busy to hear our prayers, but ghosts—ghosts have nothing to do but wait and wander, wander and wait, and they are always listening to our words because they are bored and that’s one way to pass the time.
Remember, they don’t work for free. They help us only if we offer them something in return. For Mental, it’s a voice calling his true name, and for others it’s a glass of hooch or a string of jasmine or a kebab from Ustad’s. It’s no different from what gods ask people to do for them, except most ghosts don’t want us to fast or light lamps or write their names over and over again in a notebook.
The hardest part is finding the right ghost. Mental is for boys because he never hired girls, but there are woman ghosts and old woman ghosts and even baby girl ghosts who can guard girls. We need ghosts more than anyone else maybe, because we are railway-station boys without parents and homes. If we are still here, it’s only because we know how to summon ghosts at will.
Some people think we believe in the supernatural because we inhale glue and snort heroin and drink desi daru that’s strong enough to put a mustache on a baby. But these people, these people with marble floors and electric heaters, they weren’t with Mental’s boys on the winter night the police chased them out of the railway station.
That night, a bitter-cold wind blew across the city, scoring lines into stone. The boys didn’t have twenty rupees between them to rent a quilt for eight hours, and the quilt-wallah swore at them when they asked if he could lend them one on credit. They sat shivering under a dark street lamp with a shattered glass cage, outside a shelter with no more beds free for the night. Spokes of pain turned in their hands and legs. When they couldn’t bear it anymore, they called Mental.
We are sorry to disturb you again, they said. But we are afraid we will die.
The broken street lamp crackled and glowed. The boys looked up. Beams of light syrupy and yellow with warmth tumbled down.
“Wait,” Mental’s ghost said to them, “let me see what else I can do.”
I LOOK AT OUR HOUSE WITH—
—upside-down eyes and count five holes in our tin roof. There might be more, but I can’t see them because the black smog outside has wiped the stars off the sky. I picture a djinn crouching down on the roof, his eye turning like a key in a lock as he watches us through a hole, waiting for Ma and Papa and Runu-Didi to fall asleep so that he can draw out my soul. Djinns aren’t real, but if they were, they would only steal children because we have the most delicious souls.
My elbows wobble on the bed, so I lean my legs against the wall. Runu-Didi stops counting the seconds I have been topsy-turvy and says, “Arrey, Jai, I’m right here and still you’re cheating-cheating. You have no shame, kya?” Her voice is high and jumpy because she’s too happy that I can’t stay upside down for as long as she can.
Didi and I are having a headstand contest but it’s not a fair one. The yoga classes at our school are for students in Standard Six and above, and Runu-Didi is in Standard Seven, so she gets to learn from a real teacher. I’m in Standard Four, so I have to rely on Baba Devanand on TV, who says that if we do headstands, children like me will:
never have to wear glasses our whole lives;
never have white in our hair or black holes in our teeth;
never have puddles in our brains or slowness in our arms and legs;
always be No. 1 in School + College + Office + Home.
I like headstands a lot more than the huff-puff exercises Baba Devanand does with his legs crossed in the lotus position. But right now, if I stay upside down any longer, I’ll break my neck, so I flump to the bed that smells of coriander powder and raw onions and Ma and bricks and cement and Papa.
“Baba Jai has been proved to be a conman,” Runu-Didi shouts like the newspeople whose faces redden every night from the angry news they have to read out on TV. “Will our nation just stand and watch?”
“Uff, Runu, you’re giving me a headache with your screaming,” Ma says from the kitchen corner of our