Fifteen Lanes (17 page)

We entered the open doorway of a narrow, nondescript, two-story wooden building. The single thing that set it apart was a small hand-painted sign above the door that read “Sisters Helping Sisters.” I was glad to leave behind the heat and chaos of the street outside, until I discovered the temperature inside was easily several degrees hotter, and the cacophony of voices was ear splitting. Even more overwhelming was being immediately swallowed up by a pack of street urchins.

Altogether, there were perhaps thirty children. From their clothes, I thought they were all girls, though it was hard to tell. Several had shaved heads. Most of them were dressed in salwar kameez, though a few wore bright frilly frocks and still others were in school uniform. Their clothes looked worn but relatively clean. They ranged in age from three or four years old to perhaps ten or eleven. They were desperately thin in the arms and legs; many had protruding bellies. I knew enough to
understand this was a sign of malnutrition and not good health. It took me several minutes to realize that, amid the cacophony, several were shouting in English:
How are you?
and
What is your name?
I glanced at VJ, who was removing his shoes while carrying on multiple conversations at the same time. I recognized a bit of the Hindi, but he must have been speaking other languages as well because sometimes I couldn’t pick up a single word. Mr. Donleavy, who’d preceded us inside, was nowhere to be seen.

VJ carried his shoes to a large pile of sandals, mostly little ones, on one side of the entrance, so I took off my own sandals and did the same. We walked farther into the room, dimly lit by a single fluorescent bulb, and paused to allow our eyes time to adjust. There wasn’t a single window or any source of ventilation but the open doorway.

The children led, or more accurately dragged, us over to a metal ladder that went straight up to an open hatch in the ceiling. Since it was the only place Mr. Donleavy could have gone, we started climbing. I went first, eager to get away from the noise. I hoped the children wouldn’t follow. I already felt overwhelmed.

I saw Mr. Donleavy as soon as I emerged through the hatch. He was sitting on a chair, talking to three women, all Indian, in a tiny office partitioned off from the rest of the room by a half-wall. One of the women was sitting in the only other chair. The other two were awkwardly hunched over behind her. The ceiling was too low for them to stand upright.

“Grace, there you are,” said Mr. Donleavy.

I stepped through the hatch and kept moving to allow VJ to follow. I was dismayed to see he wasn’t alone; the children were
right behind him. The upstairs room quickly became even more crowded than the downstairs had been.

Since the only other option was crouching, VJ and I plopped down on the cement floor in the room outside the office. Though the floor was stained, it was spotlessly swept. The children seemed to have some sense of what was happening. After much shoving to establish who would have the privilege of sitting next to us, they all sat down as well. I had one on either side, and they pressed up against me, even though there was room for them to have a bit of space. One grabbed my hand and held on to it. The other reached up and stroked my ponytail. My hair has always been a mousy brown, definitely not worthy of the admiration she was according it.

The upstairs room was at least ten degrees hotter than it had been downstairs, and again there was no ventilation. The sweat poured off me. VJ, on the other hand, was as fresh and dry as when we’d arrived, and happily chatting with the children.

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a kid-lover,” I said, trying not to sound as jealous as I was feeling.

“Come on, Gracie, in a world full of conspiracies, malice and deceit, how can you possibly not like children? They’re the only honest creatures on the planet.”

I had to admit I’d never thought about it that way. I gave the little girls now leaning against me a tentative smile and was rewarded with two exuberant gap-toothed grins in return.

Mr. Donleavy came out of the office with the women and they joined us on the floor. I wouldn’t have believed there was space for close to thirty children, two teenagers and four adults.

“This is Miss Chanda,” said Mr. Donleavy, introducing one
of the women. “She’s going to tell us a little bit about their concept for the program.”

Miss Chanda didn’t look much older than a teenager. She wasn’t beautiful, but every time she smiled, every single kid in the room smiled back. You could tell they worshiped her.

“I want to thank you so much for volunteering,” she began. “I’d like to introduce you to one of the girls who will explain what we do.” She looked across the room at an older girl. “Fatima, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?”

“My name is Fatima,” said the girl, and laughed nervously when she realized she’d just told us the one thing we already knew. “I’m fourteen years old and I like school very much.” I was shocked to discover she was that old, and I looked more closely at the other girls. They were all so small. Perhaps I’d misjudged their ages.

“My mother says I should be going to school but sometimes we don’t have money for books and …” She hesitated and looked at Miss Chanda, as though she wasn’t sure how much detail she should go into. I was willing to bet the list of what her family didn’t have money for was a long one.

“One of the things we provide here is funds to cover any school-related costs the girls have, as well as meals and sometimes night shelter,” said Miss Chanda. “Why don’t you tell them how long you’ve been coming to SHS?”

“I am coming to Sisters Helping Sisters since I am three years old. My mother didn’t to let me sleeping in the … the …” She looked at Miss Chanda again.

I was shocked at how good her English was, though I suspected that was why she’d been chosen to be spokesperson.

“Do all the children speak English?” I asked Miss Chanda.

“They all speak a little. Some, like Fatima, study in English-language schools, so they speak more. We’ll only match you up with girls you can communicate with.” She gave VJ a worried look. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to give you a girl to mentor. Many of our girls have already been molested, so we’re careful not to put them in vulnerable situations. But you’re more than welcome to work here at the center in our after-school tutoring program.”

“I’d be happy to do that,” said VJ smoothly, not mentioning that the girls were in no danger of sexual advances from him. “If it’s all right, I can help Grace with whoever she’s paired with.”

Miss Chanda looked relieved to have that settled. “Great. Then let’s talk about how this will be structured. Today I’m going to introduce you to a few girls and give you a chance to get to know each other. At the end of the session, I’ll ask you if there was a particular girl you felt you could help.”

“This sounds just like speed dating,” said VJ. “What fun! I’ve always wanted to try that!”

Miss Chanda gave him a stern look. “We’re going to get out some paper and pencils. Our girls love to draw. It will help them relax and give you a chance to chat at the same time.”

“What happens when we’ve found the girl we want to be paired with?” I asked.

“We ask for a minimum of two hours a week. Our girls have had little experience of life outside the brothel. Most of their mothers were sold against their will, and in spite of that, many have been disowned by their families. For the girls who grow up here, the brothel life is all they know, and there’s often pressure to follow their mothers into the trade.”

I looked at the sweet faces of the girls surrounding me. I
could tell Mr. Donleavy was watching me carefully. If he was wondering whether it had been a good idea to bring me here, he had reason to be concerned. There was no question these girls and their mothers needed help, but what could VJ and I do? We were just kids ourselves.

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,” said VJ, “but I can’t wait to get started. Where are the art supplies?”

Coming first …

In the months after Parvati’s rape I threw myself into my studies. Only at school could I pretend everything was the way it had been before. Parvati had become a ghost. Suresh hadn’t stopped with the single rape; he took her every night he could find her. Together we hid from him, constantly changing where we slept. Still, there were days I got home from school and Parvati was nowhere to be found. On those days, I knew he’d found her first.

In the middle of September every year, regular classes ceased and we wrote our first-semester exams. Just before we broke for the holiday, the grades were posted. My friends and I always met at school to look at our grades together. For many children, this was a time of great anxiety and disappointment. For me, it was a rare time when I didn’t feel like a fake. I always took firsts in English, Math, and Biology. Several times I’d taken firsts in Chemistry as well.

None of my schoolmates knew where I came from. Over the years I’d created a family history of such complexity, with so many embellishments, that to them it had the familiarity of truth. I retold the lies so often that at times I almost believed them myself. My classmates knew all about my father, the mid-level civil servant, my mother, the former actress who gave up fame to marry him, and of course my siblings. It was my one disappointment that I couldn’t enhance their attributes, but Aamaal already went to the same school, and I had every hope that someday Shami would as well. Aamaal had been coached to maintain our fiction. With her sweet face and enormous, thickly fringed eyes, people were always inclined to believe her. They never suspected that in addition to being beautiful she was a skilled liar.

The one time I felt closest to my fictionalized self was when I looked at my exam results. No one would have believed that the girl who was awarded so many prizes came from a brothel in Kamathipura. Even I found it hard to reconcile. My two selves—the school-going girl and the daughter of a sex worker—felt like two separate people, awkwardly inhabiting one body. I was like a
hijra
, not one thing and not the other, but a third thing entirely, unique and not happily so.

Gajra and I stood with a group of our friends near the school gate discussing our results.

“I knew you’d sweep the awards,” said Gajra, squeezing my arm excitedly. Her pleasure was so complete you might have thought she’d achieved the results herself. Gajra had never taken a first in anything in her life, though her kindness outshone all my achievements. I could never understand why being a truly good person was overlooked when it came to handing
out medals. It seemed to me it must be much more challenging, considering how few people managed it.

“Of course she did well,” said Sapna, whose scores were never far behind mine. “Her father does nothing but sit at home and coach her. My father’s a doctor. He can’t be spending every minute helping me.”

“Which is why you have hours of paid tutoring every evening,” said Kiran, Sapna’s best friend and fiercest competitor. I actually think their friendship survived only because I so often snatched the wins from both of them.

“Well, it appears to have paid off. You beat me in only one subject this year,” said Sapna.

“The year’s not over yet,” Gajra intervened. “There’s still plenty of time for everyone to get good results. The important thing is to improve our own scores.”

“Tell that to my father,” said Sapna darkly.

“I think you’re going to have to tell him yourself,” said Kiran, forgetting their recent fight and slinging her arm around Sapna’s shoulder. She nodded to the other side of the street, where Sapna’s father was just emerging from a parked car.

I recognized him the minute I saw him, though it had been well over a year since he’d come into Shami’s examining room. That was why he’d looked so familiar. It wasn’t because I’d already taken Shami to him before.

I looked away, hoping he hadn’t noticed me. The danger of my identity being discovered was far worse than just being caught in a lie. Ours was a fee-paying school, and a good one. I would be expelled if it was discovered that my mother was a sex worker. If he remembered that I had an HIV-infected baby brother he’d make the connection in an instant, especially
considering we were only blocks from my red-light neighborhood. I said a fervent prayer that he wouldn’t recognize me in my school uniform. Then it occurred to me that I’d been in uniform the last time he’d seen me. I started to sweat.

“Come on, Gaj. Let’s see if any of our teachers are in their classrooms so we can wish them a happy midyear break.” I took Gajra’s hand.

“Okay, but we must say hello to Sapna’s father first,” she said.

I reluctantly let her hold me back. It would have drawn more attention if I’d insisted on rushing off, now that she’d made the point that we must greet him.

I toyed with the books I was holding and told myself I was being ridiculous. To the best of my knowledge I’d never spoken to Sapna’s father before, or since, the hospital visit. He must have seen hundreds, even thousands of kids like Shami and me. But how many of them went to his daughter’s school?