Chapter 4 Rupi
Four
Rupi
The bus jerks to a stop with a giant mechanical sigh of relief, and I jolt awake. The first thing that strikes me is the missing weight of my backpack on my chest. I sit up and search the seat next to me, then bend over and look under my seat.
No!
The world stops. Everything stops.
My heart hammers in my ears. This can’t be happening.
The bus is completely, eerily empty. Not another soul on board, except for the driver.
I jump up and grab the overhead luggage rack with both hands and pull myself up, getting a foothold on the seat.
My eyes search up and down the empty racks.
Rising panic makes it impossible to process what I’m seeing.
Emptiness. Nothing but emptiness on either side.
Shit shit shit.
Over the past year, I’ve slept on a lot of public transport.
After I left LA, I spent six months going from place to place on trains and buses before I found my way to Chicago.
I also grew up in Mumbai. Clutching my belongings for dear life is coded into my DNA.
My hyperawareness of my surroundings has always been at peak paranoia levels.
I’ve always slept with my arms wrapped around my backpack, the straps clinging to my shoulders like an insecure baby. How did I let this happen?
I drop to my hands and knees and start crawling around the bus. There’s nothing under the seats, except bottles and cans and paper cups lying on their sides. Every last bit of my already paltry worldly possessions is gone. Gone.
Tina’s documents, my only leverage, gone.
“Hey lady. This is the last stop,” the driver yells back at me. “Time to get off.”
I ignore him and check every seat. More nothing. Without those documents, I have nothing.
I run to the front of the bus. “Someone took my backpack.” I sound like I’m in the throes of hysteria.
The man rubs his shoulder and looks bored. “Did you check around your seat?”
The urge to run at him and scratch out his eyes grips me, and I wrap my arms around myself. “It’s not on the bus. Please. Please. Did you see anyone walk out with a black backpack?”
“Sure,” he says. “Everyone. I’m sorry. Listen, I need to empty out the bus.” He doesn’t sound even a little sorry.
All I have left is the change I shoved into my jeans after buying that last bus ticket.
“You have to get off the bus,” the driver says again.
My legs shake as I make myself do as he says.
It took me twenty hours to make my way from Chicago to Nashville.
Then finding a bus from Nashville to Hochkinsville took almost as much time because I had to wait at the Nashville bus station for a good ten hours.
It hadn’t helped that I started to feel queasy, achy, and feverish on the bus out of Chicago.
Through it all, I clung to my backpack like my life depended on it.
Because it did. When I got on the bus, the exhaustion and the achiness was so bad, my body trembled with it.
I had to fight to keep my eyes open. I laid the backpack on the seat next to me for just one second.
One second while I settled into my seat.
The next thing I knew, I was waking up with the bag gone.
The driver says something. He’s trying to be sympathetic, but what does his sympathy matter now?
It’s late in the evening, but there’s still some light left in the sky.
My eyes search for a clock, but the terminal building is barely more than a shack.
It’s like I took a bus out of Nashville and landed in a dystopian, barely inhabited version of America.
I’m fully in character: penniless, my body starving and feverish, and I smell like I’ve survived an apocalyptic war, in the sewers.
I shake out my empty hands. Everything’s gone. All because I was stupid enough to let myself feel cornered by Tina. Why did I even come here? What is the guarantee I’ll find Simi? How am I going to find her?
My lost backpack drags at my shoulders like a ghost. I make my way to the decrepit building.
Sweat pours down my back. It’s like being back in Mumbai at the height of the postmonsoon heat.
October heat is something every Mumbaikar is intimately familiar with.
After months of being pummeled by the pouring rain, the earth releases all the pent-up fire in its belly, wrapping the city in a vise grip of steam. It’s inside me now, burning me down.
Simi hated the heat. How has she lived here for four years?
Images of Simi as a baby, a toddler, a teenager tumble through me, arms and legs spread like a starfish on the mattress we shared, sheets thrown off, hair wet with sweat.
I can smell the top of her head. My baby.
How has she survived without me for four years?
My heart squeezes with how much I miss her. Then anger drowns me.
Obviously, she’s survived much better than I have.
She has an education, a job, an apartment.
It’s been over a year since I’ve stood under a real shower or slept in a real bed.
In the studio, I slept on the waiting-area couch and washed in the sink.
At least with Ron, the bathrooms and beds were comfortable.
Whether it was the hotel rooms he took me to or the apartment he set me up in, everything was comfortable.
The man was obsessed with luxury. Clothes and cars and furniture and watches.
I’m a collector. I love beautiful things, he loved to say.
But you might be the most beautiful of all the things I’ve ever owned.
Ron thinking he owned me at least gave me a full belly and a place to sleep. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember why I wanted to get out of there so desperately. When your basic human needs are met, freedom feels deceptively important.
What a laugh Ron would have gotten out of hearing me say that.
I still can’t believe the asshole was inconsiderate enough to get hit by a drunk driver.
Such an irony, given how many times I had to keep him from getting in the driver’s seat when he’d had one drink too many.
That day he was dead sober. Quite literally.
I hear the sound of laughter—maniacal, barely human.
I look around, but there’s no one else at the abandoned terminal.
Just me. The laughter is mine. My body is shaking with it.
It’s the saddest sound I’ve ever heard. I drop into the solitary bench, lean my head back, and let myself laugh, unable to stop.
It goes on and on, until a hand lands on my shoulder. I open my eyes. My face is wet from my laughter, my body sticky with sweat under the sweatshirt. I should take it off before it cooks my flesh.
“Here, you must be hungry.” It’s a woman in a gray uniform. Not a cop but some sort of ticket agent, probably. She has frizzy gray hair and kind eyes, and it gives her the look of a holy woman like the ones who preach in saffron robes outside temples in India.
The hunger must be making me delirious, because the woman’s face changes to the face of one of our neighbors in Mumbai. The one who always glowered at our mother but tried to slip Simi and me bars of Amul chocolate.
I grab the Styrofoam container the woman holds out.
“There’s half a burrito in there. Who can eat a whole giant one of those? I haven’t touched it. You can have it,” she says.
The woman is giving me alms. And I’m taking them. She thinks I’m a beggar. She hands me the box and looks away, as though wretchedness is contagious and spreads through eye contact.
I open the box. The burrito inside, even though it’s supposedly only half, is gargantuan. Drool floods my mouth. I take a bite even before I’ve said thank you.
“Fbonk bou,” I say around the explosion of flavors in my mouth.
“You’re welcome, honey,” she says before walking away.
I should stop her, but I can’t stop eating.
Hunger is a black hole inside me, sucking everything in.
I can’t remember the last time I ate. I didn’t want to spend my last dollars on something as unimportant as food—not when I needed the money to get to my sister.
Simi is capable of feeding me for the rest of my life, even though the only thing she offered me the last time we talked was money to stay away.
Growing up, Simi was everything to me. There isn’t a single thing, other than her, that I can remember with any sort of joy. She’s the only good thing in all my memories. My one success. And I lost her. I worked hard to lose her.
I pushed her to study, pushed her into the nursing program when I found out how short on nurses the world was. It was the only way I could think of to get her out. I was desperate for her to get away. To be free. I knew I couldn’t have freedom myself until she was off my hands. Now here I am.
“You still here, hon?” The burrito woman is back.
The burrito is gone, and I feel ragingly queasy. I always do when I haven’t eaten for a while and then shock my system with a cannonball of calories. My body feels so hot, I might be combusting.
“It’s not safe to hang around here.” The sun has disappeared from the sky. A single lamppost half-heartedly sprinkles us with light. “There’s a shelter in town. I could drop you off.”
“Is there a hospital in town?” I ask, reaching for my last ray of hope.
“Are you not feeling well?” The concern on her face should restore at least a tiny piece of my faith in humanity, but instead it makes me angry. Why is this woman in a position where she gets to pity me?
“My sister works at the hospital.” I hate how proud I sound.
“Sure,” the woman says, “but I have some errands to run in Paducah first, and that’s one town over. So, if you’re okay with that, I’ll take you after.”