Choice, page 29
The other side is a flat plain, with intermittent areas of squelchy mud and darkness stretching ahead. This must be the area the river swallows every monsoon, surrendering it back in the summer. Where is the fence? Where are the sentry posts? Pulak doesn’t know if he is thankful for the darkness or suspicious; surely if there were sentry posts around here, some light from them would have reached where he is? Or if not reached, then he would have been able to see the lit posts in the distance. Is he in the right place? He has that odd feeling in his sphincter muscles again. He is imprisoned in the choice that he has made – to get fifty thousand rupees, even though he’s receiving less than half that sum. He has not given much thought to fitting the new life he has imagined into the diminishing amount; it’s still a new life, a better life. Once the plans started occurring to him, there was no going back. He thinks of his daughter’s silent face, her head turned away from the unun she is fanning because smoke keeps getting into her eyes. One dawn he had heard her singing some made-up little tune to the cow as she milked her, the girl’s dark head resting against Gauri’s white flank, and for some reason the tunelessness of the invented song had made a fierce sense of wanting to protect her wash over him swiftly then ebb out.
There is something pale sticking out of the mud about six inches from where he is standing. A concrete post, about a foot high, with writing on it; it’s too dark to make out the marks. There is the ooze of mud under and between his toes. It feels ever so slightly ticklish. Even at this hour, the heat feels like it is choking all the breath out of him. The quality of the darkness is such that he can’t see his hand if he holds it up to his face, but can make out shapes in the distance, see the sky, the undistinguished black expanse all around him. Then he almost falls into it, the river, or at least a branch of it: it doesn’t seem very wide because he can make out, from the different shades of darkness, the other bank, and a few metres farther, the barbed wire fence, like thin dark black circles and scribbles on slightly less black paper. At the far end of that wall of scribbles to the right, there is what looks like a sentry post, but there are no lights in it. How is he ever going to swim or wade across with Gauri to get to the fence? No one told him that he had a stretch of water to cross. Where is the man who is supposed to meet him? He tries to swallow but his throat is too tight. He has been set up. Or Gauri is going to be taken away from him in this darkness and he is never going to be paid. He clutches the rope in his clammy hands tighter, as if to remind himself that she is still beside him, as if the sight and smell and sounds of the animal are not enough.
Then, knocking his heart out of his bony chest, there is a voice almost in his ear. ‘Smuggling the cow, are you?’
Pulak jumps. His scalp tingles. As far as he can see, there are two men to his left, two to his right. No sound comes out of his mouth. From the darkness more men come running. He is surrounded by a circular wall of dark shapes. A torch is shone on his face, blinding him.
‘Caught him red-handed, shala Molla-r bachchha!’
‘Grab the cow first, grab the cow.’
‘He has a wire cutter in his hand. Take it, take it first.’
He cannot see anyone’s face. Above the shouting, and the abuse the men are flinging at him, he hears Gauri low once, briefly. He wants to say, ‘I’m not Muslim, my name is Pulak Bera, my village is Nonapani, I’m a Hindu, I belong to this country, not to the one on the other side, I’m not a Molla,’ he wants to shout, but he is trembling, and not even a whisper can emerge from his mouth. He wants to plead with them, beg them, pray to them to be merciful, he wants to say, ‘I have a wife and two children at home, the children are little, they’ll be cast into the sea without me, please spare me,’ but instead he just pisses himself.
They push him down onto the mud, then drag him by his hair to the river.
‘Keep the noise down, we don’t want the BSF fuckers to come running,’ someone says. The cow is lowing madly.
‘Then we can’t beat him before sending him over, we’ll have to finish the business quickly.’ They drag him back to where they were and pull him up by his hair. He has found his voice – it emerges as a cross between weeping and begging.
‘Has someone got the cow? Where’s the cow?’ a man asks.
‘Let me dispatch him, I’ll finish him off now,’ another man says, sounding as if he is exerting himself.
Pulak feels something warm and wet on the skin of his stomach, then that warm and wet sensation, stinging and piercing at the same time, is strangely inside him. Suddenly, as if in answer to the question of where the cow is, the wall of people parts. At the end of it is a vague pale shape, but Pulak cannot put a name to what it is. He’s still searching for the name, so familiar yet still so elusive, right on the tip of his tongue, when the paleness devours everything.
Acknowledgments
Monica Ali, Archishman Chakraborty, J. M. Coetzee, Carrie Comer, Michelle de Kretser, Emma Dunne, Lauren G. Fadiman, Susan Faludi, Karen Joy Fowler, Talia Goldberg, David Herd, Jenny Holden, A.M. Homes, Aravind Jayan, Meng Jin, Manan Kapoor, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dominic Leggett, Yiyun Li, Gabby McClellan, Barry McClelland, Niall MacMonagle, Janet McDonald, Paul Murray, Aditya Pande, Rohini Pande, Anna Pincus, Matthew Rabin, Ritwik Rao, Marie Rutkoski, Russ Rymer, Peter Sacks, Osman Salih, Namwali Serpell, Claire Sharpe, Akshi Singh, Tracy K. Smith, Celia Stubbs, Drew Elizabeth Weitman, Edmund White, Emily Zhao.
Jill Bialosky, Poppy Hampson.
Jessica Bullock, Sarah Chalfant.
The nucleus of Salim’s story first appeared in The Refugee Tales, volume II, edited by David Herd and Anna Pincus (Comma Press, 2017).
Also by Neel Mukherjee
A State of Freedom
The Lives of Others
A Life Apart
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
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Copyright © 2024 by Neel Mukherjee
Excerpt from “Wild Is the Wind” from Wild Is the Wind: Poems by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2018 by Carl Phillips. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.
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Neel Mukherjee, Choice
