A Bad Character Read Online Free Page B

it either. The agony of being alive, of functioning like a human being. Can you understand this? This is who I am.
    When I come down from the roof my mother is excited. She wants to know how it was, wants every detail of it. And I lie, I tell her it was wonderful, I had such fun, I made many friends. She’s so happy for me.
    But later she hears the truth from one of the mothers downstairs. She defends me at first, says it’s a lie, I went there. And the woman says, I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl of yours.
    Father comes home to find her howling in a corner, me hiding in my room.

    I’m eleven years old. Back in Agra, full of rage. But only with my mother do I show it. Twenty years old and nothing’s changed. Only the voice for it has been misplaced.
    Twelve, looking through a friend’s brother’s porn smuggled in from abroad. He’s hidden them behind the cupboards though we know where they are. Playboy, Penthouse , we look through them giggling, pretending to be ashamed. But I sneak one home and read it bytorchlight under the sheets. I like the letters pages best of all.

    Now it’s night in the car. Night falls so fast here. From dusk it’s only a heartbeat away, a curtain that falls into place. The songbirds give their final note, giant bats flit between the trees, perforating the sky. We are driving through the wide boulevards of Lutyens’ Delhi, the colonial sweep of classical bungalows housing memories of order and rule, of radial roads and white cupolas shaded by tunnels of trees. Jasmine blossoms blow along the wind, the gulmohar glow like cinders. In the darkness I follow his tail-lights. He drives fast and then he coasts along, waiting for me to catch up. It’s a game to him. He heads through Lodhi Estate, where the rich and powerful crouch in their mansions, their guards poking guns from their nests at the street. It’s still very hot, a dry heat that sees men out everywhere on the grass, lit by the street lamps on the circles, in the scattered parks—men who’ve been stunned into torpor now stirring to put away their cards, light beedis, make fires, their bicycles propped up against the trees, some walking again. Women glide along the road, apart, single file, carryingbabies, with baskets on their heads, impossibly erect, draped in frayed saris bright as Gauguin fruit. But none of this exists to me now, I can never be part of it, there’s only his tail-lights ahead of me. I follow them down into south Delhi, all the way to Vasant Vihar, no longer alone.
    I’m always alone.
    I’m thirteen years old.
    My breasts are puffing up like crisp little puris, the blood flowing out of me so hard I think I’ll die. My stick of a body ripens, tightens, becoming newly curved. The flesh around my eyes takes on the purple of a bruise.
    Such a spurt of growth that my clothes don’t fit me any more. And I can never again wear my tartan dress.
    Around this time my extended family becomes secure, finds wealth. My father’s brothers, all moving forward in the world. Not spectacularly, not extraordinarily so, but more than enough to survive. The economy is opening up. Jobs are found. Land is bought and sold. Then come the cars, the washing machines, the televisions, the cousins sent off to America to study, to become doctors,accountants, lawyers and bankers. All the bases are covered.
    But we do nothing, go nowhere. Though my father still sends money, we are displaced, shoved aside. I keep my head down in school and get lost in my dreams, but my mother sits outside it all, the exile, watching the rest of them in silence in the frozen halls of our home, becoming suddenly old, her hair getting tangled in knots. She removes her bangles. She doesn’t sit with the other women, she only sits by herself and smokes. She has her suspicions, she laughs bitterly, as if someone has made a cruel joke about the world.
    When I’m seventeen she dies. It’s a short illness, there’s no time. She’s blown away like