I squat immediately. “Help me, Samson.” I am scooping tiny lives onto a stick, flicking them into the pond even as the sun is drying them into hard curls. With a sigh he bends to help.
We work diligently and I ask a question that has been tugging at me. “Why do we call you Samson?”
He doesn’t reply, so I continue, “The religious studies teacher told us about that man in the Bible. But he had long hair and was Christian. You’re not Christian. So why?”
His hands pause suddenly. He says, “When we were small … your Thatha and I. My mother was his ayah, you know. We grew up together. When we were small we used to play together, and I was bigger than him even though we were the same age. I would lift him up and carry him on my back like I do with you. He said I was very strong, so he gave me this name, and then everyone called me that. Your Thatha named me.”
“But what’s your other name? Your real name?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. No one has called me it since I was a child, and it has gone away.”
We work in silence.
He says, “I am Samson, but who is Delilah?”
Amma calls through the garden, summoning the cousins in for tea. He raises his face to her voice. The last of the surviving tree-frog tadpoles squirm off into the pond, revived at the kiss of cool water.
*
Another memory from around this time. A game of hide-and-seek. Kavya and I hiding behind the hibiscus bushes, trying to keep the hysterical laughter, the utter fear and delight of being found, from bursting through our mouths. When Saakya draws close, we fling ourselves from our spot, run like gazelles, Punch and Judy gamboling at our heels. I feel a sharp pain in the fleshy pad of my foot and see a thin trickle of blood where a thorn has pierced and entered the skin. I sit on the grass, raise my foot to my face, and try to squeeze the thorn out between my thumbnails. Panic throbs through my veins; it is one of Amma’s rules that we are not to run around the garden without shoes on. “Samson,” I gasp to Saakya, “get him, he’ll know what to do.”
When he comes, he squats in front of me and says, “Let me see.” He rests my foot on his thigh. “Let’s see. Yes, there”—his fingers poking, prodding—“there, see, a thorn has gone in. Have to dig it out.” He picks me up. “Stay here,” he says to the others, who are waiting, watching me, their fallen comrade, carried away.
In his dark little room he lays me on his bed. I have not been inside since the day I found him crying for his mother. Now the smell overwhelms me again, his sweat amplified. He opens a box. Inside I glimpse various things my mother has been missing, a set of curved tweezers she has searched for for weeks, a package of German-made safety pins that she uses for her saris (they work better than the Chinese ones), a cheap sari broach, some hairpins with a few of her long black hairs still caught in them. He takes a safety pin out of the package, flicks open a lighter. He holds the pin in the flame, turning it this way and that. “Okay, come here.” He sits on the bed and lifts me onto his lap, the pale underside of my foot raised in his fist. I hold my breath and try to pull away, but he is too strong. I am held like a small powerless bird. The sharp point pierces my skin, pushes down like an excavation through layers of me. I cry, loud gasping sobs, but he will not release my foot. “There it is. I have it.” The splinter revealed in the bed of my unearthed flesh. Then the tweezers. “Don’t move, Baby Madame. Almost I have it.” His face so near mine, focused in concentration. A quick movement and the thorn is held aloft in the grip of the curved silver tweezers. Ignoring my quiet sobbing, he holds a cloth gently against the skin of my foot, onto which a single tear of blood is spreading. I am crying and exhausted, not sure but also aware that under me he is rocking in the strangest way, in a motion that I had not been aware of before. A sort of fog descends, a white cloud, it’s hard to see through it. My father’s face. He would save me. A fierce grasping and a gasp, and then he releases me and smooths down the back of my dress. In a strange, strangled voice, he says, “Okay, go now.” I know suddenly that this is not the first time I have felt his exhale, a kind of motion I can’t describe. I walk out into the bright sunlight, my foot screaming as if it has been torn open. It is three weeks after my eleventh birthday.
Four
Thatha and I sit at the river’s edge. It is the tail end of the vacations, and this finality has given the boy cousins a sort of glimmering mania. We watch them climb into the trees, thrust into the air, and drop into the water over and over. He must see something in my face because he suddenly asks, “Do you want me to teach you?”
I say, “To swim? In the river?” He smiles at the rising excitement in my voice, says, “No, in the pond with the frogs. Of course in the river. Go and get your swimsuit on.”