What were they shouting about? Some battle they’d fought—a battle in Mushroom Kingdom. A battle against the Webblies. Of course. They were the best. Who else would you hire to fight the armies of the Webblies? She felt a sick lurch in her gut, a feeling of the earth dropping away from beneath her feet. She was alone now, truly alone, the enemy of her former friends. There was no one on her side except for some distant people in a distant land whom she’d never met—whom she’d probably never meet.
Dispirited, she turned away and headed for home. Her father was away for a few days, travelling to Pune to install a floor for work. He worked in an adhesive tile plant where they printed out fake stone designs on adhesive-backed squares of durable vinyl that could be easily laid in the office towers of Pune’s industrial parks. There were always tiles around their home, and Yasmin had never paid them much attention until she started to game with Mala, and then she’d noticed with a shock one day that the strange, angular blurring around the edges of the fine “marble” veins in the tiles were the same compression smears you got when the game’s graphics started to choke, “JPEG artifacts,” they called them in the message boards. It was as though the little imperfections that make the games slightly unreal were creeping into the real world.
That feeling was with her now as she ghosted away from the cafe, but she was brought back to reality by a tap on her shoulder. She whirled around, startled, feeling, for some reason, like she was about to be punched.
But it was Sushant, the tallest boy in Mala’s army, who had never blustered and fought like the other boys, but had stared intently at his screen as though he wished he could escape into it. Yasmin found herself staring straight down his eyes, and he waggled his chin apologetically and smiled shyly at her.
“I thought I saw you passing by,” he said. “And I thought—” He dropped his eyes.
“You thought what?” she said. It came out harshly, an anger she hadn’t known she’d been feeling.
“I thought I’d come out and…” He trailed off.
“What? What did you think, Sushant?” Her own chin was wagging from side to side now, and she leaned her face down toward his, noses just barely apart. She could smell his lunch of spinach bahji on his breath.
He shrank back, winced. Yasmin realized that he was terrified. Realized that he had probably risked quite a lot just by coming out to talk to her. Discipline was everything in Mala’s army. Hadn’t Yasmin been in charge of enforcing discipline?
“I’m sorry,” she said, backing away. “It’s nice to see you again, Sushant. Have you eaten?” It was a formality, because she knew he had, but it was what one friend said to another in Dharavi, in Mumbai—maybe in all of India, for all Yasmin knew.
He smiled again, a faltering little shy smile. It was heartbreaking to see. Yasmin realized that she’d never said much to him when she was Mala’s lieutenant. He’d never needed cajoling or harsh words to get down to work, so she’d practically ignored him. “I thought I’d come out and say hello because we’ve all missed you. I hoped that maybe you and Mala could—” Again he faltered, and Yasmin felt her own chin jutting out involuntarily in a stubborn, angry way.
“Mala and I have chosen different roads,” she said, making a conscious effort to sound calm. “That’s final. Does it go well for her and you?”
He nodded. “We win every battle.”
“Congratulations.”
“But now—lately—I’ve been thinking—”
She waited for him to say more. The moment stretched. Grown-ups bumped past them and she realized that they probably thought they were courting, being a boy and a girl together. If news of that got back to her father—
But it didn’t matter to her anymore. Her father was off installing JPEG artifacts in an IT park in Pune. She was out of the army and out of friends and out of school. What could anything matter.
“I talk to your friends,” he said at last.
“My friends?” She didn’t know she had any.
“The Webblies. Your new army. They come to me while I fight, send me private messages. At first I ignored them, but lately I’ve been on drogue, and I have a lot of time to think. And they sent me pictures—the people I was hurting. Kids like you and me, all over the world. And it made me think.” He paused, licked his lips. “About karma. About hurting people to live. About all the things that they say. I don’t think I want to do this forever. Or that I can do it forever.”
Yasmin was at a loss for words. Were there really other people, right here in Dharavi, right here in Mala’s army, who felt as she did? She’d never imagined such a thing, somehow. But here he was.
“You know that Mala’s army pays ten times what you can get with the Webblies, right?”
“For now,” he said. “That’s the point, right? Chee! If we fight now, we can raise the wages of everyone who works for a living instead of owning things for a living, right?”
“I never thought of the division that way. Owning things for a living, I mean.”
His shyness receded. He was clearly enjoying having someone to talk to about this. “It all comes down to owning versus working. Someone has to do the organizing, I guess—there wouldn’t be a Zombie Mecha if someone didn’t get a lot of people together, working to make all that code. Someone has to pay the game masters and do all of that. I understand that part. It makes sense to me. My mother works in Mrs. Dotta’s fabric-dyeing shop. Someone has to buy the dyes, get the cloth, buy the vats and the tools, arrange to sell it once it’s done, otherwise, my mother wouldn’t have a job. I always stopped there, thinking, all right, if Mrs. Dotta does all that work, and makes a job for my mother, why shouldn’t she get paid for it?
“But now I think that there’s no reason that Mrs. Dotta’s job is more important than my mother’s job. Mamaji wouldn’t have a job without Mrs. Dotta’s factory, but Mrs. Dotta wouldn’t have a factory without Mamaji’s work, right?” He waggled his chin defiantly.
“That’s right,” Yasmin said. She was nervous about being in public with this boy, but she had to admit that it was exciting to hear this all from him.
“So why should Mrs. Dotta have the right to fire my mother, but my mother not have the right to fire Mrs. Dotta? If they depend on each other, why should one of them always have the power to demand and the other one always have to ask for favors?”
Yasmin felt his excitement, but she knew that there had to be more to it than this. “Isn’t Mrs. Dotta taking all the risk? Doesn’t she have to find the money to start the factory, and doesn’t she lose it if the factory closes?”
“Doesn’t Mamaji risk losing her job? Doesn’t Mamaji risk growing sick from the fumes and the chemicals in the dyes? There’s nothing eternal or perfect or natural about it! It’s just something we all agreed to—bosses get to be in charge, instead of just being another kind of worker who contributes a different kind of work!”
“And that’s what you think you’ll get from the Webblies? An end to bosses?”
He looked down, blushing. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so. I think that it’s too much to ask for. But maybe the workers can get a better deal. That’s what Big Sister Nor talks about, isn’t it? Good pay, good places to work, fairness? Not being fired just because you disagree with the boss?”
Or the general, Yasmin thought. Aloud, she said, “So you’ll leave the army? You want to be a Webbly?”
Now he looked down further. “Yes,” he said, at last. “Eventually. It all keeps going around and around in my mind. I don’t know if I’m ready yet.” He risked a look up at her. “I don’t know if I’m as brave as you.”
Anger surged through her, hot and irrational. How dare he talk about her “bravery”? He was just using that as an excuse to go on getting rich in Mala’s army. He understood so well what was wrong and what needed to be done. Understood it better than Yasmin! But he didn’t want to give up his comfort and friendships. That wasn’t cowardice, it was greed. He was too greedy to give it up.
&nbs
p; He must have seen this in her face, because he took a step back and held up his hands. “It’s not that I won’t do it someday—but I don’t know what good it would do for me to do this today, on my own. What would change if I stopped fighting for Mala’s army? She’s just one general with one army among hundreds all over the word, and I’m just one fighter in the army. I—” He faltered. “What’s the sense in giving up so much if it won’t make a difference?”
Yasmin’s anger boiled in her, ate at her like acid, but she bit her tongue, because that little voice inside her was saying, You’re mostly angry because you thought you had a comrade, someone who’d keep you company, and it turned out that all he wanted to do was confess to you and have you forgive him. And it was true. She was far more upset by her loneliness than by his cowardice, or greed, or whatever it was.
“I. Need. To. Go. Now,” she said, biting on the words, keeping the anger out of her voice by sheer force of will.
She didn’t wait for him to raise his eyes, just turned on her heel and walked and walked and walked, through the familiar alleys of Dharavi, not going anywhere but trying to escape anyway, like a chained animal pacing off its patch. She was chained—chained by birth and by circumstance. Her family might have been rich. They might have been high-caste. She might be in another country—in America, in China, in Singapore, all the distant lands. But she was here, and she had no control over that. There was a whole world out there and this was where fate had put her.
She wouldn’t be changing the world. She wouldn’t be going to any of those places. She hadn’t even left Dharavi, except once with her mother, when she took Yasmin and her brothers on a train to see a beach where it had been hot and sandy and the water had been too dangerous to swim in, so they’d stood on the shore and then walked down a road of smart shops where they couldn’t afford to shop, and then they’d waited for the bus again and gone home. Yasmin had seen the multiverses of the games, but she hadn’t even seem Mumbai.
Now where? She was tired and hungry, angry and exhausted. Home? It was still afternoon, so her mother and brothers were all out working or in school. That emptiness…It scared her. She wasn’t used to being alone. It wasn’t a natural state in Dharavi. She was very thirsty, the wind was blowing plastic smoke into her eyes and face, making her nostrils and sinuses and throat raw. Mrs. Dotta’s cafe would have chai, and Mrs. Dotta would give her a cup of it and some computer time on credit, because Mrs. Dotta was desperate to save her cafe from bankruptcy now that the army had abandoned it.
Mrs. Dotta’s idiot nephew doled her out a cup of chai grudgingly. He hadn’t learned a thing from the serious beating that Mala had laid on him. He still stood too close, still went out Eve-teasing with his gang of badmashes. Yasmin knew that he would have loved to take revenge on Mala, and that Mala never went out after dark without three or four of the biggest boys from the army. It made her furious. No matter how much Mala had hurt her, she had the right to go around her home without fearing this idiot. He breathed with a permanent wheeze, thanks to the damage Mala’s feet had done.
She sat down to a computer, logged in. She was sure that the idiot nephew used all kinds of badware to spy on what they did on the computers, but she’d bought a login fob from one of the shops at the edge of Dharavi, and it did magic, logging her in with a different password every time she sat down, so that her PayPal and game accounts were all safe.
Mindlessly, she plunged back into her usual routine. Login to Minerva, check for Webbly protection missions in the worlds she played. But there were no missions waiting. The Webbly feeds were all afire with chatter about the strike in Shenzhen, rumors of the numbers arrested, rumors of shootings. She watched it tick past helplessly, wondering where all these rumors came from. Everyone seemed to know something that she didn’t know. How did they know?
A direct message popped up on her screen. It was from a stranger, but it was someone in the inner Webbly affinity group, which meant that Big Sister Nor, The Mighty Krang, or Justbob had manually approved her. Anyone could join the outer Webblies, but there were very few inner Webblies.
>Hello, can you read this?
It was a full sentence, with punctuation, and the question was as daft as you could imagine. It was the kind of message her father might send. She knew immediately that she was communicating with an adult, and one who didn’t game.
>yes
>Our mutual friend B.S.N. has asked me to contact you. You are in Mumbai, correct?
She had a moment’s hesitation. This was a very grown-up, very non-gamer way to type. Maybe this was someone working for the other side? But Mumbai was as huge as the world. “In Mumbai” was only slightly more specific than “In India” or “On Earth.”
>yes
>Where are you? Can I come and get you? I must talk with you.
>talking now lol
>What? Oh, I see. No, I must TALK with you. This is official business. B.S.N. specifically said I must make contact with you.
She swallowed a couple times, drained the dregs of her chai.
>ok
>Splendid. Where shall I come and get you from?
She swallowed again. When they’d gone to the beach, her mother had been very clear on this: Don’t tell anyone you are from Dharavi. For Mumbaikars, Dharavi is like Hell, the place of eternal torment, and those who dwell here are monsters. This grown-up sounded very proper indeed. Perhaps he would think that Dharavi was Hell and would leave her be.
>dharavi girl
>One moment.
There was a long pause. She wondered if he was trying to get in touch with Big Sister Nor, to tell her that her warrior was a slum-child, to find someone better to help.
>You know this place?
It was a picture of the Dharavi Mosque, tall and imposing, looming over the whole Muslim quarter.
>course!!
>I’ll be there in about an hour. This is me.
Another picture. It wasn’t the middle-aged man in a suit she’d been expecting, but a young man, barely older than a teenager, short gelled hair and a leather jacket, stylish blue jeans and black motorcycle boots.
>Can you give me your phone number? I will call you when I’m close.
>lol
>I’m sorry?
>dharavi girl—no phone for me
She’d had a phone, when she was in Mala’s army. They all had phones. But it was the first thing to go when she quit the army. She still had it in a drawer, couldn’t bear to sell it, but it didn’t work as a phone anymore, though she sometimes used it as a calculator. (All the games had turned themselves off right after the service was disconnected, to her disappointment.)
>Sorry, sorry. Of course. Meet you there in about an hour then.
Her heart thudded in her chest. Meeting a strange man, going on a secret errand—it was the sort of thing that always ended in terrible tragedy, defilement and murder, in the stories. And an hour from now would be—
>cant meet at the mosque
It would be right in the middle of ’Asr, afternoon prayers, and the mosque would be mobbed by her father’s friends. All it would take would be for one of them to see her with a strange man, with gelled hair, a Hindu judging from the rakhi on his wrist, poking free of the leather jacket. Her father would go insane.
>meet me at mahim junction station instead by the crash barriers
It would take her an hour to walk there, but it would be safe.
There was a pause. Then another picture: two boys straddling one of the huge cement barriers in front of the station. It was where she and her brothers had waited while their mother queued up for the tickets.
>Here?
>yes
>Okay then. I’ll be on a Tata 620 scooter.
Another picture of a lovingly polished little bike, a proud purple gas-tank on its skeletal green frame. There were thousands of these in Dharavi, driven by would-be badmashes who’d saved up a little money for a pair of wheels.
>ill be there
She han
ded her cup to the idiot nephew, not even seeing the grimace on his face as she dashed past him, out into the roadway, back home to change and put some few things in a bag before her mother or brothers came home. She didn’t know where she was going or how long she’d be away, and the last thing she wanted was to have to explain this to her mother. She would leave a note, one of her brothers would read it to her mother. She’d just say, “Away on union business. Back soon. Love you.” And that would have to be enough—because, after all, it was all she knew.
On the long walk to Mahim Junction station, she alternated between nervous excitement and nervous dread. This was foolish, to be sure, but it was also all she had left. If Big Sister Nor vouched for this man—chee! she didn’t even know his name!—then who was Yasmin to doubt him?
As she got closer to the edge of Dharavi, the laneways widened to streets, wide enough for skinny, shoeless boys to play ditch-cricket in. They shouted things at her, “offending decency,” as the schoolteacher, Mr. Hossain, had always said when the badmashes gathered outside the school to call things to the girls as they left the classroom. But she knew how to ignore them, and besides, she had picked up her brother Abdur’s lathi, using it as a walking stick, having tied a spare hijab underscarf to the top to make it seem more innocuous. They’d played gymnastics games in the schoolyard with sticks like lathis, but without the iron binding on the tip. Still, she felt sure she could swing it fearsomely enough to scare off any badmash who got in her way on this fateful day. It was only at the station that she realized she had no idea how they would carry it on the little scooter.
She’d brought her phone along, just to tell the time with, and now an hour had gone by and there was no sign of the man with the short gelled hair. Another twenty minutes ticked past. She was used to this: nothing in Dharavi ran on precise time except for the calls to prayer from the mosque, the rooster crows in the morning, and the calls to muster in Mala’s army, which were always precisely timed, with fierce discipline for stragglers who showed up late for battle.