Dead Water by Simon Ings Page B

and flapping skin. This is the place where people breathe more glass than air. ‘You imagine this is a flourish, heh? Go there! Feel your lungs bleed!’
    Firozabad: city of asthma. City of tuberculosis. City of burns and scars. Virtually every glass ornament, bangle, kangan and kara is pulled from Firozabad’s furnaces on asbestos trays. Boys carry skewers tipped with molten glass across the factory floor. The heat of the skewers calluses their palms, turning them green. The boys gather bangles from baking trays and stack them on trolleys, and men pull the trolleys out of the factory gates and down the hill, along roads crusted with broken glass, to the warrens of Devnagar.
    Devnagar. Washing on a thousand lines: cheap saris from China, white shirts and baggy grey salwars. Firewood. Dogs on chains. Children playing cricket with bats and stumps torn from packing crates. Sparks and sudden outages. Bags of cement, stacks of bricks. Cementation rods spilled everywhere. It is never quiet. Spinning wheels and screaming babies. Arguments over water, about who is tapping whose electricity. Insults hurled from house to house. Generators that will not start. Cars that will, but only on a hill. Squeal of pulleys. Snap of clothes pegs. Scrape of metal wool against the bottoms of ten thousand pans. Water poured from bowl to bowl, water poured into the gutter, water poured from a high window. Snap of washing in the wind. Slam of ten thousand doors.
    In Devnagar, girls sit cross-legged before single flames, soldering bangles. Specks of flying glass make tiny scars that turn their eye-whites bright yellow. The City of Glass is a city of child labour, and if indeed the times are changing – if indeed there is such a thing as progress, as the government claims – it is expressed here in time-honoured fashion: the authorities send junior officers, probationers, do-gooders, and, at a pinch, women like Roopa Vish, to check that everyone’s papers are in order.
    Knock, knock.
    Who’s there?
    Police.
    Scrabble, scrabble.
    Come in, do! Yes, madam, these are all my children. Twelve of them, madam? If you say so, madam. I must confess I had lost count. Why so many? Well, madam, I am also bringing up my sister’s children. Because she is dead, madam. Yes, madam, I am pleased to say I have that certificate kept safe about my person. Here it is. Read it. Feel it. Judge it. Admire it. Yes, my children go to school, madam, and here are their papers. Read them. Feel how the boss of gelatinous ink on each letterhead forms a poignant contrast to the cheapness of the type beneath. No, madam, of course not. I know the law! Not one of these darlings is younger than twelve, I would not dream of such a thing. Besides, read what is printed there. Feel and judge. But I understand your mistake, madam, for indeed the little darlings are small, they are scrawny, they do not thrive. And you can see why, madam. After all, I have so many. Allow me to present you with this token of my esteem, madam. Thank you, madam, until next year, then, goodbye.
    Roopa pockets every bribe. Not so naive, she knows better than to raise her head above the parapet. She’s new here. She must work to fit in. She knows full well that, the moment her back is turned, the women in that house will turn their home back into a factory for the finishing, soldering and decoration of bangles. With flicks of their lathis, the businesswomen of Devnagar will go on imparting life’s dirty lesson to children who will never see the inside of a school.
    For Roopa and Hardik, since they moved to Firozabad, ‘home’ is a box in a half-finished housing estate on Swami Dayanand Road, opposite Gandhi Park. They arrived to exposed sewage lines, live electrical cables and mud. Hardik has work that occupies his days and most evenings as well. Roopa suspects he has male lovers, but she no longer beats herself up over it. She has her mission. She is an agent working semi-legally on an investigation of