Mouth, Fist

He never imagined himself holding a placard, waving a fist. But this, this he could do. People needed to be fed.

It wasn’t that Krushna disagreed with the protestors. He was a common man, as they were. He had lost a job enough times that the only security seemed to come from employing himself. In the mornings he watched the sun rise from behind a sky pulsing with black smoke, a sun too choked to project light. At night he coughed gritty phlegm into his pillow and fell asleep puzzling at the absurdity of the uninhibited drive to grow a country whose people couldn’t breathe. He, too, felt shocked when he saw the brittle boys lining the streets with palms outstretched, the wandering girls with hair dust-red from malnutrition. Like the protestors, he was often a little hungry, a little angry, equal parts frustrated and incredulous at the systems that churned this nation on. He, too, felt the government’s eye on him, staring unrelenting through the night.

His trouble wasn’t their cause. It was their methods he took issue with. They were loud, deafening with their shrieks of “Inqualaab zindabad!” and “Azadi!” They were dirty, huddled together to find respite from the chilling winter, a breeding stadium for colds and fevers and other more sinister things. And they never left: There they were on his walk to work each morning, as he crawled back home, when he slipped out the back door for a smoke break, chanting, stomping, arms linked together, waving placards and cell phones and candles, sometimes laughing, sometimes wailing, eyes shining, teeth bared.

There was also the fact of his restaurant. He was the owner, his brother Purush did the cooking, and his niece Vineeta waited and served and swept. She was rail-thin beneath her turquoise salwar, but she worked fast and drew in customers with the dark flare of her eyes. Krushna couldn’t remember the last time the restaurant wasn’t piled with customers, rushing in for a tiffin on their lunch break or toting paper packages of roti and batata home. On slow days, he was known for standing outside the front door in a white shirt and apron, raising his arms, and singing to passersby: “Garam garam roti, garam garam roti, no-thing-fresher-than my garam garam roti.”

Purush told him he was making a fool of himself, but he didn’t mind. It worked. Purush was always the boring one anyway, ever a stickler for rules. And even when it didn’t work, Krushna would notice children and masis stifling laughter behind cupped palms as they scuttled by, and, in a way, that felt like success too.

That stopped a month ago. Now, he could no longer rely on foot traffic in the area to draw customers in. No one but protestors dared come to this area anymore, deterred by the police lathis and their black shields and the droning of their speakers. His singing was drowned in the great churn of the chanters, his voice just another in a restless, raging sea. His profits were dropping as the potatoes piled up, day after day, soft and unused.

People needed to be fed. Their fires, fueled. Their work, sustained.

He stood behind the smudged glass of his restaurant window, eyeing the masses with a frown creasing his lips. A young man with delicate cheekbones and a scarf wound around his chin stood and shook out his feet, as if he had been sitting on them for hours. Likely he had been. The protestors had occupied this main square for a number of weeks; word was that they would stay until the government took notice, until they were forced to make a change, to scale back the monster and look at its people. Krushna wondered how many of them would get sick, trampled, or waste away before that day came. They were brave, he thought suddenly. He ran a finger across his stubbled upper lip, felt the damp sweat of the afternoon collecting in the dip of his chin. But what of the rest of them, the ones who couldn’t be out there? What of the ones who had to stay in and work, whose lives were so precarious they could scarcely take a day away, who couldn’t risk exposure to the authorities, the ever-watchful eye?

He snorted and tore his eyes from the street, where a ragged pigeon was stabbing at an oily paper bag. Beyond, the swath of protestors swelled and writhed, anchored to their turf. Behind the till, Vineeta tapped her fingertips against a greasy menu, her eyes fogged. He shook his head.

They were all trapped.

*

Vineeta didn’t tell her uncle or her father that she wouldn’t be coming in to work the next day. In truth, she hadn’t known. They relied on her at the restaurant, and she had played the part, present each morning with clean nails and enough of a smile. There was duty there, stability in the routine of it, and the certainty that her work was needed. And yet it became too much, watching the scene unfold from the cramped insides of the restaurant, the smells of cooking oil and mustard seed and curdled milk smothering. Join when u can dd, her WhatsApp threads read, followed by strings of video footage from the middle of the action, hastily typed notes reminding each other to stay safe and check in every few hours.

That morning she entered the main square, the chants of the protestors somewhat subdued in the earliest hours. She swept her eyes over the crowd. The soft light filtered through the smog and draped their tired faces like a shroud. Instead of turning left to navigate the borders of the mass until she reached the door of the restaurant, she turned right. Directly into the throng of people. Her heart thrummed and she pulled her chunni over her shoulders, the press of bodies hot and beating against her skin.

A hand closed over her arm. Her breath caught and darkness pulled at the edges of her eyes. She swung around to find Seema grinning at her, and Seema’s brother Ditya breaking up a packet of biscuits and bringing small fragments to his lips.

“You made it,” Seema breathed, her words condensing between them.

“Need energy?” Ditya said, shaking the packet at her. Vineeta waved her hands, thinking of the restaurant, a flicker of guilt. No—she was here now. She was here.

“How long you been here?” she asked.

Seema chewed her cheek. There were purplish smudges beneath her lashes and the borders of her lips were cracked raw. But her eyes shone like two moons and her voice was full and clear.

“Days. Some of us leave every night and come back the next; others stay on. We try to take it in shifts so there’s always a mass. But those women—” she cocked her head toward the innermost part of the square, where Vineeta could hear song rising up from the ground, feral and exquisite and tender, like a newborn’s cry, like a sickly moan, otherworldly, painful to listen to, impossible to turn away from, “—they’ve been here for thirty days straight. And going.”

“And going,” Ditya echoed, bundling the plastic packet around the remaining biscuits and stowing it in his pocket.

Vineeta linked her left arm with Seema’s. She caught the women’s song snaking through the wind again and something swelled in her chest. She raised her right arm, her hand a fist. And going. She knew then that she would stay.

Together they formed an organism, alive. Vineeta only realized this later, when she caught sight of the restaurant and understood that their position had shifted without her even knowing, absorbing countless more bodies, growing to accommodate all who could join. It was evening now, a bone-bright moon hanging swollen in the sooty clouds. The restaurant door was shut, a sign pasted hastily in the steamy window reading, CLOSED.

Vineeta paused. She had never seen that sign before. Her uncle was known for boasting that the restaurant had been open permanently for ten years. She wondered for a moment if everything was okay, but the thought was cut short by the blaring of a horn, followed by a sound like metal sticks clanging against a fence. Around her, bodies bristled, arms cinched together tight, squeezing out any space that could be used to wrench them apart. Vineeta held her breath as a cry rose up nearby, and then the distinct sound of lathi meeting bone, of teeth hitting concrete.

*

It began a few weeks ago, when Purush noticed the tarkari piling up behind the scrubbed pots, the potatoes sprouting tiny green eyes and the onions drawing flies with their sweet, rancid thrush. That morning he had walked by a group of swaddled protestors crouched by the roadside, their voices bellowing and teeth too prominent in their gaunt faces. One of the thinner men pushed his head between his knees and rocked, hands clasped over his neck, fingers lacing together like ten pale stems. Purush turned away, then forced himself to look back.

Neither Krushna nor Vineeta knew. They had both been too busy, Krushna trying to lure customers despite the commotion outside, Vineeta gazing vacantly out the window—that is, until she stopped coming to work at all. Purush had always existed in the background, head low to the cutting board, his focus broken only by the occasional demand from beyond the kitchen. Freed of all attention now, he peeled garlic and grated ginger, carved the eyes from softening potatoes and scraped seeds from okra pods. The pots simmered and rattled with the sounds outside: the steady beat of feet marching, the shallow pant of street dogs riled by the crowds, the guttural, unearthly cry that had sunk into his skin and remained for more than a month. Once, the clink and burst of a gas canister, the eruption of shrieks that followed.

Together they formed an organism, alive.

When the pressure cooker whistled, he ladled the rice and vegetables into old jars, crusted tin cans, the lids off pickle containers, as many vessels as he could find, piled them into a milk crate, and exited from the back of the restaurant. He tried to find the group from that morning, the skeleton-man who could no longer stand, but they were gone, swallowed by the day. Instead, he offered a bowl to a couple with a baby pressed between them, their faces flushed and voices hoarse. The couple accepted without hesitation, dipping their fingers into the bowl and bringing rice to the baby’s lips. Purush disappeared before he could hear their thanks, the sight of his food in their fingers enough.

He marveled at how easy it was to form a new habit. For years he had started his mornings simmering chai and dicing onions for the day’s meals. Now he rolled finger-thick rotis into which he spread achaar and potato, twirling them up into little cylinders that could be carried easily in one hand while hoisting a placard in the other. He never imagined himself holding a placard, waving a fist. But this, this he could do. People needed to be fed. Their fires, fueled. Their work, sustained.

Later, when Vineeta would ask him through the bars of his cell what had happened, he wouldn’t know what to say. He wouldn’t tell her about the officers’ gloved hands, the hard plastic of their chests as they dragged him to the station, accusing him of bolstering public disobedience. The feeling in his ribs something between a sob and laughter, cruel and ridiculous, and the steady realization that he was both valuable and unnecessary. The sharp sting of his cheeks against the car window and the jolting understanding that they were taking him because he was only one, because they couldn’t take the thousands in the streets. The fact that this was a kind of success.

Vineeta could tell that her father was recounting only part of the truth. She had the sense—seeing him sallow-cheeked and small, a new scar snaking gray and raised across his temple, and yet his fingers folded calmly in his lap, his eyes clearer than the sky had been for years, as if in them she was witnessing a past long gone, or a rising future, a better, healed one—that he had something to protect. And perhaps it was her, wrists trembling against the metal bars, eyes threatening to spill. What he told her was this: of the vegetables piling up. The sense of power in his hands, the ability to provide something needed. The urgency each time his crate was emptied, the speed at which he conjured more. The magic he had never known was in him, a back-room cook, surging forth like a river, carrying, nourishing.

Vineeta, in turn, would not tell her father what she had seen when she returned at last to the restaurant to find him gone: the place empty as the day it opened. Her uncle’s face, annoyance turning to knowledge turning to fear, the anger bearing down hot and relentless. The sound that rose up from him—a moan, no, a howl, fevered, broken. His teeth to the sky, his mouth a black hole. How she had seen it then, the dawning of truth, the moment it broke across his face. How on the step outside the restaurant, before the swell of restless people, she had slipped her arm into his own, and with his other hand he had shakingly, knowingly, raised a fist.