Out of Order by Charles Benoit Read Free Book Online

way through the gears while the rounded shape of the roof and the placement of the tail pipe ensured that little of the leaded gasoline fumes escaped.
    He watched as the four-star hotels gave way to no-star flophouses, a mile of road and a ten-million dollar drop in value. Concrete office buildings, their faded white paint peeling off in newspaper-sized sheets, lined the street, hand-lettered signs covered in the squiggly lines of Hindi tacked up on the walls.
    Although they passed within an inch of the tin sides of the auto-rickshaw, Jason couldn’t identify any of the cars that muscled their way down the street, squat rounded boxes that were not much larger than his golf cart-sized cab, their fenders and doors dented from countless commutes. Delivery trucks, tarted up with bright paint, lights and bits of shiny metal, coughed out hot coils of black smoke while on the left a bus crept by, every seat full with another forty passengers clinging to the sides like army ants pulling down a doomed beetle. An endless stream of scooters weaved through the traffic carrying sari-clad women sitting sidesaddle behind the stern-faced drivers or families of eight stacked on like a circus act out for a ride, the smallest toddler astride the handlebars. Seeming to flow backwards through the traffic were the bicycle rickshaws, their sweating drivers hauling passengers and cargo many times their own weight.
    Despite the images recalled from a high school social studies filmstrip, there were no cows wandering the streets, but as the driver bounced his dented cab against the side of a truck and up onto the sidewalk to avoid a lost rear axle rolling down the street, Jason felt that this said something about the wisdom of the cow.
    And everywhere—squeezing between the auto-rickshaws, cutting in front of brake-less trucks, darting out from behind parked cars—everywhere there were people. They spilled off the sidewalks, poured in and out of the buildings, and filled up every space not taken by something larger or immoveable. Most of the men were dressed in long-sleeved shirts and slacks, the styles five years out of fashion. Some wore designer suits, some wore knock-off NBA jerseys, and some wore a matching two-piece outfit that looked to Jason like a cross between hospital scrubs and pajamas.
    Most of the women he saw wore a shalwar kamiz , the female version of the scrub/pajama hybrid, theirs adding a scarf draped stylishly down the front with the tail ends tossed over each shoulder. There were teenagers in jeans and roaming pockets of girls in bright school uniforms, but fewer women in saris than he had expected and none who wore a sari as elaborate as the one bundled in the bottom of his backpack.
    Where the buildings near the hotel had been shabby and neglected, the ones they passed on the way to the station were decrepit and best forgotten. The traffic thinned out, but there was more trash in the streets, and gaping potholes threatened to swallow their cab. The suits and designer clothes were gone, replaced by ill-fitting and dirty castoffs, flip-flops or bare skin replacing the leather sandals. The people here moved at a different pace, the shuffling, nowhere-to-go gait of the unemployed. There were fewer smiles, but the ones he spotted seemed somehow more real.
    Mixed in with the pedestrians who crowded the streets, beggars approached the cars, tapping on the windows of the larger sedans, pre-teens holding up dirt-smeared babies in tattered rags as they stared into the air-conditioned cars. He felt Rachel draw back against him as a leather-faced old woman approached the cab, mouthing her toothless request for rupees. Two small boys appeared on his side of the open vehicle, one holding the stump of his arm, the other saying, “Mister look” while he balanced himself on his cane, his withered leg dragging across the pavement.
    He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to feel. He recalled a notice he had seen in a New York City