The Last Fuchka

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THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION

I was scratching my asshole with a wet dishcloth when my daughter called through her locked bedroom door, “A little higher.”

I stopped.

“Why did you stop?”

The cloth dripped between my heels. We had eaten dinner off plates I had dried with it. That was what I thought about first, the plates, because apparently there was still some part of me available for being disgusted with the rest.

“What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing. My gum hurts.”

She was twenty-four. There were things we were allowed to be embarrassed about separately.

I washed the cloth, hid it under a bucket, and asked whether she had another sleeping pill.

It was Maha Ashtami. I had slept forty minutes since Monday.

The doctor had said pinworms. He had said it loudly, with three people behind me waiting to explain their own failures of hygiene. Tablets, clean bedding, wash your hands. Did I handle food?

I said I drove a van.

I had been selling fuchka outside the same school for nineteen years. My daughter, Mou, had learned arithmetic counting the shells that broke before I could sell them. When her mother died, she sat beside my cart for a month, studying under its battery light because neither of us wanted to go home first.

So yes, I handled food. I also owed rent. I managed to convince myself these were competing medical facts.

I closed the stall the following evening. Not immediately. I would like to put immediately here.

Before closing, I gave Mou the last fuchka.

She had come to bring me home. A customer had been shouting that someone from our lane had worms, that all these fellows washed their hands in the same bucket, and Mou stood in front of him and ate it.

“Happy?” she asked him, chewing.

I remember wanting to kiss her forehead. I remember wanting her to spit it out. I did neither.

Now, in our kitchen, she opened her mouth for me.

Her lower gum was swollen behind the incisors. Something pale lay along it, like a strand of wet thread. I tilted the torch on my phone.

The strand tilted too.

“Food,” I said.

“Then take it out.”

I couldn’t make myself touch it.

She went to the sink. As she turned the tap, my throat made a hard swallowing motion. Nothing in it. It swallowed again, so forcefully that I grabbed the counter.

Mou was looking at me in the steel plate propped behind the tap.

Her throat moved with mine.

She shut the water off. We stood there waiting for our bodies to finish.

By morning, the television had stopped making jokes about the Ashtami Itch.

A water supplier had been arrested. The footage showed a man I knew by sight, the little fellow who stood beside the delivery driver and asked about our children. I had thought he was the driver’s father.

Police said a criminal group had contaminated water supplied to fuchka vendors. There had been demands for money, claims that only the group possessed a treatment. A laboratory designation appeared on the screen: EV-9.

The reporter kept saying modified parasite. Behind her, someone had overturned a cart and was kicking the owner while two men held him down.

Mou asked which supplier I used.

I pointed at the screen.

She didn’t ask why I hadn’t told the doctor.

I told her anyway. It was worse doing it without being asked.

While I spoke, she pressed her tongue against a lower tooth. It lifted slowly, stayed upright for a moment on a pink string, then fell into her palm.

There was no blood until she touched the hole.

Then there was enough that we left without locking the door.

At Medical College, a nurse gave Mou gauze and told her not to swallow it. People occupied the floor between the beds. Several had their hands inside their trousers. Nobody looked at them. That was the first kindness I noticed.

A woman beside us held a steel bowl containing teeth. Seventeen, her husband told everyone. She had gone to bed with them. Some had still had roots attached when he picked them off the pillow.

“Dentist said nothing wrong yesterday.”

He repeated it whenever anybody passed, as though the correct person would hear this and put them back.

Mou sat on my folded towel. I wanted to lie down beside her. I could have slept on the tiles if somebody had promised me ten minutes without the itch. It was high in my abdomen now, somewhere no hand could reach, and there was a worse feeling beneath it: the conviction that another inch of pressure would do it. One more inch.

I pressed until I vomited into my mask.

Mou took it off for me. She didn’t say anything about that either.

A young doctor called Sen examined our mouths. When she pressed beneath Mou’s jaw, the woman with the bowl began gagging.

Dr. Sen removed her hand.

The gagging stopped.

She looked at the woman, then at Mou, and pressed again.

This time all three of us gagged.

She stopped examining us. I disliked her much more for that than I had for hurting us.

That night, a man returned from surgery with a dressing across his abdomen. He was still unconscious. His wife sat holding his hands because he kept trying to scratch underneath the bed.

At two in the morning, the dressing began lifting.

Not soaking through. Lifting, a little ridge traveling beneath the adhesive. His wife pushed it down. His fingers dug into her wrist.

Across the room, Mou clamped a hand over her stomach.

The woman with the bowl said, very quietly, “Please ask her not to do that.”

The man’s wife had not heard. She kept smoothing the dressing. Finally I got up and held her hand away from it.

Four people thanked me.

By Navami, the taps in our ward had been tied shut.

A cleaner forgot and opened one at the far end. Patients rose from the floor before they had properly woken. A man with a broken hip tried to stand. Mou walked into a bed rail hard enough to bruise both thighs and kept pushing against it.

I held her from behind. My own feet were moving. I was holding her back and taking us forward, and I could not decide which of these things I meant to do.

The cleaner closed the tap.

Mou sagged against me. Under my forearm, her abdomen kept pushing, in short independent contractions, as though she was laughing without breathing.

She asked me to check whether she had wet herself.

She had. She cried about that after everything else, about the wet patch and whether anyone had seen, and I told her nobody had. People had. I had watched them look away.

We were all getting good at it.

Someone showed Dr. Sen a video of people gathered around closed fuchka stalls. They weren’t shouting or trying to steal anything. They stood with their mouths open above the empty water drums. One man wore a hospital gown.

I recognized my cart in the next video.

Six people were touching it. A woman had her face inside the place where I kept the shells.

Mou asked me to turn it off.

“I keep thinking we’re supposed to be there,” she whispered.

I had been thinking the same thing. It had felt like worrying about my livelihood.

The police brought another patient in that afternoon. They handcuffed him to a bed and posted a constable beside him. He had scratches so deep along his neck that yellow tissue showed through them.

He was the biologist from the laboratory. I recognized his face from the news, although the lower half had changed. His chin hung against his chest. He held it up with both hands whenever he wanted to speak.

The constable told us not to approach him.

Nobody could have approached him. We were packed so closely that his bare foot already rested against my knee.

Dr. Sen asked about the treatment.

“It stopped the itching,” he said.

“What else?”

“They ate. They slept.”

“What happened afterward?”

He started crying. His foot rubbed against my knee, faster and faster.

One of the policemen said the other three men from the laboratory were dead. The biologist wouldn’t look at him.

“We thought the quiet ones were better,” he said.

Dr. Sen crouched so he could see her without lifting his chin.

“Were there fewer organisms?”

He shook his head.

“Then why did you think that?”

He looked at her with such exhausted dislike that, for a second, I understood him. She was asking him to go back to the moment when he could still have admitted something.

“They said they felt better.”

Later, Dr. Sen brought a sheet of paper to our bed. There were sketches of throats on it. She held it against her chest rather than showing us.

“Some patients are developing folds of new tissue. Different structures in different people. They respond when we touch tissue in other patients. You’ve felt that yourselves.”

Mou asked whether the worms were eating us.

“They’re changing the tissue around them.”

“Into what?”

Dr. Sen sat down on the floor beside us.

That frightened me more than any answer she could have given.

“We keep counting patients,” she said. “I don’t think that’s how this thing works.”

From the next bed, the biologist said, “Cocoons.”

Mou made a small angry sound.

“Shut him up. Please.”

I wanted to hit him. I had to wait until his foot moved off my knee because I knew, without needing to test it, whose pain I would feel.

Before dawn on Dashami, Mou made me promise to wake her if the itching stopped.

The biologist had gone quiet an hour earlier. The constable thought he was dead until something bumped up beneath the skin of his throat and held there.

Mou could still speak, carefully, through the gauze. She had lost four more teeth. I kept them in the zippered pocket where I usually put change.

“Even if I’m sleeping properly,” she said.

I promised.

Then she asked about the last fuchka.

“Were you already sick?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes stayed on mine. I began explaining about the doctor, how ordinary he had made it sound, the tablets, and stopped because she knew all that, I had already used every one of those words in front of her.

“You could have dropped it,” she said.

I sat beside her with my hand over the pocket of teeth.

Outside, a loudspeaker tested the same two seconds of a song. There was a long break, then the two seconds again.

At 10:17, the itch stopped.

I saw the time on my phone because I had been counting how long I could keep my hands still.

The relief was so complete that I smiled before I remembered the promise.

Mou smiled back.

Then she grabbed my wrist and drove her fingernails into it. She was trying to make me understand that she was frightened. Her face would not cooperate.

Under her jaw, a bulge grew to the size of an egg.

The nurse shouted for oxygen. A patient laughed. It was a short, embarrassed laugh, the sound somebody makes when they have farted during something solemn.

Mou’s remaining lower teeth tipped outward together.

I put my hand beneath her chin. They fell into it with a piece of gum still joining them.

Something smooth filled the space behind her tongue. It pushed forward slowly. A thick, wet cuff emerged between her lips, pink on the outside, almost white within. Small blood vessels ran along it. It was made of her. I could see the little brown mark from inside her lower lip stretched along its edge.

The cuff opened.

Across the ward, others opened with it.

The woman beside us bent toward Mou. Her husband pulled her back by the shoulders, but her neck kept extending. The skin beneath her chin split in a straight line. She made no sound.

I shoved her away.

Mou convulsed.

The pressure hit my own chest so hard I thought someone had knelt on it. For several seconds none of us could breathe. The woman’s husband let go.

The two wet cuffs touched.

Their edges fastened together in a series of tiny contractions. I heard each one: a wet click, then a brief sucking sound.

Mou inhaled.

The woman’s chest rose.

I could feel the air entering both of them. I could also feel a cold floor under a foot that wasn’t touching our floor, a fractured hip, the constable’s handcuff cutting a wrist. There were more places to hurt than I could find. Some were outside the ward. Some were wet.

Mou’s hand slipped out of mine.

Her eyes were open. I said her name into her ear. She moved when the woman moved. I couldn’t find anything she was doing by herself.

I tried to separate the joined tissue.

Her chest stopped moving. So did mine. All around me hands reached for my hands.

I let go.

Breath returned, warm and sour. With it came a need to sleep so strong I nearly fell onto her. Somewhere in what I could feel, Mou was still frightened. I knew the particular way she curled her toes when she was trying not to cry. Several feet were doing it now.

I told her I was there.

I don’t know where I meant.

Another cuff pressed against the corner of her mouth. There wasn’t room. Her cheek stretched white. The need to help her filled me with the same certainty as thirst, and I was so tired, I wanted her to rest, I wanted us both to rest.

I put my thumb into my daughter’s mouth, the way I opened a fuchka, and tore the hole a little wider.