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The season has changed.
I only know this because the people outside my window have begun to shed their sweaters. And still I am locked in this room.
The lassi has made my brain too hazy to keep track of how many men have been here.
I do not know how much they pay.
All I know is that each time one leaves, my debt to Mumtaz grows a little smaller.
I remember the velvet of Tali’s pink nose.
The ghostly fragrance of night flowers.
The rough-edged notch in the school bench.
The sunset red of Nepali dirt.
The tinkling music of Ama’s earrings.
The silver-white sheen of the mountain in moonlight.
At first, these recollections came unbidden.
Soon, though, I had to work to recall them.
But eventually, with much tracing and retracing,
they became threadbare, thin as the blanket on my bed,
until one day my heart nearly stopped when I could not summon them up.
Now I practice these memories each morning and night, the way my teacher taught me to drill my maths.
Still, there is one image that I cannot forget, no matter how I try.
One stubborn memory that nudges the others out of my head: Ama’s face as she imagined the comfort of a tin roof.
Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.
One afternoon, Mumtaz comes to the door and tells me to gather up my things.
“Now that you are no longer a virgin,” she says, “I cannot fetch a good price for you.”
I cannot believe my ears. “So I can go now?”
I say. Mumtaz spits.
“You did not come easily,” she says. “You cannot easily go.” I don’t understand. “You can go home …”
She pauses, picks a fleck of betel leaf off her tongue,
examines it. I try to slow the pounding of my heart at the mention of the word “home.” Mumtaz flicks the bit of leaf into the air and continues. “… as soon as you’ve worked off the twenty thousand rupees I paid for you.” “But—” I have seen her record book, with its entry of 10,000 rupees.
I know this 20,000
price is a lie. Somehow, of all the things that have been done to me, this—this outrage—is the worst.
I haven’t cried, not one tear, since that first night with the fish-lips man.
But now tears surge up in my eyes.
I blink them back and lift my chin.
“But what?” she says. She pulls the leather strap out from under her skirt and slaps it against her open palm.
I bow my head.
“From now on,” Mumtaz says, “you will join the other girls downstairs each night. You will share a bedroom and be free to walk the house.”
I stare straight ahead.
Mumtaz comes close and takes my chin in her hand.
“But if you try to run away” she says, “I will grind hot chilies and put them in your private parts.”
I shudder, cup my hands over myself, and nod.
“Now hurry up,”
she says as she walks out. “I need this room.”
I am gathering up my bowl and my bundle when the aging bird girl comes in.
With her is another girl, a much younger girl. She is wearing a bright yellow dress and clutching a bundle of rough homespun clothes in her arms.
I move toward the door with the halting steps of an old woman.
It has been a lifetime, it seems, since I was outside this room.
I attempt a first step into the hallway then another, and watch as the new girl enters my old room with tentative steps, as if she is clenching her feet inside her new shoes like a poor frightened bat clinging to a branch.
The aging bird girl says I am to go to the kitchen, to join the other girls for the midday meal. How odd it is then, after all these days of dreaming to be free, that my feet will not obey.
“Come on,” she says.
Then she pinches my ear and drags me into the hall.
The strangeness of walking—moving more than a few paces to the window and back—makes the journey of a dozen steps feel like a million. And the hallway, a stretch of bare floor and cracked walls, seems to me wonderful, new and foreign and vast, and strange. And painfully bright.
When I finally reach the end of the hall, I see a kitchen. Girls in loud, colored dresses are calling out to each other—some in city language, some in my native tongue—all of them shouting to be heard over the wail of a music machine.
They bare their teeth as they laugh, shove handfuls of rice into painted mouths.
A fat, toothless woman stirs a vat of greasy stew while a naked child crawls at her feet, and the air is thick with the smells of spices and cooking oil, perfume and cigarette smoke.
It is all, suddenly, too much. I sink to the floor, wincing at the tenderness between my thighs.
Then Shahanna is at my side with a steaming bowl of rice. I eat, but do not taste it.
I open my mouth—to thank her, to try to tell her how odd it is to be with people again—but I can’t find any words. When I have finished my rice, she helps me to my feet, then says I must come watch TV with everyone else.
''It’s fun,” she says. “You’ll see.”
When we get to the TV room, the frowning girl is pushing the button. The box comes to life, just like before. Strange words appear on the glass, and loud, happy music plays. The girls cheer.
“It’s
The Bold and the Beautiful,”
says Shahanna. “It’s from America. It’s our favorite show.”
Inside the TV, a little pink-skinned man is talking to a woman with hair the color of straw. She raises her hand to slap him across the face, but he catches her wrist in his grip and stops her. Then, without warning, they are kissing.
The Happiness House girls clap and cheer and cackle like hens. The tiny pink-skinned TV man and woman are strange to me. But these flesh-and-blood girls are, to me, stranger still.
How they can eat and laugh and carry on as normal when soon the men will come is so perplexing that, while they laugh, I fight back tears.
There are posters of gods and movie stars on the walls, an electric sun hanging from the middle of the ceiling, a palm frond machine that stirs the air, a hole-in-the-floor privy, iron bars on the windows, and four rope beds separated by old sheets that hang from the ceiling.
“You draw the sheet around your bed when you have a customer,” Shahanna tells me.
Six of us share a room: the half-frowning girl, whose name is Anita; a coughing woman named Pushpa; and her two children. One of the children is a toddler, who is crawling around on the floor dragging an empty plastic bottle on a string. The other, Shahanna says, is a boy of eight.
She points to the half-frowning girl. “Anita,” she says, “is from our country.”
I place my palms together at my heart and say hello to her in our language. She looks over at me briefly, then goes back to pasting a movie star picture above her bed. I cannot tell, from her crooked face, if she is smiling or frowning. Or both. Or neither.
The coughing woman, Pushpa, came to work for Mumtaz when her husband died. She is pretty—with dusky skin and almond eyes—but she is so thin her collarbones poke out of her dress like the twigs of the neem tree.
As Shahanna is speaking, Pushpa is seized with a bout of coughing that racks her entire body. When the coughing subsides, she spits into a handkerchief, sighs heavily, then curls up on her bed with her face toward the wall. The little girl tugs on Pushpa’s braid and cries, “Mama, Mama,” but Pushpa doesn’t answer.
In the middle of the afternoon, a boy of about eight comes in and flings a backpack in the corner. He has hair that sticks up like the tassels on a cornstalk and knees as knobby as a baby goat’s. He gives Pushpa a kiss on the cheek and tickles baby Jeena under her chin.
He notices me and points to his shirt. It has the number twenty-three on the back. “David Beckham,” he says.
I do not understand these words, but it is clear that this David Beckham boy is very proud of his shirt.
Shahanna says it is time for us to put on our makeup. Pushpa rises wearily, gives the baby a bottle, and puts her on a little bedroll under her cot. The David Beckham boy grabs a paper kite and runs off If I could speak his language, I would ask him if the night air in the city smells like the night air on the mountain, like rain clouds and jasmine and possibility.
While Anita and Pushpa stand in front of the mirror, painting their faces, Shahanna explains everything to me.
Before, when you were in the locked room, Shahanna says, Mumtaz sent the customers to you. Now, if you want to pay off your debt, you must do what it takes to make them choose you.
Tell the customers that you are twelve, she says. Or Mumtaz will beat you senseless.
Do whatever the customer asks of you, Shahanna says.
Otherwise he will beat you senseless.
Then he will do whatever he likes and leave without paying.
Always wash yourself with a wet rag after the man is finished,
Pushpa says.
This will keep you from getting a disease.
If a customer likes you, he may give you a sweet, she says. You must eat it right away. Or Mumtaz will take it and eat it herself.
If a customer likes you, he may give you a tip. Hide it where no one can see so that you will have enough to buy yourself a cup of tea each day. Once a month, Pushpa says, a government woman comes to the back door with a basket of condoms. Take a handful and hide them under your mattress, but do not let Shilpa, the aging bird girl, see you; she is Mumtaz’s spy.
The Americans will try to trick you into running away, says Anita. Don’t be fooled. They will shame you and make you walk naked through the streets.
If an old man is at the door, bat your eyelashes and act the part of a little girl, says Pushpa. He will pay extra for this.
If Mumtaz brings you one of her important friends, bat your eyelashes and act the part of a little girl, says Shahanna. He will pay nothing.
There are special things you need to know about how to use your shawl, she says.
Flick the ends of your shawl in a come-closer gesture and you will bring the shy men to your bed, the ones who will slip an extra coin into your hand before they go.
Draw your shawl to your chin, bend your neck like a peacock. This will bring the older men to your bed, the ones who will leave a sweet on your pillow.
Press your shawl to your nose with the back of your hand, Pushpa says, when you must bring a dirty man to your bed. He will leave nothing but his smell, the stink of sweat, and hair oil and liquor and man. But you can use your shawl to block the worst of it.
Anita turns away from the mirror, transformed from a crooked-faced country girl into a tiger-eyed city woman.
There is another way to use a shawl, she says.
I cannot tell from her always-frowning face if she is being kind or cruel.
That new girl, the one in your old room, she says. Yesterday morning Mumtaz found her hanging from the rafters.
Her coughing is so bad today that Pushpa cannot get out of bed, so we take turns playing with baby Jeena, tickling her, cooing to her, bouncing her on our knees. It is peaceful until Anita and the cook begin pinching each other’s ears over whose turn it is to hold the baby. In the midst of their fighting the baby begins to wail.
Pushpa rises wearily from her cot and takes Jeena in her arms. “You do not remember,” she whispers to her little girl, “but we used to have a proper home.” She opens her blouse and puts the child to her breast. But it is to no avail. There is no nourishment left in Pushpa’s withered body, and again the baby begins to cry.
Jeena is not the only baby here. Several of the women have children. They dote on them, going even deeper into debt with Mumtaz to buy them fresh clothes for school, hair ribbons, and sneakers. The others—the ones without children—treat them like pets, buying them sweets from the street boy when one of their good customers gives them a tip.
I ask Shahanna why this is so.
“We all need to pretend,” she says. “If we did not pretend, how would we live?”
“But why does Mumtaz go along with this?” “Only Mumtaz does not pretend,” she says. “She knows that once the women have children, they cannot leave. They will do whatever she asks, or be thrown out in the street.”
I ask Shahanna why the women don’t get the shots that will keep the babies from coming.
She looks at me like I’m mad. “All the girls want babies,” she says. “It’s our only family here.”
And so the children of Happiness House go off to school in the mornings and come home in the afternoons and do their homework. They play tag in the alleyway, eat sweet cakes, and watch TV But in the evening, it is harder to pretend. As soon as dark falls, the bigger ones go up to the roof. They fly homemade paper kites until they are too tired to stand, daring to come down to sleep only late at night after the men have finally gone. The younger ones, like Jeena, are given special medicine so they can sleep under the bed while their mothers are with customers.
Morning comes early for the children at Happiness House, and they beg for more sleep with dazed and cloudy eyes. It takes a great deal of coaxing to get them dressed in their school clothes to begin another day of pretending.
They are old, young, dirty, clean, tall, short, dark, light, bearded, smooth, fat, thin.
They are all the same.
Most of them are from the city. A few are from my home country.
One day, a customer addressed his friend in my language as they left.
“How was yours?” he said. “Was she good?”
“It was great,”
the other one said. “I wish I could do it again.”
“Me, too,” said the first one. “If only I had another thirty rupees.”
Thirty rupees.
That is the price of a bottle of Coca-Cola at Bajai Sita’s store.