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Authors: Deborah Ellis

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BOOK: The Best Day of My Life
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As he said the name, the skies opened up. Water poured down from the heavens.

The rainy season had begun.

All around me, people scurried to get out of the rain.

I let it stream down on me. It ran over my face and down my arms. It flowed over my head like a blessing.

I laughed and laughed.

I felt truly free.

I took the old man's advice.

I found a family living on the street. They had their bits of belongings piled around them – a few cloths, a pot, two cups. The mother and father were soaked to the skin, but their children were dry. The parents held up a sheet of plastic to shelter the little ones. The children sat under it, protected from the rain.

As I walked up to them, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The sun came out. The streets came alive. Peddlers pulled sheets of plastic away from the fruit, padlocks and pots they were selling. Shoemakers relit the flames under their pots of glue and started tapping away at their heels. Street dogs shook the rain out of their fur and sniffed around. People folded up their umbrellas and kept on rushing.

‘Namaste,' I said, pointing my hands together as best I could when they were full of soap.

The family did the same, even the youngest.

I held out the bottle of soap and the soap that was wrapped in paper.

At first they shook their heads. They didn't understand. They smiled and spoke in a language I didn't know.

I kept holding out the soap. Finally, they took it. They were happy. They showed the soap to their children. The children sniffed the flowers and spices. Smiles spread across their faces.

I made the namaste again and walked away. It felt good to make the family happy and give them something they needed.

But what now? I wondered.

I felt a hand on my elbow.

The woman was there. She gently pulled me back to the family.

They wanted to share their evening meal with me.

It wasn't much. A bit of dal and a bit of roti. The mother broke the roti and shared it out. We dipped it into the small pot of dal. We couldn't talk to each other, but when the meal was over, they shared songs from their land and I shared a Bollywood song I had seen on the shop owner's TV.

When night came, they made room for me on their bit of pavement.

I slept between two of the children. During the night, one of the toddlers climbed up on my back. I was glad to be a softer mat than the pavement.

In the morning, I left.

Nobody really owns anything. We give back our bodies at the end of our lives. We own our thoughts, but everything else is just borrowed. We use it for a while, then pass it on.

Everything.

We borrow the sun that shines on us today from the people on the other side of the world while they borrow the moon from us. Then we give it back. We can't keep the sun, no matter how afraid we are of the dark.

We borrow our food. What we eat becomes fertiliser that goes back into the earth and gets turned back into food.

Everything is borrowed.

Once I realised that, I stopped worrying about how I would survive.

I didn't need to have anything. I just needed to borrow.

Somehow, that seemed a whole lot easier.

So that became my job. To borrow what I needed. Then to pass it on to someone who needed it more.

It worked. Days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. I ate. I slept. I lived.

5

Dead Englishmen

S
OMEONE WAS BEATING UP
Santa Claus.

I was trying to sleep down the street from the Chinese restaurant where the Santa statue usually stood, but the crash of the plastic Santa on the footpath woke me up.

Two young men were laughing and talking loudly in English as they kicked the statue between them like a football. From my spot on the footpath I saw Santa's white beard and red cap rise and fall as he was bashed by shoes and sidewalk.

The stray cat that was sleeping beside me to keep warm was startled and got ready to spring. I stroked its fur, trying to get it to stay with me a little longer. But it was too spooked, and it ran off into the night.

Park Street was usually quiet late at night after the restaurants closed up and the tourists went back to their hotels. The men beating up Santa were probably tourists. They were not street people. Street people would not be so rude as to make so much noise and wake up the rest of us.

I hoped they finished their game soon. It was better to stay put at night instead of wandering around. It was too easy to step on something or someone in the dark streets.

But then I heard the police sirens getting closer, and I decided not to hang around.

The police didn't usually bother me. I had been in Kolkata for a few months and I knew how to be invisible. Most people didn't see me. I could stand right in front of tourists and ask for money or food and even they didn't see me.

I wasn't worried about the police coming after me, but the other pavement-sleepers could be a problem. They were waking up all around me.

Kolkata nights could be cold in December. I was afraid they would notice the warm blanket I had. I had borrowed it from the unlocked cupboard at the Metropole Hotel. They had warm blankets at that hotel. I had borrowed from there a few times, although usually from the laundry room before the blankets were folded and put away.

I had on a red jacket, too, with a hood that kept my head warm. I had borrowed it from a pile of old clothes in the market when the stall owner wasn't looking. I felt cozy and comfortable and wanted to stay that way.

I planned to pass the blanket on to someone else in the morning, but there was still a lot of night to get through. I didn't want anyone to borrow it from me before I was finished with it.

I got up and moved away from the storefront where I had been sleeping. It was a store where foreign tourists went to sit at computers and breathe in cold air. During the day it could be a good spot to get money. If you kept your eyes and ears open, you could learn things, like how to sing bits of English songs that played on the radio. If I sang and danced a bit before I asked for money, they were more likely to give.

Or if I told a bit of poetry.

Kolkata has books. Lots of books. Some of them get torn and thrown away. I kept my eyes open and found part of a book that had poems in it – poems that were easy enough for me to read and learn.

I memorised bits of the easiest ones. I didn't need to learn a lot. No one expected much from a girl like me. I could say, ‘Oh, to be in England, now that spring is here,' and tourists thought I was a genius.

I picked up bits of other languages, too. In German I could say ‘Guten Tag,' which means good day. In Japanese I could say ‘Sayonara,' which means goodbye.

Tourists were easy to impress.

The phrase that made them really part with their money was ‘Welcome to Kolkata. Please give me money so I can go back to school.'

A lot of tourists gave me rupees just for that. I spent their rupees on food.

I had tried to go to school. I tried a few different ones.

I would follow the girls in as they got out of their rickshaws and walked past the guard into the yard where they were playing with ropes and balls, their uniforms blue and white or red and white or green and white.

The first time, the guard stopped me at the gate.

The second time, I went in with a group when the guard was busy. I got into the schoolyard. A teacher threw me out.

The third time, I got in through the gate, walked straight through the yard and into an empty classroom.

It was beautiful. Clean and bright and colorful, with a whole piece of chalkboard on the wall and rows of small tables with chairs. I sat down in one of those chairs, pretending that I belonged, trying to be invisible.

I was not invisible to the girl who owned the table. She came into the classroom and squealed and stamped her feet. She said I stank and, as the guard was dragging me away, cried that her chair was now dirty and where would she sit?

But I didn't tell any of that to the tourists. They were busy. They hardly stopped walking even when they were handing out rupees. They had no time for long stories.

During the day the computer store was a good place, but on this night it wasn't.

I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders, stayed close to the shadowy place along the wall of shops and moved quickly away from the sounds of the sirens. I hitched the blanket up so it wouldn't drag along the ground and gather dirt. I wanted it to be in good condition when I passed it along to someone else.

More police came into the street. They zoomed by me, lights flashing. Behind me I could hear the tourists yelling at the police and the police yelling back.

I hated the sound of yelling. Everybody should just be quiet.

I wanted to be off the street, in a place that was soft and dark and didn't smell too bad.

The Park Street Cemetery was the perfect spot, if I could get in. It was always guarded. Lots of dead Englishmen were buried there. They didn't let just anybody sleep on their graves.

But it was close. If I couldn't get in there, the Lower Circular Road Cemetery was just across the way. And if for some reason that was no good, there was always the Sealdah Railway Station.

By now I knew all the good spots in Kolkata. I had survived the rainy season, when the streets filled with water, and I would survive the winter. Jharia was a long time ago and very far away.

The cemetery guard was asleep.

He was sitting in his chair, inside his little booth just outside the closed gate. I couldn't understand how he could sleep through all the police and all the yelling. Then I got closer and smelled desi-daru, the home-brewed booze that was sold illegally in back alleys. I stayed away from it. The man who was not my uncle had taught me all I needed to know about that stuff.

The guard would have a headache in the morning, I thought. My uncle always had headaches the morning after he drank. He would lie on his mat and hold his head and hit out at anyone who made a noise.

After a quick look around to be sure no one was watching, I flung my Metropole Hotel blanket over the gate. Then I climbed over after it.

The graveyard was calm and dark. The high stone walls blotted out the sounds of the police and the men they were arresting.

I looked for a soft place to sleep.

I stepped around the other sleepers and went farther along the pathway. I found a good spot behind a big tomb. I was hot now from moving around, so I took off my jacket and rolled it into a ball to make a soft place for my head. Then I wrapped myself up in the blanket and stretched out on the grass. And I spent the rest of the night sleeping among the dead Englishmen.

The guard was in a bad mood when he came through the graveyard in the morning to wake us all up. It was almost funny. I knew he had a headache. I remembered my uncle's face, and the guard was feeling the same pain. His morning was made worse because his boss was also in a bad mood. His boss yelled at him and he yelled at us.

Lucky for me, I was deep in the cemetery. I heard him yelling before he caught me sleeping. I was able to get to my feet, run to the wall, snag my Metropole Hotel blanket on the barbed wire and use it to pull myself up to the top of the wall before the angry guard got to me.

But I forgot my red jacket and left it behind on the grave. From the top of the wall it looked like a flower I had dropped in the green grass.

I liked to start each day with a bit of fun. It put me in a good mood. I straddled the top of the wall and waited for him. I could see the rusty barbs from the wire sticking into my feet, but I didn't feel anything.

I sat on the wall, my good blanket safely out of the way, and I watched the guard go from sleeper to sleeper. These were all men who were trying to get one more moment of sleep before they had to face the day.

Not like me. I always liked to face the day. That's why I was up and high and out of the way. That's why they were still on the ground, eyes squished shut, being hit across the back by the guard's long stick.

When he had cleared them all out, he looked around. His chest was heaving. His face was pinched with the pain in his head.

‘Are you sure you didn't miss anyone?' I called out. And then I laughed because, as I said, I liked to start each day with a bit of fun.

Men don't like it when little girls laugh at them. He came at me, waving his stick and yelling in some dialect I didn't know. But that didn't matter. I knew what he was saying.

He was saying, ‘Why are you giving me a hard time on this morning that is already so hard? A filthy street girl like you, daring to make fun of a hard-working man like me? Is this what I left my village for? The more you laugh, the more I will beat you. Then we'll see who's laughing.'

He was so mad that he couldn't concentrate on beating me properly, and his stick flopped about, barely touching me. When it did reach me, it hit my foot, and I didn't feel it anyway! That just made me laugh harder.

BOOK: The Best Day of My Life
5.98Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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