“Here,” says a voice. “Take these.”
I open my eyes.
Mumtaz is standing over me. Mumtas, with her plump mango face, has taken the place of the kindly woman in white, and she is holding out a pair of white pills.
I understand then, that the woman and her cool cloth and the snowy treat and the running were all a dream.
Mumtaz lifts my head from the pillow, places the pills on my tongue, then brings a glass of water to my lips.
I swallow, and for a moment, I love her.
I love her like a mother, for giving me the medicine that will stop the fever and the sweating and the chills and the shaking. I love her for not throwing me out on the street, for caring for me.
I reach out to thank her, but she is bustling around, putting two more pills on the table next to my bed, refilling my glass of water.
“Take these pills tonight,” she says. “And you’ll be back at work in no time.”
Then she unwinds her waistcloth and takes out her record book. She wets her pencil with the tip of her tongue and writes a number in her book.
“You’ll be able to work off the cost of the medicine in a few days,” she says.
And then she is gone.
And try as I might, I cannot bring back my dreams.
AN OLD WOMAN
A few days later, when I am finally strong enough to get out of bed, I pass by a mirror. The face that looks back is that of a corpse.
Her eyes are empty. She is old and tired. Old and angry. Old and sad. Old, old, a hundred years old.
I speak to her in the words Harish taught me.
“My name is Lakshmi,” I tell her. “I am from Nepal. I am thirteen years old.”
THE LIVING DEAD
Today at the morning meal, an unfamiliar figure is at the table, hunched over a bowl, picking at her rice. She looks up, and I see that it is Monica.
“Well,” she says with strange cheer. “My father recovered from his operation.”
Her smile is wide, too wide. And I am afraid of her angry happiness.
“He needs a cane,” she says. “But he is still as strong as a goat.”
I nod slowly, unsure what to say.
“Look,” she says. She shrugs off her shawl, revealing arms and shoulders covered in angry purple bruises. “He did this with his cane.”
I wince.
But Monica laughs bitterly.
I don’t understand.
“I thought you said they would honor you and thank you,”
I say.
She snorts. “When they heard I was coming,” she says, “they met me outside the village and begged me not to come back and disgrace them.”
“Did you get to see your daughter?” I say.
Monica cannot meet my eyes.
“They told her I was dead.”
BEYOND WORDS
Pushpa has been in bed for three days and nights, and now Mumtaz is in our room. “If you don’t get out of bed and see customers today,” she says, “you are out on the street.”
Pushpa nods, stands slowly, then sinks to her knees. She kisses Mumtaz’s feet.
“Please,” she begs. “I’ll work tonight, I promise.”
Then she is seized by one of her coughing fits. She coughs until tears run down her cheeks and she spits blood into a rag.
“Pshhht,” Mumtaz says. “You are of no use to me now! No man wants to make love to walking death.”
“Have mercy,” Pushpa cries, holding her hands up in prayer. “Think of my children.”
Mumtaz sneers at her, then all at once her eyes begin to gleam like new rupee coins.
“There is something you could do,” Mumtaz says.
Pushpa looks up expectantly.
“Sell her to me.” She points to little Jeena, asleep in her bedroll. “In a few years, when she is old enough, I can make a lot of money with her.” Pushpa seems not to understand.
“There are men who would pay dearly,” Mumtaz says, “to be with a pure one. Men who think it will cure their disease.”
She puts a hand on Pushpa’s slender shoulder and smiles.
Then comes an unearthly sound. It is a wild sound, an animal sound, a howling, mournful, raging cry, as the sickly woman on the floor claws at the skirts of the fat woman standing over her.
It is a sound beyond language.
WHAT DESPAIR LOOKS LIKE
For the rest of the afternoon, Pushpa sits on her bed with her head in her hands. Shahanna tries to comfort her, but Pushpa stares into space, unmoving. Finally she rises, tucks a blanket under Jeena’s chin, and whispers to her. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I will not let that woman take you.”
Then Harish comes home from school, flushed and disheveled from his game of make-believe soccer. He beams at his mother, delighted to see her out of bed, then stops as he takes in her misery.
Neither one says a word. Harish simply pulls his little tin trunk out from under the bed, and the two of them begin packing their things.
A WORD TOO SMALL
I look on, speechless, as Harish ties up his bedroll and Pushpa places her possessions—a hairbrush, a sweater, a photo of her husband—inside Harish’s trunk.
Anita is sitting on the bed, clutching Jeena to her breast, the two sides of her poor, lopsided face matched, for once, in perfect misery. Finally, Anita kisses the top of the baby’s head, hands her to Pushpa, then runs from the room, sobbing.
Harish looks up at me.
“How are you today, Lakshmi?” he says.
The words are the same as always; but his little-boy voice breaks as he says my name.
I am not fine. I cannot pretend. But I do not know a word big enough to hold my sadness. I bite my lip and shrug.
Harish looks away, then goes back to his packing.
“Where will you go?” I say.
“I will ask the lady teacher from America if she knows a place we can stay until my mother is better,” he says. “Until then, I must earn the money.” He places his rag-bundle soccer ball inside the trunk, snaps it shut. “I have heard they pay children fifty rupees a week,” he says, “to break stones at the roadside.”
He lifts the trunk, his skinny arms straining at the weight, and I wonder how long those little arms will last breaking stones.
I point to the American storybook he’s left. “Don’t forget this.”
He shifts the trunk to his other arm. “You can have it,” he says.
Harish walks to the door, dragging the trunk.
All the words he taught me, all the beautiful words, are useless now.
Finally I remember one, one that will answer the question he asked—“How are you today, Lakshmi?”—as if today were just another day.
“Harish,” I say.
He just looks at me.
“Sorry,” I say. “I am sorry today.”
Then he is gone.
REPETITION
“Lakshmi,” I say to myself. “My name is Lakshmi.”
Now that Harish is gone, no one says my name.
So I say it to myself. “My name is Lakshmi,” I repeat. “I am from Nepal. I am thirteen.”
I am not sure, but I think so much time has passed, that I am fourteen.
LIKE ANITA
In the afternoons now, I watch TV with my head on Shahanna’s shoulder. But without Harish, I am like Anita. I cannot smile, even if there is a reason.
INSTEAD OF HARISH
Monica comes to my room today, her hands behind her back.
“Are the others all downstairs?” she whispers.
I nod. It is time for The Bold and the Beautiful. The others would all be laughing and cheering, while I lie upstairs in my bed pretending that Harish will be home any minute to resume our lessons.
“Here,” she says. “Take this.”
She thrusts a tattered, gray thing in my direction.
I examine it cautiously and see that it is an old rag doll, loved almost beyond recognition. Its button eyes are gone. Its mouth, a tiny red stitch. It
s dress thin and colorless.
“You can have her for a while,” she says. “You know, instead of Harish.”
She says this so quickly her words barely register.
I stand to thank her but she is already gone.
And I understand then, somehow, that Monica, the thirsty vine, Monica, the one with tricks to make the men pay extra, sleeps with this tattered rag doll.
A STRANGE CUSTOMER
I have never seen such a queer-looking person. He has the pink skin of a pig. His hair is the color of straw. His eyes are ice blue. And he is wearing short pants that show his hairy monkey legs. But he looks like one of the people in Harish’s storybook.
He is too friendly, this pink American man. He grips my hand in greeting, a strange and uncouth gesture that makes me pull back in alarm.
He says hello in my language.
I say nothing in reply.
“What is your name?” he says.
His words are slow and clumsy, as if he has a mouth full of roti.
“Your name,” he says again, more slowly still. “What is your name?”
This pink man is the first man here to ask my name, but I don’t give it to him.
“How old are you?”
I know what I am supposed to say. But something keeps me from lying to this pink stranger. I shrug.
He is unmoved by my rudeness. Indeed, he smiles, his ice-blue eyes oddly warm.
“Are you being kept here against your will?”
My will? This is something I lost long ago, I want to tell him.
I want to pummel this pink-skinned man with my fists. I want to spit on this stranger with his eyes of cold pity, his idiot way of speaking my language, and his bad-mannered questions that make me look at the humiliation that is my life.
I fold my arms across myself.
He takes a little book from one of his pockets, consults its battered pages, then looks up at me. Slowly with care, he asks me a question.
“Do you want to leave here?”
I know about these Americans. Anita has told me all about them. I will not be fooled into leaving here only to be stripped naked and have people throw stones at me and call me a dirty woman.
I shake my head no. “You don’t want to leave here?”
I just stare at him.
“I can take you to a place where you will get new clothes,” he says. “And good food. And you will not have to be with men.”
I pretend I don’t understand. Because I don’t.
I don’t understand how I will pay my debt to Mumtaz in this new place.
“Do you want to go there?”
I shake my head no.
“It is a clean place,” he says.
I don’t even blink.
He takes his wallet from his jacket. I wait to catch a glimpse of his riches, but what he hands me is a small white card. It is full of American words I cannot read, and m the center is a drawing of a bird in flight.
I put the card inside my waistcloth. And then he is gone.
How odd he is, this man who pays for a girl and does nothing but talk.
A SMALL DANGER
I study the strange American card. It has words and numbers in tiny print.
It is a small thing, flimsy and light, but I know it is enough to earn me a beating if Mumtaz or Shilpa sees it.
If I put it in the trash in the kitchen, the others will see. If I throw it out the window, Mumtaz might see.
And so I take this dangerous card and hide it under the mat on the floor.
Until I can think of a better way to get rid of it.
And then I head back downstairs and try to forget all about my strange visitor.
A SECRET
There is a moment, between the light and the dark, when the smell of frying onions blows in through the windows. All over the city, the cooking hour has begun. This is the saddest smell in the world because it means that here at Mumtaz’s house the men will start to arrive.
I am looking out the window, my whole being yearning toward that smell, when Shahanna comes in.
“Shahanna,” I say. “Can you keep a secret?”
She looks around to make sure that we are alone and nods. “I had an American customer the other day,” I say. “He said he would take me away from here.”
Shahanna moves a step closer to me, her dark eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Did he say he would pay off your debt to Mumtaz?”
I shake my head.
“Then how would you get past her goondas?”
? don’t know,” I say.
“You know what Anita says,” she whispers. “She says the Americans will trick you and shame you and make you walk naked in public.” I nod. I think about telling her what he said about the clean place, about the new clothes he promised. “Perhaps,” I say, “Anita is wrong.”
Shahanna looks out the window at the street below. “But Anita’s the only one of us who’s been out there,” she says.
We are both quiet for a moment, watching the world outside go by underneath our window bars.
Then Shahanna grasps my hands in hers. “If he comes back, will you go with him?” she says.
I don’t know what to say.
She squeezes my hands tightly, and her eyes burn with a fervor I have never seen before in my gentle friend. “Will you take me with you?”
I step back. Shahanna has been nothing but kind to me, from the day I first arrived. She taught me everything I know to survive here. But she scares me now with this wild talk.
I am afraid. Afraid that Mumtaz will beat us senseless. And I am afraid that the Americans will shame us and abandon us in the streets.
But most of all, I am afraid to imagine a life outside this place.
POWER OUTAGE
Now that the dry, hot months are here, there are nights when the entire city goes black. The electric lights go off, the music machine falls silent, the palm frond machine stops spinning and, for a moment, the whole city is still.
It feels like the end of the world.
If only it were.
NO REMEDY
I tuck Monica’s little sock doll under my dress today and sneak down the hall to give it back to her, but as I round the corner, Shilpa catches me.
“Don’t bother looking for your friend,” she says. “She’s out on the street.”
Her words are thick and watery, the way they get when she has been drinking the liquor the street boy sells her. I wonder if I have misunderstood. I run to the window and look out on the street. There is the usual assortment of vendors, schoolchildren kicking a ball, a policeman smoking a cigarette. But no Monica.
“Where is she?” I say.
Shilpa shrugs. “Mumtaz has no use for her anymore.”
“Why?” I say. “Monica was a good earner.”
“Don’t you know?” she says. “She has the virus.”
In this city, there are many diseases and many remedies. For the fever-and-chills disease, there are white pills. For the coughing disease, there is a special tea. For the itching and scratching disease, there is a golden ointment. For the burning pain in the groin, there is a shot from the dirty-hands doctor.
But for the virus, there is no remedy.
THE STREET BOY
I have been watching the street boy for some time now.
I still do not buy his tea, but I no longer flee the room when he arrives.
I know that he lets Anita have her tea even if she doesn’t have the money until the next day. I know that he puts extra sugar m the cook’s tea in exchange for a stale heel of bread. And I know he sometimes cheats Mumtaz out of her change if she is not paying attention.
Each day I hear him coming, the sound of his teacups clattering in his caddy as he arrives at the kitchen door. And each day when he comes to our room, I turn my back so I will not be tempted to spend even a single rupee on a luxury I have learned to live without.
Today when he arrives, I am alone. He holds a cup of tea in my direc
tion. The day is chilly and his tea is warm and fragrant, but I pretend I do not notice.
He lifts the cup to his lip and pretends to drink. “Some tea for you today?” he says. His brown eyes are dark as Tali’s.
I shake my head no.
He lowers his head and scuffs one bare foot against the other. He seems about to say something more, but I turn my back, all the while thinking about his tea, about how good it would taste, how the cup would warm my hands, my throat, my whole being. And then he is gone, the cups on his caddy clinking and chattering as he retreats down the hall.
RAID
What I remember is this:
It was the middle of the afternoon. Shahanna was upstairs painting her nails, Mumtaz was out getting herself fitted for a new sari, and Anita and I were in the TV room with the other girls when there was thunder at the front door. A man’s voice shouted, “Open up!”
The goonda at the front door, a skinny boy Mumtaz hired just a few days ago, leaped to his feet and ran for the back door. The girls jumped out of their seats and scattered like roaches. I couldn’t move.
Anita was running for the kitchen, but when she saw me frozen in place, she came back, grabbed my wrist, and pulled me along with her. The cook was waiting for us, holding open a panel beneath the sink. Anita crawled in first, then pulled me in behind her.
In the tiny dark space, there was barely enough room for one person, let alone two, and so once the door was shut, we huddled there amid the pipes and rags and buckets, holding our breath.
Soon we heard yelling. Men’s voices came closer. Heavy footsteps coming toward us, down the hall, then into the kitchen. A man shouted at the cook. She cursed at him. Cupboard doors were flung open and slammed shut. There was the sound of rice spilling, a pan clattering to the floor, the cook shrieking and stomping her foot.
The footsteps came close, then closer, and stopped.