What Lies Between Us (8 page)

One thing helps. I keep a small fruit knife under my pillow, stolen from under Sita's watchful eye. When I feel too filled up, I press its point against the skin on my wrist. I press until a single point of red rises. It's always a relief, that glowing ruby bead when I had expected a necrotic green gush. It brings a rush of safety, a hum of quiet. I can sit back, fall asleep even. I know this: I have magic skin. When I pierce it, it quivers like a million metal filings rearranged by a magnet. Always this to calm me, to take me away.

*   *   *

When I bring my school report home, Amma looks at it, then at me with enraged eyes. “What is this nonsense? You were always so good at math! And reading. What are these ridiculous scores? What the hell has happened?”

I shake my head. “I don't know, Amma.” One foot rubbing against the top of the other. Can't she see what I've become? I can't concentrate in school. There is a hum in my head, a sort of heaviness and buzz that makes it impossible to pay attention. My body is always awake, wide stark awake and waiting for danger, but my head is clouded. It's hard to pay attention to the teachers. It's hard to pay attention to the other girls. Everything they do seems stupid now. As if they live some other life very far away from mine.

“Is it some boy? Is that it? My god, if you've taken up with some boy, if you're going to bring shame to us, I swear I will wring your neck myself.”

Her words pound into my skull. I look down at my feet and say, “No, Amma, no boy.”

Her eyes cut through me. “Then what is it? What is distracting you so badly?” She gets up, moves toward my room; already I can tell what she is thinking. “No, Amma, please, no,” I gasp.

In my room, she rips open drawers, spills clothes and books until she finds what she is looking for deep under my bed. My treasure trove of American magazines. My
Tiger Beat
s and
Teen Beat
s and
Teen Vogue
s. Sent from America, precious as gems. She rips them up in big dramatic moves, causing whirlwinds of pages, great flurries of decapitated, de-limbed rock stars and actresses. Bits fly from her open hands, taken up by the ceiling fan, throwing a maelstrom of paper in the room. She says, “This is what you spend your time on? Nonsense? This is what you are doing instead of studying?”

I run out of the room and down the stairs, burst into my father's study where he is nursing his arrack and his student papers. Behind him on the wall, his parents in their old-fashioned clothes above the chest that holds the old hunting rifles. He has been locked in here for hours, slowly sipping his drink, pouring another and another and another. I say, “Thatha! Amma is tearing up my things. Make her stop.”

He swirls the amber liquid, stares into its depths. His voice is blurred. “Why is she doing this?”

“I don't know. She … she says she wants me to study more.”

He tips his head back, hands steepled around the glass as if praying. “Maybe it is time to put away childish things. Exams are coming soon. Time to concentrate, no?”

He does not rise; he does not come. He will not intervene. He will say nothing to her as she says nothing to him. She will look away and he will drink his arrack. They will watch each other from a distance like a cobra and a mongoose and say nothing.

I run upstairs again. Samson stands outside my door. Amma comes out of the room, says, “Samson, Baby Madame has made a mess in her room, go and bring everything out. Put it on the fire with the evening's trash.” I watch as Samson comes out of the room, his arms filled, his eyes apologetic. In the garden he unloads his arms into the fire that swirls and hisses and leaps into the twilight, the scent of burning fruit and vegetable matter, and with it the magazines I have hoarded like gold. I stand there, my face heated from the fire. My chest is locked, but I don't cry in front of them.

Later that night, my face buried in my wet pillow, the quietest scraping at the door. Samson's whisper: “Baby Madame?” I am instantly rigid with fear. Will he come into my room even? I have pushed the desk across it as I always do, but is he strong enough to push it aside? Am I not safe even here? If I scream, will my parents hear? He says through the door, “One book. This one was left. You keep.”

And then pushed under the door like a talisman, corners burnt, flaking, a single magazine, Duran Duran, big-haired, defiantly eyelinered on the cover. I take it, ease back the burned edges. I will find a better hiding place for it. They won't take this one thing.

*   *   *

Months later Amma must have felt something, seen something, because she comes to me one day as I am studying and says, “Darling.”

“Yes, Amma.”

“Listen, my love. This is important.”

Her eyes try to hold my gaze, but I look down at my page. The letters are suddenly moving like ants, defying their letter-ness and falling into the chaos of insect-ness. I move my pencil over the paper, try to ignore her shadow falling over my page.

She grabs my wrist, shakes it, my pencil still gripped inside my fist making faint scrawls over the number ants. She sits and stares at my face. “Has anything ever happened?”

“Like what, Amma?”

“With boys, with a man? Has anyone done anything?”

“Done what?”

“Like … anything strange. Anything you don't like?”

I look down again. “No, Amma.”

“Oh, good. That's good.” The words sigh out. Relief washing over her features, her ringed fingers moving through my hair. She bends and kisses me in relief. “Good, good. I'll just go and order some tea then.”

I go to my room. I lie on top of the bed, careful not to disturb the sheet. I am shaking, suddenly freezing as if plunged into the river's depth. I pull the sheet over me. My teeth are still chattering.

I should have told her. She had asked and I had lied. I had wanted to see her face relax into softness the way it did.

At school I've heard the older girls saying that a girl who goes with a man is like a chewed-up piece of bubble gum. No one will want her again. No one chews used bubble gum. You just throw it away.

I
should
be thrown away. Because here is the most terrible and secret thing. If I go to him, it is easier. Then I know when it will happen and how quickly it will be over and I don't have to live with my heart in my throat. I don't have to jump at every sound and have fear grasp me around the neck. It is manageable. In this way I can keep a part of myself. I can fly away into the sky while he is ripping me up. In this way the terror does not rush upon me like a wave, carrying me under, drowning me. In this way I can stay aloft, my head above the water, breathing.

But even worse than this, sometimes when he runs his fingers through my hair, his nails against my scalp making me both wide, tingling awake and sleepy, I don't want it to stop. And then the most evil thing in the world happens. Sometimes he presses his finger very lightly against me there, in the center of me, in the place no one must ever touch, and it feels like I am melting, like I am sweetly and softly dying.

And then alone in my bed I remember how it felt. I rub against the bunched-up bedclothes, against my fingers, and it is nice and I like it.

 

Six

What happened in those last few weeks? It was the season of waiting for water. The monsoon clouds gathered like a herd of elephants, they stamped with sporadic, faraway thunder, they split the sky with light, but they did not break. The earth was parched and dusty. There was a snapping static in the air; the birds, too exhausted to flit through the relentlessly burning skies, stayed hidden in the trees. We could hear them, but they did not show themselves. The dogs lay in the shade, their great pink tongues hanging out. The pond had shrunk so that what water was left gathered still and stagnant, the fish clustered thickly together. The lotuses that had floated on the surface kissing the mirrored sky now stood high and lifeless in the heated air. The river was at a crawl, the high banks exposed like gums in a rotted mouth. We waited—people, animals, the earth itself. Everything held its breath for the deluge.

*   *   *

The heat is so oppressive that I sleepwalk to school and back home. It is a few weeks to my fourteenth birthday, but no one has talked about what will happen. Amma has always thrown me a party. There has always been a cake with my name on it flooded with pink- and white-icing roses. The quietness around this birthday can only mean that big plans are being made. I'm thinking about who she might have invited when Samson grabs my wrist, takes me stumbling along the side wall to his room, pushes his bulk against me, pinning me against the wall. I float up and into the sky with the wheeling, calling birds as he fumbles at my uniform. A noise, a movement at the door. Over his shoulder, my mother's eyes. I break past her, run. Behind me, her shattered cry, the sound of her palms landing on his skin, his begging voice.

I run into my room, every artery and capillary of my body full of jagged ice. I close the door and sit shaking on my bed. They will throw me out. I will be without family, without people. I see it over and over: my mother instantly understanding, shame and pain crumpling her face. She must have suspected; that's why she came to his room. I lie on my back, staring at the ceiling, my fingers clutching and releasing the sheets. A beast sits on my chest pushing out all the air, making it impossible to inhale. I will choke here alone.

I reach under my pillow. I push the shining edge against my wrist. A line of red on my skin, blood welling onto the fabric of a white handkerchief. Outside, the blinding sunshine is choked, darkness drops, the elephantine clouds open, and water falls in torrents. The day is vanquished; it is suddenly monsoon-created midnight. I can hear the river's answering roar. Instantly it has gone from a slow crawl to a frothing, boiling cauldron. I run to the window and open it; the monsoon drenches my face. I watch the garden being punished, the trees whipped like cowering dogs.

And then with a sickening drop in my stomach I realize I have left my small black Bata slippers that fit only me in his room when I ran. If they are found there, there will be no way to protest, no way to say that it didn't happen, it never happened, my mother did not see what she saw. I stop with my ear to the door, hear nothing but the thunder. I open it gently, glide down the dark staircase. In the living room Amma and Thatha are at war.

Amma shouting, “I saw it! With my own eyes. How can you say I didn't?”

“It didn't happen. You're crazy to even think such a thing.”

“Stop drinking! Stop hiding!” The sound of his glass dashed and broken on the ground.

I slip out into the garden and am immediately soaked, gusts of wind and rain battering me, sticking my clothes to my skin. I run, the mud pulling at my feet with every step. I stand outside his door and hear no trace of Samson. Maybe he is already gone. I walk inside. The single bulb is switched off, the darkness hanging like a curtain. My eyes adjust slowly.

The snuffling of a dog and Judy lopes into the room, licks my muddy calf, and looks up at me, questioning. I freeze as my father comes in, shines a light straight at me. My hands move up to shield my eyes. I can smell the arrack on his breath. In his other hand, a long and pointed shadow.

“What are you doing here?”

“Thatha.”

We sense some small movement in a corner of the dark room. My father's eye is drawn away from me. He says, “Go back to the house.”

I stumble outside into the punishing rain. I stand there and I hear them shouting. Thatha's voice. Samson's voice. How similar they are. Barely distinguishable. And then the thunder shakes the earth, and under it something else, something almost as loud as I run back into the house.

I slip up the stairs, leaving puddles of water in my wake. In my room, I drop my clothes in a sodden pile, pull on my nightgown, crawl into bed. I pull the sheet over me and lay there, my arms around my knees, hugging myself as tight as I can, making myself as small as I can.

I wait for the light and what it might bring.

*   *   *

But I must have fallen asleep, because this is what I dream. In the thrashing, lashing storm, Thatha paces the bank of the river, screaming into the wind and the rain as if there are demons set loose in him. He is incoherent, confused, and yet also deadly sure of one fact. He has failed. He has not provided the one thing the father of a daughter must provide: protection. He climbs the tree that curves over the river. Water runs along the planes of his face, drags at his clothes. The branches are as slippery as stripped bone under his fingers and bare grasping toes. He steps out onto the dark branches, the river rushing, hissing somewhere far under him; he can hear its roar more than see its sinuous hurry. For a moment he is still. Listening for a voice to call him back, a voice to release him. My voice. When it does not come, he steps out. I see his body in the air, the moment at which he is airborne and it is unclear whether he will sprout wings and lift into the storm or drop like a stone. When he drops, I hear a gasp as if the monsoon, the trees, the river itself is shocked. The swollen waters close over his head.

 

Seven

When I wake, the storm has passed. The day is sparkling, the sky draped in clouds, filigreed in sunlight. I wait with my heart in my mouth for someone to come, for the shouting to begin, but instead all is quiet. I stand with my ear pressed to the door, but no voice comes through. Hours later I go downstairs very quietly and find Amma sobbing in a chair. Thatha is missing. He went out last night in the storm and has not come back. No one knows where he is. Samson too is missing.

In the evening a search party is sent out. They find my father's body three days later. Two policemen come to tell us they have found him. My mother sits with her face dry but every part of her shaking. Sita behind her, strokes her hair, whispers in her ear, tries to make her go to her room, not hear what is being said. But Amma wants to hear everything these men say. She wants to know the exact extent of the damage done to our lives.