Pali Navya stands before a sculpture, arms crossed, legs like two pillars, a knot of thick, black hair coiling like a snake at the nape of her neck. Her hemp skirt is the color of river silt.
“So beautiful!” she says, voice high and breathless. The object of admiration is a metal octopus, about twenty feet and grotesque, its tentacles tangling into themselves. Trash sprawls for miles—an iron clamp opening its jaws, a battered car on its side, wheels spinning, an assortment of devices and pendants. This is the largest junkyard in Raia and its horizons are impossible to map.
Pali unravels her hair. “I wanted to show you something. Come!”
Pali prefers things simple except when she doesn’t. She is quick to excite and to disappoint, quick to have love affairs too, though she never got over that boy in college who left her, got on a ship one day destined for some foreign country. She didn’t talk about it much but she started having dreams, sleepwalking. One night, she found herself at the edge of the ocean, thirty miles from the college hostel with no memory of how she got there. She told me her arms ached. She started sleeping with the room locked, the key nested inside a set of bags. The dreams, the aching arms, passed in time. Or so she said.
Now she strolls through the mess of disheveled refrigerators, metal parts of indeterminate objects, dismantled cabinets, abandoned trunks, and piles of utensils as if it’s a garden.
All I get is the sound of wind kicking metal, a tin can rolling. My patience is waning. The day has been equal parts strenuous and boring. The usual spasms are in their usual places, curling up and down my body.
Pali drops to her knees. When she raises her hand, it is wet. Sopping her fingers is a liquid, oily and dark. “It smells weird. Animal somehow. Gamey and pungent.”
I step around her for a closer look at the puddle of slime-like substance. In some places, it has crusted to form a rock. Taking a glass vial from her voluminous pocket, Pali scoops some of the vile thing into it. I am used to her enthusiasms —Pali works ate a biogenetic lab and often collects substances for testing—but a strange feeling comes over me now and I am trembling. Clenching my fists, I wrap my arms around my body, wondering why my energy reserves are so low.
A little later, brass doors swing open as we pass the bouncer juggling two yellow balls in his enormous hands and enter Agniva, a bar in Kala Bazaar, which caters to an astonishing mix of people. Customers sit at mosaic tables spangled by strobe lights. Clocks everywhere, digital and analog pieces, display identical numbers. The tree rising through the center of the room is ancient, knotted and unwieldy, a gnarled monster. In its cracks and crevices, and on its many branches, creatures crawl and roost. A man’s laugh booms. I feel lighter.
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At the circular bar, fairy lights shimmer on glass dispensers of tea and faha concoctions. Amber and gold. The bartender, a woman with a huge updo and huger earrings, chats with two men leaning forward on their stools. Pali beams at the woman. No words are exchanged but she is a regular here and the woman knows her order.
“Six months, they’ve given me. Time’s running out. Do you know what that feels like? As if some giant sits inside my chest and squeezes my insides every few minutes,” Pali says when we’re sitting. “Three nights a week, my mother comes home and falls into bed with a thump. Her body sounds lumpen even though she’s so slender. I hate that sound. As if she’s fattened on someone’s blood.”
I have no answer for the predicament that’s haunted Pali her whole life. She belongs to a clan of paid mercenaries and will have to join them when she turns 25. “It’s legal, what they are doing,” I say. “They have permits.”
“They’re assassins! Murderers.” Pali sticks a hand in her pocket, fidgets with the weapon she keeps on her, tiny and lethal. “You should’ve seen them when I took the job at the lab. All nudges and winks. Only a matter of time, the old biddies were thinking, before she gets tired of animal carcass and accepts her destiny. If I say no, they will throw me out on my ass and—you don’t get what it’s like to be without family—you become human junk.”
“You could live with me—,”
“One step from being homeless. One accident, injury, mental illness away.”
“That’s not going to happen to you.”
Pali’s face closes. “Besides the clan would never stand for it. I’ve seen what they can do.”
On the blue craquelure wall, a television plays on loop, showing the faces of Concilium members, something about taxes, budgets. A wild-haired painter at a table gives Pali an interested look. She touches her lips and aims a half-smile at him, admires his canvas, full of squiggles, multicolored, almost psychedelic. The lines move and spin, the effect dizzying. After a few minutes, she gets up and gestures to him. The two disappear in the direction of the bathrooms.
Once I asked Pali why her family was so strict about the family profession. “It’s all we’ve ever done in Raia,” she told me. “It was the condition under which they let us in. The clan is grateful and believes it is the ticket to the city. If we don’t kill for the rich and powerful, who are we? A bunch of fisherwomen who belong in the backwaters.”
Pali was born on the banks of the mangrove forests which sprawl for miles green and dense in north-east Trièste. Palm, coconut and banana trees grew so thick that the settlement of thirty families was concealed from the rest of the world. A quiet and predictable life. Mornings, they caught crabs. In the afternoons, her father drank at the communal hut with the other men. Her mother made vague threats to leave but Pali never believed the threats: divorce was unheard of in those parts. The men woke from their stupor in the evenings and went to the long tables outside where the women had laid out food. Crab and shrimp curry, fried plantain, coconut water. There was more drinking through dinner until the men fell asleep again and the women cleared, washed, and talked until late in the night.
Pali learned the traditional occupation of crab-catching early, was an expert by age eight at lowering the hook. Her father, lean and muscular with hard eyes in a weather-beaten face, tried to stamp out this hint of rebellion. He made her work long after the sun had risen in the sky, when crabs were near impossible to find. Don’t get ideas above your station, he would say. The likes of us are not meant for the big city.
Brushing Pali’s hair every night, her mother whispered: don’t listen to him. One day, this will make your fortune, you’ll see, this and your beauty. Her hands were brisk, Pali had told me. Brisk and rough.