Once upon a time…

On the days when the south wind lifted the leaf-litter and set the prayer flags chattering, Partho closed his stall early and walked down to the river.

He carried three things: a shallow basket lined with banana leaf, a small brass bowl of milk, and the sea-polished stone that had lived in his pocket since his mother’s last monsoon. The milk splashed up the rim with each careful step. The stone thudded against the side of his thigh like a patient animal reminding him to feed it.

The Ganga here was not the grand sweep of postcards. The city had crept up to her, tender and terrible both. Along the promenade, the benches were printed with old couplets that glowed at dusk to guide walkers, and drinkers stooped to free their cups from the public water taps nestled in banyan roots. Everyone said the river had become kinder these past years. The pocked hulks of old factories on the far bank had been softened into humming filtration gardens coated in algae that drank quietly. Children ran through their mist on hot days, coming back streak-eyed and laughing, their cheeks green-sheened before their mothers made a show of catching them.

Still, when he reached the steps and the river’s breath hit his face — warm and iron-scented — Partho’s throat closed in the same old way. He set the basket down on the first step above the waterline and sat with his knees open, the milk bowl between them. Below, a man in a white shirt floated on his back, his arms laid out like the petals of a lotus, letting himself spin. Monsoon season was almost here. The sky had been threatening all afternoon.

A boy with a wet face and cricket hair came close and peered into the basket. “What’s for her?” he asked, respectful for his age.

“Milk,” Partho said, and his voice was stranger than he wanted. “And hands.” He cupped water over the stone and set it in the basket, and with quick fingers he shaped the banana leaf into a small vessel. He had learned this from his nana on a flood year when the river had climbed four steps in a night and taken his father’s bicycle and the neighbor’s goat. He had learned this when they still said Ganga-ma’s temper peaked on certain dark moons you could count on your fingers. He had learned before men in white shirts with silver rings came to offer him pay for what he grew in the paddy.

“Are you a fisher?” the boy asked.

“I was,” Partho said. Then he added because the boy was watching him so squarely, “I will be again.”

The boy looked satisfied by this and went drumming up the steps, a trail of water behind.

Above the ghat, the old shrine wore new bones. The original brick lay like a spine, two hundred years into its leaning, but around it the community had grown a framework of glass panes to keep the rains off. If you knocked on the glass it trembled with the sleeping hum of the inverters nested like bats in the rafters, pulling power from the river’s flow at night to light the morning lamps. No one knocked except the children. On certain days an old woman came and drank tea and took readings to help decide when to close the sluices upstream; she fed the river sensors with songs her grandmother had sung to the goddess, songs that turned now to graphs.

Partho watched an egret stab between stones, white and thin and unsentimental. He lifted the leaf vessel in both hands and set it on the river. It bobbed and slid, circling twice before accepting the current. The milk made a pale tongue in the brown water that the fish pulled to tatters. For a long while he watched it go.

When his mother had died in an ordinary way—he refused to imagine otherwise—on the broken flagstones just inside their house with karaoke drifting in through the window and the neighbors banging pots for rain, she had left him with a stall, three debts, and a capacity for stillness that surprised and frightened him. People came to him asking for dried fish and lentils and small packets of turmeric in pink paper. They asked for his laugh and his scold and his shoulder to lean on while they argued with their wives on the phone. He gave these things, and each night when he lay on the thin mattress under the ceiling fan, he did not feel the river move under him the way he always had before. He could not hear her voice in the bucket filling from the tap. He dreamt only of heat. It seemed to him a betrayal, and yet he was relieved.

On the walk back from the ghat he let himself stop. The city’s early lights cast their neighborly pools. The ripest mangoes had started to fall on the path and burst along the curb into honey and skin, and the stray dogs took them gladly. A motorbike nosed around piles of old bricks and slowed for a line of tiny lights that weren’t fireflies but the new street sprites, flickering along a rope between two poles. A girl was promoting them to passersby, tugging them to make them pulse brighter. “When the storm comes they sense it,” she said to an old man, “and they dance,” and the old man said, “Better that than my brother, who used to stand on the roof and shout at the lightning.”

The day was almost used up when he pushed open the corrugated door to his shop. Inside, the corncob broom leaned against the shelf like a thin aunt who had come to visit and found herself unwilling to leave. He turned on the fan and it clacked once and then sighed into motion. He set the stone on the counter and half-smiled at it, because it looked like a child pretending to be serious. When the first raindrops came, they were huge and lazy, dots appearing out of nowhere on the shutter of the shop across the lane, the rust blooming around them immediately like shame. He took buckets to set around the leaky points in the roof and then he stopped moving. He leaned against the counter and listened to the rain drum with that same patience with which he had watched the leaf boat accept the current. He closed his eyes. He was tired, but he did not lie down. He stood until the rain passed and the frogs started.

Morning brought a woman with a round green fruit in her two hands, ringed in a red thread as if it needed blessing. “Can you tell me if this is of the River?” she asked, eyeing the soaked hearth where he cooked rice in a dented pot each noon.

“Of the market,” Partho said, pushing his fingers gently into the fruit’s belly, which gave a little under pressure. “It came by rail. Late-stored.”

“No good?” Her lip wobbled. He had seen her before, with a stack of jasmine pinned in her hair for her husband’s return from night shift. They never bought on credit. He wondered if this was for that husband.

“It will be sweet enough,” he said. “Next month is better.” He handed the fruit back and aggrieved gods gleamed across her wrist on beaded bracelets as she tucked money under the stone on the counter. People had started to do this after his mother’s last monsoon. Money on the stone. As if it were a lion sleeping in their path. As if the stone might bite or bless.

After she left, he touched the stone with his knuckles. He found his fingers often on that stone in idle moments, the way men in films drummed their cigarettes on coffee tables. When his palm laid full on it his chest sometimes felt a soft click. He told no one this. He had not told anyone most things in the last year.

He was thirty-eight. He had learned all the old names of the river by learning to argue with them. His mother had called her Mother, Grandmother, Thief, Wet Ear, when she was coaxing, cursing, bargaining, and surrendering. Men with waders and careful hands had come with their clipboards and had called her Channel, System, Basin, Intakes, in voices like the prickle before rain. In newsfeeds they called her Asset, Remediation, Heritage. To himself, after his mother died, he had called her only You. He did not call. He had moved inland as far as the price of a stall would allow and told himself he could tend to the living who came to him each day asking for ginger and rice.

When he was small, his nana had censured the river by placing a little pot of turmeric milk on the threshold and saying, enough. He had laughed because the words were the ones she used for him when he licked jaggery from the spoon. Years later he had set out a pot on a day of high willows and whitecaps, and the river had not come in, not that year. It had been easy, then, to mix cause and consequence. It had been easy to taste his own power. He had never been greedy with that power. He had been frightened. He’d refused the men in waders out of fear, too, and he had refused the last fish when the river had turned poor, and he had refused and refused until refusing was what he knew how to do.

Midday, the sky became a thick silver and the neighborhood, in sympathy, slowed as if moving through starching water. Two old men with betel-red teeth hunkered on the pavers in the lane and began ranking the monsoons of their youth by the remembered height of submerged steps. A teen with a shaved head pressed seed-paste onto a strip of felt and clipped it to the gutter, capturing the first eager fall of water to count for the water council; he’d get a day’s credit on the municipal meter for such offerings. Down the way, a woman slapped roti dough that lit up with cool little luminescent flecks as she worked; she’d sewn a thread through a seed under each eave that sense-shifted with moisture and spoke to the house’s performance report each month. People asked the new for what they’d asked the old—tell us if we have been wasteful, and where we are to stand when the water comes.

At half-two a man popped his head in and said, “Partho-da, did you get the message? They need you at the ghat.” His face was apologetic. “A boat stuck.”

“Whose?”

“Not ours.” The man’s eyes traveled unwillingly from the belt of Partho’s stomach to the bowl where he was washing rice. “Volunteers are called. You are called. They said your name.”

He wanted to say, I am a man of measures there are buckets to fill and lines to mark and lists to write. He wanted to say, Last year when I put my hands in that water I did not sleep for the three days after. He said, “I will come.” He washed his hands and wiped them on his trousers and put the stone back in his pocket without thinking. It sat in a snug place above his thigh and warmed.

There was a sort of rushing in him then, like the rain had started and the world had to be moved quickly to keep it from becoming sodden. He shut the shop’s door with care, wrote BE BACK on a square of brown paper with a carpenters pencil and held it with tape to the shutter. He took his mother’s scarf from the hook on the wall and draped it around his neck. It held the faint smell of neem.

The call had gone out on everyone’s devices at once: a map that pulsed where help was needed with an old story-looped over it that told of a weaver who flew by tying scarves to the feet of birds. This had been Mili’s doing, Partho knew at a distance. She loved the old stories and made them into nets. When they had been seventeen she’d made a kite the size of a bedsheet and flown it from the bridge, smuggling it in past the guard under her salwar. Now she ran with three other women a channel you could subscribe to that braided irrigation updates with fables. He had unsubscribed after his mother died. He did not like to be braided to anything.

By the time he reached the ghat a small crowd had thickened. Children made their way under adult elbows like fish. The water sat heavy and brown, and a vessel like a trapped crescent rested not far from the steps, its lip hung on a rock. It was a sleek thing with a dull green curve worn in the paint by its moorings elsewhere, throwing up its belly like a tantrum. Two men clung to its prow with bare white arms, white now because they had strained and the blood had run out of their hands. Between the vessel and the steps a simple tangle of ropes had been thrown and had done nothing. A woman on the shore blew short controlled breaths at the men until they matched her.

Mili was there, squatting with her elbows on her knees, hair braided back and ring loose on one thumb. Her eyes ticked as she counted something only she could see. When she saw Partho she stood without wiping her hands on her trousers. It struck him, stupidly and sharp, how young her face was when she did not make it a face for photographs.

“You’re late,” she said. A smile threatened and then died. Her mouth found its firm line. “Good that you came.”

“Who is it?” He nodded to the men in the boat. “Where is their safety?”

“Their safety is up there eating a guava,” Mili said without looking. “It broke down. Or it is incompetent in a more complicated way.” She pulled her eyes from the water and looked full at him. “You remember early flood training even if you pretend to have forgotten it to me on four occasions.”

He spread his hands. “I am a grocer in mourning.”

“And a devout excuse-maker,” she said softly, not unkind. She made a small circle in the air with one forefinger. “We need someone to free the bowline and then walk the thing like a goat.”

“I never walked a goat,” he said, because the part of him that liked to banter had a deep spine and surfaced even in deep water.

“No one has,” she said. “But we all claim we have.” She nodded to the men in the water and shouted something that was all proper words and some very old ones, sung like a map. The man on the shore blowing breath made a sound that matched, a response from some elder part of the brain that woke at rhythm. The crowd rose and fell. Somebody clapped, and somebody hissed at him for doing it.

The step stones had a memory of bare feet. When Partho pulled off his sandals and put his soles down it was like stepping into a story that had been told so many times only the vowels remained. His skin remembered river. The first lick of water up his shins sent a chill that was anger and love both through his gut. He breathed like Mili had taught kids at the clinic—four beats in through the nose, six out through the mouth, silly as it felt to count. He took the rope a younger man threw him, looped it over his shoulder and under his arm, and stepped forward. Water pressed harder. He reached the boat. It loomed closer than it had looked from shore. The men in the prow had the shiny shocked look of fish brought up fast from deep water. They said something like friend or brother, lips blue. His hands found knots, then knew them.

“No heroics,” Mili sang from shore, in that old tune that made a new command a tradition instantly. He loosened the tangle, whistled once without meaning to—the sound his father had used for goats, after all—and put his shoulder into the hull. The boat grated against the rock. The river had a hand up under it and was in no mood. He teased, therefore. He scooped with his hip, he pushed only on the lift, he waited through the weight like a friend with bad news waits for you to come to the end of your first story so he can give you his own. When the bow lifted he did not yell. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes up so he would not see his mother on the flagstones with karaoke drifting in. The craft slid. One of the men made a noise that was either a sob or laughter. Together they found the deeper line between stones and he began to walk it in, goat-walker now indeed, the rope bossing over his shoulder.

On the steps, Mili’s hand flashed up once like the old devotions and then disciplined itself down. “Don’t look at me,” she said, to no one and to everyone.

When the boat’s bottom sang against the first stair there was that very Indian thing of applause that is not applause but release. The teenager who had clipped the seed-paste to the gutter earlier appeared with a thermos in both hands and attempted to hand it to everyone in turn. A kind of giddiness stood up in Partho. He did not give it permission; it stood up anyway. He found himself laughing and not knowing it until he was bumping shoulders with the other man and their laughter were two animals meeting on the same path and not eating each other. He could not stop the laughter, and then he could, and he did. He came back into his skin and remembered the stone in his pocket, which somehow seemed larger now, as if it had taken a breath. He put his wet fingers against it through the cloth.

“You make an enemy of me when you do not come when called,” Mili said at his shoulder. Then, lower, more like herself: “You make my work stupid.” She pushed a towel at his chest and he took it. “You think it is some noble thing to hold back from the river. It is just childish.”

He made a face. “You have been wanting to call me childish since that kite.”

“Since before,” she said. “Since I beat you in a race by the dyeing pond and you said I cheated because the ground was not fair.”

“We were nine.”

“And you are thirty-eight.” She looked at the hem of his trousers and shook her head at the brown line there as if he had stepped in something intimate and rude. “I am sorry about Ma,” she added, too fast, as if the words needed to be made before they starved. “It was hard to find you for a while. It was as if you had folded into a very particular kind of darkness that had a carry handle, like a tiffin.”

He had not meant to let the smile come, but it did. He tucked the towel over his shoulder. “You made it a poem online,” he said, half-accusing, sudden heat in his word for poem. “About small griefs that were big, about hands in bowls of water. People sent it to me as if it could fix anything.”

“I can’t help the things I see,” she said, with that hopeless little hitch in her shoulder that had been there even at twelve when she had blamed herself for birds hitting the school window. “I hid your name. I am allowed to be on the world and not only in your shop.”

“You are allowed,” he said, and then the boy with the thermos came and saved them from one another a little with sweet tea that had a skin forming already and grittiness from being poured through a scarf with too little washing.

The men from the boat were led up the steps and wrapped in shawls that had been handed down to the water council for such days. The shawls had printed on them, in the pale blue of municipal paint, a border of snakes drinking milk out of bowls. A half superstition, a half reminder of the day every year the neighborhood put out saucers for the snakes in the vacant lot and for the sensors at the base of the big pipal, the way you put out sweets for children and contributions in the temple box. What you keep alive you honor. What you honor has reason to leave you whole. This was Mili’s other way of seeing: that the old offerings had become a language the new things could hear. He did not know if it was true, but it comforted him even as it made him roll his eyes.

It rained then properly, a sheet. The sound was the old drumming and the new hush of water slinking into purple-throated vines along the floodwalls. The ground smelled of metal that had learned to be plant. The bright spots of the bench-couplets flickered and steadied, some old lover’s name there under the new layers. He could not hear the karaoke of last year under it all. He had been carrying it like a sack on his shoulder for months, and in this sound he could not hear it, and he felt suddenly treacherous for being made lighter when nothing had changed about his mother’s not-coming-back. He found then that his hands were shaking, and he set them on the top of his own head like a man setting a bucket down to feel its weight and stop its swing.

A dog came and shook itself beside him, leaving little stars of wet on his trousers. The boy with the thermos laughed, and then the laughed turned into a whoop as the breakers on the steps filled and the Melipona bees found the hollow columns where they would ride out the wind, bringing with them the little dirts of pollen that stuck to their knees like travelers’ carry-ons. He thought then inexplicably of the time his mother had applied oil to his scalp and told him to sit up straight because when rain was close, spine should be a bamboo, and he was so tired with being relieved he almost sat down on the steps smack in the path of the small exodus of ants and said aloud to no one in particular, “She is not coming.” Mili looked at him and did not ask who. She tightened her hand on her towel and threw back her head to get rain out of her eyelashes, and he did not watch her throat too carefully when she swallowed.

There was afterwards of course a small event around the boat: signatures taken, an offering made to the shrine in thanks, a note entered into the ledger that would go to a man two neighborhoods away with a radio voice to weave into his evening reading of water-news between a cabaret song and an old protest verse. There was soup in a communal pot. There were wet bodies navigated past irrelevant politenesses. It was the human shape of rescue, and it made Partho’s chest ache, seeing it, because for all that he could be specific about tomatoes and jute and home-delivery and emmer wheat, and for all his snug small lists, the shape that held him here had always been this one: the way people arranged themselves to hold the door against the weather. It was not something he had known in language. It was something the stone in his pocket now had learned to know.

By the time wind had loosened and the mosquitoes were a tolerable rumor and the street sprites between their poles began to emit that peculiar low little note they only gave off when they had drunk enough of the sky to hum, the thing that had called him down there had fallen quiet. He felt like he had paid a bill. He also felt like he had opened a ledger he did not know he owned.

He walked back in the parting rain. Doors opened at the hiss of the street as people put out their jars and jugs to be bled of the day’s collection from their roofs, each stamping a mark on their devices like thumbprints on credit books, and those who were too old or too busy or new to the work had a neighbor do it and fold the difference into their favor. He passed the old man who had wanted to buy his ginger cheap last week and seen only himself in Partho’s refusal; the old man lifted his chin now and said a single bighearted vulgar word to him that made his stomach uncoil. He passed the place where the boys played carrom under the eaves in heat or flood and the men who lost big pretended to be philosophers. He passed a woman singing while she poured and not minding when a little light on her wall chirped because her collection jar was full. He passed the house whose foundation had cracked in the hot winter three years ago, and the new joists that had been slid in by patient hands when government money had arrived as late as the mangoes and twice as much a surprise.

At his shop door, the brown paper BE BACK had peeled at one corner and hung like a wonky eyebrow. He touched it flat before he slid it off and tossed it, damp, at the broom’s thin aunt-ankles. Inside, the room smelled of wet rope and ash. He put his mother’s scarf again on its hook. He set the stone back on the counter. He looked at it and felt, ludicrously and purely, that it was looking at him back. He blew a puff of air at its surface as if dust sat there, when only fine droplets had.

When the night was fully hatched, he lay on the thin mattress under the indifferent fan and did not make himself close his eyes. He listened to the canal song and the frog confusion and the intermittent twanging hum of the inverters at the shrine rounding off their current with contented burps. He did not dream of heat immediately and then not at all. He slept and woke twice with the sense that he had somewhere yet to give help and found instead the quiet of his own body’s insistences. In the second waking he heard footsteps in the lane and lay still to hear them and did not pretend them away or make them into a weaver or a ghost or a thief. He listened until they were only footsteps and then felt something in his chest replace itself. He slept again and woke with the sky a belly of pale green fish and the phone hissed not with a call for volunteers but with a message from Mili: a picture of a leaf vessel riding brown silk. Under it she had written, for no one, maybe, and for him, “Float, na?” He stared at it, that little old request dressed in new lace. He made his porridge, stirring the raisins in when the water boiled, and sat on his charpoy with the bowl hot in his palm and sent nothing back.

The day wore in like an old shirt. He sold red onions to someone who knew his mother and said she looked better with her hair short. He got two bags of flour from the man with the white moustache who always sniffed for wet in the sack and was never wrong. He gave a handful of trimmings to the goats who led a saint’s life along the lane nibbling all things offered with one long look up at the face behind the hand. He took his pan to the stove at noon and toasted chilies and coughed as if he had been surprised by the air itself having ideas. He caught himself three times with his hand on the stone, breathing in and out with no river for his knee to lean into, and he did not take his hand away like a reprimanded child. He left it there and smudged his palm on it the way he had seen his mother smudge her thumb on her god’s forehead when she was losing an argument with herself.

Late, when everyone had gone home to their soap and their soup and their messages, a boy he did not know came and in a cheery voice that made no apology told him the council had assigned him an hour at the weir for barrier check and he could swap his time if he liked but his swap window was only until dusk. The boy blew the fringe off his forehead, offered a smile so metal it might have come out of a mold, and trotted away. He wondered if this was Mili’s doing. He did not message her to ask. He closed the shutter and pulled the bolt and left through the back and walked where the alleys ran, where the old scent of mustard oil and fish scales lived under all the new.

At the weir the floodwall had a skin of moss like an ancient rune that had learned how to express itself in green. There were two other people there already, a couple, passing a torch back and forth and laughing in that relieved way of those who get to do small work with their hands that is also big work in the world. He nodded and took the hook on a long pole and walked the length of the metal teeth, lifting away palm fronds, the wrapper of a sweet, a long strand of black hair caught in the wire that he pretended not to think of as a curse. His arms took on the useful ache of work well matched to them. The water pressed and hissed like a cousin repeating gossip under his breath so the children would not hear. By the time the hour marked itself on his small display, he had let his mind sit down. The rain came on in sheets and slanted off and on. The weir’s snarl thinned under his method and returned, as was its nature. He did not feel grand; he felt right-sized. When he left, the couple were kissing with their foreheads touching, torch set between their feet to keep from rolling, as if they were bratty royals under strict instructions to make heirs.

It was full dark when he reached the ghat again, not because he had meant to but because his feet had once more found the old river path. The shrine hummed like an animal asleep with a little cough now and then. An old woman sat with her chin on her fist and a cotton working sari hitched up to her knees to dry. “I thought it was you,” she said, not rising. “I can smell your family’s mustard. It climbs the night.”

“My mother says I smell like brass,” he said, surprising himself. The old woman made a low noise that might have been a nod.

He went down two steps. He took the stone from his pocket. It was not warm now or cold in any accusatory way. It was simply itself, heavier than when he had put it there earlier. He set it down beside him. The ring of its weight on the step was a voice he had always known.

A bat came and skimmed the surface where offerings lost their oil. A night heron shot past with a fish that still curled its body in the shape of the water it had lately been. The house behind him with the crack running under its back room let out a chord like a man humming to himself, from the new joists shifting a little in the cooling. He had done a thing he had been refusing to do, and nothing trembled with the end of the world. His mother did not occupy the empty place beside him and did not ask him if he was eating, if he was making a fool of himself, if he was considering marriage. He kept his hands on his own thighs. He looked at the water and did not look through it for anything that would meet his gaze back.

Above the water, a thin mist lay that was not mist but a living curtain of tiny spiders on their silk, lifted like a veil by the vague convergence of wind and heat. It made the river look as if under the skin of her were a second river, and under that a third. He watched the silk flex and settle. At the temple behind him someone placed a cup down too hard and the glass rang like a finger around a bowl. The stone next to him was only a stone unless it was not. He sat. He watched the dark throw itself on the steps and pull back and throw itself again.

When the rain began once more, small-throated and steady, the first drops tapped his knuckles and danced their cold little feet there. He did not pull his hand away. He sat with his palm open, letting the rain fill it until it pooled in that tiny hollow where over years his own work had worn the flesh down. The pool rounded itself and quivered and tipped, sliding away with a neatness that would have pleased his mother when she folded boiled shirts. He filled it again and spilled it again. He kept doing this. He kept doing it until the night smelled of green as if a new garment had put itself on the city all at once and it fit, and the river gossiped with the steps in a language of clicks he could almost have joined if called upon, and the spiders lowered themselves into the music and rose again, and the prayer flags along the passes tapped very gently the plates of air they had been set to tap.

When at last he stood, he did not take the stone. He left it on the step like a seat saved for someone in case they came late. He started up toward the street. Everyone had told him leaving a thing at the river was a way of giving it. It seemed to him the reverse: that he was leaving something for himself to find in the morning, like a note, like a corner kept safe by a mother’s hand on a crowded bus. He walked up into the lane. The sprites along their rope lifted their tiny lamps as the wind went sidelong, and behind him, down on the step, the stone took the rain without effort and made its own small sound when each drop arrived and burst. He did not turn back to see. He carried the shape of that small sound in his chest as something like a key.