Master of None (6 page)

After two more stops, she asked him a question he did his best to decipher. Belatedly, he realized she was asking where he lived, it was easier to juggle his goods and give her the folded paper he kept sandwiched inside his datacard than attempt explaining that he knew his way back. Taking his arm again, she strode briskly in the direction of the charity shelter. She kept up the stream of conversation, indifferent to his inability to understand her, but he noticed she kept scanning the route around them, searching for something.

A few blocks from the shelter, she tugged on his arm, urging him into the shadow of a narrow alley. It curved and opened onto a cul-desac, a small, barren courtyard used for storage. Wooden crates weathered gray with age were stacked to one side. She pushed him around the corner, against the wall, then held him in place with one hand pressed against his chest while she scanned the passageway to be sure they were alone.

One lesson he had learned well in his unpleasant war-torn childhood was that the kindness of strangers most often came at a price. Although he outweighed his newfound friend by several kilos and could have easily shoved her out of his way to escape, he remained passive, waiting.

Once she was sure they were hidden from view, she leaned toward him intimately, her eyes sparkling with mischief. She pointed to herself. “Namasi dva Ushahayam ek Sahmudrah,” she pronounced slowly, then pointed at him questioningly.

He had to clear his throat before he could answer. “Nathan Crewe.”

She nodded knowingly, as if he had given her an answer she already knew.
“Aadmae Hengelianha?” You’re the Hengeli man?

“Hae’m, l’amae.”

She giggled suddenly, excited, and glanced again down the empty alleyway cautiously before she leaned back toward him. She pressed light fingers on top of the bundle in his arms meaningfully.
“Chúp raho, hae’m?”
she said softly. It took him a moment before he understood.
Be quiet.

“Hae’m, l’amae.”
His voice sounded strange, thick.

She reached up to slide the string from his small ponytail. Freed, his pale hair tumbled loosely around his shoulders, and he held himself still as she fondled it, marveling. She gave him another significant look before her fingers slid to the edge of his sati, exploring the folds at his hip. Her hands were shaking. He leaned back, his shoulder blades pressed against the hard wall as she spread the cloth aside to fumble for the hem of his mati. She glanced at him warningly as she lifted it, then stooped to examine his naked groin. He stared down at the top of her head, her black hair parted into zigzags and intricately plaited with silver beads.

The air chilled his exposed thighs. His breath came shallowly, the strange mixture of his fear and excitement quickening his blood. She jumped, startled, as his erection squirmed upright, dumbly expectant. For several seconds, she simply stared, then dropped his clothing.

When she stepped back from him, she blushed furiously, embarrassed. Pressing her hands together, she bowed, giggling, before she darted down the narrow alleyway, sandals slapping, and vanished around the corner.

Amazed, he stood alone for several minutes, his legs rubbery and, although the air was cool, his face uncomfortably sweaty. Clutching his goods, he walked back to the shelter and climbed the stairs, stopping to catch his breath halfway up.

When he unpacked his goods, he found that besides the vegetables, the girl had given him bread, soft-shelled eggs, a bottle of clear yellow oil, a sack of honey-colored short grain, several small jars of unfamiliar condiments. Not a bad bargain for a clandestine peek at his pubic hair, he decided. The second bundle turned out to be a selection of spices, equally strange. He recognized few of the vegetables, experimentally cutting and sniffing, touching them to his tongue before electing to cook it up as a soup. The result was not delicious, but at least edible.

He did not go hungry that evening.

IV

H
E DREAMT OF SOMETHING VAGUE AND FRIGHTENING, OF BEING
trapped inside a ruined house, occupation military police searching outside. A huge hand smelling of smoke clamped across his mouth, threatening to suffocate him; a heavy body crushed him facedown into the rubble-strewn floor. Labored breath whispered beside his ear in time with the constant thump of artillery in the distance. Pressure rather than pain hammered into him, familiar, sour. The dream shattered, and he struggled bolt upright, heart pounding, queasy with momentary disorientation. It took him several seconds before he remembered where he was and wondered what had awakened him.

That: the sound of urgent voices in the hail. His feet had barely swung over the edge of the sleeping shelf before a woman appeared at the archway of his room and strode directly inside. She wore a voluminous saekah of bright rainbowed geometrical pattern cuffed at the ankles, her kirtiya blouse a shimmering purple. On someone slightly taller and slightly younger, it might have been attractive, but on her it only seemed garish. “Tah byat, bahd’hyin,” he said quickly, bowed and straightened to comb his fingers through sleep-disheveled hair falling over his face.

She merely grunted in reply and stared at him: a middle-aged woman with an unsympathetic square face, before inspecting the flat-reader she held cradled in the crook of her elbow. “Nay-teen Kahroo.”

He wasn’t sure it was a question, but answered anyway. “Hae’m l’amae.”

She studied the screen and said in an oddly syncopated Hengeli, “My name is Dronsanu Harinyua. I am pahlaqu, guardian to this place.” She looked up at him critically. He realized she was reading from a phonetical text without any idea of the meaning of the words, gauging by his reaction if he understood.

“Hae’m l’amae.”

She nodded, satisfied, then consulted her reader again. “I be financial manager of you.” Her words were chopped into ponderous syllables. “I to come one times every month, same times. You obligatory here. No here, very bad trouble.”

She glanced up again, eyes narrowed, and stabbed one finger at the floor emphatically. Behind her, a few of his new neighbors hovered by the archway, watching curiously but ready to jerk back out of sight should she suddenly turn around.

“Hae’m, l’amae,” he repeated.

He would repeat it several times before she struggled all the way through her prewritten text, and he wondered if she’d done her own translation. This charity shelter, he managed to work out, was one of several in the city for naekulam, men without families. It was one of the better ones, she informed him, reserved for the elderly, the disabled, and other nonviolent residents. Any infraction and he’d quickly find himself in less pleasant accommodations where his independence would be severely restricted. No violence, she warned with an insistent edge. She glared at him, and he realized her arrogance wasn’t skillful enough to cover her fear of him. He wondered if she knew where he had just spent the last six months of his life.

“Hae’m, l’amae,” he said with heartfelt sincerity.

The pahlaqu would come to observe him, see that he had enough to eat, make sure he got medical treatment if he was unwell. No one was homeless on Vanar. No one starved. Although no one would much care if he committed suicide or not, as he would discover later. There were usually one or two a month, with the resulting mayhem as tenants scrambled to swap their own rooms for one better, a noisy, heated restructuring of the social hierarchy.

She demanded his datacard, flipped it open, and painstakingly showed him how to use it. Even as a naekulam, Nathan would have a nominal government subsidy to draw from. It was enough to cover food and small luxuries such as tea and coffee, soap and bath fees. In the meantime, his limited funds precluded anything much more expensive than wandering the streets for entertainment. Her lecture finished, she smiled scornfully at him. “Do you have beings to asking of no questions?”

He smiled back. “Máat, l’amae.”

She snapped her reader shut and left. He heard her speaking with several other men, tones of entreaty or admonishment more eloquent than the words.

Even armed now with food and a few guidelines from his pahlaqu, he was abandoned to his own devices. He had no more lessons with Pratha Yaenida. Other than the pahlaqu, no one ever came to see him, no one questioned him. But he knew that if he had any hope of ever escaping, he would have to learn as much as he could about his prison, find the chinks in the walls, learn the rules before he could break them. Not an easy job when you couldn’t even ask directions to the nearest airport.

His new life, although better than prison, was not that less Spartan. A small crate made of thin woven reeds held what few possessions he owned: his spare mati and two worn hand towels, his toiletries, the handful of bookcubes Yaenida had given him along with a secondhand reader. He’d found a discarded pot and planted a hydrangea cutting he’d furtively taken from a public garden, the plant just now sending out roots from its place on his windowsill.

He spent much of his time struggling to learn Vanar from simple bilingual children’s stories translated into painstakingly correct Hengeli. Obviously translated by someone whose Hengeli was slightly less than fluent, sometimes the mistakes were amusing, sometimes simply puzzling. A woman’s voice read the stories in the most basic audio Vanar: “The girl has a ball. The ball is red. See the red ball.” He tried to decipher the ornate squiggles matching the sounds before giving up and simply listening to the stories, repeating the words. More than a few nights, he would end up with the reader propped on his chest and an empty cup on the floor beside him, sound asleep despite the strong tea.

The charity shelter had been built wedged into a rock cleft running down the side of the far west bank of the river. Twenty layers of boxlike rooms balanced one atop the other, latticed with haphazard staircases. Roofing overshot narrow porches barely wide enough to allow space for a single man. Passing another habitant along the balconies often meant squeezing by while avoiding looking over at the sheer drop below. His was one of the less-desirable rooms, a tiny cell at the top of the complex accessible only by plodding up several steep stairways. There was a service elevator, he eventually realized, but that was locked, restricted for use only by the police authorities or emergency medical teams. The winding stairs served to keep the inhabitants either physically fit or indoors.

He spent the next few months watching his neighbors, listening, wandering the streets for clues. He learned where to buy his food from following other white-garbed naekulam, how to pick up extra money on his card by leaving the complex before dawn with an eye out for shopkeepers willing to pay naeqili te rhowghá, the ostracized class of familyless outcasts, for such odd jobs as sweeping the storefront or hauling away the previous day’s rubbish. Hiring a human being for such manual labor, before the computerized cleaning machines keeping the city scoured and pristine arrived and automatically totaled the charges, was not only cheaper, the Vanar considered it a charity to recognize the men’s existence at all. The little money he earned with such menial labor supplied a bit more luxury than the state stipend allowed. He was grateful for any such jobs, his size and strength and cheapness occasionally winning out over the shopkeeper’s wariness of him.

While the other residents had no objection to his trailing them, so long as he maintained a safe distance, his first few attempts at friendly gestures were utterly rebuffed. Offers of a shared meal or simple company earned him only nervous, hostile silence. After his initial tentative approaches failed, his personal contact with his fellow naekulam was reduced to wary nods in passing. While he had no friends in the complex, at least he had made no enemies, either. But the sound of laughter made him even lonelier.

He tried to ignore other sounds, the soft, urgent moans in the night. He listened with passive incomprehension to quarrels usually conducted with muted hostility, not knowing how to cross the isolation even enough to enjoy arguing with his neighbors. He watched as they passed by in the hall, pretending not to see him. Despite his long isolation, he craved the illusion of privacy and used his spare linen sati to hang across the doorless entrance to the room, another feature of Vanar architecture he could not get used to. Then, instead of his fellow residents ignoring him, he was subjected to having his makeshift screen twitched aside at any moment, curious eyes peering in to see what he could possibly be hiding. He finally took it down.

He practiced folding the long sati into intricate patterns in his hands and tying the pleats he’d made from it around his body, as Pratha Yaenida had taught him. Eventually, Nathan’s technique improved so that the knots didn’t unravel to leave him standing in the one-piece mati with a pile of cloth tangled around his ankles. In the confined privacy of his small room, he walked in circles and trained himself to balance on one leg while hooking his foot around the edge of the sati to move it from around his knees before he knelt, just the edge of the mati showing over his knees. Too little and the cloth would be trapped under his legs and jerked out of its intricate folds. Too far, and his thighs would be bared, the mati hitched up indecently.

Other simple things—the nuances of gestures and body language, the unspoken minutiae understood by everyone but himself—continued to elude him. Or blindside him. Razors, for example, were not a common item. Vanar men were as smooth-faced as the women, keeping their face and bodies denuded by using the various depilatories supplied at public baths in the complex. He had watched one afternoon in amazement as one resident subjected himself to having all his body hair removed, the hair on his chest, back, legs, and groin ripped away with a gluey paste embedded in cloth. The man had not made a single sound, his bored expression one of habitual practice. Nathan chose to shave in private, as the public baths tended to want to also strip the hair from areas of his body young Namasi had found so fascinating.

He had thought about her since then, and once believed he’d spotted her on the streets. But when the woman had turned around, her ivy green sati over a wine-colored mati, he was both relieved and disappointed to see it was someone else. The woman had stared at him, and touched her companion on the arm, nodding her head in his direction. Embarrassed, he’d pretended to be unaware of their scrutiny, and had walked by with the end of his sati drawn up over his head to shadow his face.