The Light of Hidden Flowers (31 page)

We returned to the bench, and after Kate distributed candy bars from her backpack, Reina briefed us on our next leg. She had once again hired her pal Salim to be our driver and translator. He would be here shortly to drive us to the orphanage. While Kate kicked back for a minute, Reina filled me in on the latest legal machinations. Her buddy from HBS was able to secure us our license to operate, and his family had been happy to purchase the parcel of land that stood adjacent to the existing structure. Demolition would soon begin and our new building would be erected.

“Bribes—large and small—greased the wheels,” Reina said. “But this is India. Bribing is SOP.”

According to Reina, the community was already buzzing, and if early interest was any indication, outreach to area fathers wouldn’t present the challenge we feared it might: they had already taken to waiting with their daughters outside the existing building, hoping to enroll. Though Mrs. Pundari took their names and assured them she’d be in touch when registration began, they still returned, day after day.

When Salim arrived, we greeted him like an old friend. I hadn’t noticed the first time around, but he was probably only eighteen years old himself, a good-looking guy with low-slung slacks and seriously styled hair. It was the way he looked at Kate that clued me into his youth.

“Kate’s fourteen years old,” I said to Salim. “Fourteen.”

In Salim’s car, we drove first through the congested city streets and then into the countryside, where the crowding and shocking poverty scarcely lessened. Kate was shell-shocked, and because I felt my words were weightless against the demands of her grief, I simply draped my arm around her and offered her my shoulder. To see the barefoot children wading through the mountains of garbage, the preteens asleep on the edges of the street, and the girls soliciting themselves in alleyways was belladonna to the brain.

Thunder rumbled; rain dumped from above, roads filled with ankle-deep water. With Kate still glued to my shoulder, I wondered about the shoddy rooftops and dirt floors and children on the streets we were passing. What did a deluge like this mean to them? How many times could one family rebuild before they lost the will to survive?

The rain had stopped by the time we pulled up to the orphanage.

“Home for the Orphaned and Malnourished Girls. Home for the Destitute,” Kate read quietly.

“Don’t worry,” I said, squeezing her hand. “It’s actually quite happy inside. Wait’ll you see the girls.”

Reina and I gathered backpacks and bags from the trunk of Salim’s car and led Kate to the building. We entered through the back and wended our way until the chorus of chatter and girls filled our ears. When the girls saw us, they greeted us with smiles wide enough to bridge the garbage-laden country.

Mrs. Pundari had prepared lunch for us: flatbread grilled on her griddle and topped with vegetables. While Reina ate according to Indian culture, using her hand as a utensil to tear up her bread, mixing in the vegetables and sauce, and scooping the contents into her mouth, Kate and I opted to keep our bread whole, and instead wrapped our veggies inside, like a burrito. The girls sipped from their small steel cups, ate, and never stopped giggling.

Hours later, as the afternoon sky darkened, Salim drove us three miles down the road to town and the motel we would call home for the next six weeks. It was a provincial little motel, far from the Marriott in the city, but it was nice and clean and would provide a safe refuge for us each night.

The next day, we got to work.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

It was only our second day at the orphanage. Kate and I were working outside, curriculum materials spread out on a flat piece of scrap wood set atop two old sawhorses, when a teenage girl hobbled up. She was an amputee—one leg, the other stopping below her knee, just like Joe’s, but no prosthetic. She was pretty, with a long, glossy braid and bright eyes. She told us her name was Aneeta. “It means Grace,” she said.

“My middle name is Grace,” Kate said.

Aneeta told us she lost her leg when she was trapped in a house fire when she was little. Kate told her about her father. And like that, they became BFFs.

Aneeta wasn’t typical of the kids in the area. She actually had two parents and both of them supported education. Though her mother hadn’t been educated formally, her father had, and taught Aneeta to read when she was little. Kate told Aneeta about some of her favorite books. They went off to look at them, and from that moment on, they were nearly inseparable. Kate Santelli, a kid who couldn’t make a friend all year in middle school, even if her GPA depended on it.

Aneeta helped us out, as well. She was able to tell us what most Indian kids in this region knew and didn’t know. Many of them were wise in math because of the bartering and selling of goods they were forced to do. While most of them had at least a basic understanding of English, their reading skills were poor. And as for history, what was going on in the rest of the world, most had very little idea.

“With a population as large as ours,” Aneeta said, “you would think that there would be more to our lives, but they’re actually quite simple, quite small.”

Every minute of every day, we worked. In the morning, crews of laborers would show up, or they wouldn’t. Some days we were hopeful, watching the men demolish walls, knowing that soon new ones would be rebuilt. But then days would pass and the workers wouldn’t arrive on the site, and we were left trying to maneuver around yet another pile of rubble.

One week, the construction crew rolled up, ready to install the toilets, a luxury the orphanage heretofore hadn’t enjoyed; only, the workers couldn’t begin because the water taps and plumbing had yet to be fully connected. In order for the water work to be finished, we needed new paperwork to be signed and stamped, even though we had already completed sheaves of forms the month earlier. The ironic thing was that it wasn’t about the big money; it was about the small money. Between my start-up capital, the grants we’d received from One by One, and a number of alliances we had forged—chief among them one with water.org to provide for safe water and sanitary conditions—we had the operational budget. The problems we encountered were largely bureaucratic, structural, political—all of which required incentive money.

Aside from the construction issues, we continued to be swarmed with interested girls and their fathers. Notices had been posted in the village alerting the families of the school’s opening. Each day, girls and their fathers, sometimes their entire families, would walk to the construction site, drop off their applications, and ask to be accepted. So far we had more than one hundred applications for only a handful of available spots.

Every night Reina and I read applications and made piles, aware that our decisions meant choosing to give opportunity to one girl while denying it to another.

Each morning, Kate worked alongside Reina and me. In the afternoon, she gave reading lessons to the orphanage kids and any other curious kids who’d come to check out the school. With Aneeta’s help, they split the youngest from the oldest kids into groups and worked on their English.

I had only known Kate for a short time, but I knew her well enough to savor the glow that now emanated from her. There was no hint of the anxiety that had once muffled it. Her face was now wide-open and joyful, eager and expectant. She had traveled overseas and seen a much bigger world. She had lived in a village hemmed in by tradition and environment and seen a much smaller world. Somewhere in there, she had found her place. Much of the same could be said for me.

Because the daily operation of the orphanage had no choice but to continue on in the midst of the construction, it did, shuffling living quarters and kitchen supplies to one side of the building, and then again to the other. Meanwhile, the construction crew did its part to accommodate the residents, building new walls and structures on the outside, before knocking down the old facades on the inside. For many weeks, the image was one of a building wrapped around a building, a graft and a host, scaffolding encasing an ailing edifice.

We had been working for exactly a month when the Dynamic Duo—Kate and Aneeta—approached me with mischievous smiles.

“Cat? Canary? What are you two up to?”

They looked at each other, holding hands, and grinned conspiratorially at me. “We have the most awesome idea!” Kate said.

“And by
awesome
you mean you have a way to get the construction workers to work more than four hours a day?”

“More like awesome for
us
,” Aneeta said.

Kate looked at me with puppy-dog eyes, an expression that struck me as extraordinarily childlike—a state I didn’t think Kate was altogether familiar with, worrying for her father at war, assuming her position as the eldest child, maintaining her straight-A averages. “We want to have a sleepover.”

“Here?” I asked, already thinking that there was no problem with that. There were plenty of new beds in the dormitory.

“At Aneeta’s,” Kate said. “Her parents said it would be okay and they would be home the entire time and they would walk us both ways.”

I looked at Aneeta, not wanting her to think I didn’t trust her parents. “Aneeta, you know I adore you and your parents, but I kind of vowed—like promised on my life—that I wouldn’t let Kate out of my sight.”

“It is only a mile away,” Aneeta assured me, in her mature British-English voice. “And our house is substantial, with a real door and lock.”

I knew this to be true. Kate and I had walked Aneeta home on a few occasions. Her family lived in a relatively nice neighborhood.

“It’s a mile from here,” I said, “but it’s at least four miles from the motel where we stay every night.”

Now the two of them were giving me puppy-dog eyes, their hands clasped together in begging position.

“I need to mull it over,” I said, thinking I would find Reina and run it by her. “When do you want to do this?”

“Tonight,” Kate said.

“Tonight!” I gasped. “Why tonight?”

“Because there is a lunar eclipse,” Aneeta explained, “and my father has a telescope and said we could watch it.”

Kate leaned in close to me and whispered, “I’ve never slept over at a friend’s house.”

“Never,” I said. A statement, not a question. I had gone my childhood, tween, and teen years without a sleepover, too. I’d overheard girls talking about them—pricking their fingers to become blood sisters, painting each other’s nails, confessing truths that made sense of adolescent confusion.

“Once a girl slept over at our house,” Kate said. “But I’ve never slept over at a friend’s house. Please?”

I looked at the two of them, then shooed them away. “Go, you little beggars. Let me think about it.”

I found Reina hunched over a giant blueprint, discussing with our foreman the plans for the water lines. I listened in for a while, and then walked away with the thought that I would catch her later. I could text Joe or Lucy, and gauge their reaction. But how would that sound—me, the supposed adult in charge, looking to them for advice as to whether Kate could have a sleepover with Aneeta? They didn’t know Aneeta, or her parents, or the town, or the risks attendant to her leaving my side. It would only make them worry.

I got back to work, screening candidates for the headmistress position. She would work alongside Mrs. Pundari, though Mrs. Pundari would continue management of the food and housing, whereas the new hire would be in charge of the school and the teachers. There was one woman in particular in whom I was particularly interested. Her name was Ms. Chopra, and she was educated in Mumbai at the university, though had returned home to Rohtak to care for her parents. Although she hadn’t had the opportunity to graduate, she had taken numerous classes in education, special ed, and curriculum development.

When Reina was free, she sauntered over, glimmering from the diamonds on her sunglasses and the diamonds in her eyes and the diamonds she kicked up in the dust. “Need me?” she asked.

I outlined for Reina my dilemma about letting Kate go home with Aneeta. “What if something happens while she’s out of my reach?”

Reina looked at me with disapproval. “Let the girl go,” she said. “It’s Aneeta! Her family is lovely and educated. Nothing will happen to her.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Of course, you’re right.”

When I delivered the news to the girls, they yelped and jumped in the air and hugged me until I couldn’t breathe. Hours later, after we had put in a good ten hours, Aneeta’s parents arrived at the orphanage. The girls ran to greet them, and when Shri and Aadesh nodded their heads and smiled, I knew the news of the sleepover had been delivered.

“Thank you for having her,” I began, when they joined me on the steps.

“This will be such a treat for Aneeta,” Shri said. “She and Kate have become . . . how do you say?”

“Two peas in a pod,” I said. “Yes, indeed they have.”

“The walk is not far,” Aadesh said.

“This sounds crazy on my part, I know,” I admitted, “because you walk this walk every day to get Aneeta. And I know she walks it herself much of the time. But . . .” I stalled, worried about insulting them. “Would you mind if Salim drove you all home?”

Shri laughed. “Of course, that would be fine.”

“Let me just make sure Kate has everything she needs.”

I went inside and held Kate by the shoulders. “Kate, you know that your life is in my hands, right? If something happens to you, I would
die
—like, hero’s-journey, throw-myself-into-a-fiery-pit
die
. I need you to tell me that you will be safe. That you will make only safe decisions. Okay?”

“I get it,” she said. “I promise we’ll stay inside Aneeta’s house, except to look out the telescope.”

“You have your phone?”

“Got it.”

“Text me the second you get there.”

“Got it.”

I reached for her and squeezed her into a bear hug. “Promise me you’ll be safe and smart.”

As Kate drove away with Aneeta’s family, my heart seized into a fist. I had just let a fourteen-year-old girl in my charge out of my sight in India. I flashed to a time I’d gotten lost in the supermarket when I was little. “Where’s your mother?” I remember a woman asking me. I stood there shaking my head
no
because I didn’t have a mother and this lady asking me about her whereabouts made that reality ache in my heart. When my father found me, the lady gave him a disapproving nod, and then she looked at me and dumped the responsibility into my lap: “Stick close to your father, in case he loses you again.”

A few minutes later, Kate texted that they were at Aneeta’s and that she and her friend were inside and were planning to read books for a while.

I calmed down. Just a bit.

Around seven, Reina announced that she was ready to call it a night. I agreed that I was finished working, too . . . but the idea of returning to our motel a good three miles in the opposite direction made me nervous. Here at the orphanage I was only a mile from Kate, should she need me. On the other hand, if I let Salim and his car go for the night, I would be at the orphanage without transportation, so what good would my proximity do? At least at the motel I could hail a taxi if a situation came up.

“You’re kind of green,” Reina said. “You look like you’re going to puke.”

“I might just do that,” I admitted. “I’m worried about Kate. What if something happens to her?”

“She’s fine. It won’t.”

“Gang of thugs? Earthquake?”

Reina shook her head.

“Fire?”

“Unlikely.”

“Don’t tell Aneeta that,” I said. “She got stuck in a fire, remember?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Reina said. “Why don’t you and I stay the night here at the orphanage? I’ll have Salim run me into town for some takeout for us. I’ll ask him to stay ‘on call.’ The proximity will make you feel better.”