“Only if you want.”
His palm smells like diesel, and his knuckles are creased with grime. His fingernails are the longest he’s ever let them grow, and they’re gray from quick to tip. He wouldn’t eat with these hands, much less pass out food with them.
Irina gives Ted a map of Bhuj, highlighted in different colors. Piotr’s handiwork. Colored pathways circle in on themselves. Large dots are distribution points for the various religions and sects centered around temples. People flee toward what they know, toward community.
“But if they’re starving—” Ted continues, “really starving — can’t they compromise?”
She puts a hand on Ted’s shoulder. “Have you ever gone hungry?” she asks.
She doesn’t challenge; she doesn’t mock.
The trucks delivering to the religious centers, she says, handle themselves. These centers are accustomed to preparing food for festivals, holidays, and weddings. Even with damaged infrastructure, they persist. Monks minister to the injured and the bereft. From the folds of their longhis, they offer fruit, prayer beads, bandages. The elderly Sisters of Charity, stooped and frail in their gray habits, clear rubble away brick by brick.
What is it about religion that brings about such devotion? When he was young, Ted watched the news footage from the shelters around the city every Thanksgiving. A cramped cafeteria, homeless men wearing stocking caps and thin polyester jackets. Families from deep in Westchester County came to help — tall teenage boys in basketball jerseys, ladling mashed potatoes from heating trays; young girls with glittery eye shadow, passing out slices of pumpkin pie; their parents beaming with benevolence. They spoke the language of evangelism — the day’s blessing, the grace of God — and their recipients responded in kind: Thank you, Jesus. Ted’s parents never made him do anything of the sort, but there was always the implication: There but for the grace of God goes you.
Ted tries to remember what he ate this morning — coffee and a high-energy biscuit that crumbled in his mouth like sand. He has to cinch the waist of his pants with a safety pin, lest it slide off his hips. If he fasts, does this prove moral rectitude? Willingness to sacrifice?
“Oh!” Irina says. “I almost forgot. Hindu Vaishnavites don’t eat root vegetables, either.”
The trick to food-basket distribution, Irina says, is to give only to the women. These baskets are designed to last a family group several days. The World Food Programme learned this the hard way: in Somalia, when they gave men the food baskets, the men traded them for munitions. Giving the baskets to the women means better chance of the food being eaten.
The term “family group,” though, seems nebulous. Ted understands the “family” part — but “group”? Does a group include uncles and cousins? As he saw in Lodai yesterday, it’s not uncommon for the entire passel of relatives to live like geese in a pen. Do grandparents count, or do they warrant their own basket? It’s not much, these baskets: flour or rice, chickpeas or lentils, a bottle of vegetable oil fortified with vitamins A and D, sugar, iodized salt.
Though the WFP prefers to purchase food locally, Irina explains, sometimes bulk donations from corporations arrive. For instance, two days ago, a crate arrived with incomprehensible stenciling on it, consonants jumbled together the way only Scandinavians can manage. No one knows what’s in it. Arni had secured it, but now he’s gone, and nobody can translate the export label.
Ted gets a crowbar. “Let’s see.”
Inside: boxes. And inside the boxes: cans. Ted hopes that the label will yield answers, but no: it’s a cartoon penguin holding a broom, like a Christmas card. Stupid Scandinavians. He scans the ingredients for a cognate—vatten, vetemjöl, nöttalg—and after that fails, he looks at the nutritional information. Whatever this is, it has a lot of calories: two hundred kilocalories per one hundred grams and nine grams of fett.
Irina hooks her knuckle under the tab and pulls back the top. A thin layer of aspic makes the whatever-it-is sparkle.
“Looks like Spam,” Ted says, though the color — akin to raspberry mousse — is too dark. The contents smell almost metallic, like a rubbed penny.
Ted and Irina look at each other. It’s a dare.
“You first,” he says.
“Not on your life.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Rock paper scissors, then.”
Her paper covers his rock.
“Here goes,” Ted says. He dips his finger through the aspic. The texture is solid, like bologna. He scrapes a bit with his fingernail and brings it to his mouth.
“And?”
“It doesn’t taste like anything.”
“Maybe you need a bigger piece.” Irina finds a spoon. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
They both chew thoughtfully.
“Salty,” she says.
There’s a creaminess, a layer of fat on his tongue. Nothing like Spam. Spam-based meals were a short-lived experiment from his mother. It was a cost-cutting measure, something she’d found a coupon for. She fried slices of it one morning along with the eggs, and since Ted had to finish his plate before he was allowed to watch cartoons, he had a few bites before discarding the rest beneath the browned, crisp edges of egg. His father pushed his plate away with a firm “You know, the bacon was just fine.”
“I can’t think of any religions that would allow this,” Ted says.
The first distribution point is in front of the Bhuj jail. The jail has cracked like a nut. The heavy door lies on its hinges, and the walls have split, but — truth be told — this was not a high-security facility. The criminals and militants now sift their way through the general populace. Earthquake as amnesty. Ted isn’t worried. Not really.
The afternoon sun has flensed away the night’s cool. In the lot, women wait for the truck to pull up. A mother with two young children stretches her sari across the back of their heads to shield them from the sun. The only man present helps an elderly woman; she holds his forearm and rests her weight on him. As the truck arrives, those who have been reclining stand, and others appear from beneath the shade of nearby doorways and tents. They shift left and right, like commuters trying to position themselves to exactly where the subway door opens. The soldiers hop off the back, guns slung on their shoulders, and bark a few words. This is a familiar drill. There are blankets on the ground. People have waited here all night. Maybe this is home.
Ted hands a basket to a young woman — maybe twenty. Her head is draped with a tan scarf that sparkles in the sun. She turns the basket over in her hands. It rattles and sloshes. She pierces the cellophane with her fingernail and holds up the vegetable oil to the sun, and it glows like honey.
The recipient of the basket announces something — an aside to a friend — but it’s overheard, and excitement runs through the crowd, and then there are hands everywhere. The crowd swells and surges forth; the soldiers bristle. The trucks rocks gently.
Ted sees an elderly woman. Her arm is bent at the elbow, an open hand close to her breast, as though beseeching. If I can get something to her, he thinks, it’ll be OK. No one pushes her aside — that he sees, at least — but she falls farther and farther behind, her small hand, a bird’s claw, disappearing beneath the others.
“One at a time,” Ted says. How do you say one per family group in Hindi? The crowd clumps around the truck, and hands reach for the still-sealed baskets. He understands now why some aid workers dump and run. It’s not the violence — it’s the claustrophobia. The bodies press against him, the static of their clothes against his.