A CUP OF TEA
I have grown to dread one sound more than any other: the rasping of the key in the lock, which means that Mumtaz has arrived with her strap and her taunts.
And so I am in the corner of the locked-in room, my face to the wall, when the door opens. It is Shahanna, the girl with the nut-brown skin, holding a cup of tea.
She guides the cup to my mouth and talks softly. “Take it,” she says. “Your lips are cracked.”
I sip, unwilling at first to let on how badly I want it, then I gulp it down greedily.
“Slow down,” she says, gently prying the cup from my hand. “If you go too fast, you will retch.”
I do as she says, but soon, too soon, the cup is empty.
Shahanna reaches out and runs a gentle hand over my head. “Your hair is already starting to grow back,” she says.
I try to speak, but there is no voice in my throat after all
these days with no one to talk to.
I want to tell this kind, dark-skinned girl about all the things
I don’t do.
That I don’t think about my parched lips or my shorn hair. That I don’t look in the mirror. But the words won’t come.
“Mumtaz will let you live,” she says, “if you do as she says.”
I turn my back to her and look out the window.
Two schoolgirls in crisp blue uniforms skip by on the street
below, holding hands.
“I’ve been out there,” Shahanna says. “And I can tell you that it’s not so bad here.”
I am wary, knowing now how these city people cannot be believed.
“It’s true,” she says. “Out there, you’re no better than a dog.”
She points to a mongrel that has stopped to nose through a ditch full of human waste.
“Here at least we have a bed and food and clothes.” She pauses.
I shake my head.
“No,” I hear myself say in a ragged voice. “I will not do this disgraceful thing.”
Shahanna sighs. “She will only sell you to another place just like this.”
She moves toward the door.
Inside I am begging her not to go, not to leave me alone watching the world go by outside my locked-in room. But on the outside I am blank. I have already learned from these city people. From the ones who turned a blind eye to the legless beggar boy, from the ones who shuffle through this city of the dead with their eyes empty.
You are safe here only if you do not show how frightened you are.
AFTER SHAHANNA’S VISIT
No one comes to my room. And I wonder if a day and night have passed, or two days and nights. Or a dozen days and nights.
A PRONOUNCEMENT
One day Mumtas comes to my door without her strap.
“I have decided to let you live,” she says.
Then she is gone, leaving me to ponder what will happen
next.
A CUP OF LASSI
A little while later, the aging bird girl is standing at my door, holding out a cup of lassi, the sweet yogurt drink Ama gave me when I was sick.
I take the glass with shaking hands. The drink is sweet and cool and tastes of mango. The girl takes the cup from me, but she remains, watching me.
After a few minutes, I feel odd. And soon her image is fading in and out like lantern light.
I squint and there are two of her. I blink and she is gone.
My arms and legs become distant things, their movements slow and liquid.
Soon the sounds from the bazaar below bleed into one another, a soup of bleating horns and snarling engines.
I try to think. But my thoughts keep collapsing or turning sideways or lapping circles around themselves.
I begin to understand, dimly, that the lassi must have had some strange poison in it, when Mumtaz steps into the room.
After that I don’t understand anything.
LUCKY TO BE WITH HABIB
A man with lips like a fish comes into my room and says, “You’re lucky to be with Habib.” He is squeezing my breast with his hand, like someone shopping for a melon. I try to push him away, but my arm, stone-heavy from the lassi, doesn’t move.
“You’re lucky,” he says, “that Habib is your first one.”
I close my eyes. The room pitches this way and that.
“You can tell the others that it was Habib,” he says.
I open my eyes, watch him squeeze my other breast, and wonder: Who is this Habib he keeps talking about?
“If this is really your first time,” he says. “Old Mumtaz is a tricky one.”
He unbuckles his belt. “Once before, she sold Habib used goods.” The fish-lips man removes my dress.
I wait for myself to protest. But nothing happens. “Habib,” he says. “Habib is good with the ladies.” Then he is on top of me, and something hot and insistent is between my legs.
He grunts and struggles, trying to fit himself inside me. With a sudden thrust I am torn in two.
“Oh, yes,” he says, panting. “Habib is good in bed.”
I hear, coming from a distance,
a steady thud,
thud,
thud,
and register that this is the sound of a headboard hitting a wall.
After awhile,
I don’t know how long,
another sound interrupts the rhythmic thud of the headboard.
I know this noise from somewhere.
I work very hard to make it out.
Finally, I identify it.
It is the muffled sound of sobbing.
Habib rolls off me.
Then I understand: I was the person crying.
ONE OF THEM
I awake stiff and sore. I have no idea of the time, although I suppose, from the buzzing of the electric sun on the ceiling, that it is the evening of the next day.
My head throbs. My mouth is parched. I stand on shaky legs, then collapse on the bare floor, the pain between my legs like a searing coal.
I grab the bedsheet, struggle to my feet, and make my way to the little table, where someone has left a glass of water.
Then I catch sight of a girl in the mirror.
She has blackened tiger eyes and bleary chili pepper lips.
She looks back at me full of sadness and scorn and says, You have become one of them.
TWILIGHT
In the days that follow, many people come to my room. Some are real. Some are not.
Mumtaz appears each day at dusk and forces a cup of lassi between my clenched jaws. Shahanna comes each morning with a cup of water and face of pity.
They are real. Of that I have no doubt.
In the endless twilight after the lassi, and before the morning, others come.
My stepfather appears, wearing his big-shoulders coat and city hat, puffing on a cigarette. Then Baija Sita is standing at the foot of the bed, locked in gossip with the headman’s wife. And sometimes, Auntie Bimla comes, her eyes glinting like new coins.
They seem real, but I know that they are not.
In between, men come.
They crush my bones with their weight.
They split me open.
Then they disappear.
I cannot tell which of the things they do to me are real, and which are nightmares. I decide to think that it is all a nightmare. Because if what is happening is real, it is unbearable.
HURT
I hurt.
I am torn and bleeding where the men have been.
I pray to the gods to make the hurting go away.
To make the burning and the aching and the bleeding stop.
Music and laughter come from the room next door. Horns and shouting come from the street below.
No one can hear me. Not even the gods.
BETWEEN TWILIGHTS
Sometimes, between the twilights,
I unwrap my bundle from home and bury my face in the fabric of my old skirt.
I inhale deeply drinking in the scent of mou
ntain sunshine,
a warmth that smells of freshly turned soil and clean laundry baking in the sun.
I breathe in a cool Himalayan breeze,
and the woodsy tang of a cooking fire,
a smell that crackles with the promise of warm tea and fresh roti.
Then I can get by. Until the next twilight.
WHAT YOU HEAR
Before it starts,
you hear a zipper baring its teeth,
perhaps the sound of a shoe being kicked aside in haste,
the wincing of the mattress.
Once it starts,
you may hear the sound of horns bleating in the street below,
the peanut vendor hawking his treats,
or the pock of a rubber ball as the children shout and play in the school yard nearby.
But if you are lucky,
or if you work hard at it,
you hear nothing.
Nothing, perhaps, but the clicking of the fan overhead, the steady ticking away of seconds until it is over.
Until it starts again.
THE DANGER OF PROTECTION
One day Shahanna comes to my room, bearing a cup of tea and a leftover heel of bread. She slips a small plastic package into my hand.
“Don’t let Mumtaz see this,” she whispers.
“What is it?” I ask.
She checks to make sure no one can hear. “A condom.”
I don’t understand what this condom is and why it must be kept so secret.
Shahanna explains.
'Ask the men to use it, so that you do not get a disease,” she says.
“Most of them will say no; they will threaten to go somewhere else if you insist.”
I nod.
Shahanna turns to lock the door.
“Do not insist,” Shahanna says.
“Or Mumtaz will beat you half to death.”
A BUCKET OF WATER
There is a bucket of water next to my bed.
But no matter how often I wash and scrub and wash and scrub,
I cannot seem to rinse the men from my body.
COUNTING
The season has changed.
I only know this because the people outside my window have begun to shed their sweaters. And still I am locked in this room.
The lassi has made my brain too hazy to keep track of how many men have been here.
I do not know how much they pay.
All I know is that each time one leaves, my debt to Mumtaz grows a little smaller.
A HANDFUL OF FOG
I remember the velvet of Tali’s pink nose.
The ghostly fragrance of night flowers.
The rough-edged notch in the school bench.
The sunset red of Nepali dirt.
The tinkling music of Ama’s earrings.
The silver-white sheen of the mountain in moonlight.
At first, these recollections came unbidden.
Soon, though, I had to work to recall them.
But eventually, with much tracing and retracing,
they became threadbare, thin as the blanket on my bed,
until one day my heart nearly stopped when I could not summon them up.
Now I practice these memories each morning and night, the way my teacher taught me to drill my maths.
Still, there is one image that I cannot forget, no matter how I try.
One stubborn memory that nudges the others out of my head: Ama’s face as she imagined the comfort of a tin roof.
Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.
CHANGES
One afternoon, Mumtaz comes to the door and tells me to gather up my things.
“Now that you are no longer a virgin,” she says, “I cannot fetch a good price for you.”
I cannot believe my ears. “So I can go now?” I say. Mumtaz spits.
“You did not come easily,” she says. “You cannot easily go.” I don’t understand. “You can go home …”
She pauses, picks a fleck of betel leaf off her tongue,
examines it. I try to slow the pounding of my heart at the mention of the word “home.” Mumtaz flicks the bit of leaf into the air and continues. “… as soon as you’ve worked off the twenty thousand rupees I paid for you.” “But—” I have seen her record book, with its entry of 10,000 rupees.
I know this 20,000 price is a lie. Somehow, of all the things that have been done to me, this—this outrage—is the worst.
I haven’t cried, not one tear, since that first night with the fish-lips man.
But now tears surge up in my eyes.
I blink them back and lift my chin.
“But what?” she says. She pulls the leather strap out from under her skirt and slaps it against her open palm.
I bow my head.
“From now on,” Mumtaz says, “you will join the other girls downstairs each night. You will share a bedroom and be free to walk the house.”
I stare straight ahead.
Mumtaz comes close and takes my chin in her hand.
“But if you try to run away” she says, “I will grind hot chilies and put them in your private parts.”
I shudder, cup my hands over myself, and nod.
“Now hurry up,” she says as she walks out. “I need this room.”
NEW GIRL
I am gathering up my bowl and my bundle when the aging bird girl comes in.
With her is another girl, a much younger girl. She is wearing a bright yellow dress and clutching a bundle of rough homespun clothes in her arms.
I move toward the door with the halting steps of an old woman.
It has been a lifetime, it seems, since I was outside this room.
I attempt a first step into the hallway then another, and watch as the new girl enters my old room with tentative steps, as if she is clenching her feet inside her new shoes like a poor frightened bat clinging to a branch.
WHAT IS NORMAL
The aging bird girl says I am to go to the kitchen, to join the other girls for the midday meal. How odd it is then, after all these days of dreaming to be free, that my feet will not obey.
“Come on,” she says.
Then she pinches my ear and drags me into the hall.
The strangeness of walking—moving more than a few paces to the window and back—makes the journey of a dozen steps feel like a million. And the hallway, a stretch of bare floor and cracked walls, seems to me wonderful, new and foreign and vast, and strange. And painfully bright.
When I finally reach the end of the hall, I see a kitchen. Girls in loud, colored dresses are calling out to each other—some in city language, some in my native tongue—all of them shouting to be heard over the wail of a music machine.
They bare their teeth as they laugh, shove handfuls of rice into painted mouths.
A fat, toothless woman stirs a vat of greasy stew while a naked child crawls at her feet, and the air is thick with the smells of spices and cooking oil, perfume and cigarette smoke.
It is all, suddenly, too much. I sink to the floor, wincing at the tenderness between my thighs.
Then Shahanna is at my side with a steaming bowl of rice. I eat, but do not taste it.
I open my mouth—to thank her, to try to tell her how odd it is to be with people again—but I can’t find any words. When I have finished my rice, she helps me to my feet, then says I must come watch TV with everyone else.
''It’s fun,” she says. “You’ll see.”
When we get to the TV room, the frowning girl is pushing the button. The box comes to life, just like before. Strange words appear on the glass, and loud, happy music plays. The girls cheer.
“It’s The Bold and the Beautiful,” says Shahanna. “It’s from America. It’s our favorite show.”
Inside the TV, a little pink-skinned man is talking to a woman with hair the color of straw. She raises her hand to slap him across the face, but he catches her wr
ist in his grip and stops her. Then, without warning, they are kissing.
The Happiness House girls clap and cheer and cackle like hens. The tiny pink-skinned TV man and woman are strange to me. But these flesh-and-blood girls are, to me, stranger still.
How they can eat and laugh and carry on as normal when soon the men will come is so perplexing that, while they laugh, I fight back tears.
IN MY NEW ROOM
There are posters of gods and movie stars on the walls, an electric sun hanging from the middle of the ceiling, a palm frond machine that stirs the air, a hole-in-the-floor privy, iron bars on the windows, and four rope beds separated by old sheets that hang from the ceiling.
“You draw the sheet around your bed when you have a customer,” Shahanna tells me.
Six of us share a room: the half-frowning girl, whose name is Anita; a coughing woman named Pushpa; and her two children. One of the children is a toddler, who is crawling around on the floor dragging an empty plastic bottle on a string. The other, Shahanna says, is a boy of eight.
She points to the half-frowning girl. “Anita,” she says, “is from our country.”
I place my palms together at my heart and say hello to her in our language. She looks over at me briefly, then goes back to pasting a movie star picture above her bed. I cannot tell, from her crooked face, if she is smiling or frowning. Or both. Or neither.
The coughing woman, Pushpa, came to work for Mumtaz when her husband died. She is pretty—with dusky skin and almond eyes—but she is so thin her collarbones poke out of her dress like the twigs of the neem tree.
As Shahanna is speaking, Pushpa is seized with a bout of coughing that racks her entire body. When the coughing subsides, she spits into a handkerchief, sighs heavily, then curls up on her bed with her face toward the wall. The little girl tugs on Pushpa’s braid and cries, “Mama, Mama,” but Pushpa doesn’t answer.