Fifteen Lanes - S.J. Laidlaw Page 0,30

went through the crowd and it parted to let a boy step forward. Everyone in the school knew him, by reputation if nothing else. He had a following of his own, the school’s beautiful people.

“Speak for yourself, darling,” he said to Madison in a mocking tone. “I for one am positively delighted she’s here. She’s the first interesting person we’ve had at this school since, well, since I arrived.”

Drop-dead-gorgeous VJ Patel, son of Bollywood icon Sanjay Patel and a rising film star himself, held out his hand.

“What do you say, Slut? Would you join me for lunch?” He shot me a saucy grin guaranteed to make any female not already in her grave swoon.

I’d never spoken to him before, and would have said he didn’t know of my existence, but I did the only sensible thing I could do. I took his hand.

Noor

Sleeping on the street …

“It’s easy,” boasted Parvati when I told her I would have to join her sleeping on the street.

It had been two weeks since the man had tried to buy me, and Ma was a bundle of nerves. She acted like it was the first time a man had spoken to me in that way. Admittedly, I’d never told her about the bad things men said to me or the many times they’d tried to touch me, even her own customers. I always assumed she knew. In the same way I knew what men did to her. I thought it was our secret language. We kept our eyes open but our mouths sealed shut. After that night, I began to wonder.

She paced our small room for days. No one could calm her. Deepa-Auntie was the only one who dared try and Ma bit her head off. Prita-Auntie, who’d known Ma the longest and was the closest thing she had to a friend, made herself scarce. Lali-didi, who’d recently been moved into our room, sat nervously on her own bed, watching us both because suddenly we were always together. Ma wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She even walked me to school and was waiting at the gate at the end of each day.

At first the novelty of her attention was gratifying. It was the first time I’d felt like I was more than a servant, perhaps even loved, but Ma’s restless anger quickly wore on me. I created excuses to steal time away from her. One day I deliberately spoke out of turn in class to get kept after school. That was a mistake though. When my teacher finally let me go, Ma was a hissing cobra, barely able to contain herself until we got home, where she beat me.

I was the one who suggested I was too old to sleep in our house. “The men look at me differently now,” I told her. “It will be safer if I sleep elsewhere.”

I didn’t say that men had looked at me this way as long as I could remember. Was there any other way for a man to look at a girl?

“But where will you sleep?” asked Ma.

It was a stupid question. How many people did we know who slept in the street every night? Did she think I could give her the coordinates of the patch of pavement I would claim as my own?

“I’ll go with Parvati,” I said. “She knows someone with a small room we can share.”

This was a lie and Ma knew it. If she’d believed me she would have asked for more details. To have a room was sufficiently extraordinary that it bore investigation. Perhaps there would be space for Aamaal and Shami as well. But Ma said nothing.

She crinkled her already deeply lined brow and gave me a hollow-eyed stare. It went through my head that she used to be pretty and I wondered if her horror that men were noticing me was in part because she struggled now to get their attention. What would happen if men no longer paid to be with her? How would she support us? I didn’t know how old Ma was. Like most people, myself included, her birth wasn’t registered and the date was long forgotten. She didn’t even have a fake birth certificate, like the one I got to register for school. She’d once said she was barely in her teens when she had me, so she had to be in her twenties still, but time moved faster in our community. Many women, their bodies wasted by disease and addiction, didn’t live