SIRINDER, OUR DRIVER, had the expertise and the daring needed to move through the city traffic, dodging cars, buses, burros, bicycles, and more than one starving cow. No one hurried—life is long—except the motorcycles zigzagging at the speed of torpedoes and with five riding aboard. Sirinder showed signs of being a man of few words, and Tabra and I learned not to ask him questions because the only one he answered was Willie. The rural roads were narrow and curving, and he drove them at breakneck speed. When two vehicles met nose to nose, the men at the wheel looked each other in the eye and determined in a fraction of a second which was the alpha male, then the other man ceded right-of-way. The accidents we saw always involved two trucks of similar size that had smashed head-on because it wasn’t clear in time which was the alpha driver. We didn’t have safety belts, we had karma; no one dies before his time. We did not drive with lights at night for the same reason. Sirinder’s intuition warned him that a vehicle might be coming toward us, at which time he flashed on his lights and blinded the driver.
As we drove out from the city, the landscape became sere and golden, then dusty and reddish. The villages were farther and farther apart, and the plains stretched forever, but there was always something to attract our attention. Willie carried his camera bag, tripod, and cannon-sized lens everywhere, a rather complex apparatus to set up. It is said that the only thing a good photographer remembers is the photo he didn’t take. Willie will remember a thousand, like an elephant painted with yellow stripes and dressed as a trapeze artist, all by itself in that open countryside. On the other hand, he was able to immortalize a group of workers who were moving a mountain from one side of the road to the other. The men, wearing nothing but loin cloths, were piling rocks into the baskets the women carried across the road on their heads. The women were graceful, slim, dressed in threadbare saris of brilliant colors—magenta, lime, emerald—and they moved like reeds in the wind, carrying their burden of rocks. They were classified as “helpers,” and they earned half of what the men did. When it was time to eat, the men squatted in a circle, holding their tin plates, and the women waited a respectful distance away. Later they ate anything the men left.
After still more hours of driving we were tired; the sun was beginning to go down and brushstrokes the color of fire streaked the sky. In the distance, in the dry fields, stood a solitary tree, perhaps an acacia, and beneath its branches we could see some dark figures that looked like huge birds but as we went closer turned out to be a group of women and children. What were they doing there? There wasn’t any village or well nearby. Willie asked Sirinder to stop so we could stretch our legs. Tabra and I walked toward the women, who started to back away, but their curiosity overcame their shyness and soon we were together beneath the acacia, surrounded by naked children. The women were wearing dusty, frayed saris. They were young, with long black hair, dry skin, and sunken eyes made up with kohl. In India, as in many parts of the world, the concept of personal space we defend so fiercely in the West doesn’t exist. Lacking a common language, they greeted us with gestures, and then they examined us with bold fingers, touching our clothing, our faces, Tabra’s red hair, something they may not have seen before, and our silver jewelry. We took off our bracelets and offered them to the women, who put them on with the delight of teenagers. There were enough for everyone, two or three each.
One of the women, who could have been about your age, Paula, took my face in her hands and kissed me lightly on the forehead. I felt her parted lips, her warm breath. It was such an unexpected gesture, so intimate, that I couldn’t hold back the tears, the first I had shed in a long time. The other women patted me in silence, disoriented by my reaction.
From the road, a toot of the horn from Sirinder told us that it was time to leave. We bade the women good-bye and started back to the car, but they followed us. One touched my shoulder. I turned, and she held out a package. I thought she meant to give me something in exchange for the bracelets, and tried to explain with signs that it wasn’t necessary, but she forced me to take it. It weighed very little, I thought it was a bundle of rags, but when I turned back the folds I saw that it held a newborn baby, tiny and dark. Its eyes were closed and it smelled like no other child I have ever held in my arms, a pungent odor of ashes, dust, and excrement. I kissed its face, murmured a blessing, and tried to return it to its mother, but instead of taking it, she turned and ran back to the others, while I stood there, rocking the baby in my arms, not understanding what was happening. A minute later Sirinder came running and shouting to put it down, I couldn’t take it, it was dirty, and he snatched it from my arms and started toward the women to give it back, but they ran away, terrified by the man’s wrath. And then he bent down and laid the infant on the dry earth beneath the tree.
By that time, Willie had come too, and he hustled me back to the car, nearly lifting me off the ground, followed by Tabra. Sirinder started the engine and we drove off, as I buried my head in my husband’s chest.
“Why did that woman try to give us her baby?” Willie murmured.
“It was a girl. No one wants a girl,” Sirinder explained.
There are stories that have the power to heal. What happened that evening beneath the acacia loosened the knot that had been choking me, cleaned away the cobwebs of self-pity, and forced me to come back to the world and transform the loss of my daughter into action. I could not save that baby girl, or her desperate mother, or the “helpers” who were moving a mountain rock by rock, or millions of women like them and like the unforgettable woman I saw crying on Fifth Avenue that winter in New York, but I promised at that moment that I would at least attempt to ease their lot in life, as you would have done. For you, no act of compassion was impossible. “You have to earn a lot of money with your books, Mamá, so I can start a shelter for the poor and you can pay the bills,” you told me one day, entirely serious. The money I had made, and was still making, from the publication of Paula was sitting in a bank waiting for me to decide how to use it. At that moment, I knew. I calculated that if the capital would grow with every book I wrote in the future, something good would come of it: only a drop of water in the desert of human need, but at least I wouldn’t feel helpless. “I am going to establish a foundation to help women and children,” I told Willie and Tabra that night, never imagining that with the years that seed would become a tree, like the acacia.