Didi run.
“One of her teammates dropped the baton that day,” Ma says, “but Runu was so fast, her team still won.”
Someone knocks on the door. It’s Fatima-ben. She forces Ma to accept a tiffin box filled with something. “Roti and subzi, it’s no feast,” she says. She talks about Buffalo-Baba. “My heart has been burning since I found him…in that state,” she says. “Who would do something so cruel, and why, I can’t even imagine. It’s not the same as what you’re going through, of course…”
When she leaves, Ma puts the tiffin box on the kitchen shelf.
Shanti-Chachi also brings us food, wrapped in foil. “Puris, your favorite, Jai,” she says.
I put her food on top of Fatima-ben’s tiffin box.
Ma and Shanti-Chachi go outside to discuss something grown up.
I look at Runu-Didi’s books stacked by the wall. Her clothes hang from nails. Her track-pants for yoga class lie on a footstool, waiting for Friday when the class will take place.
I can smell Runu-Didi on her clothes and her pillow that has acquired a dip in the middle from the weight of her head. If I stare at it long enough, the snatcher or the bad djinn who has caught Didi will let her go. I stare and stare. My eyes hurt, but I don’t look away.
RUNU
When the school bell rang, everyone hurried out of the classroom, but she stood behind her desk, taking her time with her textbooks, uncreasing dog-ears, and arranging the folds of her dupatta so they formed a crisp V on her chest. She could feel the tautness of the starch in her uniform, carefully soaked for hours in rice water, then rinsed and pinned to a clothesline where it dried, slowly, collecting every smell in the alley: spices, smog, goat shit, kerosene, smoke from woodfires and beedis. What even was the point of washing, her ma liked to say. By the time Runu finished her training in the evening, the uniform was damp and sticky with sweat anyway.
Ma couldn’t understand why Runu put in so much effort for a mere few hours in which her clothes looked as if they had been ironed by a press-wallah. Ma couldn’t understand anything about her. No one did.
Runu stood now in the empty classroom, its walls darkened by cobwebs and inky fingers, the blackboard cracked at the edges and whitened by years of chalk. Curls of smog crept in like unruly tendrils through windows that wouldn’t shut fully. She saw for herself a life that would be a series of misunderstandings, and hated herself—and the world—for it.
She touched her cheek where the previous night her father had slapped her. She could still hear the sound of it, his hand swinging backward and then slicing through the air toward her as she stood unable to move. That moment of humiliation had thankfully left no mark on her skin, but part of her also wanted her face to be disfigured so that even strangers could tell a man needn’t be soused up to the eyeballs like Drunkard Laloo to be a bad father.
Her resolve grew firmer. She wasn’t going home (not today, not ever). She would never wear earrings again (not today, not ever).
Textbooks in her bag, she walked outside, into the corridor where her brother was gleefully narrating the events of last night—and then he slapped Runu-Didi—to his friend Pari, who was a hundred times smarter than him and made sure he knew it too. Runu told him not to wait for her, and the donkey spat out a swear more colorful than usual.
Since he had been born, she had considered Jai with a blend of loathing and admiration; it seemed to her that he had a way of softening the imperfections of life with his daydreams and the self-confidence that the world granted boys (which, in girls, was considered a character flaw or evidence of a dismal upbringing). At least tonight she wouldn’t have to sleep next to the smells he carried on him, sometimes the butcher shop in Bhoot Bazaar, sometimes tea and cardamom, and always in winter the filth of days that accumulated on him from his refusal to wash himself with cold water.
Runu leaned against a pillar in the corridor and watched her brother leave. On the other side of the pillar stood a boy from her class. Pravin turned up wherever she went, the school ground where she trained, the ration shop from where she procured sugar and kerosene, and the basti water