THE GIRL IN THE ROAD by Monica Byrne

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The
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The
Gir l
in t he
Road
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Monica Byrne
CROW N PU BLISH ER S
NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Monica Byrne
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of

the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of

Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-Publication Data

Byrne, Monica
The girl in the road / Monica Byrne. — First edition.
pages cm
1. Women—Fiction. I. Title
PS3602.Y764G57 2014
813'.6—dc23
ISBN 978‑0‑8041‑3884‑0
eBook ISBN 978‑0‑8041‑3885‑7
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Ellen Cipriano

Jacket design by Christopher Brand
Jacket photography by Eduardo Jose Bernardino/Et/Getty Images
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First Edition

The
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in t he
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BOOK I
Meena
The Third Flight
The world begins anew, starting now.

I pick my kurta up off the floor and put it back on. The blood
makes it stick to my skin. This is a soap opera. It can’t be real.
I walk back up the hallway toward the kitchen and press the
wounds to see how deep they are. I feel panicked. I need to find a
knife and break more glass with it. Instead I remember that I dealt
with a wound like this at Muthashi’s clinic, once, when we got a
little girl who’d been bitten by a snake in a strange place, her solar
plexus, down in the hollow between the shells of her breasts. I
helped apply ointment and white bandaging in a cross. She looked
like a little Crusader.
I become calm. This is what happened to me, too.
I don’t know who put the snake in my bed. I just know I need
to leave home right now because someone here means me harm.
It might be Semena Werk. They say they’re a humanitarian orga-
nization and not a terrorist one, but I’ve heard of them migrating
south, targeting Keralam, though never so creatively, a snake in a

2 Monica Byrne
bed, that’s new. And already Mohini’s voice is in my head, scolding

me for blaming Ethiopians because of my family history, before
I know anything, really. Her voice is so strong. I have to remind
myself every few seconds that we’re not together anymore. We’d
been planning a hero’s journey as lovers, Sita and Rama, Beren
and Lúthien, Alexander and Hephaestion. Instead I’ll go alone.
I’m already at the kitchen counter and pick up my satchel,
which contains my scroll, mitter, and cash. I walk out the door and
around the pookalam we’ve been growing by adding a new ring of
blossoms for each festival day. The steps lead to the iron gate, the
gate unlatches, and then I’m by the road, which is steaming from
the monsoon.
I hear gunfire in the distance.
Mohini says: Calm yourself. It’s just the firecrackers of chil-
dren celebrating Onam early.
You’re right, I say. I’m not in my right mind. I know this. My
heart is pumping adrenaline instead of blood. I start walking and
physical realities calm me: mist rising from the asphalt. Then the
rain starts again and I withdraw back into my head. I have to get
used to being solo again if I’m going on this journey alone. I like
company, but only the kind that doesn’t ask me to explain myself.
I’m simple. Do good, be good, feel good.
I pass the cathedral and the stone wall of the old town rises up
on either side of the road. I pick up to a jog. My satchel bounces
off my ass. I’m soaked. I can’t get any wetter than I am. Gold and
pink bougainvillea get in my face and I raise my arm to protect
myself. Here’s another good reason for leaving home: there’s so
much shit blocking me down here. Like vines. And even when it’s
not raining, the air is so thick in the South. It’s like breathing co-
conut juice.
My initial path is clear. I need to go north, to Mumbai, and

The Gir l in t he R o a d 3
given the concentration of Ethiopian migrants there, do some re-

search. I have some college friends in the city—Mohan from the
Campus Alliance for Women, Ashok from Indian comp lit, Deepti
from rugby. I think she lives in one of the fancy high-rises near
the Taj that collects rainwater for showers. I’m thinking of Deepti,
muscled and dripping in her shower, when I realize I’m already ap-
proaching Vaddukanatha at the center of town. I don’t remember
the last ten minutes. I digress, especially in crisis.
I reach Round East, the road that surrounds the temple com-
plex at the center of the city, and slow to a walk. I’m ringing the
heart of the world. There are bright banners arching overhead to
celebrate Onam, the end of the monsoon. It’s Uthradam Day. We’re
supposed to buy vegetables today. I see a vendor I talked to just an
hour ago and turn away before she sees me. I shouldn’t speak to
other people right now. I know I’m in a manic state but it also feels
like a sanctified state.
I turn onto Round South and there’s a parade of children coming
toward me, defying the rain, like me. They’re dressed in white and
gold. They’re not well organized. Some boys in the front are car-
rying a banner that says thrissur special primary says welcome
and bless us king mahabali, but some rowdy girls are breaking
rank and rushing forward, touching the ground and darting back
in a game of inscrutable rules. I have to change my course to avoid
them. One of the girls hails me and I don’t answer, so out of spite,
she calls me Blackie. Lovely. Another reason to leave.
I pass Melody Corner, where Mohini gives voice and dance
lessons, and take a left onto Kuruppam Road. Distance grows be-
tween me and the heart of the world. Now there’s the march of de-
votional icons all the way down to Station Road. Shiva and Jesus
wear gold to see me off.
I turn into the train station lot. My blood still feels like lemon

4 Monica Byrne
juice. The autoshaws sidle up to me, warbling, and I wave them off.
I go to the counter and ask for a ticket to Mumbai. I don’t make
eye contact, which makes it hard for people to hear me, weirdly,
always, so the teller has to ask me again. Then he holds out a scan-
ner for my mitter. I hold it out, then snatch it back as if I’ve been
burned. I can’t use my mitter because I might be being tracked,
either by Semena Werk or by the police, or both. I can’t rule it out.
Nobody can know I boarded a train to Mumbai.
The teller is startled.
I say, “I’m sorry, I forgot, I need to pay in cash.”
He rolls his eyes and fans himself while I dig in my satchel for
the wad of rupees. I hand them over. They’re soaked. He tells me
to look into the retinal scanner. I’d forgotten this, too—all the new
security measures. I’m flustered. I tell him I have an eye condition
and that I’m sorry I’m such a bother. He reaches under his counter
and pulls out a stamp pad and stamps my hand with a bar code and
waves me on. An express maglev train leaves in fourteen minutes.
I’m fleeing in style.
The platform is sheltered so I can step out of the rain, finally.
Once there I realize I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I walk to one
of the hole-in-the-wall kiosks, where a man looks out from under
hanging metal spoons. I order idlee and sambar and hand over a
five-hundred-rupee note. He takes it by the corner like it’s a rotten
sardine and calls a boy to take it and store it in the special box they
keep for paper money. I’m lucky I have cash on me at all. I only
carry it to buy spices from Sunny, the spicewaala on the corner
of Palace Road and Round East, whose cardamom seeds are the
freshest because he picks them in his mother’s garden. He wasn’t
there today, though, so I had to go to somebody else. I still have
six plastic baggies full of spices for the Onam feast I’ll no longer
be making.

There’s no one to take care of now, and no one to take care

of me.
It’s clear that life continues after trauma. What’s not clear is
whether it’s worth continuing to live.
A horn sounds in the distance. I look south. The train is com-
ing, saffron yellow, with its silver emblem, the Lion of Sarnath, and
its triad of lights, the top one shining like a third eye.
I have thirty seconds to end this story.
Everyone is crowding the platform. Everyone ignores the
safety line. Everyone is so close to death. I move through them,
toward the track. Some are closer to death than others. I move my
right foot forward and then my left. I repeat the motion. Now I’m
closer than anyone. I repeat. I repeat again. Now I’m in the track.
I repeat. I repeat again.
The train triples in size.
My legs go weak.
I hear a shout from the crowd. The shout multiplies into many
shouts and a thicket of hands pulls me forward.
I close my eyes and feel a great wind at my back, so close it
makes my muscles itch.
So the dream continues.
When I open my eyes there’s a crowd of people reproaching me
with big angry eyes and I know I have to offer some explanation
and so I emit lies that I hope will mollify them. “Thank you. I
wanted to cross the track but I cut it too close. Thank you. I have
a blind spot in my right eye. Thank you.”
I’m a minor celebrity on the platform now, which is the last
thing I wanted. Stupid, chutiya, stupid. I can’t draw attention to
myself.
I board the train and take my seat. Back to the dream, back to
business. I watch the parking lot for another attempt by Semena

6 Monica Byrne
Werk, a bomb or an assassin, or for a sudden burst of police saying,

Wait, Stop This Train; we need to question one R. G. Meenakshi,
also known as Meena, Meerama, Mimi, Nini, Kashi, or M.
I don’t see any police. But I do see a girl on the platform, star-
ing at me.
She’s not Indian, too dark even for a Malayalee, probably an
African migrant, a rag picker or rat catcher. Her dress is rumpled,
once pink, now mottled mustard. Her head is covered like a Mus-
lim, but her dress only comes to mid-calf and she’s barefoot. They
won’t let her on the train barefoot. She fits no prepoured religiocul-
tural profile. She might be a new religion, an immigrant religion. It
wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened in India.
I don’t know why she’s staring at me. I hate making eye contact
anyway so I drop my eyes but I can feel her still staring. What the
fuck is wrong with her. Though I could also ask what the fuck is
wrong with me, given that I just walked in front of a train.
I’m distracted by a mother and daughter who sit down across
from me. They’re both immaculately dry and dressed in match-
ing purple saris. The daughter lets her eyes go soft and unfocused
around my head because she wants to read my aadhaar, my unique
ID and cloud profile, to see what sort of person I am and treat me
accordingly. But I keep my aadhaar locked. I’m old-fashioned like
that. What you see is what you get. This girl is the opposite. I see
her life haloed around her head like a charm bracelet: impeccable
schooling, tours abroad, a Brahmin surname. And she’s definitely
not impressed with me, or with my choice not to display my own
aadhaar, or the fact that I’m drenched, or my butch clothes, or my
“African” cornrows that Mohini braided and teased me that I was
asking for it. For a second I want to turn on my aadhaar just to
fuck with her and let slip that I’m Brahmin too. But I stop myself.
As Mohini also told me, being looked down upon is good for the
soul, good for empathy, good training for a human.

The doors of the train pinch closed with a hiss and a woman’s
voice tells us to seat ourselves. I switch off my glotti because I’m
about to hear the same thing in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, English,
and Mandarin. Now that I know we’re leaving soon I feel safe
enough to look out the window. And as soon as I do I wish I hadn’t.
The barefoot girl hasn’t moved. She’s still staring at me. She
might be twelve and she has baby-fat cheeks and a button nose.
Her dress has slipped off her shoulder. She has this expression on
her face like I’ve betrayed her.
I look away. I have other things to worry about than a mentally
unstable African girl.
A warm electric hum runs beneath our feet. I hum the same
note under my breath until the tones match perfectly and I can’t
tell one from the other. The note slides up and the train lifts. We’re
airborne. We slide forward on silken tracks of air.
The barefoot girl is no more.
My hometown, Thrissur, the center of the heart of the world,
passes by. The city turns to suburbs, then paddies and fields, then
jungle. The train gathers speed. I forget to be vigilant. Mundane-
ness returns. Banana palms beat by like a metronome. I’m always
calmed by being in motion. I feel like a tsunami. I can only go
forward. I can’t stop until I come ashore, wherever that might be.
The mother and daughter across from me are already asleep,
their heads tented together. All my adrenaline retreats from ser-
vice and leaves me beached and my eyelids begin to flutter.
I dream of an age of miracles, when it only takes two hours to
ride all the way from Keralam to Mumbai. And then I wake to find
that the age of miracles is Now.

8 Monica Byrne
Mumbai Live
Dusk in Mumbai. There’s one star in the sky for thirty million
souls.
I’m stepping off the train with seven hundred fellow humans
and I don’t have a place to sleep tonight. Not that I’ll be in Mumbai
long. Just long enough to plan for the wheres and the hows of the
journey. I think again of Mohan, Ashok, and Deepti, but they’d
ask me why I was in Mumbai and so I’d have to tell them about
the snake, which would lead to other questions I don’t know how
to answer yet.
Right now I’m hungry and my wounds still sting, so I have to
take care of my body. I still have my white box of food. I sit down
on the platform away from the crowds with my back to the wall.
I use one hand to break the idlee and the other hand to slip inside
my jacket to palpate the bites in my skin. They hurt. It’s a bright,
prismatic pain that means infection. So after I eat, I have to locate
first aid.
Just when I finish eating, I see the barefoot girl get off the
train.
At least, that’s my first thought. It looks like the same girl, still
head covered, still barefoot, still unplaceable. How did she get
on the train? We left her behind. There’s no way she could have
boarded it unless she hitched and then was let on by a conductor
who didn’t make her pay. Only wealthy people could afford that
train. Did she follow me? I watch her. I grind my palm into the
cement until I feel pain. Then Mohini says to me, soothingly: In
a manic state, one sees connections where there are none. You’re
not usually like this. You’re of a sullen nature, certainly, but not
paranoid.

I’m sitting behind a support beam, so the girl can’t see me un-
less I let her. She joins the flow of the crowd but moves at half the
pace. She looks around. She’s clutching her dress, fabric balled in
her fists. If this were the first time I was seeing her I’d think about
approaching her and helping her. Mohini would, in an instant. Her
heart bled for the charismatic lost.
She departs through one of the gates to the outside. I put the
last of my idlee in my mouth and get up and head out of the train
station in the opposite direction.
Outside of Victoria Terminus there’s chaos. D. N. Road is a
human river, clogged to a halt with cars, trucks, buses, bicycles,
rickshaws, autoshaws, and autorickshaws. A local train glides
overhead on its way to the suburbs. I smell oil, sparks, and sew-
age, all the smells I forgot about while living in a hippie Keralite
enclave. People on foot weave between the vehicles and animals
weave between the people on foot. There are cows, too. I read that
the tourism office lets them loose for ambiance.
On the other side of the road begins Azad Maidan, the gath-
ering ground. At one end there’s a cricket game in session, at the
other end, a protest. From what I can see it looks like Ethiopian
domestic workers. I walk faster. They’re everywhere, Keralam and
Mumbai both.
Not everywhere, says Mohini, Not at all. This is your fear
speaking to you. Your family history.
A flock of children runs toward me, breaks around me, and
re-forms behind me. I calm down. I know this city. Already I’m
remembering the grid and my orientation within it. I feel good.
This is the manic phase of psychosis but it feels good for the dur
ation, and only abnormal afterward, so I’ll just accept this, that
there’s nothing I can do to change my course. I remember this is
the park where I bought a first edition of Crime and Punishment and

10 Monica Byrne
read it while eating bhelpuri from a newspaper cone. I sat under

the bodhi tree, right over there, the one with the perfect shape.
Enlightenment de Dostoevsky.
An explosion goes off.
I fall to the ground and cover my head.
Onam, I tell myself, it’s just Onam firecrackers again, even
here in Mumbai, they’re celebrating a Keralite festival, that’s nice.
But then I see a circle of motionless bodies at the end of the
green where the protest was and so, it’s not firecrackers.
I turn around and see the barefoot girl, staring at me from
across the green.
Now things are starting to make sense. I take off in the oppo-
site direction. I’m running perpendicular to everyone else who’s
either running away from the explosion or toward it. It’s like a
game. I’m dodging missiles. I collide with someone and I fall so
hard my skull bounces. I get up and keep running.
I run till I hit Fashion Street and then turn south. I just assume
the barefoot girl’s following me. If she’s still barefoot, that’s fuck-
ing dangerous for her, and I can outrun her in boots, especially
on stone roads. The faces of people I pass begin to change. First,
people who are running toward the explosion. Then, people who
only heard the explosion and are worried. Then, people who are
still oblivious to any explosion that might have happened and are
going about their lives, hefting mangoes at street-side stands.
I’m beginning to get tired. I can’t keep running. This is like a
movie. What does an action hero do? She takes a turn onto a side
street and then ducks into a shop and lets her pursuer run past. So
that’s what I do. I thank The Film Industry in my head and then
take a sharp turn into an alley and count one, two, three shops,
then duck into the fourth one, which turns out to be a pharmacy,
which solves the problem I began with, of needing first aid.
I get out of sight of the doorway and bend over, wheezing. I

hear a cry from the woman behind the counter. She’s asking me if
I’m all right. I hold up my hand. I can’t talk yet.
“You’re bleeding,” she says.
I look down at my kurta. So I am. The snakebites have opened
up again, probably while I was running.
“Did you come from Azad Maidan? Is it from the terrorists?”
So the news hit the cloud already. “Yes,” I say.
“Lie down,” she says.
I do, out of sight of the doorway. I watch the ceiling and listen
to the sound of drawers being opened, product wrapping rustling.
I count to forty.
The attendant’s face reappears over me. “Fucking Habshee,”
she says. “They want to live like Indians now.”
Here I would usually say what Mohini would want me to say:
first, that I’d like to know which Indians she’s talking about. And
second, that Habshee is a derogatory word for black people and
she shouldn’t use it. And third, that Habshee doesn’t equal Ethio-
pian.
But right now I don’t care.
The attendant begins peeling up my kurta. And then I remem-
ber the nature of the wounds and force it back down. She’s startled.
“Sorry,” I say, “they’re not shrapnel wounds, they’re something
else. I’ll take care of it.”
She looks hurt but she hands me all of the supplies she’d gath-
ered. I start peeling a square of clearskin but my hands are shak-
ing. She watches me. Then she snaps her fingers.
“You! You went to IIT-Bombay, yes?”
I look at her face again. I realize it’s the exact same attendant
who worked here when I was at university nine years ago, and had
my little episode over Ajantha, not unlike my current episode. Now
it occurs to me that every word I say to this woman, and every
minute more I spend here, is a liability.

12 Monica Byrne
“I have to go,” I say. “I can pay for these.”

She waves it off. “But how are you?” she says. “You were so
sad. I never forgot about you.”
“I’m fine,” I say. Then I start making things up in case anyone
comes to question her later. “Been living in Gandhinagar. Just in
town to see family.”
“For Onam? Aren’t you Malayalee?”
“Nope,” I lie. “Just a darkie Gujarati.”
That shuts her up.
I thank her for the supplies and head back to the street. No sign
of the barefoot girl, so my ruse worked. Why did I say I was from
Gandhinagar? That’s where my mother’s from. It’s deep dusk now.
The sky is lilac and all our faces glow.
I have to find another place to apply the dressing, the farther
away from the explosion, the better. The barefoot girl can’t track
me if I’m on wheels. I turn to face traffic and raise my arm to flag
down an autoshaw, but one with a driver sees me first and veers
to the curb. Its cord is dragging in the street so I pick it up and
tuck it back before I get in. I tell her to take me to the first place I
think of: Butterfly, a Singaporean club at the north end of Marine
Drive. Mohini pointed it out to me when we visited last monsoon.
It was very much her scene and very much not mine, but that’s a
good thing, now. Even if the barefoot girl tracked me there, they
wouldn’t let her in.
The driver powers up. I can see her smiling in the mirror. She
has two dimples big enough to hold cardamom seeds. She might
be fifteen.
As we speed up she begins shouting, loud enough to be heard
over the wind, and I strain to listen so I can respond, but I realize
she’s talking to someone in her ear. Her sister. Wedding plans. The
caterer has fallen through but she knows someone else, a brother

of a boyfriend, who’s cheap but not cheap enough to insult their

in-laws.
Then the buildings pull back like stage curtains and I see the
ocean. We stop at a red light. It’s beautiful, the golden light on
black water. The wind blows in from the bay. The ocean tang is
stronger here, dirtier and saltier than in Keralam. There are more
spices in this sea.
The light turns green and we swerve right onto Marine Drive.
When we break free of the swarms and hit open road, she floors
the acceleration and hugs the curve and I press my hand to the side
to keep from sliding out. A fingernail moon drops into the sea. I
fight to keep sight of it. It means something.
It’s full night by the time we reach Butterfly. The autorick-
shaw slides to a stop and the driver says, “Yashna, wait,” and turns
around, holding out her wrist with a cheap mitter flashing.
“Do you take cash?”
She wags her head and turns over her palm.
I pay her and tip generously. She tucks the bills into a pocket
sewn onto her kurta. “Thank you very much!” she says in English
without looking back. I step out and she floors the pedal and is
gone.
Butterfly is the neon confection I remember. The bathroom is
down a black hall with pink track lighting. In the stall I get toilet
paper and ball it up and run it under the faucet and then go back
into the stall. For the first time, I take off my jacket and peel up
my kurta all the way up over my breasts. The cloth is stuck to
the dried blood and rips the scabbing when I pull up. Fresh blood
wells like tears and runs down my belly. I wipe it up and press the
wet wad of toilet paper to the wound, or rather the constellation
of wounds, five scratches of varying depths, not deep but not su-
perficial, either. I don’t know what kind of snake it was. It wasn’t

14 Monica Byrne
a cobra, krait, or viper, because I know them all by sight and any-
way, I’d be dead by now. This snake was colored golden bronze.
I take out my scroll and search for images, but none are the right
kind of gold, or at least not native to Keralam. It might be an Afri-
can species. If it is, that would tell me something.
I wipe up the wounds, apply oil, smear some on my throat be-
cause it smells like peppermint, press squares of clearskin to the
wounds, and then the larger white bandage over them. I flex my
torso to make sure it’ll stay in place.
I come out and look in the mirror. I’m still wearing what I put
on in our bedroom in Thrissur this morning. I feel the need to alter
my appearance. I take my jacket off, then, and stuff it in my satchel.
I roll up the sleeves of my kurta past my elbows and undo three
more buttons. I can do nothing radical with my jeans or boots. So
I start unbraiding my hair. There’s something about dressing my
own wounds and fixing my own hair that makes me feel invinci-
ble. Look on my works, ye Mighty: I both heal and adorn my own
body. In fact I could go for a drink, now.
Here is my new strategy: act normal.
When I come out into the club there’s a people-scape of black
silhouettes against violet light. A Meshell Ndegeocello bhangra
remix is making the floorboards shake. The bartender looks like
an old Bollywood hero with shaved and pregnant biceps. He’s
wearing a threadbare T‑shirt with holes along the seams, carefully
placed, Dalit chic, not authentic. His eyes flicker up around my
head and, seeing nothing, look back down at me.
“What can I get you, madam?”
“Jameson’s.”
He takes a second look at me. “Malayalee?” he says.
How’d you guess, chutiya?
“Nominally,” I say. “My family’s lived in Mumbai since the
Raj.” Lying is so easy and useful, I don’t know why I ever stopped.

“Isn’t it Onam?”
“I guess.”
“Not much one for tradition, huh?”
“Not really.” This bartender talks too goddamn much. And I’m
a quiet person. Talking takes energy and anyway, nothing I want
to say comes out right. I use my body to talk, when I can, but that’s
not an option here, so I say, “We live in Santa Cruz East. Haven’t
been down much lately. What’s going on around here?”
“Oh, bombs on Azad Maidan, the usual.” He concentrates on
pouring my drink, looks angry.
“It’s probably Semena Werk,” I say. It’s prejudicial speech that
Mohini would warn me against. Given the snake. Given the bare-
foot girl. Given Family History. “They can’t be reasonable.”
“So they bomb their own people?”
“They don’t think of them as their own people. They think of
them as traitors.”
“True.” The bartender pushes the glass of whiskey to me. I take
a sip and, as soon as the sting reaches my stomach, start to unkink.
I hadn’t realized how nonlinear the day has been. Now things feel
like they’re proceeding in order.
“Looked like you needed that.”
“I did.”
“Glad I could oblige.”
I’m beginning to feel comfortable. This may be the end of the
mania. Or it may be a new phase of the mania.
“So what else is going on downtown?” I ask.
“Lots of foreigners moving in, especially because of Energy
Park.”
“Which is—?”
“It’s the cluster of towers at the end of Nariman Point, the one
that looks like Oz. You should go see it if you haven’t. They have a
new museum in the HydraCorp building.”

16 Monica Byrne
“A museum of what?”
“Energy.”
“That could mean a lot of things.” HydraCorp is one of the big-
gest multinational energy conglomerates. They’re also the hippest
because they invest five percent of all profits in developing weird
new energy sources. I read about a device to power a Gandhian
cotton wheel with human shit. I didn’t know whether to laugh
or cry.
“Have you heard of the Trail?” he asks.
I pause. Mohini and I saw an episode of Extreme Weather! about
the Trail a few years ago. The bartender sees I know what he’s
talking about and says, “At the museum, they give you the corpo-
rate version, but it’s still worth seeing.”
Now memories come back, shook loose by whiskey. The Trail
seemed unreal: a floating pontoon bridge moored just offshore
from Mumbai, which spanned the whole Arabian Sea, like a poem,
not a physical thing. I asked Mohini what she thought it’d be like
to walk on it all the way to Africa. She received my enthusiasm in
her gracious way but cautioned that the Trail was all blank sky
and faceless sea, the perfect canvas upon which to author my own
madness.
“What’s the corporate version?”
“I can’t tell you. Only, don’t call it ‘The Trail’ when you’re there.”
“Why?”
“They try to discourage people from swimming out to it and
walking on it.”
I am amazed. “People walk on the Trail?”
“I’ve heard of—hey, Arjuna!”
Another man is in my space. He’s well groomed, wearing a
silver-gray shirt, unbuttoned to show a bush of glossy chest hair.
He leans across me to kiss the bartender and his leg presses against
my knee. He withdraws and presses his palms to me in apology.

And when we make eye contact I realize I know him: Arjuna Swa-
minathan, half Persian. He was in my nano seminar at IIT. I used
to fantasize about him instead of paying attention to the lecture.
But unlike the clerk at the pharmacy, he doesn’t seem to recog-
nize me.
The bartender says, “Arjuna, I was just telling—what is your
name?”
I need to be careful. I lie again. “Durga.”
“I’m Sandeep,” says the bartender, and plants a clear shot in
front of Arjuna, who takes a seat next to me and rolls up his sleeves.
His hands are huge. His fingers are muscular. I can see the veins
snaking up his forearms. “I was just telling Durga about the Trail.
Didn’t someone try to walk it last monsoon?”
“Oh yes, people try. They’re crazy. Mostly poor kids who hear
they can make a living from fishing and so they swim out to it and
no one ever hears from them again.”
“Arjuna should know,” Sandeep says to me. “He works for
HydraCorp.”
“Do you work on the Trail?”
“No. But I can see it from my office window pretty far into the
distance. Every now and then you can see a blur against the sea, so
you know someone’s camping, because they get special camouflage
pods. They only walk at night.”
“So they don’t get caught.”
“I imagine.”
“What’s the penalty if they do?”
“A night in jail, a month in jail, whatever the police feel like. It’s
corporate trespassing. But we don’t have the resources to patrol it
all the time. If you want to just feel what it’s like, you can—”
Sandeep snaps his fingers in Arjuna’s face. “Don’t tell her!”
“Don’t tell her what, chutiya?”
“I told her she has to go see for herself.”

18 Monica Byrne
Then Sandeep leaves to help someone else and Arjuna turns to

me, opening his body to face mine, spreading his legs. “He means
the museum,” he says smoothly. “I can get you free tickets.”
On another night, I would not be impressed by his moves. But
he’s sexy, despite himself. This is a familiar sequence: see someone
with potential, want to fuck them, fuck them. It is such a clean
exercise of power, such a simple application of effort, leading to a
desired result. He hasn’t asked about my aadhaar. He didn’t even
check. I appreciate that.
I keep looking at the floor. Sometimes I can only talk to other
people if I can make myself believe I’m talking to myself. “Would
you go walk on the Trail, if you could?”
He shakes his head, Western-style. “No, I don’t see why. It’s
like kids who ride the tops of trains. A thrill for thrill-seekers, but
that’s not me. I have a nice enough life.”
And I can tell he does. I can tell he’s a tech prince, an unmar-
ried Third Culture playboy with a modern flat and a few servants.
He’s an only child. His parents are divorced. He works out every
morning in his tower’s basement gym. I can picture the wings of
his iliac crest.
“Who needs thrills?” I say.
He smiles, leans back. “You remind me of someone I used to
know,” he says, “a girl at college. She wore heavy boots and a scarf
around her neck, even in monsoon. She never looked anyone in the
eye. She came to class alone and she never spoke.”
I think: I didn’t make eye contact because eye contact is too
intense for daily use and I didn’t speak because nothing would ever
fucking come out of my mouth right. Sex was how I said what I
wanted to say.
“I heard she dropped out,” he continues. “But I remembered
her. Fierce, but shy, like a femme trapped in a butch body.”

I think: How perceptive of you.

But I don’t say that. Right now I’m playing Durga, so I say what
Durga would say. “What would you say, if you saw her today?”
“Probably? . . . I would ask her for a kiss.”
Now my whole loin area is burning. The conversation goes on
but the goal is secured, so it’s all filler, now, and my mind sustains
small talk with Arjuna as I’m having another conversation with
myself: I need a place to sleep for the night. He’s smarmy but my
body needs this. I need the flavor of someone else in my mouth be-
sides Mohini. I can delay planning for my journey or even better,
consider this a part of it. I assure myself it makes sense that a day
including an assassination attempt and a terrorist attack would
end in the urgent need to fuck. In fact I can’t even think about
anything else right now but fucking this man.
When we leave the nightclub and mount his scooter, before
we pull away, I scan the waterfront for the barefoot girl, sitting
and looking at the bay, her headscarf rippling along the rampart.
I don’t see her.
The Trans-Arabian Linear Generator
I wake up alone in a pool of sunlight.

I’m lying in a wad of white sheets. I’ve slept maybe two hours.
I’m still too wound up. The mattress sheet came off in the night
and the pillows are all on the floor except the one we used to prop
up each other’s hips at various points. There are stiff spots in the
fabric where our juices dried and left solids behind. I’d forgotten
what it was like to have sex with a man. Mohini, by the time I left,
had fully changed into a woman with woman-parts. We celebrated
with a rosewater cake. I’m a good cook when I want to be. There’s

20 Monica Byrne
so rarely an occasion that merits my talents. But I was so happy

to love her, finally, as she wanted to be loved and in the body she
wanted.
But when a man is inside me, I feel like the eye of my body is
held open, and I’m not allowed to blink.
And how is it possible that . . . A nwar? I can’t believe this but
I can’t remember his name. My mind is blank. I’m sure it started
with an A. This is ridiculous. But regardless of his name, why
didn’t he recognize me from college? Maybe he does, and he just
never said so. Maybe we had sex and now he’s going out to get the
police, who are looking for me, a Malayalee on the run, nursing a
snakebite to the solar plexus. Maybe he was filing away the infor-
mation to use against me later.
This might be a trap. In fact I’m sure it is.
I can’t run out of the room this second. I have to think. I sit
down. I use the breathing exercises Muthashan taught me when I
was little, but they fail.
I find the bathroom, get in the shower, and turn it on icy-cold.
I count to ten.
When I get out of the shower I at least have the illusion that I
can think more rationally. I run my fingers over the patch cover-
ing my wounds. When I took off my shirt last night, he—Arjuna,
for fuck’s sake, Arjuna—didn’t even acknowledge it was there. He
wasn’t really present, in general: a vigorous lover, but too aware of
himself, parroting endearments from Bollywood films, never hav-
ing broken the surface and learned the real language.
I find a towel and spread it on the floor. I sit and lean back
against the shower door, naked, dewy bush out. I haven’t had five
minutes in the last eighteen hours to just sit and plan my next
move. I close my eyes and try to remember the flavor of my life one
day ago.
It was an overcast morning in Thrissur.

The neighbor’s dog wouldn’t stop barking.

We had a breakfast of chai and leftover Chinese.
Mohini and I had been planning a trip to Africa to try to un-
derstand My Family History, which I knew the facts of, but had
never really tried to understand. But Mohini felt this was the root
of my restlessness. My parents were murdered by a young woman
who’d been their friend, an Ethiopian dissident. My mother was
only six months pregnant. They were killed in the hospital where
they both worked as doctors. I was saved by the nurses who found
them.
So an atlas of the Horn of Africa was open on our kitchen
table. I wanted to go right away, but Mohini stalled, because she
was slower, more careful, the means of transportation important,
given her awareness of energy, responsible usage, modes of travel,
better and worse, pros and cons. Meanwhile the map became a
tablecloth. Africa was obscured by takeout boxes.
I spot two paper tickets stuck in the bathroom mirror.
They’re white with silver lettering in a slender font: Admit One to
the Museum. On the other side is the HydraCorp logo, a stylized
multiheaded snake. On one ticket is written, Wait for me.
I don’t fucking wait for anyone. I used to, for Mohini. She was
the only one.
There’s a knock at the door. I wrap a towel around my body
and look through the eyehole. It’s the dhobi with laundry. He looks
Ethiopian. I open the door.
“I’m sorry, he’s not here,” I say.
“That’s all right ma’am,” he says, looking down. “We settle up
weekly.” He hands me a stack of shirts, ironed and starched.
I close the door without thanking him.
I drop the stack by the door and press my ear to it. He might be
a member of Semena Werk. He might be gathering information on
me. I probably shouldn’t stay here. At the very least I should leave

22 Monica Byrne
before Arjuna gets back. Now I remember he climbed over me

and pressed his body down and whispered in my ear that he was
going to get me my breakfast and to make myself at home before
dismounting and dressing and leaving. A door shut, a lock turned,
and footsteps faded to silence.
I’ll get my own breakfast. But I can use the ticket for the re-
search I need to do.
===
Two hours later I’m back on Marine Drive, standing in front of the
HydraCorp Museum. White seabirds are dipping and wheeling
overhead. The museum is eleven stories tall and shaped like an
eight-pointed star. The outer walls are transparent so I can see the
exhibits bunched up inside like intestines.
The lobby is hung with flags representing the consortium of
participant nations and corporations. India and Djibouti are prom-
inent. I walk to a sickle-shaped desk and hand over my ticket. The
attendant, seeing no aadhaar, hands me a map of the museum and
a glossy pamphlet about HydraCorp’s many projects.
I can see he’s unnerved by my not meeting his eye so I try to
put him at ease. I wave the pamphlet. “HydraCorp. Funny name
for a company with lots of projects,” I say.
He smiles, but I can tell he doesn’t know what I mean. It’s my
fault. My jokes aren’t really jokes. They’re oblique and not funny to
anyone but Mohini. We had a shared language. No one else speaks
it. I have to remember that. It seems my suavity from last night
wore off and I’m beached again on the shore of awkwardness.
The attendant tells me to start on the top floor, so I get in the
Lucite elevator and say, “Eleven.” The car begins a smooth ascent.
I rise higher and higher above Back Bay, the curve of Mumbai. I
see a silver thread bobbing on the surface of the water, stretching

toward a hazy horizon. That’s that famous Trail, then. I stare at it

all the way up.
Once on the eleventh floor I walk in the direction of a black
doorway that says cinema in silver lettering. The word is comfort-
ing. I feel good. I’d like to sit still and watch an educational film. I
enter a black velvet room shaped like a half-circle. When I sit, the
room senses my presence and the screen dawns blue. I’m relieved
it’s not an immersive theater where the images get into your head
and cup your eyeballs. I like there to be a distance between me
and art. Mohini and I argued about that, with her feeling that I
was being a Luddite on par with Luddites who impugned film as a
valid art form in the early twentieth century. I disagreed. I still do.
The film begins. It’s beautifully produced. The narrator is a
woman speaking in English with a north Indian lilt and for once
it doesn’t annoy me. She tells me about the history of artificial en-
ergy on our planet. Wood. Water. Coal. Oil. Nuclear. Geothermal.
Wind. Solar. The twins Fusion and Fission, both functional in lab-
oratories, but still too expensive to be scaled up. And lastly Wave,
which I think is what the Trail is. They call it Blue Energy, the
successor to Green Energy. I’m excited for whatever Red Energy
and Purple Energy and Orange Energy will turn out to be. I’m
starting to feel euphoric.
The narrator doesn’t call it the Trail. She calls it the Trans-
Arabian Linear Generator, or TALG. She presents a succession
of pleasing metaphors: that its technology draws from ancient
pontoon bridges which, though remarkable for their time, only
spanned distances of a few kilometers, like the Bosporus or the
Hellespont, in times of war. And then they were discarded, more
easily disassembled than assembled. The narrator emphasizes that
the TALG only resembles a pontoon bridge, as its overall shape
is more like that of an upside-down caterpillar. Each segment is a
hollow, inverted pyramid made of aluminum, and each sunward

24 Monica Byrne
surface is faced with solar paneling, which seems brilliant to me,

makes me want to applaud. Between the segments are hinge arrays
called nonlinear compliant connectors, each of which contains a
dynamo, in each of which is suspended an egg of steel that bobs
up and down as the wave does. This generates energy, as does the
solar paneling, making the TALG a dual-action apparatus. Mo-
hini would love this—I wonder if she knew about this. And then
the energy is imported to its recipient plant in Djibouti—there is an
image of a house in Djibouti lighting up, and a Djiboutian family
rejoicing—via superconductor threads made of metallic hydrogen,
a controversial material whose manufacturing process was per-
fected ten years ago. Despite its history of catastrophic accidents,
metallic hydrogen is metastable, the narrator assures me; structur-
ally sound, like an artificial diamond. She explains how the TALG
was also a breakthrough in intelligent self-assembly on a mass
scale, because every component of the TALG has an intelligent
chip that, like a human cell, “understands” where it goes and what
it’s supposed to do and can monitor and repair itself.
Then the tone of her voice changes. This is a pilot project, she
cautions. HydraCorp and its partners, mainly the Djiboutian gov-
ernment, rich from recent oil wealth, wanted to know if this is
a viable, sustainable form of energy after oil runs out, in which
case they’ll build a TILG for the Indian Ocean and a TPLG for
the Pacific Ocean and all the world’s oceans could be crisscrossed
with energy generators like a fishnet flung across the entire planet.
This is incredible. Mohini would be clutching at my sleeve right
now if she were here. And how does the TALG stay roughly in
the same place? Well, because of breakthroughs in materials sci-
ence, the TALG is anchored to the seafloor by means of Gossa-
moor, synthetic silk modeled on the draglines of Darwin’s bark
spider, native to Madagascar, which is not only the strongest sub-

stance known but weighs about twelve milligrams per thousand

meters. And thanks to HydraCorp’s partnership with China Tele-
com, the anchors parallel the SEA-M E‑WE 3 undersea cable that
carries data between Mumbai and Djibouti before veering up the
Red Sea. And how does the TALG survive the many intrusions of
maritime traffic? Well, gentle viewer, it turns out that the segments
are programmed to sense oncoming ships and take on seawater,
sinking up to thirty meters to let the ship pass, and then pumping
the water back out to regain buoyancy.
The Trail is a conspiracy of ideal materials. I am fucking
amazed.
When the presentation is done, a static map of the world ap-
pears and the narrator urges me to explore it with my fingers. I
jump up to the screen. If I press my finger to any city in the world,
a pie chart surfaces next to it, detailing the breakdown of that
city’s energy sources. This is marvelous. I press my finger to Dji-
bouti. Thirty percent of their electricity is currently sourced from
the TALG. The results are promising. And now I have a theory
brewing in my mind, something I want to tell Mohini, a new field
of study altogether, about how the source of a society’s energy must
necessarily shape their language, art, and culture. In the case of
Djibouti, their people will be wavelike. Should I call it the socio-
psychology of energy?—that then infuses its culture, even its indi-
viduals. Mohini was of a solar nature, certainly.
I need to find out my own.
Maybe that’s why I’m here. Maybe the universe is conspiring
in my favor.
After waiting a polite amount of time the narrator invites me
to explore the rest of the museum and I take her up on it. I need to
remember to ask the attendant who the voice actor is. I feel senti-
mental.

26 Monica Byrne
I descend a stairway that is slanted, crystalline. For each type

of energy the narrator named, there’s a dedicated floor, scientifi-
cally, technically, stylistically. I lose my intention of researching
travel methods. I give myself to wonder. It’s a palace of human in-
vention. The Wood Gallery is paneled in sweet-smelling cedar and
features a hologram of proto-Dravidian nomads chopping wood
and throwing it onto a fire. They’re wearing skins and pelts. They
introduce a carcass of some woodland animal, which they roast,
and it smokes and blackens. The hologram cuts away before they
begin eating it, and resets, to one lone nomad wandering in the
forest. She’s gazing at the trees in wonder. She selects one, thanks
it, and then chops it down with her stone ax. The sequence begins
again.
I turn away and look at the exhibits against the wall. There’s
a display where you can select a wood chip, insert it into a clear
box for burning, and then watch how much energy is generated. I
burn six wood chips. I don’t get tired of it. Everything is amazing
to me. The display informs me that this gallery is powered by high-
efficiency wood combustion, that in fact every floor is powered by
the energy source it features. Next to the display there’s a pair of
immersive goggles that, when I put them on, casts me as a mole-
cule of groundwater sucked up through a tree root. The journey
up through the xylem is exhilarating. When I enter the leaf and
get split up, I’m presented with a choice: If you would like to go with
the hydrogen atoms, say “ hydrogen.” If you would like to go with the oxygen
atom, say “oxygen.”
I say, “Oxygen.”
I’m released from the tip of the leaf and float out into the air.
This is like flying. I look below me and there’s a forest floor dap-
pled with sunlight. I expect the simulation to pixelate and dissolve.
But it doesn’t. The trees are sharp and clear and I can see every
leaf and flower. I keep floating. The programmer imagined a whole

world for me. She’s more than a programmer, she’s a storyteller, a

creator goddess. I’m crossing over a slow-moving green river and
then the land turns to desert, where a caravan of trucks makes its
way across the waste.
I take off the goggles. I’m back in the Wood Gallery. The ho-
logram sequence is right at the moment where the animal carcass
burns. I watch it a second time and then a third time. I feel like I
could watch it all day.
I descend the stairs and explore the Water Gallery, where the
walls are made of waterfalls, and eight mills pinwheel on the en-
ergy they make. The floor is crisscrossed with streamlets, each of
which powers a display table featuring a notable world dam.
Below these are the Coal Gallery (uninspired), the Oil Gal-
lery (depressing), the Nuclear Gallery (neon orange and green),
the Geothermal Gallery (my favorite besides the Wood), the Wind
Gallery (I set all the turbines spinning), and the Fusion Gallery
(a hologram of Enid Chung at her bench, making the discovery).
The Solar Gallery is on the second floor. There’s a miniature
array I’m invited to manipulate, a model of the Sun Traps in Sudan.
I remember from the floating pie chart that they supply twenty per-
cent of Europe’s energy and forty percent of North Africa’s, after
ARAP (African Resources for African Peoples) repossessed the
land their governments had sold off and forced new lease agree-
ments. My euphoria increases: despite the snake, despite the terror,
overall the world is only getting better.
Now is the time for me to undertake a great journey.
I float down the last staircase. I come to the same lobby where
I’d first entered. I ask the attendant: “Where’s the Wave Gallery?”
He points to a doorway in the wall behind the front desk.
“Down one more flight,” he says. “It’s in the basement.”
So this’ll be the room dedicated to the Trail. From the door-
way comes a warm chlorine smell. This staircase is concrete, not

28 Monica Byrne
crystalline. It looks much older than the rest of the building. I turn
around to ask the attendant a question but he already has the an-
swer: “It used to be a warehouse for fishwaalas. We preserved it
and made it part of the museum.”
I thank him. I wonder if he can see me glowing, if he can see
that I’m a different person than I was when I first came in.
I descend the staircase and come into a low, broad room. In
the ground there’s a rectangular pool, maybe eight meters across.
From this side to the far side is a pontoon bridge, each section
bobbing with gentle artificial waves. I realize I’m looking at a pro-
totype of the Trail.
A young woman stands up from where she’d been crouching
on the opposite side of the pool. She’s wearing a red swimsuit and
holding a red foam buoy.
“Namaste!” she calls.
“Namaste. Are you the lifeguard?”
“Yes,” she says. “The pool is only two meters deep, but that’s
enough to drown in. Have you watched the film?”
“The what?”
“The film in the cinema. About how the Trail works.”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to call it the Trail.”
“You’re right! The TALG. Don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“Go ahead and try it,” she says.
“Try what?”
“Walking on it, silly!” Even from this far away I can see she
gets dimples when she smiles. “That’s what it’s here for. I promise I
won’t judge you. Believe me, I’ve seen everything.”
I can sense she’s eager to see me try. She probably sees couples
and families, mostly. Not another woman alone, like her. I can feel
she wants me to succeed.
I take a step toward the edge of the pool. The concrete walls

have been painted with murals: a sunset on the left, a moonrise on

the right.
I stall.
“So you just . . . walk across it?”
“Well, you can explore it any way you want. You can swim
around it if you brought a swimsuit—there’s a changing room over
there. But walking on it is the coolest thing, in my opinion.”
“Won’t it sink when I step on it?”
“It’s buoyant,” she says. I can tell she gives this speech a lot, but
makes sure to infuse it with warm reassurance every time. “We
call the segments ‘scales’ because they ripple. Each scale reaches
down one meter and displaces three hundred and forty kilograms
of seawater. Each scale is also hollow, made of aluminum alloy and
shaped like an upside-down pyramid, with a hundred and thirty
kilograms of ballast at the bottom to counteract the weight on the
top. So you’re fine! Some water might slosh in and you might get
your feet wet, but don’t worry. I haven’t seen them sink yet.”
“Oh yeah? How long have you worked here?”
She laughs. “Only two months, I guess. I’m on break from col-
lege.”
“Where at?”
“IIT-Bombay.”
“That’s where I went.”
“You did? What did you study?”
“Nano and comp lit.” I don’t tell her I left my second semester.
“What a mix. I’m studying nano too.”
“It’s useful,” I say. “Lots of jobs.”
She knows I’m still stalling. But she’s gracious enough not to
say so. She says, “Do you want me to show you how to walk on it?”
“No, it’s all right,” I say. Now I feel ashamed. Apparently this
has been done. I need to get over it.
I take off my boots. I place one bare foot on the surface of the

30 Monica Byrne
first scale, right in the center of its solar panel, and then transfer
more and more weight to it. I’m surprised that it holds. My weight
creates a wave and the wave travels up and down the Trail. The
surface is rough like sandpaper, not smooth like what I think of as
a solar panel.
I continue forward. I let my knees be soft. I hold out my arms
like a dancing Shiva. The scales bob more vigorously and I stop
to regain my balance. I keep going. I enter a sublime headspace:
my body learns from the mistakes I don’t have words for, and my
anima makes corrections.
I take a final lurch to reach the opposite side. My feet are wet
and leave dark prints on the floor. I come face-to-face with the
young lifeguard. She’s gorgeously built, short, solid, muscular, like
a gymnast. Her smile is that of a girl well loved.
“Good job!” she says. “You’re a natural.”
“Are you?”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “When I get bored here, I just run across it.”
“Show me.”
She smiles and puts down her foam buoy. Then she jogs across,
as if it were a solid sidewalk. I’m amazed.
“How did you do that?”
“You just learn to read it,” she calls from the other side. “Your
body learns to anticipate how it’s going to move when you step on
it. It’s just a matter of practice.”
“I want to try again.”
“Do it!”
I love her enthusiasm.
Taking the first step is easier this time. My body makes ten
thousand unconscious calculations in terms of ankle, spine, wrist.
I don’t hurry.
“See? Now you’re a pro,” says the lifeguard when I’m by her
side again.

I want to go back and forth all day and get as good as she is.
“Have you ever walked on the real Trail?”
She looks over her shoulder to make sure no one is coming
down the stairs, and then she sits down at the edge of the pool and
dangles her legs in. I roll my pant legs up and sit down next to her.
The water is warm.
“No,” she says. “It’s illegal. I would if someone took me there,
though. It’d be interesting to try it out on the open sea where the
waves are a lot bigger.”
“Do you think it can be done?”
“People have tried.”
“Do you know anyone who has?”
“Not personally. You hear rumors about desperate kids and ex-
treme hikers and such. And then there are rumors about rumors,
like cults and ghosts and whole villages that live off the Trail.”
“What do you think?”
“I think there are more things in heaven and earth than can be
dreamt of in our philosophy!”
“Wouldn’t expect Shakespeare from a nano major.”
“Ohho?” she chides. “Free your mind.”
She’s right. I feel chastened. It was a cliché I said without think-
ing, only to prolong the conversation because I like her.
I try again. “So there are ghosts on the Trail.”
“Well, I’ve heard of one, Bloody Mary. Supposedly she walks
back and forth on the Trail and preys on travelers.”
“Anyone seen her?”
“ ’Course not. But people never come back from the Trail, and
so it’s easy to say, oh, Bloody Mary got them.”
“And not—”
“Not the hundred other things that could go wrong, right. I think
it would be hell. Even if you were well prepared. You can’t prepare
for everything that could happen, even if you went to the Mart.”

32 Monica Byrne
“The Mart?”
“It’s some kind of secret store in Dharavi. They cater to fish-
waalas, but I heard they also have a special stock for ‘long-term
workers.’ ”
“Like pods.”
“Yeah, camo pods. Walkers have to be careful. Security is lazy,
but I imagine they don’t want to take chances anyway.”
“I wonder what walking on the Trail does to them.”
“What do you mean?”
What do I mean? I want to tell her all about my new theory of
the sociopsychology of energy. How Mohini was of a solar nature
but I’m just realizing here in this moment that I’m of a wavelike
nature.
How I’m having a transcendent experience at this museum.
How I was at the Azad Maidan bombing yesterday.
How someone tried to assassinate me in my home in Thrissur.
How a barefoot girl has been following me and I think she’s an
agent of Semena Werk but I haven’t seen her in twelve hours and
so I think she lost me.
There’s so much I want to tell her. But I can’t get it out of my
mouth. So instead I just splash my heel in the water.
The lifeguard smiles, rescues me. “What’s your name?” she asks.
I pause, then remember to say “Durga.”
“I’m Lucia,” she says. She gazes into space. “I’m studying nano
because I want to learn how to make things like the Trail. Did you
know that metallic hydrogen is what they use as the superconduc-
tor? Amazing. Fifty years ago they couldn’t even produce a stable
sample.”
I stare at the pool surface. “I think some people are like su-
perconductors,” I say. “They have no resistance to the energy they
receive. They just convey it.”
Lucia looks at me and reaches out her hand toward mine.

At that moment, a Chinese couple comes down the stairs.

They’re wearing kurtas and jeans. They seem embarrassed to have
interrupted us. They begin apologizing in English.
“No, it’s certainly all right,” says Lucia in English. She jumps
up. “Would you like to try it?”
As they come forward, I get nervous and step away and raise my
arm in farewell to Lucia. She looks sad that I’m leaving. “Durga,”
she calls, “it was nice talking to you.”
I wag my head and begin up the stairs. Leaving so quickly feels
wrong but I didn’t even know what to say to Lucia when we were
alone, much less with other people there.
I come up to the ground floor and see Arjuna at the desk. He is
talking to the attendant.
My blood turns to adrenaline again. I turn around and go back
down the steps. Back to Lucia. Back to the Chinese couple. They’re
standing by the side of the pool, looking doubtful.
“Oh, hi again!” says Lucia, brightening when she sees me. “Did
you forget something?”
I speak in Marathi, hoping Lucia knows it, hoping the Chi-
nese tourists don’t have their glottis turned on. “May I go into the
changing room? There’s someone upstairs I don’t want to see and
I’m afraid he’s going to come down here.”
Lucia sees the look on my face and replies in Marathi, “Yes, of
course. I’ll cover for you.”
As I head toward the changing room, I hear her say to the cou-
ple in English, “She needed the bathroom.”
I close myself in. It’s clear to me now. Arjuna did recognize me
from college. He’s part of the conspiracy. He means me harm too.
The walls are painted with blueprints of the Trail. I stare at them
to calm myself. I hear Lucia encouraging the Chinese couple, but
as far as I can tell they both just step on the first scale and then
back to safety. They thank her and ascend the stairs.

34 Monica Byrne
Then a new, manly voice. It’s Arjuna. I can hear Lucia greet
him but I can’t hear what they’re saying over the hum of the pool.
He asks her a question, sounding agitated.
She answers, sounding soothing.
He mumbles.
I hear steps.
I brace myself.
I hear an outer door open and close.
Then bare feet padding on concrete over to me. The door
swings open.
“Accha, are you a runaway or what?” says Lucia, looking flus-
tered.
“Is he gone?”
“Yes, I said I saw you heading to Churchgate. Cousin?”
“No.”
“Husband?”
“No. I just shouldn’t see him right now.”
“He was hot.”
“Yes.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
She raises an eyebrow. “This sounds like a juicy story. At the
very least you owe me dinner. You can tell me then.”
“Okay.”
“Want to stay in here a little longer? It’s slow today. If anyone
asks I’ll say the changing room is out of order.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
She eyes me over, smirks, and shuts the door.

Entanglement
We never make it out to dinner. First she insists on making me chai

in her tiny Colaba flat in the old bus depot, cooled only by a ceiling
fan, and I tell her that Arjuna’s a man I met but don’t want to talk
to now, which is true, and she seems satisfied.
Then she brings out a box of hashish. I feel anxious but I tell
myself that even if Arjuna is part of the conspiracy with Semena
Werk, there’s no safer place I can be at the moment, and I can use
tonight to decide what to do next. So I let my guard down and
we smoke. Then we’re hungry, so we order tiffin, and when the
delivery boy knocks on the door, we scream, and then can’t stop
laughing when we open the door, and give him a big tip for putting
up with us. Then we eat. Then we get in bed together.
She’s not like Arjuna. She’s very present. She traces my lips and
tells me my mouth is shaped like a cowrie shell, which I’ve heard
before. And when we’ve taken off each other’s clothes and her
hand passes over the patch between my breasts, she rests her hand
back on the spot where I was bitten and asks, “What happened
here?”
“Somebody tried to hurt me.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
In the night, it rains again. I’m still too wired to sleep so I lie
awake listening. I’ve gotten maybe four hours of sleep in the last
three days. But I don’t feel tired. Meanwhile, Lucia passes in and
out of sleep, each time with fresh insights from her dreams. Her
innocence is starting to grate.
Near dawn, she whispers, “Durga . . . now we’re bound up.”
I clench up. This is it. She’s going to cling to me like Arjuna
did. “How so?”

36 Monica Byrne
“It’s like quantum entanglement. Our bodies have exchanged

matter and so now we’re interlinked.”
She sounds intimate. I deflect. “I didn’t get that far in nano.”
“You learn it second year!”
I have to lie again. She’s making me lie. “I switched to comp lit
after my first year.”
“Oh. Well, it means that if we think of our bodies as particles,
our states are the same right now, but then when we separate, we
remain entangled. Now it’s impossible to describe you without de-
scribing me, and vice versa. We tell each other’s stories by living
our own lives.”
I feel angry. As angry as I felt euphoric six hours ago. I try to
control my voice. “That could be scary. Depending.”
“True,” she says. “It means that relationships never end. Once
made, they just influence each other backwards and forwards in
time, for better or worse.” She nudges my arm open and docks her
head against my breast. “But I’d say this is for better.”
So hackneyed. I kiss her head but transfer no love. It’s clear
she’s suffered little in life and it pisses me off. I close my eyes and
try to control my breathing. In general I can tell those who haven’t
suffered trauma from those who have just by looking at them. It’s
marked on their foreheads and it shows in their eyes. The ones who
saw something unbearable and continued living anyway. I’m one
of those even though I don’t have a conscious memory of it. As a
baby I felt my mother die around me. And after a thing like that,
why live?
I open my eyes and the barefoot girl is staring down at me with
her finger in her mouth.

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THE GIRL IN THE ROAD by Monica Byrne

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THE GIRL IN THE ROAD by Monica Byrne

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Pur

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Copyright © 2014 by Monica Byrne

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of

Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of

Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Ellen Cipriano

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The Third Flight

The world begins anew, starting now.

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bed, that’s new. And already Mohini’s voice is in my head, scolding

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given the concentration of Ethiopian migrants there, do some re-

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There’s no one to take care of now, and no one to take care

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Werk, a bomb or an assassin, or for a sudden burst of police saying,

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read it while eating bhelpuri from a newspaper cone. I sat under

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“I have to go,” I say. “I can pay for these.”

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of a boyfriend, who’s cheap but not cheap enough to insult their

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Then Sandeep leaves to help someone else and Arjuna turns to

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I think: How perceptive of you.

The Trans-­Arabian Linear Generator

I wake up alone in a pool of sunlight.

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so rarely an occasion that merits my talents. But I was so happy

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The neighbor’s dog wouldn’t stop barking.

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before Arjuna gets back. Now I remember he climbed over me

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toward a hazy horizon. That’s that famous Trail, then. I stare at it

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surface is faced with solar paneling, which seems brilliant to me,

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stance known but weighs about twelve milligrams per thousand

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I descend a stairway that is slanted, crystalline. For each type

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world for me. She’s more than a programmer, she’s a storyteller, a

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have been painted with murals: a sunset on the left, a moonrise on

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Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-Publication Data

The Trans-Arabian Linear Generator