The hilly ranges that the giants had raised from the flat land of the city, layering fertile earth over the vast mounds of garbage being digested by microbes in Rajarhat and New Town, stepped villages of huts and terraced farms replacing refuse, peaks graced with the floodlights and huge mesh origami of insect farmers’ traps.
The forests the giants had planted along the arteries and spaces of the city, the groves they had pulled forth from grassy field and torn concrete, where wild deer, horses, and goats were bred, hunted, or tamed by the urban villagers who lived in the bans, the woods of the Maidan, Victoria, and St. Paul’s. Self-repairing biocrete huts and garibari clusters huddled around the old Christian cathedral and the memorial palace to the queen whose empire had once ruled this land. Both buildings were now plague hospitals, and places of worship for people of any and all faiths.
IN HUNTING SEASON, DAITYA SHOWED HIS DAUGHTER THAT ALL BODIES HAVE THEIR potential for violence. In the mekha, in low power mode with all their lights off and engine low, he stalked a cheetal, one of the local deer, through Victoriaban one dusk, when sunset crumbled in gleaming shards through the eaves. When the beautiful creature was in the sights of the giant’s ribs, Brishti’s father raised his hands, and so did the mekha. An invisible volley of hunting darts killed the cheetal instantly.
Daitya regretted this instantly, not because he hadn’t hunted deer before and sold their carcasses to butchers in the Muslim communes of forest villages, but because his daughter burst into inconsolable tears when she realized what had happened to the cheetal.
They carried the cheetal in the giant’s arms to a baner gram, one of the forest villages. There, it was exchanged for leaf-wrapped meals of kebabs and cricket flour roti left in the giant’s mouth. Daitya tried to share the meal with Brishti, but she refused, the meat a reminder of the death they had caused.
In that moment, Daitya remembered clinging to his mother during one of the labor uprisings, so many years before Brishti was born, watching in terror as a giant not unlike the one they sat in sprayed scalding teargas over the crowds, and another swiped a huge hand through them, sending bodies flying like they didn’t matter. They had barely escaped.
“You’re a horrible monster,” said Brishti to him, and to the mekha, no doubt. Daitya. Still the same word she normally used with such joy. Different meaning.
“Brishti. A mekha will never hurt any animal unless the body is used to nourish others. And I would never hurt another person, ever, with my body or that of the mekha. You know that, don’t you?” he asked Brishti as she cried. “Just like the body of god we inhabit, and our bodies, that cheetal’s body is serving a purpose. His body didn’t expire in vain. It goes back to this city, this land. People need to eat. To make clothes and blankets for winter.”
Brishti didn’t acknowledge her father’s words, only begrudgingly snatching the rotis and not the kebabs. He watched her eat through her tears and suppressed a smile. He had lied—he would hurt another person or animal, with his body or that of the mekha, if it meant protecting her. He ate the kebabs as her sniffles died down to a sulk.
In a few years, Brishti would be helping her father target the cheetals during hunting season, and praying over their bodies before their delivery to the village butchers. She would soon deny she had ever refused the kebabs made over the firepits of the city’s bans.
WHEN THEY HAD WANDERED LONG ENOUGH IN SERVICE, THE GIANTS OF KOLKATA returned to the mekha depots scattered throughout the city. There, the mekhas would periodically gather inside cavernous warehouse garages. Workers in gas masks and HEV suits would examine the giants and provide surgery on them if needed, sparks flying like glowing blood, lubricant oil seeping across the floor like bodily fluids, filling the air with an acrid scent. Their disinfectant tanks would be refilled, their backup batteries charged, their bodies trailing cables like hair.
They would usually spend the night at the depots, when all the mekhar hridaya, all the hearts of the giants, would talk to each other over their radios while lounging in the open chests of their mekhas, smoking weed beedis that twinkled in the shadows. Brishti thought it a beautiful sight, all the giants kneeling and quiet, praying in peace while their hearts chattered. Glowing earrings of worklights hung from their sides, illuminating their freshly polished and stencil-tattooed arms in the gloom of the warehouses. During these visits, Daitya would tense up, always holding Brishti’s hand, telling her not to wander off.
Sometimes the other hearts greeted Brishti over the comms. She was an open secret. They knew about her from the radio chatter in the city, but it was only at the depot they saw her clearly. On these rest stops she would wear one of her father’s lungis like a long skirt, instead of her shorts, along with a t-shirt, and she’d tie her now long hair into a braid. She was welcomed by the tribe. They waved from their mekha’s chests and told her father how lucky he was to have found her, with a hint of envy in their voices. But they were loyal to each other, and no one informed the state that one of their own had broken the rules attached to their greater bodies—namely, that they couldn’t share the mekha with anyone else. Luckily for them, the age of plagues had diminished the surveillance networks of governments, broken by the very cataclysms they’d aided by using their billion eyes to look at the wrong things. In this fragile and healing world, trust had far more value than it had in the collapsing time before the age of plagues.
Since Brishti’s father, like all of his lonesome tribe, was mekhar hridaya, the heart of the mekha, Brishti became affectionately known as mekhar atma, the soul of the mekha. Theirs was the giant with both heart and soul.
SOMETIMES DAITYA WOULD BRING THE MEKHA TO THE CRACKED HIGHWAYS BEYOND New Town at night, where the dark green lakes of algae farms glistened under the moon. His hands guiding Brishti’s, they would increase the speed of the mekha together. The giant would run down the open road until the inside of its chest was shaking violently, making Brishti laugh, safely strapped into the seat. The packs of wild dogs who wandered the highways would join the race, howling and barking alongside the pumping mechanical legs of this strange beast, which they knew not to get too close to.
The forest flowed, the city ebbed.
The plagues waned like the shadow of the moon, always sure to return.
AS BRISHTI GREW OLDER, AND HER BODY GREW WITH THE YEARS, THE MEKHA stayed the same size, still a giant but less of one to her. She became, more and more, a part of this god’s body, a twin heart and soul to her father, mimicking his moves, absorbing his knowledge of the being that sheltered them. As she grew more confident inside the mekha, her father grew less confident about the future he had bestowed upon her, wondering if he had imprisoned her in the cramped chest of a giant for all her days. She was a teenager, and deserved a life of less solitude than being one of the mekha.
Whenever he brought this up, she would go silent with rage. Later, she would blame him for trying to get rid of her, the only times she could bring him to tears deliberately. But Brishti couldn’t hide the way she looked at the young people in the villages they delivered supplies to. Daitya recognized the longing in her eyes as she watched them play in the distance, or walk up to the mekha’s open mouth to leave offerings. Sometimes they would look up and wave to Brishti. She would wave back but retreat into the chest of the giant with uncharacteristic shyness.