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I used to fear Shilpa, but I look her in the eye. “No,” I say. “Not if it means a few extra rupees toward what I owe Mumtaz.”
She spits. “You stupid hill girl,” she says. “You actually believe what she’s told you?”
I do. I have to believe.
A new girl arrived today. I know because I heard her sobs through the door of the locked-in room as I passed by on my way to the kitchen.
Mumtaz is a monster, I tell myself. Only a monster could do what she does to innocent girls.
But I wonder. If the crying of a young girl is the same to me as the bleating of the horns in the street below, what have I become?
Some days, the time between when I awake and the time when the customers arrive is so long and dull and tedious, that I can only lie in bed and watch the spinning of the palm frond machine.
These are the days when I understand Shilpa and the way she loves her liquor.
And so when the street boy comes today, I do not pretend I cannot see him. I look at his caddy and point to the bottle he has brought for Shilpa.
He shakes his head. “This is bad stuff,” he says in my language. “Once you start it, you cannot stop.”
“What do you care?” I say.
He looks down, fiddles with his wire caddy for a bit, then looks back at me, his dark brown eyes as wide and unblinking as Tali’s. Then he takes a cup of tea from the caddy and holds it out to me. ‘Take this instead,” he says.
I shake my head.
He turns to go, then stops. “I can bring you other things,” he says. “I can bring you sweet cakes.”
I sigh and try to remember the time when a sweet cake was enough to make me happy. I turn my face to the wall. He leaves without making a sound, but I can tell from the aroma that fills the room that once again he has left me a cup of tea.
Shilpa passes by my room with her gold-watch customer, and I try to remember what it was she said the other day when she warned me to stay away from him.
When I told her I would do whatever I could to pay my debt to Mumtaz, she said that I was stupid. Her words come back to me:
“You actually believe what she tells you?”
I wonder. What can she mean?
Shilpa is Mumtaz’s spy. She is the one who guards the door to her counting room. She is the one who seems to know Mumtaz’s secrets.
I have seen Mumtaz’s record book; I know how she cheated me. But I wonder. Does Shilpa know something I don’t?
The street boy is at my door again today. He is holding a bottle of Coca-Cola.
“For you,” he says.
I am curious about this drink. The people who drink it on TV are happy when its tiny fireworks go off in their mouths.
“I have no money,” I say to him.
“It’s okay,” he says.
I regard him with some suspicion. “Why are you giving this to me?”
He shrugs.
'And why do you give me tea without asking for anything in return?”
He kicks one bare foot against the other. “We are both alone in this city,” he says. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
He doesn’t wait for my answer. He removes the cap, and the bottle hisses at us like an angry snake. I shy away from it until it has finished its hissing. Then I take the bottle from him and bring it to my mouth. Little bubbles—so tiny they cannot be seen—sneak out from the bottle and tickle my nose. I think I will sneeze, but nothing happens. I take a sip. It is true! A dozen tiny fireworks go off on my tongue. I cannot help but smile.
The street boy is smiling, too.
Then Shilpa calls out to him from down the hall. “Get in here, you lazy boy,” she cries.
He turns to go. “I can bring you other things, you know, whatever you like,” he says. “I know everyone in this town.”
I have no need for other things, I want to tell him. This small gift is more than enough.
Today the street boy shows up late. He scurries past my door, his eyes downcast. I call out to him and he peeks around the door frame. His brow is cut, his cheek swollen with a big purple bruise.
“What happened?”
I say.
“The boss,” he says, touching his face gingerly.
I ask him why his boss would do such a thing. “If I don’t collect for all the drinks,” he says. “Sometimes he takes it out on me.”
We are both quiet for a moment. I open my mouth to tell him I am sorry at the same time he opens his to say it’s okay, and then we are quiet again.
He turns to leave, and I see that his clothes are worn thin, that they are nothing but rags. “Come back tomorrow,” I say.
He looks puzzled.
But I do not tell him that I have decided to borrow from Mumtaz, just this once, so that tomorrow he doesn’t have to face his boss empty-handed.
Shilpa is alone in the counting room when I get there. I tell her I want to borrow 40 rupees.
She spits. “You are even stupider than I thought.”
I do not care what this drunken woman thinks of me. I just want enough to pay the street boy what I owe. “What do you care?” I say. “It is my money. My family won’t miss a few rupees.”
She laughs. “You think the money goes home to your family?” she says.
I tell myself she is talking nonsense, the nonsense that comes when she is drunk.
“Bimla may have given your family a little sum when you left home,” she says. “But the rest—the money from the customers—goes to Mumtaz. Your family will never see one rupee more.”
I put my hands to my ears, but still I can hear what she is saying.
“You will never pay off what you owe,” she says. “Mumtaz will work you until you are too sick to make money for her. And then she will throw you out on the street.” I shut my eyes and shake my head from side to side. She is wrong. Because if she is right, everything I’ve done here, everything that’s been done to me, was for nothing.
It has been three days since I learned the truth from Shilpa. I ran from her, straight to my room, where I was sick to my stomach all day and night. For two days more I lay in bed, too wretched to move. But last night I rose from my bed, put on my makeup, and went back to work.
And today when the street boy comes, I will be ready. Today I will ask him if it is really true that he knows everyone in this town. And today I will show him the small white American card with the flying bird on it.
The street boy is standing in the kitchen, and all the girls are gathered around him. He says today is his last day.
“The boss is giving my route to a new boy,”
he says with a shrug.
The other girls tickle and kiss him and tell him they will miss him. The cook ruffles his hair with her hand, then slips him a piece of fresh bread. Anita takes a rupee note from her waistcloth, presses it into his palm, and says good-bye. Shilpa asks if the new boy will bring her what she needs.
I look at him with frantic eyes. He says not to worry, it is not my fault.
He steps toward the kitchen door. My heart is pounding so hard I think it will burst from my chest. I do not think. I run to him and throw my arms around him.
The others cackle and bray.
“Stupid girl,” Shilpa says. “She must be in love with him.”
I do not care if she thinks I’m in love with him. I don’t care if she thinks I’m a fool. Because I didn’t just hug him. I whispered in his ear and slipped him the flying-bird card.
More than a week has passed since I gave the street boy the flying-bird card. Each day the new boy comes in his place. The new boy is slow and surly. He does not joke with anyone, and he refuses to give out so much as a single teacup without getting his money first.
I ask if he ever sees the boy who used to bring us our tea. “Who?” he says.
I realize then that I do not even know his name.
I look around the table at mealtime. There is a pair of new girls. One is sniffling over her rice and dal, the other is too dazed to eat. A third girl, one who has been here a while, is wiping her plate with her bread.
The first one is sitting in Monica’s old seat, the second in Shahanna’s. The third is sitting where Pushpa used to sit.
It occurs to me that, except for Anita, I have been here the longest.
I awake in the middle of the night to a familiar sound. It is the hacking of someone with the coughing disease. It took me a moment to realize, though, that Pushpa has long been gone. And a moment more to realize that this time, it is Anita.
It is only afternoon, but already a customer is at the door. I see at once that he is an American. It is not the same one who gave me the flying-bird card; this one is taller, and he is wearing a vest of many pockets. I shrink behind the door frame; every day I have prayed for an American to come. Now that one is here I don’t know what to do.
I hear a noise from the counting room and see that Shilpa is watching. So I go to the man like a thirsty vine. I tell him I will make him happy. I tell him I know some good tricks.
Shilpa goes back to her movie star magazine, and the man follows me up the steps.
When we get to my room, he grips my hand in greeting, the same uncouth way the first American did. I pull away.
He says hello in my language. I say nothing in reply.
“What is your name?” he says. His words are hurried, and he looks nervously over his shoulder.
“Your name,” he says again. “What is your name?”
I cannot open my mouth.
“How old are you?” I don’t reply.
He sighs. “May I take your picture?” he says. He takes a small silver box from one of his pockets. He touches a button and its eye blinks open with a whir.
I do not like this seeing box, but I do not object.
“? will not tell the fat woman,” he says. “You have my promise.”
A tiny lightning jumps out of the box, the eye blinks shut. And for a moment, I see doubles and triples of the man, framed m a red glow. He is smiling, looking at the back of his little lightning box.
“Come see your picture,” he says.
I take just one step toward him and wait. He holds the silver box toward me, and I can see a tiny version of myself—smaller than the people on TV—in a tiny TV in the back of the silver box.
“Digital,” he says.
I don’t know this word, but it must be the name of the strange American magic he has that allows him to put me in his silver box. “Do you want to leave here?” he says.
I cannot answer.
How do I know if he is a good man?
What if he is like the drunken American?
What if he is like the ones Anita talks about, the ones who make young girls walk naked in the street?
“I can take you to a clean place,” he says. “Look,” he says. “Pictures. Of the shelter. Other girls.”
He holds out the silver box so I can see the tiny TV in the back.
He pushes a button.
There is a tiny image of a Nepali girl smiling back at me.
He pushes the button again.
There are girls in school uniforms sitting at a desk.
Girls fetching water at a spring.
The man turns off his digital magic machine. I am afraid, all of a sudden, that he is leaving. I wish there was a way to say something, to keep this American here a little longer.
I reach under my bed and pull out the American storybook, the one Harish gave me. I hold it out toward the American. He cocks his head to one side, puzzled.
I point to a picture. “
Elmo
,” I say. He nods slowly.
“Ice cream,”
I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Very good.”
“America.”
The man smiles.
I do not mean to, but I am smiling at this queer-looking man, smiling and trembling at the magic—not of his digital image-taking box—but at the magic of a handful of nonsense words to keep him here a little longer.
The American man whispers. His way of speaking my language is hurried now as he reads from a battered Nepali wordbook. I see that it has the image of the flying bird on its cover, and I say a silent prayer of thanks to the street boy whose name I will never know.
“What the fat woman does here to you is bad,”
he says. “Very bad.”
I nod.
“She cannot force you to do these things,” he says.
This American is not so magical after all, I decide. He doesn’t know about Mumtaz’s leather strap. And the goondas. And the chain on the door.
“I will come back for you,” he says. “I will come back with other men, good men, from this country—fathers and uncles who want to help—policemen who are not friends of Mumtaz. We will take you away from here.”
This is too good to believe.
“You must believe me,” he says.
I shut my eyes tight. I don’t know what to believe. I believed that the stranger in the yellow cloud dress was taking me to the city to work as a maid. I believed that Uncle Husband would protect me from the bad city people. I believed that if I worked hard enough here at Happiness House, I could pay down my debt. And I believed it was all worth it for the sake of my family.
I am too afraid to believe him.
And so I am going to believe that this strange pink man is a dream, a cruel trick of the mind. I am going to believe that when I open my eyes he will be gone.
I count to
100. Count to 100 again and open my eyes.
He is still there, gripping his battered Nepali wordbook.
“The clean place,” I say. “I want to go there.”
The American man says he will come back. He will return, he says, as soon as he can, with the other men and the good police officers who will force Mumtaz to let me go.
When he returns, I must go with him quickly, before the goondas can try to stop us.
He bows and says, “Namaste,” the word in my language that means hello and good-bye.
And then he is gone, leaving me to wonder if he was really here at all.