The Bridge Home

by Padma Venkatraman

  11

  ORANGE

  Sweat was rolling down our backs, plastering our blouses to our skin when we finally reached the temple. It was in a quiet part of the city, with tree-lined avenues and large houses surrounded by walls. One wall had bits of broken glass set into the concrete on the top, so no one could climb over without shredding their palms.

  “Pretty,” you said, reaching for the multicolored shards, through which sunlight skipped. “Pretty.”

  “No, Rukku! Owwa!”

  Near the temple we found a house set in the middle of a sprawling garden. I could spot every kind of fruit tree—mango, coconut, banana, jackfruit, and even a short orange tree. The wall was low enough to look over, and it bore a sign with the house’s name: LAKSHMI ILLAM.

  “Look, Rukku. These people are so rich, they have time to choose a name for their house!” I said. “They must want even more money, too, because they’ve named their house after the Goddess of wealth!”

  Kutti ran up to the wrought-iron gate, which swung open invitingly.

  Our feet crunched on the gravel path leading to the front door. We’d only taken a few steps when an old man picking oranges called out, “Ai! What do you think you’re doing?” He looked us up and down, and I wished I’d smoothed our hair and skirts before entering the compound.

  “I’m looking for work, sir, and—”

  “Beggars?” He waved a fruit at us. “Get lost!”

  “We’re not begging,” I said angrily. “I just told you I’m looking for work. I can do housework and—”

  “You think rich people are going to give you jobs if you wander into their compounds with a mangy dog tagging along?” the old man said. “I’m the gardener here. Let me tell you what they’ll do. They’ll call the police, that’s what!”

  “Police?”

  “Yes!” he said. “So keep out.”

  A noise came from a shed at the end of the driveway. To my surprise, a car drove out.

  “House?” You pointed. “House? For cars?”

  “That’s called a garage,” the gardener said.

  The car pulled up to the front door of the mansion, and a woman in a sequin-studded sari stepped out. A girl in a lacy white dress skipped out from behind her.

  “Look!” she cried. “What a cute doggie!”

  “Get out.” The gardener shook his fist at us, like he’d been trying to chase us away.

  “Stay away from that dog, Praba,” the woman said. “It’s a stray.”

  I took your hand and walked briskly out the gate.

  Something whizzed by my head. I ducked, shocked the gardener would go so far as to throw a stone just to keep up his pretense.

  The object landed with a thud.

  It wasn’t a stone. It was an orange.

  I looked back, wondering if I should thank him, but the gate clanged shut.

  “Might as well eat it. It’s not big enough to share with the boys,” I mused.

  You smiled.

  We sat in the shade of a gnarled rain tree. Kutti settled his head on his forepaws and watched us.

  I gave you the orange.

  “Ahhh,” you murmured, cradling it in your hands as if it were the most beautiful thing ever. You ran the tips of your fingers across its waxy peel. You turned it around and around, as if it looked different from every angle.

  “Ahhh,” you repeated. You raised the orange to your nose, took a long sniff, and then gave it to me.

  I took the orange and turned it around, just as you had. It glowed like a small, pale sun.

  I felt its weight, its perfect ripeness—not too soft, not too firm. I breathed in its citrus scent. I started to peel it, noticing things I’d never noticed before: how the leathery peel isn’t colored the same all the way through, how the papery sections inside feel like leafy veins, how the pulp is shaped like raindrops.

  When, at last, I placed a section in my mouth, I could hear it burst as my teeth met the flesh, squeezing the juice out onto my tongue, tart at first and then sweet. Everything else melted away except for the taste, the smell, the feel of the fruit on my tongue.

  I ate the fruit slowly. The way you liked to do things.

  Until then, I’d thought it was a sad thing that you were sometimes slower than the rest of us. But that day, I realized that slow can be better than fast. Like magic, you could stretch time out when we needed it, so that a moment felt endless. So the taste of half an orange could last and last.

  12

  CHOOSING FAMILY

  By the end of that long day, I hadn’t found a job. Our money was gone, and we weren’t any richer, except for the raincoat and bananas and bag of beads that Teashop Aunty had given us.

  Still, I felt thankful. Thankful we had at least that much. Most of all, thankful that you were following me without a fuss, with Kutti at your heels.

  Smart, independent Kutti, who’d scampered off to eat scraps out of every open, overflowing garbage can we’d seen. We wouldn’t have to worry about feeding him.

  Arul and Muthu returned as we were trying to tie our raincoat to a steel rod that was poking out of the wall of the bridge to make a roof. Arms outstretched, you ran toward the boys.

  The raincoat flapped in the wind and started flying about the bridge.

  You squealed with excitement as I zigzagged after the raincoat, dodging the holes in the bridge. Kutti yipped and joined the chase.

  “Cloth bird,” Muthu yelled as he helped me catch it.

  “Nice save.” Arul clapped. “But that’s not big enough for a roof.”

  “What do you know?” I huffed. “We don’t need you telling us how to build a shelter.”

  “Too bad, because I got a spare tarp for you. A nice, big one.”

  “Now you tell me? After I almost twisted my ankle hopping all over the bridge?”

  “You could thank me, you know,” he said.

  “I could,” I agreed.

  Arul grinned.

  I grinned back.

  “Well, maybe you’ll want to thank me after we have some dinner.”

  We spread the raincoat on the ground and sat cross-legged in a circle around it. Arul set out their food—four crisp murukkus, wrapped in newspaper. My mouth watered, seeing the beige spirals made of spicy lentil flour.

  I added the bananas that remained from the bunch that Teashop Aunty had given us.

  Arul pressed his palms together and said a prayer I’d never heard before. It sounded like our father, O. R. T. Narayan, something something—all in English, not Tamil like Amma’s prayers.

  Then we split the food up evenly.

  Almost.

  Arul insisted he wasn’t very hungry. He gave me his fruit to save for you for the next morning.

  Ashamed that I was too selfish and hungry to be so noble, I downed my fair share.

  * * *

  • • •

  After dinner, Arul helped us build our shelter. We tied one edge of the new tarp to the rods poking out of the wall of the bridge, right alongside their tarp. You and Muthu helped us stretch the other end of our tarp from the wall to the ground and weight down the bottom edge with stones to make a sloped roof. We hung our towel between the two sloped tarp roofs, like a wall. I spread out our sheet and bunched up the raincoat for you to have as a pillow.

  “Sleep well in your new home,” Arul said.

  We crawled into our tent. I took out the book Parvathi Teacher had given me and strained my eyes, trying to read in the semidarkness, but I could hardly make out the words. I put the book away and thought of how kind she had been to us.

  “When we grow up, I want to be a teacher,” I told you. This dream had flitted through my mind before. Voicing it for the first time made my dream feel more solid. But it also made me worry if, by running away, I’d pushed it further out of my reach. “You think I
can be a teacher someday? Subbu and Parvathi Teacher moved to cities so their lives could get better, right? Like us?”

  “Story,” you demanded.

  I sighed. I didn’t want Arul hearing my story and thinking it was silly, so I started whispering as I’d done the night before.

  “Loud!” you commanded. “Palace! Peacock!”

  “Okay, okay.” I raised my voice a little and saw Muthu’s shadow as he crept next to the towel dividing our tents.

  When I was done, you demanded, “Again!”

  I was about to protest when Muthu’s voice floated through the thin barrier between us. “Yes, Akka, please? One more time?”

  His words made my throat squeeze up, and it was a few moments before I could speak again.

  He’d called me akka, older sister. He’d made me family.

  13

  WORK AND PRAY

  That morning, after we’d combed our hair, I offered our comb to the boys. “If you’d like,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to offend them, “you can use this . . .”

  Muthu snickered. “Next you’ll try to make us iron our clothes.”

  “Thanks.” Arul stuck the comb in his tangled hair and yanked. “Months since I did this.”

  “Months, really?” Muthu said. “Akka would never have guessed that just by looking at your hair, boss.”

  The comb snapped in two.

  “Tak!” You imitated the sound of the comb breaking and clapped your hands. “Tak! Tak! Tak!”

  “Sorry,” Arul said, tugging at the piece left in his hair. It stuck up at a jaunty angle, refusing to come out.

  “Why are you sorry, boss?” Muthu pealed with laughter. “You just made two combs out of their one.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Here, let me help.”

  I pulled out the stubborn piece of comb, along with a chunk of Arul’s hair.

  He yelped and rubbed his head, but continued apologizing. “I feel bad. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

  “There is something you can do,” I said. “You can promise to eat your share of our food every night.”

  “What do you care how much I eat?” Arul asked.

  “I don’t care. It’s just that if you eat your fair share, then I won’t have to feel guilty about doing it either. You made me feel like a greedy pig last night.”

  Arul grinned.

  “It’s silly to skip meals,” I said. “How are you going to live a nice long life if you don’t eat properly?”

  “What’s the point of living longer?”

  “Well, what’s the point of dying sooner?”

  “I don’t mind going off to meet our father who art in heaven as soon as I can.”

  “Our father who art in heaven? Oh, you said that last night. Your father is dead?”

  “Yes. But I wasn’t praying to my father,” he said. “I was praying to God. He’s called our father.”

  “God’s our mother, too.”

  “Only if you’re Hindu,” he said. “Hindus have a million names for God, but all are wrong, because Hindus worship the wrong Gods.”

  “I’ve never heard anyone say there’s a right name or a wrong name—let alone a right God or a wrong God,” I said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me, because I don’t pray.”

  “You really never pray?” Arul looked horrified. “Even the wrong Gods are better than no God.”

  “My mother must’ve prayed a million times for our father to be better to us, but he only got worse. He always hit her, and then one night he beat us, so we ran away.” I cast a glance at you, wondering if it would upset you to hear me talking about Appa, but you and Muthu were busy combing Kutti’s scanty fur with one of the pieces of comb. “What about you?”

  “My family died,” Arul said.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told him.

  “Don’t worry. Christians go to heaven when they die.”

  “What do Christians do when they’re alive?” I said, sensing he didn’t want to dwell on the subject of his family’s death. I had a vague idea that being Christian had something to do with worshipping Yesu, a God who wore a crown of thorns.

  Arul started explaining all about Yesu, and about doing what a book called the Bible says to do.

  Muthu joined us when Arul was telling me that Yesu said that if someone whacks you on one cheek, you should show them the other cheek.

  “And if you do the things Yesu says to do,” Muthu added, “you sprout wings when you get to heaven so you can zoom about like an airplane—”

  “You’re Christian, too?” I asked Muthu.

  “I don’t know.” Muthu scratched his chin.

  “You are!” Arul said. “You repeated those words I told you to, remember?”

  “Yes, yes,” Muthu said. “But those are just words, and you told me to say them, boss, so I said them. But there’s lots I don’t really understand.”

  “Like what?” Arul demanded.

  “Like that showing the other cheek thing. And like why didn’t Yesu fight the bad guys?” Muthu continued. “He had twelve in his gang—”

  “Not a gang!” Arul said. “Followers.”

  “Gangs follow the boss,” Muthu argued. “So gangs are followers.”

  “Yesu had apostles,” Arul corrected him. “Teachers who spread his word. Stop talking nonsense, Muthu. You should know better.”

  “Okay, okay, boss. I’ll just turn around and show my other side.” Muthu whipped about and wiggled his bottom at us.

  Arul looked at the sky and moaned about how he didn’t want our souls to burn in hell until the end of eternity. If I hadn’t been laughing so hard, I’d have asked Arul how eternity could have an end.

  “We’re running late.” Muthu glanced at an imaginary wristwatch. “Need to get to the office, boss.”

  “Want to come with us?” Arul asked as he gathered the sacks and sticks they’d been carrying the day we first met.

  “Yes, thanks. We really need a job,” I said. “Where do you work?”

  “We’re adventurers,” Muthu said. “We climb mountains every day. Right, boss?”

  “Right,” Arul said. “Although some days we swim across rivers instead.”

  “What do I need to bring?” I said.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find you what you need,” Arul said.

  “Rukku will bring beads.” You patted your bead bag.

  “Good idea.” He grinned at you.

  “Good,” you agreed.

  Kutti trotted along as we followed Arul across the bridge to the side we hadn’t explored yet.

  It led to a crowded street where cars honked and bicycle bells trilled and motorbikes and auto rickshaws spewed trails of smoke. A van lurched by, with schoolchildren in uniform hanging out the windows.

  “One day, we’ll go to school again, Rukku,” I said. “Just like those kids.”

  “School!” Muthu guffawed, like I’d been joking. “You actually like school?”

  “Not exactly,” I admitted, thinking of the kids who teased us and the teachers who ignored us. “Not all the time. But there was one teacher I loved, and she said . . .” I paused, thinking of all the wonderful things she’d said—about my imagination and how smart I was—and how she’d encouraged us both. I realized the biggest gift she’d given me wasn’t the book—it was something else. “She believed in me and Rukku.”

  “Believed what?” Muthu said.

  “She said if we work hard”—I tried adopting Parvathi Teacher’s persuasive tone—“we can do anything when we grow up.”

  “I used to go to school, when I lived in my village.” Arul sounded wistful. “I had a great teacher, too.”

  “Don’t sound so sad, boss,” Muthu said. “We can do anything we want now, even though we aren’t going to school. In fact, we can do anything we
feel like because we don’t have any schoolteacher telling us what to do!”

  We turned onto a street full of wooden stalls. At one stall, flies swarmed up from an open gutter onto the skinned carcasses of goats. You held your nose.

  “Think that’s a bad smell?” Muthu cackled. “Wait till you get where we’re going.”

  I couldn’t imagine what could be worse. I remembered reading an article about a man who cleaned sewers—on an oily bit of newspaper in which Appa had wrapped pakoras to surprise us with on one of his good days. Surely we weren’t going to clean sewers?

  Finally, we stopped in front of a shack that had a peeling sign hanging above the open door—VICTORY WASTE MART.

  “Kutti should wait outside,” Arul said.

  “Sit.” You and Kutti and Muthu sat on the steps while I ducked into the shack after Arul.

  Towers of junk—paper, plastic, glass, and metal—were stacked everywhere. A man was holding up a pair of rusty scales, weighing some cardboard.

  “One sack, please, sir?” Arul asked.

  The man’s eyes fell on me. They were mean, like a rogue elephant’s.

  “What’s your name, pretty girl?” the man asked.

  I pretended I hadn’t heard, figuring the less he knew about us, the better.

  “Won’t tell me your name, but you want my help?”

  “Viji,” I mumbled.

  “New to the city? Where do you live?”

  “Not sure,” I said.

  He motioned toward a pile of crumpled jute sacks lying in a corner. I took one, and Arul picked out a stick.

  “Thank you, sir,” Arul called over his shoulder.

  We stepped out of the cluttered shack into the dazzling sunshine.

  Arul shot me a concerned look. “You probably want to wait outside with Rukku and Kutti from now on?”

  “Yes,” I said, grateful he’d understood that the waste man scared me.

  We cut through an empty park and past some teetering apartment buildings that at least offered us shade from the blazing sun. Huge posters as tall as we were, advertising the latest movies, were plastered on the walls. We followed Arul to a flat, open field, where there was no escape from the sunshine.