Past the old fort walls of Bhuj, Bhid Gate, one of five ancient entryways to the city, lies toppled. The bricks from the top of the gate — a jaw with punched-out teeth — have fallen onto the auto rickshaws below. A drink cart, with a row of smashed-open bottles of colored syrups, thrums with flies. Signs were painted on the brick surface, but these have long flaked off. The bright-yellow Vodafone announcement is as obsolete as the gate itself. A faded poster announces “Rahul!”
At the gate, men stand upon a scaffold of wooden poles lashed together with rough brown rope. With hammers and chisels, they chip at the gate’s surface. One concentrates on a frieze of elephants, legs and trunks raised as if dancing, the larger ones cradling the smaller ones with their feet. The stone is orange, as if rubbed with rust. Another man carries a lotus the size of a bowling ball up a metal ramp into a tractor trailer.
For a moment, Ted thinks that they’re clearing rubble. But that’s not what they’re doing at all.
One day, he will see these pieces pried off Bhid Gate again. He’ll be walking through SoHo, on his way to brunch, or to exchange his current cell phone for a newer model. And in a storefront that he never looks into because he feels inadequate every time he sees something that he can never have, he’ll see that lotus, or those elephants, still entwined, abandoned by the herd. They will have outrageous prices: Chinese and Japanese antiques have peaked, Africa hasn’t yet made a comeback, and India is definitely on the way up. The provenance will be incorrect. Reclaimed from a temple to be demolished in Amritsar. Right. Who’s your buyer? he’ll demand, and the owner of the gallery (called the Mehta Collection or Vijayarajji Antiques) will assure him that these pieces are, indeed, authentic. The owner, a middle-aged white man, will be dressed in a linen kurta with gold embroidery along the hem. His collar will be splayed to show his tanned, sagging skin and white wisps of chest hair. Ted imagines Bhuj as he has never seen it: where his eyes are drawn to every surface, where goddesses carved into the walls are an act of devotion, where mortar is set properly and never crumbles, where children chase each other rather than lie in cots with bloody stumps. And he will push the pieces — these trophies—to the ground. He’ll grind them beneath his feet, return them to the city to which they belong: the destroyed city, the unseen city.
No one should own that stuff, right, John?
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Ted feels like a tourist. That’s what seasoned aid workers call people who pop in and out of disaster areas. Disaster relief as an ego stroke. Lorraine should add them to her list of types of aid workers — the passers-through to go along with the running-aways and the running-towards.
Isn’t aid work supposed to make you feel better?
Not if you’re doing it right, she says.
Lorraine had come to USAID after a stint with International Orthodox Christian Charities. “That’s what you get for being raised Greek,” she said. She had been in Cambodia, on an agricultural project, when, about fifty feet behind her, a roaming herd of cattle trod onto an unexploded land mine. When she woke up, the doctors were still picking shrapnel out of her back.
Sometimes, in the office, when she reaches for a binder on a high shelf, her shirt rides up, and Ted sees the scars, pale puckers of skin.
“I couldn’t do this just to make my parents proud,” she told him. “I needed to do this for myself.”
When Ted first started training with USAID, he imagined himself in front of television cameras, handing a housing kit to a grateful family. The camera would zoom in on the beads of sweat on his face as he helped a dust-ravaged wife set up the family tent. She would marvel at the new pots, the tin of cooking oil, the blankets encased in Mylar. Here, the American government delivers sorely needed aid to the residents of Lodai, a small town in the devastated Gujarat region. The chyron would identify him as “Ted Armstrong, USAID worker.” The United States is committed to helping those in need around the world, he would say, the rest of his spiel cut off in the interest of time. The narrator would deliver inspirational words, accompanied by cuts to scenes shot earlier in the day (a young Oxfam worker’s blond hair falling across the face of a bottle-feeding infant, uniformed men with Union Jack patches on their shoulders, grunting as they clear away rubble) and give information on how to contribute.
But the reality? Stuck behind camels.
The soldier drifts to a stop, laying on the horn. The herd, an undulation of tan fur, obstructs the road. They graze at bits of scrub poking out of the ground, buckteeth working like a pestle. A young boy wearing a white turban keeps them in line by flicking a cane of frayed bamboo. He skips behind them, zigzagging across the road. The car pulls parallel to the boy, who looks at Ted. Ted wills his mouth into a smile. The boy stares at him, hard. What is this Westerner doing here? Go home, ferengi, go home.
The soldier tries to find a path through, but the camels refuse to give way. Such awkward beasts, all sinew and muscle. As the driver honks, a relentless noise, they saunter off the road. Ted, still looking at the boy, distends his jaw and shifts it laterally, the best imitation of a camel he’s ever done, down to the ridiculous scruff on his chin. But the car has already moved on, and the boy is far past laughing.
Ted consults the map. It’s useless. A fourth-generation photocopy. The roads are so faint they may as well not exist. Town and village names are broken, no longer words, but mere indications, suggestions of place. Nagor, Raydhanpur, Boladi, Lodai, Jhuran, Jawaharnagar. Ted tries to estimate how far they’ve gone with the scale indicator at the bottom of the map, but as he looks for the road signs and markers, he realizes that they’re written in Gujarati. Even the numerals are different: loops and squiggles. Ciphers.
He leans to the driver. “Do you know where we are?”
The driver shakes his head, a dismissal. Don’t bother me.
In the distance, Ted sees a handful of peaked roofs. “Is this Lodai?” he asks. On the map, the word “Lodai” is larger than the other towns, but smaller than Bhuj. Font size as an approximation of population. He’s lost any sense of scale, of distance. “Turn here,” he says, pointing. “Here.”
The washboard road leads toward the roofs. The car grinds out a herald of dust. Maybe the villagers use this as an early warning system. Here we come, the dust says. We are almost at your doorstep.
But as they approach, Ted sees that this isn’t a town, not in any proper sense. It’s an outpost, so small that Ted isn’t sure it even has a name. Six mud huts, arranged in a semicircle; between the third and fourth huts, a canopy of palm fronds, propped by bamboo poles; in the center, a rectangular water tank that has cracked, leaching its contents into the sand. Three of the huts have collapsed. Half the village! But to say that this place was destroyed is to assume that it had existed in the first place. If Ted gives it a name, will it concretize? Two elderly men sit in the shade of the fronds. Where are the other people who live here? Are they waiting on the road to ambush passersby? Are these the men who attacked Arni yesterday?