How to Escape From a Leper Colony

by Tiphanie Yanique

  Gita was pretty smart by all definitions, but no one thought there was anything so special about this. She was a hard worker. She studied with the ferocity of someone in love. And this was special. She was respected for this by teachers and sought out for guidance by students. Her parents, who imagined her growing up to be someone’s wife, approved because her study habits meant she would be a desirable catch—a woman who could bear smart and studious sons. Gita did not see it this way. She imagined that she was growing up to be an obstetrician-gynecologist. In her dreams she treated immigrant Indian women and slipped them birth control while their husbands waited in the lounge. Because she was darker than most of the other Indian girls who came straight from India, she was often mistaken even by her own for being Guyanese or Trinidadian. To be called Guyanese or Trini was thought to be an insult by some in the subcontinent community. But Pinky did not take it this way. Those island Indians had children who spoke loose and didn’t go to Hindu classes on Saturdays. The girls didn’t think twice before dating native boys. Pinky called herself black and no one who heard her objected—she never called herself this in front of her parents.

  Up until the first two weeks of her senior year Pinky’s routine was the same.

  “Gita! Get up my love. Gita!” She was the only child and much was made of her. The maid, Mrs. Delroy, would tickle her toes with the straw of the broom until Gita pulled her feet away and bolted upright. She would go to the shower. Which was her shower alone. As she got older her showers became longer and by the second week of being a senior in high school she was taking forty-five minutes—something of a crime on an island where rainwater was stored under the house like treasure. She liked the water hot, despite the heat of the island. She liked it scalding hot. Her mother would come and knock on the door. “Too much heat! You’re going to wrinkle young!” Then Gita would blast on the cold water and squeal, turning circles under the shower so that she could erase the wrinkling. For many years she stepped out of the shower and reached for her towel without even glancing at herself in the bathroom mirror that covered an entire wall. But since becoming a senior and since Leslie had lost her virginity last year, Gita has become more interested in her own body, and more bold with it.

  Now she would step out of the shower and dry herself off with the delicate pats her mother had taught her would not dry out the skin. When the steam evaporated Gita would hang up the towel and walk slowly to the mirror. She looked at herself as she brushed her teeth and arranged her hair. Sometimes, if she was thinking of Mateo Parone, she would look serious and sexy like she imagined Leslie might when she was doing it with Ben Jamison. Then she would blow a kiss to her reflection but this would be too much and she would collapse into giggles. Her uniform would be laid out on the newly made bed when she emerged.

  At the breakfast table her mother and Mrs. Delroy would lay out jelly and tea and tofu eggs. The two women would be quarreling with each other in the way master and servant have quarreled for centuries. Neither one really able to understand the other even after sixteen years making breakfast together in the same kitchen. Mrs. Delroy had a thick Kittitian accent, while Mrs. Manachandi had never lost her northern Indian lilt. This is not to say that the Manachandis treated Mrs. Delroy as though she was less. They called her Mrs. Delroy. They gave her that respect. The other new Indian families called their maids by their first names and talked badly about them at Indian-only functions. When Mrs. Delroy and Mrs. Manachandi stood in the kitchen together they seemed as though they were two halves of the same person.

  Mr. Manachandi would also be at the table, reading yesterday’s paper. He wished that the island had a paper delivery system so he could read that morning’s paper at the breakfast table as businessmen did in England, but it was not so. Mr. Manachandi had never lived in the U.K., coming directly from Bombay, so he would never have the paper delivered to him in time for that morning’s breakfast. He always read the news a day late.

  Gita and her father ate breakfast together. He quizzed her on yesterday’s news, which she had read yesterday before she arrived at her father’s store to deliver the paper. He imagined that she would marry the son of one of his fellow jewelry store owners in Tortola or St. Thomas. As each son returned from the U.S. or the U.K. with his business degree Mr. Manachandi would scrutinize him. But either the young man would marry someone already out of secondary school, or there would be a scandal with a native girl and the boy would be sent to St. Vincent to recover. Mr. Manachandi wasn’t sure which shop heir Gita would marry but he knew that she would have to be witty and up on local politics to win the best mate. She would also have to know math quite well and the value of different bits of gold. So often at the breakfast table he would test her with problems of centimeters and karats. He might present her with a pair of heart-in-hand gold earrings with diamond studs. “How much do you think I bought this for?” She would smile over her tea. “Seventy dollars a bag.” “How much should I sell it for?” She stirred her tea. “Is it Christmas or regular season?” “Christmas.” “Is your customer a tourist or a local?” “A local.” She tapped her fingers on the tablecloth. They made a thudding but musical sound. “Two hundred dollars at first. Bring it down to one-fifty. If they don’t take it wait until they come back the next day. Say something like Yes, I remember you. And now this is the last pair. One-twenty is the lowest.” “Too high.” her father would say. “You’ll never sell anything. People will think you’re cheating them.” But later that day someone would come into his store and he would say, “Look at the diamonds. They’re real. These are eighteen-karat gold. Handmade, each one. One-twenty is the lowest I can go. I’ll give it to you for one-twenty.” Secretly he wished Gita would never have to marry. That she would come to the shop and work with him like a son.

  But this had changed in the second week of Gita’s senior year. She’d had a quiz in calculus that most everyone was sure to fail, except her. She and Leslie hung about in the school courtyard and talked about college. Leslie would go over to St. Thomas, to UVI. So would Gita. Leslie because it was cheaper and she wasn’t incredibly academically inclined. She wanted to play volleyball and the college had a good team that competed on other islands. Gita because, though she was a sure thing for a full Barnard scholarship and even had Wellesley and Spelman as backups, her mother didn’t want her to go far away to college. Too many girls came back with American boyfriends or with ideas about never getting married.

  “There’s Ben,” said Pinky, pointing with her chin across the school yard where a pickup basketball game was in progress.

  “Screw Ben.”

  “Why?”

  “He horned out on me over the summer.”

  “How do you know? He was in Atlanta all summer.”

  “Grapevine, Pinky.”

  “Why you ain tell me, girl? Dang. We need to get you a next man.”

  “I ain tell nobody. We need to get you a man, period.”

  “Good luck.”

  “I telling you. Fine ass Mateo is all over you.”

  “Mateo’s an idiot.”

  “But he’s fine and you’re smart enough for the both of you.”

  “And what I going to do with him? He can’t even drive his car without crashing it. Good luck getting a black guy to pass my parents’ husband meter.”

  “He’s half black. And Pinky, really. Stop thinking about stupid-ness. You practice first with boyfriends. Don’t even think about husband. Boyfriends are more fun anyway. Husbands are soo boring. You ain noticed?”

  Pinky nodded. “Do you think you’d ever do it like on the kitchen table?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know.”

  “Oh, you slut.” Leslie paused and looked out at the boys across the school yard. “Yeah. I think I would. Would you?”

  “I guess if my husband wanted to.”

  They nodded together. Leslie had only done it three times with Ben before school let out and he went to Atlanta to spend the summer with his mother. She s
aid that it hurt every time but she expected that if they’d kept doing it all summer by now it would be feeling good. Pinky had shrugged. She didn’t like the idea of waiting for it to feel good. Why can’t it feel good right away? It feels good to him. She imagined that when she became an obstetrician-gynecologist she would make sure it felt good for all women all the time.

  Leslie picked up her schoolbag. “You want a drop?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey, we gone,” called Leslie to the guys still playing basketball.

  Mateo dribbled the ball with one hand and put the other one up to signal a time-out. “Hey, I going see you ladies at Vive tonight?” His voice had become deep over the summer and to Pinky it sounded rich and matched the musky way he smelled.

  Leslie gave their response. “Maybe.”

  Mateo was looking at Pinky. “You too, Pinky?”

  “You know I’m bagged up.”

  “Sneak out,” said Mateo, dribbling the basketball hard, slamming into the ground, while the other guys waited for him. She laughed at his suggestion. She flipped her hair and then felt stupid for doing so.

  In the car Leslie didn’t look at her friend as she maneuvered out of the tight space. “Really, Pinky. We’ve been friends so long and I’m sick of giving you the business secondhand. I mean, I go with you to all the Divali stuff but you never come to the club. ’Bout time. You’s seventeen, woman.”

  “Screw you. Divali is like a religious thing. The club is not.”

  “It could be.”

  “Whatever.” But she wanted to go. Maybe tonight she would have that fight. She would cry and ask her parents why they’d brought her here to this island only to tell her she couldn’t be a part of it. Or maybe she would ask to stay over at Leslie’s and even though her mother didn’t like Leslie so much she wouldn’t have much reason to say no. The last time she’d asked her mother had said she was too old for sleepovers. But that was a year ago. Maybe it’s time to ask again.

  They kissed on the cheek before Leslie drove off. When Pinky walked into the shop she knew something was wrong. Only the workers were there. Not her uncle Rommy or her father. Just the black women who helped sell the T-shirts. They were behind the counters on both sides of the store. One came out and touched Gita’s face with the palm of her hand.

  “Gita, girl. You need to call home.”

  When she did no one answered. Then the phone rang in the shop. The woman nodded into the receiver. When she hung up she motioned for them to start locking up. “Sorry,” she said to the customers, with an astuteness Gita had never noticed before. “Family emergency. We must lock up the store now.” They closed the store in silence. Gita did not ask the women what was going on. They all went and stood outside in the hot sun. The street was crowded with tourists half-naked in bathing suits speaking French and Spanish, and an English that grated at Pinky’s ears. The two women spoke to each other in a patois Gita did not understand. The traffic was heavy with taximen yelling “Back to the ship” as they loaded on any tourists tired of shopping. After half an hour Gita could see her father’s sedan inching up the street.

  Her uncle was driving. He was sitting straight up in the car and didn’t look at Gita as one of the women opened the passenger door for her. “What’s going on, Uncle?” But he shook his head quietly and drove. When they turned into the hospital parking lot Gita could feel her bowels growing tight. Not Dada, she thought. She held her belly as they walked through the lobby and took an elevator to the second floor. There her father was sitting in a chair in the waiting room. When he saw her he turned away as though she had insulted him. She went to him anyway. “Dada?” She put out her hand. He moved from it. Gita turned and walked past her uncle, who was just standing there dumb, and went to the nurses’ station. They called for a doctor. A doctor came. She was young and brown-skinned. Her hair was in a ponytail like a student’s.

  “Are you Gita?” the doctor asked.

  Gita nodded.

  “Come, let’s sit.” Gita followed her to a corner.

  “Did you know that your mother was ill?”

  “Just tell me.”

  The young doctor narrowed her young eyes. She seemed to be either scrutinizing Gita or fighting back her own tears.

  “Your mother died this afternoon. Your father is very upset and he wanted me to talk to you. I want you to know …”

  As the doctor talked Gita heard her father let out a loud wail. She turned to look at him. He was looking at her and weeping. At that moment Gita decided that no, she would not become a doctor.

  Gita’s family was all in India or Britain. Uncle Rommy wasn’t even her real uncle. He was someone her father knew from India and had invited to help with the shop. Her mother’s family wrote that they would take her in at their house in Mumbai because Gita needed a woman’s hand to raise her. Pinky told her father she wanted to stay with him. He nodded absently because he had never intended to send her off. On the phone he fought with his mother-in-law. “She is my daughter. She is my responsibility. What makes you think my Leela would have wanted her to go back to you? So what if I am a man.” But really he and his mother-in-law were thinking the same thing. The mother-in-law was saying, “Gita should not be where her mother is not. And I am her grandmother which is a kind of mother.” The father was saying “Gita should not be where her mother is not. Her mother is here. Her mother is coming back.”

  Mr. Manachandi talked to his wife at night. Gita would walk past the door and hear his side of the conversation. At first she thought he was on the phone but then he would say, “Ey, Leela?” and there would be no audible response. He seemed quite normal otherwise. The shop did not falter. He did not crash the car. He did not get mad. He simply talked to his dead wife at night. He simply slept on only one side of his bed.

  Mrs. Delroy served them breakfast but for the first week she did it all in tears, then she would go to the kitchen to eat alone and cry. Mr. Manachandi stopped asking his daughter about weights and costs. He started to ask her about her future. “Are you going to college?” he asked her. And she realized that she had only had that conversation with her mother. She was aware of the betrayal when she answered: “I’ve been thinking of Barnard.”

  He nodded. “That would be a good school for you.” She lowered her head and felt that pain in her bowels again. Her mother was dead and now she would get to go to Barnard.

  “What will you do, Dada?”

  “I will stay here,” he said softly. And if he had been talking more loudly he might have completed his thought out loud as well. “I will stay here because I am waiting for your mother to come back.”

  Gita’s mourning was different. Her mother died and suddenly her own life began. Suddenly she could go Barnard; she even applied as early decision. Suddenly she could spend the night at Leslie’s without a fight. Suddenly no one scrutinized her clothes when she went out … didn’t check the length of her skirts or the transparency of her blouses.

  Gita and her father were invited to many Indian houses for dinner. She was the same good Gita with the aunties. They caressed her and gave her their cell phone numbers, saying to call if anything. But those aunties had children around Gita’s age and though they were not Gita’s close friends they were still like cousins. They knew her business. They saw that she stayed later on campus than usual. They saw that she and Mateo Parone looked at each other with little flirty smiles during class. Her grades slipped just a little in calculus. Soon people were talking: She’s changed since her mother died. She’s not our same Gita anymore.

  But during the Divali celebration she danced onstage with two other girls to a Bollywood song that even the aunties liked. And so no one had the heart to tell the widower to keep his daughter under wraps. But then before school was even out for the fall semester the letter came from Barnard.

  When her father dropped the mail on the dinner table it was there among the endless catalogs of her mother’s that kept coming. It was a slim envelope, and this made Gita�
��s heart pound. She knew that if the envelope came back thick and heavy it meant an acceptance. A flat letter could go either way. She took it to her room because Mrs. Delroy came in the evenings now and cooked dinner for them and sometimes she even stayed later than that to help clean. Gita stared at the letter and wondered if she should pray over it or just rip it open. It was too late for prayer she decided. She would just rip. But delicately. She found a letter opener and carved at the envelope. “We are thankful but we are sorry …” She read it over and over again. She must be reading it wrong. She looked at the back. She looked at the salutation to see if that was her name. Dear Gita Manachandi. They had even spelled it correctly. Rejection. Barnard had said no.

  Gita rolled into a ball on the floor and shook. She wanted her mother now. She wanted her mother to come and hold her and say Barnard wasn’t worthy of her. Her mother would have said “I told you so.” And Gita would have felt better because perhaps her mother was right. She could have told herself that her mother had willed the rejection, that it was her mother’s fault even. But now her mother wasn’t even there to blame and all she could do was cry and shake and then call for her father who didn’t come because he couldn’t hear her, and it all seemed anticlimatic when she stood up and went to begin a long shower, taking the rejection letter with her and letting it get wet until it melted down the drain.

  How did Gita mourn? She mourned by becoming Pinky only.

  She had been walking back and forth in front of the coffin shop for days. Her mother had not been buried in a coffin. She had been cremated. Her ashes were sent to Mumbai to her family as was the custom. Mr. Manachandi didn’t mind this. The presence of the urn would only make him think his wife was dead. Gita watched the shop from across the street for weeks. She noticed the small priest go in. She noticed that otherwise mostly women went in. That many of them were older women, perhaps burying parents. She would stand across the street and watch them and her stomach would hurt. Perhaps she was getting an ulcer.