Fifteen Lanes - S.J. Laidlaw Page 0,51

and I do? We were just kids ourselves.

“Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,” said VJ, “but I can’t wait to get started. Where are the art supplies?”

Noor

Coming first …

In the months after Parvati’s rape I threw myself into my studies. Only at school could I pretend everything was the way it had been before. Parvati had become a ghost. Suresh hadn’t stopped with the single rape; he took her every night he could find her. Together we hid from him, constantly changing where we slept. Still, there were days I got home from school and Parvati was nowhere to be found. On those days, I knew he’d found her first.

In the middle of September every year, regular classes ceased and we wrote our first-semester exams. Just before we broke for the holiday, the grades were posted. My friends and I always met at school to look at our grades together. For many children, this was a time of great anxiety and disappointment. For me, it was a rare time when I didn’t feel like a fake. I always took firsts in English, Math, and Biology. Several times I’d taken firsts in Chemistry as well.

None of my schoolmates knew where I came from. Over the years I’d created a family history of such complexity, with so many embellishments, that to them it had the familiarity of truth. I retold the lies so often that at times I almost believed them myself. My classmates knew all about my father, the mid-level civil servant, my mother, the former actress who gave up fame to marry him, and of course my siblings. It was my one disappointment that I couldn’t enhance their attributes, but Aamaal already went to the same school, and I had every hope that someday Shami would as well. Aamaal had been coached to maintain our fiction. With her sweet face and enormous, thickly fringed eyes, people were always inclined to believe her. They never suspected that in addition to being beautiful she was a skilled liar.

The one time I felt closest to my fictionalized self was when I looked at my exam results. No one would have believed that the girl who was awarded so many prizes came from a brothel in Kamathipura. Even I found it hard to reconcile. My two selves—the school-going girl and the daughter of a sex worker—felt like two separate people, awkwardly inhabiting one body. I was like a hijra, not one thing and not the other, but a third thing entirely, unique and not happily so.

Gajra and I stood with a group of our friends near the school gate discussing our results.

“I knew you’d sweep the awards,” said Gajra, squeezing my arm excitedly. Her pleasure was so complete you might have thought she’d achieved the results herself. Gajra had never taken a first in anything in her life, though her kindness outshone all my achievements. I could never understand why being a truly good person was overlooked when it came to handing out medals. It seemed to me it must be much more challenging, considering how few people managed it.

“Of course she did well,” said Sapna, whose scores were never far behind mine. “Her father does nothing but sit at home and coach her. My father’s a doctor. He can’t be spending every minute helping me.”

“Which is why you have hours of paid tutoring every evening,” said Kiran, Sapna’s best friend and fiercest competitor. I actually think their friendship survived only because I so often snatched the wins from both of them.

“Well, it appears to have paid off. You beat me in only one subject this year,” said Sapna.

“The year’s not over yet,” Gajra intervened. “There’s still plenty of time for everyone to get good results. The important thing is to improve our own scores.”

“Tell that to my father,” said Sapna darkly.

“I think you’re going to have to tell him yourself,” said Kiran, forgetting their recent fight and slinging her arm around Sapna’s shoulder. She nodded to the other side of the street, where Sapna’s father was just emerging from a parked car.

I recognized him the minute I saw him, though it had been well over a year since he’d come into Shami’s examining room. That was why he’d looked so familiar. It wasn’t because I’d already taken Shami to him before.

I looked away, hoping he hadn’t noticed me. The danger of my identity being discovered was far worse than just being caught in a lie. Ours was a fee-paying school,