*
Yet when the school bell rings, it releases a mad dash of schoolgirls spilling out of the old building like birds fleeing a python. I walk out of the school gate with my arm around Puime. She and I have been best friends since we were tiny. All around us, girls chatter and squeal. We gather around the bunis man’s stand, reaching out for steaming seeni sambol buns. We pull apart the soft sweet bread to reveal the nests of fried onions within. We stuff these bits into our mouths, sucking air in through puckered lips to cool our burning tongues, chase it all down with a rainbow of fizzy-colored drinks—Portello, Fanta, Sprite.
Across the street, boys are walking home in twos or threes, arms around each other. My cousin Gehan raises a hand, a quick wave before he is swallowed into the gaggle of schoolboys.
Dishani, quick-witted, all-seeing, demands, “Who is that? Your boyfriend?”
I swat her shoulder. “Just go men, you know who that is.”
“I don’t know. Must be your boyfriend, no?”
Puime flips the end of her braid across her top lip, adopts a gruff boy voice, and says, “Look at me! I’m her boyfriend. I want to kiss her like this.” She comes close to me, her eyes squinting; under her held-up braid, her mouth is puckered.
“Oh yes, I lorrrve you, darrrling. Let me kiss you, my lorrve.” Holding the braid mustache in place she puts her other hand on her hip, her legs wide as a Bollywood hero’s.
I jut out my own hip, raise a hand to ruffle my hair and a teasing finger to beckon her closer. Our audience hoots and calls. I purse my lips, and when she closes her eyes and stretches forward for the kiss, I rip off a piece of the last seeni sambol bun, stuff a large chunk of it into her fast-approaching lips. Her eyes pop open. She has to chew, laughing, tears streaming down her face. Girls all around me are cackling.
I say, “What? You wanted hot-hot kissing. No?”
Through a mouthful of bun, flapping her hands, we can make out the words “Aney, aiyyyoooo, my moufth is burning!”
Afterward we walk to the three-wheeler stand together, her arm around my shoulder. She picks up her braid again, puts it to her lip. “I’ll be your boyfriend anytime.”
I say, “Let’s get ices.”
The ice man sells vanilla ice cream in small plastic tubs with flat wooden spoons. It melts instantly. When the ice cream is done, I bite the spoon for the crunch of it against my teeth, sucking the last vestiges of sweetness out of the splintered wood.
*
On school holidays the various cousins released from their boarding schools gather at our house. It is the maha-gedara, the ancestral house of my father’s family, and so this is the place they all return to. In the garden, the girl cousins are baking chocolate cakes, and as the mistress of the house I am the big boss. I tell Sonali where to get the choicest mud, and the sisters Kavya and Saakya where to gather flowers. They come back with these various treasures, buckets of rich river mud, sprays of jasmine and pink bougainvillea darkening to orange in the scoops of their skirts. We pat and shape multitiered cakes with florid flower decorations rising from our hands.
On the riverbank the boy cousins shed their shirts, clamber up the trees leaning over the water, leap high into the air, and drop like fishing birds into the river. Neck-deep, they climb onto each other’s narrow shoulders and fling themselves into the liquid again and again with the desperation of the long-deprived. They swim and splash. They cavort like baby elephants. Their voices carry into the high bright vault of the sky as they throw their heads back to spray silver arcs from their dark streaming hair.
*
At night in our various beds, we are all awakened by the sudden death of the ceiling fans. Electricity cut, sudden power failure. The air is thick and hot. It is hard to breathe. We drift out of our sweltering rooms. Amma presides as Samson drags the mattresses one by one out onto the verandah. The night air is warm but stirred by a river breeze. Cousins lie down in rows, whispering, poking with elbows and knees, causing a barely contained delirious giggling at even the thought of being tickled. Amma’s sharp voice rises. “Go to sleep. Now. All of you. Otherwise I will call the parents and you can all go home tomorrow and sleep in your own houses.” We fall silent, lie there until the queen of the night soothes us into perfumed sleep.
*
In the midst of these cousin-mad days, Samson and I alone near the pond come upon a pile of squirming commas, tiny specks of curling life and a foamy substance in the midst of smashed leaves.
He looks up into the tree. “Tree frogs. The nest should land in the water, but it has fallen to the side. The tadpoles are drying out.”