But no roofs of gold.
No date or mango or orange trees.
And no movie stars.
Only rows of sleeping bodies. Side by side by side are men, women, and children in rags, asleep on the ground.
I try to count them,
get to two hundred
and give up
when I see two hundred more beyond them.
Uncle Husband says to stay close as we get off the train. Outside, the air is warm and heavy, thick with the smoke of a hundred cooking fires. The sky is so choked with dust that the light from the electric suns on poles disappears in the haze. All around us, people shuffle along, heads down, eyes empty, as the dust churns at their feet.
I am afraid of this city where the lying-down people look like the dead. And the standing-up ones, like the walking dead.
It is hard to walk in my new shoes, harder still to push through streets jammed with scrawny rickshaw men hauling plump passengers, naked children pawing through rubbish heaps, stray dogs nosing through gutters filled with human waste.
At one street corner, two boys are begging for coins. One has a leg that ends in a stump where his knee should be. He cups his hand and brings it to his mouth as if he is eating invisible food.
The other has a music-making machine. He wears one glove and does a dance that makes it look as if he’s walking even though he’s not going anywhere.
The people drop their coins in the dancing boy’s cup, avoiding the hungry eyes of the other one.
A man in baggy trousers twists the tail of his water buffalo to make him go faster. Uncle Husband presses his fist into my back to make me go faster.
Finally, we turn down an alley and arrive in front of a metal gate held fast with a heavy chain. Uncle takes a key from his vest, opens the lock, and hurries me inside.
“Will Auntie be here?” I say.
“Who?” He is distracted, locking the chain behind us.
“Auntie Bimla,” I say. “Will she be here?”
“Later,” he says. “Shell be here later.”
Beyond the gate, a man lies sleeping in front of a door. Uncle nudges him with the toe of his boot. The man rises, lets us in, then locks the door behind us.
This place is dark as a cave, and it smells of liquor and incense.
As my eyes adjust, I see a dozen sleeping girls, some in the corners, some on rope cots.
“What kind of place is this?” I ask uncle.
“Happiness House,” he says. ‘Auntie Mumtaz will explain it all to you.”
In the weak morning light, I see that the girls are wearing dresses of every color. They have heavy silver bangles on their wrists and ankles, and earrings of gold and jewels. Their eyes are painted with black crayon, and their lips are drawn on like red chilis.
At home, these girls would be up at dawn to do their chores, not sleeping in their festival clothes until the midday meal.
I wonder if perhaps this Happiness House is where the movie stars live.
A figure rises from the corner and steps toward us. She has the reed-thin body of a girl and the hollow cheeks of an old woman. She is, under the folds of her yellow dress, frail as a baby bird.
Uncle speaks with her in brisk city language, and the aging bird girl disappears behind a curtain.
Moments later the cloth is drawn back. Inside a darkened chamber, a fat woman in a purple sari lounges on a cot. She has folds of flesh like roti dough at her waist, and a face as plump as an overripe mango.
She snaps her fingers and the bird girl flinches. Even Uncle Husband seems to draw back. He pushes me toward the fat mango woman, so close that I can see the bloom of hair on her upper lip.
I stand upright, so she can see what a strong worker I am.
She surveys me head to toe, then spits.
“How much?” she says to Uncle Husband.
“Fifteen thousand,”
he says.
The woman laughs. “For this one? She is thin as yesterday’s tea.”
They bargain back and forth, sometimes in my language, sometimes in another tongue. Uncle goes high, the woman goes low.
Eventually Uncle shrugs and gives up. The woman takes a record book out from inside the folds of her dress. She writes down the number 10,000.
The woman snaps her fingers, and the bird girl rises and
takes me by the arm.
I look to Uncle Husband.
“Go on,” he says impatiently. “She will find you a bed.”
I am afraid to leave Uncle Husband, who protected me from the bad border men and bought me a roti, and who is the only person I know in this strange dead city. But I obey, pulling my bundle to my chest and following the girl down a hallway.
She takes me upstairs to a tiny room, unlocks the door, and gestures for me to enter.
“My Auntie Bimla is coming for me,” I tell her.
“When she comes to the door, will you tell her I am here?”
I cannot tell if the girl understands. She doesn’t answer. She simply closes the door.
I don’t know why I am in this strange house or where Auntie Bimla is. It seems as though this Auntie Mumtaz is my new mistress. She is a strict one, to be sure, but I will prove myself to her. And then my mother will have a new dress, shoes for the cold season, even a new shawl made of the finest yarn. My little brother will have fruit and curds twice a day and a jacket of yak fur. Even my stepfather can get new spectacles and a vest, I suppose. And our roof, our new tin roof, will be the shiniest one on the mountainside.
This is what I am thinking as I hear the girl lock the door behind her.
There are posters of gods and movie stars on the walls.
An electric sun hanging from the middle of the ceiling.
A rope bed.
A palm frond machine that stirs the air.
And iron bars on the windows.
A corner of the room is curtained off with a length of cloth from an old sari.
On the floor, a plastic bucket sits next to a hole in the floor. I can tell from the stink that this is the privy.
I sit on the bed and try to picture Tali’s little pink nose. The mists dancing around the swallow-tailed peak. The tawny grain fields. Ama’s crow-black hair. Krishna’s sleepy cat eyes.
But my thoughts spin like the palm frond machine.
I think of the aging bird girl and wonder why she is so skinny if she eats sweet cakes and dates and oranges and mangoes every day.
I think of the woman with the rolls of roti dough at her waist and wonder why she lives in this darkened cave building if she is so rich. And if she will teach me city words when I am finished with my chores.
But finally my eyes grow heavy and I lie down on the bed. And after four days of traveling, I fall asleep.
I awake for a moment, unsure of where I am.
I yawn and wait for the scent of hearth smoke and baking
bread.
And what greets my nose is the stench of the privy hole next
to my bed.
I pray for a mountain breeze, brisk with the promise of snow,
and instead I see the palm frond machine lazily churning the
same sultry city air.
I listen for the clucking of the hens.
What I hear are the fighting voices of a man and woman in
the room next to mine.
So far, this city is not what I had hoped.
Perhaps if I close my eyes and fall asleep again, I can at least dream of home.
I awake when two girls come and unlock the door. One is pretty, with teardrop eyes and deep brown skin, like the hide of a nut. The other has a crooked face. Her right cheek is sunken, and the corner of her mouth is tugged down in a permanent half frown.
They take me to a room where the other girls have gathered.
The aging bird girl is there, as well as others.
Young ones dressed to look old, and old ones dressed tolook young.
A naked baby sleeps on a blanket on the floor,
and a little girl in pigtails kneels at her mother’s feet as she
checks her scalp for lice.
There is no chatter or laughter like there is when the village women gather.
Instead they are all entranced by a black box with a large glass window in front.
Inside the box, a tiny woman is singing. She is wearing gold pants, and her hair is blowing in the wind.
The half-frowning girl pushes a button and the woman is gone.
A man sits at a table reading from a paper.
She pushes the button again and again,
and the picture inside the box changes again and again. There is a woman scrubbing a pot, shaking her head. Then there is a man hitting a ball with a paddle. Then a schoolgirl drinking Coca-Cola. Then back to the woman in the gold pants.
A man with slicked-back hair whispers in the woman’s ear. She puts a finger to his lips, then dances to the corner of the box and disappears.
I put my hand to my mouth and wait to see what will happen next.
The girl with the nut-brown skin leans toward me.
“It’s a television,” she says in my language. “TV.”
I have heard about television. My stepfather says his brother received one as a dowry when his son married a wealthy girl.
There are no golden roofs here, but perhaps this city is a grand one after all—if every house has a TV.
The fat woman in the purple sari walks into the room. The girl with the crooked face jumps up and turns off the TV The dark-skinned girl sits and waits, while the others saunter away.
The fat woman asks angry questions in the city language. “Yes, Mumtaz,” says the dark-skinned girl. “No, Mumtaz,” says the frowning girl.
This Mumtaz pinches the skin above my elbow and twists it until my eyes sting.
I don’t move. I don’t say a word. Even when she lets go and shoves me toward the other girls.
Then Mumtaz is gone. And the dark-skinned girl is washing my face, the half-frowning one brushing my hair.
They do not speak, and I feel shy around these bold city girls, as they do for me what only my ama has done before.
“What are you doing?” I say.
The dark-skinned girl starts to answer, but the frowning one tells her to shush, and yanks the brush through my hair. She opens a tin box and removes a small bottle of red liquid. Then she takes my hand and paints the liquid on my nails, while the other girl uses a black crayon and draws on my eyelids.
What is happening?” I say.
They don’t answer.
The dark girl, the one who explained to me about the TV, says “Shhh.” Then, when the frowning girl turns away, she whispers in my language, “You’ll know soon enough.”
I see my face reflected in a silver glass on the wall. Another Lakshmi looks back at me. She has black-rimmed tiger eyes, a mouth red as a pomegranate, and flowing hair like the tiny gold-pants woman in the TV.
She is fancy, like Auntie Bimla, like a movie star, like these
other city girls.
I smile at this new Lakshmi. And she smiles back. Uncertainly.
Mumtaz studies me.
“Are you ready to go to work?” she says in my language.
I nod and say yes, then nod again, although I do not understand how these city people do their chores in such fine clothes and uncomfortable shoes.
I follow Mumtaz down a hallway lined with tiny rooms. We pass by girls sitting cross-legged on the floor. Girls drawing on tiger eyes. Girls spraying themselves with flower water. Some of them stare at me. Some take no notice.
We go up some stairs, down another hallway, then into a room where an old man is lying on a bed. His skin is yellow and he has tufts of hair poking out from his ears. Mumtaz speaks kindly to him and I wonder if he is sick.
Across the hall, in another room, where a red cloth is hung across the doorway, I hear the sound of grunting. It is a strange, animal sound that makes me shudder.
Mumtaz points to me and says something to the old man. He licks his palm and smoothes down his hair. They do not seem to notice the grunting.
Then it stops. The red cloth is pulled back. And a man stands in the hallway zipping his pants.
I look down at my red-painted nails and my new shoes. Something is not right here. I don’t know what is going on, but it is not right, not right at all.
Mumtaz pats the edge of the bed and tells me to come closer. The old man makes a clucking sound.
“Don’t be afraid,” she says. “Come here, now.”
I don’t move.
Her voice turns hard. “Get over here, you ignorant girl,” she says.
Still, I do not move.
Then Mumtaz flies at me. She grabs me by the hair and drags me across the room. She flings me onto the bed next to the old man. And then he is on top of me, holding me down with the strength of ten men. He kisses me with lips that are slack and wet and taste of onions. His teeth dig into my lower lip.
Underneath the weight of him, I cannot see or move or breathe. He fumbles with his pants, forces my legs apart, and I can feel him pushing himself between my thighs. I gasp for air and kick and squirm. He thrusts his tongue in my mouth. And I bite down with all my might.
He cries out “Aghh!” and I am running. Running down the hall, past the other girls, losing my fancy city shoes along the way, until I am back in the room where I started, pulling my old clothes out of my bundle.
I’m wiping the makeup off my face when the dark-skinned
girl comes in.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she says.
“I’m going home.”
Her tear-shaped eyes grow dark.
“There is a mistake,” I tell her. “I’m here to work as a maid for a rich lady.”
“Is that what you were told?”
Then Mumtaz arrives at the door, huffing, her mango face pink with anger.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she says.
“Leaving,” I say. “I’m going home.”
Mumtaz laughs. “Home?” she says. “And how would you get there?”
I don’t know.
“Do you know the way home?” she says.
“Do you have money for the train?
Do you speak the language here?