A Star Called Lucky

by Bapsy Jain

  The girl is distracted. Chris is almost crushed by a boulder. She mouths the words in sync with the father: “So, I see ya been lolling about in your nightie. Too much trouble to wait for dinner?”

  There is a chink of glass hitting the marble countertop hard. There will be another drink. And another. And another. The exchange will grow nastier until the father goes upstairs and opens his bedroom door and the mother follows, shouting. What happens then is anybody’s guess.

  The girl is leaning so close to the monitor that her face almost touches the screen. If it were cold, she would fog it with her breath. Her fingers fly over the controls as if of their own accord. Chris has broken down the door. She has never been to this place. Chris stalks down the hallway toward the chamber where they are chained. He fires the shotgun nonstop. The girl has never felt more alive. She is one with the machine. She is one with the machine. She is one with the machine. Chris has the Alpha team. The whole house can burn for all the girl cares. Chris has the Alpha team. She has won with the machine.

  The Detached

  Mumbai, India. November 3, 2012. 11:00 p.m. The doctor is gently sewing up a boy’s cheek when he asks the nurse to go out of the examination room and see what all the commotion is outside. The doctor cannot be distracted from his patient—the boy fell through a window and his face is cut. But the needlework is almost done. He speaks soothingly to the boy as he sews, in spite of the distraction. The nurse steps away, leaving behind the gauze with which she has been staunching the flow of blood. She crosses the room in two quick strides.

  A woman has arrived at the clinic, bypassing the line in the corridor and pushing past the old guard whose presence is intended to keep some semblance of order. The woman is nineteen, maybe, or twenty. She is leading a little line of small ones, a boy of four or five, a girl, and another, a shy one and of indeterminate sex hiding behind the older boy. Besides leading the children, she is supporting a man. The man is drenched in sweat, his chest heaving. He is only semi-conscious.

  The nurse relieves the woman of the man. The man is dark skinned, a middle-class worker of some sort, dressed in gray western slacks with an open white cotton shirt. He is, perhaps, twenty-six or twenty-seven—no more. He should be the picture of health at his age, but his eyes are glassy, his face almost black with fever. His breath comes in short, pulse-like gasps that neither draw in air nor expel fluid. The nurse takes the man and half-drags him to the examination room and lays him on the bed.

  The boy, frightened, sits up. The doctor, in one smooth stroke, follows the boy with his needle and completes the final stitch. He is good. Very good. He cuts the thread, pats the boy on the head, and turns to see the patient. He does not have to ask. The look on the nurse’s face says more than the nurse’s stammered, “Another one.”

  “This makes five this week,” the doctor says. His tone is matter-of-fact. He sighs. “Fetch me some ice and we’ll see what we can do.” A new strain of Influenza. No hospital in the world can save this man. In another place, the doctor would roll the man over onto his side and try to drain the heavy green fluid from the man’s lungs, but it is too viscous—too sticky to flow. The man is suffocating. It would not even help to insert a tube into the lungs. They’ve tried that, too, but the thick fluid won’t be drawn out. The doctor looks at the wife. He knows that if he does not save her husband, she will become a widow doomed to a life of hell on earth, along with her children. His eyes brim with tears. He has been at the clinic since nine in the morning. With any luck, he will make it to bed by two or three. While the nurse is gone, he reaches inside his shirt and produces a tiny vial carried on a black thread. The vial is almost empty. It is light in his palm. He pries loose the stopper and cradles the man’s head in his arms, and shielded from sight, tips some small bits onto the man’s bloated tongue followed with a little water. “Try to swallow,” he whispers. Then he recites a Buddhist mantra to ensure the mushroom bits administered will heal.

  The man, delirious, rasps a sound that may or may not be a reply.

  “Just try,” the doctor says. He strokes the man’s wet hair. “Just try.”

  The Conflicted

  Tollygunj Golf Club, Calcutta, India. January, 1992. Soli and Hutoxi are across the lawn sitting at a table under a tipping green awning sipping tea with Alec and Susan. Their laughter carries to the three children who peek at them through a small gap in the hedge surrounding the tennis club. There are twenty tables clustered on the south end of the courts, and a handful of servants in cream-colored suits with wide red sashes and red turbans and ridiculous, shiny green pointy-toed shoes, to wait on them. The children’s scheme has been meticulously planned and rehearsed twice over the preceding weekends. When the order for lunch has been placed, they will have exactly nineteen minutes. Four for the drinks, five more for the salads, and then, ten minutes later (on the button), lunch will be served. The children will not be sought after or missed until their sandwiches arrive. By then, they will have returned—older, wiser, and having settled a dispute that has tormented them all summer. No one will know. There is even a small wager: Amay’s prized collection of rare marbles versus the antique French cameo necklace with the profile of Marie Antoinette (that Susan bought from a reliable antique dealer in Prague and gave to Lucky for her most recent birthday). The third child is not invested in the argument. He is Amay’s distant cousin, Varun, who is from Mumbai and has been left with Amay’s family for a few weeks while his father takes his mother to London to seek treatment for an obscure medical complaint. Varun is younger than Lucky and Amay, a nervous child, a crybaby, and a despised tagalong. He has been alternately threatened and bribed until his silence and complicity are assured. Varun has no interest in the outcome of the bet other than proving his courage to his cousin and his cousin’s friend. They have promised to quit tormenting him if he serves his task successfully. His job is to watch the door and make certain that no one ventures down the hall while Lucky and Amay inspect something strange and western—otherworldly, really—called a “sauna.” Here, it is rumored, Lucky’s hippopotamus-like spinster-aunt is supposed to lounge naked in a large oven, purportedly to help her shed weight. Lucky swears it is true. Amay swears Alec and Susan are pulling Lucky’s leg.

  The head waiter bends over the table, listening intently to the order even though all four have eaten the same lunch every Sunday for the past six months. With a glare and a warning finger, Lucky reminds Varun to stay put no matter what. She and Amay dart for the door. They have been gone only a few minutes. It seems like no time at all. When they return, they know right away that something is wrong. A crowd of adults stands by the gap in the hedge. Beyond them, two waiters run, their backs to Lucky and Amay. One of them carries a small bundle in his arms. On his right side, two thin legs flop like a gull’s broken wing. On his left side, cradled like a football, is Varun’s head. From the hedge comes a loud thwack and a shout, more of anger and relief than triumph. A moment later, a groundskeeper swings the body of a cobra over his head and cracks it again, like a whip. The snake is dead, but so, too, will be the boy. Over and over again, Soli and Hutoxi ask, “What were you thinking, leaving your little friend like that?” Lucky and Amay could only stare at the pools their tears made on the floor. There was no good answer and no excuse. It was an episode Lucky and Amay would never speak of again. Only once as an adult would Lucky discuss it—with Shanti, her friend and guru.

  “Well,” Shanti said, after Lucky told her the story, “the snake must have been there for a reason. Maybe they had an appointment.”

  “An appointment?” Lucky asked.

  “Varun and the snake. Stop judging everything, Lucky. Things happen for a reason, and the universe doesn’t owe us explanations. Varun was being a boy and the snake was being a snake. It’s what we do. We follow our inherent nature. It wasn’t personal to either of them, or to you. Sometimes, things like that happen. The real question is, why have you carried around the blame for all these years?”

  “W
hat do you mean?” Lucky asked.

  “I mean, were you an adult? Did you start this situation just so that Varun would die? Did you know the snake was there?”

  “No,” Lucky said.

  “Okay then. Let it go. It happened. It wasn’t like the universe went out and did something TO you. Or TO Varun, either, for that matter. Things happen. Sometimes, we are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you have no deliberate fault, then take no deliberate blame. What were you doing again?”

  “We were trying to find out whether Aunt Benaifer really sat naked in the sauna.”

  “And did she?”

  Lucky thought about this. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I don’t remember a thing about it. Only that Varun was bit by the cobra and died. That, and for twenty years I thought it was my fault.”

  Chapter 1

  Lucky was singing to herself as she entered the wrought iron gate with the inscriptions, “New York State Department of Corrections.” It was early morning and she smiled as she mentally went through the schedule of the yoga poses she would give to her class of inmates to reduce their high levels of testosterone. She would make those toughies, who would try to give her a hard time, unwittingly flop on the floor. And there were two of them, both newcomers, Andy and Donald, who constantly mocked her in the last two classes by imitating her and doing the poses standing on their tiptoes and copying her in high, falsetto tones. Suppressed peals of laughter followed. Today, they would be there for class and she had her part well planned. Newcomers were always a challenge in the first few classes but she knew how to flatten their egos with just a few “easy” yoga poses. It was her way of keeping them and her class under control.

  For some reason, her ID badge wouldn’t work in the card reader, and there were new guards working in the security booth—some sort of institutional rotation thing—who made a big deal about the foul up, despite having Lucky’s photo and description in their computer.

  “But I’ve been working here for three years,” Lucky said. “And you can see my picture right there!”

  “Maybe you have and maybe you haven’t,” the duty officer said. “Maybe that’s you and maybe it isn’t. Anyway, we’ve got these new Homeland Security directives, and nobody’s taking any chances, and I’m not opening the gate without authorization from upstairs. If everybody was who they said they were, we wouldn’t need prisons, now would we, sweetie? That’s why we have rules.”

  Lucky’s ears tinged red. “Homeland Security? What? Are they worried about people breaking into prison now? Is there anything inside so valuable that it has to be protected from foreign intrigue? Or is the food that good? Or maybe there are people so desperate to take a free yoga class that they’d break into prison to do it.”

  “I’m just following protocol, ma’am,” the guard said.

  Lucky frowned and crossed her arms, but didn’t argue further. It was no use, and besides, it was more important to be on time for her class. After all, she was supposed to be teaching the inmates responsibility, and she couldn’t do that if she appeared irresponsible herself. But it didn’t matter. The guards had to call their supervisor, write an incident report while they waited for him to call back. The supervisor had to call Warden Capps. By the time everyone was done calling everyone else and the warden had given the go-ahead, Lucky was late.

  The two troublemakers she’d anticipated weren’t there, and Lucky was told they had detention that week. Not surprising, she thought. Still, in their place there were three more newcomers who, judging by their casual postures and leering grins, would ensure that Lucky’s tough class plan wouldn’t go to waste.

  Lucky went to the front of the classroom, spread out her mat, retrieved a belt and stepped out of her shoes. When she turned around to face the class, she noticed the new students were smirking. The way their hands quickly dropped to their sides made it clear why. They were playing the same game, imitating her moves.

  “I saw that,” Lucky said. Let them know you know but be calm and fair.

  The trio scowled, slinking off to the back of the room. They stood there with their arms folded across their chests, looking macho and stupid and sullen and defiant. They weren’t properly dressed, didn’t have their yoga belts, and hadn’t even taken off their shoes. Arguing with them would make the class even later. On the other hand, there were many ways to argue.

  Lucky smiled. She brought the trio to the front of the class and set them in a triangle pose—feet set wide apart, one hand on the floor by an ankle, the other pointing straight up in the air. Although it looked easy, invariably, novices didn’t align their hips properly, and when they finally did, they fell flat on their faces.

  “It looks easy,” Lucky said to the three, now looking more sheepish than tough. “But strength is not always found in big muscles. Your body has hundreds of small muscle groups, and these are the glue that holds the whole body together. The big muscles sometimes even work against each other. In the end, yoga is not just about strength, but about balance. All the big muscles in the world won’t do you any good if you can’t stand up. The chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and the body is no stronger than its weakest muscle.”

  After that, the novices quieted down and made a more serious effort. Still, the class was late, and Lucky had to rush to make up for lost time. Speed yoga, she termed it, even though yoga was supposed to be slow, meditative, and unhurried. As she pulled into Ustrasana, the camel pose, she felt a tweak and a burn in her groin. After that, she gave up on the idea of doing the whole workout, settling for quality over quantity in the remaining time.

  When they were done and the room had emptied out, she toweled off and tested the sore spot to see if the muscle was torn, or just strained. She decided it was strained, thanking her lucky stars the injury hadn’t been worse. “Focus,” she said to herself. She took a deep breath. All in all, it hadn’t been too bad—except that, well, these days “not too bad” was her mantra. The last six months had been a long series of minor hassles that, when taken together, added up to a stinking pile of aggravation. First, the state had tried to cut the classes altogether; Lucky had had to volunteer to forgo her pay before they relented. When they tried again to cut her class, Lucky had taken on an administrative position in exchange for continued funding of her prison work. So now she had two jobs. Her friends had wondered about her dedication—what, they asked, could possibly be worth all this trouble? Lucky couldn’t always find the words to answer. The truth was that she had seen the difference she could make in people’s lives. Every time a student came back to her class, every time someone managed a new pose, every time she heard that they found it easier to focus and learn—there was so much joy and fulfillment in this work, who cared about a few hassles? The only downside was that she spent less time with Sean, but, well, few single moms were lucky enough to be able to stay home all day. Why should Lucky?

  After the class, Lucky drove home, showered and changed, and caught the train into the city, where her other job was located. The train crept along at a snail’s pace, the passengers rocking lethargically as if in rhythm to some mysterious music only they could hear. Lucky had pulled out her special Internet wired laptop, on which she was watching—dare she admit it?—cartoons. Old re-runs of Tom and Jerry.

  She was supposed to be reviewing a presentation, a proposal to revamp the education program run by the New York State Department of Corrections. The idea was to make classes compulsory, rewarding prisoners with privileges for earning good grades. Lucky wanted to make it clear to them that they had skills and abilities that would serve them far better in the “outside” world than whatever shortcuts had landed them in prison. It’s not just about education or punishment but about reformation, Lucky had written in the proposal. It’s about changing the prisoners’ perception of themselves and their place in society. They’ll earn their privileges in prison just like we do in the real world. Once they know they can play the game, there’s a better chance that they will re
integrate successfully into society.

  Technically, neither classroom education nor prisoner rehabilitation was Lucky’s area of expertise. She was an accountant by training, an entrepreneur at heart, and a yoga instructor by vocation. She had run a successful business in Mumbai, and after her divorce, had returned to New York to try running another one. For a while, that seemed to work—until she found herself entangled and bruised by a con artist. Eventually, she’d ended up here, at the New York State Department of Corrections. This education proposal had grown out of her work at the prison, and her financial background had helped her sell the idea—so far. After all, incarceration was expensive, and if the state could reduce recidivism by even a few percentage points, the program would pay for itself. And as a sharp accountant, she had the numbers to prove it. Lucky had pushed Warden Capps and Barkley, her other boss, until they’d passed her idea up the ladder and made sure it got a fair hearing. Finally, the word came down from Albany: Show us. Hence, the appointment and the presentation.

  Meanwhile, every time Lucky powered up her laptop, the damn thing went straight to the Web and something called Hulu. Lucky didn’t watch much television and certainly didn’t want to watch much today (although she had to admit, the cartoons held a certain allure), but she couldn’t figure out how to change the default settings on her home page. Here she was, a chartered accountant, volunteering yoga classes for the Department of Corrections, now preparing a presentation to revamp the educational system for the department, and she couldn’t figure out how to turn off the cartoons. She was going to have to go home and ask her neighbor’s sixteen-year-old daughter how to fix the computer. Perfect. This was turning out to be one of those days. It happens, Lucky thought, a bump in the road. Still, at the moment, she found the images of the cat and mouse amusing. Some days, she thought, are just made for cartoons. If only life was as simple.