Piotr boards a smaller truck with only a few pallets of sheeting and tenting. His route will stop by Ratnal on the way back to Bhuj. No one has heard from Ratnal. No calls for aid, no evacuees. The city has disappeared. Arni from the World Food Programme will travel with him. Arni has established a food distribution center in Bhuj, and if the destruction in Ratnal is as bad as feared, they will return with additional aid.
“It might be a good idea,” says Arni, “to establish another distribution center here in Gandhidham. We can use those army hangars as warehouses. We can divert some food-aid flights here quite easily, don’t you think?”
“We would also need to station someone here full-time,” Piotr says. The age-old question: Which mouse will hang the bell around the cat’s neck?
The lumbering caravan of trucks waits to exit the single navigable road. Soldiers wave them on, arms like pinwheels, but old habits die hard: drivers lean on their horns, inching right and left, gauging the available space to pass. Soldiers tap offending truck doors with batons. Many trucks have talismans dangling from their front grills: a tin eagle with its claws grasping a heart, blue-faced Vishnu holding a flute to his lips, a pair of baby shoes.
Gandhidham, Piotr decides, is a poorly planned city. It was meant to be a transportation hub linking to the port of Kandla to the south, but its design is stilted. Piotr would have formed the city as a spider: the military base as the body, the populous stretching along the legs. Each leg could feature a specialty: vegetables and fruits heading northwest; automobile parts lining the roads eastward; to the south, toward Kandla, silks and textiles. Roadside stands could buttress against actual buildings with reinforced mortar and brick. The city would creep outward. A good civil engineer could have shaped Gandhidham’s soul the way Le Corbusier shaped Chandigarh’s.
But Le Corbusier was no civil engineer, and Piotr is no architect.
For now, the desert lies before him, sprouting a black tail of trucks. If Piotr has erred in his calculations, he will not have to bear the brunt of that error. But second-guessing his conclusions will accomplish nothing. Worse than nothing, even: the negative impact would be even more severe. If only Stetslovich had developed a measurement for increments of need, desire, and disappointment. Piotr would plot himself onto that graph, a single point in a vast plain.
If Stetslovich’s conjecture had a weakness, it was the assumption that needs and desires were separate entities, that the rational mind could distinguish one from the other. The limbic and the cortex are entwined, like lovers holding hands, forgetting where one ends and the other begins.
Piotr worked with Connor for ten years, and for that time, his occupation met his needs. But then he knew desire, a rash that delivers pleasure in the scratching. It was in Sarajevo. Connor had hired Rana as an interpreter. She spoke Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, English, Spanish, and Russian. She wore a thick skirt, with pleats as sharp and perfect as a lamp shade. Her skin was smooth and tinged with olive from her mother’s side. Piotr knew he would marry her. He knew.
It was the way she tilted her head when she heard a certain inflection. The way her vocabulary occasionally failed her, the way she used her hands and her body to indicate the immensity of a word, its secret depths of emotion. Piotr dutifully recorded what she said, memorizing the curve of her arm, her black waves of hair. Outwardly, she seemed impassive. She translated without shuddering, without flinching. She paused before speaking, her upper lip twisting as if testing the language: The soldiers held me down and forced me to watch them rape my wife and daughter. I begged them to kill me, but they shot me in the leg so that I could not move. When they were finished, they pushed my wife and daughter into an open ditch and covered them with dirt. They were still breathing. She was an interlocutor, and what she said passed through her like a ghost.
On the way to Ratnal, Arni rolls down the window to circulate air. Altars, festooned with silk flowers, appear sporadically on the side of the road. Arni points out the first few, but soon grows tired. Too many gods. Someone must maintain these shrines. Someone must set offerings on the tiny pedestals.
Commerce has not abated. One passing truck is loaded with sandbags, another with corrugated cardboard tied together with twine. Two boys, no older than twelve, hold the ropes securing the cardboard. As the trucks approach each other, they threaten to run one another off the road. Both drivers honk in symphonic speech. Arni pulls his arm inside to keep it from being shorn off by this urgent delivery of cardboard.
A short time later, their truck stops.
Imagine, Stetslovich tells his class, a bridge. Say that this bridge spans a gully carved into the earth by yearly floodwaters. The ground is soft, salt ridden. It crumbles in your hand like smoke. Say that during an earthquake, the bridge’s support pillars shear away from the top load and send the traveling surface into a heap. A passenger car might be able to traverse the gully slowly. But if it’s loaded down with a life’s worth of possessions and a panicked family, the soft earth might swallow the tires down to the axle. Say that in addition to the misaligned chunks of pavement, there are now abandoned cars as well, stuck in the ground like the hollow shells of dead beetles. You need to cross the gully. What is the solution to this problem? You have fifteen minutes to respond.
Connor answers: Requisition a deployable bridge from the US military. If one isn’t available within a one-day radius, purchase one from the Indian Army. Despite the overcharge, we need to establish the bridge long enough for aid to flow across and for the wounded to evacuate. After two or three days, we reposition the bridge elsewhere.
Lorraine answers: Getting aid to affected peoples is always our priority. We will circumvent the gully, find an area that’s stable enough to support the weight of the trucks. If need be, we can lay down planks of lumber or metal sheets to provide support and traction. We can worry about the bridge’s repair later.
Babu Roshan answers: No need to continue at all. See those cars? Strip them of parts. We can take the catalytic converters for their platinum and remove the copper wiring from its rubber. The leather from the seats, we can restitch it into coats and shoes and use the batting to stuff our own pillows.
Rana gives no response. She cradles Katia in the crook of her arm. The question isn’t worth answering.
The truck idles, and the driver, who doesn’t speak English, looks to Piotr for the correct answer.
Lorraine once told him that he had enough experience to lead his own team. But Piotr wanted to work less in conflict zones and more in disaster relief.
“You realize,” she said, “that it’s no less dangerous.”
Of course. But at least he wouldn’t need a flak jacket. In Rwanda, for instance, armed men ran after his and Connor’s vehicle, shooting in pursuit. He crouched low to the floor, and bullets pinged against the metal, cracked the back window. He and Connor had walked into gatherings of warlords where the air throbbed with anger and they were the only ones who were unarmed.
Aid workers are easy targets.
In Bosnia, he and Connor brought Rana from one refugee camp to another: Vrnograč, Miholjsko, Banja Luka, Tuzla. For six months, people pleaded to make themselves understood. An old woman pulled her hair so Piotr could see the lice crawling in the part. Men hoisted their shirts to expose their ribs and concave bellies. Rana traveled in the safety of a car, had regular meals, earned hazard pay, and young women tugged at Piotr as if to ask, Why her? You could have any one of us. Why her?