Text copyright © 2006 by Patricia McCormick
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Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
A TIN ROOF
BEFORE GITA LEFT
THE NEW STUDENT
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SON AND A DAUGHTER
BEYOND THE HIMALAYAS
CALENDAR
ANOTHER CALENDAR
CONFESSION
FIRST BLOOD
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW
WAITING AND WATCHING
ANNOUNCING THE DRY SEASON
FIFTY DAYS WITHOUT RAIN
MAKING DO
SIXTY DAYS WITHOUT RAIN
MAYBE TOMORROW
WHAT IS MISSING
WHEN THE RAIN CAME
STRANGE MUSIC
MAYBE
WHAT THE MONSOON DOES
TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
TRYING TO REMEMBER
WHAT DISASTER SOUNDS LIKE
A BITTER HARVEST
THE PRICE OF A LOAN
HOW LONG THIS WILL LAST
STRANGER
FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS
AN AUSPICIOUS NIGHT
AT THE FESTIVAL
POSSIBILITY
WINDFALL
THE NEXT DAY
NIGHTFALL
A TINY EARTHQUAKE
CITY RULES
A TRADE
A SECOND LOOK
MOVING FORWARD
A NEW WORLD
WHAT I CARRY
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
AN INAUSPICIOUS START
THE CITY
NEXT
ON THE BUS
SEEING A GIRL WITH A LONG BLACK BRAID
LOST
MORE QUESTIONS
NEW CLOTHES
NUMBERS
UNCLE HUSBAND
A REWARD
TRAIN
ONE HUNDRED ROTIS
CITY WAYS
DISGRACED
A CITY OF THE DEAD
WALKING IN THE CITY
HAPPINESS HOUSE
TEN THOUSAND RUPEES
IN THIS ROOM
HOMESICK
TV
A CITY GIRL
OLD MAN
SOLD
THREE DAYS AND THREE NIGHTS
WHAT’S LEFT
HUNGER
WHAT I DON’T DO
AFTER FIVE DAYS
A CUP OF TEA
AFTER SHAHANNA’S VISIT
A PRONOUNCEMENT
A CUP OF LASSI
LUCKY TO BE WITH HABIB
ONE OF THEM
TWILIGHT
HURT
BETWEEN TWILIGHTS
WHAT YOU HEAR
THE DANGER OF PROTECTION
A BUCKET OF WATER
COUNTING
A HANDFUL OF FOG
CHANGES
NEW GIRL
WHAT IS NORMAL
IN MY NEW ROOM
MEETING THE DAVID BECKHAM BOY
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW NOW
PRETENDING
THE CUSTOMERS
MONICA
AN ORDINARY BOY
WHAT IS MISSING NOW
STEALING FROM THE DAVID BECKHAM BOY
UNDERSTANDING ANITA
REMOTE CONTROL
CAUGHT
POLICE
NO ORDINARY BOY, AFTER ALL
SOMETHING ELSE I KNOW ABOUT THE DAVID BECKHAM BOY
YES
WHAT I LEARNED TODAY
MORE WORDS
TWO WORLDS
THE STREET BOY
WHAT I LEARNED TODAY
SHILPA’S SECRET
HOW ARE YOU TODAY?
A STRANGE VOCABULARY
DONT CROSS THE COOK
AN ACCIDENTAL KINDNESS
AM I PRETTY?
NOT COUNTING
UNDERSTANDING MONICA
A GIFT
SOMETHING FOR THE DAVID BECKHAM BOY
STILL NOT COUNTING
WHEN MONICA LEFT
SORRY
THE COST OF A CURE
AN OLD WOMAN
THE LIVING DEAD
BEYOND WORDS
WHAT DESPAIR LOOKS LIKE
A WORD TOO SMALL
REPETITION
LIKE ANITA
INSTEAD OF HARISH
A STRANGE CUSTOMER
A SMALL DANGER
A SECRET
POWER OUTAGE
NO REMEDY
THE STREET BOY
RAID
AFTERMATH
GOSSIP
IMMOBILE
TODAY
ALL I HAVE LEFT
A HIDING PLACE
ANOTHER AMERICAN
CALCULATIONS
JUST A CUP OF TEA
A RECALCULATION
ANY MAN, EVERY MAN
WHATEVER IT TAKES
A WARNING
MONSTER
PASSING THE TIME
SUSPICION
A COCA-COLA
PAYING A DEBT
REVELATION
A KIND OF SICKNESS
STUPIDITY
WAITING
NOT A NEW GIRL ANYMORE
COUGHING
DIGITAL MAGIC
BELIEVING
NAMASTE
READY
TWO KINDS OF STUPIDITY
FORGETTING HOW TO FORGET
PLAYING THE FOOL
A KIND OF ILLNESS
PUNISHMENT
THE WORDS HARISH TAUGHT ME
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOR PAUL
A TIN ROOF
One more rainy season and our roof will be gone, says Ama.
My mother is standing on a log ladder, inspecting the thatch, and I am on the ground, handing the laundry up to her so it can bake dry in the afternoon sun. There are no clouds in sight. No hint of rain, no chance of it, for weeks.
There is no use in telling Ama this, though. She is looking down the mountain at the rice terraces that descend, step by step, to the village below, at the neighbors’ tin roofs winking cruelly back at her.
A tin roof means that the family has a father who doesn’t gamble away the landlord’s money playing cards in the tea shop. A tin roof means the family has a son working at the brick kiln in the city. A tin roof means that when the rains come, the fire stays lit and the baby stays healthy.
“Let me go to the city,” I say. “I can work for a rich family like Gita does, and send my wages home to you.”
Ama strokes my cheek, the skin of her work-worn hand as rough as the tongue of a newborn goat. “Lakshmi, my child,” she says. “You must stay in school, no matter what your stepfather says.”
Lately I want to tell her, my stepfather looks at me the same way he looks at the cucumbers I’m growing in front of our hut. He flicks the ash from his cigarette and squints. “You had better get a good price for them,” he says.
When he looks, he sees cigarettes and rice beer, a new ve
st for himself.
I see a tin roof.
BEFORE GITA LEFT
We drew squares in the dusty path between our huts and played the hopping-on-one-leg game. We brushed each other’s hair a hundred strokes and dreamed of names for our sons and daughters. We pinched our noses shut whenever the headman’s wife passed by, recalling the time she broke wind strutting past us at the village spring.
We rubbed the rough-edged notch in the school bench for good luck before a recitation. We threw mud at each other during the long afternoons stooped over in the paddies, and wept with laughter when one of Gita’s mud pies hit her haughty older sister in the back of the head.
And in the fall, when the goatherds came down from the Himalayan meadows, we hid in the elephant grass to catch sight of Krishna, the boy with sleepy cat eyes, the one I am promised to in marriage.
Now that Gita is gone, to work as a maid for a wealthy woman in the city, her family has a tiny glass sun that hangs from a wire in the middle of their ceiling, a new set of pots for Gita’s mother, a pair of spectacles for her father, a brocaded wedding dress for her older sister, and school fees for her little brother.
Inside Gita’s family’s hut, it is daytime at night. But for me, it feels like nighttime even in the brightest sun without my friend.
THE NEW STUDENT
Each morning as I go about my chores—straining the rice water, grinding the spices, sweeping the yard—my little blact-and-white speckled goat, Tali, follows at my heels.
“That silly goat,” Ama says. “She thinks you are her mother.”
Tali nudges her head into the palm of my hand and bleats in agreement. And so I teach her what I know.
I wipe the hard mud floor with a rag soaked in dung water and explain: “This will keep our hut cool and free from evil spirits.” I show her how I lash a water jug to the basket on my back, not spilling a drop on the steep climb up from the village spring. And when I brush my teeth with a twig from the neem tree, Tali copies me, nibbling her twig as solemn as a monk.
When it’s time for me to go to school, I make her a bed of straw in a sunny corner of the porch. I kiss her between the ears and tell her I’ll be home in time for the midday meal.
She presses her moist pink nose into the pocket of my skirt, searching for a bit of stowaway grain, then settles down, a jumble of elbows and knees, burrowing into the straw to nap.
“What a funny animal,” Ama says. “She thinks she is a person.” Ama must be right, because one day last week when I was sitting in the schoolroom, I heard the tinkling of her bell and looked up and saw my little speckled goat wandering around the school yard, bleating in despair.
When finally she spotted me through the window, she bahhed with wounded pride, indignant at being left behind. She marched across the yard, propped her hooves up on the windowsill, and looked in with keen and curious eyes as the teacher finished the lesson.
When school was over and we climbed the hill toward home, Tali trotted ahead, her stubby tail held high.
“Next week,” I promised her, “we will work on our spelling.”
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
In the morning, Ama bends down to stir the kitchen fire and to plait my hair before I go to school. All day, as she trudges up and down the mountain, a heavy basket braced on her back and held fast by a rope around her brow, she is bent under the weight of her burden.
And at night, as she serves my stepfather his dinner, she kneels at his feet.
Even when she is standing upright to scan the sky for rain clouds, my ama’s back is stooped.
The people who live on our mountain, a cluster of red mud huts clinging to the slope, worship the goddess who lives there, on the swallow-tailed peak. They pray to the goddess whose brow is fierce and noble, whose breast is broad and bountiful, whose snowy skirts spread wide above us.
She is beautiful, mighty, and magnificent.
But my ama, with her crow-black hair braided with bits of red rag and beads, her cinnamon skin, and her ears hung with the joyful noise of tinkling gold, is, to me, more lovely.
And her slender back, which bears our troubles—and all our hopes—is more beautiful still.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SON AND A DAUGHTER
My stepfather’s arm is a withered and useless thing. Broken as a child when there was no money for a doctor, his poor mangled limb pains him during the rainy months and gives him great shame.
Most of the men his age leave home for months at a time, taking jobs at factories or on work crews far away. But no one, he says, will hire a one-armed man. And so he oils his hair, puts on his vest and a wristwatch that stopped telling time long ago, and goes up the hill each day to play cards, talk politics, and drink tea with the old men.
Ama says we are lucky we have a man at all. She says I am to honor and praise him, respect and thank him for taking us in after my father died.
And so I act the part of the dutiful daughter. I bring him his tea in the morning and rub his feet at night. I pretend I do not hear him joining in the laughter when the men at the tea shop joke about the difference between fathering a son and marrying off a daughter.
A son will always be a son, they say. But a girl is like a goat. Good as long as she gives you milk and butter. But not worth crying over when it’s time to make a stew.
BEYOND THE HIMALAYAS
At dawn, our hut, perched high on the mountainside, is already torched with sunlight, while the village below remains cloaked in the mountain’s long purple shadow until midmorning.
By midday, the tawny fields will be dotted with the cheerful dresses of the women, red as the poinsettias that lace the windy footpaths. Napping babies will sway in wicker baskets, and lizards will sun themselves outside their holes.
In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air.
At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land.
Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.
CALENDAR
At school there is a calendar, where my young, moonfaced teacher marks off the days with a red crayon.
On the mountain we mark time by women’s work and women’s woes.
In the cold months, the women climb high up the mountain’s spine to scavenge for firewood. They take food from their bowls, feed it to their children, and silence their own churning stomachs.
This is the season when the women bury the children who die of fever.
In the dry months, the women collect basketfuls of dung and pat them into cakes to harden in the sun, making precious fuel for the dinner fire. They tie rags around their children’s eyes to shield them from the dust blowing up from the empty riverbed.
This is the season when they bury the children who die from the coughing disease.
In the rainy months, they patch the crumbling mud walls of their huts and keep the fire going so that yesterday’s gruel can be stretched to make tomorrow’s dinner. They watch the river turn into a thundering beast. They pick leeches from their children’s feet and give them tea to ward off the loose bowel disease.
This is the season when they bury the children who cannot be carried to the doctor on the other side of that river.
In the cool months, they prepare special food for the festivals. They make rice beer for the men and listen to them argue politics. They teach the children who have survived the seasons to make back-to-school ink from the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree.
This is also the season when the women drink the blue-black juice of the marking nut tree to do away with the babies in their wombs—the ones who would be born only to be buried
next season.
ANOTHER CALENDAR
According to the number of notches in Ama’s wedding trunk, she is thirty-one and I am thirteen. If my baby brother lives through the festival season, Ama will carve a notch for him.
Four other babies were born between me and my brother. There are no notches for them.
CONFESSION
Each of my cucumbers has a name.
There is the tiny one, Muthi, which means “size of a handful.” Muthi gets the first drink of the day.
Nearby is Yeti, the biggest one, named for the hairy snow monster. Yeti grows so fat, little Muthi cowers under a nearby leaf in fear and awe.
There is Ananta, the one shaped like a snake; and Bajai, the gnarled grandmother of the group; Vishnu, as sleek as rain; and Naazma, the ugly one, named for the headman’s wife.
There is one named for my hen and three for her chicks, one for Gita, and one for Ganesh, the elephant god, remover of obstacles.
I treat them all as my children.
But sometimes, if my water jug runs low, I scrimp a bit on Naazma.
FIRST BLOOD
I awoke today—before even the hen had begun to stir—aware of a change in myself.
For days I have sensed a ripening in my body, a tender, achy, feeling unlike anything I’ve felt before. And even before I go to the privy to check, I know that I have gotten my first blood.
Ama is delighted by my news and sets about making the arrangements for my confinement.
“You must stay out of sight for seven days,” she says. “Even the sun cannot see you until you’ve been purified.”
Before the day can begin, Ama hurries me off to the goat shed, where I will spend the week shut away from the world.
“Don’t come out for any reason,” she says. “If you must use the privy, cover your face and head with your shawl.
“At night,” she says, “when your stepfather has gone out and the baby has gone to sleep, I will return. And then I will tell you everything you need to know.”
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW
Before today, Ama says, you could run as free as a leaf in the wind.
Now, she says, you must carry yourself with modesty, bow your head in the presence of men, and cover yourself with your shawl.
Never look a man in the eye.