I am Squatting on a Mound

I am squatting on a mound near the river and feeling sad.

The sun is rolling in the night and far away from where I have to squint my eyes so they can make out some of what’s there, I see my sister taking the dirt road, the one down there that takes people right out of Beldangi. I am squatting on a mound and I don’t know if I’ll see her again.

Yesterday, when I was having what boys have here, which is a bowl of cereal flour that white men in big blue trucks bring for us once every month, Ama put a little girl in front of me and said here, this is your new sister. The flour, when mixed with hot water, makes a fizzling noise. That was the noise I was poking my thumb in when Ama said that.

Ama liked saying these kinds of things. Things that make your head spin because some while ago she also lost me for a whole week by saying seven other people in the world looked like me. She had me looking all over Beldangi, past the White River, the old Sequoia tree, until people started pushing me away because I had my hands in their faces.

“I found her in the bazaars for you,” Ama said.

People here go to the bazaars after waking up at the end of the night before the day breaks so they can make full use of any light the day gives. Before they do that, though, they head to the water standpipe and fight with their neighbors until the water dies. It’s the stale heat from their mouths that kills the water. Then they carry that heat to the bazaars, where they fight some more.

“That’s why the bazaars are so difficult to breathe in, Ama said. “It’s the heat from all the shouting that even the freshness of the morning cannot cool. That’s why I had to save her life. She was dying in the heat. That’s why I had to bring her here. You see why?”

“I see,” I said.

“And that’s why people will come looking for her, because I saved her and brought her here to save her from the heat. You see why?”

“I see.”

“And I know they’ll ask you about her, and when they do, you tell them that you’ve never seen her. You hear me? That you’ve never heard of her.

“I hear,” I said.

The White River is narrow and not so white but filled with lumps of mud. If you stand still in the river tadpoles will swim between your toes and you will begin to sink in the sand. If you like the sinking feeling and try to push in your feet deeper, a piece of glass will cut your sole and touch the bone in your heels and give you a sharp tickle. Though that’s if you don’t know where to stand. Because I’ve been with the river for as long as I can remember, I know well the places where not to push in my feet too deep.

On hot days like yesterday, my friends and I get in the river and throw rocks at each other. We find the rocks with our feet on the riverbed. On hot days like yesterday, days hot enough to heat our hard heads and crisp our thick skins, we hope for the breeze to make a pass. But when the breeze doesn’t, because it likes to hold its breath whenever it passes through Beldangi, and we get only the crinkling sun above us, we give ourselves away to the wet mud on the river bank and the cold earth seeps through our skin and settles us down.

Yesterday, as I lay on the floor looking up at the empty sky, my head started wandering off to think about the little girl. I pulled my hair to the side so it would stop. Ama doesn’t like it when my mind wanders off. That is what gets you stoned, she says. But my head is hard like that so it keeps on going. It keeps on going until it reaches a vast plain and stumbles on these things… these realizations that don’t really come out of my mouth but get stuck in my throat like fishbones that slide back down to my chest to stay there. I thought about the little girl like that, under the sun and above the earth, with a pain in my chest. But the way things are here is that when the water slapped us wet on the river banks, it choked out a few words from one of my friends: “Your new sister, I hear she’s a rich bitch.”

That friend is Deepen. He is one eye blind. He lost it in a fight with Lokesh over a game of marbles. Deepen kicked Lokesh in his gut and Lokesh fell to his knees and turned red, holding in his tears. He sobbed and screeched. And when a snot hung from his nose, Deepen and I laughed. Lokesh must’ve lost it then because he went home and dragged back a cricket bat.

You don’t have it in you, I’d told Lokesh.

Deepen looked at me, then at Lokesh, who ran towards him screeching and swung the bat at his head, where the face is. Deepen dropped like a log and blood gushed out of him. We dunked his head in the river, so the bleeding would stop. Which it did. Deepen cried on his way home covering his face with his hand. Two days later when he couldn’t count the fingers we placed in front of his eye, that was when we knew he was done in. He’s been trying to get us back since. That’s why we like to stay on the left side of his head, where he can’t see us so easily but we can see him. And that’s why I got up in a snap and dragged my legs across the heavy river and blew my fist on his hard head. When those words came out of him like sewage water under the hot sun, that was what I did.

It was when I saw my sister again that I saw her for the first time. But by then, by yesterday evening, word had gotten far about my sister and people had started flocking to our hut from all over Beldangi. She sat on our patio, under our thatched roof, eating cereal flour. Her back was straight, like a bamboo shoot. Ama came in and out of our hut trying to find me.

“Go home,” Ama yelled at the crowd. “There’s nothing to see here. She’s good with me.”

I hid behind the crowd that was looking at my sister’s plump cheeks, red like the tomatoes Ama has me steal from our neighbor’s garden, and then we looked at her nose which was like a soft pebble, then her ears, and holding our hands together, we eyed at the gold that hung from her ears and nose.

“You’ll be sleeping on the floor tonight,” one of them said to me.

“I do it all the time,” I said.

“Get me near her,” another asked. “Do that and I’ll leave you alone.”

They squeezed me out of the crowd, in front. That was when my sister looked towards me. She looked towards me as if I wasn’t there. She looked right through me. That’s what she did. People have been looking right through me since I started looking at them, but when she looked right through me I felt the fishbone pressing in my chest again.

“This is why you get stoned,” Ama yelled when she saw me.

Ama doesn’t like seeing me around people. You don’t know when to keep your mouth shut, she says. Ama doesn’t like it when people gather around our hut too. That’s why I can’t bring my friends over. They’ll steal everything, she says. Will you bring everything back? She asks. I say nothing. That’s why she took out her handkerchief, the one that’s always clumped with snots and gave it a yank so loud it sent the birds and crowd away. It was some yank that she gave. A loud yank.

The cold mud floor woke me up coughing deep in the night. And I would be lying and Ama would say that I’ll burn in hell if I said I didn’t let out a tear or so because that night when Ama and my sister went to bed, when Ama had me sleep on the floor, I thought about it all and let out a tear or so. That’s what I did. But when I awoke and didn’t cough out the fishbone, my head, harder and heavier in mid-sleep, wandered towards my sister. That’s how I was able to hear Ama’s fussing. It’s one of those things I need to see with my eyes to hear.

The thing is: Ama was holding a kerosene lamp and working on her toes to shrug the gold off my sister, who was deep asleep in the cold night. Ama is old but steady on her toes. And it must’ve been then when she was feeling the gold on her hands under the lamp when she saw me from the corner of her eyes because that was when she looked right at me. And when Ama looks at me like that, when she’s on her toes, I think of that one stick she always keeps around. Just in case you act up, she tells me when I ask. When I throw the stick away, it comes back and stands at the corner, waiting for Ama to swing it on me again. The stick is long. It was once fat and short but it’s been thinning towards the top, growing with me. And there is nothing more frightening in Beldangi than seeing that stick in Ama’s hand, because that is when she’s chasing after me.

When Ama chases after me, she lifts her lungi with one hand and wags the stick with the other like she means it. She swats me. Sometimes the stick rips the air behind, sometimes it rips deep into my skin. I run for my life. When I start gaining distance I rejoice, but the wind carries her on its back and she chases me all around the Camps. I cry and scream. A dog barks and barks. Boys on the roadside laugh and throw rocks. When she chased after me yesterday, though, the two of us were alone under the moonlight and I kept quiet.

“You can’t get very far with your giant head,” Ama yelled from behind.

I ran mindlessly, wherever the moonlight shone.

She chased me for a while. She chased me down past the big Sequoia tree, which she usually does because I usually run that way. Then she chased me past the cricket grounds. There she threw the stick at me. She threw it with all her might because it slung to me like a whip and slit opened my back. I stumbled and fell. The grounds are vast, so she can find the stick and try again.

“I told you to keep your mouth shut,” Ama yelled.

“I did, I did,” I said. “But words just fly out of my mouth. They come out and out and it hurts more to keep them in.”

She chased me into the Beldangi jungle, which grows out of the cricket grounds, tree by tree, until it’s lush with vegetation and trees. Things are slower there. The air is thick, so the wind doesn’t blow as hard. There we slowed to a stop, but both of us kept our distance. We gasped and stared at each other through the thickness of the night, through the water in the air that glimmered in the moonlight.

“This is why you get stoned,” Ama said. “Someone has to get through your dense head somehow. Even that doesn’t work!”

When we caught our breath, we tried again. Each time, her voice grew quieter. She yelled less and ran not as fast. We did this a few times until we reached deep into the jungle where the air was too thick with all the clumps of awkwardness in it. Then I asked myself what would happen if she were to catch up. That’s when I stopped running to look behind but saw only the jungle and its trees.

On my way back, my legs ached. I walked quietly. The long slit in my back flared open and close. Ghosts howled behind. Bugs and insects chirped above. But I kept to myself, thinking about the thickness that swallowed Ama whole, and followed the starlight out of the jungle.

Whenever I get out of the jungle, I hear the White River call out to me. It moves violently in the night. It cries and roars. I walk on its bank and sometimes my legs slip because they ache. But I catch myself and stand in the river so it cleans the dirt on my feet in gushes of waves. And if I keep on the bank it takes me to my hut, and if I keep on it for a little longer, it leads me to a mound that rises out of the riverside, on which I have to crawl to get to the top, where the patch of grass is, and from where I can see way down there where Ama is dragging my sister, down there — a little to the left, yes — right there on that road. And that’s what I did.