Ajay doesn’t get a say. The next morning before light, he is loaded into the back of a Tempo carrying eight boys he’s never met. It’s an old vehicle with a battered cabin and a greasy cage fitted behind that has a roof open to the stars so its human cargo can see but dare not risk escape. Ajay has nothing to show for himself save his old clothes and a soiled blanket. His mother and sister stand at a distance, then turn and walk away. The engine idles on the dirt track beside the gully. Then the contractor climbs in and the assistant climbs in and they drive from the crawling light along a potholed track toward a black horizon pierced by stars. Ajay sits catatonic among the sullen and shivering boys. A patchwork of blankets barely keeps them warm. They huddle together on the cab side of the cage, facing east, watching their homes recede, waiting for dawn.
They stop at a busy dhaba just before sunrise to piss. A mindless tube light gathers yearning moths. Steam escapes resting truckers’ mouths. In minutes the sky has turned pale and the landscape grows distinct. Vehicles trundle down the highway. Wheat fields stretch in the mist on either side. The contractor’s assistant, a wiry, dark, pockmarked man with a twisted mustache and a long face and narrow eyes, opens the back of the cage. He warns them not to run as he leads them to the trench to piss, and to make certain of this, he stands behind them toying with his knife. The fog sweeps in more heavily, the sun briefly appears as a pale silvery disk, then vanishes. Locked back inside the truck, the boys are given roti and chai as the thekedar and his assistant sit at one of the plastic tables in front and order aloo paratha.
This is the moment.
One of the caged boys, pigeon chested with curled hair, once passive, leaps up and scales the cage, throws himself down. He’s running along the earth before anyone can react, down and running toward the backside of the dhaba, hands reaching out instinctively to grab him, but the boy slips through and leaps over piles of garbage, then over the stinking ditch into the shrouded field. The thekedar’s assistant is quick on his feet, his plastic chair falling as he gives chase—running alongside the toilets, jumping over the ditch himself, pulling his knife. And then both boy and man are gone. The truckers, the dhaba workers, the boys, all watch expectantly in the direction of the escape, peering into the gray expanse, cocking their eyes to hear. Only the thekedar, a man of great experience, sits calmly sipping his chai.
Five minutes pass with no sign.
Normal life resumes.
Then there’s a paralyzing scream, an outrageous howl somewhere in the fog. All the stray dogs begin to bark.
When the assistant comes back panting, alone, his white undershirt is flecked with blood. He spits on the ground and sits without a word.
No one dares meet his eye.
He finishes his chai, eats his paratha.
The moment is seared into Ajay’s brain.
The mist in the fields rises and fades.
They drive all day and the sun grows sharp, burns captive the whole world through its towns with dusty junctions of trucks and vegetable stalls. Some of the boys begin to stir as if waking from drugged sleep, whispering among themselves, trying to shield themselves from the glare of the sun and the dust and wind. Ajay squints and talks with no one; he tries to remember his father’s face, his sister’s face, his mother’s face. He tries to remember the road home. In the afternoon he wakes without realizing he’d fallen asleep and sees a city with wide boulevards and grand buildings and gardens of bright blooming flowers, a world he thinks is a dream.
When he wakes once more, it’s nearly sunset and they are on a narrow road rising into a mountain range, with a tumbling bank of scree at the right and rolling hills behind.
He looks at the eyes of the other boys and finally speaks.
“Where are we?” he says.
“Punjab.”
“Where are we going?”
One nods above. “Up there.”
“Why?”
The boy looks away.
“To work,” another says.
* * *
—
They breach the mountains late that night, rising into the foothills, crawling the switchbacks there, the Tempo ascending no faster than a mule, its engine straining against the gorge torrent and the pitch dark. As they plateau, a humming sheet of river stalks their side. The moon shows again, waxing to full, the tall sky incandescent. But beneath the gliding fleet of cloud, there’s blackness, grotesque shapes, dead drops, a world of shadow, the lull of the engine. The temperature drops and the boys draw close for warmth, rattling bones in cages, bracing themselves. Then the lava hours of nightmare begin, the ceaseless rise and rise, the sudden fall, hour upon hour wrapping around valleys and hairpins, with air so cold it scars, Ajay holding on for the next bend, for the plateau, for the sun to rise and spread itself on the unseen river, to be returned home, for his mother to wake him up from sleep, to drag dead dogs from school.
Then tendrils sprout and the night is done, the yolk of a sun cracks over the peaks and the blue death that filled the final hours is cast away. Pure light and the victory of dawn. Ajay examines the faces of the blinking boys, stirring dazed within their blankets. Faces older: fourteen or fifteen, a face that is younger, maybe seven. Checking to see if they have changed. They have not. But they have passed through a portal.
There’s no hope of home now.
* * *
—
The truck stops for breakfast at a chai shop cut like a grotto into a sheer rock face high up on a mountain beside a shrine to the local deity, with barely enough room on the road for two vehicles to pass. Across the way, a soft river flows deep inside a gorge. The assistant leaps from the cab, stretches his arms in the air, lights a beedi, and wanders to the edge, where white-painted stones guard against the drop. He cleans his nails with his pocketknife and spits into the void as grooming monkeys hiss their bare fangs and lope off to the next bend.
The boys still sit inside.
The dead engine is the loudest sound in the world.
The thekedar greets the chai wallah as he works the vat on a paraffin stove. The assistant returns from the edge to sit with him, flipping open the cage on the way. The three men gossip, catching up on the latest comings and goings on the road.
The assistant whistles at the boys. “Stretch your legs, go piss. You won’t get another chance soon.”
The men are relaxed, the incident at the dhaba the previous morning forgotten.
There’s nowhere for the boys to run or escape to this time.
So they climb out and mill aimlessly, staring up at the corridor of limestone, taking in cool lungfuls of clean air. Ajay hears the river, out of sight, pouring from the top of the world.
One of the boys, the youngest maybe, the seven-year-old, walks over to the edge.