks she sees something, a house, a line of trees. She crawls, stands, walks, sinks, crawls.

And then, there is something ahead. A wooden shack, a wooden door. She knocks heavily. The wind carries the sound away. She knocks again brutally, breaking the skin on her knuckles, and again, till she feels a trickle of blood between her fingers.

Abruptly, the door opens inwards. A blaze of heat hits her – she welcomes the force of it.

A man stands before her. His face is matted with black hair. He is tall and wears a dark sweater and a cap pulled low over his head. He stares – he cannot fathom her.

She steps forward forcefully. There is a glowing stove behind him and she must be closer to it. He makes a sound and steps back. In between the hair on his face, she sees bits of red skin. His eyes are watery. He makes another sound and then gestures to his mouth and his throat. The sound is strangled and rusty. She sinks to the floor beside the stove. It is a cast-iron rectangle with flames licking out from the centre. Above the flames, a metal grate and on the grate, a black pot of something that smells of meat. There is a table on the right. A window. Another doorway leading to another room. A narrow bed on the left and beside it, a large shaggy rug. A stack of magazines in a corner piled high, almost to the ceiling.

He is pawing at her neck with his hands. She is too tired to flinch and turns slowly. He holds a wad of clothes in his hand and nods towards the other room. She un-clasps her backpack and stands. The second room is a storeroom. It is cold with an earthen floor. There are lots of tins everywhere and in a corner from a hook, hangs a carcass of an animal. She puts on his woollen pants and sweater. They smell of urine but they are dry and warm.

When she returns, he is spooning something from the pot into a bowl. He hands it to her. It is a thick soup. She sits on the rug, eats it and then hands the bowl back to him. The wind whistles through the wooden rafters. The walls flinch and creak from the force of it. He watches her, his eyes narrowed, holding her soup bowl.

Dully, she imagines her husband out in the storm. Then she stops the thought. She closes her eyes and lets the warmth seep into everything. She feels the weight of blankets being placed on her and sinks with them into the dark.

When she wakes, it is still night and the fire is still going high on the stove, casting shadows on the wall. The she hears bed springs creak. The man is on her. She yells into his soundless mouth as it covers hers. He claws at her pants. She kicks at him, but his weight is tremendous. She slaps at his face, his beard, his chest till her arms ache. He does not budge. So she does not. She lies there, still, dead. He becomes frantic. One hand tightens around her throat, the other pulls at her hip, slapping at it, urging her to move. He is frenzied. He begins to squeeze her throat. She cannot breathe. But she lifts her knee with force. His hand slackens on her throat and he rolls into a huddle at the side of her.

She watches him rise unsteadily and move back to his cot. He sits down heavily, places his head in his hands and sobs. Crying softly, he lays back on the bed. She stays awake till dawn. Then she sleeps.

When she awakes, the sun is bright. He stands before her. He does not meet her eyes.

In one hand, he holds her clothes. The other proffers a piece of paper. She sits up, takes her clothes and the paper and goes to the other room. The paper is a map of sorts. It shows a rough square with a chimney – this cabin – and beside it, a straight dotted line, a stream. He has drawn arrows to indicate that she must follow this stream, to the left of the cabin, to a place marked X. The name that he has written next to the X is the same name that her husband has told her will be their destination. It is one mile from a road where a bus stops and picks up people and takes them back to civilisation. There are two suns drawn on the right of the paper which she takes to mean that this journey will take her two days.

When she returns to the main room, he is sitting on a low stool, facing the fire. He does not turn and she does not address him. She puts on the backpack and opens the door.

Ahead is a landscape of trees and hills and to her left, the new stream that she is meant to follow. It is narrow and fast, overfed by rain. She walks beside it. The ground is wet and slippery but it is no bog and firm enough. After she was walked for some time, she stops. The stream is so clear and shallow that she can see its pebbly base. She lays down her backpack and takes off all her clothes. The cold stings her skin. She cups water in her hands and pours it over her body. With a smooth round stone, she scrubs. She washes her hair, her eyes, her face, her breasts, her legs, her vagina, her toes, between her toes.

Then she stands and speaks her name out loud. The sound echoes in the stream and in her skin. She puts on her clothes and continues walking.

When night comes, everything in her is spent. She places the sleeping bag under a tree and crawls inside. The night is thick with sounds that she does not know and cannot name. She tries to remember the clear well-lit shapes of things. But the darkness deceives her and she is afraid of it.

High-pitched yelps suddenly rent the air. She does not move. The sounds rise. She places her hands over her ears, huddles into the bag and wishes for it to stop. It does not. The sounds hurt her teeth. Finally, she unzips the bag. The moon is full and bright. Nothing else is stirring except the sound and her – as if only she can hear it.

She begins to walk, her breathing shallow. After an hour or ten minutes – she does not know which – she reaches a small clearing. There are remnants of a barbed wire fence. A deer-like animal with a long neck is tangled in this fence. About three or four wild dogs are biting it. Their teeth are sunk into its flesh. The sounds it makes, somewhere between a neigh and a scream, are deafening.

She does not think. She walks straight into the dogs with her body. She walks straight into them as if they were not there. They are so startled that they freeze. She stoops, picks up a small log at her feet, hits one dog and then the other with it. She swings wildly at their mouths dripping with the blood of the animal. They are more surprised than afraid when they growl and run away.

She looks at the animal. It is half-eaten, its belly cut open in serrated lines and much of what was inside is outside. It is watching her. It knows her. It is not surprised to see her step towards it.

This step, words are forming in her brain, and that step.

She kneels beside the animal, and places her hand on a patch of intact skin.

The skin feels hot.

She feels the last pulse, drumming, fading. She waits. She waits till the last breath.

Then she rises and begins walking away. She hears the dogs returning, barking but they are feasting on the animal and want nothing from her. She crawls into her sleeping bag and sleeps.

She wakes to a still hot day. The sky is cloudless and the stream a ribbon of glass.

She walks. There is no softness in anything; nothing seems to dissolve into anything else. By twilight, she is in the place marked X on the map.

It is an ideal spot for honeymooners, a flat expanse of grass with a clear pool fed from the stream and rimmed with trees. In the centre, a circle of logs for a campfire.

She sits on the grass to wait for her husband. He will come and they will leave this place and their lives will ravel and unravel as lives do.

For now, there is the sky, darkening into indigo, like nights painted in folktales.

There is a smudged white moon. The stars feel brittle. In the moist air, she can almost hear songs. Who are they, the women who have walked out of the dark? What is this low chorus that persists in the night? Her fingers, still darkened by the blood of the animal, tap in rhythm.