the finish line, hands the baton to her coach, says something that makes him look angrier than ever. Then she jogs toward us.
* * *
When Ma gets home late in the evening, she doesn’t say a word to me or Runu-Didi. I watch her face closely, but she isn’t noisy like she usually is when she gets mad. She tastes the dal Didi made and adds some salt and garam masala to it. She rubs her lower back, just above her underskirt, where she’s always saying it hurts. I try to give her an old tub of Tiger Balm and she pretends she can’t see me though I move my hand to wherever her eyes go. I put the balm back on the shelf. Runu-Didi stares at Papa’s belt hanging from a nail that’s been hammered into the wall so hard, there’s a starburst of cracks around it. Papa has never used the belt on us.
Finally, Papa gets home. Ma and Shanti-Chachi and Shanti-Chachi’s husband push us out of the door and give Papa a high-level briefing inside. Runu-Didi and I sit on the doorstep, shivering.
Tomorrow is exam day. Exams seem unreal, like they belong to another world. In our world we are doing daily battle with djinns and kidnappers and buffalo-killers and we don’t know when we will vanish.
The grown-ups are whispering, but I can hear Papa’s shock that comes out in gasps.
Shanti-Chachi opens the door and calls us inside. Then she and her husband leave.
“Jai, you thought we wouldn’t have enough money to pay for food unless you worked?” Papa asks.
“I won’t do it again,” I say.
“Are we starving you here?”
“I just…I thought I could give Faiz some money because his brother is in jail and the lawyer charges a lot.” It’s a good lie and it makes sense to me but not to Papa.
“And this Faiz, he takes your money?”
“I haven’t…Duttaram hasn’t paid me anything. Maybe if I had worked until the end of the month.”
“And you, Runu,” Ma is speaking now, “I asked you to watch your brother. Instead you ran off to school? Running around all the time in the smog because you like your coach, haan? Think I don’t know what’s going on in that mind of yours?”
“The coach?” Runu-Didi asks.
She looks at me, eyebrows raised, as if asking me to explain Ma’s thinking to her. I tuck my chin into my chest. I can’t explain anything.
“Your coach is your hero, isn’t he?” Ma asks. “You’ll risk being snatched if it means you’ll get to see him.”
Didi’s coach doesn’t look like a hero at all.
“No one will snatch me when I’m going to buy vegetables for dinner,” Didi says, flapping her arms around, hitting my face by mistake, and still not stopping. “Nothing will happen to me when I stand in the queue for water by the tap or for rice at the ration shop. But the second I do something that I want to do, that’s when I’ll get kidnapped. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Watch your mouth,” Ma tells Didi.
“You have a little brother to care for,” Papa says.
“If you two couldn’t look after Jai, why did you have him?” Didi asks.
Papa moves in a flash and slaps Runu-Didi on her left cheek. Her small hoop earring falls down. Papa is shaking. His eyes are round, and he looks at his hand as if he can’t believe what it has just done. Ma starts to cry. Papa has never hit Didi before; he has never hit me either. Ma clouts us all the time, but never Papa.
Ma bends down and picks up the earring. She tries to put it back but Didi pushes her away and climbs onto the bed and sits in the corner where I do my headstands. Papa seizes a blanket and marches out.
“Won’t you have dinner?” Ma asks after him. Papa raises his right hand to say no without looking back.
I sit on the bed, away from Runu-Didi, squishing the battered mattress with my knuckles. I guess Didi won’t be able to go to the inter-district championships. I bet she’s feeling a lot sadder about that than Papa hitting her.
KABIR AND KHADIFA
It felt like she had been waiting in the alley for hours. Behind her, the curtains that marked the entrance to the video-gaming parlor twitched, letting out ribbons of light that unfurled toward her feet. Night had swooped down without her noticing and erased the rooftops of Bhoot Bazaar.
Khadifa imagined stomping into the parlor and hauling