The Lost Girl

  9

  Sculpture

  It’s weeks before I think of Lekha as anything but Amarra’s classmate. But one afternoon after school, when I find myself sitting with her in Coffee Day, at the very table where Amarra sometimes sat with Sonya and Jaya, it dawns on me she’s not just a girl in my class. She’s a friend.

  She makes me laugh, often at her, but she doesn’t mind. She also tends not to listen to me. No matter how many times I tell her that “Palestines” are not what she thinks they are, she insists I must be wrong and that “Philistine” is in fact a country in the Middle East. I don’t give up. She has no talent for metaphor, either, but insists on using it.

  I realize she’s also incredibly perceptive when she admits one day that she knew almost from the start that I wasn’t Amarra.

  “It’s the way you move,” she says. “You’re too light on your feet. Like you’re ready to run. Or you’re about to growl and defend yourself. Like a hurt wolf cub. Lost but wolfy, you know?”

  She shows me places in town I haven’t yet visited. Restaurants, rooftop cafés, cute little shops, and enormous stores. We go see movies at the multiplexes, buy peanuts off street vendors, visit shiny bars and hope no one questions our age as we order drinks with long, exotic-sounding names. We can never manage more than one or two because they’re so expensive and we’re poor teenagers. We sit under the hot sun and design costumes for famous literary characters: Lekha comes up with them and I draw them for her. We splash through puddles as we desperately try to hail rickshaws in the rain. I learn very quickly that the price a rickshaw driver will charge is directly proportional to the amount of rain rocketing down on the city at the time.

  “Times like this,” I tell her one hot April evening, during the last week of school before the summer, “you remind me of one of my guardians.” She’s pirouetting on the step in front of me, striking a ridiculous pose as I try to sketch her. “She’s as dopey as you.”

  “A new word! Dopey. I like it. Like the dwarf. Does it mean charming and beautiful?”

  “If you know the dwarf, you’ll know it doesn’t.”

  “Did you not think Dopey was adorable? Shame on you.” She stops pirouetting, moving on to a contorted imitation of a plié. “Well? What does it mean?”

  “In Ophelia’s case,” I say, smiling, “it means she has her heart in the right place, but her head is definitely full of dust and feathers and has a few necessary ingredients missing.”

  “Her name is Ophelia? Good grief. Has she done anything to ward off the evil eye?”

  “Her father is a Weaver. I don’t think she can ward off the evil eye.”

  “Creepy?”

  “No,” I say, “but I saw him on telly once and there was something cold about him, like he wouldn’t let anything stop him from getting what he wanted.”

  Lekha abandons her posing. She sits down next to me. “Eva,” she says, having by now coaxed my real name out of me, “I overheard someone in class talking the other day. About the Weavers. And hunters. You. All kinds of stuff. And normally I don’t listen to a word anyone says about you but they did say one half-sensible thing. Ray used that Mark thingy-wingy”—she points to my neck—“to give you away.”

  I make a face. “We’re supposed to hide them. Ray proved that doesn’t always work, though. I think the Weavers decided it was worth the risk of exposing us.” I give her a tiny smile. “See, this way we never forget who we belong to.”

  “Then . . .” Lekha hesitates. “Then you do belong to them? Completely?” I nod. “And they could destroy you if you didn’t be Amarra properly?”

  I nod again.

  “Does that mean you’re stuck here forever? But Amarra would have gone off to university. She was thinking of applying to places in the US and the UK and Australia. She used to talk about searching online for the best archaeology courses.”

  “It means I’ve pretty much got to go to university and study archaeology,” I tell her. “Echoes are generally expected to do what their other would have done. I could study art instead. Or not go to university at all. But if I did that, Neil or Alisha could report me to the Weavers. They’d show them how different my choices are from what Amarra’s would have been.” I shrug. “Or maybe no one would say anything, maybe they’d just let it go.”

  “But that’s unlikely. They’ll want you to be like her.”

  “Exactly,” I say. “So there’s wiggle room, but they made me for a reason, Lekha. I have to stick by that.”

  “What about Ray?”

  “What about him?”

  “If he decides after all that Amarra is in you somewhere and he gives you a chance—would you have to be with him? Romantically?”

  I nod. I think about Ray, winking at me that first lunch at school. The way he smiled, the way he looked at me. He was gorgeous. Temperamental, moody. He told me I was beautiful. He thought she was. He was rash and hot tempered and he was hers. He loved her. For a little while, he thought he loved me. And I pretended to love him.

  Lekha stares at me. “Would you really be able to forget the guardian you told me all about? Sean?”

  Would I?

  Would I have loved Ray, really, truly, if I had just forgot-ten Sean? The sunlight dances off the pavement, making the air shimmer. I try to put Sean in this setting, imagining him with sweat in his hair and the sun in his eyes. His crooked smile broke my heart every time. He had the most amazing green eyes. He was irritatingly practical, grounded, clever. He broke the small rules for me but never the big one. He was there when I needed him and he was there when I didn’t. I’d have loved him if he’d let me. But I will never know if he could have loved me. If he did.

  I never forgot Sean. He was always there, a breath away, every moment I spent with Ray. He never left me alone. And I’m not sure he ever will.

  “I don’t know,” I tell Lekha truthfully.

  She shakes her head. “I think I’d have a coroner if I were you,” she says. “I have a very low tolerance for turmoil.”

  “Coronary.”

  “No, sweetie pie,” she says tenderly, “that’s someone who works in a morgue.”

  I sigh.

  “What are you doing out here with me, anyway?” I ask her. “Didn’t you tell me last week that it’s your mother’s birthday today?”

  “It is,” she says, “but she’s out of town, so I am as free as a daisy.” This is a familiar refrain. Her mother is often traveling. “I always stay with my father when she’s away. I like him. He never gives me veggies with my dinner.”

  I laugh. I stretch out in the sun, yawning on the steps. “I know we have exams starting in the next few weeks,” I say, “but I’m so happy this is the last official week of school. I’m sick of being there every single day.”

  “You mean you’re sick of everyone acting like you personally shot their dog,” says Lekha.

  I snort out a startled laugh. “That is rather how is it, isn’t it?”

  When it starts to get dark, we share a rickshaw back to our houses. I go in without any sense of homecoming. It will never be home to me, though it has become reassuringly familiar. The atmosphere never changes. It’s peaceful, filled with the hum of conversation or Alisha clattering in her attic or Neil shuffling through papers in his study. But the peace is a tenuous thing, hovering on the surface, and if you shift too suddenly you could pop it like a balloon. And underneath is fear, and pain, and grief.

  I stop long enough to thoroughly muss Sasha’s hair before going up to Amarra’s room. My last Lit essay of the school year is due on Friday, and I want to finish it tonight.

  I’m halfway through when Alisha knocks on the door. “Busy?” she asks, surveying my neat handwriting and diligent attempt at homework with an amused look. It took me years to copy Amarra’s handwriting.

  “A bit,” I admit. “I’m just stuck.”

  “Need some help?”

  “It’s this poem.” I show it to her. “The question talks about truth and lies and how
everything in the city is a mask, but all I seem to notice about the poem is how sad it is.”

  Alisha smiles faintly. “I know this one. It is sad.”

  “All I can see when I read it is that there’s this man and he lost his world and now he wants to go back to the place he once belonged to. And it’s sad because he can’t go back; that world’s not there anymore.”

  “Then say so,” says Alisha. “Write that.” But there’s an odd note in her voice, and I look up at her. Her mouth trembles. What have I said? She tries to smile. “It’s nothing. What you said just made me think . . . of something . . .”

  I wait. She glances down at me before explaining.

  “This city used to be a different world. When Neil and I were younger, we could get in the car and go driving late into the night, stop at an ice-cream shop or at the Imperial for biryani. This one time . . .” She laughs. “Your aunt Hema and I decided to be silly. I was eighteen. She blazed into my room late at night and said, ‘Come on, Al, let’s paint the town red.’ So we got some red paint out of the shed, drove all over town, and painted random walls bright red.”

  I laugh. She smiles, too. “Do you remember when you were about four and we took you to the disco? We danced. You held my leg because you were dizzy and then you giggled and looked up at me and said, ‘Mummy, the song’s called “Dizzy,” too,’ and we found that so funny.” She hums the song quietly. “It was a whole world,” she says, “and it faded away.”

  There are tears creeping down her face, leaving glistening trails like the wet left behind by a snail. My throat is tight, and it occurs to me that she’s crying because she can. Because she was once young and happy and silly and never knew anything about laws, or loss, or risks and sacrifices and desperate pretenses. Her whole, unfractured world is gone. And it’s clear how fragile her belief in me is, how little of Amarra she must actually see when she looks at me.

  I want to make her feel better, but I don’t know how Amarra would have done it. I give her an awkward hug. She sniffles out an embarrassed laugh and looks around for a tissue, trying to compose herself. At the dresser, she finds the box of makeup Ophelia gave me when I left home. She brightens.

  “Ooh, where did this come from?”

  I tense, forming my reply carefully. “Someone gave it to me.”

  We spend the next half hour being silly with the makeup. Sasha joins in and demands we paint patterns on her face with lipstick. For the moment, at least, the pretense remains intact.

  I’m in a good mood on Friday. I’ve been waiting for the end of the school year for weeks. I’m going to have to spend most of the holiday studying, until our exams are over, but I don’t have to be back in school except on exam days. Not until July, anyway. Sean always started school in September and finished in June, but here we run from July to April; it won’t be long before we’re back for the new school year.

  The last class of the day is English Literature. Mrs. Singh divides the class into pairs and asks each pair to talk for five minutes about a writer we’ve studied this year. I wait, fully expecting to be paired with Sam, which would be a very Mrs. Singh-like thing to do.

  I’ve underestimated her. She pairs me with Ray.

  I stay very still, arms folded on the table. In front of us, Ray’s profile is dark, brooding, and Hamlet-esque in expression. I can almost picture him tearing his hair out.

  Sam, who is supposed to be working with Lekha, comes to sit by her. He edges away from me, apparently convinced I’ll choose this moment to wreak vengeance for my black eye and bruised face. I ignore him, watching Ray instead.

  “And what do the two of you think you’re doing?” Mrs. Singh demands, glaring at Ray and me. “Did I or did I not tell you to work together? Amarra, come forward.”

  “I’d rather stay here, Mrs. Singh,” I say politely.

  “Ray, move back, then.”

  “I’m staying here,” he says through gritted teeth.

  Mrs. Singh sends us both out of the classroom and slams the door after us.

  “That was childish,” snaps Ray.

  “Ever heard of a pot and kettle?” I snap back, irritated.

  I’m still aggravated hours later. He has a remarkable knack for getting under my skin. I scowl out the window on the bus, stomp loudly into the house, and bang mugs together as I make myself a drink. Trust him to ruin my good spirits. Nobody else is home. Lekha is at the dentist’s. There’s no one to distract me.

  Then I think of the attic. If Alisha’s studio can’t make me feel better right now, nothing else will. I go upstairs.

  It’s as beautiful as I remember. I’ve been here plenty of times since my first visit, but it never gets any less awe-inspiring. I stand in the middle of the attic and turn, absorbing each piece of this world as slowly as I can, savoring it hungrily, joyfully.

  There are boxes in a corner of the attic. One is marked JUNK, so I look through it and find scraps of paper, wires, brushes, feathers. I pick out some tough wire and long black feathers.

  Hot summer air flutters through the windows. I smell salt and earth and baked concrete, and it makes me want to be outside, high up in the air.

  I twist the wire into a shape. At first I start to make a bird, a seagull or a crane, like the wax birds I used to give Sean. But I keep seeing something else in my mind. I stop to imagine the sculpture I want to create.

  Wings, I think. Not a whole bird. Just the wings. I put my hands back to the wire and get to work. My supple fingers thrive beneath the coil as I pick apart separate pieces, heft them, twist them, shape them into the frame I need for the wings. I lose track of time, lose awareness of the real world beyond these walls. After I’ve made the frames, I retrieve a tube of superglue from a shelf. It’s crude, but I’m not working to make something perfect. Slowly and meticulously, I stick feather after feather to the wire, blending, layering, the dark wings in my mind becoming clearer as they become real. It’s fitting that the feathers are so ragged, unformed. Fitting for an angel the gods want to tear from the sky, who must ride on a bird until her broken wings heal.

  Abruptly, I become aware of a sharp intake of breath. My concentration cracks. I look up at Alisha. She’s frozen in the doorway behind me, her face so pale I’m afraid she’s going to faint. My skin heats up and I stand.

  “I’m sorry,” I say hastily. “I know I shouldn’t have. I should’ve asked, but I came up here and I saw all that stuff you were going to throw away. . . .”

  I trail off, because it seems inadequate, and I don’t think she’s listening.

  “Did you do this?” she whispers.

  She moves closer, like a ghost, her eyes fixed intently, enormously, on my unfinished wings. I nod uncertainly.

  She’s quiet for a long time. She looks like she has stepped into a familiar world, but one that has lost all meaning.

  When she finally turns to face me, there’s a look on her face that makes me think this is the first time she is truly, properly, looking at me.

  “It’s sad,” she says.

  “I know.” I trace a feather on the wings with my finger. “But they’re supposed to mean things will be happy, in the end.”

  She nods.

  “So what did you think?” she asks tentatively.

  “About your work?”

  She nods again. She’s asked me what I think before, but always casually, with no expectation. This time it’s different. This time she needs my answer.

  I tell her the truth. “These things make me feel like I’m not in my body any longer. Like I don’t have a body or a past anymore, but I’m still more myself than I’ve ever been.”

  Her eyes are shining with tears. “Yes,” she says very softly, “that’s what I wanted people to feel.”

  I wait, sensing she has more to say.

  “She wasn’t interested in any of this,” she tells me. “You’d know that as well as anybody. She would never have made this.”

  She gazes at my wings, haunted. Her eyes brim and the tears
spill down her face. Her voice breaks as she asks the question.

  “She’s not here anymore, is she?”

  I shake my head. Then Alisha begins to weep, and I know that, for her, the pretending is over.

  10

  Ghost

  The city is always quieter on Sundays. And Sasha is always at her most restless on Sundays. A couple of weeks into our holiday, she begs to be taken into town for the day.

  The house isn’t much fun for her. We do our best, Nikhil and I, but even we can’t keep Sasha from noticing that her mother is in desperate pain and her father has finally given in to his own grief. They act normally when we’re all together. They don’t treat me any differently; they tease Nikhil about being an old soul; they laugh and smile and play with Sasha the way they always did. But she’s not blind. She can see beyond it.

  I take her out that Sunday, holding her firmly by the hand as we walk up our street. At the corner, I flag down a rickshaw. Sasha chatters excitedly.

  “Where to, Sash?” I ask her.

  She turns her face up to me doubtfully. “Anywhere?”

  “Anywhere.” I wince. If she suggests Mysore Zoo, I’m in a stew. Mysore is three hours away.

  “Lunch?”

  “That’s all? Lunch?”

  She nods eagerly. I can’t help smiling. She could have had anything, and she picked lunch. Not long ago, an ordinary day out was such a treat for me, too. I hear a ghost of a laugh, a boy telling me I don’t have to be ashamed, a flicker of green eyes. Sean. I swallow and push the memory away.

  I consider the places I know and settle on a Chinese restaurant on Church Street. Sasha loves Chinese food.

  I’ve been waiting for a blow. When Alisha realized Amarra was gone, I thought she’d be angry with me. But she’s only grieving. I waited for her or Neil to decide they don’t want to keep me, but it’s been more than two weeks and they haven’t said a word about a Sleep Order. Maybe they don’t want to get rid of me after having gotten to know me all these months.