hand toward the other girls—“then please leave.”
Her teammates, panting, puffing, looked at her with consternation when she half-lifted her hand in a gesture that she hoped combined hello and goodbye. They were her tribe (even Harini), these meticulous girls who were also her rivals, who ran because they wanted sports scholarships to study, or hoped to secure a government job through the sports quota when they finished college. She considered them with envy. She thought of the times they had traveled for inter-school competitions and shared good secrets and bad secrets and shameful secrets and she didn’t know what she would do without them without hope without dreams.
The sky hung low, cropping the school roof. She walked out of the playground and into the alley. Empty wrappers and foil bowls rustled and winked brightly on the ground. The alley was deserted. The vendors had moved their carts to wherever their customers were. She felt alone in a way that frightened her, and not because of the bad djinns her brother worried about, or the men who took one too many sips of desi daru and attempted to pinch every passing woman’s bottom. Who was she if not an athlete?
She wondered if her parents would allow her to resume training when the snatchings ended. “Jai needs someone to teach him Maths,” she imagined her father saying. “Water has to be fetched every evening,” her mother would say. It was as if she existed solely to care for her brother, and the house. Afterward, she would similarly look after her husband, her hands smelling of cow-dung cakes. Her own dreams were inconsequential. It seemed to her that no one could see the ambition that thrummed in her; no one imagined her becoming someone.
When she reached Bhoot Bazaar, she stood for a moment to tug at her ponytail and tighten it. On the paan-spattered walls around her were advertisements for computer classes, banking and insurance exams, tuitions, and appeals for votes from politicians. She withered under the lecherous stares of the men who sold carrots and radishes and capsicums. She wished she were a boy because boys could sit on culverts and smoke beedis without anybody stopping them.
She went into a fabric shop and the shop-girl considered her suspiciously as she browsed. Runu asked the girl to pull out a blouse-piece as blue as the sea (she had seen the sea often enough on TV) from a shelf behind the counter. The shop-girl hesitated, her eyes asking what someone wearing a shoddy uniform was going to do with the shiny material. Runu made up a story about a wedding she had to attend, thinking all the while of her teammates running, and she missed the taste of dust in her mouth and the grit in her eyes and the pounding of her heart, and this picture of her running interrupted her story of a fake wedding such that the shop-girl said, “The bride ran away? But what of the wedding?”
She must have said something aloud, unaware, as if talking in her sleep. Embarrassed, Runu felt the blouse-material between her fingers and said, “This isn’t right.”
She turned on her heels and ran out of the shop and the bazaar until she reached the highway. Her shoulders and her school bag smacked against strange men and women. Then she collided with a toddler who toppled sideways to the ground and bawled, though he appeared unhurt. His mother swung her shopping bag toward Runu, missing her by a millimeter. The gust of violence propelled Runu forward. But where was she going? Who knew who cared not her.
She walked along the highway, smelling the corncobs that vendors were roasting on charcoal, watching bhelpuri-sellers balance their almost-empty baskets on their heads and fold their wicker stands, a hard day’s work done at last. The stone slabs on the pavement see-sawed with every footstep. People hissed at her for being in their way. She was directionless, and they read it in her stride. They had dinners to prepare, Purple Line trains to catch, children whose homework needed supervising. When the crowd dwindled for a moment, she saw a young man who stood proprietarily next to a steel box on wheels that said:
FILTERED WATER
FRESHEST! PUREST! CLEANEST!
2 RUPEES PER GLASS ONLY
He gaped at her as if she were mad, which all things considered, she might be. Traffic rushed by on the highway like streaks of light. Her mother must be home and already beside herself with worry. Runu