Read Online The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne - Free Book Online

animals.
    â€œI come here every morning before school and watch the sunrise and braid her hair,” continues the elder.
    The younger one comes to life. “Are you going to walk on the Trail?”
    â€œYes,” I say, and the answer comes so easily, an admission of a given, what I knew all along, before I went to the museum, before I even boarded the train to Mumbai, that the seed was there, and the solution.
    She wags her head. “Our brother Rana left a month ago. Amma says he went to join the seasteads.”
    â€œWhere are you from?”
    â€œDharavi,” says the elder, more shyly.
    â€œBut we go to school at Francis Xavier,” says the younger. “We take the student train.”
    I remember Lucia’s tale of a special shop for the Trail in Dharavi. I remember the universe is conspiring for me. I ask, “Do you know of a store called the Mart?”
    Of course she knows exactly what I’m talking about. “Yes, Amma can tell you where it is,” says the elder. “Her name is Sunita. She has a fish shop in Koliwada. She’s famous for her pomfret curry. Tell her that her daughters sent you and she’ll give you a discount.”
    I thank them and say good-bye. When I turn around to look back at them, their heads are haloed in the sunrise.
Koliwada
    It’s a long ride north in traffic. I count my cash. Just under two thousand rupees left. That’s a day’s worth of food before I’d have to start using my mitter again, which would broadcast my location.
    But my stomach feels like a black hole and I need to eat. So when I get to Koliwada, I ask around for Sunita, and when I find her, before anything else, I buy pomfret curry with chapati. I lean against a wall and eat out of the paper with my elbows close to my body. Then I go back to her, a barrel-bodied woman in a red sari crouching behind the grill.
    â€œWhere is the Mart?”
    Without looking at me, she turns the filets out of the heat, gets up, and beckons me back into her shack. As soon as I follow her into the shadows, she snaps at me.
    â€œMadam, you shouldn’t say that word so loudly.”
    â€œI didn’t know.”
    â€œIt’s illegal, madam.”
    â€œSo it exists.”
    â€œAre you from the police?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhy do you want the Mart, madam?”
    â€œI heard about it from your daughters on Marine Drive.”
    â€œChutiyas,” she says, which startles me. “Are you trying to join the walkers, madam?”
    â€œIt’s not your business.”
    â€œIt’s so dangerous, madam. It’s no place for a woman.”
    I’m not going to touch that. “But people survive, right?”
    â€œI don’t know, madam. There are rumors of settlements but we never hear back from them. My son Rana left a month ago and I’ve heard nothing.”
    â€œSo I heard.”
    Something shifts in her eyes. “If you go, you could find him and tell him to come home, madam.”
    â€œIf you tell me how to find the Mart, I might.”
    Five minutes later, carrying a picture of Rana and a box of soan papdi she insists he needs, she leads me by the hand through Dharavi. It’s like being in a three-dimensional maze. The view ahead is a labyrinth and the view overhead is a labyrinth, too, since Dharavi can only grow upward, not out, because there’s no more space, and not down, because all the basement workshops flooded when the sea level rose. When I look up I see children swinging from building to building on a network of ropes, all the way up, ten stories high, until the white of the sky blots them out.
    The woman stops at a doorway and greets a well-dressed man in a prayer cap. He turns to me.
    â€œWhy are you looking for the Mart, please?”
    â€œI’m interested in looking at your products.”
    â€œFor what reason?”
    â€œTo go out on the Trail.”
    This statement fazes him not at all. “Very