Fifteen Lanes (19 page)

I couldn’t understand what the argument was about. They weren’t speaking English. The big woman was doing most of the talking. She seemed to be demanding something that Miss Chanda wouldn’t agree to.

I reached the girl and tried to catch her eye. She was staring resolutely at her feet. I doubted she spoke English, but she was in a school uniform and looked a little older than most of the girls upstairs, so I figured it was worth a try.

“Is that your mom?” I asked.

She looked up in surprise.

“No,” she said gruffly, and looked down again. Though it
wasn’t a response that encouraged conversation, I’d just spent the past hour feeling expendable, and here was a girl who seemed as uncomfortable as I was.

“What’s she shouting about?” I persisted.

She glanced up again and away. I wasn’t sure if she was considering her answer or ignoring me. She was very thin, like most of the girls, with watchful, intelligent eyes.

“Why are you here?” she finally asked.

It was my turn to hesitate. The truth was, I wasn’t sure myself. The past hour had reinforced my skepticism that I could be helpful to these girls. While the little ones were friendly, the older ones, the girls I was supposed to connect with, had no interest in talking to me. I couldn’t imagine mentoring any of them.

“I have no idea,” I said honestly.

She smiled sympathetically and nodded in the direction of the angry woman. “She is asking them to help me stay in school.”

“Well, I guess we have that in common.” I smiled back.

“Your school is saying you must leave? What did you do?” She sounded genuinely intrigued.

Having started down this path of honesty, I found myself stuck. As much as I didn’t want to admit the truth, I didn’t want to lie to her.

“I took a picture of myself without my shirt on and sent it to someone I thought was a boy I knew, and he, or someone, sent it to every kid in the school. They even printed up a few hard copies and posted them around the halls.”

She giggled.

“It really wasn’t funny.”

She giggled again.

“Still not funny.” I tried to sound stern but fell short, mainly because I was shocked to discover my own spirits had lifted at her reaction. Maybe someday even I would see the humor in what I’d done.

“Okay,” I said, “fair is fair. I told you mine. Now you have to tell me what you did.”

“I got first in all my subjects.”

“Wow, your school is tough. In my school, the worst you’d get for good grades is a suspension.”

She laughed outright. Her English was excellent and I’d made her laugh. My spirits rose higher.

Together, we watched the adults for a few minutes. Their discussion wasn’t showing any signs of calming down. The angry woman was practically spitting she was so mad, and several of her friends were throwing in their own comments. I was worried for Miss Chanda.

“What did you really do?” I asked.

“My ma is a sex worker.”

“I figured that.”

She looked offended.

“Only because you’re here,” I said quickly.

She nodded. “The school found out about my ma.”

“So?”

“They do not want the daughter of a sex worker in their school.”

“Too bad. Just refuse to leave.”

“It is not like that. They can make trouble. My ma does not have an identity card. She does not have a birth certificate. And my birth certificate is fake. I have no right to be in the school.”

“That’s crazy.”

She shrugged.

“Well, then the rules need to change,” I said stoutly.

She gave me a look like I’d just suggested we should throw up a high-rise across the road to solve homelessness.

“Hello,” said VJ, suddenly materializing beside us. He extended his hand to the girl. “I’m VJ Patel. Yes, that VJ Patel. And who might you be?” He gave her his best magazine-cover smile.

I thought, even in her current circumstances, her heart must have skipped just a little. If so, she hid it well. In fact, she looked at his hand as if it were a dead rat. After a delay that would have embarrassed most people, though it did nothing to shake VJ’s confidence, she took it for about a second.

“Noor,” she said. She added her surname after an extended deliberation. “Benkatti.”

“Noor Benkatti,” said VJ warmly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you!”

“So why have you come to Sisters Helping Sisters?” I asked when it was clear that Noor wasn’t going to respond to VJ. “Are you a member?”

She cut a look at VJ and crossed her arms. I wished he’d leave us alone. Instead, he shot her another winning smile. She glowered back but finally answered.

“I am not a member, but sometimes the NGOs can stop the schools from making us leave.”

“Her school’s going to kick her out,” I explained to VJ.

“Really?” exclaimed VJ cheerfully. “I go for years not meeting a single interesting person and then I meet two rebels in one week. Isn’t life unexpected?”

“So, if the NGO speaks to the school they’ll let you stay?” I asked, elbowing VJ in the ribs.

“I said
sometimes
.”

“We don’t need the NGO,” said VJ. “Just tell me who to pay off.”

“My ma does not know I am here,” said Noor.

I could tell by the way she said this that it was significant information. I’d actually forgotten that the woman with her wasn’t her mom.

“Is your mom sick?” I asked hesitantly.

“I could pay the medical bills as well,” said VJ.

“My ma hates the NGOs,” said Noor.

“Oh.” I didn’t really understand. Even if her mom didn’t like NGOs, surely she’d make use of them under the circumstances. “So …?” I prompted.

“The NGO lady says they cannot help me because I am not in their program.”

“Can’t you join?”

“My ma would never allow it. Prita-Auntie, the lady who brought me, wants the NGO to talk to my school anyway.”

“Do you want to be in the program?” asked VJ. I could tell he was hatching something.

“I want to be in school. If I have to be in a program for them to talk to my school …” She trailed off. “Ma will never agree. She will take me out of school before she will allow me to come here. Ma says the NGOs think they are better than us. They waste our time teaching useless things like sewing and Mehndi.”

“Mehndi?” I asked.

“Henna design,” said VJ. “Noor, if you take Mehndi, can I sign up with you?” he added.

I glared at him, while Noor looked at him curiously. Even I knew that only girls did Mehndi.

“Ma is proud,” Noor continued, as if she was explaining to herself as much as me. “She comes from a tradition where sex work was part of a religious duty.”

I tried not to let the shock show on my face but that had to be one of the strangest things I’d ever heard. “Religious?”

“Devadasi,” said VJ. “I’ll explain it to you later. It’s positively medieval.”

Noor scowled at VJ. “It goes back a long time to when women like my ma were given to the temple to serve the priest. At that time, it was not only for sex. Devadasi women had many talents. Ma is not proud of being a sex worker but she is not ashamed.”

“So, let’s just recap, if I may,” said VJ, holding up his fingers as he itemized his points. “Noor has to join the program but can’t actually darken the door of this building as someone in the neighborhood is bound to see her and spill the beans. Gracie has to find a teen she can mentor, which isn’t going to be easy since the girls here aren’t keen on her.”

I started to object but he raised his hand and continued. “Sorry, darling, but you know it’s true. So, I have the solution.”

VJ stepped away from us and raised both hands in the air. “Ladies, attention, please,” he shouted over the babble of voices. “We’ve solved the problem.”

Shockingly, everyone actually did quiet down.

“Grace and Noor have discovered a budding kinship. They give true meaning to the idea of sisters helping sisters …”

“Get to the point,” I groused.

He gave me a wounded look before continuing. “They’re going to meet at least once a week, for the requisite bonding
experiences, but they will never meet here, so there’s no need to get Noor’s mom’s permission. Should anyone ask, we say only that Grace is Noor’s new friend. Are we all in agreement? Can I have a show of hands?”

There were several minutes of stunned silence. VJ repeated his suggestion in Hindi.

“Is this what you want to do, Grace?” asked Mr. Donleavy.

I didn’t even have to think about it. “If Noor agrees.”

I looked down in surprise when I felt Noor slip her hand into mine.

The foreigners …

Parvati and I waited on the corner, at the end of our lane, for the foreigners. Shami was asleep in my arms. As usual he had a fever. It wasn’t too high, though his breathing was raspy and labored. I’d stolen some of Binti-Ma’am’s alcohol that morning. An alcohol-soaked rag was wrapped tightly around his chest.

Aamaal picked through a rubbish heap across the street from us. I scolded her whenever she accidentally picked up broken glass or syringes, though she rarely did. Aamaal had learned quickly how to avoid the dangers of our world. Most days she amassed a small bag of recyclables, carefully sorted, to sell to the rag picker when his cart rattled by. I let her keep what she earned. We could have used the money but she wouldn’t have stuck with it if she’d had to share. It was worth it just to keep her busy.

“Are you sure they can be trusted?” asked Parvati, for perhaps the tenth time.

A lot had changed in the months since Parvati’s rape, not the least of which was Parvati herself. She’d always been distrustful of strangers; that was just common sense in a community where most of the girls and women we knew had been forced into sex work. But her spark of mischief had withered.

“You can’t count on them to help you. Foreigners are as different from us as elephants.” Parvati rhythmically thumped Shami’s back as she talked. She was as familiar with the tricks for loosening the mucus in his lungs as I was. “Elephants act tame for years and then one day they crush their masters to death. People think the attacks are unprovoked but elephants have long memories. They take revenge for things that happened long ago, sometimes in a previous life. Foreigners are like that—unpredictable.”

I squeezed Parvati’s shoulder. I knew what was really troubling her. “We’ll find a way to get you away from Suresh. We don’t need the foreigners for that.”

Parvati self-consciously put her left arm behind her back, as if I hadn’t already noticed the fresh cuts. I had tried to talk Parvati into asking Chanda-Teacher for help but I couldn’t convince her she wouldn’t be arrested for prostitution. We’d both heard stories about the prisons where they incarcerated underage sex workers who’d been “rescued.” The conditions were so bad that only last year a group of girls had scaled the thirty-foot fence surrounding their “rescue home” and broken their legs in the long, desperate drop to freedom.

“What if the foreigners try to kidnap you?” asked Parvati.

I had explained the deal I’d struck with the NGO, but Parvati refused to believe that friendship with a foreigner was necessary to prevent my being expelled from my own school. I
still felt raw when I thought of the teachers I’d loved who’d tried to get rid of me. I wondered if any of them had argued to let me stay before Chanda-Teacher spoke to them.

Chanda-Teacher tried to comfort me by saying that many of my teachers were even more impressed with my academic success when they learned of my background, but that made me feel worse. It was like everyone expected me to be stupid or lazy just because my mother was a sex worker. Didn’t they know it was because of my mother that I studied so hard? Ma suffered to send me to school. The teachers had things completely backwards.

“I have to do this, Paru.”

“I still don’t understand what the foreigners want.”

I didn’t have time to answer as just then a gleaming silver SUV turned into our lane and stopped. I glanced back at our house to where Adit was leaning on the wall out front. He’d followed me outside. In the old days I would have invited him along but we weren’t friends anymore. Adit said he had no time to waste with girls. I’d heard he was working in one of the gambling houses, running errands. I prayed he wouldn’t tell Ma what I was up to. It made me nervous, the way he watched me.

“I’ll let you do the talking,” said Parvati.

I hid a smile. I doubted Parvati’s English would have been up to doing the talking and it was me the foreigners were coming to meet, not her.

“If I nudge you,” she continued, “it means there’s something suspicious going on and we must make an excuse and leave.”

I gave her a solemn nod. I couldn’t admit that secretly I hoped the white girl was serious about being my friend. Parvati
would have said I was foolish. Even worse would have been to share my hope that perhaps the foreigner understood, even more than Parvati, that my too-dark skin and my mother’s work weren’t the whole story of who I was. The white girl didn’t come from a world where people were judged by the caste they were born into.

The car doors opened and suddenly she was there in front of me. Vijender Patel climbed out on the other side. Parvati gasped. I hadn’t told her about Vijender. There was no way she would have agreed to spend the day with him. The only people Parvati mistrusted more than foreigners were film stars. Every once in a while they showed up in our neighborhood, taking photos of themselves handing out cheap toys to the poor children, which was us. They always promised they were going to make our lives better but the promises were broken as quickly as the toys.