A week later, Amol Apte was barking at his junior: ‘Have you got wax in your ears, you idiot? Remember what Top said. Nothing happened.’ The sky had not dribbled in weeks, let alone poured, he reminded her. The lakes were dry. Like Senior’s green eyes, Junior thought, no tears hidden there. A petite woman with a top knot, Junior persisted: ‘But some promenade regulars told me that they had seen the most dramatic fireworks, I mean fishworks?’ Her version was that the sky had not only dribbled, it had poured long enough for the lakes to overflow. Anyway, she knew she was not an idiot. She had seen the clean-up crew cordon off the site and work on it around the clock. By the time they had finished, the pavements were practically gleaming. ‘Pavements without kachra in Mumbai, as if the Ingraz had come back with their sprinklers,’ she muttered. 

‘Tujha doke thikanyaavar aahe ki naahi?’ Senior’s question was rhetorical. Everybody knew that Junior’s head was not screwed on right. A child of the Konkan, whose ears stuck out like fins, she always smelt of fish, moist coconut and tangy tamarind.  

That night, the sleepyheads in the police control room were going about doing nothing when a call came through and their faces lit up. Meera Priolkar was on the line, with her routine end-of-day press inquiries: ‘Hello, Meera here.’ Pause. They rushed into loudspeaker mode and the tittering began. ‘Times of India VAR-oon pat-TRA-kaar baul-TAY. Sarva KSHAY-mm?’ Senior, in his high-pitched voice, barely able to control his giggling, replied: ‘Ho, ho, madam, sarva kshem, sarva kshem. All good!’ Meera’s rotund anglicised Marathi made the officers roll on the floor with laughter. Junior, the only female in this group of balding, middle-aged officers, looked away. Used to being the butt of everyone’s jokes, she did not join in. One of the officers, half-apologetically, took her aside: ‘Sorry, but what to do? This is a palace of tears, you know we don’t get too many laughs here.’

Pleasantries were exchanged, diligently by Meera, wickedly by the officers. The usual silliness, thought Junior. But her fin-ears perked up when Meera said: ‘I have an anonymous tip about the Taraporevala Aquarium incident – a photograph. The face of the man who drove into it is visible. We should…’ Senior cut her off mid-sentence: ‘Nothing happened on Independence Day.’ Meera butted in: ‘But the photograph…’ For a second, Senior stopped in his tracks. He recovered immediately and shot back: ‘Fake news, madam. All lies – Photoshop.’ The conversation wasn’t over, far from it, but how could it ever be resumed? The thought of Top made Senior break into a sweat. Nothing could have been allowed to go wrong on Independence Day. And not around the Mumbai Coastal Road, for Top’s sake! 

Junior, on the other hand, was fearless. She swam out of the room, hitting the surface of imaginary water with a clicking sound that irritated Senior no end.  

In the police canteen, the smell of fried onions and urine circulated under a blue tarp. Its steel benches had already been warmed by many bottoms. Meera’s freckled, bottled-shaped nose drew a clicking sound from Junior. What was she doing here, Meera wondered, on an oppressive afternoon unrelieved by the sea breeze, sitting with this woman who made funny sounds?

Unzipping her leather sling bag, Meera delicately placed her lunch box on the table. Without waiting for Junior to return with their cutting chai, she began to eat with her plastic knife and fork. Junior, sitting down, examined her vada paav. The green chutney oozing out of the pillow-soft bread pocket made her frown. All she wanted was the perfectly round potato vada, draped lightly in besan and placed on a bed of dry red garlic chutney. The watery green chutney had made the bread soggy. Fortunately, Junior did find some crispies inside – besan droplets rescued from the piping hot oil – and they went straight into her hungry mouth.

The pedestal fan had swung in Junior’s direction. She lifted her head towards its blades, covered with thick ropes of goop. Apart from the smell of sweat and sludge, there was some other insistent smell – pungent and tart like cashew apples – that made her throat itch. Meera was startled to find Junior’s nose in her lunch box. ‘It’s pomfret poached in cashew feni and green peppercorns. Want to taste?’ Junior pushed her vada paav towards Meera, took over the reporter’s lunch box, and made short work of the intoxicating fish. Meera dropped her fork in shock. She had not expected Junior to construe her polite remark as an invitation to polish off her lunch. 

Junior wiped her mouth on her sleeve and rubbed her hands together: ‘Photo please.’ Unsure of how to deal with the cheerful glutton sitting across from her, Meera gingerly pushed her smartphone towards Junior. All that fish in the picture made Junior whistle. Meera frowned, raising her hands like bewildered question marks. Licking the sweat off her upper lip, Junior pointed to the blue ribbon eels entangled in the man’s salt-and-pepper curls. They must have been alive when the photograph was taken, caught mid-movement thrashing about like snakes. That rust-red asteroid on his open palm – ‘That’s called a brittle star, did you know that?’ Meera looked on, astonished by Junior’s knowledge of sea life. It was time to interrupt the flow. ‘And this,’ said Meera, ‘this is a seahorse with its dinosaur-like tail hanging like a pendant around the man’s neck.’ Now, it was Junior’s turn to be surprised. ‘Meera-madam, I am granting you citizenship to my Republic of Samudristan,’ she said, ‘with immediate effect!’ Encouraged by Junior, Meera went on confidently: ‘On his arms, we can see lemon-yellow butterfly fish with pherozi blue lashes and black eyespots. And that’s a stingray on his stomach looking like Ganesha.’

‘No, like a kite,’ countered Junior.  

‘Hey, what are we doing?’ said Meera. ‘This is evidence, not an atlas of marine life!’ Junior raised her top knot and pouted like a child whose favourite toy had been snatched away. There was shattered glass and water everywhere. A diamond-shaped shard had pierced the man’s left thigh. The excavator boom, with YES emblazoned on it, had dug a deep hole in the Art Deco building, its façade decorated with dancing dolphins. The 100-foot-long glass tunnel and scores of fish tanks had exploded. The falling debris had settled into mounds of coral, rock, dust and shattered bricks. 

Although she had not yet fully recovered from her fish-induced trance, Meera had gathered some evidence. The man who had driven kamikaze-style into the aquarium was nut brown, weathered by the sun. He may have been five feet tall. Or a little less. Or a little more. It was difficult to say. She couldn’t tell, since his legs had gone under the wheels of the excavator. His curly, greying hair was shoulder-length. His eyes were a glassy grey. Meera forwarded the image to Junior’s mobile. Junior promised to show the picture around to the regulars at the promenade.  The two parted ways. Junior drew her right forearm up to her nose. While others might pinch themselves to come back to earth, Junior would sniff her own skin. If she smelt fish, the worst was over and everything was well with the world.  

Junior was astounded to see so many crows in the city. Hundreds of them, fluttering and cawing around what looked like mountains of gravel. Or were they mounds of earth dug up by the excavators? Were these crows harbingers of death or were they calling out to their ancestors to knock some sense into this city of short-term gain and long-term peril? 

The bhuttawallah, Janaki Sharan Paswan, took one look at the picture and froze. His eyes often smarted from the flying embers, but now tears rolled down his acne-scarred cheeks. Bhuu-khOO, he began to sob. Junior had not expected this reaction. She did not know what to do. She patted Janaki’s shoulder and leaned towards him, gently rubbing her fin-ear against his surprisingly small, all-too human ear. This seemed to calm him down but he drew back, not used to the touch of a woman who was neither his mother nor his wife. As he gave her a sideways glance, he wondered: ‘Is she a woman or a fish? Or both?’  

A week before the incident, Bhukho had crawled into Janaki’s gunnysack-and-tarp six-by-four-feet under the Princess Street flyover. Sloshed as always, he was mumbling under his acid breath. Seeing Janaki, he had begun clapping his hands and singing: 

Dhumaka bhai dhum 

                   Ne kere aavi lum 

                                 Ne dhumaka bhai dhum 

                                                                  Re dhumaka bhai dhum 

                                                                                                  Dhum, dhum 

Junior began to clap her hands along with the bhuttawallah. What a catchy Gujarati folk song! She figured the drums were on a roll and the banana tree was blooming. Midway into their second round of recital, they looked down at their hands, the clapping paused, they both felt a little foolish. The bhuttawallah excused himself and attended to an impatient customer.  

Junior’s method of collecting evidence was idiosyncratic, but she had learnt something useful. Bhukho’s name may have spelled the ghost of hunger, but this drunkard had been a jolly fellow. Who else remembered him? She looked for the college students she had often seen on the promenade. They were not on the tetrapods today. But the lovers were. They seemed to have had a fight. That did not stop Junior from pushing her top knot between their heads, whistling and clicking. Boyfriend glared at Junior. The sunset halo around his head made him look like a lion with his mane ablaze. Girlfriend’s brown eyes turned to honey gold when she looked at the photograph. ‘Bhukho,’ she whispered and began to cry softly. Her partner was terribly annoyed: ‘You’ve never shed a tear for me.’  

‘And you have never known hunger or fear,’ she said firmly. ‘I met Bhukho before he died. His eyes were swollen and his hair limp with sweat and dirt. His shirt was stained with blood and shit. He hadn’t had a bath in days. His demand for a just wage had brought down a rain of kicks and punches. From being the guard at Gate No. 7 of the Coastal Road Project, he became nobody and nothing. I dipped my hand into my purse but Bhukho refused. He reminded me of my father, those soft curls, and even softer heart. When he made chapatis, he would leave pieces of dough on the ground for the ants.’ 

‘How do you know this?’ asked Boyfriend. ‘We have been coming to the promenade since college and I barely remember Bhukho.’  

Girlfriend had begun to press the top of her head. Bhukho’s death brought back the sharp pain of being hit with an iron rod. The skull cracked open. The body kicked into a gutter on Independence Day. She tried desperately to wipe the blood off her fingers. But it kept coming back, like in a film running in reverse. ‘You are OCD-ing again,’ said Boyfriend, worried now. The blood was her father’s. A trade unionist in Chhattisgarh, he had been murdered by the mining mafia. When the news came, she was a fourteen-year-old rebel who despised her father for his long absences. She felt nothing when her mother told her. Turning her back on the news, she went out with her friends for ice cream. The colder the better to numb the brain, to chill the pain.  

Junior reached up to feel the tips of her fin-ears. They had gone ice-cold.

One day when she was six or seven, Junior had seen a dolphin on Dapodi beach. Silver-grey, several metres long; its stomach cut open; its fins entangled in blue tarp. That raw wound, spear-deep, stunned her into silence. Her father, a rat-poison peddler, hit her hard on the back a couple of times, hoping that speech might fall out of her mouth like a piece of fishbone trapped in her throat. But nothing came, neither bone, nor tears, nor words. Spitting and cursing, he left her on the beach to fend for herself. There she learnt to mimic the sound of the wind keening like a professional mourner, and the haunting song of the humpback whale, which soared and fell like the cry of a child abandoned in a cave.  

It was an exceedingly hot afternoon. Junior was clucking along with the long-necked herons – kuk, kuk, kuk, kuk. Kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk. Another voice joined hers. A woman with wavy, black hair and a freckled, bottle-shaped nose was smiling at her. They spent the evening playing with the foam fairies, sieving the milky lace through their sand-crusted fingers. The woman treated Junior to corn flavoured with pink salt and lemon, chaat sprinkled with pomegranate pearls and kulfi sticks shaped like houses on stilts. The houses melted very quickly between Junior’s thumb and forefinger, leaving behind a sticky mess. Having wandered at the edges of love, she had never heard the beating heart of a home.   

Junior placed her head in the woman’s lap. It felt soft, like dewdrops on a lotus pad in the early hours of the morning. ‘Meera, meet your sister,’ said the woman, caressing her belly. If there was a sister inside, Meera couldn’t feel anything except the occasional plopping of bubbles of air. That night, she drew a house for the first time on the cold sand, tracing its conical roof and tall stilts with her little fingers. She was inside the house. And outside, her sister, a toddler with a bottle-shaped nose, was knocking at the door.  

The woman never saw the drawing. She disappeared from Junior’s life, leaving her with a rich repertoire of sounds, the gift of speech and a scholarship for the beach girl under the care of the local Convent of Jesus and Mary.

Junior’s head was a swirling ocean and the fish her kin. She had to focus on the man in Meera’s photograph. Unlike the others, Junior had not met Bhukho on the promenade. Meera had wanted more details about Bhukho, to build up a portrait. Instead, she now knew more than she wanted to about the lives of the people Bhukho had touched. ‘This is a waste of time,’ the reporter muttered under her breath. Junior, whose responses rarely had any logical connection to their stimuli, mumbled: ‘Meera, meet your sister.’ She pinched Meera’s bottle-shaped nose tenderly. Utterly baffled, the reporter thought it best to ignore Junior’s quixotic behaviour. The aquarium site had been cordoned off. The college students were jumping up and down on the sea wall, as massive waves lashed it. The sea was choppy and the skyscrapers on the horizon had vanished into daubs and dashes of silver-grey. The city appeared like an illusionist’s dream – there but not there. Meera’s gaze fastened on Junior’s name tag: Meera Samudrin. Big deal, thought Meera. So they were both named after the God-crazed, love-drunk bhakti poet, the queen who became a saint. Junior, for her part, was happy to have been seen by Meera, who rarely looked beyond that long nose of hers. ‘What does your mother do?’ she asked her companion. 

‘She was a marine biologist.’ 

‘Was?’ 

‘She bled to death, while giving birth to me.’ 

Junior tried to read Meera’s face. She found nothing. No residue of grief, or anger, except for a tremor at the corner of her lips.  

‘I knew your mother.’ 

‘Sure,’ said Meera, laughing. ‘Like hell you knew her. Then I’m a seahorse and you’re a sea urchin.’ 

Junior started to whistle and make clicking sounds: ‘Seriously, I knew you before you were born. Your mother sang and danced with the dolphins. She imprinted you when you were in her womb.’ Trilling, Junior tried to communicate with her sister. ‘Please, no more of this fairytale,’ said Meera, exasperated. ‘Give me something real for heaven’s sake.’  

Ruke na joh 

                     Jhuke na joh 

We won’t pause 

                             We won’t kow-tow  

A group of protestors were marching purposefully along Marine Drive, their voices raised in song: 

Mite na joh 

                    Dabe na joh 

We won’t be wiped out 

                                          We won’t be crushed 

And a resounding choric call: 

Hum woh Inquilab hain 

                                            We are that Revolution! 

‘Real enough?’ Junior prodded Meera, who was surprised to see such a large procession flowing across Marine Drive. ‘Isn’t there a designated space for protestors at Azad Maidan?’ she asked. Lawyers wearing their stiff bands over their sari blouses, urban planners and environmentalists in pinstripes, jeans and khadi kurtas. And the fisherfolk, looking a bit at sea, wondering how on earth their right to fish in local waters had so quickly become a distant memory. Junior spotted Senior trying to convince Insaf D’Monte and Insaf Khan to shift their protest to the Freedom Maidan. ‘Madam-sirs, we have made all the provisions to facilitate your protest at the maidan. We have also arranged for Bisleri water. Please go there.’ The lovers had joined the march and so did Junior, now shouting slogans, now pretending to do her duty by keeping the protestors in line. 

Senior’s eye fell on her. He pushed his way through the crowd towards Junior. ‘Tchyayla, vaed laglay ki kai hya muli la? Back to the cordon, you idiot, fall in line! Fall in line!’ Dodging his baton, Junior ducked deeper into the procession.    

A resolute ‘Hum woh Inquilab hain’ was interrupted by a shrill, ‘Stalinists, go take a flying fuck.’ The college students, back on earth after their high, were at their woke best. Girlfriend shushed them with ‘All Leftists are not Stalinists.’  

‘Whatevs, but most Leftists still have that Stalinist tude.’       

‘#gulags #famines #russia #ukraine – When will you acknowledge the deaths of millions of people by the Commies?’ they taunted Girlfriend.   

‘When will you acknowledge the plight of the poor?’ Girlfriend screamed. ‘Ignore them,’ said Boyfriend, stroking her hair.    

More people had joined the protest. The desire for Revolution was growing louder. Girlfriend’s eyes were changing colour again to honey gold. She was whispering to no-one in particular. ‘Bhukho did all the housework from the age of five. He went to the market every day to buy fish. On one condition – that his mother gave him a little something to buy jaggery. He would pop pieces of pure amber into his mouth all the way home. By the time he was seven, his mother was too sick to go to work. His father sold him for a bag of rice.’ Junior gripped Girlfriend’s hand tightly, tight enough to crush her bones.  

Hum woh Inquilab hain 

                                            Zulm ka jawab hain 

We are that Revolution 

                                          The answer to oppression 

Har gharib har shahid 

                                         Ka hum hi toh khwab hain 

Every proletarian, every martyr 

                                                         We are their dream, we are their dream! 

The college students, now properly narcotised again, began to jeer: 

‘#khwab #dream – A revolution by the poor is just a daydream!’ 

Insaf D’Monte shouted above the raucous students: ‘Who is the eight-lane highway for? For the few who have cars? We need better public transport!’ Insaf Khan joined Insaf D’Monte: ‘We must save our mangroves. The mangroves are our fortress against the sea! Forget the claims about playgrounds and jogger’s tracks, the land reclaimed from the sea will be usurped by the land sharks!’  

‘Rich or poor, we will all find ourselves on the ocean floor in a few years from now,’ said Boyfriend cheerfully.  

The students picked up the tune: ‘#drowning – Yo! Bombay will drown! Peeps rejoice ☺️’  

Junior began to sway to the ebb and flow of slogans and hashtags. She did not see Senior snaking his way through the crowd, pushing a student here, shoving a lawyer there. She did not feel his breath on the nape of her neck. He grabbed her by the collar and dragged her into a police van. Slamming her against the seats, grown hard over years of transporting constables and prisoners, he began to punch her in the stomach. ‘Here’s to Inquilaab, you stinking fish.’ 

Breathing heavily, Junior mumbled: ‘And you, you green-eyed brahmin!’ Ripping Senior’s sleeve, she sprayed his face with fish-spittle: ‘You murdered Gandhi!’  

Senior seized Junior’s head. It was small, soft, palpitating wildly in his large hands. He traced its tender bumps and craters. She was transfixed by his eyes: the black pupils surrounded by sunflower bursts against sea-green irises. His hands pulled away from her head, then came together again. Warm blood began to pour from her ruptured eardrums.

The sea was unmoving. A few flashes of purple streaked against the night sky. Junior sat on the sea wall with her back to the world. Her uniform was stained with blood and shit. She was squeaking, trilling, moaning, grunting, clicking and whistling, one sound following another in a series of sonic shocks that she could not hear, would never again hear.  

On the road, opposite the promenade, a billboard hanging high in the sky advertised Apple’s latest AirPods. A cool liquid pink figure splayed in silhouette promised, to anyone who stopped to look up, the immersive magic of surround sound.