Unsaid between your mother and your father is that on ten thousand a month he could, just barely, afford to bring her and his children to the city. It would be tight but not impossible. At the moment he is able to send most of his salary back to the village, where it is split between your mother and the rest of the clan. If she and you children were to move in with him, the flow of his money to this place would slow to a trickle, swelling like the water in the gully only in the two festival months when he could perhaps expect a bonus.

You watch your mother slice up a lengthy white radish and boil it over an open fire. The sun has banished the dew and, unwell as you are, you no longer feel cold. You feel weak, though, and with the pain in your gut it is as if a parasite were eating you alive from within. So you do not resist as your mother lifts your head off the earth and ladles her elixir into your mouth. It smells like a burp, like the gases from a man’s belly. It makes your gorge rise. But you have nothing inside that you can vomit, and you swallow it without incident.

As you lie motionless afterward, a jaundiced village boy, radish juice dribbling from the corner of your lips and forming a small patch of mud on the ground, it must seem that getting filthy rich is beyond your reach. But have faith. You are not as powerless as you appear. Your moment is about to come.

Decision time arrives a few hours later. The sun has set and your mother has shifted you onto the cot, where you lie swaddled in a blanket even though the evening is warm. The men have returned from the fields, and the family, all except you, have eaten together in the courtyard. Through the doorway you can hear the gurgle of a water pipe and see the flare of its coals as one of your uncles inhales.

Your parents stand over you, looking down. Tomorrow your father will return to the city. He is thinking.

“Will you be all right?” he asks you.

It is the first question he has asked you on this visit, perhaps the first sentence he has uttered directly to you in months. You are in pain and frightened. So the answer is obviously no.

Yet you say, “Yes.”

And take your destiny into your own hands.

Your father absorbs your croak and nods. He says to your mother, “He’s a strong child, this one.”

She says, “He’s very strong.”

You’ll never know if it is your answer that makes your father change his answer. But that night he tells your mother that he has decided she and you children will join him in the city.

A month later, you are well enough to ride with your brother and sister on the roof of the overloaded bus that bears your family and threescore cramped others to the city. If it tips over as it careens down the road, swerving in mad competition with equally crowded rivals as they seek to pick up the next group of prospective passengers on this route, your likelihood of death or, at least, dismemberment will be extremely high. Such things happen often, although not nearly as often as they don’t happen. But today is your lucky day.

Gripping the ropes that bind luggage to this vehicle, you witness a passage of time that outstrips its chronological equivalent. Just as a quick shift in altitude can vault one from subtropical jungle to semi-arctic tundra, so, too, can a few hours on a bus from rural remoteness to urban centrality appear to span millennia.

Atop your inky-smoke-spewing, starboard-listing conveyance, you survey the changes with awe. Dirt streets give way to paved ones, potholes grow less frequent and soon all but disappear, and the kamikaze rush of oncoming traffic vanishes, to be replaced by the enforced peace of the dual carriageway. Electricity makes its appearance, first in passing as you slip below a steel parade of high-voltage giants, then later in the form of wires running at bus-top eye level on either side of the road, and finally in streetlights and shop signs and glorious, magnificent billboards. Buildings go from mud to brick to concrete, then shoot up to an unimaginable four stories, even five.

At each subsequent wonder you think you have arrived, that surely nothing could belong more to your destination than this, and each time you are proved wrong, until you cease thinking and simply surrender to the layers of marvels and visions washing over you like the walls of rain that follow one another seemingly endlessly in the monsoon—endlessly, that is, until they end, without warning, and then the bus shudders to a stop and you are finally, irrevocably there.

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Shopping

As you and your parents and siblings dismount, you embody one of the great changes of your time. Where once your clan was innumerable, not infinite but of a large number not readily known, now there are five of you. Five. The fingers on one hand, the toes on one foot, a minuscule aggregation when compared with shoals of fish or flocks of birds or, indeed, tribes of humans. In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation—the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.

Your sister turns to look at you. Her left hand steadies the enormous bundle of clothing and possessions balanced on her head. Her right hand grips the handle of a cracked and battered suitcase likely discarded by its original owner around the time your father was born. She smiles and you smile in return, your faces small ovals of the familiar in an otherwise unrecognizable world. You think your sister is trying to reassure you. It does not occur to you, young as you are, that it is she who needs reassurance, that she seeks you out not to comfort you but, rather, for the comfort that you, her only recently recovered little brother, have in this moment of fragile vulnerability the capacity to offer her.

Your city is not laid out as a single-celled organism, with a wealthy nucleus surrounded by an ooze of slums. It lacks sufficient mass transit to move all its workers twice daily in the fashion this would require. It also lacks, since the end of colonization, generations ago, governance powerful enough to dispossess individuals of their property in sufficient numbers. Accordingly, the poor live near the rich. Wealthy neighborhoods are often divided by a single boulevard from factories and markets and graveyards, and those, in turn, may be separated from the homes of the impoverished only by an open sewer, a railroad track, or a narrow alley. Your own triangle-shaped community, through which you walk now, textbook in hand, is bounded by all three.

Arriving at your destination, you see a whitewashed building with a plaque declaring its name and function. This is your school, and it is wedged between a tire-repair stall and a corner kiosk that derives the bulk of its revenues from the sale of cigarettes. Until the age of about twelve, when the opportunity cost of forgone wages becomes significant, most children in your area manage to go to school. Most, but by no means all. A boy your height is working shirtless in the tire-repair stall. He watches you now as you pass.

There are fifty pupils in your class, and stools for thirty. The others sit on the floor or stand. You are instructed by a hollow-cheeked, betel-nut-spitting, possibly tubercular teacher. Today he takes you through your multiplication tables. This he does in a distracted chant, his preferred, indeed only, pedagogical tool being enforced rote memorization. Parts of his mind not responsible for control over the tissue and bone of his vocal apparatus wander far, far away.

Your teacher chants, “Ten tens, a hundred.”

The class chants it back.

Your teacher chants, “Eleven elevens, a hundred twenty-one.”

The class chants it back.

Your teacher chants, “Twelve twelves, a hundred thirty-four.”

One foolhardy voice interrupts. It says, “Forty-four.”

There is silence. The voice is yours. You spoke without thinking, or, at least, without thinking sufficiently ahead.

Your teacher says, “What did you say?”

You hesitate. But it has happened. There is no way back.

“Forty-four.”

Your teacher’s tone is soft with menace. “Why did you say that?”

“Twelve twelves are a hundred forty-four.”

“You think I’m an idiot?”

“No, sir. I thought you said a hundred thirty-four. I made a mistake. You said a hundred forty-four. I’m sorry, sir.”

The entire class knows that your teacher did not say a hundred forty-four. Or perhaps not the entire class. Much of the class was paying no attention, daydreaming of kites or assault rifles, or rolling nasal residue into balls between their thumbs and forefingers. But some of them know. And all of them know what will happen next, if not the precise form it will take. They watch now in horrified fascination, like seals on a rock observing a great white breaching beneath one of their own.

Most of the pupils have in the past been punished by your teacher. You, as one of the brightest among them, have drawn some of the most severe punishments. You attempt to hide your knowledge, but every so often bravado gets the better of you and it comes out, as it just has, and then there is hell to pay. Today your teacher reaches into the pocket of his tunic, where he keeps a small amount of coarse sand, and grips you by the ear, the sand on his fingertips adding abrasion to the enormous pressure he applies, so that your earlobe is not only crushed but also made raw and slightly bloody. You refuse to cry out, denying your torturer satisfaction, and thereby insuring that the punishment is prolonged.

Your teacher did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to be a meter reader at the electric utility. Meter readers do not have to put up with children, they work comparatively little, and, more important, they have greater opportunity for corruption and are hence both better off and held in higher regard by society. Nor was becoming a meter reader out of your teacher’s reach. His uncle worked for the electric utility. But the one position as meter reader this uncle was able to facilitate went, as all things most desirable in life invariably went, to your teacher’s elder brother.

So your teacher, who narrowly failed his secondary-school final examination but was able to have the results falsified, with his false results—plus a bribe equivalent to sixty per cent of one year’s prospective salary, and a good low-level connection in the education bureaucracy in the form of a cousin—secured the post he currently occupies. He is not exactly a man who lives to teach. In fact, he hates to teach. It shames him. Nonetheless, he retains a small but not nonexistent fear of losing his job, or, if not losing his job, then of being put in a position where he will be forced to pay yet another, and indeed larger, bribe in order to retain it, and this fear, augmented by his sense of abiding disappointment and his not unfounded conviction that the world is profoundly unfair, manifests itself in the steady dose of violence he visits upon his charges. With each blow, he tells himself, he helps education penetrate another thick skull.

Penetration and education, the two are intertwined in the lives of many around you. In the life of your sister, for example. She is sobbing when you return home. Lately, she alternates with alarming frequency between suppressed but globular tears and calm airs of smug superiority. At the moment, it is the former.

You say, “Again?”