Fifteen Lanes

by S. J. Laidlaw

  “Do you want me to check if Pran has gone out?” I asked. “Perhaps we could sit out in the window box for a while. Men won’t bother with us on such a hot day.”

  “Thank you, my love. I’d like that.”

  The window box was the only outdoor freedom Deepa-Auntie was allowed, and of course that had all the freedom of sitting in a shop window. Unlike the other aunties, not to mention myself, she couldn’t come and go from the house as she pleased. She had to ask permission and be escorted by Pran or Binti-Ma’am. Her only outings were infrequent trips to the temple to pray, and she always returned home more disheartened than when she’d left. I often stayed in on the weekends, when I’d have preferred to play in the street, because it cheered her to have my company. I didn’t realize until years later that Deepa-Auntie was not so many years older than me and my friends.

  Taking Aamaal’s hand, I left Deepa-Auntie and went into the hallway, pausing for a moment to listen to the voices of the house. I could hear murmurings from the second floor. One of the aunties barked with laughter, which was enough to confirm that Pran wasn’t upstairs. I put my finger to my lips to silence Aamaal and led her down the short, narrow passage to his room. We had to pass Binti-Ma’am’s room. There was no danger of awakening her. She slept deeply in the afternoons, knocked out by the heat and her own bootleg booze.

  I leaned my ear against Pran’s door. Aamaal’s hand sweated in my own. How quickly she had learned to fear him. I shook my head to let her know he wasn’t there, though I didn’t speak, as it was possible he’d heard us come out of the washing room and was deliberately keeping silent, waiting to pounce. Aamaal tugged at my hand and I let her lead me back down the hall to the washing room. I stuck my head in and gestured to Deepa-Auntie to come out. I still didn’t dare speak.

  The three of us crept as silently as we could to the ladder leading to the second floor. Deepa-Auntie had one foot up when the door to Pran’s room flew open and he raced out.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded.

  Deepa-Auntie started to cry.

  Grace

  I was nervous going to school on Monday but it was happy nerves. I realized it was possible that things wouldn’t work out with Todd, but just the fact that he liked me made me feel like a brand-new person, prettier, more confident. As I entered the building, I smiled at kids and said hi to the receptionist, like it was completely normal for me to speak to an adult even when I was not compelled to.

  Todd and I had texted all weekend. It turned out we liked a lot of the same music and we shared a passion for Bollywood films. Like me, he was studying Hindi so he could watch them without subtitles. We agreed to a Bollywood movie marathon that coming Friday night, just like I used to have with Tina. It was all I could do not to share my excitement with my parents but I wanted to see their look of amazement when I brought him home. He wasn’t only good-looking, he was smart and funny and surprisingly wise, in a teenage boy way. I told him a bit about what happened with Madison, not his part in it of course, but just that I’d said something thoughtless that upset her and she didn’t want to be my friend anymore. It felt so good to tell someone. I told him how Madison’s group made me wonder if I was even capable of making friends. He said that was ridiculous and I couldn’t let other people get inside my head like that. Nothing he said was a revelation, but just hearing it from someone else made me feel stronger.

  By Sunday evening the conversation had taken a romantic turn, though perhaps romantic isn’t quite the right word. At some point we got more playful, flirted, talked about sex and crossed a line. Just thinking about it made my stomach churn. I never would have thought I’d do something like that. I deleted all of his texts immediately and made him promise to do the same. I was horrified that anyone might read them—or worse, see them. I don’t even remember what I wrote. It was like I was channeling someone else, someone sexy and fearless.

  We’d agreed to meet for lunch and show the whole world we’d become a couple. I’d got up early and dressed carefully. I’d left my hair down, instead of scraping it back into a ponytail the way I usually did. I’d brushed it until it fell in one shiny waterfall almost to my waist. I’d put on makeup, which I almost never did, and wore the dress Tina and I had picked out before she left. She’d insisted on buying it as a going-away present. She’d said to save it for my sixteenth birthday but I knew she’d understand why this occasion was more important. It clung to my body, accentuating what little I had in the way of curves. When I looked at myself in the mirror I felt different, more sharply defined, as if my whole persona had gone from black-and-white to color.

  The only thing weighing me down now was Madison. I’d had time to get over my shock that Todd liked me and not her. That knowledge made me feel both invincible and sad. In the first few weeks I’d been having lunch at Madison’s table, we had peacefully coexisted. She could’ve been nasty then, and she wasn’t. She’d let me sit with her group when I had nowhere else to go. And this was how I repaid her. If I didn’t owe her an apology for my comments last week, there was no question I owed her one now. I’d knowingly taken the boy she wanted. The fact that she’d never had a chance with him was beside the point.

  I was so lost in these thoughts that I didn’t notice the stares and giggles until I reached my locker. I didn’t even feel trepidation when I saw the paper taped to the door—not until I got close enough to see the photo, my photo. It was blown up, in full living color. My heart galloped and my mouth went dry. I was naked from the waist up. I’d never seen myself quite that way. Of course I’d looked in mirrors, but a photo is something different. It’s more than a representation of life, it’s a retelling.

  I can’t explain why I did it. I didn’t even let other girls see me in public change rooms. I’d always been shy about my body. I’d wait till the room was empty, or I’d duck into a toilet cubicle.

  Todd and I had been texting for hours. It was close to one in the morning, barely seven hours ago, when he asked me to prove my feelings for him. What a stupid request. Really, I barely knew him, but at the time I didn’t feel that way. I’d confided how I always felt like an outsider. He said he did too, that most of his friends couldn’t be trusted. Everyone was always jockeying for status and position, looking to take each other down a peg. We could rely on each other, he said: the two of us against the world. I teased him for being so cliché; we were hardly Romeo and Juliet. He insisted on calling me Juliet for the next hour.

  I pulled the paper off my locker and stuffed it in my backpack, as if that was going to change anything. I felt a thousand eyes burning into me from every direction. My face was so hot I’m surprised my head didn’t burst into flames. It was all I could do to hold back the tears.

  “Hey, Grace, nice tits! Who would have guessed?” I whirled around, expecting to see Todd, but it was a boy I barely knew.

  “I don’t know,” said another boy. “From what I saw—and I saw EVERYTHING—I think she’s going to need implants. What do you think, Grace? Time to go up a few cups?”

  “She could earn money for the operation by stripping. She obviously enjoys it.”

  The comments came from all sides, a cacophony. I could no longer distinguish one voice from another. Laughter reverberated off the walls. It seemed like the entire school was there. I tried to push through the mass of bodies but they formed a wall, tight, impermeable. Then one voice rose above the others.

  “I feel sorry for her. I always knew she was desperate, but I never realized she was quite that desperate. Imagine sending her photo to everyone. Why would she think any of us were even interested?”

  Madison. She’d slithered through the same crowd that had prevented my escape and stood in front of me, her retinue behind her.

  “Poor, pathetic Gracie,” said Kelsey. “It’s the only way she could get a boy to look at her.”

  Gracie? She’d never called me that before. In a flash it occurred to me that I had no idea who I’d been texting with all weekend.
It might not have been Todd. Maybe it wasn’t even a boy. I could see Todd now on the periphery of the crowd, smirking. Clearly he wasn’t the sweet guy I’d been thinking, but there was no reason he’d single me out for this kind of humiliation.

  Unlike Madison and her posse.

  “It was you,” I accused, though my voice was tentative. A part of me couldn’t really believe she’d do it either.

  “What was me?” demanded Madison.

  “You were messaging me.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. All I know is that you’re so desperate for attention that you sent your topless photo to the entire school. But I think you’ve had more than enough of our attention.” With that, she collected her minions and the crowd parted to let her leave.

  They closed in again before I could make an escape, but I’m not sure I would have been capable of it anyway. I was shaking so badly I felt in danger of collapsing on the spot. I turned my back to the crowd, opened my locker and just stood there, one hand gripping the top shelf for support. I leaned in, under the pretense of looking for books, and took deep breaths, trying to slow my racing heart. The barrage of comments continued but the buzzing in my own head was drowning them out. This couldn’t be happening. I’d spent my entire life striving to go unnoticed. How could I have been so reckless?

  After an eternity the bell rang and the crowd dissipated. When I was sure the last of them had cleared out, I sank to the floor next to my locker and tried to figure out what to do next. It wasn’t like I had a lot of options. I was at the only international school in Mumbai with a North American curriculum. It briefly went through my mind that I could kill myself. Surely this was the kind of thing that drove girls over the edge. At the same time, a small voice of reason told me this would all blow over. I was certain I’d heard of other girls suffering things like this in the past. The fact that I couldn’t bring any to mind was probably a good sign. I didn’t realize I’d been hyperventilating until my breathing finally slowed to normal. No wonder I felt like I was going to pass out.

  I got to my feet. I was going to get through this. The one silver lining was that at least my parents hadn’t found out. I couldn’t have borne it if they’d had this irrefutable confirmation that I was a loser who clearly didn’t fit in to their perfect family. As bad as things were, at least that indignity had been avoided. I shouldered my backpack, closed the locker and made my way to the office for a late pass.

  The secretary scrambled to her feet the second I walked through the door. It was odd behavior but I figured she was just keen to get me back to class.

  “She’s here!” she shrieked.

  Something told me things were about to get worse.

  Noor

  I have a brother …

  Shami arrived in the early evening of a drizzly monsoon day. The fruit-wallahs who lined our street were packing up their carts, giving way to the bars just starting to open. Men poured out of buses, mostly migrant workers eager to douse their loneliness in cheap liquor before spending their miserable earnings on gambling, or women like Ma. Ma was already inside with a jittery boy who’d been coaxed in by Binti-Ma’am herself.

  We all knew Ma’s time was close. Though Shami was still little more than a bump—Ma had carried him barely eight months—he’d already dropped low in her belly. Few men wanted her in this condition, but Binti-Ma’am insisted she continue to work.

  “You should have got rid of it,” Binti-Ma’am scolded. “Is it my fault that you chose to keep it? I’m not running a charity. You must pay for your bed like everyone else.”

  Ma didn’t argue. Everyone knew that too many children was bad for business. One or two were acceptable, even encouraged. Young girls recently forced into sex work would often be forced to have children as well. The need to feed their own child was sometimes the only thing that broke their resistance to the work. Ma didn’t state the obvious: she wanted a son. Binti-Ma’am knew as well as anyone. Everyone preferred boys. Why would Ma be any different?

  And so it was that I found myself outside with Aamaal, perched on the step of the building next door to ours, which housed our local heroin den. The owner was one of a few in the neighborhood who would allow us to huddle in his doorway. He thought a couple of young girls out front would throw off any police who might be suspicious of his business. For a rupee I promised to tell him if I saw the cops coming, though the regular bribes he paid ensured that was unlikely.

  My friend Parvati kept us company with her baby brother, Eka. He was fast asleep in her arms. Parvati could have left him at home under her mother’s bed, but she’d heard there was a group of foreigners coming through our neighborhood. This happened periodically. There was a tour company that specialized in showing off the poor areas of Mumbai. My neighborhood, Kamathipura, was an especially popular destination. The tourists gawked at our mothers as if they were Madari monkeys performing for coins. They didn’t look at us though, the children of Kamathipura. If they noticed us at all, they quickly turned away.

  Parvati was determined to get money from these foreigners. She called it “only fair,” though she knew they wouldn’t share her sense of justice. It would take some trickery to squeeze it out of them, which was why she’d brought Eka. It was common knowledge that foreigners couldn’t resist babies. Professional beggars would borrow or even rent babies to increase their earnings.

  Parvati tried to enlist Aamaal as well. “When I spot them, you must start crying, Aamaal, and clutch your tummy like you’re hungry.”

  “I am hungry,” grumbled Aamaal. She was cranky because she wanted to watch TV. Our small TV was in the room where Ma and the aunties entertained customers. There would be no TV for either of us that night, or any night. I wasn’t allowed to bring Aamaal inside until she was ready to drop from exhaustion so that she’d sleep peacefully under the bed without disrupting business. Many aunties drugged their children at night. Ma only did that when we were too sick to stay outside.

  “That’s even better,” said Parvati. “If you’re really hungry, you should have no trouble convincing them. Remember to grab the woman, if there is one, and don’t let go until she gives you something. If the amount is too small you must cry louder. Money is nothing to them. They’ll forget it in an instant. You, if you’re clever, can live off it for a week.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I said. “I think they must love money very much. It’s never easy to get them to part with it.”

  “Perhaps we should undo her braids,” said Parvati. “She looks too clean.”

  “I spent half the morning picking out her lice and oiling her hair. I certainly hope she looks clean.”

  “There they are!”

  We all watched the group making its way toward us.

  “Start crying now, Aamaal,” urged Parvati. “It will look more natural if your face is already red when they arrive.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Aamaal, though her lower lip trembled. Like me, she knew what Ma would do if she caught us begging.

  Parvati sighed. “All right, watch me this time. You’ll see how easy it is.”

  Dragging one foot, as if she were lame, Parvati hobbled out to the center of the street. She didn’t even try to shelter Eka from the rain. He woke up and screamed his annoyance. Parvati ignored him as she focused intently on the approaching group. Cupping her hand and putting the tips of her fingers together, she gestured toward her mouth, making the motions of eating. She really did look pitiful.

  There were six foreigners, three men and three women, with a local guide. A couple of them gave Parvati sidelong looks. The ones nearest shied away, almost tripping over each other in their determination to avoid her. Parvati limped after them.

  “Just one rupee,” she called out in her heavily accented English. I almost laughed. She would certainly not be satisfied if that was all they gave her.

  The foreigners looked at their guide, who glared at Parvati. “Get away. Stop bothering them.”

  “Please, just o
ne rupee. My brother is hungry.” She singled out one of the women, catching up to her and grabbing her shirt. The woman gasped and pulled away, dragging Parvati and Eka with her. The guide raised his hand to Parvati threateningly but she stared him down. The guides were guests in our neighborhood as much as the foreigners. He wouldn’t dare hit us. Snorting in disgust, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a small handful of coins and tossed them on the ground. They rolled into the muck at the side of the road. Parvati let go of the woman to dive for the change, leaving the group to hustle away.

  Aamaal and I helped Parvati collect the scattered coins. Slime from rotting food, mixed with human and animal waste, coated our fingers by the time we’d collected every coin. There was barely enough for a couple of panipuri, but the vendor knew us. He added a third for free. We got spicy, but I reminded him to hold back on the onions as they gave Aamaal gas. Parvati divided the three small stuffed pastries equally, ripping a little piece off her own for Eka, though he had no teeth. He stopped whimpering as he sucked greedily on the fried dough, and we all settled back on the stoop to enjoy our treat.

  We were just finishing when we heard loud voices from our own house next door. I heard my name called. My alarm was reflected on Aamaal’s face as we leaped up and tore home. We slowed down as we entered, wary of coming upon Pran, who would surely beat us for coming inside so early.

  Lali-didi, a recent addition to our house, practically plowed into us in the narrow hall. “Noor, thank goodness you came. I’ve been shouting for you. You must go down the street and fetch Sunita-Auntie. Your ma is having the baby right now.” I didn’t ask why Lali-didi hadn’t gone herself. It would be years yet before she was allowed street privileges. She might have secured her freedom sooner if she’d had a baby of her own, but she was still a child herself.