A Bad Character Read Online Free Page A

else. But you cannot just run and play in this life, you can’t live on air alone.
    She’s only thinking of me, she says. I’m too young to understand, too much like my mother still. But my situation is precarious. Marriage is important. It needs to be handled well. One stray step and well, let’s not talk about that.
    It wasn’t for love that my parents married. They were placed together in their awkwardness, in their deficiencies, through the taint of their blood, though it was known he was very handsome and she was oddly beautiful in her own nervous way.
    My mother, who makes me read books. Who forces them on me, even as she drowns in loneliness, superstition, gossip and boredom, like so many good housewives before her. And not just any books, but the classics: works of great literature. There is a whole series in the library. We go through them together, one by one. Shedoesn’t even know what’s inside them, never reads them herself, just forces them on me the way another mother forces diamonds down her daughter’s throat before the soldiers knock at the door.

    In Bombay I hold her hand. I hold my father’s too on the local trains, hold on for dear life. He says if either of us lets go then that will be it, the beggars will have me, they’ll cripple my legs and send me to work.
    Technicolor Bombay, that crack of hope, the heartbreaking city, clinging to the edge of India, falling off the century like a cartoon. We lived there awhile, not even a year—my father was posted from Agra for work.
    When we moved my mother was happy at first, it breathed new life into her. There was that rotting fish smell, the salt of sea in the air, the trawler stench, the song of gulls, the relentlessness of jet planes taking off. It all held a breezy promise Agra never could.
    In Khar West, it was an apartment building on the fourth floor, not the Delhi kind, not a mausoleum like Aunty’s but bright and crumbling, open to noise; you could hear the others, their music, their TVs, their arguments; everyone on top of everyone else, palm trees growing up past the windows, coconuts ripening and crows swaying on the branches like happy drunks. Often I forget we lived there at all, it’s a punctured dream of glossy print, clothes drying out on the balcony lines, blood oozing through Konkan saris in my sleep.
    She dresses my hair with a Minnie Mouse bow and sends me outside to play with the other girls. Instead I climb to the roof to watch the ocean beyond the bald heads of the apartment blocks and the planes taking off in the haze.
    I wait for Sunday all week. My mother is holding my hand on the way to the chicken shop with the money for the evening meal. It’s so sunny here. The meat is hanging in great mean lines on the hooks, and scattered behind there’s the scene of blood. Terrified, fascinated, I waitall week to see this flesh being chopped, but I pull away, almost close my eyes to it, when it comes. She buys one whole chicken, has it wrapped in paper, and at home she prepares it lovingly, with great concentration, with her tongue peeking out the corner of her mouth and a beatific look on her face. When we sit to eat in the evening, I’m amazed by the alchemy of this, the life made out of death.
    There’s a birthday party in the building one day and the girl whose birthday it is, her mother has told my mother I’m invited. And she’s very excited, my mother, eager for me to go and be with the other girls, to dress up and play. I want to go too, to be accepted, to be with everyone else and adored.
    So she bathes and dresses me. She puts me in a red dress with blue satin panels and ties a ribbon in my hair. Then I’m pushed out into the corridor and sent downstairs. But I never make it inside. I stand outside for an hour or more, unable to bring myself to knock on the door. When other people come by I run away and hide, pretend to be busy with something else. Eventually I escape to the roof. I cannot bear it, can’t explain