Free The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne Page A

somewhere.
    I pick through the jacks for dolls or crustaceans or keychain souvenirs but find nothing that could be a murti. I actually feel panicked. I can’t begin my journey without this puja. All of a sudden it seems I’m devout, even superstitious. But isn’t the point of Hinduism that God is manifest everywhere, repeating Godself in endless aspects, so the specific object to which we direct puja doesn’t matter? But still, it wouldn’t feel right to pray to a greasy napkin. Would that be okay? I realize I know nothing about the religion in which I was supposedly brought up. This is what I get for being a nominal Hindu. I don’t know how to make it real.
    I decide the closest thing to a murti I have in my backpack is the tongue scraper. I’ll just make it a sanctified tongue scraper.
    Now I have all the elements of a puja gathered. I just have to wait for night to fall. I approach the hollow square in the seawall, and for the benefit of anyone watching, act as though I’d just discovered it, making gestures of surprise, curiosity. It’s about a meter on all sides and a meter deep, which, I remember, are the dimensions of each Trail scale. I climb in. It’s midday, so it’s hot and wet. I lie on my back with my knees bent and look up at my concrete ceiling. I put my backpack under my head as a pillow. I look out over the jacks, across the water, toward the Tata complex. I close my eyes. I haven’t really slept in days. The voices of those above me, calling in Marathi, Chinese, Hindi, English, and Urdu begin to blend in the heat and make a sunlight lullaby.

    The Trail becomes sentient, like a great sea snake, and wants to know how it was made.
    The Trail wrangles itself out of the bay and onto land, blocking traffic on Marine Drive, slithering like a steel dragon to the doors of HydraCorp, which panics and calls the military, which drops in with helicopters and guns and shoots at it, calling for it to desist. It’s a disaster. The Trail, badly wounded, retreats back into the ocean and disappears beneath the waves.
    The engineers at HydraCorp hold a press conference, looking tired. They announce they’ve decided not to make efforts to catch it. It has its own life now. It just wants to be left alone.
    So the Trail travels all the world’s oceans, deep as the undersea shipping routes, where it causes some disruption, but the world is gently disposed toward the Trail and so its bumblings are tolerated. It’s just lonely, they say.
    The Trail becomes an object of lore. There are sightings reported off the coast of Japan. Fishwaalas wake up in the cold star glimmer and where there had been nothing the night before, there’s the Trail, a long skinny tongue splayed in the harbor. Some consider it a blessing and others, an omen. One day a segment gets trapped in Sydney Harbor and picnickers gather to watch maintenance crews untangle and reassemble it. The Trail bears this indignity and, once whole again, retreats into the deep.
    Some who see it can’t shake it from their minds. They become obsessed. They push pins onto a map and hold conventions at hotels in small cities. And then there’s a rumor of a young grieving woman who swims out to meet it and is received. She becomes the mother of the race of the drowned.
    From then on, the Trail goes from shore to shore and more people come. They form towns and then entire cities along its length. The city at the end of the tail is used to being thrashed, like the tip of a whip. It’s where the most fashionably drowned spend their nights, among bright colored lights, watching the ocean floor flick by, gossiping about the residents at the head of the Trail, which is the seat of government.
    But even the race of the drowned outgrows their host. They depart for other adventures—condos in calderas, or houseboats on the moon. The Trail becomes a ghost of its former self, and when the last inhabitant finally