by Tikiri
The man with the machine gun threw a plastic sheet over the girl and joined them. Vlad offered a cigarette to him and a lighter. Even seeing Zero kick Win hadn’t prepared me for this. That had been horrifying, but I remembered how I’d thought these were small-minded, stupid criminals. Who am I kidding? These were ruthless men. Men? Are they even human?
My shock waned, and in its place came a surging rush of rage. I remembered my grandma telling us that when all else fails, we need to put our trust in the gods. She should have known because she worshiped them all—from the christian gods, the hindu gods, the buddhist gods, the jewish gods, and even the islamic one, though she wasn’t allowed in the mosques.
So where did all these good gods and prophets go to hide today? I wondered. Where were those magnificent deities I’d seen in the temples of India, the shrines of Tanzania and the churches of Canada? Where were these omnipresent, omnipotent creators who are quoted, trusted, worshiped, and on whom money is showered by the millions? Why didn’t a single one of them come down from their precious heavens to stop this atrocity on a vulnerable child?
The world’s mad, I concluded. Yes, the world’s infuriatingly, infinitely mad, madder than ten thousand dogs with rabies.
Something stirred in me. Something raging, uncontrollable, insuppressible. The image of the terrifying warrior Hindu goddess, Kali, sprang to mind. That purple-skinned woman with a necklace of dead men’s heads, a sickle covered in blood in one hand and her ghastly red tongue hanging out. Back in Goa, Grandma had a picture of her taped over her mattress to ward off evil spirits. What a useless goddess, I thought. All talk but no action. We humans were here alone, to take care of our own messes. The quicker we realized it, the better.
I knew then that before my stay was over on this continent, those men would pay for their sins.
The two khaki-clad packers were now walking toward our van.
“Stay down.” I heard Tetyana say softly.
I lowered my head, but not before I saw her tuck her mobile phone back into her T-shirt. She did it so quickly, I almost missed it. I wanted to ask, but now was not the time. The men had come closer and I felt the tension rise in everyone next to me, even Tetyana.
The men got to work, without bothering to look our way. We could have been empty cardboard boxes for all they cared. And maybe that was all we were worth.
I now saw why Tetyana had rearranged the inside of the van. She had known this was going to happen. She’d created an area large enough for us to sit on the floor with our feet pointing forward. The bags were not a barricade as much as a demarcating line between us and the boxes being packed. The men started piling the boxes just behind the bags.
One by one, the boxes filled the van all the way to the top. They were building a wall, right in front of our eyes, locking us in. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but the air seemed to get thinner. I felt my chest constrict and I had to force myself to breathe. I felt Luc’s hands squeezing mine.
“It’s okay,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s only to hide us.”
“From who?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
The doors were slammed shut, leaving us in complete darkness. The van wobbled as people jumped into the front seats. The engine started with a roar and we were on our way.
Chapter Twenty
“She died for all of us,” Tetyana said, quietly.
It wasn’t the voice of the cocky, self-assured woman I’d met a few hours ago. Something had changed in her. In everyone. We were all broken now.
“I can’t believe that happened,” I said, shaking my head. My stomach was whirling like a washing machine, but my mind had completely shut down. “I just can’t believe it. I can’t.”
I heard Katy whimper in assent. I guessed she couldn’t even get any words out.
“We knew this was coming,” Luc said, staring at the floor. “We just pretended it wasn’t. We pretended we were gonna make good money and get out.”
“He’s going to pay for that,” Tetyana said, her eyes burning.
We sat in silence after that, each lost in our own nightmares.
The image of the girl’s pretty yellow blouse splattered in blood was etched with fire on my mind. I couldn’t get it out. The blouse was the least offensive thing I’d seen at the warehouse, but it was the only aspect my weakened mind could bear to remember without going insane. I vacillated between horror and guilt. Horror and guilt.
She had not been much older than Win. She’d probably been running away from something bad, seeking something good, like we all were. I could have been her. She could have been me. She could have been any one of us.
“Why didn’t we do something?” I cried out, and punched the floor next to me. I heard the fury boiling in my own voice. I wanted to explode and hurt every one of those dastardly men. How, I didn’t know, just that I couldn’t sit quietly. “How could we let that happen right in front of us?”
No one bothered to shush me now. There was a long pause, while I tried to choke back the sobs threatening to surge out.
“You think we can fight those guns?” Tetyana said finally.
I gave her a defiant look. I’d rather have died in a hail of bullets than live with that forever branded into my brain. Knowing I just sat and watched and did nothing was going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
“Why do you think they have a man with a machine gun in there?” Luc asked in a soft voice.
“Does it even matter?” I snapped.
“They wanted to threaten us,” Katy wailed. “To—”
“It’s a very efficient piece of equipment to mow down a rebellion from the vans,” Tetyana said crisply. “Gets the job done in five seconds or less. A good pressure washer can clean it all up afterward.”
I felt my blood chill.
“Do you really think they’d have killed all of us like that?” asked Katy, looking at Tetyana in horror.
“Yes,” Luc said.
“In a heartbeat,” Tetyana said.
“But the police?” I stammered. “You can’t hide machine gun fire, can you? They’d hear it. And rescue us, wouldn’t they? I mean, if we’re still alive, that is….” My voice trailed off.
Tetyana laughed her coarse laughter. “Do you know how many graves there are in Europe with forgotten foreign girls, hun?”
I shook my head. Part of me didn’t want to know.
“Sometimes, they find ten bodies in one spot. One time they found thirty. Do you think anyone cares?” Tetyana said. “They wash the blood off, pay the cops and it’s back to business. No politician wants evidence of this happening under their watch, so they cover it up.”
“Not in Europe,” I said, not wanting to believe any of this.
“Believe it,” Tetyana said, looking at me pointedly, her green eyes glowing in the dark. “You better believe it!”
“It’s true,” said a small voice, “but it’s worse in my country.”
We all looked over at Win, curled up in the corner. She’d been following the conversation without a word. She looked away now, when she saw us all turn her way.
Tetyana put her hand on her chin, like she was contemplating something. “You know,” she said finally, in a thoughtful voice. “I thought I had agreement with those bastards.”
Agreement? Is she profiting from all this?
“Tell me,” I said, sitting up and looking at her. “Why are you here in the back of the van and not up front with them?”
I felt Luc give a start next to me. Tetyana was silent for a second. “Because I’m not one of them.”
“But,” I said, pointing at her, “you seem to know a lot.”
She took her time answering. “I do what I have to do.” It sounded like there was more to be said, but she stopped herself.
“Why did you put me to sleep when we left?” I said. I felt my voice rise. “Why did you do that?”
“To keep you alive,” she said. Then, she looked away and refused to say another word
. And that was the end of that conversation.
The van rocked us back and forth until one by one, we all dozed off. We’d been going through stop-and-go traffic for such a long time, I eventually got used to it, slipping in and out of consciousness, half-asleep, half-awake.
Next to me, Luc had fallen completely asleep, eyes closed, breathing deeply. I accidentally elbowed him but he didn’t budge. In the far corner, Katy and Win were dozing off, heads close together. I looked at Tetyana next to me; her eyes were half-closed like she was meditating, but her hands on her lap were clenching and unclenching. Clenching and unclenching. She was still awake.
“Tetyana,” I said softly.
She opened her eyes. Even through the darkness, I could see the weariness on her face. She looked decades older than when I first saw her at South Hill Square, and she’d looked terrible then. How old is she? Twenty? Twenty-two? She couldn’t be more than a couple of years older than any of us, could she?
“Are we going to be okay?”
She half nodded.
I looked down at the midnight-black robe we were now using as a makeshift blanket. “What happened to Bibi?”
Tetyana sighed before replying, like it was too laborious an answer to give. “She probably ran away and is hiding somewhere. Out in the streets and away from the cops.”
Bibi was supposed to be at the mosque when I fell through that window into the London house, which probably meant I’d been lucky to get hold of one of her spare robes. I now imagined her small figure shuffling through darkened alleyways, ducking into hidden nooks, peeking out fearfully through her eye slits, as blue police lights flashed across the building.
“She must be really scared right now,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Tetyana said, shaking her head. “She’s probably happy now.”
“Happy? How?”
“Because she’s far away from that madman.”
Does she mean Zero?
“Are they related?” I asked.
Tetyana didn’t say anything. I remembered when Bibi had shown me her face. It hadn’t been a threat, but a warning. I remembered those fierce black eyes, that horrible, disfiguring scar on her cheek, that scar that gave me nightmares.
“Did Zero—” I swallowed. “Did he do that to her face?”
“You ask so many questions.” Tetyana sighed.
I pointed at the robe on my lap. “I’m Bibi now, so I need to know these things.”
“Good point,” Tetyana said in a business-like manner. Then, she sat silent for five maddening minutes. I waited impatiently, not wanting to annoy her further. The last thing I needed was for her to stop opening up to me. I was nodding off when she began to speak again.
“It happened when they were back home.”
I sat up. “Where?”
“Pakistan.”
“Oh?”
“She fell in love with the neighbor’s son. They were fifteen or something, but she was supposed to be married off to a fifty year old man as wife number four.”
“A fourth wife?”
“It’s their tradition. The fourth wife is always a young girl, sometimes barely ten or twelve if she’s lucky. Somehow Bibi had held off.”
“I just can’t believe it.”
“So Bibi ran off with her boyfriend,” Tetyana continued as if not hearing me. “But they didn’t get too far. The village chief ordered Zero, he’s the oldest brother, to find them. They found them near the Indian border and brought them back to the village.” She paused. “They whipped the boy till he bled to death, she said.”
“Oh my god.”
“Something about family honor, she said.”
I felt cold goose bumps come all over me. Back in Goa, I’d heard about honor killings, read about it in the newspapers, but to know of someone who’d gone through that experience was chilling.
“Are you serious?” I said. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe it, I didn’t want to believe it.
“That’s what honor’s all about in some places,” Tetyana replied. “They torture and kill any woman who disobeys, and hey, presto!” She snapped her fingers. “Family honor’s restored. Just like that.”
“That’s twisted.” I stopped myself. Like I hadn’t seen enough nonsensical stuff in my life, I thought.
I remembered how Aunty Shilpa had been married off to an older man who beat her mercilessly. When he died of AIDS, they considered her “Untouchable” because she was a widow, and infected with HIV on top of that, a disease that took her life in the end. I remembered how my own grandma had arranged for me to be married off to that alcoholic pervert when I was only fifteen. I remembered escaping to Canada, where I thought I was going to work for a year to pay off my debts to the immigration broker, only to discover he was the entry point for a human trafficking ring. A year after I fled, I learned how Grandma had forced Preeti to marry that vile man in my place. The world is twisted.
“Better believe it,” Tetyana was saying. “Happens every day, and Bibi’s family is not any different. The village chief made Bibi watch all this on her knees. She said her boyfriend cried like a dying animal with every lash. When they finished with him, the chief ordered Zero to throw hot oil on her face to punish her.”
Bibi’s scarred face flashed to my mind. I choked. There was nothing I could say. I didn’t want to hear anymore, but Tetyana wasn’t done.
“You know that old man she was supposed to be married off to? He raped her while her own brother, Zero, and his friends held her down. In the middle of town while all the men watched.”
“Barbaric,” I whispered.
“The chief wanted to whip her to death like her boyfriend too, but the imam of the village told him she was a slut now, because she lost her virginity in public, regardless of how she lost it, mind you. This meant she lost all her honor, so according to the imam, that was a fate worse than death. They let her live to punish her.”
“So inhuman,” I said, my voice faltering.
“Absolutely,” she snapped.
“Zero’s an animal. How could he—”
“I’m sure I’d go a little crazy if I had to do this to my sister too.”
I sat back, horrified. What do you do when your own family hates you that much and hurts you that badly? Then blames you for it? I pulled Bibi’s robe up to my chest. I half-wished she was here with us, so I could give her a hug.
“How-how do you know all this?”
“She told me.”
“Just like that?”
“I found a strange bottle of pills in the back of the kitchen cabinet one day and asked her. She grabbed it and hid it under her robe, so I knew something was wrong. When I asked her what was going on, she told me it was her poison. She wanted to kill herself.” She paused. “I don’t blame her.”
My stomach turned.
“She was scared because Zero had seen the pills before and told her she’d go straight to hell because their religion doesn’t allow her to kill herself. He said if he saw those pills again, he’d slit her throat himself.”
I clutched Bibi’s robe even closer to my chest. What a life she’s gone through. It took me a minute to get my tongue working again.
“So what happened?”
“I took the pills away and threw them down the toilet.” Tetyana went quiet for a few seconds. “I thought I could help her somehow, but maybe…” She stopped herself.
“Couldn’t she have run away?”
“I asked her. Even said I’d help, but she said Zero would have hunted her down with the help of his community, and punished her even worse.”
“How much worse can it get?”
Tetyana shrugged. “She felt trapped.”
I tried to let this sink in.
“You know what rape is?” Tetyana asked me.
I stayed quiet.
“It’s the most effective weapon to shut a human being up. It’s like bashing them with a hammer, again and again, until they submit, until they’d do anything you say.”
I stayed silent, too numb to reply.
“At the mosque in London, they made Bibi sit behind all the women because they said she was dirty. Men sit up front and the women always sit in the back, and dishonored girls like Bibi are relegated to the very back. They are the lowest of the lowest, I was told.”
That anyone could think of someone who’d been beaten and raped as “dirty” was not a totally foreign concept to me. I remembered when that vile alcoholic had tried to attack me. I’d fought back and escaped, but Grandma had asked me to never bring it up, then pretended it didn’t happen. Even Preeti, my dear, sweet cousin Preeti, had thought it blasphemous to talk about the incident, saying I’d only bring dishonor to myself and my family. It was that man who had tried to attack me, yet I was the one everyone had blamed.
Do they also blame someone for getting robed? I asked myself. Or for getting beaten up by thugs on the streets? It was then I realized it wasn’t the heinous act that mattered, but the victim. If you’re a girl, whatever happens to you, you’re the one to blame. I shook my head at the stupidity of this.
What happens to the people who do these terrible deeds, I wondered. Aren’t Zero and his gang the ones who are dirty? Despicably dirty? Why don’t they get sent to the very back? Or straight to prison where they rightly belong?
Tetyana closed her eyes and leaned back. “Bibi’s resourceful, that girl. The fact she survived all this means she’s going to be fine now. This will be the free-est she’s ever been her whole life. We should be happy for her.”
Chapter Twenty-one
“I need to pee.” Katy’s voice woke us all up.
She’d been unusually subdued, sleeping through so much of the trip I wondered if Tetyana had given her a double dose of whatever she’d given me as well.
“Are you okay, Katy?” I asked.
“Just need to pee,” her strained voice came from the other end of the van. “Really badly.”
“Hun, you have to hold,” Tetyana said. “Toilets and food will come soon.”
“How soon?” Katy asked.