We’d always looked out for each other, I said. I told her how you’d earned money with your beadwork, how well you could work with your hands, how most of our teachers and even Amma thought you couldn’t do much of anything.
At that, she frowned. “Too often, we expect too little,” she said.
“Rukku was more careful about what she ate than we were. She never waded through trash like we did,” I said. “It’s not fair she fell ill.”
“Life isn’t fair.” Celina Aunty sighed. “There are too many children like you without a home. And children shouldn’t have to work. I’m just glad I can help you a little now. Thank you for trusting me, Viji.”
If only I’d trusted Celina Aunty sooner, you and Muthu might have been playing in the sunshine, celebrating the end of the rainy season, instead of lying on hospital beds.
* * *
• • •
That night, Celina Aunty asked if I wanted to call anyone on the phone or write anyone a letter.
I wrote to Amma, but I didn’t tell Celina Aunty whom I was writing to.
I let Amma know we were in the city with good friends. I asked her if she was all right, said I would earn and send her money.
I didn’t tell her how sick you were.
I didn’t want to believe it.
36
GONE
I ate and slept, but hardly spoke to the other girls in my room or to the boys who slept in another part of the house.
After breakfast, Celina Aunty drove me from the house where she lived, along with two teachers and all the children, to the hospital.
There, I held your hand and told you our story, although you slept the whole time.
Muthu was delirious, raving in his sleep.
The doctor confirmed you both had dengue fever. Except you had developed pneumonia, too. Muthu hadn’t, so his condition was less complicated.
* * *
• • •
A night or two later, Dr. Sumitra proclaimed that Muthu was “out of danger,” and he was sent to another part of the hospital.
When I saw him—scrubbed clean by a nurse, with his hair cut short and washed and brushed—I could hardly believe it was Muthu. I realized I must have looked more presentable, too, because Celina Aunty had given me clothes, and I’d bathed and combed my hair. But Muthu didn’t comment on my appearance.
He just asked, “How’s Rukku?”
“Not well enough,” I said.
He slipped his fingers through mine. They felt bony as a skeleton’s.
“Will you tell me the story, Akka?” he asked. “The fairy tale you used to tell on the bridge?”
I tried a few times but kept choking up, unable to get beyond the first sentences.
“Never mind.” Muthu squeezed my hand tight.
* * *
• • •
That afternoon, a surprise was waiting for me.
Arul.
“I couldn’t stand being away,” Arul said. “I’d rather be locked in with all of you than alone and free.”
His words felt like a warm ray of sunshine slipping in through a rain-soaked sky.
Arul had brought with him the new doll I’d bought you. The one you’d been too sick to play with.
When we visited you that night, I took the doll with us, hoping your eyes would light up when you saw her.
But by the time we stood by your bed, your own body was as stiff as a wooden doll’s and it was too late.
* * *
• • •
Celina Aunty asked many questions. Hadn’t I written a letter to someone? Were our parents alive? Shouldn’t she try to contact them?
No, I said. Definitely not.
What should she do with your body?
I didn’t reply.
Burned or buried, what was the difference? You were gone.
Arul answered for me. He said you were Christian, so we should bury you. And I thought of you lighting candles and didn’t say no.
37
STONES
Christmas came about a month after your funeral. The rains had stopped by then.
In the hall of the home, Celina Aunty set up a little crèche, a set of dolls in a stable: baby Yesu, Mary, Joseph, three kings, a drummer boy, and lots of animals. Outside the front door, she hung a paper star with a twinkling light inside. You’d have loved all of this—as well as the strings of lights she wound around the crèche and the branch she stuck in a pot and called a Christmas tree.
She gave all of us presents. The little kids who live at the home laughed and gave me friendly smiles, but it was hard for me to act like I was in good spirits.
Arul and Muthu got fancy kurtas, which they changed into right away. I noticed they had both put on a bit of weight. But though Muthu’s body looked less frail than before, his eyes hadn’t regained their twinkle. And he wasn’t the chatterbox you knew either. He was unusually quiet around me, like he knew I couldn’t stand it if he started making jokes.
“You look smart in your new clothes,” I managed to say.
“What did you get, Akka?” Muthu asked.
I didn’t care what my gift was, but I opened the package, for his sake.
I got a notebook, handmade paper, and pencils made from recycled scraps.
“What’s this for?” Muthu asked.
“To write on,” Celina Aunty said.
“I have no one to write to and nothing to say,” I told her.
She didn’t respond. Not right away. But before we went to bed that night, Celina Aunty called me into the schoolroom and motioned me toward one of the empty desks.
“Sit,” she ordered. “Write.”
“Write?” I said. “Why?”
“Because you’re not talking much to anyone, Viji, and that’s not healthy. Your thoughts are sitting inside you like a stone, and I think you should set them down on paper.”
I stared at the empty page before me and picked up the pencil, and she corrected my grip, and I stared at the page some more.
The paper seemed to stretch. Its emptiness grew, and mine grew, too. My fingers went limp, and the pencil rolled off onto the floor.
She picked up the pencil and put it in my hands again.
* * *
• • •
For months, I couldn’t write, Rukku. Celina Aunty would sit beside me, reading, keeping me silent company.
Arul and Muthu visited your grave in a nearby cemetery every week and laid flowers on it.
I didn’t join them.
But I did all the chores I was supposed to do at the home. In fact, I liked doing chores, not only because it made me feel like I was not living on charity, but also because it gave me a reason to do something when I felt like a rock was sitting on my chest, weighing me down so I couldn’t rise out of bed.
38
GOOD IS GOD
During the day, students of all ages sit together in the biggest room in the house, learning. Reading, writing, mathematics, history, geography, science. The teachers give us different things to do, and we work at our own pace.
Arul doesn’t join us, because he has no interest in schoolwork. Instead, he takes a bus every morning to work with a carpenter. Celina Aunty says this is an important path, too—getting special skills to become carpenters, tailors, gardeners, or to learn some other trade.
She says she wishes she had more space, so she could take in every homeless kid, but she can’t. She doesn’t have enough space for all of us to live here forever, so those who are older, like me and especially like Arul, who’s even a bit older, are allowed to stay for a bit, until we have a safe, sure place to move to.
Before our lessons each morning, we gather in the hall to pray. Most of the children here are Christian, like Celina Aunty, but some are Hindu, and two are Muslims.
The pra
yer assembly is unending. Celina Aunty starts off with Arul’s favorite prayer to “our father” and then there are prayers to Mary and Allah, and some Hindu chants that Amma used to say. When I hear those, I miss Amma.
It amazes me that there are so many different words to pray with, and so many people praying, but there is still so much misery and cruelty in the world.
* * *
• • •
This morning, during the prayer assembly, I yawned and yawned, and Muthu caught my eye and started yawning, too. Soon, I’d set the whole place yawning.
Priya Aunty, one of our other teachers, told me off. “You’re the oldest girl here,” she said. “If you don’t start showing respect, all the little ones are going to behave badly.”
“I don’t behave badly,” I said.
“Don’t talk back.” Her face flushed redder than a brick. Lips quivering with rage, she hauled me off to Celina Aunty’s office and ranted. Celina Aunty listened and didn’t let me say a word until after Priya Aunty stormed off into the classroom.
“Viji, I can imagine you feel guilty about your sister’s death, but you need to stop accusing yourself. You made the choices that seemed best. You did all you could.”
Those weren’t the words I’d expected from her.
“Religion can be a solace, Viji. If you have faith in a higher power, if you trust that each life has a purpose whether we see it or not, if you could only believe your sister has a soul that’s still alive—”
“You want to convert me? You can’t,” I told her. “Ask Arul. He’s been trying ever since we met.”
“I’m not trying and never will try to convert you, Viji. It’s just that when we suffer a loss like you have, we lose a sense of purpose. I lost hope when I lost my husband, and I found it again in God, but it’s not the only way. Maybe your way is to search inside yourself and rediscover purpose.”
My life felt pointless now that you were gone. She got that right, but I didn’t say so.
“You also need to respect Priya Aunty’s position,” she said quietly. “We can’t have children here being disrespectful to any religion.”
“I’m not mean about any one religion,” I said. “They’re all equally silly.”
An amused smile flickered across her face. “We can’t have you being disrespectful to all religions either.”
What about respecting my nonreligion? I thought.
As though I’d spoken those words, Celina Aunty said, “I think I understand you, Viji.”
She wrote two words on a piece of paper and turned it toward me so I could read them.
God and Good, side by side.
“Those two words, God and Good, are only one letter apart in the English language,” she said. “So maybe, when we pray in the morning, if you don’t want to think of God, you might try thinking about being Good. About doing Good. Yes?”
“Okay,” I said.
“I don’t mind if you have no faith in religion, Viji. Just as long as you have faith in the goodness within yourself.”
39
LOSING AND FINDING
Celina Aunty assigned me and Arul the job of doing the dishes together. For months, we didn’t talk much as we worked side by side in the kitchen. But one evening, Arul finally broke the silence.
He asked how I was doing, and when, as usual, I just said, “Fine,” he wouldn’t let me get away with it.
“No,” he said. “You’re not fine, Viji.”
I said nothing.
“Talk to me,” he said. “Let me help.”
“I don’t need your help,” I growled.
Arul sighed. “Sulking and being rude to people who care about you isn’t going to make life any easier.”
“Since when,” I said, “has life been easy?”
“Since now!” Arul let a dish clatter into the sink. “Some things are easier here than on the bridge—in spite of all that’s happened—and you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
“I don’t just sulk!” I shocked myself by shouting for the first time since your passing. “I do every chore I’m given. I clean. I sit in the classroom. I eat. I sleep.”
“You don’t look like you’ve been sleeping much.”
“That’s because Rukku is gone, Arul! She’s gone because of me. If I hadn’t forced her to leave home—”
“If she hadn’t come here with you, she’d never have enjoyed the good times we had, and we had so many good times, Viji.”
“I should never have run away.”
“What choice did you have? I’ve heard of parents who beat their kids to death. Who knows what your father might have done? You tried your best—”
“It’s my fault Rukku died.”
“Your fault you couldn’t see into the future? If you’re to blame, we are, too. If I’d believed you when you were scared the waste mart man would come after us, we might never have been forced to live in that mosquito-infested graveyard. If Muthu hadn’t scared you off from Celina Aunty, you might have come here sooner.”
He couldn’t comfort me. I banged the pan against the sink. “I want her back!”
“Stop it.” Arul yanked the pan out of my hands. “I miss her, too. So does Muthu.”
“She was not your sister! She was mine. Mine. Now I have no one.”
“You’re no more alone than Muthu and I are,” Arul yelled. “If you choose to drown in loneliness, go ahead, but don’t claim she wasn’t our sister. We’re not just friends, we’re family.”
The loudness of his tone shocked me.
“Start looking at what you haven’t lost,” Arul said. “Start giving thanks for what you do have.”
“Thanks?” An odd snort left my lips. “That’s all you ever do. If someone came to stab you, you’d probably thank them, too, wouldn’t you? But there’s nothing to be thankful about.”
“Yes there is,” he said, taking my soapy hands in his. “You’re here in this home with a chance to do something more with your life. You have Celina Aunty. You have me. You have Muthu. Most of all, you have yourself.”
“Myself?”
“Yes. And now that you’ve been angry and raised your voice again, you’ll feel a lot better—just wait and see.”
He was right.
When I left the kitchen that night, I found I actually wanted to write to you for the first time.
* * *
• • •
Easter came, and I finally agreed to visit your grave with Arul and Muthu. On your stone, instead of flowers, I laid down one of the chocolate Easter eggs Celina Aunty had given us.
“She’d have loved that,” Muthu said. “Sweet, gooey, and wrapped in green foil, her favorite color.”
“I’m sure she’d have loved the flowers you always leave for her, too,” I said.
As we left the cemetery where you’d been buried, Arul said Easter was about new beginnings. But some things will never change, Rukku.
You’ll never be back.
40
HOPE
“I’m going to visit a place I’d love for you to see,” Celina Aunty told me the next day. “So you’re excused from attending lessons.”
I shrugged like it didn’t matter one way or another, but I felt myself flush with pleasure. She’d chosen me to go somewhere with her, as a special treat.
She drove us to a white bungalow, three stories high, an oasis of calm in the midst of all the noise and bustle. Celina Aunty smiled as she parked the car. “This is a school for children like Rukku.”
“Children like Rukku?” Anger spurted out of me. “No one’s like Rukku!” I yelled. “No one!”
“Viji? I put that very badly.” Celina Aunty bit her lip. “There’s no one in the world like your sister. I didn’t mean those words to sound the way they did. I’m sorry.”
I screwed up my eyelids, tight
, so no tears would fall out.
“I have a sister, Viji. A sister with a disability.”
My eyes flew open.
“We never were as poor as the two of you, but we weren’t rich either. She came to this school. It’s a school for young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.”
For a while I said nothing, but her words were a key, opening my locked heart. “Where’s your sister now, Celina Aunty?”
“She works at a print shop. She used to have her own little place at the other end of the city, but recently she got married and moved farther away. We meet as often as we can.”
“Will you take me to see your sister sometime?”
“Sure. Now, are you ready to go in, Viji?”
“Yes. And I’m sorry for yelling.”
* * *
• • •
Everyone in the building greeted us with smiles and vanakkams. Everyone seemed to know—and like—Celina Aunty.
We were shown into an office. Sitting behind a desk, beneath a picture of the Hindu God Ganesha, was a wiry young woman. She sprang up and pressed her palms together in greeting.
“Viji, this is the director,” Celina Aunty said. “Dr. Dhanam.”
“Call me Dhanam Aunty, Viji. Come. Let me show you around.”
We followed Dhanam Aunty into a sunny, high-ceilinged room. We stayed by the door, peeking in.
A boy around my age was sprawled across the floor, drawing on a large sheet of paper. A little girl of maybe seven or eight was playing with colored blocks. In the center of the room, a few children of all ages sat on straw mats on the floor listening to a silver-haired teacher who sat cross-legged, reading aloud from a picture book. Some of the children looked up at us curiously.
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