“Namaste,” I said, pointing my hands together as best I could when they were full of soap.
The family did the same, even the youngest.
I held out the bottle of soap and the soap that was wrapped in paper.
At first they shook their heads. They didn’t understand. They smiled and spoke in a language I didn’t know.
I kept holding out the soap. Finally, they took it. They were happy. They showed the soap to their children. The children sniffed the flowers and spices. Smiles spread across their faces.
I made the namaste again and walked away. It felt good to make the family happy and give them something they needed.
But what now? I wondered.
I felt a hand on my elbow.
The woman was there. She gently pulled me back to the family.
They wanted to share their evening meal with me.
It wasn’t much. A bit of dal and a bit of roti. The mother broke the roti and shared it out. We dipped it into the small pot of dal. We couldn’t talk to each other, but when the meal was over, they shared songs from their land and I shared a Bollywood song I had seen on the shop owner’s TV.
When night came, they made room for me on their bit of pavement.
I slept between two of the children. During the night, one of the toddlers climbed up on my back. I was glad to be a softer mat than the pavement.
In the morning, I left.
Nobody really owns anything. We give back our bodies at the end of our lives. We own our thoughts, but everything else is just borrowed. We use it for a while, then pass it on.
Everything.
We borrow the sun that shines on us today from the people on the other side of the world while they borrow the moon from us. Then we give it back. We can’t keep the sun, no matter how afraid we are of the dark.
We borrow our food. What we eat becomes fertilizer that goes back into the earth and gets turned back into food.
Everything is borrowed.
Once I realized that, I stopped worrying about how I would survive.
I didn’t need to have anything. I just needed to borrow.
Somehow, that seemed a whole lot easier.
So that became my job. To borrow what I needed. Then to pass it on to someone who needed it more.
It worked. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. I ate. I slept. I lived.
5
Dead Englishmen
SOMEONE WAS BEATING UP Santa Claus.
I was trying to sleep down the street from the Chinese restaurant where the Santa statue usually stood, but the crash of the plastic Santa on the sidewalk woke me up.
Two young men were laughing and talking loudly in English as they kicked the statue between them like a football. From my spot on the pavement I saw Santa’s white beard and red cap rise and fall as he was bashed by shoes and sidewalk.
The stray cat that was sleeping beside me to keep warm was startled and got ready to spring. I stroked its fur, trying to get it to stay with me a little longer. But it was too spooked, and it ran off into the night.
Park Street was usually quiet late at night after the restaurants closed up and the tourists went back to their hotels. The men beating up Santa were probably tourists. They were not street people. Street people would not be so rude as to make so much noise and wake up the rest of us.
I hoped they finished their game soon. It was better to stay put at night instead of wandering around. It was too easy to step on something or someone in the dark streets.
But then I heard the police sirens getting closer, and I decided not to hang around.
The police didn’t usually bother me. I had been in Kolkata for a few months and I knew how to be invisible. Most people didn’t see me. I could stand right in front of tourists and ask for money or food and even they didn’t see me.
I wasn’t worried about the police coming after me, but the other pavement-sleepers could be a problem. They were waking up all around me.
Kolkata nights could be cold in December. I was afraid they would notice the warm blanket I had. I had borrowed it from the unlocked cupboard at the Metropole Hotel. They had warm blankets at that hotel. I had borrowed from there a few times, although usually from the laundry room before the blankets were folded and put away.
I had on a red jacket, too, with a hood that kept my head warm. I had borrowed it from a pile of old clothes in the market when the stall owner wasn’t looking. I felt cozy and comfortable and wanted to stay that way.
I planned to pass the blanket on to someone else in the morning, but there was still a lot of night to get through. I didn’t want anyone to borrow it from me before I was finished with it.
I got up and moved away from the storefront where I had been sleeping. It was a store where foreign tourists went to sit at computers and breathe in cold air. During the day it could be a good spot to get money. If you kept your eyes and ears open, you could learn things, like how to sing bits of English songs that played on the radio. If I sang and danced a bit before I asked for money, they were more likely to give.
Or if I told a bit of poetry.
Kolkata has books. Lots of books. Some of them get torn and thrown away. I kept my eyes open and found part of a book that had poems in it — poems that were easy enough for me to read and learn.
I memorized bits of the easiest ones. I didn’t need to learn a lot. No one expected much from a girl like me. I could say, “Oh, to be in England, now that spring is here,” and tourists thought I was a genius.
I picked up bits of other languages, too. In German I could say “Guten Tag,” which means good day. In Japanese I could say “Sayonara,” which means goodbye.
Tourists were easy to impress.
The phrase that made them really part with their money was “Welcome to Kolkata. Please give me money so I can go back to school.”
A lot of tourists gave me rupees just for that. I spent their rupees on food.
I had tried to go to school. I tried a few different ones.
I would follow the girls in as they got out of their rickshaws and walked past the guard into the yard where they were playing with ropes and balls, their uniforms blue and white or red and white or green and white.
The first time, the guard stopped me at the gate.
The second time, I went in with a group when the guard was busy. I got into the schoolyard. A teacher threw me out.
The third time, I got in through the gate, walked straight through the yard and into an empty classroom.
It was beautiful. Clean and bright and colorful, with a whole piece of chalkboard on the wall and rows of small tables with chairs. I sat down in one of those chairs, pretending that I belonged, trying to be invisible.
I was not invisible to the girl who owned the table. She came into the classroom and squealed and stamped her feet. She said I stank and, as the guard was dragging me away, cried that her chair was now dirty and where would she sit?
But I didn’t tell any of that to the tourists. They were busy. They hardly stopped walking even when they were handing out rupees. They had no time for long stories.
During the day the computer store was a good place, but on this night it wasn’t.
I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders, stayed close to the shadowy place along the wall of shops and moved quickly away from the sounds of the sirens. I hitched the blanket up so it wouldn’t drag along the ground and gather dirt. I wanted it to be in good condition when I passed it along to someone else.
More police came into the street. They zoomed by me, lights flashing. Behind me I could hear the tourists yelling at the police and the police yelling back.
I hated the sound of yelling. Everybody should just be quiet.
I wanted to be off the street, in a place that was soft and dark and didn’t smell too bad.
The Park Street Cemetery was the perfect spot, if I could get in. It was always guarded. Lots of dead Englishmen were buried there. They didn’t let just anybody sl
eep on their graves.
But it was close. If I couldn’t get in there, the Lower Circular Road Cemetery was just across the way. And if for some reason that was no good, there was always the Sealdah Railway Station.
By now I knew all the good spots in Kolkata. I had survived the rainy season, when the streets filled with water, and I would survive the winter. Jharia was a long time ago and very far away.
The cemetery guard was asleep.
He was sitting in his chair, inside his little booth just outside the closed gate. I couldn’t understand how he could sleep through all the police and all the yelling. Then I got closer and smelled desi-daru, the home-brewed booze that was sold illegally in back alleys. I stayed away from it. The man who was not my uncle had taught me all I needed to know about that stuff.
The guard would have a headache in the morning, I thought. My uncle always had headaches the morning after he drank. He would lie on his mat and hold his head and hit out at anyone who made a noise.
After a quick look around to be sure no one was watching, I flung my Metropole Hotel blanket over the gate. Then I climbed over after it.
The graveyard was calm and dark. The high stone walls blotted out the sounds of the police and the men they were arresting.
I looked for a soft place to sleep.
I stepped around the other sleepers and went farther along the pathway. I found a good spot behind a big tomb. I was hot now from moving around, so I took off my jacket and rolled it into a ball to make a soft place for my head. Then I wrapped myself up in the blanket and stretched out on the grass. And I spent the rest of the night sleeping among the dead Englishmen.
The guard was in a bad mood when he came through the graveyard in the morning to wake us all up. It was almost funny. I knew he had a headache. I remembered my uncle’s face, and the guard was feeling the same pain. His morning was made worse because his boss was also in a bad mood. His boss yelled at him and he yelled at us.
Lucky for me, I was deep in the cemetery. I heard him yelling before he caught me sleeping. I was able to get to my feet, run to the wall, snag my Metropole Hotel blanket on the barbed wire and use it to pull myself up to the top of the wall before the angry guard got to me.
But I forgot my red jacket and left it behind on the grave. From the top of the wall it looked like a flower I had dropped in the green grass.
I liked to start each day with a bit of fun. It put me in a good mood. I straddled the top of the wall and waited for him. I could see the rusty barbs from the wire sticking into my feet, but I didn’t feel anything.
I sat on the wall, my good blanket safely out of the way, and I watched the guard go from sleeper to sleeper. These were all men who were trying to get one more moment of sleep before they had to face the day.
Not like me. I always liked to face the day. That’s why I was up and high and out of the way. That’s why they were still on the ground, eyes squished shut, being hit across the back by the guard’s long stick.
When he had cleared them all out, he looked around. His chest was heaving. His face was pinched with the pain in his head.
“Are you sure you didn’t miss anyone?” I called out. And then I laughed because, as I said, I liked to start each day with a bit of fun.
Men don’t like it when little girls laugh at them. He came at me, waving his stick and yelling in some dialect I didn’t know. But that didn’t matter. I knew what he was saying.
He was saying, “Why are you giving me a hard time on this morning that is already so hard? A filthy street girl like you, daring to make fun of a hard-working man like me? Is this what I left my village for? The more you laugh, the more I will beat you. Then we’ll see who’s laughing.”
He was so mad that he couldn’t concentrate on beating me properly, and his stick flopped about, barely touching me. When it did reach me, it hit my foot, and I didn’t feel it anyway! That just made me laugh harder.
Then I saw in his face that his frustration was getting bigger than my enjoyment, and that’s always my signal to find something else to do. A bit of fun could turn into a bit of meanness if you weren’t careful, and that wasn’t ever how I wanted to start my day.
I ripped my foot out of the barbed wire and hopped down from the wall.
The secret to jumping down from a high wall to the hard pavement was not to land on your feet. You could break an ankle that way. I had seen it happen. I had also seen people get hit by cars or scooters. Sometimes the driver would get out and apologize and take the person into his car. Sometimes the driver kept on going. If the person they hit couldn’t afford a rickshaw to ride to the hospital, their ankle or whatever stayed broken. They walked lopsided from then on, dragging their useless foot behind them like a clot of buffalo dung stuck to their sandal.
So I always tried to roll my body to the side when I fell. The pavement was just as hard when you landed, but there was more of you to soak up the hurt. That spread it around. Then you just got to your feet, brushed yourself off and went about your business.
I jumped from the wall, rolling as I went, and I kept rolling when I hit the sidewalk.
I almost rolled into a fortune teller. His parrot leaped and squawked and tried to fly away. Its feathers were clipped, so it couldn’t really go anywhere. Parrots were expensive, even for fortune tellers, who could make a lot of money. I had watched them. I had seen the rupees change hands. All the fortune teller had to do was sit and talk and people gave him money.
I decided that would be a good job for me one day, since I could both sit and talk.
I sat on my haunches and spoke softly to the bird until it was resting on its perch again. It looked like it couldn’t wait for the next customer to come by.
“You should be more careful,” the fortune teller told me.
“You should have known I would jump from the wall and set yourself up farther away.”
“How could I know that?”
“You would know if you were a good fortune teller.”
“That’s not the way it works,” he said. “Let me tell you how it works. I need to know your date of birth, your astrological sign, the alignment of your planet among the heavens.”
“Oh,” I said. “I thought the bird just picked a card.”
Which set the fortune teller off on a long and cheerful explanation of how the bird worked with intuition and how he worked with science and how the two worked together to tell the most accurate fortunes in all of Kolkata. I didn’t listen to most of it, but I enjoyed hearing him talk.
So, because he was enjoying himself, and because my hunger was still sleeping, I sat while he explained. Every now and then, when he seemed to be winding down, I tossed in a comment that would get him all excited again, and so we passed a pleasant hour.
“Why don’t you give me a demonstration,” I suggested. “Tell me how my life will go, and I’ll come back and let you know if you were right.”
“Do you have any money? You don’t. This is how I earn my dal.”
“If you’re right, I’ll tell everyone,” I said. “I’ll tell the tourists down on Sudder Street. They will all come to you.”
The fortune teller twirled his long hair through his fingers and thought.
“I’ll tell you a short fortune,” he said. “Do you know your birthday?”
“No.”
He sighed and squirmed. Then he did what I knew he would do all along. He brought the parrot down from its little perch. The parrot pecked among some fortune cards spread out on the blanket. It picked one up in its beak.
I reached for it, but the fortune teller beat me to it. He stared at the writing on the little card. He frowned, stared at me, then frowned again.
He started to make me nervous.
“Does it say I will be a big Bollywood star?” I joked.
“Excuse my bird. He is not yet awake,” he said. “The card says you will soon have many friends.”
“You don’t think I can have many friends?”
“I
don’t think you have any friends,” he said. “You spent the night in the English cemetery. If you had friends, would they let you do that?”
He was looking a little too pleased with himself.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. And I didn’t like the way he was smirking.
When I feel mean I want to act mean.
I swooped down at the parrot and yelled a big “Kaaa!” close to its head. It almost jumped out of its feathers.
The fortune teller reached out to soothe his bird, and when he did, his cloak rose away from his body.
That’s when I saw his feet.
He had no toes, and his feet were curled in on each other like claws.
He was one of those monsters.
I jumped up. And I ran. Hard.
I ran to make the panic fall away. I ran so fast that my feet did not feel the pavement. They did not feel the stones or the broken glass or the dog droppings or the cow dung.
They did not feel anything.
6
Talking with the Gods
I RAN AS FAR AS I COULD, leaving the monster behind me, until I couldn’t run anymore.
Kolkata had woken up.
I could run two steps, then I had to stop and wait as a bicycle loaded with coconuts crossed in front of me. I ran a few more steps, then had to stop again and go around men and boys from the auto-repair shops who had moved their repair work out into Lower Circular Road. I crawled along with the stream of people until I got past the car repairs and into the next block. I ran again, right into a rickshaw that had stopped to pick up passengers — two large men with formal suit vests over their salwar kameez.
“Give some warning before you stop,” I said to the rickshaw puller as I moved past him.
“I’ll have the customers wave a big flag just for you,” he replied. He groaned as he got the rickshaw moving. His passengers were a lot fatter than he was.
I kept going.
The streets were full of people going to work. And with people already at work, pushing handcarts, pumping pedals on bicycles loaded down with big reed baskets and walking with huge bales of cotton on their heads.
No Ordinary Day Page 4
