Sold
Text copyright © 2006 by Patricia McCormick
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First Edition
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eISBN 978-0-7868-5172-0
ISBN 0-7868-5171-6
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Contents
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SON AND A DAUGHTER
SEEING A GIRL WITH A LONG BLACK BRAID
STEALING FROM THE DAVID BECKHAM BOY
SOMETHING ELSE I KNOW ABOUT THE DAVID BECKHAM BOY
SOMETHING FOR THE DAVID BECKHAM BOY
FOR PAUL
One more rainy season and our roof will be gone, says Ama.
My mother is standing on a log ladder, inspecting the thatch, and I am on the ground, handing the laundry up to her so it can bake dry in the afternoon sun. There are no clouds in sight. No hint of rain, no chance of it, for weeks.
There is no use in telling Ama this, though. She is looking down the mountain at the rice terraces that descend, step by step, to the village below, at the neighbors’ tin roofs winking cruelly back at her.
A tin roof means that the family has a father who doesn’t gamble away the landlord’s money playing cards in the tea shop. A tin roof means the family has a son working at the brick kiln in the city. A tin roof means that when the rains come, the fire stays lit and the baby stays healthy.
“Let me go to the city,” I say. “I can work for a rich family like Gita does, and send my wages home to you.”
Ama strokes my cheek, the skin of her work-worn hand as rough as the tongue of a newborn goat. “Lakshmi, my child,” she says. “You must stay in school, no matter what your stepfather says.”
Lately I want to tell her, my stepfather looks at me the same way he looks at the cucumbers I’m growing in front of our hut. He flicks the ash from his cigarette and squints. “You had better get a good price for them,” he says.
When he looks, he sees cigarettes and rice beer, a new vest for himself.
I see a tin roof.
We drew squares in the dusty path between our huts and played the hopping-on-one-leg game. We brushed each other’s hair a hundred strokes and dreamed of names for our sons and daughters. We pinched our noses shut whenever the headman’s wife passed by, recalling the time she broke wind strutting past us at the village spring.
We rubbed the rough-edged notch in the school bench for good luck before a recitation. We threw mud at each other during the long afternoons stooped over in the paddies, and wept with laughter when one of Gita’s mud pies hit her haughty older sister in the back of the head.
And in the fall, when the goatherds came down from the Himalayan meadows, we hid in the elephant grass to catch sight of Krishna, the boy with sleepy cat eyes, the one I am promised to in marriage.
Now that Gita is gone, to work as a maid for a wealthy woman in the city, her family has a tiny glass sun that hangs from a wire in the middle of their ceiling, a new set of pots for Gita’s mother, a pair of spectacles for her father, a brocaded wedding dress for her older sister, and school fees for her little brother.
Inside Gita’s family’s hut, it is daytime at night. But for me, it feels like nighttime even in the brightest sun without my friend.
Each morning as I go about my chores—straining the rice water, grinding the spices, sweeping the yard—my little blact-and-white speckled goat, Tali, follows at my heels.
“That silly goat,” Ama says. “She thinks you are her mother.”
Tali nudges her head into the palm of my hand and bleats in agreement. And so I teach her what I know.
I wipe the hard mud floor with a rag soaked in dung water and explain: “This will keep our hut cool and free from evil spirits.” I show her how I lash a water jug to the basket on my back, not spilling a drop on the steep climb up from the village spring. And when I brush my teeth with a twig from the neem tree, Tali copies me, nibbling her twig as solemn as a monk.
When it’s time for me to go to school, I make her a bed of straw in a sunny corner of the porch. I kiss her between the ears and tell her I’ll be home in time for the midday meal.
She presses her moist pink nose into the pocket of my skirt, searching for a bit of stowaway grain, then settles down, a jumble of elbows and knees, burrowing into the straw to nap.
“What a funny animal,” Ama says. “She thinks she is a person.” Ama must be right, because one day last week when I was sitting in the schoolroom, I heard the tinkling of her bell and looked up and saw my little speckled goat wandering around the school yard, bleating in despair.
When finally she spotted me through the window, she
bahhed
with wounded pride, indignant at being left behind. She marched across the yard, propped her hooves up on the windowsill, and looked in with keen and curious eyes as the teacher finished the lesson.
When school was over and we climbed the hill toward home, Tali trotted ahead, her stubby tail held high.
“Next week,” I promised her, “we will work on our spelling.”
In the morning, Ama bends down to stir the kitchen fire and to plait my hair before I go to school. All day, as she trudges up and down the mountain, a heavy basket braced on her back and held fast by a rope around her brow, she is bent under the weight of her burden.
And at night, as she serves my stepfather his dinner, she kneels at his feet.
Even when she is standing upright to scan the sky for rain clouds, my ama’s back is stooped.
The people who live on our mountain, a cluster of red mud huts clinging to the slope, worship the goddess who lives there, on the swallow-tailed peak. They pray to the goddess whose brow is fierce and noble, whose breast is broad and bountiful, whose snowy skirts spread wide above us.
She is beautiful, mighty, and magnificent.
But my ama, with her crow-black hair braided with bits of red rag and beads, her cinnamon skin, and her ears hung with the joyful noise of tinkling gold, is, to me, more lovely.
And her slender back, which bears our troubles—and all our hopes—is more beautiful still.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SON AND A DAUGHTER
My stepfather’s arm is a withered and useless thing. Broken as a child when there was no money for a doctor, his poor mangled limb pains him during the rainy months and gives him great shame.