“Your bathroom guard needs to go too!” my soldier called.
“Coming!”
When I came out, his face was turned away toward the sun.
“You’re getting too old to make me wait like this,” he said.
“I’ll tell you my color later, but not now,” I said. “It’s a secret. Not until the little girl knows first.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got too many secrets to keep already.”
My soldier took me to buy a bra. He said my mother was waiting for an important phone call. I thought Mother was just uncomfortable around me. Ever since I got my period, she wouldn’t look at me. The sight of my blood, menstrual or not, had always disgusted her. Once when I fell while running with a ceramic bowl in my hand, a small piece of the broken bowl pierced my knee. I went to Mother for help. She looked at the syrupy liquid streaming down my shin in a single line and grimaced. She ordered me to remove the shard, wash my wound, and cover it with a bandage. While I followed her directions, she stood in the corner of the kitchen with her arms crossed. After that, I took care not to let her see anything that might come out of me.
I’d forgotten to take out the trash one day and I believed she’d found crumpled, stained toilet paper in the wastebasket, though she didn’t say anything to me. Soon afterward, my soldier announced we were going on an outing.
“I’m going to miss you,” my soldier said. We had been driving for some time.
“Why? Where are you going?”
“I’m not going anywhere, but you’ll go far away. Very far away. A place where you can have a future.”
“Where?” I said.
“All the women I love leave for New York,” he said.
“You’ll come with me then. Who’s going to protect me?” I said.
“Your mother will arrange it. You’ll be safe there; you won’t need me. She needs to work and you need to go back to school. It’s unrealistic to go on like this.”
We got out of the car. Around me, the market bustled with vibrant colors. My vision went blurry. At the camp, everything was gray. Mother too was losing color. Recently, she’d become black and white whenever I looked at her. We went to a stall full of small, lacy things where a woman sat with her legs wide open. A small square of fabric at her crotch was different than the rest of her pants. It looked like it had been recently stitched on. Tall stacks of clothes still wrapped in plastic encircled her.
“What do you need, baby?” She addressed my soldier in the pronoun reserved for older men or a boyfriend, even though she was clearly older than him. I hissed at her under my breath.
“What you need? I’ve got everything,” she said.
“Tell her,” my soldier said to me.
“Um. A bra?” I said. My soldier had told me what to ask for in the car.
She laughed, “You little thing? Something without a wire, that’s what you need. You don’t want a wire at your age. Messes everything up.” She stood up and looked around, stuck her hand under a seemingly random tower of things and pulled out a single bra, miraculously the only object not wrapped in plastic. My cheeks were hot. I snatched it from her.
“This is a job for a mother, no? What’s a young, handsome lad like you doing here?”
“Just doing my job.” My soldier squeezed my shoulder. I didn’t like hearing that I was a mere responsibility to him. I swore to myself I wouldn’t speak to him on the ride back. “Let’s take seven of those. One for each day of the week?” he looked at me and raised his brows.
“She should try it on first.” The woman pulled a sheet full of holes from underneath her. “Come on girl. I’ll cover you.”
I went around the display to her side. I didn’t like anything about what was happening. The little girl was older than me and she never wore anything underneath her shirt. What would she say when she saw me with a bra? I was sure she would make fun of me. The woman giggled as I took off my shirt. I could feel her stare on my back.
“Oh my, you young, beautiful brat. How smooth is your skin!”
I struggled to figure out the bra’s mechanism. None of it made sense. The woman called my soldier over and ordered him to hold up the curtain. He did so, craning his neck as far as possible in the other direction. She put the bra on me, snapped on something at the back. It poked my skin. I turned around. There was a lot of extra fabric in the front. She pulled on one of the cups and accidentally pinched my nipple. I yelped. My breasts suddenly felt as if hundreds of ants were crawling inside.
“You’ll grow into it just fine.” She laughed. I decided then that I didn’t like people who laughed a lot.
Neither of us said anything as we made our way to the car. Once we were inside, my soldier gave me the bag of seven bras. I put my hand in it and fingered the soft fabric. If the woman was right and I grew into them, maybe I would like them better.
“Can we please stay out longer?” I asked from the backseat.
“We have to go back.”
“I know, just not yet.”
My soldier looked at me through the rearview mirror.
“You liked trying on new clothes that much?”
“No . . . ”
“Since when did you learn to demand things?”
He didn’t sound pleased, but I noticed the car decreasing in speed.
We drove past a pond. My eyes followed a line of ducks crossing the water to the other side. When we were farther ahead, they became a blurry, silky sweep of yellow between the sky and muddy earth.
We stopped in front of a shack that was held up by a few bamboo sticks. Inside, where sunlight didn’t reach, I saw silhouettes of three or four figures. Out front, a boy who looked my age was sitting on the arm of a plastic chair. His face was dirty, his lips dry and chalky.
“Dropping something off,” my soldier said to the boy.
“No kids,” the boy said.
My soldier smacked him on the side of his head. The boy half grinned half winced. I was afraid of looking at him in the eye. He seemed to know much more than I about the world of my soldier, the world outside the camp. The boy was also a piece of this world. I’d never felt ashamed of being a kid till then.
Inside, the shack was bigger than I thought. There were bricks everywhere, both whole and broken, as if the shack was raised on top of a home struck by the monsoon. The silhouettes whispered as we approached.
“In your proper attire today, huh?” somebody said.
The shadows giggled. The giggles sounded more tired than cheerful.
My soldier handed one of the silhouettes a bag I hadn’t noticed he was carrying. It looked ordinary, a heavy weight at the bottom. I couldn’t see the face of the figure, except for her thin legs, scraped and bruised. Her shoes didn’t match, though they showed the effort of having had someone force them to. Both were high heels. The woman put her hand into the bag and scooped up a handful of the contents inside. Some fell on the ground.
“Careful!” Someone else said.
I knelt down and picked up the droppings. Rice. Long white grains.
“Thank you,” the woman said to my soldier. She glanced at me and for a split second seemed like she was going to kneel down and help, but changed her mind.
“Can I have a glass of water?” my soldier said.
Nobody answered, so we left.
My eyes took some time to readjust to the sun. I already wanted to go back inside the shack, to look again at the women silently buzzing around my soldier as though he were nectar and they bees. I regretted my earlier restrain from touching one of the women’s legs to make sure she was a real person.
“Can you keep a secret?” my soldier asked.
“Who are they?” I said.
“Can you keep a secret?”
I nodded. The only person I would tell was the little girl, who I didn’t consider to be outside
of myself. I nodded again more vigorously. But my soldier didn’t say anymore until I could see the gate to our camp in the distance.
“Keep this between us, will you?” he said.
“Keep what?”
“Never mind,” he said.
“Which one of them is your girlfriend?” I asked.
“None of them.”
“Which one?”
He turned and looked at me. “All of them. They keep me company when I’m lonely. It gets that way inside the camp. They don’t want any money. I just bring gifts.”
“Rice?” I said.
“They have nothing.”
I tried to picture my soldier holding hands with the silhouettes, forming a circle. I blinked.
“It’s adult loneliness. You’ll understand when you’re older,” he said.
9
We started to plan our escape. Exactly what prompted our decision, I wasn’t sure, only we didn’t like that the old black and blues on our bodies didn’t fade completely before new ones were pressed on top of them. We started to fear that if we stayed, our skin would eventually turn a dark purple, an ill-fitting shade for us both. Boyfriends would be nearly impossible then. The beatings, different in the way they were administered and in the reasons why, looked the same on our skin.
After having gone out with my soldier, I confirmed to the little girl that our camp wasn’t completely isolated. When we broke out of the camp, we would follow the river upstream to town. There was a market and a shack with a mean boy as a guard. I didn’t think he would let us stay there. We would have to beg or sell lottery tickets until we had enough for a bus pass to the city. Unlike in our usual games, we didn’t think about the what-ifs, the endless ways we could fail. Failure to make it out of the camp: get caught, get lost, or starve. I feared a great number of things, but voicing them was useless. The little girl was set on leaving.
I didn’t tell the little girl what my soldier had said about me moving away, even though it had been on my mind ever since. I had thought myself perfectly content until another option was presented to me. The United States seemed a contradictory place, where a girl my soldier once knew had gone, where he too wanted to go. It was a place that made one person’s dream and shattered another’s, my soldier had told me. Half of me believed in running away from the camp with the little girl, but the other half wanted to go to New York more than anything.
At the camp, time didn’t seem to move forward linearly, instead scattering itself all around us. Everything was horizontal. In the morning, I ate breakfast and studied at my desk. In the evening, I followed the little girl around. At night, I fell asleep next to Mother while she worked on her laptop. I’d forgotten how many birthdays I’d celebrated since I’d been here. I didn’t know my age.
All I knew was I didn’t want to be a girl forever. I wanted to know the adult loneliness my soldier talked about. There were occasions when he would treat me as an equal, a friend. Unlike Mother, he had never yelled at me or assumed my ignorance. A mutual understanding eclipsed our relationship. I knew he shared with me things he wouldn’t talk about to anyone else, even other adults. He valued my intuition. It was a gift, he had said. Though I didn’t know what he meant, I promised myself I would nourish and strengthen it.
In New York, I knew from my soldier that there were many tall buildings. One floor added on top of another and the buildings grew vertically until they reached the sky. There would be a sense of time passing.
Though I longed for something new, anything other than the camp, I continued to participate in the little girl’s plan. If anything, I was more enthusiastic than before. Usually, it was the little girl who could create anything with her mind. This time it was I who talked wildly about our journey as vagabonds. The knowledge that I didn’t have to carry out the plans freed me. It was then that I first became aware of her as an entity outside myself who could be deceived and manipulated.
We were standing in front of the brick wall, where the little girl had waved to me for the first time. We hadn’t played this game in a long time—pretend to build our own protected city. That night, we began to stack the bricks in the same way the little girl had shown me when we became friends. I told her the story of the silhouettes again and again, embellishing details and smudging facts. She was captivated. I even suggested that one of these women was her mother.
She bit her lips as she worked. Then she stopped and frowned in a way that made her whole face crumble. When I saw that she was shaking her head, I quickly corrected myself. I didn’t want to take it too far.
“Maybe it wasn’t her. Could be anyone,” I said.
“No, it’s her.” She shook her head again as if to empty her thoughts.
“What if it’s not?” I said.
“I want to see her. I want to go there,” she said and sat down on the wall we’d made.
“If that’s what you want.”
“Will you come with me?” she said, not looking at me.
“Anywhere.” I said.
It seemed like the sky could not get any darker, but it did, as if the light was drained out of it. The little girl asked if there were no sun ever again, would I miss it? I told her of course, I would. I would miss anything I couldn’t ever have again. We couldn’t see well in the sudden blackness so we looked up at the stars. I tried to make out the little girl’s face. The sky had wrapped her up in its millions of shimmering lights. I reached out my hand and touched her face. She was as cold as night.
A few months after the shopping trip, Mother showed me a photo of her friend in a newspaper. One side of her face was dented. Where her eye was supposed to be was a smear of skin oozing pus and blood. Her good eye was wide-open, staring right at me. I dropped the newspaper to the ground and ran to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and pulled on my cheeks. Everything was intact. When I came out, Mother was sitting on the floor, looking at the photo. She tilted her head left and right alternately.
“She used to be my secretary. She was also a talented singer,” Mother said. She covered her face. “I hardly recognize her. Come here.”
I lay down on the floor and put my head in her lap.
“The article says she was found unconscious on the street. They knew the news would reach me. It’s not safe here anymore. I’m making arrangements for you to go to the United States. When it’s right, I’ll join you.”
I started to cry. I was afraid of losing her again. She petted my temple, scratched my back. Her touch felt alien.
“Is she dead?” I asked.
“No. That’s the punishment.”
On the news, India conducted three atomic tests despite worldwide disapproval. Pakistan responded with five nuclear tests. In the US, Clinton ordered air strikes against Iraq. A gay student was beaten to death. Vietnam dealt with the occasional protests from dissatisfied peasants and non-Party intellectuals. Corruption plagued and inhibited the country’s socio-economic advancement. Mother had taught me how to be callused to the tragedies of the world, or at least act as if I was. Nothing seemed important compared to the picture of the young woman, which invaded all aspects of my imagination. Whenever I closed my eyes, everyone I’d ever known had a bloody face, smashed teeth, broken jaw bones that jutted out and then were bent backward by an invisible hand to puncture their throat. Yet danger in my mother’s mouth was more like a violent film than anything real. Danger was the idea of running away with the little girl. Danger was the pleasure and shame I felt when my soldier’s gaze was on my back the first time I tried on a bra.
Life went on normally while Mother silently searched for ways to send me abroad. I developed an irrepressible rage around animals, who I used to love. I had the urge to grab the necks of stray dogs and squeeze them. I kicked my pet chicken when she tried to get near me so that I wouldn’t do worse things to hurt her. I hated anything that was helpless and weaker than myself.
> That appetite for physical harm was so strong that I went to the pond one day by myself. It was barely morning. The sun had just broken through the sky. I crept out of bed so that I wouldn’t wake Mother. In the foyer, yellow and orange dust pirouetted around in elaborate patterns. I opened the door and left. Overcome by fear and excitement, I’d forgotten to put on shoes. It was better that way. I didn’t want anybody to ask where I was going. The pond was north of the community’s kitchen and next to the dumpsters. Adults had warned me never to swim there. The water was extremely toxic from years of being the dumpsite for oil and a medley of liquid waste from the kitchen. It was incomprehensible how fish still survived there. Nobody would eat fish from that pond.
I crunched up my pants to above my knees and inched toward the syrupy water. When the water was up to my thigh, I stopped walking. I could feel many fish around my ankles. They were not afraid of me. Maybe if they bit me, I would grow hideous scales on my legs. I reached down to catch them. They were fast, dispersing as soon as my hand shot down into the thick water. I couldn’t see anything so I waited until they came back. They always did, circling my legs rapidly. After a while, my whole body was soaked and itchy. Still I didn’t catch any fish, but I kept trying, growling to myself. I must have been making noises out loud.
“Hey, kid,” someone said.
I didn’t know how long he had been standing there by the kitchen’s back door. His apron was as ragged as the rest of his clothes. He was smoking a cigarette.
“What are you doing, kid? You won’t catch any fish that way.” He came toward me and threw his cigarette in the pond.
I’d been caught. I decided that not saying anything would be my best way out.
If I Had Two Lives Page 7