“Teach me how to speak to them.”
“I will. Later. They must get used to you.”
We were just two boys then, playing catch in the street. Stray dogs napped under the gulmohar tree. Ears twitched. Fur flaked. Summer in Bangalore and the dirt road seethed.
My sneakers: white and new and fresh from the box.
Vaishnav’s sandals: red and thin and from a distance, it looked as though he wasn’t wearing shoes at all.
Sunlight glared. My socked feet hot, swollen. His bare toes dark, his toenails pearly.
He knew things I did not, but I had things he did not.
My Ajji’s house: pink stucco, three floors with a jasmine tree out front and terracotta rakshasa heads keeping watch on the terrace. My mother’s childhood home.
Vaishnav’s house: not a house, but a halfway hut on an open plot of green land across the street. His family’s residence there was illegal, my mother and grandmother noted. The land was slated for development.
I, the visiting American, moral and powerful.
He, the Indian, backwards, ignorant of the ways of the first world.
I wanted him jealous.
I made a show of my English, my rounded r’s, my tall a’s. Puffed out my chest, felt tough, large (though really, I was a scrawny thing).
“We don’t have stray dogs in America. We have animal shelters, so kids don’t get attacked in the street. And drivers follow the speed limit. And actors aren’t worshiped like gods. And not everything smells like pee.”
Vaishnav didn’t take the bait. He never did. Only shrugged and in Kannada said, “Is that so?”
I huffed, threw the ball. He smirked, caught it.
I hated when he did that. I wanted to stomp my feet and scream so I could hear it ringing in the sky, We’re not friends anymore!
Of course, I did no such thing. He was the only one who could talk to stray dogs. He said he would teach me, and I believed him.
~
Nine years old—too soon for a boy to have munji, alva? But Thatha, my father’s father, was ill (cancer, everyone whispered, like it could hear them). There was no time to waste. His last wish was to see his grandson become a Brahmin.
My parents paraded me around Bangalore all summer. Aunt, uncle, cousin, in-law, neighbor, teacher, chauffeur, and maid—all invited to watch my rebirth.
“Please come,” my parents said, folding an envelope into their palms.
Munji Boy, they all called me. Was the Munji Boy excited? Does the Munji Boy know what munji means? Will the Munji Boy learn his prayers and shlokas?
They kneaded my cheeks like fresh dough then asked the most important question of all: Does the Munji Boy remember me? I met you when you were a newborn, a putta avarekalu. Remember?
The Munji Boy nodded. Liar, liar, pants on fire.
They smiled, pleased.
They spoke to me through my parents (what does he want to be when grows up? A doctor? An engineer? Too boring. Let him run free), then forgot I was there at all. Talk turned to the years before my conception, before my parents’ marriage, and I turned my attention to insects shredded by ceiling fans as they flew towards bright tube lights. Flies, mosquitoes, moths. Quiet extinctions.
I wondered if insects knew what it meant to die.
I wondered about Vaishnav.
I wondered about the strays.
I wondered when he would teach me to speak to them.
~
We were wind and water, fire and earth. We leapt, twirled, scooped our hips, craned our necks, slapped our feet on the tiled floor. We grabbed each other’s arms, spun each other on an axis of our own creation.
Force. Momentum. Velocity.
We were boys.
We were dancing.
Vaishnav was my secret that afternoon. Amma was away visiting Thatha in the hospital, Ajji napped upstairs. The heat was dastardly, and the stray dogs were elsewhere, and so I’d invited him in. He liked Parle-G biscuits and the music videos on B4U, the liquid moves of Salman Khan and Hrithik Roshan.
His first question: “Can I have some water?”
I went to the kitchen, returned with a metal cup filled too close to the brim. Vaishnav sipped slow, flecks of biscuit washing out of his teeth.
His second question: “Do you dance?”
“No,” I’d replied, too quick, too cagey. Lies, again. I used to take blankets, wrap them around my waist, spin in dervishes of quilted color. I’d let my vision blur, my feet take me round and round, giddy and free. My parents laughed and clapped, once upon a time. But, as I grew, laughter and applause had morphed into furrowed brows and folded arms.
But then, there was Aishwarya and Madhuri on the TV. Vaishnav leapt up and mirrored her movements. Her grace. Her ease. I was dazzled. I couldn’t help myself. Ajji had left her silk shawl on the settee. I drew it around me and joined in.
Aishwarya and Madhuri. Vaishnav and I.
Dola re dola re dola re dola.
“What is the meaning of this?”
Ajji, awake, halfway down the stairs and hair about her shoulders like a silver mane. I stopped spinning. Vaishnav switched off the television.
I mumbled, “Nothing, Ajji.”
Ajji said, “Come here.”
I let the shawl drop to my feet.
Ajji said, “No, no. Bring that here. Let me wrap it for you like a proper sari.”
We danced for my grandmother all afternoon. She clapped along off-rhythm, sang along off-key. Jump higher, faster! Growing boys need exercise!
We danced until our hearts beat fast and calves throbbed. Until Amma called to say she was coming home. Save some space in your stomach. I bought Mysore paak from the corner store.
I walked Vaishnav to the gate. He was glowing. A small dimple pressed into his left cheek.
“Thank you for inviting me,’ he said.
Strange: I wanted to say something to him, only I didn’t know what exactly it was. Language caught in my throat, bent back on itself, twisted and wound itself into tight, unbreakable knots.
Unable to speak, I smiled. And he smiled.
Vaishnav returned to his home, and I returned to mine. Inside, Ajji asked me, “Did he touch anything? Did he drink from our lotas?”
I nodded. I pointed at the metal cup on the coffee table.
She patted my head, took the cup to the sink and scrubbed it till there wasn’t a trace of Vaishnav left anywhere on its silver surface.
~
“Munji day?”
“Munji day.”
Early morning cool, sweet like mountain water. Kogiles singing, streets silent, leaves of the gulmohar lolling in the breeze, a chapra of palm fronds, bamboo, and strings of white and saffron flowers fronting Ajji’s house.
Me, outside, by the gate. Parents inside, anxious, arguing over something small. Today’s the day.
I spoke to Vaishnav through metal bars. My stomach growled.
“Eat something,” he said.
“I’m not supposed to.”
“A morning without food isn’t so bad.”
I rubbed my belly. Vaishnav chuckled. He gestured for me to follow him.
I looked behind me. Voices hurtled out the door. No bodies followed.
I went with Vaishnav.
Inside his hut: his mother pregnant, squatting, ankles swollen, flipping chapatis on a small tawa over a kerosene flame; his father in one corner, resting, his hands rough and flecked with dried concrete; his younger brother in another, cradling an even younger sister.
His mother asked, “Who’s this?”
Vaishnav said, “The munji boy. Can he have a chapati?”
“Munji boys aren’t supposed to eat anything all morning.”
“Half of one. Please?”
She flipped a chapati. Sucked her teeth, rolled her eyes. Sighed.
“Just take the whole thing and go. No one hears about this, okay? And you, Vaishnav, you stay here and eat. I’m not letting this food go cold.”
She handed me a chapati. I was slow to accept.
“It’s not poisoned,’ she said sharply.
I took it, quiet.
Vaishnav smiled, bright, kind.
“This is our secret now,” he whispered to me.
Chapati on my tongue. Warm. Tender. Melting into me.
Vaishnav led me home, through the plot overfull of teeming ferns and tall grasses and tilting palm trees that dropped hirsute coconuts from their high branches. Vaishnav and I, in that green, green place.
In my mind, I said to him: Come with me, too. Language, again, snagged in my teeth. Step into my head. Listen to my thoughts.
I went home to my family, who were oblivious to my absence. They worked through their disagreement and burst out of the house, a storm.
“Shoo! Shoo!”
Amma waved off the strays sniffing around the van my father had brought.
“We’re running late,” she said. “We have to get Thatha from the hospital.”
We loaded into the vehicle and whirred off, frenzied.
In the rearview mirror I saw him: Vaishnav standing in the street, receding, smaller, smaller, a film reel in reverse, lost in dust, surrounded by stray dogs.
~
Heat on my face. Sacred fire burning, burning. The pujaree scolded me through my prayers. He said I made gibberish of the Vedas.
“No,” said the pujaree. “Say it again. Properly.”
Eyes, hundreds of them, fixed on me on the chatra stage, watching my munji boyhood, falling away and a Brahmin manhood rising in its place. Audience to my reincarnation in living motion.
They watched me as I tied a string around a peepal tree and prayed to the sun. I am reborn.
They watched me as I ate rice from my mother’s hand for the very last time. I am reborn.
They watched me as the elders washed me in cold, cold water. I am reborn.
They watched me as I was dressed in saffron robes and a langoti of chafing rope. I am reborn.
They watched me carry around a burlap sack, beg for alms, grains of rice, bhavati bikshaam dehi. I am reborn.
Ceremonies.
Rituals.
Sanskrit, Vedas, language of gods and saints, mangled and mangled and mangled by my American English-tainted tongue.
And then, somehow: evening. Janivara, sacred thread, mark of the Brahmin conferred, strung across my torso. Eyes were sated, mouths were fed. Stage and audience cleared.
My mother and my father tended to Thatha, glad to have borne witness to his grandson’s munji.
“He’s a Brahmin now,” I heard him say. “A Brahmin now.”
I slipped up to the chatra’s terrace. The ocean of Bangalore’s rooftops rushed towards the horizon, pink and red, shades in a garden of hibiscus. In the street below, stray dogs prowled around a water buffalo eating out of a trash heap.
I wondered about Vaishnav.
I wondered what he did all day.
I wondered if one so close to enlightenment as I could still learn to speak to stray dogs.
~
Their tongues were rough where they met my skin.
“Don’t make sudden movements. Stand still.”
Vaishnav steadied my hand. Stray dogs gathered around us, Kurkure in my open palm.
Amma and Ajji were out again that afternoon, shopping.
Vaishnav’s parents were away, too, laboring.
“You have to feed them before you can speak to them,” Vaishnav said. I liked having his hand on mine. It made me ecstatic, it made me nervous. I wanted him close, I wanted him away. My stomach knotted and knotted and knotted.
He said, “They have to know they can trust you.”
He’d named the stray dogs on our street after Sandalwood stars.
Rajkumar, with the testicles hanging like two small plums and a snout long and regal.
Vishnuvardhan, with the half-cut ear and dappled gold coat.
Manjula, with the soft white fur—soft, still, after days in the sun and streets.
Ganesh, clumsy and sweet and always sleeping.
“And what about that one?” I asked, nodding my head at a long mutt hobbling down the road. I thought it slow, harmless.
The Sandalwood strays rumbled. They gathered.
Vaishnav stomped and yelled, pelted the newcomer with small rocks. But the dog didn’t back away. It stayed in place and panted miserably.
“Stop!’ I cried. ‘What are you doing?”
“He looks like trouble.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
Vaishnav shrugged.
“A feeling.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “That’s not nice!”
Vaishnav shrugged again. He threw more stones. I didn’t like him this way: bigger, louder, always knowing more about the world than I.
But I knew things now too. I touched my finger to the janivara looped across my torso under my shirt.
A Brahmin now.
“He could be friendly,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid. He’s dangerous.”
“I’m not stupid. I’m going to feed him.”
Vaishnav yanked me back by the arm.
I freed myself of him.
I slapped him. His cheek was soft against my palm. I’d never touched him there before.
Why had I never touched him there before?
I wanted to pause, to renege on my act, but I was caught in the surge of my hot head and my American English, rushing out. Fluid. Smooth. The easiest thing in the world to say: “You’re not the boss of me.”
Vaishnav held his cheek. He gave me a dark look and turned away.
He didn’t stop me.
He didn’t stop me when I thrust my hand under the stay dog’s nose.
Didn’t stop me when the dog bared its teeth.
Didn’t stop me as I nudged my hand closer, closer, till a flock of kogile took to the sky, borne on a wind of screams.
~
Winter in America. Michigan. In the bardo of suburbia, snow falling blue and gray and gentle.
My father went about his morning rituals in the makeshift prayer room that doubled as his office. A daily act, sacrosanct. After he’d showered, no matter what and when. He lit incense and the scent of it slithered through the house.
I’d joined him once, full of devotion. I sat beside him and fumbled my way through prayers. I felt connected to something larger, the brief and wondrous presence of transcendence. But transcendence required discipline and practice. And I grew bored.
I’d worn my janivara an entire month. I bathed with it, tucked it beneath my shirt, hoping it served as a sign of my newfound worldliness. I sweat into it. It began to stink. Eventually, I stowed the thread away, under my bed, in a wooden box of things I found occasionally precious. I returned to it when I needed god to help me pass a test. Or, in the night, when ghostly ferns tickled my chin and the impulse to memory gripped me tight.
My mother stood before the stove in the kitchen, frying puris for lunch, speaking to Ajji over our wireless landline.
I sat at the top of the stairs, pressing our other landline into my ear, absently tracing the stump of my right index finger.
I eavesdropped the best I could. This was how I gathered family secrets: who had run away with whom, who had suffered at the hands of her husband, who had lost his job and bummed around for decades. It was how I learned, too, what my parents really thought: about their friends, about each other. About me.
I worry he’s growing too soft. We’ll have to sign him up to play some sports this summer.
If they knew I did this, they never said anything. I wondered if they wanted me to hear so they wouldn’t have to tell me themselves.
I awaited something good, a morsel of gossip that would glisten fatly in my palm. But Amma and Ajji spoke only of a distant cousin’s wedding. Who came, who didn’t. What was served, what was not. Who wore the sari with the gold border, who wore the sari that made her look like an old woman before her time.
There were only so many colors of a sari. Only so many ways to serve idli-dosa-vada.
I set the phone back in its cradle, rested my head on the banister, listened to my mother’s voice alone, rising over the exhaust fan and the running faucet.
“Then, what else, Ma? Haudha? You went? Chief of police? By yourself? What, Ma, at your age? It’s dangerous. But I suppose it’s a good thing. Yaro hēḷabēkittu. Sadhya. Someone had to make that family leave.”
My ears perked up and I joined her in the kitchen. She said her goodbyes and hung up the phone.
“Who had to leave?” I asked her. “Who had to leave?”
Lunch that afternoon was puri and saagu. My mother dropped thin rounds of gram flour dough into a pot of canola oil. Dough puffed and ballooned, light and airy.
“That slum family across the road from Ajji’s house. The police chased them off the property. Anyways, go tell Dad the food will be ready soon. He always takes forever to sit down and eat.”
~
Thatha held on three years longer, a miracle. My parents were grateful, though a little wistful.
We could have waited. We could have had a grander munji.
We returned to India for the cremation. The whole street came out to witness my father wrap the body of his own father in white sheet and pour cold water over the corpse—an old practice, my mother said, to make sure the dead were truly dead.
My father shaved his head and flew to Varanasi to scatter the ashes in the Ganga. Amma and I stayed behind in Bangalore.
Vaishnav and his family; hut and open land; banana trees and coconut palms and tall grasses and ferns: none of it there. An apartment stood in its place, gray and nondescript. Odd man, the developer: he was searching for inhabitants who would purchase a unit, not rent.
Only one unit had sold so far. The rest remained empty.
“It’s terrible,” Ajji said. “No more morning light. And the people there can see straight into my living room.”
I stood at the gate, looking out over the road, my hand twitching with the memory of its phantom limb.
The gulmohar tree had been felled.
The Sandalwood strays were nowhere in sight.
Across the street, a man emerged from the apartment, yelling into his cellphone about his software development company, Siberian husky on a leash.
“Yes, yes. No, no. Call them now!”
He tied the husky to the gatepost, scratched its ear and left.
No water. No shade.
I held the bars of Ajji’s gate, nose poking through the metal.
“Speak to me,” I whispered.
Speak to me.
