Inheritance

by Balli Kaur

  ‘Father, it’s me. What happened? Is she okay? Where did you find her?’ Gurdev was short of breath. In the background, he heard Karam scolding and Amrit crying.

  ‘Somewhere in Khatib. A policeman found her and brought her straight here.’

  Khatib was on the other end of the island. That girl in the red shirt could not have been Amrit. ‘Has she explained what she was doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Father said. ‘I won’t look at her. I will not speak to her.’ Gurdev remembered him saying the same thing about Narain. He glanced at Banu, who was looking at the paint cans curiously. A look of realisation crossed her face. She glared at him and stormed off into the bedroom.

  ‘I’ll come over,’ Gurdev said to Father.

  Amrit

  There was too much noise. Amrit felt it grinding into her bones. The normal level of noise in her home was acceptable – a low hum of electrical appliances, distant traffic, and thoughts. Yes, thoughts made noises too. Narain had pretended not to believe her when she told him, right before he left for America, that she could hear his thoughts. ‘What am I thinking right now?’ he had asked.

  ‘I can’t actually hear each word you’re thinking,’ she explained, ‘but I can hear something. Like a zzzz noise. And if it’s loud it means you’re thinking of something exciting.’ Narain had chuckled and told her she was full of rubbish. She knew he believed her, though.

  Gurdev was here now, standing with his back to the wall. He kept on wincing and shifting his weight from one leg to another, as if he, too, was uncomfortable with the noise.

  Amrit traced the source of the noise, following its invisible path until she reached Father. He was shouting and shaking his hands, gesturing to the ceiling and then down to the floor. She struggled to concentrate on what he was saying but his hands were so distracting. He struggled to be angry in English. She watched his mouth form the imperfect words and she heard the quaver in his voice before he gave up and began shouting in Punjabi. She still could not determine what he was saying. His face became blurry and out of focus and then, suddenly, it was painfully sharp in the late morning sun.

  Amrit sat down on the sofa with her head in her hands. Everybody stood and watched, bewildered. She didn’t know how to tell them to stop talking and let her think for just a moment. They wanted answers. Where had she been? With whom? What happened? Nothing she said would satisfy them. Her explanations didn’t even seem plausible to her. They came to her as a whirlwind of nonsensical events, broken into pieces she didn’t have the energy to re-assemble. There was school, the boys at the coffee shop, the street opera, a fire, a low ditch, and a mattress soaked in sweat. She remembered the burn of whiskey in her throat, and the hand that tipped the bottle gently towards her lips, then the sensation of her body adapting to things it had never experienced before. She felt a soreness in her arms and legs, and vaguely remembered running. ‘Wait, wait. I can explain,’ she heard herself saying. Her voice was still miles away.

  The boys liked to feel her ribs. They asked first, coyly reaching towards her torso with their long fingers and then asking, ‘Can?’ And if she said, yes, can, then they shot forwards, tracing their hands along her T-shirt. She let out a giggle or a sigh as they felt the bump of each bone and pressed into the hollow spaces between them. Sometimes it made her wince because there were too many hands and she could not connect them to the boys. At other times, she wanted to lie back and let them slip their hands under her T-shirt and get closer and closer to her bones.

  ‘What if your father saw us?’ The boy with the tattoo whispered to her the first time she let him touch her under her shirt. He was Jaya, the first of four boys that she’d selected. Yes, I choose you. I have a choice, she’d said between fits of uncontrollable giggles. She couldn’t stop her laughter even though she couldn’t explain what was so funny. His fingers were cold as he spider-walked them across her belly. She felt a surge; she wanted all of the boys now, all of their cold spidery fingers. Jaya asked the question again and she shrugged him off.

  ‘My father doesn’t come here,’ she said, leaning against the wall. A protruding pipe dug into her back so she shifted before she closed her eyes. Satisfied with her answer, Jaya proceeded with his hands. His low breathing matched the guttural noise that rose from somewhere deep inside Amrit.

  Her family probably believed she had run away just to be with boys. ‘She’s impatient,’ they were thinking. The disgust in their thoughts produced a thick hum like flies around a clogged drain. ‘She just can’t wait till she’s married.’ Amrit could not fault them. The boys were the first thing that entered her mind as well. It was easiest to blame them and her temptation towards them. There were girls who could not wait. They were the stars of cautionary tales: pregnant-before-getting-married, seen-smoking-cigarettes, dancing-in-discos-in-short-skirts, giggling-with-boys-all-the-time. Itchy girls. Amrit’s family knew she was one of them now. She could not escape their judgement; she wanted everything she was not supposed to want, badly. She wanted to talk loudly when there was silence, to sob uncontrollably at the slightest grievance. How much of her life had Amrit already wasted on practising restraint? Too much, she decided. As the youngest daughter, there were so many rules that often became apparent only when they were broken. She would no longer be shushed and scolded for being wrong. As far as Amrit was concerned, there was nothing wrong with what she said and did. She heard a sudden and urgent calling to make up for those lost indulgences. She would devour all those grown-up novels she had not been allowed to read, and repeat all the dirty jokes she had been discouraged from hearing in the first place. She would stand in the sun and let it bake her fair skin; she would eat all the sugary, fattening cakes and sweets she wanted. She would not allow any more censorship in her life. It was an infinite task, to go back in time and collect these excesses, but she was confident she would manage.

  It had not begun with the boys, though they looked culpable with their pierced ears and their stale cigarette breath. They were school drop-outs who lingered on street corners and coffee shops and planned nothing for the long stretch of days ahead of them. They tried catching girls’ attention by whistling or saying crude things. They’d been doing that to all the girls since they started secondary school, even though the pinafore tops the girls wore were tailored with stiff pleats to camouflage their growing breasts. No girl responded to those good-for-nothings unless she was desperate; their female teachers warned them against making eye contact. A few teachers made it a point to go outside and shoo the boys away as if they were flies swarming around a drain. Mr Rahman, Amrit’s Science teacher, was one of these teachers, and all the girls fell in love with him for being their protector. Amrit loved him too – she loved everyone, all the men, all the boys. It sickened and delighted her, this overwhelming love that brought her to shivers.

  Narain would probably think this was all his fault. One night, he had seen her sneaking out to meet the boys, and he had kept it a secret. By that time, many things were happening that Amrit could not explain. The buzzing, as though her mind was a radio with its dial set between stations. She could go three days on very little sleep because other people’s thoughts filled her mind. They had to be other people’s thoughts – they were too complicated and far-fetched to be her own. Suddenly, she knew everything there was to know about the colour green because questions and theories and wild proclamations consumed her, and all of them had to do with greenness: green peas, green beans, electric green, lizard green, watercolour paint green, stale green. Then the same thing happened with crockery – Amrit had a sudden awareness of a range of dishware brands and she considered knocking on all the doors in her neighborhood, recommending better products to the housewives who used those outdated wooden spoons and shineless plates. Overhearing two classmates discussing a physics test one afternoon, Amrit wondered why on earth there was a subject studying wheels, and then for days, she could not stop seeing patterns of spinning wheels in her surroundings. The wheel patterns p
opulated her vision, making her dizzy and breathless.

  Exams approached but Amrit could commit no facts to memory. Every word that entered her mind produced a string of other thoughts so brilliant and distracting that it wasn’t necessary to continue reading her textbooks. They were only slowing her down. She remembered the delirious way she befriended the boys; she was thrilled to sit with them in the coffee shops. They told jokes that made her sides ache from laughter, although she struggled to remember them immediately afterwards. As Amrit sat on their laps and sipped the beers they brought her, she was certain that this was what her life was supposed to be. Outside the confines of her house, she was not the protected youngest daughter. She was clever and articulate here – she told stories that captivated the boys, and when they teased her, she had the quickest retorts.

  The excitement faded when the thoughts multiplied at too quick a rate for her to control. They branched off into hundreds of streams that burst through her mind. Wide awake and muttering to herself one night, Amrit was aware that something was not right. Too much schoolwork, she told herself. Too much schoolwork and too little sleep. But when she shut her eyes and forced herself to sleep, the thoughts shook her out of bed and forced her to pay attention. They became voices. She did not tell Father about this growing problem. He would panic and make her stay in bed, when this was the last thing she wanted. The house felt unbearably crowded with the cacophony of thoughts and ideas in Amrit’s mind.

  One day at school she locked herself in the toilets and stayed in the cubicle for two hours because she was certain that the other girls were talking about her. They were saying she was not the right height for their school, and she believed them – she was too lanky. She would die here. The thought made her shake so badly she looked like she was doing a dance. When she finally emerged and told the teacher she was ill and wanted to go home, her underpants felt slightly damp. She had wet herself and all the girls – even the ones who wanted her to die – were wide-eyed with sympathy. How could she explain this to her family? What would she tell them? They did not see her as somebody who could have problems beyond those they had already anticipated.

  Another day she was sitting with the boys and she told them her idea for a business. ‘I can cut down all the trees – no, listen – I can take a parang, I can cut down all the trees in Singapore and I’ll sell them to people who don’t have trees in their countries. Everybody needs trees to survive. Look at the oxygen levels and you’ll understand.’ She bit her lip to keep it from trembling with excitement. Something surged through her and made her want to leap on top of the table and dance. ‘If you help me, all of you will be millionaires. Think about it. All the windows and people will see the trees out of them and they will be able to make coffins and shoes and even car sellers will need to buy trees.’ The boys broke out in raucous laughter. They asked her how much beer she’d drunk. ‘Not that much, lah,’ she said, her eyes darting from one boy to the next. She was hungry for each of them. Another current ran through her, this one so powerful it straightened her spine and made her skin taut. She could have them all at the same time and it still wouldn’t be enough. One night in the shower she had pressed the nozzle against her breasts. Her nipples grew hard; they swelled and screamed. She gasped and clutched her own skin, collapsing against the slippery walls. The next time, she brought the nozzle lower slowly, with more control, and she bit gently into her wrist. The boys’ faces flickered and alternated in her mind until she was out of breath, and when she closed her eyes, she believed they must have been there with her. Disgusting, she chided herself. ‘Sick,’ she said aloud, trying to fill her body with remorse, but there was no space for anything else besides a tearing hunger for somebody – everybody – to touch her.

  School became a dull pastime. She was there all day but all she could think about was the boys and the drinks they poured for her. During Maths class one day, Ming Ni asked if she could borrow her ruler. Amrit passed it to her and then told her she could keep it. ‘I have millions of those. I could buy millions more,’ she bragged, whipping out her purse to reveal the money the boys had given her. Each boy had paid her a dollar. ‘For the pleasure of your company,’ one boy said. The others had laughed wildly. In another class, she was assigned to do a project with a group of students and she appointed herself leader. Their ideas were plain and boring and she told them so. ‘You’re not seeing the real thing,’ she insisted, taking their bewildered faces as proof. She drew convoluted diagrams explaining her concepts. ‘Listen, I know this is right. You can trust me. If you all just put your minds to it, you’d get perfect scores like mine. Remember, I always get top scores because of what’s up here,’ she said, tapping the forehead of the girl across from her, who flinched.

  That night, ideas overwhelmed Amrit. She paced her room and jotted them down, her wrists hurting from the speed of her movements. Go back. If you add the two together, you have another phase, and the quality is higher. For the project, mix two chemicals and test the point where they combust. Test all of the points, for all of the explosions, and then do it again. Somewhere along the way, she realised she had not spoken to Narain, and although Father had warned her that overseas phone calls were very expensive and only for emergencies, she searched the family telephone directory for Narain’s phone number in America and dialled. Waiting for the operator to connect her, Amrit flipped impatiently through the diary and stopped on the calendar page. January. It was winter in Iowa, and somewhere, Narain must be walking around in those thick-soled shoes she had placed in the other suitcase. He did not answer the phone but she stayed on until she could hear the buzzing of his thoughts, loud and persistent. Although there was a lot Amrit wanted to tell Narain, everything overlapped in her mind and she was speechless. After hanging up, she paced her room some more and finished her Science workbook. I’m too smart for this school, for this country. I could get all those bloody government scholarships, they’re so easy, she thought smugly as she scrawled answers in writing she later wouldn’t recognise.

  The day before she disappeared, Amrit skipped the Friday assembly at school and walked to the coffee shop. The boys nudged each other and whispered as she approached. ‘Saying what?’ she challenged them.

  ‘Nothing, nothing, sit,’ said the tall one with the gold chain. He ordered her some breakfast and tea. A girl wearing a different school uniform sat on his friend’s lap. Every now and then he tickled her and she squealed and twisted like a worm. Her laughter reminded Amrit of her own - loud and uninhibited. She watched the boy’s hand disappearing into the pleats of the girl’s skirt. An itch started somewhere in Amrit’s belly and it spread like fire across her body as the boy buried his face into the girl’s neck, making her giggle.

  ‘I’m Seema,’ the girl said when she finally slipped off the boy’s lap. ‘Amrit, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The girl took in Amrit’s uniform. ‘I think you’ll be late for school,’ she said. There was something unkind in her tone.

  ‘Yeah, I’m late,’ Amrit said. She picked up her bag and made a hasty exit. Morning lights crept across the sky, making bold streaks of gold on top of the shop roofs. In the lane that Amrit used as a short cut, an old lady with a bent body threw a pail of water, washing lettuce leaves and hollow chicken bones into the shallow gutter.

  Latecomers never had trouble sneaking into school since construction began at the back of the campus. Workers flowed freely through the open gates and said nothing if the occasional student did the same. Amrit felt the gazes of the men, warm against her bare limbs. She smiled coyly at them as she slipped into the school and walked around the ditch they were digging for a pond. It was a deep and wide crater in the middle of the ground, the borders protected by workers and their shovels. A strong vision shot into her mind. She was charging past the men and throwing herself inside. She was sinking far and dissolving into the soil. The vision was so clear she thought it was real, and for a moment she could taste the rich tangy earth in her mouth and
feel her bones becoming pliant as they mixed with the rest of the earth.

  ‘Amrit, did you just arrive?’ She spun around to see Mr Rahman, her Science teacher.

  ‘No,’ she lied, eyeing the open gate. ‘I was looking for something. I left something here.’

  Mr Rahman didn’t look like he believed her. ‘Amrit, I must talk to you about something.’ He led her to a row of benches facing a mess of trees and shrubs. The decorated roof of a small Buddhist temple in the distance poked out behind the greenery. ‘You haven’t been doing well lately,’ he said.

  Amrit shook her head. ‘No, no, I’m fine.’

  ‘Your exam results, Amrit. I compared them with last semester’s results. Shocking difference. I’m very surprised with your attitude. You used to be a top student.’

  ‘I’m still a top student,’ Amrit blurted. ‘Ask anybody.’

  ‘You failed everything,’ Mr Rahman said. He winced as he delivered the news, as though it hurt him more. ‘Every single subject. I checked with all of your other teachers and they all said the same thing. They don’t know what’s gotten into you.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Amrit insisted. ‘Check my exam results again. They’re fine. I’m doing better than last year. Look.’ She unzipped her bag and produced her Science workbook. ‘Just see, I did all of the work last night. I finished it ahead of time.’ Electricity surged through her. She wanted to burst out laughing. Which fool had miscalculated her exam results?

  ‘There’s something else I’d like to talk to you about.’ Mr Rahman said as he accepted her workbook. He hesitated. ‘Some of the teachers have seen you mixing with… bad company. Those guys who hang around coffee shops, they’re not the types of people…’ he faltered here, and changed tactics. ‘Amrit, you could go to university, do you know that? You have the brains. To see this kind of thing happening, it’s very upsetting. There is time to meet boys later. Concentrate on your studies first.’ He opened the book and flipped through the pages as if they would hold the next part of his script. Amrit was thrilled. Nothing he said had bothered or embarrassed her. The sun glinted off the temple rooftop and the surrounding greenery, making all of it painfully bright to Amrit.