A Play for the End of the World: A Novel by Jai Chakrabarti

Author:Jai Chakrabarti [Chakrabarti, Jai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780525658931
Google: BTcNEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0525658920
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

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Lucy had never been anywhere as crowded as Howrah Station. The concierge at the Park Hotel had gotten her into a sedan with tinted windows, which had taken her, feeling nearly blindfolded, across the city. The car dropped her off next to the main terminal. There were over a dozen tracks, and the loudspeaker that declared the comings and goings of the trains was barely functional; announcements came one atop another, but the words were muffled, indecipherable noise.

Worse, from the moment she’d been dropped off by the driver, bands of poor children had begun to follow her. There were other foreigners around and certainly enough wealthy-looking Indians, but all the beggars seemed to gravitate in her direction. With so many yanking at her sleeve, grasping for her suitcase, she ran into the crowd and the crowd obliged, accepting her into its scores of colors: the bright greens and blues of travel saris; the reds of the turbaned porters, hunched with their weights; the blacks of the habits of nuns, who pushed and shoved as hard as anyone.

She reached her track an hour early and congratulated herself on the accomplishment by lounging atop her suitcase and eating one of the twenty-four granola bars she’d brought to sustain her on the trip.

The child who broke her heart had dirty, knotted hair. She climbed up from the tracks like a ghost, her tiny hands and feet finding the right-sized cracks to make it over the divider. When she saw Lucy, she ran over. She couldn’t have been more than four years old.

Stretching out her hand, the child said, “Milk, not money.”

At the mouth of the station, the children had asked for rupees, or “just one Amrikan dollar,” but this was new. The child repeated again and again, as if it were a chant: “milk, not money.” There were strands of red in her hair. She had the strong chin of tomboys everywhere.

“What’s your name?” Lucy said.

The girl seemed puzzled by the question, but she responded in her own time.

“Shristi.”

It took Lucy a few tries to get it right, but she liked the sound of the name. Shristi led her to the closest vendor’s stand, which carried everything from biscuits to Redbook magazine, and pointed to the largest bottle of milk in the refrigerator.

“That all for you?”

Shristi nodded. Her teeth were stained the same color as her palms, but her smile prodded Lucy in all the right places. She’d brought along a sketchpad and she thought that Shristi might want to draw with her, but before she had the chance to offer, Shristi was gone, walking back down into the tracks, where a pair of sunning dogs regarded her with territorial contempt, then up onto the other side of the station.

Lucy watched her for as long as she could. After Connor, she’d never found the right man in Mebane. Had she stayed, she would’ve found someone. That was how the law of attraction worked in small towns: live there long

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