In my room, she rips open drawers, spills clothes and books until she finds what she is looking for deep under my bed. My treasure trove of American magazines. My Tiger Beats and Teen Beats and Teen Vogues. Sent from America, precious as gems. She rips them up in big dramatic moves, causing whirlwinds of pages, great flurries of decapitated, de-limbed rock stars and actresses. Bits fly from her open hands, taken up by the ceiling fan, throwing a maelstrom of paper in the room. She says, “This is what you spend your time on? Nonsense? This is what you are doing instead of studying?”
I run out of the room and down the stairs, burst into my father’s study where he is nursing his arrack and his student papers. Behind him on the wall, his parents in their old-fashioned clothes above the chest that holds the old hunting rifles. He has been locked in here for hours, slowly sipping his drink, pouring another and another and another. I say, “Thatha! Amma is tearing up my things. Make her stop.”
He swirls the amber liquid, stares into its depths. His voice is blurred. “Why is she doing this?”
“I don’t know. She … she says she wants me to study more.”
He tips his head back, hands steepled around the glass as if praying. “Maybe it is time to put away childish things. Exams are coming soon. Time to concentrate, no?”
He does not rise; he does not come. He will not intervene. He will say nothing to her as she says nothing to him. She will look away and he will drink his arrack. They will watch each other from a distance like a cobra and a mongoose and say nothing.
I run upstairs again. Samson stands outside my door. Amma comes out of the room, says, “Samson, Baby Madame has made a mess in her room, go and bring everything out. Put it on the fire with the evening’s trash.” I watch as Samson comes out of the room, his arms filled, his eyes apologetic. In the garden he unloads his arms into the fire that swirls and hisses and leaps into the twilight, the scent of burning fruit and vegetable matter, and with it the magazines I have hoarded like gold. I stand there, my face heated from the fire. My chest is locked, but I don’t cry in front of them.
Later that night, my face buried in my wet pillow, the quietest scraping at the door. Samson’s whisper: “Baby Madame?” I am instantly rigid with fear. Will he come into my room even? I have pushed the desk across it as I always do, but is he strong enough to push it aside? Am I not safe even here? If I scream, will my parents hear? He says through the door, “One book. This one was left. You keep.”
And then pushed under the door like a talisman, corners burnt, flaking, a single magazine, Duran Duran, big-haired, defiantly eyelinered on the cover. I take it, ease back the burned edges. I will find a better hiding place for it. They won’t take this one thing.
*
Months later Amma must have felt something, seen something, because she comes to me one day as I am studying and says, “Darling.”
“Yes, Amma.”
“Listen, my love. This is important.”
Her eyes try to hold my gaze, but I look down at my page. The letters are suddenly moving like ants, defying their letter-ness and falling into the chaos of insect-ness. I move my pencil over the paper, try to ignore her shadow falling over my page.
She grabs my wrist, shakes it, my pencil still gripped inside my fist making faint scrawls over the number ants. She sits and stares at my face. “Has anything ever happened?”
“Like what, Amma?”
“With boys, with a man? Has anyone done anything?”
“Done what?”
“Like … anything strange. Anything you don’t like?”
I look down again. “No, Amma.”
“Oh, good. That’s good.” The words sigh out. Relief washing over her features, her ringed fingers moving through my hair. She bends and kisses me in relief. “Good, good. I’ll just go and order some tea then.”
I go to my room. I lie on top of the bed, careful not to disturb the sheet. I am shaking, suddenly freezing as if plunged into the river’s depth. I pull the sheet over me. My teeth are still chattering.
I should have told her. She had asked and I had lied. I had wanted to see her face relax into softness the way it did.
At school I’ve heard the older girls saying that a girl who goes with a man is like a chewed-up piece of bubble gum. No one will want her again. No one chews used bubble gum. You just throw it away.
I should be thrown away. Because here is the most terrible and secret thing. If I go to him, it is easier. Then I know when it will happen and how quickly it will be over and I don’t have to live with my heart in my throat. I don’t have to jump at every sound and have fear grasp me around the neck. It is manageable. In this way I can keep a part of myself. I can fly away into the sky while he is ripping me up. In this way the terror does not rush upon me like a wave, carrying me under, drowning me. In this way I can stay aloft, my head above the water, breathing.
But even worse than this, sometimes when he runs his fingers through my hair, his nails against my scalp making me both wide, tingling awake and sleepy, I don’t want it to stop. And then the most evil thing in the world happens. Sometimes he presses his finger very lightly against me there, in the center of me, in the place no one must ever touch, and it feels like I am melting, like I am sweetly and softly dying.
And then alone in my bed I remember how it felt. I rub against the bunched-up bedclothes, against my fingers, and it is nice and I like it.