The Best Day of My Life (6 page)

Then I saw in his face that his frustration was getting bigger than my enjoyment, and that's always my signal to find something else to do. A bit of fun could turn into a bit of meanness if you weren't careful, and that wasn't ever how I wanted to start my day.

I ripped my foot out of the barbed wire and hopped down from the wall.

The secret to jumping down from a high wall to the hard pavement was not to land on your feet. You could break an ankle that way. I had seen it happen. I had also seen people get hit by cars or scooters. Sometimes the driver would get out and apologise and take the person into his car. Sometimes the driver kept on going. If the person they hit couldn't afford a rickshaw to ride to the hospital, their ankle or whatever stayed broken. They walked lopsided from then on, dragging their useless foot behind them like a clot of buffalo dung stuck to their sandal.

So I always tried to roll my body to the side when I fell. The pavement was just as hard when you landed, but there was more of you to soak up the hurt. That spread it around. Then you just got to your feet, brushed yourself off and went about your business.

I jumped from the wall, rolling as I went, and I kept rolling when I hit the sidewalk.

I almost rolled into a fortune teller. His parrot leaped and squawked and tried to fly away. Its feathers were clipped, so it couldn't really go anywhere. Parrots were expensive, even for fortune tellers, who could make a lot of money. I had watched them. I had seen the rupees change hands. All the fortune teller had to do was sit and talk and people gave him money.

I decided that would be a good job for me one day, since I could both sit and talk.

I sat on my haunches and spoke softly to the bird until it was resting on its perch again. It looked like it couldn't wait for the next customer to come by.

‘You should be more careful,' the fortune teller told me.

‘You should have known I would jump from the wall and set yourself up farther away.'

‘How could I know that?'

‘You would know if you were a good fortune teller.'

‘That's not the way it works,' he said. ‘Let me tell you how it works. I need to know your date of birth, your astrological sign, the alignment of your planet among the heavens.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘I thought the bird just picked a card.'

Which set the fortune teller off on a long and cheerful explanation of how the bird worked with intuition and how he worked with science and how the two worked together to tell the most accurate fortunes in all of Kolkata. I didn't listen to most of it, but I enjoyed hearing him talk.

So, because he was enjoying himself, and because my hunger was still sleeping, I sat while he explained. Every now and then, when he seemed to be winding down, I tossed in a comment that would get him all excited again, and so we passed a pleasant hour.

‘Why don't you give me a demonstration,' I suggested. ‘Tell me how my life will go, and I'll come back and let you know if you were right.'

‘Do you have any money? You don't. This is how I earn my dal.'

‘If you're right, I'll tell everyone,' I said. ‘I'll tell the tourists down on Sudder Street. They will all come to you.'

The fortune teller twirled his long hair through his fingers and thought.

‘I'll tell you a short fortune,' he said. ‘Do you know your birthday?'

‘No.'

He sighed and squirmed. Then he did what I knew he would do all along. He brought the parrot down from its little perch. The parrot pecked among some fortune cards spread out on the blanket. It picked one up in its beak.

I reached for it, but the fortune teller beat me to it. He stared at the writing on the little card. He frowned, stared at me, then frowned again.

He started to make me nervous.

‘Does it say I will be a big Bollywood star?' I joked.

‘Excuse my bird. He is not yet awake,' he said. ‘The card says you will soon have many friends.'

‘You don't think I can have many friends?'

‘I don't think you have any friends,' he said. ‘You spent the night in the English cemetery. If you had friends, would they let you do that?'

He was looking a little too pleased with himself.

I couldn't think of anything to say. And I didn't like the way he was smirking.

When I feel mean I want to act mean.

I swooped down at the parrot and yelled a big ‘Kaaa!' close to its head. It almost jumped out of its feathers.

The fortune teller reached out to soothe his bird, and when he did, his cloak rose away from his body.

That's when I saw his feet.

He had no toes, and his feet were curled in on each other like claws.

He was one of those monsters.

I jumped up. And I ran. Hard.

I ran to make the panic fall away. I ran so fast that my feet did not feel the pavement. They did not feel the stones or the broken glass or the dog droppings or the cow dung.

They did not feel anything.

6

Talking with the Gods

I
ran as far as I could, leaving the monster behind me, until I couldn't run anymore.

I Kolkata had woken up.

I could run two steps, then I had to stop and wait as a bicycle loaded with coconuts crossed in front of me. I ran a few more steps, then had to stop again and go around men and boys from the auto-repair shops who had moved their repair work out into Lower Circular Road. I crawled along with the stream of people until I got past the car repairs and into the next block. I ran again, right into a rickshaw that had stopped to pick up passengers – two large men with formal suit vests over their salwar kameez.

‘Give some warning before you stop,' I said to the rickshaw puller as I moved past him.

‘I'll have the customers wave a big flag just for you,' he replied. He groaned as he got the rickshaw moving. His passengers were a lot fatter than he was.

I kept going.

The streets were full of people going to work. And with people already at work, pushing handcarts, pumping pedals on bicycles loaded down with big reed baskets and walking with huge bales of cotton on their heads.

My hunger had woken up just like the city. A cup of morning tea would be a good start. I knew a tea seller on Vivekananda Road who was sometimes friendly. It was a bit of a walk, but I always had time.

The day was warming up quickly. The Metropole Hotel blanket was getting heavy on my shoulders. It was easy to find a family of pavement dwellers who needed a good blanket. Behind a dumpster, next to the wall outside St. James' Church, a woman was trying to keep her toddlers close by. She was nursing a baby and only had one free arm to keep her other kids in line. I didn't see a man. He was probably off looking for work.

I folded the blanket into a tidy square and put it on the ground in front of the mother. She was almost too busy to notice. The children noticed, though. They reached out and patted the blanket with their tiny hands, then snatched their hands back, as if they weren't sure they should. They giggled, then patted it again.

I moved on.

A bicycle came by pulling a cart piled high with bales of rags. I felt like taking a ride so I hopped on the back. I rode in style all the way to Baithakkhana Bazaar before the bicycle man realized he was pulling more weight than he needed to.

‘Off! Off! Off!'

I jumped off, smiled and made the namaste. So he had to make the namaste back, and we parted on good terms.

I walked up a few more streets, through the tight markets under the highway flyover, then finally I hit Vivekananda Road.

The tea seller who was sometimes friendly had a stall just outside a cake shop. I liked seeing the little cakes and sweets, so pretty with their colors and decorations. They looked like flowers or treasures from a jewelry store. If I ever got the chance to taste one, I would feel like a queen.

The tea seller had just brewed a fresh pot of tea. The steam rose as he poured it from one pot to the other, mixing the milk and tea and sugar.

I could almost taste the hot tea going down my throat. It would give me a warm happy start to the day. I wouldn't feel so hungry with a bit of tea in me.

I stood right beside the tea stall, ready to ask for a blessing, when I hit the first bit of bad luck for the day.

The tea seller's older brother arrived in a rickshaw.

The brother owned the tea stall. He was always in a bad mood.

The brother saw me and started yelling at the tea seller.

‘Look how these urchins approach you! Totally without fear. No wonder I am not making enough money. You give away all my profits. You are a thief! Show me you are not a thief, or I will take this stall away from you. I don't care if you are my brother.'

The tea seller looked at me. I knew he was about to yell at me even though he didn't want to.

I shrugged a tiny shrug to let him know that it was okay, so he started to yell at me to get away and never come back. Then, in a way his brother couldn't see, he gave me a bit of a hand movement that told me, ‘Go and wait nearby. This bullock of a brother is leaving soon.'

So I backed away and went to sit in a nearby doorway. I watched the metal workers hammer and solder long pieces of metal into railings and bed frames and kept an eye on the older brother, who was waving his arms around and spewing out all sorts of angry words.

Finally the brother called over the rickshaw puller who had been waiting patiently (and who certainly wouldn't get paid for all the time he had wasted waiting). He got back into the seat and the rickshaw puller heaved the rickshaw into a run. They disappeared among the cars and carts.

I went back over to the tea seller's stall.

‘I can't give you any tea,' he said in a sad way, not mean. ‘I have to account for all the cups. The number of cups and the money in the box must balance. My brother will check.'

That seemed like a small problem.

The cups were small and made of clay. When someone was finished drinking, they threw their cup to the ground. Someone else had the job of going through the streets and collecting the broken cups so they could be taken back to the potter. The potter turned them back into clay, then back into cups again. There were dozens of broken cups lying around on the ground.

I found a cup that was not broken, picked it up out of the gutter and presented it to the tea seller.

‘Your brother does not measure tea, does he?'

‘That cup is dirty.'

It was. I rubbed it with the sleeve of my kurta, the same one given to me when I first got to the city. The kurta was dirty, too.

‘Kolkata dirt,' I said, holding the cup out again. ‘It's on me and in me.'

He gave up. A stream of hot tea flowed from the kettle into the cup in my hand.

‘Drink it quickly,' he said. ‘My brother could come back.'

The tea was too hot, so I took it away and sat among the roots of a banyan tree. The tree had come up through the sidewalk, pushing the slabs of cement to the side as it grew.

I sipped my tea next to the clay statues of two gods that had been left there during the Durga-puja. The statues were crumbling a bit. The fingers on one had turned to dust, and part of the nose on the other had disappeared. Their painted-on clothes had once been bright blue and yellow, but the colors were now hidden under a layer of grime.

Still, the gods were smiling and friendly looking. I sipped my tea, held the cup up to their lips in case they were thirsty and asked them if they had enjoyed the festival.

They didn't say anything, but they kept smiling. I smiled with them, and we sat in the sun and enjoyed our tea.

For a few short moments, I didn't feel lonely.

For a few short moments, I almost had friends.

7

The River

I
could make things happen.

Just by staring and concentrating hard, I could sometimes make things and people do what I wanted.

It was not a gift I used very often. Only when I needed to.

After I left the tea seller, I needed to.

I was hungry.

By the middle of the day, the full belly feeling of the tea had worn off. It felt like my luck was taking a holiday.

I went down to the river to try to get it back.

In Kolkata they call it the Hooghly. North of Kolkata it's called the Ganges. South of Kolkata it empties into the Bay of Bengal.

I know this because I saw it on a map in a bookstore before the owner threw me out.

I went down to the river and went into the water. People threw coins into the river to be blessed by Mother Ganges. My plan was to pick up some of those coins and use them to buy something to eat.

I had done it many times. Many.

But today I had no luck. I kept diving and feeling around in the mud. I kept coming up with nothing.

I climbed up on an old cement pier to take a rest. When I don't eat for a long time, I can't move as fast or for as long. I get tired faster.

While I was sitting there, I decided to try to use my powers on a little girl who was also sitting on the pier a short distance from me.

She had been lucky. She had a little pile of coins beside her, and she was playing with them, clinking them together over and over and driving me quite crazy.

‘Dirvala, come and eat!' A woman waved to the girl from the steps.

‘In a minute,' the little girl answered.

‘Not in a minute. Come now.'

The little girl turned her head, pretending not to hear.

The woman went back to arranging food on a cloth. There were a few other people around helping – an older woman, a man, a few more children. They all looked happy and relaxed.

The bathing ghat was busy. The sun was shining and the day was a little warmer than recent days had been. The broad stone steps down into the water were full of people having picnics, doing yoga or soaping themselves before diving into the water. Others scooped up mud from the river bed, smeared it on their bodies and let it dry in the sun. A couple getting married were performing a ceremony on shore. People were saying prayers and giving offerings of fruit, flowers and incense. A lot of children were diving for coins.