Flash House

by Aimee E. Liu

  “They need limits. They like them. This way they know exactly where they stand. Simon, stop that.”

  A box radio sat on a table in the common room. Simon was twirling the dial. He turned the volume down so low that Mem no longer heard it, but he did not turn it off. The girls covered their mouths and whispered to one another, looking from Simon to me.

  Not one of these girls had been at Safe Haven when I was last here. They did not act as those girls had, either. They did not call out or clutch at Lawrence. They did not tease him with their eyes. Without their collyrium and rouge and bright, clinging saris, they did not look like prostitutes. Instead they resembled schoolgirls, which in a way they had become.

  A row of typewriters lined one wall of the common room, a bank of sewing machines the other. A large chalkboard stood in one corner, and several bookcases held not just the books that had been sitting in boxes eight months earlier but also colored files representing each girl’s work. Their crayon drawings of birds and mountains and winding rivers decorated the walls. It was very different from the sprawling campus of the All-Nations School, and yet it was not so different from the school Bharati had described to me long ago.

  Suddenly I understood why Lawrence objected to my coming here. I understood why these girls all stared, and I wished that I might disappear—or else change from my Western skirt and blouse into one of their salwar kameez and take my place in their line.

  But Mem was calling us outside for the ceremony. Chairs had been placed on the veranda. The two teachers and the husband-and-wife cook-and-ayah were waiting. Simon and Lawrence and I were seated in front with Vijay, who had recently completed his examinations and now served as the rescue home’s advocate and general translator. The rest of the girls sat behind us except for the four honorees who stood before Mem at the podium.

  These four ranged in age from fourteen to sixteen. Two had completed grammar school before going into the red-light district. One had been taught to read Hindi by her parents and the fourth by a babu who had taken a liking to her in the brothel. Here at the rescue home they had an advantage over their illiterate sisters much like the advantage my father had given me. And now Mem was to reward them.

  “You should be very proud,” she started off. “You have done well. You have learned to read. Reading will allow you to educate yourselves and eventually to take good jobs. I would like you to start by working with the other girls here at Salamat Jannat. You will be teachers’ helpers. In the evenings you are to read to the other girls, assist them with their lessons. And the teachers will give you special study assignments to improve your skills even more.”

  The girls stood in a row, like a quartet of ruffled finches. Their eyes were dark and round, lips pinched. Two clasped their hands. The other two hugged their elbows.

  Vijay caught Mem’s eye and rubbed his fingertips together.

  “Of course, you’ll be paid for your work!” Mem took from the podium four small red purses, which she distributed among the girls. “Three rupees per day to begin, more depending on the effort you make. But this is just the beginning. There are many positions in shops and offices around Delhi for which you may qualify. You must look for notices each day in the newspaper. If you find an appropriate position, you will be allowed to pursue it.” She turned to address all the inmates. “As I see it, we are partners in a mission. That mission is to equip you with the skills and support each of you needs to achieve an independent life.”

  Bimla, the girl whose babu had taught her to read, shyly raised her hand. She had glistening hair, which hung in two pigtails over her shoulders. As she voiced her question in Hindi to Vijay she kept her eyes on Mem’s feet.

  “She wants to know if you will allow her to leave the home in order to find her boyfriend, as she has not been in contact with him since her arrest.”

  Mem sighed. “That is just what I’m talking about! No, you may not go out looking for boyfriends. You must not look to marriage as the answer to your problems.” She stopped. A muscle moved in her cheek. Then she turned again to the others. “As I’ve told you before, if I catch any of you flirting with men, either on or off the premises, you will be given a single warning. If it happens again, I will consider this grounds for dismissal.”

  “But, Mem—” Vijay tugged on his ear as if sending her a stage cue. Lawrence squinted at his fingernails.

  “No, I mean it. There are hundreds of girls who will gladly take their place if they don’t like my rules.”

  A murmur ran through those girls behind us, and the four up front stared straight ahead. India was a country where most girls were married off by age twelve, where widows were expected to throw themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and parents who could not afford dowry killed their daughters at birth. Only prostitutes remained unmarried. Was Mem lying, then, when she said they were prostitutes no longer?

  The girls’ fingers closed over their new red purses, confusion straining their faces. I shrank in my seat, trying not to look at them, but I was not to get away so easily.

  “I want you all to meet Kamla,” Mem said, crooking her finger for me to stand.

  Simon jabbed me in the ribs. He thought it was funny. I stumbled forward.

  “Kamla is an example for you all.” Mem placed a book in my hands. “Just a few months ago she could barely speak English. Now I would like you to listen as she reads this passage from the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.”

  As I stared at the page she had opened for me, the words seemed to swim. I heard Lawrence clear his throat, Simon shift his feet. All eyes were on me. I felt them like a hundred pinpricks.

  “‘Come out of thyself,’” I read finally.

  “‘Stand in the open.’” I swallowed.

  I had read aloud at school. I read aloud with Mem and Simon every night. This was the first time I felt my heart pounding through my chest, the first time my voice lodged in my throat.

  Mem’s hand squeezed my shoulder.

  “‘Within thy heart wilt thou hear the response of all the world.’”

  But the only response to my standing there in the open was dead silence.

  Then Mem stepped away from me. “Beautiful,” she said. “That was beautiful, Kamla. Thank you.”

  She began to clap. Lawrence and Vijay and the staff smiled stiffly. Then Simon clapped and whistled out the side of his mouth. Finally the others joined in.

  Mem told me I should be proud of myself. Why, then, did I feel so ashamed?

  I would never go back to Salamat Jannat. If I had to feign illness or run away, I would never see this place again.

  But the very next week Mem called me into her bedroom and sat me down at her dressing table. She removed my pink butterfly barrette and began to brush and braid my hair the way she used to during our trek. “Your performance the other day gave me a wonderful idea,” she said. “I’ve invited a lady named Mrs. Solomon to have tea with us. She’s going to write an article for the New Delhi Gazette.”

  I watched her in the mirror as she tugged at my head, squinting and frowning and turning me this way and that. She seemed nervous for me to make a good impression on this Mrs. Solomon. “If people read our story, they might be moved to donate money to Salamat Jannat.”

  Our story, I repeated silently.

  Mem continued, “Bertie’s been to the home a few times, and she’s talked to Hari, so she knows its limitations. She’s American, Jewish, from New York I think. Friendly. The Gazette’s not much—mostly social puff pieces. But the women who read it are the same ones who’ve been gossiping about us, so maybe this will crimp some of their rumors. It could also help over at the embassy next time we try for your visa. Especially since she’s agreed not to mention Aidan. There.” She finished tying my hair into two thick bunches with black velvet ribbons and refastened the pink butterfly above my left ear. Then she stood back to admire her handiwork.

  Outside, the day was overcast, and the rest of the room—including Mem—wore a violet shad
ow. But I wore a new black-and-white checked dress and sparkling black patent leather shoes, and the lamplight reflected in my eyes and hair. “You look wonderful,” she said, and leaned to kiss me. I watched the kiss in the mirror as if I were outside myself.

  Soon Mrs. Solomon arrived, and we sat down around the tea tray. Nagu and the cook had outdone themselves, so excited were they to be entertaining. There were soft yellow cakes and salty crisps, crustless tea sandwiches and biscuits in frilly paper nests. Lawrence had dragged Simon off to the cinema to keep him from attacking the tray. Mem had consoled them with promises of leftovers, but watching Mrs. Solomon help herself to a large pile of sweets, I was not so sure there would be any leftovers.

  “I do love these Indian teas,” she said, settling her plate on her knee and lifting a butter cookie toward her mouth. Then she laughed a hearty, ha-ha laugh. “But you can certainly see that!”

  It was true. Mrs. Solomon was a padded lady with round gray eyes, her pink face encircled by springy brown curls. She proceeded to tell us that although she had only arrived a few months ago, she had always wanted to come to India. Her British uncle, Colonel William Solomon, had lived for years in Madras and sent the most exotic presents when she was growing up. Strange musical instruments and birdcages, wooden cosmetics boxes and bells that one wore on the hands and feet. Only when she was older did she learn that her uncle had been active in the Vigilance Movement, and most of these objects had been given to him as gifts by nautch girls he had rescued.

  “Perhaps you can see now why I was particularly interested in your story, Joanna,” she said.

  “It’s Kamla’s story more than mine,” Mem said.

  Mrs. Solomon licked a crust of sugar from her lips and beamed at me. “Isn’t she an angel!”

  Mrs. Solomon meant no harm. She was like a grown-up baby, all full of pinkness and flesh and innocence. But her words made me uncomfortable. Did she not see me? Did she not know where I had come from and what had been done to me? I thought that was why she was here, to write my story. I thought she must at least be able to glimpse what the girls at Safe Haven could see so plainly—that I was no angel.

  “Yes,” Mem was saying. “I knew at once that Kamla was different. In part that’s her heritage—she’s half Sikh and half Tungan Chinese. At first we thought she was a hill child—from the Himalayas—but then we learned she was born in Sinkiang. And when we determined she was an orphan, I just knew I had to adopt her.”

  Mem turned her eyes on me—they appeared golder than usual under the yellow lamplight. I had never heard her speak of me in such a way. I did not recognize this half Sikh, half Tungan Chinese orphan who might have been an ornamental pot, or an exotic pet.

  “But, you know,” she raced on, “every one of the girls at Salamat Jannat has a unique story of her own. I’m happy to tell you ours, but you must understand, Bertie, all these girls deserve the chance I’m giving Kamla, to be educated and lead normal, productive lives. Sadly, adoption is a realistic solution in only the rarest cases. That’s why I prefer to describe the home as a ‘school of opportunity’ rather than a rescue mission. But we ’re just beginning this new approach, and it’s not cheap. If your readers are moved to help, we need books, clothing, vocational training and equipment, funds for more teachers and facilities…”

  Mrs. Solomon finally set aside her plate and took up pencil and pad. I became conscious of her lead scratching the paper. It sounded like a lizard trying to escape from a cardboard carton. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

  As Mem talked on about conditions at Salamat Jannat, her words seemed to blend together. It struck me as the talk, not of Mrs. Shaw, but of those radish-nosed, cloud-haired firenghi Indrani once warned me about. Those memsahibs who pretended to save the souls of lost girls, when all they truly cared about were their palaces and ball gowns.

  “Kamla,” Mrs. Solomon said, for the first time addressing me directly. “Tell me about meeting Mrs. Shaw.”

  I looked to Mem. She held her cup to her lips, then slowly set it down. I watched the muscles of her long throat tighten as she swallowed. Two silver dewdrops dangled from her mango-shaped ears. I tried to remember. She was slimmer than she had been then, her body even more hard-edged. Her older eyes and hair now made me think of the whiskey she and Lawrence drank, rather than imagined honey. “Well,” I said, “the first time she comes to G. B. Road, even before she reaches my house I am watching her. She is firenghi, but, you know, I do not feel she is a stranger.”

  Mem smiled at her hands. I could see she was pleased.

  “And the day she rescued you…?”

  I hesitated. In all our time together Mem had never asked, and I had not told her that it was her inquiries which had caused Indrani to turn me over to Golba. Mem merely thought she had failed to save me.

  Smiling at the good-hearted Mrs. Solomon, I said merely, “Yes.”

  “Actually,” Mem said, “you mustn’t make it sound so heroic. Kamla rescued herself. You see, for me to take her from the house where she was living, I would, in effect, have had to arrest her. But because she gave herself up to us, we were able to take her directly under our protection. She’s the one who took the risks, escaping from her keeper and finding her way alone and penniless out of Old Delhi. Can you imagine, a girl that young?”

  Mrs. Solomon looked at me. She lifted her pencil from its pad and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “How young are you?” she asked.

  It sounded across the chill of the room like such a simple question. But I did not know what to say. A look at Mem’s face told me she, too, was confounded by the reversal. Not how old, but how young. Mrs. Solomon waited, turning her gray eyes from one to the other of us. Sounds of washing up clattered from the kitchen. I felt Mem’s husband watching from his photographs and was drawn back to the scene of the explosion in Sinkiang. I recalled Mem’s face that night, the false light of the flashlights yellowing her skin. And something else. A feeling of relief within my own breast. A feeling, even, of gladness that now in the contest of sorrow Mrs. Shaw and I were even.

  Mem was explaining that because my birth date was unknown, she could only guess at my age, but according to the doctor I must now be about twelve. Mrs. Solomon wrote that down. Then she pulled a camera from her large handbag to take our picture. Mem slid an arm around me, cheek against my forehead.

  We smiled.

  2

  “Say cheese!” Lawrence heard Bertie Solomon bray as he opened the front door. Fortunately, the entry was not visible from the living room. He could slip right back out and rejoin Simon in the servants’ quarters with Dilip and Bhanu. Simon’s blow-by-blow of the Marx Brothers movie they’d just seen was bound to be more entertaining than the ladies’ tea party, which he’d assumed would be over by now. Lawrence had met the effervescent Mrs. Solomon on her arrival. He was pleased Joanna had found a champion and that her get-together seemed to be succeeding. That was about as much as he wished to do with it.

  But as he was backing out, his eye fell on the day’s incoming mail stacked on the hall table. A pale blue aerogram with U.S. stamps crowned the pile. Automatically Lawrence scanned the return address. Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  He knew—or believed he knew—everyone in the States to whom Joanna had written for help. Most of these supposed friends had replied with condolence cards, clearly presuming Aidan to be dead and saying they hoped she would ring them up when she returned home. None of these friends lived in Wisconsin. But Lawrence knew from his own investigation that Alice James’s mother and sister did.

  “Oh, one more!” Bertie Solomon cried in the other room. “I’m just never sure I know what I’m doing, and we’d better be safe than sorry.”

  Lawrence leaned over the table. The name above the Milwaukee address was small and pinched. It looked like a woman’s hand. G. Darling, he deciphered finally, and whisked the envelope into his pocket.

  Out back he told Simon he was off to a meeting, then took a cycle rickshaw to his flat. He steamed open the s
eal. What Joanna didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and a day’s delay would make no difference. This was simply a precaution, he told himself. He was protecting her.

  February 1, 1950

  Milwaukee, Wisconsin

  Dear Mrs. Shaw,

  My name is Grace Darling. You don’t know me, but Alice James was my sister. After months of runaround and misinformation from the State Department, my mother and I received a call last week from your friend Ben Eldon, who informed us that you were responsible for finding my sister’s body and seeing her properly buried. Ben said he was contacting us on your behalf and asked if my family had any information that might help you in your search for your husband. I was sorry to have to tell him how little we knew, but I was grateful to him for offering a way to get in touch with you.

  However belatedly, I want to thank you, Mrs. Shaw, for your generosity under circumstances that must have been unbearable. I wish I had more to tell you, but I am older than Alice by eighteen years, and we were never close. I am a housewife and the mother of two. Our parents were both schoolteachers, pillars of the community. We were none of us much for adventure, except Alice. In fact, I can no more imagine running off to China in the face of that Communist invasion than I can imagine going on vacation among a bunch of headhunters. Alice was always a puzzle to us. She was a girl of high spirits, all right, but so stubborn that no one could tell her what was right or safe or smart. I have no idea what she even thought she was doing in China.

  The State Department said they had to rely on Chinese Nationalist reports for information about the explosion that killed Alice. Those reports blame the bomb on rebel tribesmen—Communists, I think they mean—though they call the explosion “accidental.” I would like to know whether you agree with this explanation…

  You see, America is a kind of peculiar place right now. Maybe you can’t see it from all the way over there in India, or maybe that’s why you’re still there. Considering what Mr. Eldon told us, I wouldn’t blame you. The other day Senator McCarthy released a list of more than two hundred men and women with the State Department who he claims are Communists. Then yesterday I got a call from some news reporters asking was it true that my sister was a Communist agent? Was it true she and your husband were on their way to meet with other Reds in a secret camp near the Soviet border? Was it true they were having an affair?