Where one dream ended, another began; when the ship emptied onto Appleton Dock, Maha clung to her father’s shoulder and stared across Port Melbourne to the silhouette of the city. A queue of burly factory workers waited beside the barge, counting and measuring the barrels of petroleum, and as her father limped across the planks with his hand outstretched, the salty air made her weep, a rolling howl that echoed between the trucks and startled the plump men with their clipboards and upturned eyebrows. Her father hobbled across the docks, scowling, shaking her with both hands. ‘Just please shut it up,’ he said. They passed sheds, piles of timber and a red and white radio tower flashing in the fog. They walked along the Yarra under the purple sunrise. The shops were still closed, the cobblestoned laneways clear and the offices shut. Her father collapsed under the clocks at Flinders Street Station, dragging clods of dirt out of his shaggy hair, rubbing his sunken eyes, staring for hours at the happy drunks outside the Young and Jackson Hotel, like a man who had fallen through the bottom of his grave. ‘Alive, but not well,’ he said. ‘Awake, but out of place.’ They climbed the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and Maha’s eyes widened at the echo of the priest’s voice. ‘Let all these poor migrants never forget,’ he said, ‘that at heart we are a good Christian nation.’ Then the organs boomed, the choir wailed and Maha bawled against her father’s shoulder blades. He pulled her down to his chest and she wriggled over his singlet, searching for his nipples, but when she tried to feed not a drop of milk eked over her lips. ‘Please, little one,’ he said, as the parishioners shifted in the candlelit pews. ‘Why so many tears all of a sudden?’ Her father hung her under his singlet and they bounded across town to Queen Victoria Market. ‘Come in off a flight, have you, boy-o?’ said a man who was cleaning his clippers on his apron. ‘Just looking,’ said her father, leaving Maha on a wooden table and trudging into the crowd. ‘Gee, looks like big brother’s not in a good way,’ said the man, tickling Maha’s tummy. ‘Youse are Indian? Paki? No worries, bub. Welcome to Melbourne. Hope she treats you alright.’ The man slid a bottle of milk across the table, the glass cold against Maha’s cheek, and the shock set her face in a smile. Her father returned with some bread and a few biscuits. ‘Best you stay away from this child,’ he said to the man. ‘She is some kind of divine disappointment.’ He swept up Maha, thrust the bottle of milk under his arm and hurried through the market. ‘On the house, my gift to youse,’ said the man. ‘Kids are the future, mate. She could be the next Mahatma Gandhi, you never know. Can’t write off anyone in this town.’
They squatted in a flat on Swan Street and ate brown bread with white sugar. Every morning, her father covered Maha in tartan sheets, hid her in the cupboard, then disappeared down the street. She cooed in the dark, yearning to be with him, to nestle against his chest. He would return each night with his face knotted, his fingers kneading his crotch. ‘Not one doctor,’ he said, ‘not a single surgeon. No one has any alternative. No solution, none.’ Not once did he want to play; he was only in need, it seemed, of the echoes of his lone voice. Soon he started murmuring about finding work, returning each evening with his hands smeared with oil. ‘So much of loss, little one,’ he said. ‘My sadness, so much for them to handle. One day they will see I am not like them, not another Aussie, not another top bloke. From the bottom, then, I tell you. Without home or family or trust in god. But from the bottom comes patience, see, and cunning.’ He poured her shots of milk, broke bread crusts for himself and limped in circles around the flat. Sometimes she woke to see him crying, or biting his lip as he hovered by the cupboard, or circling his hands over his belly. After two months, her father returned from working on the streets, pulled Maha from the cupboard, hefted her over his shoulder and hurried into the night. They walked back to Swanston Street, down by the arcades along Flinders Street and stopped before a boarded-up garage. ‘Garagewallah says owner of the best chop shop has skipped town. Melbourne needs a new coolie to carry the flame,’ he said, ‘and no police would ever suspect me, na, this young man so fresh off his boat.’ Her father opened the chop shop there and then, in the middle of the night. He coiled the cord of the shop vac into a makeshift cradle, placing her inside, then tightened the pneumatic lines and sealed the rubber leaks. Over the next few weeks, he took hundreds of discarded books from Cash Converters and piled them around the basement for insulation. Encyclopaedias and atlases lined the brick walls. Physics textbooks and world histories towered around her bed. With her body heat trapped under the cement ceiling, Maha rocked from side-to-side, squinting at the spines of the novels. Every Saturday for two years, her father took her on his rounds of the city, passing cash and papers to men in black leather coats, their faces lit by the embers of Pall Mall cigarettes as they warbled in their avian accents. Sometimes they met the clients at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, where the city folk gathered to watch the footy, a rough-and-tumble, free-for-all game seemingly without rules, played by men with the torsos of weightlifters and the long limbs of marathon runners. The sport was brutal, like a gladiator contest, and as they roared from the stands, the locals’ faces reddened and their weekday nonchalance faded. Oblivious to her father’s wheeling and dealing, Maha left the stadium with ringing ears, her fingertips splitting as she clapped to the rhythms of the footy fans, those lifelong devotees in scarfs and beanies. At home, she curled in the shop vac cord or crawled between the repaired motorcycles, while her father ran the garage, eighteen hours a day, through migraine headaches, winter viruses and blisters on his toes. He poisoned the mice that hid in the walls, crushed the spiders with his broom and beat the possums out of her bed with his bare hands. ‘It is no wonder this place is full of brutish animals,’ he said. ‘In a country of such degenerate men, their reincarnate forms could be no better.’ In spite of all his scorn for the locals, word of this subcontinental workaholic spread in cafes and bars. First came the amateurs, in need of honest repairs for their Nortons or Triumphs. Then came the clandestine gangs, who needed to disassemble their outlawed rides and pawn the parts, who gave her father extra to break the steering lock and grind the VIN off the forks. They always paid in cash. Trust was established and her father’s reputation grew.Each night, after locking the roller door and swaddling Maha in her sheets, he sat against his sacks of cash, plumping them like pillows. Then he opened his newest magazine, ignoring Maha’s murmurs for attention, and followed those faraway sentences further into silence.
Maha spent the next few years pressing her face to the window, staring past her round cheeks and curly hair at the silhouettes on the street. Women clasped their daughters’ hands as they crossed the road. Men bounced their little girls on their shoulders as they walked. She crept upstairs to the garage and tied her arms around her father’s waist, but he only huffed and shook her off to focus on his chores. She felt sad that she was not a normal daughter, that she had no mother who would listen to her, but she didn’t want to bother her father, so she kept her sorrows to herself. One day, enchanted by the city beyond the basement, she took a ten-dollar note from one of her father’s sacks and snuck outside, wandering for hours between the crowds of businessmen, their faces hidden in broadsheet newspapers, and past salons where women dyed their hair pink and red and peroxide blonde. She watched the girls in their lessons at the outdoor swimming pools, their sun-drenched bodies shivering in one-piece suits, and followed them to choir recitals, and picnics, and to a cafe where their mothers waited with desserts on shining plates. She waited in line and bought the treats for herself: pavlovas, lamingtons, chocolate biscuits, vanilla scrolls, hot jam doughnuts. She liked to close her eyes and let the sugar ooze over her tongue and settle on the ridges of her teeth. ‘But, darling,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘where’s your mum? You can’t be loitering in here.’ Maha opened her eyes; of course, she was alone in the cafe. Trudging back to the chop shop, she wondered where her own mother was waiting. When would she arrive, after all this time, and guide Maha home? Away, she thought, far away from the loneliness that lined these streets and darkened the four corners of the basement. That evening, she scrambled out of bed and wailed until the walls shook. ‘Where is she?’ she said. ‘Mother, when will she come?’ ‘Please quiet,’ said her father, wiping his thumb across her wet cheeks. ‘Just wait. Let me show you. Here, your mother’s love.’ He leafed through a Yamaha manual, tracing her fingers over the letters and pronouncing their sounds, and as she copied him, the words held her in a state of grace, a kind of knowing she had never had before. Her tears dried. She opened an atlas, tracing her fingers over the borders of the continents, the curves of the tectonic plates, the shores of the widest oceans. ‘Good,’ he said, opening a pulp story magazine, ‘better than expected. All natural ability, and more.’ Over the next sleepless weeks, she sang poems, mulling each syllable over her tongue, revering every stanza she uttered. She read ancient scriptures from every corner of the Earth, the histories of divinities, of those who destroyed cities, or spread enlightenment, or faced only ridicule and torture. She learned that all beings came and went out of this form and into the next. And yet she found that books held infinite worlds within their pages, that writers were gods who wrote other humans into being, that every creator would find her readers, her true believers amid the loneliness of her life. Soon she brought her favourite sweets back from the cafes and read for hours in the dark, embraced by this presence she could not see. She munched her pastries with glee, ignoring the lives of the other Melburnians, of the other daughters she would never be.
The Degenerates can be found here.