In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Thirst
  • Geeta Kothari (bio)

By the time the first small British community was established in Bombay, five of the original seven islands were already interconnected at low tide by shallow sandbanks, silted up over the years . . . By 1730, land reclamation, carried out under supervision of the British, had permanently united the five islands into a single mass and large earth works had been thrown up to prevent a major invasion by the sea . . .

Dom Moraes, Bombay

The people living on these islands were mainly fishermen. They worshipped the Goddess Mumba Devi after whom Bombay is named. Gradually, the shallow waters between these islands were filled so as to connect the seven islands into a large one.

Swarn Khandpur, India: The Land and Its People

In the photo, my father stands in front of a blooming red hibiscus, framed by pink bougainvillea. The sun bleaches the ground beneath his feet, makes the leaves of the hibiscus shine, as if they have just been polished. Holding his arms out from his sides, my father is a bird about to take flight. He wears gray suit pants, a short-sleeved shirt, and a dark blue tie: his idea of vacation wear. In his left hand, he clutches a clear plastic bag that probably contains maps and brochures. His curly black hair springs from his head in mild shock, and he smiles widely, his eyes hidden by square-framed glasses.

Or does he?

I always thought my father was just smiling until a friend saw the photo and dubbed him “laughing man.” Of course, he was laughing, his mouth wide open, his teeth showing slightly. He laughed more than he smiled, the [End Page 39] smile itself a prelude to a deep belly laugh brought on by something my sister or I said or did.

And I felt embarrassed, standing next to my friend, as if I should have known he was laughing, not smiling, should have heard the familiar guffaw. I had been looking at the wrong thing: the arms like wings, weighed down only by the bag in his left hand.

* * *

Although Bombay is a city that starts work late in the day, we rarely slept past six. The screeching koyal, the incessant cawing of crows, and the tinkle of bicycle bells as people made their way to work woke us every morning at sunrise despite the closed windows and air conditioning. In those early hours of the morning, we often heard the pickers sifting through the garbage for plastic bottles. Above the cacophony of street noise and wildlife, I heard the early morning call to prayers, issued over a loudspeaker from the mosque down the road. The men in the alley continued to reclaim the bottles we may have discarded the night before.

“They’re looking for your bottles,” I said. My husband, a firm believer in recycling, did not like to crush the empty Bisleri bottles we discarded. He did not share my concerns about the way these bottles would be recycled.

Bottled water, especially in rural areas, is not trustworthy. Recycling the empties by filling them with tap water (or worse) and resealing the cap is a small business that starts with the picker who sorts through the mounds of garbage and sells the old bottles to a middleman, who refills and distributes them as new. My husband’s guidebook suggested that our fears about tap water, in the cities anyway, were exaggerated, that the worst we could expect from it was a “minor dose of the shits” for a couple of days.

For my father, illness was never minor. Growing up in pre-penicillin, pre-vaccine India, he had seen people die from unexplained fevers, unidentified infections, mysterious aches that never went away. Grandparents who died from bubonic plague, cousins who died from dehydration, brought on by a dose of amoebic dysentery.

The guidebook had no such stories. Its pages did not talk about people like my cousin and her husband, both doctors, and their kids, who got so sick on their last visit to Bombay that they had to use IV drips. My father assumed that we understood the seriousness of IV drips, even if we didn...

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