From the Bombay anthology: Snakes and trees jostle for space in Shubhangi Swarup’s story

The baby snake moves on the human palm, in various shapes of infinity. It has brown and black stripes and can be mistaken for a large earthworm. But the hand that rescued it from the disorientation of a busy highway, lifting it gently by the tail, knows better. This hand knows its species and subspecies, and has an insight into its tiny, reptilian mindset. The wildlife rescuer claims it is lost. As the pockets of green vanish, these animals turn homeless overnight, seeking their way back to safety. “All creatures search for a way back home. They know the way, in their DNA,” says the caption on the Instagram feed. The girl pauses from scrolling. The words hit her. Even a snake knows things she doesn’t. The city that breathes fumes, waits outside the doorless auto to ingest her whole. She ignores the heckles and tugs, the curses and thugs, to stare at her phone. She messages her parents: “I’m leaving.” “At least pick up your phone,” her mother texts. “No”, she texts back. No to three healthy meals a day and three litres of water. No to cognitive behavioural therapy. The girl has been diagnosed with a body dysmorphia, and she refuses to let her quest be reduced to a disorder. In a city that operates in chaos, she has been singled out for being out of order. She slips on her headphones and switches to the noise cancellation mode. Surrounded by an artificial silence, she closes her eyes. What is it like, she wonders, to be a snake in this city? The girl’s dad had trained her to stomp her feet on monsoon treks. Snakes were deaf and relied on vibrations, he’d said. But the vibrations here are hell. The auto trembles with the driver’s frustration as he accelerates and brakes, all while stuck in traffic. Concrete spews into the sky above. It erupts from a layer of smoke, filth and clamour. There are no roots. This city has no roots, only noise. If she were a reptile, she would have simply slithered away, brushing against the roughness of pavements and rust of the gates till she bled. She would have found a small, abrasive opening to squeeze through, encouraging the skin to moult. Snakes, textbooks say, shed skin to accommodate their growing selves. Her need is more basic. She is in search of a different skin. The girl graduated with average marks a week before her twenty-second birthday. It was nothing to celebrate, but nothing to cry over either. On her birthday, she drew her face close to her mother’s and confided in her. She told her of the open pores that dotted her cheeks, the blackheads on her nose … “No one can see it,” her mother said, “only you.” She grazed her face with her fingers, bringing the uneven terrain of micro-peaks and pores of her skin to life. Her mother was right, even she knew it. But what was worse, she wondered, to be seen or unseen? The girl is on her way to a small room at the island’s edge. She prefers to call the city an island. It makes fantasies possible. As she moves away from her sheltered existence in the south to the western suburbs, there is a shift in intensity. Everything is multiplying – the skyscrapers, the slums, the flyovers, the roads, the people … even the noise, the traffic and the fumes! She peers at the skyline, bold in its palette. Shades of the setting sun reflect on all the glass facades, magnifying the intensity. The essence of her city, she is relieved to see, remains. She arrives at her destination in the dark. Someone found ten fingers’ worth of space under a tree and built a solitary shanty. A small shrine at the trunk’s base prevents the neighbours – a garage on one side and an obscene bungalow on the other – from encroaching. The board on the door screams, PROPERTY OF DEVI TEMPLE. DEMOLISHERS WILL BE CURSED, in loud, red lettering. The room belongs to her friend, an influencer of minor proportions. Her social media handle is a mix of manifesting and wellness, celebrating inconsistencies in thought and lifestyle. The influencer has sublet the room from a man who rented it from a woman who claimed to have sublet it from someone who rented it from the owner’s grandchildren or some such lineage. No one knows who the original owners are, and the only way to secure possession of the shanty is to occupy it. Everything about it is illegal and temporary. The construction, the water and electricity, even the sand, illegally quarried from the beach to reinforce the mud it stands on. The shanty itself is a squatter here, like the temple and the god it houses. Everyone, except for the tree. Exhausted, the girl enters the shanty. All she can do is move restlessly amidst the smelly, humid sheets she’s spread over the futon. A lifetime of fears, suppressed and buried, begin to resurface. Fear of nails scratching against a blackboard. Fear of something wet, slow and sticky, crawling over her foot. Fear of ghosts and unicorns, roses and thorns. Fear of being raped and mugged, beaten and drugged. The sea breeze brings with it the smell of shrimp and prawns left out to dry. It makes her nauseous. Intensely nauseous. She rushes to the toilet in the room’s corner, an Indian style commode and basin, separated by a frayed curtain. A sulphuric stench emanates from the yellowed, cracked bowl. She can see bottle caps and polythene entangled in hairballs and dust clumps, floating in the black hole at the elongated edge. A warm liquid trickles down her groin, wetting her chappals. A reminder that she hasn’t used the toilet since she left her home twelve hours ago. Here she is, on the first day of the first decision she made all by herself, independent of reason and elderly counsel. Here she is, wetting her pants. She slowly undresses herself and rinses her underwear and sweatpants with water. She goes to open the window and hang it over the frame. The sound of waves floods in. Rhythmic. Calm. Persistent. It is only now, at 2 am, that she can hear the waves. At 2 am, the city is a forest of sounds. It comes to life as the high tide that drowns the constant clamour of construction. It comes to life as the eager songs of a cricket wooing the air-conditioner, mistaking its gentle hum for a mating call. It comes to life as the growls of a leopard, startled by headlights, somewhere at the edge of the national park. If the city is home to millions of humans, it is also home to billions of other creatures. Emboldened by the dark, they speak up and hope to be heard. The girl also hears the loud gush of a man relieving himself on the wall. She confuses it for a water tap, left half-open. The man urinates on the compound wall of a forty-crore bungalow. No one can stop him, for it is his home. A decrepit old woman, wrapped in wrinkles and rags, stands right behind him. She has a way of finding him, be it two in the afternoon or two at night. He could be on his way to work or returning wasted – she appears from nowhere and hisses at him in her toothless dialect. It has taken him months to piece the words together. And he has tried to ease her confusion. “Ajji,” he says, “my grandparents built this bungalow eighty years ago. My family, and only my family, has been living here since then.” She nods like she comprehends his broken Hindi, pounded with words from Marathi, Gujarati and English. But the fact that she shows up means she doesn’t. She is here to convince him that she once lived here, when it was all a mangrove. She has seen a leopard attacking a hen, and the hen flying away in fright, where his garden now stands. She has seen dozens of herons and egrets shitting from the branches that surround. This has given way to pigeon shit now. It wasn’t the best dwelling place, this spot. But it was home. It is home. “It is my home!” The man shouts in exasperation. “This is my inheritance! Didn’t you hear the lawyers this morning? The banks don’t stand a chance. They are the fools, and the man who fooled them is dead. My dad is dead!” He is exhausted. He’s lost money in the stock market and his mind to a cocktail of chemicals. He wipes his hands with sanitiser and walks ahead. He punches the security code on his gate and wishes it could all be quicker. For he, a mass of protein, testosterone and credit cards, is afraid. He’s afraid of the frail, homeless woman accusing him of crimes he isn’t guilty of. He’s afraid of the infections lurking on all surfaces in the great outdoors. He’s afraid of the night for turning him into a petulant child. He enters the safety of his porch, only to realise the relief is short-lived. He is sinking into an emotion, as heavy and sticky as sugar syrup. He can’t help it. He feels regret. He shouldn’t have shouted at her like that. So what if she’s a stalker, she’s also old and frail. He removes a hundred-rupee note from his wallet and makes his way out. He will hand her the note and call it charity, not truce. She isn’t around. Barely a minute has passed, and this hunchbacked, hobbling creature has disappeared from the scene! Except for the rain trees, he is all alone. A Devi shrine blocks the lane, deeming it a dead end. It protects them all from the chaotic crowds thronging to the beach, on the other side. He is about to turn back, when he halts mid-step. A huge shadow has caught his eye, coiled on his car’s bonnet. His limbs, like his mind, freeze at the sight. His brain swells with fear, even as the heart feels awe. There is no fight, let alone flight. Excerpted with permission from ‘Snakeskin’ by Shubhangi Swarup in The Only City: Bombay in Eighteen Stories, edited by Anindita Ghose, HarperCollins India.