What Lies Between Us Page 4

  He turns and walks away from me, and I am suddenly and irrevocably shattered by loneliness.

  Three

  Another photo on the wall. Three rows of girls, the tall ones in the back, the short ones sitting in front with crossed ankles, hands on knees. Our teacher, Sister Angelica, is poised in the very center, her hands held together, her hair hidden under the nun’s habit. Around her so many hunched shoulders, thin bodies, white short-sleeved shirts bisected by the dark blue school tie. Schoolgirls with identical postures, the glint of glasses, short hair or plaits, skirts hanging to our knees, many shades of brown skin. Here I am in the second row. Hair middle-parted, braids running down to my waist. Weak-tea-colored skin, which is fair enough that the girls laugh and call me sudhi, white girl. Big eyes and a pointed chin, angular lines I share with every other girl in this picture. None of us smiling. This is not a smiling moment. This is a serious moment. We are being educated. We are good girls of good families going to a good school, and it is all very, very serious.

  * * *

  Yet when the school bell rings, it releases a mad dash of schoolgirls spilling out of the old building like birds fleeing a python. I walk out of the school gate with my arm around Puime. She and I have been best friends since we were tiny. All around us, girls chatter and squeal. We gather around the bunis man’s stand, reaching out for steaming seeni sambol buns. We pull apart the soft sweet bread to reveal the nests of fried onions within. We stuff these bits into our mouths, sucking air in through puckered lips to cool our burning tongues, chase it all down with a rainbow of fizzy-colored drinks—Portello, Fanta, Sprite.

  Across the street, boys are walking home in twos or threes, arms around each other. My cousin Gehan raises a hand, a quick wave before he is swallowed into the gaggle of schoolboys.

  Dishani, quick-witted, all-seeing, demands, “Who is that? Your boyfriend?”

  I swat her shoulder. “Just go men, you know who that is.”

  “I don’t know. Must be your boyfriend, no?”

  Puime flips the end of her braid across her top lip, adopts a gruff boy voice, and says, “Look at me! I’m her boyfriend. I want to kiss her like this.” She comes close to me, her eyes squinting; under her held-up braid, her mouth is puckered.

  “Oh yes, I lorrrve you, darrrling. Let me kiss you, my lorrve.” Holding the braid mustache in place she puts her other hand on her hip, her legs wide as a Bollywood hero’s.

  I jut out my own hip, raise a hand to ruffle my hair and a teasing finger to beckon her closer. Our audience hoots and calls. I purse my lips, and when she closes her eyes and stretches forward for the kiss, I rip off a piece of the last seeni sambol bun, stuff a large chunk of it into her fast-approaching lips. Her eyes pop open. She has to chew, laughing, tears streaming down her face. Girls all around me are cackling.

  I say, “What? You wanted hot-hot kissing. No?”

  Through a mouthful of bun, flapping her hands, we can make out the words “Aney, aiyyyoooo, my moufth is burning!”

  Afterward we walk to the three-wheeler stand together, her arm around my shoulder. She picks up her braid again, puts it to her lip. “I’ll be your boyfriend anytime.”

  I say, “Let’s get ices.”

  The ice man sells vanilla ice cream in small plastic tubs with flat wooden spoons. It melts instantly. When the ice cream is done, I bite the spoon for the crunch of it against my teeth, sucking the last vestiges of sweetness out of the splintered wood.

  * * *

  On school holidays the various cousins released from their boarding schools gather at our house. It is the maha-gedara, the ancestral house of my father’s family, and so this is the place they all return to. In the garden, the girl cousins are baking chocolate cakes, and as the mistress of the house I am the big boss. I tell Sonali where to get the choicest mud, and the sisters Kavya and Saakya where to gather flowers. They come back with these various treasures, buckets of rich river mud, sprays of jasmine and pink bougainvillea darkening to orange in the scoops of their skirts. We pat and shape multitiered cakes with florid flower decorations rising from our hands.

  On the riverbank the boy cousins shed their shirts, clamber up the trees leaning over the water, leap high into the air, and drop like fishing birds into the river. Neck-deep, they climb onto each other’s narrow shoulders and fling themselves into the liquid again and again with the desperation of the long-deprived. They swim and splash. They cavort like baby elephants. Their voices carry into the high bright vault of the sky as they throw their heads back to spray silver arcs from their dark streaming hair.

  * * *

  At night in our various beds, we are all awakened by the sudden death of the ceiling fans. Electricity cut, sudden power failure. The air is thick and hot. It is hard to breathe. We drift out of our sweltering rooms. Amma presides as Samson drags the mattresses one by one out onto the verandah. The night air is warm but stirred by a river breeze. Cousins lie down in rows, whispering, poking with elbows and knees, causing a barely contained delirious giggling at even the thought of being tickled. Amma’s sharp voice rises. “Go to sleep. Now. All of you. Otherwise I will call the parents and you can all go home tomorrow and sleep in your own houses.” We fall silent, lie there until the queen of the night soothes us into perfumed sleep.

  * * *

  In the midst of these cousin-mad days, Samson and I alone near the pond come upon a pile of squirming commas, tiny specks of curling life and a foamy substance in the midst of smashed leaves.

  He looks up into the tree. “Tree frogs. The nest should land in the water, but it has fallen to the side. The tadpoles are drying out.”

  I squat immediately. “Help me, Samson.” I am scooping tiny lives onto a stick, flicking them into the pond even as the sun is drying them into hard curls. With a sigh he bends to help.

  We work diligently and I ask a question that has been tugging at me. “Why do we call you Samson?”

  He doesn’t reply, so I continue, “The religious studies teacher told us about that man in the Bible. But he had long hair and was Christian. You’re not Christian. So why?”

  His hands pause suddenly. He says, “When we were small … your Thatha and I. My mother was his ayah, you know. We grew up together. When we were small we used to play together, and I was bigger than him even though we were the same age. I would lift him up and carry him on my back like I do with you. He said I was very strong, so he gave me this name, and then everyone called me that. Your Thatha named me.”

  “But what’s your other name? Your real name?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. No one has called me it since I was a child, and it has gone away.”

  We work in silence.

  He says, “I am Samson, but who is Delilah?”

  Amma calls through the garden, summoning the cousins in for tea. He raises his face to her voice. The last of the surviving tree-frog tadpoles squirm off into the pond, revived at the kiss of cool water.

  * * *

  Another memory from around this time. A game of hide-and-seek. Kavya and I hiding behind the hibiscus bushes, trying to keep the hysterical laughter, the utter fear and delight of being found, from bursting through our mouths. When Saakya draws close, we fling ourselves from our spot, run like gazelles, Punch and Judy gamboling at our heels. I feel a sharp pain in the fleshy pad of my foot and see a thin trickle of blood where a thorn has pierced and entered the skin. I sit on the grass, raise my foot to my face, and try to squeeze the thorn out between my thumbnails. Panic throbs through my veins; it is one of Amma’s rules that we are not to run around the garden without shoes on. “Samson,” I gasp to Saakya, “get him, he’ll know what to do.”

  When he comes, he squats in front of me and says, “Let me see.” He rests my foot on his thigh. “Let’s see. Yes, there”—his fingers poking, prodding—“there, see, a thorn has gone in. Have to dig it out.” He picks me up. “Stay here,” he says to the others, who are waiting, watching me, their fall
en comrade, carried away.

  In his dark little room he lays me on his bed. I have not been inside since the day I found him crying for his mother. Now the smell overwhelms me again, his sweat amplified. He opens a box. Inside I glimpse various things my mother has been missing, a set of curved tweezers she has searched for for weeks, a package of German-made safety pins that she uses for her saris (they work better than the Chinese ones), a cheap sari broach, some hairpins with a few of her long black hairs still caught in them. He takes a safety pin out of the package, flicks open a lighter. He holds the pin in the flame, turning it this way and that. “Okay, come here.” He sits on the bed and lifts me onto his lap, the pale underside of my foot raised in his fist. I hold my breath and try to pull away, but he is too strong. I am held like a small powerless bird. The sharp point pierces my skin, pushes down like an excavation through layers of me. I cry, loud gasping sobs, but he will not release my foot. “There it is. I have it.” The splinter revealed in the bed of my unearthed flesh. Then the tweezers. “Don’t move, Baby Madame. Almost I have it.” His face so near mine, focused in concentration. A quick movement and the thorn is held aloft in the grip of the curved silver tweezers. Ignoring my quiet sobbing, he holds a cloth gently against the skin of my foot, onto which a single tear of blood is spreading. I am crying and exhausted, not sure but also aware that under me he is rocking in the strangest way, in a motion that I had not been aware of before. A sort of fog descends, a white cloud, it’s hard to see through it. My father’s face. He would save me. A fierce grasping and a gasp, and then he releases me and smooths down the back of my dress. In a strange, strangled voice, he says, “Okay, go now.” I know suddenly that this is not the first time I have felt his exhale, a kind of motion I can’t describe. I walk out into the bright sunlight, my foot screaming as if it has been torn open. It is three weeks after my eleventh birthday.

  Four

  Thatha and I sit at the river’s edge. It is the tail end of the vacations, and this finality has given the boy cousins a sort of glimmering mania. We watch them climb into the trees, thrust into the air, and drop into the water over and over. He must see something in my face because he suddenly asks, “Do you want me to teach you?”

  I say, “To swim? In the river?” He smiles at the rising excitement in my voice, says, “No, in the pond with the frogs. Of course in the river. Go and get your swimsuit on.”

  * * *

  We walk into the river. It licks at my toes, then my knees and thighs. He pulls me in, his hands under my body holding me. The water feels purely alive. I am a small toy tugged this way and that, harboring terrified visions of water closing over my head and blocking off the sky. I cling to his shoulders and he says, “Shh, shh … It’s okay, I have you. I won’t let you go.”

  He says it again and again over the course of weeks until slowly the terror recedes. His hands are lighter and lighter under my body until it seems he is holding me up only by the tip of his finger, my own moving limbs making me somehow magically aloft. He says, “Yes. There you are. Just like that,” and then his hand slips away and I am borne up, moving in the water, joyous. It is alive and I am alive with it, and then immediately I am falling, swallowing river water, drowning, dying, everything exploding, but his hands reach in and pluck me out. He laughs at my coughing, my spluttering face. He says, “You have it. Just do that a hundred more times and you’ll have it.”

  Amma stands at the shore, hands on the hips of her sari. “Aiyo, be careful, be careful.”

  He is laughing, saying, “Come on! I’ll teach you too.”

  “You must be mad. What shall I wear ah? A small-small bikini like a sudhi woman?”

  “Wear anything. Wear a sarong like a village girl if you like. Just come. I’ll teach you.”

  “Don’t be crazy. I’m not ready to die.”

  I stand on a rock in the middle of the water. The sun beating down on my shoulders, the river parting around my tiny island, dashing silver droplets onto my feet and legs. I listen to the banter flowing like sweet honey between them. I can taste it. The sound of my parents’ mingled laughter. The most beautiful sound in the world. I am willing to do anything to hear this sound again and again.

  * * *

  We swim together, my green one-piece bathing suit tight against my body. The dogs wait for us on the bank, their tongues lolling. Somewhere I know Samson is hiding and watching us. But I know this with only a corner of my mind. In the river with my father, I am safe. He holds me up against the tug and flow and then slowly lets me go as if the water is a bed that moves and rolls. I dive down to the sandy bed, see smooth stones, my father’s legs magnified, silver bubbles caught in the hairs. Some terror rises into my throat and immediately slips away.

  We swim every day. Downstream, women bathe and men cast fishing nets. Our swimming for pleasure is rare and precious. This is an island of people who don’t know how to swim, who are suspicious of the rivers and of the sea. My father defies this fear. It is his greatest legacy to me.

  * * *

  Shorts! My American aunt Mallini, my mother’s sister, who got married to a rich man and moved abroad a long time ago and who now lives in California, a place that I know from the song we all sing about a mysterious hotel, has sent a box as she does every three months or so. Shoes, lipsticks, and cast-off purses for my mother. Books and clothes for me from her daughter, Dharshi, who is only a few months older than me. And shorts! I’ve never had a pair of shorts before. I pull them on, look at the reflection, my legs long and exposed from the middle of my thigh down.

  My mother says, “Okay, but only here. Only in the house. Not out on the street where anyone can see. I won’t have people saying vulgar things about you.”

  There are other magic objects in these boxes that come smelling of abroad, magazines from America called Tiger Beat and Teen Beat. Amma doesn’t like these, but she lets me have them because they are from her sister and therefore must be safe. I hurry to my room and pore over the boys with big hair and eyeliner, read every article about makeup and clothes and haircuts over and over. I take them to school hidden at the very bottom of my bag, and all the girls gather together to pore over these pictures, rushing to hide them under textbooks when someone raises the alarm that a teacher is near. They make me special, linked to something glamorous. At home I keep them in a box under my bed, pushed as far back as I can. They are precious, evidence of some other magical but faraway world.

  * * *

  I am at Puime’s house. We are doing math problems at her table when I get up to go to the bathroom and she furrows her brow and says, “What’s that? Did you sit on something?” And then her expression changes and she says, “Oh my gosh! Look, you’ve attained.” I twist around and there it is, on the back of my white school uniform like a small blooming red frangipani. I know what is happening. Amma has described blood flowing, pain, pads, the whole thing. There are older girls at school who have gone through this, so I’m not scared. I walk stiffly into Puime’s bathroom and lock myself in. I’m not some village girl whose mother never warned her, but I still panic when I see the thick blood. I stuff my white handkerchief between my legs, twist around to wash it off the back of my uniform, and wait. I feel my pulse burning. It had to happen at Puime’s house. Even now her mother will be calling all the other women to tell them that I have become a big girl. They will all look at me differently now.

  Puime’s mother calls Amma, and she is at the door very soon. She hugs me tight and whispers, “You’re a big girl now.” There’s such excitement in her voice. She says, “No one can see you. If a man sees you, it will be bad luck.” She throws a white sheet over my head. I can’t breathe well, but she holds me tight. Her strong, slim arm is around my shoulders and she says in my ear, “Hush, girl, hush, shh. We’ll be home soon, very soon.”

  She leads me out of Puime’s house, thanking them as we walk, my steps stumbling and hesitant. We go out to the car, where my father, embarrassed, nods at me. We get in the back, she a
nd I, and she pushes my head down against her lap, my arms around her waist, so that I am hidden under the sheet as we drive through the churning streets.

  At home Amma closes me away in my room for the traditional seven days. She hangs her thickest saris across the windows so that no man’s lust or woman’s envy can find me. She rubs my back. She tells me stories of the village, tells me how dangerous I am, how if a man sees me at this moment when my first blood is coming, even my own father, I can make him vulnerable to demonic possession. I can cause calamitous karmic shifts within my own fate. I listen to her, but I am also bored sitting here alone, missing school. I reread every book I own, go through my pile of American magazines over and over.

  In the mornings when Amma takes away my soiled pads, she says, “In the old days, we had to use cloths and take them to the river, wash them in the water. How things have changed! Now we have maxi pads. No mess, no fuss. Just use and throw away.” She unfolds one for me like a flower, hands it to me with a flourish. “No one has to stoop in the river washing away blood. Now everything is modern.” I understand how happy she is to be the mother of a grown-up girl. When she leaves the room, it is with a dance in her step. She brings me trays of food, roti with eggplant and potato curries, nothing fiery, nothing with garlic or onions that could awaken desire and lust. She watches while I eat.

  I’m not supposed to bathe during this time, so I become used to the scent of my body, like some small rooting animal alone in the dark. I wonder what is happening in the world. Has Puime gotten a new cassette? Has she invited someone else to come and dance around her room with her? Has the boy she has been in love with for the last three months, Suresh, talked to her? Is Thatha even now down at the river swimming, missing me? When Amma comes, I beg her to let me out, but she says, “Don’t be silly. You have to stay here until you are finished bleeding and can be bathed properly.”