Make Shift: Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

10 A Necessary Being ^{Indrapramit Das}

Brishti had a memory that seemed unreal but wasn’t, of an army of giants carrying an entire forest on their shoulders and backs. She couldn’t remember her mother, but she remembered this. The giants had carried the forest to the city, and pounded old roads with their great fists, tearing asphalt and concrete like cloth, filling trenches with fresh soil to plant the trees they’d carried.

People watched from the valley of buildings around them, many wearing face masks. Some shook their heads or shouted as they watched their roads vanish. Others clapped and cheered as they watched the forest come to their plague-haunted city, to bear fruit and breathe for its choked denizens. Brishti couldn’t remember who had held her in that moment, listening to the tolling of their fists, warned to keep a distance by the flashing lights on their bodies.

One of those giants would become Brishti’s father.

It was well into the age of plagues that Brishti was born again. It was a time of warnings, of sirens blaring across the skies, alerts sparking across networks to warn people of pandemics, wildfires, superstorms, flocks and swarms that darkened the sky in panic. The streets of Kolkata were emptier than they had been for centuries, with most of its millions huddled at home or in rows of garibaris, old fossil-fueled cars reclaimed as interim homes for those who didn’t have any. Hundreds of thousands had vanished to overcrowded crematoriums, ghats, and burial grounds.

During superstorms, the roads were rivers. As one of these cyclones roared into the megacity from the Bay of Bengal, unhindered by the sunken Gangetic delta, a lone child clung to a bobbing branch in one of those rivers. She shouldn’t have survived that maelstrom, but some atavistic impulse, some holy hope, had kept her clinging to that branch, saved only by her scant malnourished weight on the shattered tree limb. As the child tumbled through the city on her branch, the wind strengthening with each passing second, she floated near a giant who stood in the waters, epaulettes of light flashing on its shoulders and bursting in starry spray across the flowing floods and rain-slashed air.

The giant saw her.

The giant swept one great arm down and snatched her off the branch, taking the child to their chest as a mere man might hold a tiny kitten found in a gutter. And the giant’s chest opened up to reveal their beating brown heart—a man, who took from the giant’s hands the child, his skin quickly shone by the rain to match the gleam of his new charge. The giant’s glass-webbed ribs shut again, to seal in their confines man and child, as well as the little girl’s first memory of the new life she was hurled into by the storm. It was, perhaps, a memory only imagined later when her father told her how it had happened—the memory of her first time inside the giant, from cold to the warm gush of the giant’s breath against her, steam fogging the panes of their transparent chest, the earthy smell of the man’s soaked limbs holding her to his chest, the softly blinking lights that lined the inside of her great savior as they stood waiting. “You’re safe, you’re safe,” the man told her over and over again, like the words of a song.

He would tell her often that he’d had named her Brishti, rain, right then and there, rain outside lashing the giant’s skin, rain inside running down their skin and turning to fog on instruments and windows. Brishti knew he hadn’t named her in that moment. It didn’t matter—it was true in the same way that he was that being of ultra-strong but lightweight metal and carbon fiber that had rescued her. In that moment she was born Brishti, daughter of a giant and a superstorm, even if neither of them knew it yet. He wiped the caul of rain from her dazed face and smiled at her for the first time.

THE GIANT SPENT THAT NIGHT WALKING THE STORM-LASHED CITY, REMOVING FALLEN trees, cables, and posts from the street, their outer body sometimes sparking when live wires shocked it, dimming the lights inside.

Brishti spent that night curled against the giant’s heart, sat in his lap, shivering despite the heat inside, which the man had turned up to dry the both of them, having no clothes to replace her tattered t-shirt and shorts. He’d wrapped a threadbare blanket and towel around her.

The giant waded Kolkata’s streets, sweeping searchlights across the waves and hurtling squalls. The giant’s heart lent the girl the heat of his blood as he piloted his greater body, his arms moving in comforting concert with the limbs outside, the wired braces around his limbs sometimes pushing against her with a comforting assurance. She had no mask. She could have been infected with any number of the novel pathogens scouring the world, her foreign body a hazard to the greater one of the giant and their heart. But the giant’s heart kept her in their shelter, let her arms unfurl slowly from a tight curl against her chest to an embrace around his torso, cold hands tucked between his back and his seat, head against his ribs. She was the rain against his chest. Inside, outside. She could hear his heart beat, even above the hum and hiss of the giant’s sinews, the roar of raindrops against their body.

THE NEXT DAY, BRISHTI WATCHED HER RESCUER HELP CLEAR THE STORM-STRUCK megacity with other giants, all the while sitting in his lap. She learned the face of the giant’s heart by light of day—his fearsome but graying muttonchop beard, insomniac eyes bloodshot, bald pate always glistening with sweat, heralding a surprising ponytail of curly hair tied with a rubber band. His white tank top was grayed by extensive use.

They never had direct contact with other humans, only seeing giants and vehicles, or people, in the distance, at their windows, descending up or down the mountainous spires of multi-stories on tensor cables from their balconies, tending to the vertical gardens hanging off the buildings. It came back to her, this land recreated by the giants—roads turned to forested paths and groves, buildings forming verdant vales and geometric hills bejeweled with windows, the distances of emptiness given to the city by the plagues filling with vegetation. The giants had wandered Kolkata like gods, transforming the land, grasping in their titanic hands an opportunity to draw the wilderness back to cool the Earth’s raging fever.

Brishti watched keenly through the giant’s transparent chest, as their hands righted the fallen trees that could be salvaged, and embedded their exposed roots into heaped earth again, packing the soil around their trunks. Around her, the man’s smaller arms moved in the same way, hands dark and calloused like the bark of those trees he was restoring, but so delicate in their movements. His body of flesh and blood looked frail in comparison to the one that enclosed them, his limbs tough but wiry.

They never left the inside of the giant, though it began to stink of damp. Brishti wondered if they would be inside the chest forever, watching the city pass by. The giant spoke to the other giants through their instruments, voices crackling disembodied over speakers, coordinating efforts. Sometimes, the cousins of the giants—solar and biofuel cars and lorries—passed by along the roads, cousins also to the still rows of garibaris. Reformed like the giants themselves were—some had been used for military and police, in past lives. As Brishti watched the city, she knew that it was her home, though she had no other clear memories of her life before, except of the giants planting the trees that were everywhere. The storm, or something else, had knocked them out of her head.

Sometimes masked people came out of buildings, and walked out into the roads to give thanks to the giants. They came with offerings of fruit and vegetables from the rooftop gardens of their high-rises—capsicum, tomatoes, apples, mangoes, cucumbers. The giant would squat low to respect these pilgrims. The civilians would wave through the glass, brush their palms against the giant’s limbs, and leave their offerings of food in a small mouth below the giant’s chest, which was flipped open from the instrument panel inside. Offerings to gods. Brishti remembered this. This was the country they lived in. Giants were gods too, in some of the stories. The giant swallowed these offerings. But inside, the giant’s heart ate nothing. So Brishti ignored the gnawing in her gut. She drank from the water tap he’d shown her among the instruments.

Brishti didn’t speak. The heart needed to beat, so the giant would move and help the people of the city, the ones inside their garibaris and high-rises and ancient crumbling houses that had survived the age of development by donating their plots of land to reforestation, their centuries-old structures hidden by trees. It was work that required a deep attention.

As the sun receded behind the city, windows began to glow through the foliage trailing down from rooftop farms and gardens and snaring the remnants of useless billboards whose faces wept with rust. The roads and paths of Kolkata glistened in the firefly glow of alor gach, the bioluminescent trees and plants that had replaced most streetlamps, their light-flecked leaves giving the impression of stars rustling close enough to touch.

In the quiet, under a sky ripped cloudless and moon-shot after the storm, the giant came to rest at the shore of one of the many streams and canals of Kolkata, which were only a few years or decades old at most. Along the water, there were garibaris parked in their permanent spots, solar-powered lights glimmering behind their brightly curtained windows, the shadows of their residents flitting like moths trapped in paper lanterns.

The humming of the giant’s body died down. Insects drummed against the glass of their chest, a stringed charm of dried chilis and lemons twirling in front of the panes. The giant’s heart picked Brishti up off his lap and sat her down in the extra seat next to his. She looked nervous to finally leave his lap. He pushed a lever on the instrument panel.

The ribs of the giant’s chest hissed open a little, letting a cool draught of air inside.

“You can speak, child?” the giant’s heart asked, turning to her. “You understand Bangla?”

She nodded.

“Do you have a name?”

She said nothing.

“That’s alright. What about a home I can take you back to?”

She shook her head.

“You are lost.”

She nodded.

“And found,” he peered at her. “Do you remember anything? That the world is sick? That you should stay away from people?”

She nodded.

“Good. Good. This,” he waved his arm. “This is a mekha. I, too, am mekha. You understand this?”

She nodded.

“The mekha allows me to be one with god, so I may give service to the people of Kolkata, help them in this age of plagues. Our bodies,” he patted his chest. “They can’t protect us. But this body can. It is an emanation of god. In here, you are safe. You are one with god.”

She said nothing.

“Ah! Are you hungry?” he said, and his stomach growled to follow his words.

She giggled.

He smiled at her. “I am a fool. I forget not everyone is like me. I have been alone for a long time. I go long hours without eating, you know… when I am one with my mekha. Look at me babbling. Words won’t fill your little stomach.”

He freed himself of the braces that connected him to the giant’s body, collapsing them with practiced movements and letting them hang in the air above the seat. “Remember the food those people gave the mekha? It is their thanks. Now we eat it.” He played with his instrument panel, his fingers dancing across the mystery of switches. Something hissed and clanked in the guts of the giant. He bent down and opened a hatch below the console, revealing a cache of fruits and vegetables fed to the giant by grateful people over the day. There was a citrus scent of disinfectant in the air. He handed Brishti an apple, and took one himself, biting into it. Brishti did the same, juice squirting on to her dirty face.

“You’re… a boy or a girl?”

Brishti paused as if to think about this, and nodded.

“Boy?”

She shook her head.

“Girl. Of course. Stupid me.”

She crunched on the apple.

“Do you have a… a mother and father?”

The words tumbled out of her mouth with bits of half-chewed apple, as if she hadn’t been silent all day, her voice small and cracked in the tight space of the giant’s chest, assertive in its desperation: “You are my father.”

He looked at her, his chewing stilled.

She continued devouring her apple, not looking at him. As if she were suddenly afraid of looking at him, for fear that he wasn’t actually there.

He tapped her shoulder gently. He noticed the tears rolling down her cheeks now, mingling with the juice on her lips, salt and sugar that she licked quietly. She concentrated on the apple, and nothing but the apple, taking huge chunks out of it with her teeth. He waited a moment, and tapped her shoulder again. She looked at him fearfully with her big brown eyes.

“You are right,” he said, softly. “I am your father. By god’s grace, I am your father.”

The giant’s body pinged in the silence as it cooled. The girl looked down at her mostly eaten apple. Her hands were shaking.

“I remember you,” she said, voice wavering.

“You do?” he asked cautiously.

“I saw you and the other giants carry the forest on your shoulders. You planted it in the city.”

He looked out of the giant’s ribs. Indeed, there it was—the “forest,” entwined into the labyrinth of the city. He and all the mekhas in Kolkata had walked hundreds of kilometers across Bengal to a tree farm and transplanted the harvest to the city, replacing smaller streets with groves, seeding the empty spaces of fields, racetracks, golf greens, and club lawns into forest land for new villages of public housing. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since that great march, carrying young trees like umbrellas against their shoulders, along endless highways emptied by the age of plagues. It had been one of many marches, performed over decades, before he became a mekha. The last one had been five, six years ago, maybe. The girl was older than he’d expected, if she could remember that. He barely remembered Kolkata when it was less reclaimed by forest, when cars moved in armies down the streets like he and his fellow mekhas had during the forestation march, when people flooded the footpaths like water did after the storms. Like his parents. People who, in another time, would have had to risk death and walk thousands of kilometers to their distant villages, when pandemics hit and they were left with no jobs or help by uncaring governments. His parents had no giants to walk for them on those harsh migrations, no free housing to give them shelter, not even makeshift villages of repurposed cars, no urban forest from which to gather communal food.

“We moved the forest,” he agreed.

“Because you are a giant,” said the girl. The apple in her hands was whittled to its core.

“Are you scared of me?” he asked. After all, the word she used, daitya, could also mean monster. Perhaps that was what the word father meant to her, he thought, with fear in his heart.

She shook her head. He couldn’t tell if there were still tears fresh on her cheeks, because her face was so grubby.

“You don’t mind being a giant’s daughter?” he asked, his body heavy with exhaustion, limbs aching from the work of the day. He hadn’t been this close to another human being in a long time. He had never shared this space inside his mekha with another, ever.

She shook her head again.

His relief was so palpable that he had to wait a moment before he spoke again. He had never wanted a child. But the thought of sending this girl out beyond the safety of his mekha’s body terrified him, an idea that was a corruption of all the mekha stood for, all he stood for in his place inside it, as a servant of god and of the people of this wounded land. He stood, and reclined both their seats. “Sleep now. You need to rest.”

She leaned back without hesitation, still clinging to the apple core. He took it from her fingers, to add to the biofuel compost cache. She was snoring softly in seconds. He shook his head, cursing his single-minded will, the fact that he hadn’t remembered to let her sleep in the side seat earlier in the day. As a mekha, he had a duty to do the work of repair, rescue, and cleanup after the cyclone. But logic evaded his self-judgment. How could he have not let her sleep or eat, after everything she had been through? He found himself once again struck by a fear—that she would dream of her parents, of her real father and mother, if she had ever known them, and wake and remember them. He shook his head to banish this uncharitable unease.

She jerked awake with a gasp. Her little hand found his larger hand. He enclosed it. “Don’t leave!” she said.

“No. This is my body, my mekha. This is my home. You are part of this body now, as am I. I cannot abandon my body. I will not go anywhere, I promise you,” he said. Her breathing slowed, eyelids drifting down as she fell back to sleep. He unfolded the blanket, and covered her entire body with it. He looked around at his mekha’s chest, the neuronal flicker of its internal lights, its cabled nervous system and hydraulic musculature surrounding them. He wondered whether it too felt this new heart inside their chest. Water glittered on the panes between the mekha’s ribs, catching the soft organic light from the alor gach. The city was calm now.

He was a giant.

The girl was small for her age, from the way she talked, her memory of the march. Probably nine or ten. He touched the wall of the mekha in silent thanks, for being the body it was, for saving this child. For making him into a giant, though he had never felt less like one than in that moment. He felt like an open wound, in a way that awakened his senses.

“By god’s grace. A daughter,” he whispered, looking at the sleeping child. “My daughter.”

TO BRISHTI, THE HEART OF THE GIANT BECAME DAITYA, OR BABA.

Brishti, in all her smallness, became one of the giants.

She was a spark in their solitude during fresh plagues like this one, when the mekha were among the only ones on the roads of Kolkata, along with the rest of what the inside-people called robotlok, the essential workers who ventured outside in smaller exoskeletons and HEV suits that were second skins rather than second bodies. The chatter of the robotlok was constant. They would take job requests from the barirlok, the insiders, over their comms, and joke with each other in between, to stave off loneliness.

As they roamed the city, Brishti sat in her father’s lap, following the movements of his limbs, the giant’s limbs, the dance of his hands across the instruments, learning how he was both heart and brain to the great body that surrounded them. He often repeated that the mekha was an emanation of god. At other times he would point to the stenciled tattoos all over its body in Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Japanese, and explain how it was designed by international technology collectives, made in factories here and owned by the government. But to Brishti, it was clear that the mekha was him. He was the life of the giant, and she learned how this was truth.

She learned to use the tiny toilet embedded in the back of the cockpit, which was attached to a biofuel processor, cleaning it in turns so it didn’t stink.

She learned that the mekha had no religion but their own.

She learned how they bathed out in the open, in forest groves, turning on the mekha’s hose and standing under the giant’s open hands. Daitya would always turn around to give her privacy, asking her to hum loudly so he would know she was right behind him as they scrubbed themselves under the cold spray.

She learned how they made the mekha breathe disinfectant, gushing vapor like breath in winter, trailing clouds of it as they walked the city’s valleys.

She learned how they unfurled the mekha’s solar sails when they were low on biofuel or charge, the absorbent membranes iridescent, reminding her of dragonfly wings.

DAITYA SHOWED BRISHTI THE CITY THE GIANTS HAD MADE ANEW.

The streams the giants had dug with their titanic hands out of old roads no longer used, redirecting the anger of the rising Hooghly, filled with fish they could snatch from the waters and eat after roasting them in the palms of the giant, under the flames of their mounted torch.

The hilly ranges that the giants had raised from the flat land of the city, layering fertile earth over the vast mounds of garbage being digested by microbes in Rajarhat and New Town, stepped villages of huts and terraced farms replacing refuse, peaks graced with the floodlights and huge mesh origami of insect farmers’ traps.

The forests the giants had planted along the arteries and spaces of the city, the groves they had pulled forth from grassy field and torn concrete, where wild deer, horses, and goats were bred, hunted, or tamed by the urban villagers who lived in the bans, the woods of the Maidan, Victoria, and St. Paul’s. Self-repairing biocrete huts and garibari clusters huddled around the old Christian cathedral and the memorial palace to the queen whose empire had once ruled this land. Both buildings were now plague hospitals, and places of worship for people of any and all faiths.

IN HUNTING SEASON, DAITYA SHOWED HIS DAUGHTER THAT ALL BODIES HAVE THEIR potential for violence. In the mekha, in low power mode with all their lights off and engine low, he stalked a cheetal, one of the local deer, through Victoriaban one dusk, when sunset crumbled in gleaming shards through the eaves. When the beautiful creature was in the sights of the giant’s ribs, Brishti’s father raised his hands, and so did the mekha. An invisible volley of hunting darts killed the cheetal instantly.

Daitya regretted this instantly, not because he hadn’t hunted deer before and sold their carcasses to butchers in the Muslim communes of forest villages, but because his daughter burst into inconsolable tears when she realized what had happened to the cheetal.

They carried the cheetal in the giant’s arms to a baner gram, one of the forest villages. There, it was exchanged for leaf-wrapped meals of kebabs and cricket flour roti left in the giant’s mouth. Daitya tried to share the meal with Brishti, but she refused, the meat a reminder of the death they had caused.

In that moment, Daitya remembered clinging to his mother during one of the labor uprisings, so many years before Brishti was born, watching in terror as a giant not unlike the one they sat in sprayed scalding teargas over the crowds, and another swiped a huge hand through them, sending bodies flying like they didn’t matter. They had barely escaped.

“You’re a horrible monster,” said Brishti to him, and to the mekha, no doubt. Daitya. Still the same word she normally used with such joy. Different meaning.

“Brishti. A mekha will never hurt any animal unless the body is used to nourish others. And I would never hurt another person, ever, with my body or that of the mekha. You know that, don’t you?” he asked Brishti as she cried. “Just like the body of god we inhabit, and our bodies, that cheetal’s body is serving a purpose. His body didn’t expire in vain. It goes back to this city, this land. People need to eat. To make clothes and blankets for winter.”

Brishti didn’t acknowledge her father’s words, only begrudgingly snatching the rotis and not the kebabs. He watched her eat through her tears and suppressed a smile. He had lied—he would hurt another person or animal, with his body or that of the mekha, if it meant protecting her. He ate the kebabs as her sniffles died down to a sulk.

In a few years, Brishti would be helping her father target the cheetals during hunting season, and praying over their bodies before their delivery to the village butchers. She would soon deny she had ever refused the kebabs made over the firepits of the city’s bans.

WHEN THEY HAD WANDERED LONG ENOUGH IN SERVICE, THE GIANTS OF KOLKATA returned to the mekha depots scattered throughout the city. There, the mekhas would periodically gather inside cavernous warehouse garages. Workers in gas masks and HEV suits would examine the giants and provide surgery on them if needed, sparks flying like glowing blood, lubricant oil seeping across the floor like bodily fluids, filling the air with an acrid scent. Their disinfectant tanks would be refilled, their backup batteries charged, their bodies trailing cables like hair.

They would usually spend the night at the depots, when all the mekhar hridaya, all the hearts of the giants, would talk to each other over their radios while lounging in the open chests of their mekhas, smoking weed beedis that twinkled in the shadows. Brishti thought it a beautiful sight, all the giants kneeling and quiet, praying in peace while their hearts chattered. Glowing earrings of worklights hung from their sides, illuminating their freshly polished and stencil-tattooed arms in the gloom of the warehouses. During these visits, Daitya would tense up, always holding Brishti’s hand, telling her not to wander off.

Sometimes the other hearts greeted Brishti over the comms. She was an open secret. They knew about her from the radio chatter in the city, but it was only at the depot they saw her clearly. On these rest stops she would wear one of her father’s lungis like a long skirt, instead of her shorts, along with a t-shirt, and she’d tie her now long hair into a braid. She was welcomed by the tribe. They waved from their mekha’s chests and told her father how lucky he was to have found her, with a hint of envy in their voices. But they were loyal to each other, and no one informed the state that one of their own had broken the rules attached to their greater bodies—namely, that they couldn’t share the mekha with anyone else. Luckily for them, the age of plagues had diminished the surveillance networks of governments, broken by the very cataclysms they’d aided by using their billion eyes to look at the wrong things. In this fragile and healing world, trust had far more value than it had in the collapsing time before the age of plagues.

Since Brishti’s father, like all of his lonesome tribe, was mekhar hridaya, the heart of the mekha, Brishti became affectionately known as mekhar atma, the soul of the mekha. Theirs was the giant with both heart and soul.

SOMETIMES DAITYA WOULD BRING THE MEKHA TO THE CRACKED HIGHWAYS BEYOND New Town at night, where the dark green lakes of algae farms glistened under the moon. His hands guiding Brishti’s, they would increase the speed of the mekha together. The giant would run down the open road until the inside of its chest was shaking violently, making Brishti laugh, safely strapped into the seat. The packs of wild dogs who wandered the highways would join the race, howling and barking alongside the pumping mechanical legs of this strange beast, which they knew not to get too close to.

The forest flowed, the city ebbed.

The plagues waned like the shadow of the moon, always sure to return.

AS BRISHTI GREW OLDER, AND HER BODY GREW WITH THE YEARS, THE MEKHA stayed the same size, still a giant but less of one to her. She became, more and more, a part of this god’s body, a twin heart and soul to her father, mimicking his moves, absorbing his knowledge of the being that sheltered them. As she grew more confident inside the mekha, her father grew less confident about the future he had bestowed upon her, wondering if he had imprisoned her in the cramped chest of a giant for all her days. She was a teenager, and deserved a life of less solitude than being one of the mekha.

Whenever he brought this up, she would go silent with rage. Later, she would blame him for trying to get rid of her, the only times she could bring him to tears deliberately. But Brishti couldn’t hide the way she looked at the young people in the villages they delivered supplies to. Daitya recognized the longing in her eyes as she watched them play in the distance, or walk up to the mekha’s open mouth to leave offerings. Sometimes they would look up and wave to Brishti. She would wave back but retreat into the chest of the giant with uncharacteristic shyness.

One day, Daitya asked Brishti, “Do you feel like, living with me, that you’re missing out on being with other children?”

She frowned as if this was an absurd question. “I am mekhar atma,” she put a fist to her chest. “My life is here, I don’t need anything else.”

He smiled at her. “I know. But… it’s normal to want to be with others your age.”

She shrugged and looked away, evening light through the panes of the giant’s chest catching the curve of her cheek. “You aren’t with others your age.” He felt these words, sharper than she realized. “I’m not normal. I’m like you. We live to serve the people of the city.”

“You’re a child, Brishti. You shouldn’t have to live to serve—”

Brishti’s head whipped around, eyes wide. “I’m not a child! We are the heart and soul. We are one with god together here, you said,” she said, her voice wobbling.

“Of course you are. Of course we are, I didn’t—”

“You don’t want me to live with you anymore,” she snapped, eyes shining.

“No,” he pleaded. “I could never think of leaving you. But this is not a space for two people to live in. There are opportunities out there.”

“You are mekhar hridaya. You can never leave this body. It’s your home!” Brishti said, shaking her head. “You told me that, you promised. Which means the only solution is for me to leave.”

“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to think of… of a life outside. Outside this giant. I helped build this city, with its forests, these rivers and villages, with this giant. It is not like when I was small, and those without wealth would be doomed to die on the roads, or work for nothing. There are forests to live off, villages to settle and lend your labor to, where you could meet others your age, and grow with them.”

“I will not leave the giant that saved me. The giant won’t abandon me, even if you will, Baba,” she said, not hearing him at all, because she was a teenager, and terrified of losing him.

“Okay, I am sorry,” he said, over and over, and didn’t bring it up again. But he couldn’t forget the look on her face when she looked to other children beyond the shared body of their giant. He couldn’t forget what he had denied himself as a teenager, struggling to survive at the dawn of the age of plagues.

DAITYA CONTACTED GOVERNMENT HQ OVER THE RADIO ONE DAY, WHEN BRISHTI was bathing under the open palms of their giant. They no longer bathed together, because she was too old. Though Brishti had little notion of privacy because of the way they lived, even she would come to appreciate some time alone, or even separated by just the barrier of the giant’s chest, since she had never left the shadow of the giant. She still hummed loudly, by habit, or to assure her father she was outside the giant, still there.

It felt like a betrayal, but Daitya forced himself to tell HQ that he had a daughter now, and that she lived with him.

Their next trip to a mekha depot was their last with their giant.

Daitya lost his home, the body that housed him. He felt a self-loathing so powerful it nearly buckled his legs when Brishti looked at the reclaiming officers at the depot, the realization that the open secret was now no secret at all, that she had become the infection in the giant’s body, expelled along with her father from their place in god’s body.

“Please, please, please, I take very little space, please don’t take away my baba’s home,” she begged the officers. They looked sympathetic but firm behind their masks. Daitya went to tell her the truth, to calm and comfort his daughter and absorb her anger. But he saw her holding on to the giant’s leg, the worn, soiled leg of the body that had been his for so long he couldn’t remember, the body that had saved her life. Brishti, born of a superstorm and a giant. Her face mask had slid off on her tears. Looking at this, Daitya collapsed at his daughter’s feet and broke down in shuddering sobs. Brishti’s own sorrow vanished in concern as she crouched and held him. She had never seen him cry with his body, his tough, exhausted body. Only ever his eyes, when she blamed him for trying to get rid of her. He shook in her arms and begged forgiveness, and she realized what had happened, that he had done the opposite of get rid of her, like she’d feared so many times.

Though she was of the mekha, one of his tribe, he didn’t want her to be. He didn’t want her world restricted to the rib cage of a giant that did not grow with her.

Shorn of his outer body, Daitya the mekha became just a father raising his teenage daughter in a small village in the forest of the Maidan.

Shorn of her outer body, Brishti the mekha became a young woman, taller than her father now and more formidable, a butcher and huntress with bow and machete. Clad in sari and gas mask, she rode out of the forests of central Kolkata on horseback with cryocaches full of meat, out to the less verdant valleys of high-rises, delivering the meat to open-air markets, sending the caches up hoisting cables to the balconies and windows of barirlok.

Though Brishti’s hands remembered the motions controlling a different body, she loved riding horses through the forest paths with her friends, some of whom fell in love with her. She fell in love with some of them. She slept with some of them under the stars, drunk on this private intimacy new to her, thrilled by the mythic danger of tigers that sometimes wandered this deep into the city, annoyed by the real danger of insects.

Sometimes, Brishti’s dreams made of her a giant running through the forest.

With the passage of time, Brishti forgave her father. Her father, who found others to love besides her: the married couple who shared their communal hut. The quiet husband a butcher, and the garrulous wife a garden-farmer. They shared their bed with Daitya, who learned their trades, and shared his body in ways he had never done before. Their daughter, a child, became as a daughter to him, and as a sister to Brishti.

By the grace of god, a family.

BRISHTI GOT OFF HER HORSE AND LOOKED OUT OVER THE MEKHA SCRAPYARD. A graveyard of giants rusting in the rain, sinews overgrown with vines, chests heartless and filled with nests of birds and jackals that flitted across the grounds like spirits. Finally at rest, their limbs sprawled in disarray. Brishti’s contact, looking like a crow in her black cloak and gas mask, pointed the way through the winding labyrinth of bodies. Brishti led her horse carefully, not wanting her to get hurt on the rough ground.

The contact pointed at a giant, still kneeling with dignity, not disrepair. Newly arrived at the yard.

Brishti’s breath hitched. She didn’t have to check the serial number tattooed on the giant’s arm. This body, given of god, once had a heart that had sat behind those open ribs, a heart who became her father, and christened her the soul. It was her body kneeling there in the rain. A retired mekha belonged to no one. She had as much right to it as salvagers and recyclers. Was it fixable? She would take that chance.

Her contact held up two gloved fingers as a reminder. Two goats for a lead on one dead giant. Fair. Brishti nodded, tethering her horse to the broken limb of another mekha. She climbed into the giant’s ribs. Into the dank, dark chest. Her body remembered, traced the neural pathways of her father’s movements across the broken console. She could feel wind whistling through the giant’s body. Breath. Rain pattered on the broken glass of its chest. Of their chest. Brishti remembered her father’s heartbeat as she leaned her head on his chest, after he saved her. Her dear father, who had sacrificed his body for her, the body of his god. This body was no longer his. She understood that now, even if it had taken her a while.

But her father had taught her well. The giant had a new heartbeat now.

“Let me save you this time,” Brishti said.