I said, “Those adoption things must be for babies. I’m twelve. You’re fifteen. Who’s going to adopt us? We’ll just get caught and have to come back.”
“If you don’t want to come, don’t come. I’ll find another way of leaving.”
*
The manure van used to come from far away a few times a year. I can’t recall how often. I felt as if scarcely a month passed between each delivery of cowdung and sodden leaves. Since Jugnu went, it had been my job to unload the van. I shovelled the manure with a spade into a smaller basin that I carried on my head just as he used to, and tipped it out into a heap by the shed. It took me two days. At about six in the evening on the second day, the driver came to where I was working and stood watching me. “How much longer? She looks like a stick and tries to do the work of a man,” he said. “That bastard Bhola has no brains. I should’ve been out of here hours ago.” He spat a red stream towards the basin I was filling.
He went off to the hut where Bhola and the others were smoking and drinking. “Call someone to help,” he shouted, “I need to get going in an hour.”
This was as Champa had planned. I waited for Bhola to say I could get someone else to help.
In a minute, Bhola’s voice: “Go get someone. Move that skinny ass.”
I shouted, “Is anyone there? Is that you, Champa? Can you come here? I need help.” She had been waiting nearby.
She ran towards the van saying, “What do you want? Don’t expect me to do all the heavy work!”
The two of us scurried about emptying the van. There were still five sacks left to unload. My legs trembled and my arms shook as I struggled back and forth with the basin. Our heads and bodies stank of manure. My hair was crawling with dung beetles.
Before the driver came back, Champa and I hid ourselves under the heap of empty sacks in the back of the van, among the rest of his junk. There was a spare tyre, empty liquor bottles, flower pots meant for delivery to some other place. I was suffocating under the scratchy sacks. They smelled of rotted dung. Bugs and ants crawled over me. I was itching all over, but we had to keep still. It felt days, those minutes of waiting. I thought people would start looking for us at the ashram. There was a desperate moment during the wait when I thought I could run back, fetch you, Piku, and smuggle you into the van as well. There was enough space, and you would have taken up so little. But it was too late: we could hear the driver coming. He came towards the back. Then we heard him lurch off towards the front and get into the seat. The door banged shut. The van jolted forward. Long minutes later it came to a halt. We heard the scraping of metal, the clank of latches and chains. A voice said, “Still here? Want to spend the night or what?”
The driver said, “Nope, I can find better chicks out in the city. More flesh on them.” They tittered and someone thumped the side of the van. It sounded like a bomb blast inside, where we were. You would have started screaming for sure, Piku. You were always scared of loud sounds. The van began to rumble along again. There were jolts and bumps that threw us against each other.
I cried all the way in that van, thinking of the smile on your face the evening before when I stroked your knobbly legs and arms in the way that always soothed you. I kept telling you I would come back for you. Did you understand that? I was the only person who knew what you were trying to say with your whimpers and squeals. That evening you made no sounds at all.
The van stopped after quite a while. I did not know why or for how long it would stop, but Champa poked her face out of the sacks, then stabbed me in the ribs with her fingers and said, “Out. Get out.” The two of us had barely scrambled out from the back when the van started again. It trundled ahead and then it was gone. It took only a few seconds.
My knees felt weak. My eyes were blinded by the beep-beep-beep of horns. A woman’s high-pitched voice was sing ing on a loudspeaker. Bright, white headlights from cars. And people — I had never seen so many people. I didn’t know the world had so many people in it. They didn’t pause for two scrawny children fighting their way down a street.
Champa held my hand and dragged me towards a line of auto-rickshaws. She pushed me in and she told the driver where to go. The auto-rickshaw began to move. Then moved faster. We were breathing open, fresh air. Gas lamps peppered with insects hung over hand-carts selling everything from boiled eggs to hot parathas. And in the distance, all along the road, was a frill of white foam on black cloth — the sea that Jugnu had told us was very close.
The sea he had been thrown into.
Champa had told me what to say when we reached the girls’ home. We were cousins. We had no parents. Our uncle used to beat us and so we had run away. We had enough scars and bruises and cigarette burns for this to be convincing. “Not a word about the ashram,” Champa said. “Everyone rich and famous is his disciple, they all think he’s a god. They’ll never believe anything bad about him. They’ll take us straight back there and then we’ll be dead, like Jugnu.”
“What about Piku? What about the other girls? We can’t just leave them there. We should tell the truth.”
“Just stop being such a saint,” Champa snarled. “I’ll throw you out of this auto right now.”
I spoke to you in my head then. I speak to you in my head all the time. Do you know the taste of betrayal? How would you know it? It’s as if your clothes are full of sand, so full of sand that the grains bite you and pierce you and scratch you. You shake out your clothes, you wash them, you wash yourself, but even then, days later, years later, in the crevices of your toes, in the lining of the pockets, the grains pierce you. They’re unbearable, those grains that don’t go away whatever you do. You no longer know the real from the nightmare. Your heart, mind, mouth, everything is filled with sand.
For a month, maybe three or six months, I stayed at the girls’ home. They put Champa somewhere else soon after we got there. I don’t know where she went — to another home or to a family. The home never told anyone where its children were being sent. I did not see her again. They had told me that they would soon send me off as well. They were hoping to find foster parents for me. Nobody would know about me either. Not even you, Piku.
I did not talk about the ashram to them, but I wrote. All day I wrote. Half the evening I wrote. I used an exercise book with many pages. I wore out pencils. I started with the day my father was killed and wrote everything I could remember. I wrote especially about you. I wrote about how you would die if you were left in the ashram because of the way you were.
When I had finished writing, I kept the book safe until it was time. I was to be sent off to my new home: first to Delhi, then to some other country. A happy future, they told me, with a woman who had waited a long time to adopt a child.
I stole out of the home the day before I was to be sent to Delhi. I had taken down a newspaper’s address from the copy of it that came to the home every day. It was the same newspaper that had written about us once — the article which had a picture of me and some of the other girls with Guruji. I had pasted together sheets from the exercise book to make an envelope and written the newspaper’s name on it, then put in my exercise book and stuck my envelope fast with glue. I walked more than an hour, asking every second person on the road for directions, and found my way to the newspaper office. After a moment’s panic that I would lose the book if I let go, I dropped it into the big letter box at the gates of the office. It fell in with a hard thump.