Disowned

by Tikiri

  “Mrs. Rao’s not all that bad,” I added, thinking of my alternative. If I were back in Goa, I’d have been married off to that disgusting Kristadasa. A shiver ran through me at the mere thought. “She’s a bit strange, that’s all.”

  “If this was me,” Tim said pointing at his chest, “I’d call Social Services. Don’t think this is right.”

  Everybody seemed to be interested in my life these days. My science teacher had asked about my home life the week before when she found out I hadn’t finished a take-home exam on time. It was because I’d spent the evening prior cleaning Mr. Raj Kapur’s bathroom after he’d eaten too much hot curry and thrown up, not once but twice, and growled whenever I tried to get close to clean up. Mrs. Rao said I couldn’t go to bed until the dog and the room were clean and Mr. Raj Kapur was happily tucked in bed.

  My teacher hadn’t been impressed when I’d told her I’d stayed up all night to take care of a family pet. She didn’t buy it because that wasn’t the first time I’d used that excuse. When she called that night, Mrs. Rao had explained in her sweetest voice how I was helping her out because she was an “invalid.” I was in the kitchen when the call came, so I heard everything. But I didn’t care what Mrs. Rao told my teachers, or how much work I had to do for her. Franky had already written to me to say Aunty Shilpa was taking her medicine and getting better every day, and Preeti was doing well in school and had even applied to university to become a medical doctor. I kept reminding myself, every day, why I was here.

  I’d also written to Preeti and Aunty Shilpa many times, telling them about my new life, Mrs. Rao’s beautiful house and garden, the fresh air, the expansive boulevards, and the changing seasons in this grand country. Mrs. Rao had even given me fancy writing paper and offered to mail my letters for me. Grandma’s apartment complex didn’t receive any postal service, so all letters had to go via the Good and Fast Immigration Broker office. I never heard back from Preeti or Aunty Shilpa, but then Aunty couldn’t write, and I knew how Preeti could get caught up in her books, especially if she was on her way to med school. Mrs. Rao also said it was because the Indian postal service was slow.

  “I like it here,” I said to Tim. “She treats me well. Better than anyone else.”

  “Whatever you say, Asha.” Tim was looking at me with raised eyebrows. He was half-turned toward the window, like he couldn’t wait to get out. “But you’ll only have one sixteenth birthday in your whole entire life, and you’re gonna stay stuck here alone because of that bat? Coz, I’m not staying here. I’m going to that party!”

  Suddenly, my need to escape this claustrophobic room overpowered my fear of disobeying the rules. I got up and grabbed my jacket.

  “Now we’re talking,” Tim said with a grin. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  That was when my window rattled like an earthquake had started.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “What’s that noise?” Tim said, peering outside the window.

  I walked over and peeked out. It sounded like a truck or several trucks were coming up the driveway.

  “What’s going on?” Tim asked.

  “They’re early tonight,” I whispered.

  A shadow fell on the wall. We instinctively took a step back.

  We didn’t hear voices, only sounds of truck engines, doors opening and shutting, creaking hinges, something heavy being dragged or moved. Doors slamming shut. Then footsteps. We strained to listen, but it was hard to make anything out. Whoever was out on the driveway was not talking.

  “What the hell?” Tim said.

  “Shhh,” I whispered. “It’s the full moon crowd.”

  “Who the heck are they?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Does this happen every full moon night?”

  “Yes, but usually around midnight.”

  “This is freaky, you know that, eh?” Tim asked.

  “Yes.” I looked at him desperately. “I know.”

  “I think your aunt’s in the drug business.”

  “Drugs?” My eyes widened.

  “Maybe we should call the police.”

  “No!” I said too quickly. “No, I don’t want to get into—I mean, I don’t want her to get into trouble.”

  Tim raised an eyebrow.

  “Maybe she’s just having friends over for supper,” I said.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Maybe they’re having a secret full-moon dinner out on the lawn,” I said, grasping at straws.

  Tim’s eyes widened. “So your aunt’s into crazy full-moon orgies?”

  “Well….”

  “I don’t care what they’re doing, as soon as these old geezers quiet down, you and me are getting out.”

  “But they’ll spot us.”

  “Not if we get out on the quiet,” Tim said. “I’m not staying stuck down here, while they’re partying it up upstairs. We’ve got our own party to go to, remember?”

  He’s right. I didn’t want to stay cooped down here either.

  “Hey,” I said, “let me make sure everyone’s inside first and the front door’s closed, so we don’t bump into anyone in the yard, okay?” I whispered, signaling him to be silent.

  He nodded.

  I walked over to my door, and put my ear to it. Not a sound from outside. No one came to the basement other than me anyway. All I had to do was tiptoe up the stairway and peek into the kitchen to see if I could see or hear anything. I quietly turned the door knob. Will I finally get to see those full-moon strangers?

  “There’s gonna be a w-e-r-e-w-o-l-f,” Tim sang in a low voice behind me.

  “Shhh….” I said, trying not to giggle.

  “If I see one, I’ll knock it out,” Tim said with a wink. He stationed himself behind me, holding out his bottle of rum like a weapon. I pulled the door open. And my heart jumped straight into my mouth.

  Standing outside the door with her hands on her hips and her dog at her feet was the formidable Mrs. Rao. Behind her, Ashok was holding my kitchen mop upside down.

  Seeing Tim, Mr. Raj Kapur let out a volley of barks.

  “Oh my god!” I cried out, horrified.

  “I knew it!” Mrs. Rao roared, pointing at Tim. “I knew we had an intruder! Get out before I set my dog on you!”

  Mr. Raj Kapur didn’t waste a second. He rushed toward Tim, barking like mad. Before I could say “Oh no,” Tim had jumped onto the bedside table near the window and was pushing it open. I didn’t know he could move that fast.

  Mr. Raj Kapur balanced himself on his short hind legs and jumped on the table after him. Tim struggled to open the window. Now on the table, Mr. Raj Kapur jumped once, then twice. The third time, he sunk his teeth into Tim’s left bum cheek, which I’d found oh so cute only minutes earlier.

  “No!” I cried. “Get down, Mr. Raj Kapur! Let him go!”

  “Get him!” Mrs. Rao shouted, gesturing madly. Ashok waved his mop with a wild look in his eyes, but didn’t budge from his safe spot behind Mrs. Rao.

  “Argh!” Tim said, clutching his bottom. “Damn dog!” He let out a wild kick. Mr. Raj Kapur went flying across the room with a piece of Tim’s jeans tucked tightly between his teeth. He smacked right onto Mrs. Rao’s stomach. She doubled over from the force and slammed into Ashok, knocking them both down to the floor.

  She sat on the floor on top of Ashok, her legs spread apart, her hair askew, looking half-shocked, half-enraged. The mop was now on her head and Mr. Raj Kapur was on her lap, a fiery, barking ball of fur. Squashed underneath them both, Ashok looked terrified. With considerable effort, he squirmed out from under his heavy-set boss and stood up shakily. Then he put his hands together and started to prance around Mrs. Rao like he was engaging in a strange worship ritual. I guessed that was the closest he could come to saying sorry.

  Mr. Raj Kapur wasn’t done yet, though. He jumped off his owner’s lap, spat out the cloth, and, snarling like a mini tiger, ran back to the table as fast as his stubby legs could take him, and readied to t
ake another shot at Tim’s bum cheek.

  “Get away, you piece of crap!” Tim shouted, half-way out of the window now. He twisted his body a few times and the bottle of rum in his pocket slipped out and came crashing on the floor, sending glass shards everywhere, and booze spilling on the white carpet.

  “Shit,” Tim said, looking down at the mess. The smell of cheap rum filled the room, and a red color oozed across my clean carpet. Mr. Raj Kapur stopped his barking immediately, sniffed the spill, and started to lick it.

  “No-o-o-o!” Mrs. Rao said, waving her hands, her face a dark crimson now, still sitting on the floor. “Don’t touch that! Come here, my baby. Come here!”

  I looked up to see Tim almost out of the window, his feet dangling on the ledge.

  “Be careful, Tim!”

  “Get out of there, Asha!” he yelled. “Follow me! Get out!”

  When he’d come into my room through the window earlier that evening, he’d looked debonair, like a knight in shining armor coming to rescue me. Now, he looked like a scruffy thief trying to make an ungainly escape.

  His shirt tore on the window ledge.

  “Jeezus!”

  “Tim!” I brought my hands to my face. “Oh my god.”

  “If I see you again, I’ll have you arrested! You hear me! And jailed!” Mrs. Rao shook her fist at Tim’s disappearing back. “You criminal! You thief!”

  Mr. Raj Kapur stopped for a second to bark half-heartedly at no one in particular and went back to studiously licking the spilled liquid.

  Mrs. Rao struggled to get up. Ashok gingerly offered a frail hand to help her up, almost getting pulled down as he did.

  “It’s Tim from school, Mrs. Rao,” I said to her. “He’s not a thief. He’s harmless. He’s my friend.”

  “Oh, is that right?” Mrs. Rao snapped. “Is this what happens when I let you go to school? You let intruders in? You ungrateful tramp! I never let any of the other girls go to school. This is how you repay me for treating you so well? Well, I don’t ever want to see that boy or any other boy in my house again, you hear me?”

  I nodded, trembling, worried what punishment she was going to mete out on me now.

  “And when I say, stay in your room, I mean stay in your room!” She glared. “I don’t want to see your face till seven tomorrow at breakfast, you hear!”

  Something outside banged, startling us all into silence.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “There’s some real weird shit going on in your house,” Tim said, splitting open a dark chocolate cupcake.

  Katy, Tim, and I were sitting in the school cafeteria during lunch the next day. Katy had been upset we hadn’t shown up to the party. The chocolate cupcakes were my way of saying sorry.

  “Sounds like you had a real crazy night,” she said.

  Crazy was right, but I’d expected worse. Much worse. To my surprise, Mrs. Rao simply picked up her dog and walked out of my room in a huff, with Ashok at her heels, trailing the mop behind him. Then, in the morning, she acted like nothing had happened. I wasn’t sure if she was prolonging my fear and holding off the punishment till later, if something more urgent occupied her mind, or if she’d forgiven me and moved on. I highly doubted it would be the latter, but she and I had run out of excuses for me not being in class, so she had no choice. Ashok took me to school as usual the next morning.

  “I thought someone shot you or something,” I said, looking at Tim. “I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

  “I’m alive, aren’t I?” Tim said, puffing his chest slightly. “Won’t let a bunch of batty old fogies bring me down. Can outrun them any day.”

  “I didn’t know you could jump out of a window that fast,” I said. “I was worried you’d break your neck or something.”

  “I did break something,” Tim said. “My good bottle of rum.”

  “It didn’t go to total waste,” I said. “Mr. Raj Kapur licked all of it.”

  “So you wanna know what happened after I got out of your room?” Tim asked, reaching for another cake. He seemed to be relishing keeping us in suspense. I’d been asking him all morning how he got out okay.

  “Yes!” Katy and I said at the same time.

  “Thought I’d slip out through the front because the fence is shorter and easier to climb,” he said. “But I bumped into that probo—that orangutan you keep complaining about.”

  “It’s a creepy old man who comes to Mrs. Rao’s dinners,” I explained to Katy.

  “Yeah, I’m sure that was him,” Tim said. “This guy had the biggest, fattest nose I’ve ever seen on a man. He was standing near the shipping container with another dude. This other guy was wearing this weird pajama shirt, just like that dude with the mop in your room last night.”

  “Really?” I said. “There were more people like Ashok?”

  “Did they see you, then?” Katy asked.

  “Oh yeah, they did, but I was half-way up the fence by then. The fat nose dude started yelling, ‘Intruder! Get out! Call the dogs!’ and all that.”

  Katy and I listened with wide eyes.

  “Didn’t you hear him?” Tim asked. “He was loud enough to wake the devil.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Mr. Raj Kapur was getting drunk and Mrs. Rao was having a stroke. It was a circus in my room.”

  “You guys have got to be kidding,” Katy said, shaking her head. “You were having way more fun than I was last night, and the party was at my place.”

  “This was no party, I can tell you that,” Tim said. “The fat-nose guy came flying down. He was shaking his fist and shouting. Then the other man hiked up his shirt and ran over with a two-by-four piece of wood in his hands. I was sure they were gonna kill me.”

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “The man tried to hit me with that two-by-four, but he missed and hit the fence instead.”

  “That was the bang I heard?”

  “Probably. I climbed over real fast. Think I left my jacket on your lawn, but I didn’t look back. Just ran like hell all the way home.”

  “That’s wild,” Katy said. “Like something from a movie.”

  “You know what I think?” Tim said, looking at me pointedly. “Your aunt’s not an innocent widow like you say she is. She’s not a crazy old dingbat either.”

  “Oh?”

  Tim leaned over. “I tell you, she’s doing serious crime.”

  “Crime?” I said.

  “Don’t you find it strange?” Tim asked. “This moonlight shit?”

  “It’s a house rule.”

  “House rules?” Katy said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Whatever she’s up to, she doesn’t want you to know,” Tim said. “That’s why she makes you stay in your room like that.”

  They were looking at me with strange expressions on their faces. I looked down and picked a chocolate cake crumb off the table. I wasn’t ready to share my story yet. They didn’t know about my forced engagement to Kristadasa. They didn’t know about Aunty Shilpa’s terrible sickness, or that Mrs. Rao was not really my aunt, that I was only here to make enough money, and return home. I knew Mrs. Rao’s antics were making my new friends uneasy, but the last thing I wanted was to scare them off, the only two people I knew at school.

  “Asha,” Katy asked after a long silence. “Does she, like, ever, like, abuse you?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  “Oh no, she’s not abused,” Tim said, rolling his eyes. “She treats her like a slave. That’s all. She even has a contract to do housework, can you believe it?”

  Katy looked deeply concerned. “Has she, like, ever hurt you or, like, done anything weird to you?”

  “Especially on those full-moon nights?” Tim said, wiggling his eyebrows.

  “This is serious, Tim.” Katy gave him a withering look.

  “You guys are overreacting,” I said. “Look, I’m fine. No one’s ever done anything bad. I help around the house. That’s all. Indian kids have a lot of house stuff to do a
nd house rules to follow. It’s expected. It’s something to do with duty…” My voice trailed.

  “Do you want to talk to a counselor maybe?” Katy asked gently, as if she was afraid she’d hurt me. “Or a teacher?”

  “No!” I said more forcefully than I expected. “You’re being really paranoid.”

  “Well, I think you need to get the hell outta there,” Tim said, pointing a chocolate-icing-covered finger at me.

  “And where will I go?”

  “Come stay with me,” Katy said.

  I looked at her in surprise.

  “If you promise to help with my rent,” she said with a smile.

  “You live on your own?”

  “It’s not my apartment. It belongs to my boss, but I’m the only one who lives there. It’s a tiny studio but two can live there. And I need help with the rent.”

  “That’ll be a riot,” Tim said, with his mouth full.

  “You bake, right?” Katy asked, picking up a cake and twirling it in her hand.

  I nodded. I noticed she looked longingly at my cakes but she never took a bite.

  “You can work with me,” she said. “My boss is a bit of a pain, but he’s okay.”

  “Isn’t that your boyfriend?” Tim said with a wide grin. “Your sugar daddy? The Mafia man?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Katy said, turning red. She turned to me, ignoring Tim. “We’re looking for a baker now.”

  “You work at a bakery?”

  “Kind of. They do other things too. The baking business seems to lose money all the time, and he’s always trying to find a good baker.”

  “That’s because he hasn’t met Asha yet,” Tim said with a wink.

  “Whenever we lose a baker or he fires one, he keeps trying to shove me in the kitchen,” Katy said, “but I just want to stick to my own job.”

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “Bookkeeping and office work. I hate working in the kitchen. Can’t even boil an egg, so I’d love some help.”

  “I wish I could.” I sighed. As appealing as this was, I had other priorities and a family to take care of back in Goa.