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Do you even have any idea where you are?”
My heart is pounding like the drumming of a monsoon rain, and my shoulders are shaking as if I had a great chill.
“You ignorant hill girl,” she says. “You don’t know anything. Do you?”
I wrap my arms around myself and grip with all my might. But the trembling will not stop.
“Well, then,” Mumtaz says, pulling her record book out from
her waistcloth.
“Let me explain it to you.”
“You belong to me,” she says. “And I paid a pretty sum for you, too.”
She opens to a page in her book and points to the notation for 10,000 rupees.
“You will take men to your room,” she says. “And do whatever they ask of you. You will work here, like the other girls, until your debt is paid off.”
My head is spinning now, but I see only one thing: the number in her book. It warps and blurs, then fractures into bits that swim before my eyes. I fight back tears and find my voice.
“But Auntie Bimla said—”
“Your ‘auntie,’” she scoffs, “works for me.”
I understand it all now.
I blink back the tears in my eyes. I ball my hands into fists. I will not do this dirty business. I will wait until dark and escape from Mumtaz and her Happiness House.
“Shahanna!” Mumtaz snaps her fingers and the dark-skinned girl hands her a pair of scissors.
This Shahanna leans close and whispers to me, “It will go easier on you if you hold still.”
There is a slicing sound, and a clump of my hair falls to the floor. I cry out and try to break free, but Shahanna has hold of me.
Mumtaz draws back, the jaw of the scissors poised at my
neck.
“Hold still,” she says, her teeth clenched. “Or I’ll slice your
throat.”
I look at Shahanna. Her eyes are wide with fear.
I stay very still, looking at the girl in the silver glass. Soon she has the shorn head of a disgraced woman and a face of stone. “Try to escape with that head of hair,” Mumtaz says, “and they’ll bring you right back here.”
And then they are gone, leaving me alone in the locked-in room.
I pound on the door. I howl like an animal. I pray.
I pace the room. I kick the door.
But I do not cry.
Each day, a thousand people pass below my window. Children on their way to school. Mothers hurrying home from the market. Rickshaw pullers, vegetable sellers, street sweepers and alms-seekers.
Not one looks up.
Each morning and evening Mumtaz comes, beats me with a leather strap, and locks the door behind her.
And each night, I dream that Ama and I are sitting outside our hut, looking down the mountain at the festival lights, and she is twining my hair into long dark braids.
Tonight when Mumtaz comes to my room, she sees that her strap has left raw sores on my back and neck, my arms and legs.
So she hits me on the soles of my feet.
Tonight when Mumtaz comes and unlocks the door, she sees there is no part of me unmarked by her strap.
“Now will you agree to be with men?”
I shake my head.
And so she says that she will starve me until I submit.
What she does not realize is that I already know hunger.
I know how your stomach gnaws on itself searching for something to fill it.
I know how your insides keep moving, unwilling to believe they’re empty.
I also know how to swallow your spit and pretend that it is
soup.
How to close your nose to the scent of another family’s
supper fire.
And how to tie your waistcloth so tight that, at least for a
few hours, you can fool your belly into thinking it’s full.
Mumtaz, with her doughy waist and fat mango face, doesn’t know the match she’s met in me.
I don’t pay attention to cries of the peanut vendor under my window.
I don’t let myself smell the onions frying in the kitchen
below,
or pay heed to the chatter of the girls as they head past my
door to the midday meal.
I don’t listen for the footsteps of the street boy who brings afternoon tea in a wire caddy.
I don’t permit myself to smell the aroma of the bowl of curried rice that Mumtaz passes under my nose, or take notice of the churning of my stomach.
Even in my sleep, I don’t allow myself to dream of even a single roti.
After five days of no food and water I don’t even dream.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 mountain 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.
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.
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.”
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.
