The little girl with no friends reads contentedly enough at her small wooden desk during recess. (We pronounced it ri-CESS.) She sits by the corner of the softboard, likes to tenderly peel the crepe paper sheets that Mrs. Lobo has stapled to its expanse away from their moorings. From her schoolbag she pulls out Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl. Books about heroic friends solving crime, tales of spunky weirdos forceful enough to make dents in their worlds. In second grade, you read for the same reasons you eat candy bars, not to see yourself reflected at you as if from mirrors, and in this case that’s just as well; the little girl does not fall into either category.
• •
Usually, the little girl is smart enough to keep her head down when the other second grade teachers come to eat their lunches and gossip at Mrs. Lobo’s desk. But Mrs. Tareen, who teaches 3B, is getting divorced (we pronounced it DIE-vorced), and the teachers are all whispering about it, making big-big eyes, saris rustling like dry leaves. The details are almost as riveting as James and the Giant Peach, so the little girl looks up and listens with frank interest, forgetting all subterfuge.
“Small water pitchers have big ears, hain na?” says Mrs. Azmi, nudging Mrs. Lobo, who is busy telling the rest about how when she went to Mrs. Tareen’s house for Eid, Mr. Tareen touched her sari pallu very suggestively and also complained how his wife always missed the top of the television set when she did dusting.
They all look up and see the girl staring at them through the fringe of her bowl cut. She looks back down at her book, but it’s too late.
“You can’t sit here like this, OK,” Mrs. Lobo says, rustling over. “This is not good, OK. Go outside! Challo, go play like a normal child!”
The teachers giggle as the little girl walks out, biting her lip. She circles the soccer (we pronounced it football) field, squinting in the noonday sun. Her knee socks have slid down, and she pulls them up, weary as sin itself.
• •
The little boy sneaks up behind her and tries to place a handful of dried leaves on her head. She whips around and says, “Stop it.”
He keeps doing it. Arcing his arm like a lamp, giggling in a maddening way. And so she slaps him. Bloodying his nose. A teacher sees, and she is sent home with a note safety-pinned to her blouse. She has to have it signed by one of her parents.
The note says, in a round and spiteful hand, “Did not behave today. Slapped fellow pupil badly.”
“Next time, slap him well,” her father says.
He chuckles, which is a grown man’s way of giggling, and hands the note back to her. He lifts his newspaper back up between the two of them like he is closing a door.
• •
In third grade, both she and the little boy who salted her with leaves are now in Mrs. Tareen’s class. He is seated at the desk behind her, both of them at the back of the class. Anuj, the boy’s name is. Anuj (we pronounced it Uhn-uj) is confident, loud, a jokester. He has a toothy, pretty grin.
In front of her sits a boy who has no friends. His name is Karan. (We pronounced it Curren.) Karan has a lantern jaw, bulbous staring eyes, and a stink that nestles close, follows him like a stray. Even Mrs. Tareen, who is the kindest of all the elementary school teachers, is mean to him.
During recess, Anuj asks the little girl if she wants to go on the swings, and she looks shocked, and then shyly says, yes, thank you.
• •
Even though she doesn’t turn around to see, a small section of her is aware of Karan sitting at his desk in the now empty classroom, not even a book in front of him, watching the door swing shut, as she and Anuj go out into the bright, hot world.
• •
Anuj’s parents are getting divorced, he says, but he doesn’t care. He spends more time now with the little girl than with his football friends, which delights her even as it makes the two them the target of ridicule, the object of sitting in a tree rhymes.
She tries to show him how to draw Minnie Mouse or make paper origami frogs, but he is uninterested. They spend homework period at the end of the day making rubberdust, which is what Anuj calls the tiny pink and gray curls left behind in an eraser’s wake. They do this every day. They store the clumps of rubberdust in the drawer of the little girl’s wooden desk.
• •
“Let’s stare at the sun,” Anuj says.
They lie on a slope of dry grass, and he squints up into the sky. The girl covers her face with her hands.
“I can’t do it,” she says.
“S’OK,” Anuj says.
It becomes a routine: walk past the football field, pass the guarri hedges, and lie down together, the girl shielding her eyes with her small palms.
“Let’s play get married,” the little girl suggests from behind her hands during a sun-staring session.
“Yuck, no. That’s corrupted,” is Anuj’s matter-of-fact rejoinder.
The rubberdust production continues. Anuj discovers that sawing his steel ruler across his Faber-Castell rubber makes several times the amount of dust. A fourth of the girl’s desk is now full of soft shavings the color of organs. She likes to run her hands through them while Mrs. Tareen writes Hindi vocabulary on the board: नमकीन. बुरा. पुराना पुराना means old, and it also means story, the little girl notes.
• •
At some point, they start sprinkling the rubberdust on Karan’s head. Biting lips to keep from laughing, they wait until the teacher’s back is turned and pepper it into the naked whorls of his scalp as he bends over penmanship or multiplication tables.
(Later, neither the little girl nor the person she grows into, will remember who started this, she or Anuj. That uncertainty will beat its own tattoo within her, bang a hidden gong of shame.)
• •
Anuj grows bolder and bolder, dropping rubberdust onto Karan nearly every time he walks by him. He has begun to get headaches, leaving for hours to sit in the nurse’s office.
Mrs. Tareen says, “You need to get your eyes checked, son. Here, take this note to your parents.”
“My parents don’t care one FART and I don’t need STUPID glasses,” Anuj yells, kicking Mrs. Tareen’s desk legs and running out of the room.
Later he shows the little girl the new rubbers his mom has bought: large, pliable, pinkly beautiful, and they get to work.
• •
Anuj’s mother arrives the next day, during homework period. Mrs. Tareen gives namaste, then says, “If I don’t hear pin-drop silence while I’m in the next room, everyone here will be quite, quite sorry. OK?”
“Yeeesss, Ma’am,” the denizens of 3B say in chorus. It is testimony to how Mrs. Tareen is both strict and beloved that most every child keeps their heads down in their notebooks, yellow HB pencils gripped tight.
“OK fine, challo, let’s get married,” Anuj whispers to the little girl, apropos of nothing. She smiles at him, then raises her eyebrows to signal: watch. She scoops a handful of rubberdust from under the desktop and shows him: she’s been mixing it with color-pencil shavings.
Hand outstretched, she begins to powder it on Karan’s head. Anuj covers his hands with his mouth to muffle his snickering.
Karan whips around, facing the little girl. His bulging eyes are full of tears.
“Why do you do this?” Karan hisses, face twisting, swatting at his own head, and the rubberdust-and-shavings mix dribbles down his forehead and gets into his eyes.
“Ow, oww.”
He rubs his eyes furiously, mewling in pain. The little girl’s mouth turns dry like sand.
She turns around to Anuj, who looks thunderstruck. By now, the other children around them are staring, whispering like so many rustling leaves. Karan runs out of the room, hands over his eyes.
The little girl reaches in and sweeps every bit of rubberdust in her desk into the skirt of her pinafore. Sweat prickles in her armpits and down her back. There is so much of the dust. So much. Why did they do this? Holding the heaps of dry, gray-pink matter in her skirt, she runs to the garbage can. (We called it dustbin.) She shakes out her pinafore, trembling, her ears buzzing. The class’s whispers burrow into her. A sonic drill. She runs out to look for Karan, shoving her palms hard into the swinging door.
When she finds him outside the boys’ bathroom, his eyes are a bright and burning red. He hunches into himself the second he sees her. (Years later, she will look up the word cower in the dictionary, and the image of a child’s bloodshot eyes, lashes wet with hurt, will surface in her and thrash like a fish.)
“I’m sorry, Karan,” the girl says. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”
He turns his head. She wants to cry.
“Sorry. Please. I’m sorry.”
“I won’t tell Ma’am” is all he mumbles, before starting down the stairs to the nurse’s office, and she doesn’t know how to say that that’s not it, that his tattling isn’t remotely the shape of her fear, that the dark creature that has galloped into her chest and gnaws around her organs might actually be kept at bay if Mrs. Tareen thrashed her, sent her to the principal’s office, wrote DID NOT BEHAVE TODAY across the front of her blouse.
She goes back to the classroom. Mrs. Tareen is marking corrections at her desk. Everyone is still doing homework. Anuj has put his head down on his desk, arms folded above it like a roof. He is very still, but she can hear his occasional sniffle, hear the too-fast rustle of his breath.
In front of her, Karan’s chair is empty, stray curls of rubberdust on its wooden seat.
• •
“Can you beat me please?” she asks her father, but he just changes the TV channel to the India-Pakistan match and then to American news.
She locks herself in the cupboard and pinches her legs all over.
• •
Anuj’s mother takes him to get glasses. His headaches persist, wracking him with an evil, shelling pain. He and the little girl do not talk much anymore.
The little girl sharpens Karan’s pencils for him and drops Quality Street candies onto his desk, until she sees that he simply throws them away unacknowledged.
Even with glasses, Anuj has to sit up in the front now to see the chalkboard. He bumps into desks; he walks half his face smack into the doorframe, clutches his head, lets out a noise lost somewhere between moan and scream.
The girl goes back to reading books at recess. She draws Minnie Mouse again and again, but with long mustaches and bat-like teeth.
• •
One day he isn’t at school. And then the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next.
“Excuse me, Ma’am, where is Anuj, please?” the girl asks, voice shaking a little, when she brings up her penmanship for inspection.
Mrs. Tareen says that Anuj has to go to a special school now, that he won’t be coming back.
• •
In fourth grade, they all have numerous alien subjects to study, and their old class sections are shuffled, so no more Karan. The girl opens her new geography textbook. (We pronounced it JOG-reff-ee.) On its flyleaf is printed a quote from Mohandas Gandhi. It says,
I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test:
Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj (freedom) for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?
She feels like this is the beginning of an answer, a tranquilizer dart to the thick, muscled limbs of the stalking creature within. She copies it again in her purple-ruled notebook, the curls of the word talisman shining in wet ink.
Later the girl will become a person who learns, wearily, that Gandhi was racist against the blacks of Africa, that he liked sleeping next to naked nubile girls to test his willpower, that he fought to keep the caste system in place—pin the poorest and the weakest exactly where they were in the scheme of things.
• •
Please listen. I grew up in a place that I cannot return to. When I search for my old home on Google Maps, it says Result Not Found. Shake me, and the past rattles like broken circuitry. I make myself a mug of tea and close my eyes. Heat radiates through the ceramic and into my palms.
I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating heavily, go sit at my computer and type out a story. I title it The Nature of Evil, The Nature of Good. I send the story in to my writing group. They are mystified and slightly uncomfortable. Why is the little girl the only one left without a name, they ask. They are nervous about how to pronounce everything.
“The relevance of this seems grounded in a kind of cultural specificity that the narrator doesn’t include the audience in on,” one man says carefully.
Part of me wants to give the story over to someone in my group to write, start over, make their own in clarity and directness. Maybe someone would set down, clean and loud, right at the start, “The first friend I ever made went blind.”
After talking about my story, they discuss the solar eclipse that is days away. Some of them will take off work, drive to something they call the path of totality. The rest mull over how to buy glasses to stare at the sun in supposed safety. The man says he will order them in bulk for us.
“You in?” he asks me, and I shake my head: no.
• •
In fourth grade, the girl’s father buys the family their first computer. After school, she turns the machine on and sits in front of the bright, hot screen. Her parents are away at work. She marvels at how it lets her erase sentences without using rubbers, so clean and easy, no debris left behind. She stares at the upright, blinking line that is the door for words to walk out of, lifts her fingers to the keys, and pushes down.
