Unspeakables (a nightmare)

Untouchables are hands reaching out. Babies paraded through streets like pity accessory dolls. If you know the unspeakables, the unspeakables haunt you worse. Hands walking in beach flip-flops. Strange human contortions. A kid in a loincloth barking on all fours for rupees. Melty face man, who follows you with melty face and melty hands until you pay him. He looks like his lower lip is stapled to his chest and the rest of his head got sandblasted off his skull. Teeth stick out wherever they want.
You can see tourists moving across the street to be alone, and that's when he really doesn't leave. I look straight ahead so I don't have to look, but I look anyway. I don't have anything to give today. It would mean a million hands outstretched, all of Delhi motioning toward its mouth.
Nomamanopapachapati
Nomamanopapachapati (chapati means bread)
Polio feet flopping around like flippers, amputees dragging themselves by their arms, on homemade wheely-carts or just pulling torsos behind them through puddles and cow dung. Humans pedal bikes with their hands. Lepers rub their wounds like sculptors. A man's scrotum, out in the midday sun, swells like a watermelon and bursts. Intact bodies pedal cycle-rickshaws of plump white and brown people. Rickshaw-wallahs eat dal and rice. When they tire of dal and rice they eat rice and dal. Calorie intake doesn't support bodies that pedal for a living, and they die on their 40th birthdays.
"Sir, you're going? Hallo?"

I used to joke about melty face man. It was a joke for a little bit. He'd show up wherever I went.
I tolerated him in my waking life so he wouldn't hang around in my nightmares. On the night train to Mumbai he'd be the other guy bunking in our compartment.
"Oh hell no," I'd say. "D21 and D22?"
Or another time. With one melty hand he'd throw bunny ears behind my head in Taj Mahal snapshots.
"Jesus Christ, melty, quit that shit and, at least, maybe you could keep your Freddy Kruegger face out of the frame until I get a good one of just me. Thanks."
I didn't want him around anymore. The guy was wearing on us, and pretty soon we didn't talk about him at all. You know the way a joke wears thin.
I think he sensed it too, because everywhere we went--even his favorite urinal corners where it was dark and he had a good spot to jump out and surprise us--we didn't see him. Like he turned unspeakable overnight. He stayed out of our sick jokes and it was better that way.
Then we saw melty face man in our nightmares. I did at least. He knocked on our guesthouse door and broke the lock on the thing but I didn't even notice I was so dead asleep. Just dreaming there.
It sounds weird, but I could have sworn the guy was trying to introduce himself to me. And do it properly this time, like with his real name and everything. Except, from what I could tell, he didn't have any lips or tongue to work with. So it came out like a moan that just breathed itself out of his throat-hole, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
That's when the whole scene--already a little awkward--turned pretty nightmarish. And like I said, the next morning melty face man had up and left town like he said to himself forget this town you guys none of you know how to have any fun anymore.