Asha Thanki
somewhere in bombay, a fog descends
Here’s what I remember:
The day was unnaturally cool. Mist coated the dirt road, the sweet smell of dew camouflaging what we were used to—sweat, rotting fruit, the odor of the heat itself. The only thing that seemed familiar was the thickness of the air. Sunlight refracted, muffled, through the new weight, and a hazy golden glow settled onto the painted signs of storefronts and patterned kurtas shuffling through the streets.
It was difficult to know the difference between this fog and the usual suffocation; our lungs had known thickness from birth, known humidity and smog the same way we knew which floorboards creaked, which windows slid open easily, which aunties were most forgiving.
Anu told me once that she didn’t notice the fog until it was already filling the space outside her window, ghost-like and heavy, and only then did she miss the way she used to be able to see the sweating concrete of the building next door. That, see, was a turning point: You couldn’t tell you were losing something until it was gone, and by then, you’d already forgotten it.
Maybe I should start earlier.
The fog took Dadima first. She sat in the middle of the floor of the apartment, cross-legged, shoulders bowing with the residual motion of rolling roti. Her arms were covered in wheat flour up to her elbows, her hairline dotted with sweat. This was how I remember her, most of the time; feeding us, wrinkled face perpetually ageless. If you could freeze Dadima in amber, you’d see the liquid resin caress every peak and valley of her skin, however small, rippling quietly outward across her body.
That day, she paused mid-roll and mid-banter, a perplexed look on her face. We tugged at her sari, wanting her to continue the story she and Bhabhi had been half-sharing, half-performing. She cocked her head to the side, the wrinkles of her eyes twitching as she tried to focus on something beyond our comprehension. After a few moments, she shook her head, wiped her hands on the part of her sari draped down from her hair, and snapped at us, śānt, said, kavanu tayar che, said, chalo, let’s move on.
We looked around at each other, confused by the coldness in her tone. Dadima was usually so tender, the one to forgive us our endless chorus of questions. We looked up at Bhabhi, who looked back at us and shrugged, and eventually we retreated, wary of this unexpected wrath.
Something always felt wrong from then on. In what must have been weeks but felt like days, Dadima became more and more reserved, telling us fewer stories from her childhood, scribbling fewer cartoons onto the edges of handkerchiefs. There were no more hard candies left on our pillows after we were sent to bed without dinner by our mothers or disciplined by our fathers. Sometimes, she ignored our presence entirely.
For a while, we wondered if she lost the happiest memories first. It’s the only thing that made sense to us; that she might have turned her back on us because she couldn’t place us anymore. We became street children to her, not grandchildren balancing on her lap and begging for more stories. Even after we found out that Dadima wasn’t alone, that the fog was spreading across our neighborhood faster than anyone could measure, there was a pang in our chests of being abandoned by the one person we had been able to count on.
* * *
There was a sweet shop on the corner where the clerk would give us thick, mango-flavored condensed milk for free if it was a Friday. Yes.
There were cricket games every Saturday, and once the wooden ball made its startling crack and soared straight into the small dome of the mosque wedged between the sweet shop and a laundromat. Yes.
The auntie at the laundromat always covered her head, her dupatta tucked behind long, hanging ears wearing gaudy fake gold. Yes. Everyone wore gaudy fake gold if they wore jewelry at all. Yes. She was beautiful. Yes.
Good.
Good.
* * *
As the fog descended into the streets, to the point where an open window led only to a view of opaque grey and you had to go down into the street to see that it was indeed still there, we strung canisters and twine from window to window. There were so many sounds outside; we couldn’t call down from our living rooms to each other the way we had before. Armed with our rudimentary network, we met on rooftops, side streets, telling each other stories about the way the adults in our lives were changing.
“Shanta masi stopped leaving food out for the street dogs,” one of the younger cousins reported.
“Ma stopped singing lullabies.”
“We’re not going back to Porbandar for Heema didi’s wedding.”
We laughed most of these observations off, too proud to be concerned. Who were we to still need lullabies? There didn’t seem to be a pattern anyway, just adults changing their minds. We were content to play cricket in the galis between our buildings and leave the decisions to anybody else.
Over time, the complaints grew more egregious. A shopkeeper suddenly stopped yelling at us when cricket balls careened onto the floor of his shop and, instead, began to pitch them back with childlike delight. A father began calling his wife the name of his illicit high school lover. A grandmother left home and never came back.
The people we relied on were experiencing a dementia we didn’t have words for. Once we knew this, even without the right terminology, there was no going back.
Something about the fog felt like camouflage. Underneath its cover, we grew distinct.
Some used the fog to steal small things from corner shops, to take advantage of the older man at the end of the street who grew so forgetful he would leave money out and abandon his jalebi stand. There was no one to get us in trouble, no one to prioritize a man incapable of remembering he had earned money in the first place. Some of us stole sandwiches, stole jewelry, stole knick-knacks from parents with safes in the walls.
Others of us were held captive by fear. We would sit on couches, watching as a dadaji spaced out in front of the TV, his eyes glazing over as though cataracted. We would tug on pant legs, ask for another story or something sweet, only to be brushed aside. I found myself in this camp. I spent more and more time with my mother, who by then was designated Dadima’s caretaker. Maybe it was because she was the youngest, presumably the one most capable of taking something onto her plate. Maybe her age meant that, as the fog crept lower and lower, she would have more time to remember, more time to take care of Dadima and every other bhabhi who would slowly begin to forget.
Mostly, my mother would let me sit in the corner of the kitchen as she took on the task of rolling rotis and dicing vegetables. I watched her closely, trying to see how her facial expressions changed with every movement she made. I thought, if I watched closely enough, if I never blinked, she would never suddenly cock her head to the side and forget her place in the world.
“You can join me,” she offered more than once, but I shook my head and concentrated on my eyeballs and the dryness of them.
At night, I was scared of sleeping. I couldn’t watch her from my spot on the floor of the living room. Did my father know how important it was to keep watch, to make sure she didn’t fade in the middle of the night? I wanted to warn him, and yet I also knew, viscerally, he would laugh at me. By the time he realized he should’ve taken the fog more seriously, Ma could have already forgotten.
Anu felt the same way. In one of our conversations late at night, canister held closely to my lips, I whispered everything that scared me into the tin. I could almost feel her nodding. “I know. I worry about Mummy too.”
I wonder now if I should have worried more about my father, of the childish disrespect that comes from believing a father who is always working is not as loving. If I should have guarded his memory as fiercely as I did my mother’s. Maybe that could have made a difference.
* * *
Twenty miles south of our neighborhood, government workers began to build an exoskeleton around Bandra. Weeks passed, then months. The project started small; how do you create a chamber of ground-level, fog-free air? How do you make that chamber larger to encompass, first, a person; then, a home; then, the trees and the next house, always growing, it seemed, from the bottom? Inside, the air was the clearest in the city. Outside the exoskeleton, everything was that ghostly white Anu and I saw outside of our windows.
“Bandra has, historically, prided itself on minimizing waste and pollution,” said the chief of police to a gaggle of reporters, all standing under cover of reinforced, amnesia-free glass. “The water on both sides of this peninsula makes the fog more extreme. The community, collectively, has invested billions into this project in partnership with state government. We hope to see Bandra set an example for how other cities suffering from this same fog can look to recover.”
Of course, we didn’t have television or government workers going door to door to tell us about the exoskeleton. What would they have said, anyway; in what language and accent would they have chosen to share the news with us? Anu and I sat with Dadima in her living room, the windows open, the fog as dense inside as it was outside. We called each others’ names through its mist; we played hide and seek in a room devoid of large furniture. Dadima cackled as we flitted about her, two birds flapping and cawing, her silver tufts of hair enveloped in cloud.
* * *
Panic spread like plague. Some people packed up their things nearly overnight, returning to the villages their parents had once called home. Others presumed it better to move on, that perhaps there was something fated about our forgetting, as though we were all assimilating toward a thing that must be more right. More true.
Anu’s family debated the merits of leaving for what felt like months. The two of us would meet in the side street between our buildings, clanging cans against window bars to signal that we were needed. She was nervous and I was, too, but somehow I knew not to show that to her. I brought my doll with me one afternoon after she had called for time together. I handed it over to her, no words to describe my feelings.
“I don’t want to take this from you,” she said, even as her fingers curled around the doll’s arms.
I looked down at the painted face that looked enough like my mother’s. It looked like anyone’s mother when you blurried your eyes and thought about what you wanted. Black hair in a braid down the back, eyes that could look soft or hard depending on the moment. Her dress was a faded and brownish pink, her lips matching.
I let go of the doll.
“Do you think they know how to get back?” Anu asked, squatting on the ground and hugging her knees.
“I’m sure they do.”
“Do you think, when people forget places, they still exist?” “What do you mean?”
Anu shrugged. “I mean, if everyone forgets, maybe it disappears. Maybe there’s no such place anymore. Not even what it would’ve been.”
I gave her shoulder a little shove with my own and breathed in the scent of mud and rotting mangoes. She could be right for all I knew. She started rocking back and forth, and I started to, too. Two little dolls in perpetual motion, the same movement that our Dadima would make when rolling rotis.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said softly, rain beginning to beat down into the gali.
* * *
Inside the exoskeleton in Bandra, they retained their memories. Outside, citydwellers protested.
Sometimes, they had signs; sometimes, they had torches. It was not lost on the city who was inside the shell and who was outside. At the front of the protests were the people who thought they also deserved to be inside, those who thought someone was supposed to have their backs. The government sectioned off Sea Link, enforced a no-rickshaw rule within ten miles of Bandra. Private cars only.
Noticeably missing from the protests were those who believed there was no fair thing as deserving and undeserving. In a nearby slum, a group of boys and a retired science teacher tried to recreate the dome. Their air wasn’t pollution-free; it stank of cow shit and garbage and rotting wood. They didn’t have machinery or plexiglass; no fancy cranes and tractors. But every day, as soon as the sun shone bright enough through the fog and skyscrapers on the horizon, the boys discussed blueprints and plans, intent on saving their families.
A stray reporter stumbled upon the story, and soon it spread among the city that slum boys were trying to build their own exoskeleton against the fog. A story appeared in the regional newspaper. It was printed in Hindi, and while Anu and I understood from the photo and the large printed headline that something big was happening near us, we couldn’t tell what it was.
It was all the same, in the end. The science teacher lost his memory before they had finished a critical amount of the work. The fog dipped lower until it was inside the doorways of every ramshackle hut, and soon no one remembered that the boys had tried at all.
* * *
One morning the next week, there was a stickiness about the air. I woke up with my hair plastered to my forehead, the bedsheets damp. I looked around the living room I had slept in all my life: its simple cot in the corner, the old television Ma had gotten from a cousin who had moved away after the fog deepened. The two framed photos we had: my parents on their wedding day, black-and-white marigolds draped around their shoulders, the clear film at the photograph’s edges beginning to peel up; Dadima surrounded by the sons and daughters and wives and husbands of the family, lips straight lines across every face, school uniforms that made the children look like exact duplicates of one another. I sniffed the air, but there was no hint of chai. “Ma?” I called. No reply came echoing back.
It was then that I noticed the canister drooping at the window. They were usually strung taut from window to window—easy to clang against the bars when Anu or I wanted each other’s attention. Something twisted, tightened; I ran to my parents’ room, hesitating at the doorway for only a moment of habit before I pushed it open. The bed was a mess, unmade; Ma and Papa must have just been there. I sprinted to the kitchen and then careened out the door of our apartment, down the rotting wooden stairs, and stood in the entryway of our building.
The bustle of our neighborhood drowned me out each time I called their names; and who would have known, anyway, who this elusive Ma and Papa were? I was a dirty, sweaty child drowned out by rickshaw engines. I bit the nails of four fingers all at once.
The canister.
I wove my way through the crowded street, Anu’s home a landmark in my mental map of the city. By the time I got there, to the street-level tailor shop where her father worked, I knew I had moved too late. My mother stood in the doorway, hands cupping elbows. I went up to her slowly, not wanting to startle and especially not wanting to get in trouble. When she saw me, she patted her thigh with one hand and I wrapped my arms around her waist, dirty cheek pressed to her clean kurta.
“We didn’t want to wake you up,” she said, hand brushing against my hair. “Bhabhi told us last night that they were planning to leave.”
“They’re going back?”
“They’re hoping it’s not like this there.” She knelt down to my level. “We’re not going to leave, though. Are you okay with that?”
I bit the insides of my cheeks. Nodded. She nodded back. “Anu left some of her stuff. Do you want to see if there’s anything you want?”
I turned to face the dark shell of the shop behind us. I imagined my doll somewhere inside, dusty. Did Anu have any reason not to take it? Did I want to know if she hadn’t? I shook my head and took my mother’s hand, and she led us slowly back into the fog.
* * *
Here’s what I do know:
Anu’s father, my fua, was a tailor. Yes. His Singer sewing machine was his greatest possession. Yes.
I gave Anu my doll. Yes. We stayed in Bombay. Yes.
I never see Anu again. I don’t know. I don’t know.
* * *
A thing about places that don’t exist on maps: nobody besides the people who lived there or who left there really know that it exists. I can’t tell you how to get to the place where Dadima grew up. I can’t place it on a map; I can’t give you directions.
And, eventually, everyone in a place leaves. What they remember is what it was at a certain point in time and even that isn’t what that place really is, not anymore. Eventually everyone forgets, and what used to be a roundabout in the center of a very small village becomes a roundabout on the long road to someplace else.
There was a woman who would come door to door in our apartment building—every Monday morning, when most husbands were at work—and request any photos people didn’t want or school crafts that would only be tossed away. Ma made me give her some of my papers from school, and she would take the pile of consonant rewrites and newspaper clippings eagerly, bowing her head and muttering thanks. She said she was writing cards for her extended family, for a nephew finishing school in the south of the city, for a sister still back in their home village, for an ailing mother. I always wondered what the cards looked like, these collages of the neighborhood’s leftovers. In some ways, I wished we were related.
After Anu left, I saw the woman on a street corner. Her makeshift stand held nearly a hundred greeting cards, each a little fading. I peeked inside one of them but couldn’t read what was written. I asked her, tugging on her dupatta. She gave me a gummy smile. “I don’t know either,” she said.
“Didn’t you write it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know.”
I touched one of the cards covered in cutouts of food and what looked like a starry sky etched in light pencil. Inside, the script was beautiful if entirely foreign to my eyes. “Maybe it was for Eid,” I said.
“Maybe.”
“For a nephew?”
“Maybe.”
“For a sister? Or a mother?”
She laughed at my pleas. “Take it,” she said, pulling it off the stand. “I don’t know what I need the money for, anyway.”
I considered not taking it only for a moment before I clutched it to my chest and ran home to Dadima, slipping it onto her nightstand, a blessing from one disappearing woman to another.
* * *
Ma unwrapped a bundle of charcoal delicately, as though a pile of gold. “You like drawing, baccha?”
I edged closer to her from my usual spot in the corner of the kitchen. Nodded.
“We’re going to do something for Dadima,” she said, gesturing for me to take a piece in my hands. “In the center of the wall, draw a chowk like ours.”
The charcoal dusted off onto my fingers, grainy. I drew an intersection of three lines, a large circle in the center. I rubbed away at the lines inside the roundabout, watching them blend into the rest of the wall.
“Good. Label that one”—she pointed—“one, and two, and three. A street from one going up. Yes. Halfway, another…”
Like this, we built a village. Ma remembered everything, pausing every now and then to take a break from rolling rotis and share a story. This is where she and Masi used to play with their dolls when their brothers wouldn’t let them join in on cricket. This is where she tried a cigarette for the first time with an older classmate. This is where Dadima’s husband used to clerk a salty snack shop.
“Are you paying attention?” she asked. I nodded vigorously. “Good.” “Why are we doing this, Ma?”
She motioned for me to sit down next to her. I leaned into her knee, forcing her to work around me. “One day, I might forget these things,” she said. “I need you to help me remember. Can you do that? Can you tell me the stories on this wall?”
Yawning, I pointed at the chowk. “This is one, two, three. That’s where you grew up, and up there is where you went to primary, and somewhere down here is where Anu’s ma grew up, and . . .”
She tussled my hair. I fell asleep somewhere between the place where Ma met Papa and the train station at the edge of the wall where they got into a carriage and never looked back. She kept murmuring stories, a lullaby, and I promised myself I would remember them all.
* * *
The fog dipped deeper. We closed the windows, Ma insisting I stay in her sight. It wasn’t hard to keep that promise; I spent most of my time in the kitchen, watching Ma’s charcoal-stained arms as she lifted herself onto tiptoes to extend the streets toward the ceilings. She looked like a woman from a magazine or a movie poster. She looked like she was dancing.
If I could have painted the image, I would have only drawn Ma, the way her braid fell against her back, her hair frizzy by her ears, curling in the moist of the fog. She was full of lines where other mothers were full of curves, nothing soft about her, not to the touch, but her eyes were warm and her arms always outstretched. I would trace the rough lines of her palms at night when she laid down my bedding. “One day, you’ll have something softer,” she would promise. But I never wanted something softer.
I spent most days mesmerized by her, eating cucumber sandwiches at her feet, the crumbs sticking to my hands and lips, to the spots on the wall where I pointed and asked, “What here?” and watched as Ma’s eyes lit up with memory. Sometimes Dadima would join, a childlike delight in her laughter. She didn’t seem to recognize the stories, but she liked to listen and that was enough. I tried to hand her the charcoal or even just a pencil, ask her to doodle a little something, but she shook her head, no.
As we nested in our closed-window, fog-encompassed house, the sounds of the streets began to change. We had always heard so many different languages outside, but in a Gujarati neighborhood like this one, you could always pick out our people. But there was so much more formality in the air, now, the sounds of kathiyawar giving way to a foreign Hindi. I didn’t mind having to stay inside; I wouldn’t have known how to speak to someone out there anyway.
* * *
One day, Papa never comes home. Leaves in the morning and does not return.
I feel like I am always there, at that night. I feel like I watch the doorway; I feel like I wait for a silhouette. I try to remember his face. I forget.
I asked Ma over and again if she thought he had been forgetting. If his eyes ever glossed over, if he ever cocked his head to the side and forgot his story. If she watched him at night to make sure he was still there.
I didn’t ask what I wanted to know most: if, by focusing on the wrong parent, I had caused this. If I had allowed the fog to take my father away. Why had I been reluctant to hold onto him the same way I was holding onto my mother? And now he was lost, somewhere in that greyness of people speaking tongues I couldn’t understand.
Ma held vigil by the entryway, ready at a moment’s notice to make chai and offer a warm meal. She waved me away. “You don’t have to wait,” she said. “You’ll wake up and he’ll be here.”
I retreated to the living room, where the tail ends of the roadways on the kitchen walls had slowly begun to progress like vines around the cot where Dadima sat.
“It’ll be okay,” I promised her, staring down at my feet. “Papa’s going to come back.”
Dadima stayed silent. I forced myself to look up at her, into her cataracted eyes, and realized she didn’t remember she had a son.
* * *
Without Papa, we still survived. Yes. Ma bore the burden of finding work in a place with no memory of value for work. Yes. Ma began to take care of the people who had lost their footing like Dadima had, trading lucidity for meals. Yes.
Our world grew smaller, no more tugging at canister strings. Yes. We closed the windows. Yes. I’ve already said this. Yes.
Ma always covered her head, her dupatta tucked behind long, hanging ears wearing gaudy fake gold. No. Everyone wore gaudy fake gold if they wore jewelry at all. Yes. She was beautiful. Yes.
* * *
Here is what could have happened next:
Ma and I map out the entire wall. It grows until it envelops the house, veins scattering across, pumping life into every corner. We paint it, shades of taupe and mauve across the broken beige walls. We sit Dadima down in the kitchen. We point to the cross-sections of the village and Ma names every road from memory. Dadima’s face looks blank for a while, and then, one day, she can parrot the names back to us. A week later, she can name them on her own. After a month, she knows it all by heart, not because we have said it to her but because she knows it is true. The fog lifts.
Ma and I map out the entire wall. It grows until it envelops the kitchen and the living room, and I go to sleep every night memorizing the angles of the streets extending out from that chowk. Dadima spends her days on my cot, listening as Ma and I tell her stories of what we know of her childhood. Dadima trusts us, tell us we must be right. We hope we are. Eventually, she begins to retain at least the short-term items, and one evening when Ma and I come back from prayer, there she is, like I always remembered, back muscles heaving with the motion of rolling roti, her hands returning to the drape of her sari. She wipes off the extra flour from her hands onto the georgette, barely staining, just fading, and smiles at us. “Chalo, let’s eat.” The fog lifts.
Ma and I map out the entire wall. Ma tells me the stories of her own childhood and realizes the risk of me forgetting is too great. She teaches herself to write Gujarati. She teaches me to write Gujarati. We practice together every evening; we write down, in the simplest sentences, what it means for us to be who we are, what it meant for her to come here as she did. The notebooks are filled by the time Ma forgets. I place the pages into her hands, every evening as she makes the blandest dal. She smiles. Even if she never remembers, she will always have this.
Ma and I map out the entire wall. Ma tells me the stories of her own childhood and realizes the risk of me forgetting is too great. Ma sends me to an auntie’s apartment every Thursday evening to learn to write. The auntie teaches me Marathi instead of Gujarati, and when I come home, the words don’t align with the stories told in Ma’s kathiyawar. I cannot write anything down to help her. We are left with the skeletons of the stories when Ma eventually forgets, and I try—I try so hard—to tell her about her life, to remind her of Dadima, to remind her of Papa. To remind her of me, of what I might mean.
Ma and I map out the entire wall. Ma realizes the risk of me forgetting is too great. She sells all her jewelry from their wedding; she sells everything that belongs to Papa. I am sent to boarding school in Bandra. I learn to write in Hindi. I never come home. Eventually, Ma forgets me.
Ma and I map out the entire wall. There is no other option. Ma and I map out the entire wall. It doesn’t matter what we are now. Ma and I map out the entire wall. Ma never forgets. Ma never forgets. Ma never forgets.
* * *
Let me start at the beginning. I can find my way back.
Here’s what I remember: The day was unnaturally cool.
Asha Thanki is a writer and dancer based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in The Common, Platypus Press’ wildness, Catapult, the Nashville Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Spectacle, and Hyphen. For her fiction, she was nominated for the 2018 PEN American/Robert J. Dau prize. She also reads for the Baltimore Review and is currently a candidate for the University of Minnesota’s MFA in Creative Writing. Find her at ashathanki.com or on Twitter @ashathanki.