Fifteen Lanes (11 page)

I saw the word, scrawled on my locker, from ten feet away. I didn’t let my steps falter, though other kids stopped walking to watch my reaction.

Conversations ground to a halt.

I unlocked my locker.

Someone tittered. It was an odd sound in the stillness, like birdsong at the scene of a crime. I piled my books onto the single shelf and shut the door.

“She doesn’t even care,” said a voice. I knew who it was. “She knows she’s a slut.”

I turned around and surveyed the group. It was a mix of
kids, some I knew better than others. I’d been in school with most of them for three years, shared classes with a few, worked on assignments with others, cheered alongside many at assemblies. I didn’t cry or rage. I wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. I just shook my head. Every one of them, whether bully or bystander, was enjoying my humiliation. They didn’t care that I’d had thoughts of suicide, or felt so ashamed I’d carved into my own flesh. I was nothing more than a moment’s entertainment. I’d never felt so alone.

“Who do you think you are?” asked Madison.

“Well, by all accounts …” I let the words trail off.

“You tried to blame me.”

I didn’t deny it.

“Why don’t you just leave? No one wants you here.”

Leaving was exactly what I wanted to do, but she and her group were only the front line in a thick circle of kids forming a solid ring around me. I was on the point of saying that when a ripple went through the crowd and it parted to let a boy step forward. Everyone in the school knew him, by reputation if nothing else. He had a following of his own, the school’s beautiful people.

“Speak for yourself, darling,” he said to Madison in a mocking tone. “I for one am positively delighted she’s here. She’s the first interesting person we’ve had at this school since, well, since I arrived.”

Drop-dead-gorgeous VJ Patel, son of Bollywood icon Sanjay Patel and a rising film star himself, held out his hand.

“What do you say, Slut? Would you join me for lunch?” He shot me a saucy grin guaranteed to make any female not already in her grave swoon.

I’d never spoken to him before, and would have said he didn’t know of my existence, but I did the only sensible thing I could do. I took his hand.

Sleeping on the street …

“It’s easy,” boasted Parvati when I told her I would have to join her sleeping on the street.

It had been two weeks since the man had tried to buy me, and Ma was a bundle of nerves. She acted like it was the first time a man had spoken to me in that way. Admittedly, I’d never told her about the bad things men said to me or the many times they’d tried to touch me, even her own customers. I always assumed she knew. In the same way I knew what men did to her. I thought it was our secret language. We kept our eyes open but our mouths sealed shut. After that night, I began to wonder.

She paced our small room for days. No one could calm her. Deepa-Auntie was the only one who dared try and Ma bit her head off. Prita-Auntie, who’d known Ma the longest and was the closest thing she had to a friend, made herself scarce. Lali-didi, who’d recently been moved into our room, sat nervously on her own bed, watching us both because suddenly we were
always together. Ma wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She even walked me to school and was waiting at the gate at the end of each day.

At first the novelty of her attention was gratifying. It was the first time I’d felt like I was more than a servant, perhaps even loved, but Ma’s restless anger quickly wore on me. I created excuses to steal time away from her. One day I deliberately spoke out of turn in class to get kept after school. That was a mistake though. When my teacher finally let me go, Ma was a hissing cobra, barely able to contain herself until we got home, where she beat me.

I was the one who suggested I was too old to sleep in our house. “The men look at me differently now,” I told her. “It will be safer if I sleep elsewhere.”

I didn’t say that men had looked at me this way as long as I could remember. Was there any other way for a man to look at a girl?

“But where will you sleep?” asked Ma.

It was a stupid question. How many people did we know who slept in the street every night? Did she think I could give her the coordinates of the patch of pavement I would claim as my own?

“I’ll go with Parvati,” I said. “She knows someone with a small room we can share.”

This was a lie and Ma knew it. If she’d believed me she would have asked for more details. To have a room was sufficiently extraordinary that it bore investigation. Perhaps there would be space for Aamaal and Shami as well. But Ma said nothing.

She crinkled her already deeply lined brow and gave me a hollow-eyed stare. It went through my head that she used to be
pretty and I wondered if her horror that men were noticing me was in part because she struggled now to get their attention. What would happen if men no longer paid to be with her? How would she support us? I didn’t know how old Ma was. Like most people, myself included, her birth wasn’t registered and the date was long forgotten. She didn’t even have a fake birth certificate, like the one I got to register for school. She’d once said she was barely in her teens when she had me, so she had to be in her twenties still, but time moved faster in our community. Many women, their bodies wasted by disease and addiction, didn’t live to see thirty.

“I don’t want you begging,” Ma said. “I don’t send you to school to have you end up a beggar.”

I wanted to ask why she did send me to school. What was her plan for me? Did she have one? “I’ll only sleep with Parvati. That’s all.”

She sighed and sank down on the edge of Lali-didi’s bed. Lali-didi practically left behind her own skin in her haste to scuttle away.

“I don’t like Parvati. She’s a bad influence.”

I suppressed a smile. As if anyone could be a bad influence in our neighborhood. What did she think I might learn from Parvati that I didn’t already know?

“She doesn’t even go to school,” Ma continued.

“That’s not Parvati’s choice,” I said indignantly, though Parvati always pretended she was glad she didn’t have to go to school. “Her ma won’t pay for the uniform and books.”

“You’ll need to be back first thing to wash the dishes. You know what Pran will do if he wakes up and finds the dishes haven’t been cleared up.”

I nodded, though no one ever knew what Pran would do.

I stood outside our building that evening, discussing sleeping options with Parvati. Although it was late, I still had Shami strapped to my back. He had a cough that made it hard for him to sleep lying flat. Sticky yellow goo collected in his lungs so he woke up gasping for breath. It was another reason I didn’t mind sleeping outside. Keeping him quiet and breathing at the same time was becoming an impossible task. He would breathe easier if I could keep him upright.

“I told Hussein there would only be two of us,” said Parvati for at least the third time. “Why can’t you leave Shami with your ma? Aamaal can watch him.”

I looked across the street to where a fight was brewing between two men outside a bar. We needed to get moving. It wasn’t safe for us to be hanging around this time of night.

“We can sleep under the bridge,” I said.

Parvati often worked with the beggars who’d built a shanty community under the railway bridge near Grant Road Station. It wasn’t far from Kamathipura. We could make it there on foot in thirty minutes. I’d suggested it earlier but Parvati refused. I couldn’t figure out why. I thought the beggars were her friends.

Parvati put her hands on her hips and gave me a look, like I was being unreasonable. Maybe she wanted to show off her “boyfriend,” Hussein, who sold T-shirts outside Central Station. He claimed he owned the stall where he worked and we could sleep under the table when he shut down for the night. I had my doubts on both counts. He was too young to own a stall, and I didn’t want to risk being discovered by his boss and chased away in the middle of the night. If it had been closer I might
have agreed to try it out, but it was more than an hour’s walk.

“Why would he let us sleep there for nothing?” The boy’s ulterior motive was the other thing worrying me. We couldn’t afford to pay him, not in cash anyway, and I didn’t want to contemplate what other form of payment he might expect.

Parvati shrugged. “He said he loves me. He gave me this T-shirt and he didn’t ask for anything.” She puffed out her chest in case I’d failed to notice she was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with
I’m a Princess
in gold lettering. She was also wearing new blue jeans. It was the first time I’d seen her out of traditional clothes. The difference was startling, as if she were one of those girls who advertised toothpaste on television, with a life as perfect as her teeth.

“Did he give you the jeans too?”

“No, I bought them myself.” She looked way too smug.

I suspected she’d stolen them. I just hoped she’d been smart enough not to steal from a stall near the T-shirt shop. The vendor was bound to notice if she sashayed past wearing them. Parvati scared me sometimes. She was much too bold for a girl. It would get her into trouble one day.

Two men walked by and gave us a speculative look. Even after they were beyond us, they turned back for a last gawk. Parvati winked at me.

“Those clothes reveal too much,” I said, grateful Ma had already been inside with a customer when Parvati showed up.

“You’re just jealous.” Parvati arched her back and squeezed her arms on either side of her tiny boobs.

“You can’t make melons out of cherries,” I said grumpily.

Parvati sighed. “When I get rich I’m going to buy boobs the size of melons!”

“They’ll grow on their own, Paru,” I relented. “Your ma has the biggest boobs on the street.”

Parvati smiled happily. “That’s true, isn’t it? But I’m a teenager. They should be bigger by now.”

“You’re twelve. That’s not a teenager.”

“You don’t know how old I am.”

“Neither do you.”

“That’s the problem with being the oldest. Do you remember the exact date Aamaal and Shami were born?”

“Of course.”

“Never forget that. When Eka starts school he won’t have a fake date on his birth certificate like you and I did. My ma couldn’t tell you when he was born but I remember.”

“Your ma didn’t register his birth so you’ll still have to fake the certificate.” I didn’t have to ask why she knew her ma would let Eka go to school when she’d pulled Parvati out after third standard. Even a goat knew education was more important for boys than for girls. I also didn’t suggest that Eka might not be the best candidate for school. Parvati’s ma had a serious drug problem. It didn’t seem to have affected Parvati but I wasn’t so sure about Eka. He wasn’t sick as often as Shami, but Shami was already talking, while Eka, though eight months older, was still babbling.

“It’s getting late, Paru. We need to decide where we’re going.”

“Fine,” she huffed, “let’s go to Grant Road. But leave Shami at home tomorrow night.”

I started walking. Parvati fell in step, taking my hand. We both knew that tomorrow night I’d show up again with Shami. We’d have the same argument, and Shami would come along. Parvati may not have loved Shami as much as I did but she did
love him, the same way I loved Eka. They were family. And Parvati understood that in the nearly two years since Shami’s birth he’d become a vital part of me. I was so used to looking after him that sometimes at school I felt his absence as if the air had been emptied of oxygen and I couldn’t breathe. All I could think about was rushing home to make sure he was still okay.

As if he knew what I was thinking, Shami stirred and wrapped his fingers around a strand of my hair. I craned my face around and kissed his tiny fist.

“Do you want me to carry him for a bit?” asked Parvati.

“No, he’s not heavy.” The truth of that statement made my stomach twist.

“He’ll grow, Noor. He’s like my boobs. We’re late bloomers, right, Shami?” She briefly dropped my hand to reach up and ruffle his hair.

“Right, Shami,” agreed Shami.

We laughed.

Leaving our crowded street, we hit the bright lights of Bapty Road. Food stalls on carts gave way to proper restaurants, open at the front so their fluorescent lighting lit up the whole street. You could tell we were coming into a richer neighborhood because bright lights shone from upstairs windows as well, as if the whole street were one big carnival. In our neighborhood, electricity was scarce and not so frivolously wasted.

“Are you hungry?” asked Parvati. She always seemed to have money these days. That also worried me.

“Are you buying?”

“Sure, why not?”

I almost asked her where the money came from but she beamed at me so full of pride that the words shriveled on my
tongue and I swallowed them down again. “I’m not hungry,” I lied, and immediately felt guilty. Even if I didn’t want to take her money, I couldn’t deny Shami. “Maybe just a samosa for Shami.”

“We’ll all have samosas,” she said magnanimously, like an NGO worker who could produce food as easily as spit.

We stopped at a café that had tables spilling onto the sidewalk. That was another thing you didn’t find in our neighborhood: space was too precious to waste it on the luxury of tables and chairs on sidewalks. People ate as they walked along or took their food home. We approached the counter. There was already a crowd of men waiting to be served but Parvati pushed her way to the front and shouted her order. The server tried to ignore her, looking over her head to the men who now engulfed her. She put her hands on the countertop, which was almost as high as her shoulders, and peered over the top, continuing to bellow. I chuckled at the foolish man who thought Parvati could be ignored. Giving her a foul look, he took her order, snatched the cash she held up and practically threw a bag of samosas at her.