A girl in Delhi has a brilliant mind and secrets darker than the nights that won't let her eyes close.
She lives in the Labyrinth, a place that always seems dim, even in the middle of the day. There, customers flock in their dozens, and there, th...
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Most people would celebrate having a room to themselves. Yashvi, though, despises every moment she must spend alone in the initially cramped, now relatively spacious chamber she and Prisha once shared.
Digging the math textbook out from beneath the floorboard, Yashvi reads: Surface arearefers to the area of each face of a three-dimensional figure combined. Imagine you are a city worker looking at a house your employer has asked you to paint from bottom to top.
Yashvi closes her eyes, pictures herself in faded blue jeans, lugging two hefty tin cans. In her back pocket, a paintbrush dents her buttock. It is a silly image.
You wonder, continues the textbook, how much paint it will take to cover the entire house. Must you buy extra cans, or do you have enough, perhaps even more than enough?
To solve this problem, you must find the surface area of the house.
Instead, Yashvi wonders if Prisha is inside the house.
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Ruby's stomach has grown. The girl who gets the most customers is pregnant, her belly a soft orb under her shirt.
Whisperings sputter through the alleys she roams. Tiya refrains from jesting about whorishness. There are no giggles as Ruby stretches at the edge of the shallow pool under the bridge. No more jokes about her flexibility. The girls treat her with a gawky reverence that Yashvi suspects Ruby finds worse than ridicule.
Madam has decided the pregnancy should not be terminated. She prepares a room with towels and surgical utensils, buckets, scissors, forceps, amniotic hooks. Ruby makes a ritual of weeping every morning on the steps leading into the courtyard, and Yashvi sits with her one day.
Ahead and in the distance, you can see the way the Labyrinth winds into the morbid spiral it is, the passages twisting and weaving together in such a muddle of combinations that nobody can trace beginning to end.
"Kill the fetus," Yashvi says under her breath. "Kill it."
"How?" Ruby's eyes appear to leak tar due to the mascara blackening her tears.
"Throw yourself down, hard." Yashvi struggles to not choke on her words, which come out unusual, raspy, and misshapen. "Or use a hangar. I'll help. I swear I will."
Ruby takes her hand. "Thank you."
Yashvi blinks a few times.
Abortion. It's the only way.How dare you foul customers plant monsters in us? We refuse to sprout your mutants.
Yashvi wishes genitalia didn't exist. If only the world was sexless. What can she do to shove back the claw of an imp reaching out from between its victim's legs? Ruby will grieve the birth of her child, while almost any other mother would be considered unfortunate even to have to grieve her child's death.
"How godless," says Yashvi.
Ruby nods at the ground, the black liquid that drips from her face making inky dots in the dirt.
"Excuse me," calls a voice.
It's Kajel.
The girl who gets no customers.
She keeps her face turned from the others and struggles to sit without looking.
"I wanted to thank you, Yashvi," she mumbles, facing the wind, only the wind, "for the things you told me about beauty and . . ." She loses the sentence, or a gust steals it away.
Yashvi wants to say something profound but can't, all her philosophizing wasted on a hope gone with Prisha. Ruby and Kajel seem to wait on Yashvi, but they receive no proverb. Then Kajel turns her face, revealing it to Yashvi and Ruby for the first time. The girls talk another minute before the customers find them. Two hours later, after Sharib releases Yashvi, she finds in her—and once Prisha's—chamber an ant struggling to get over the sill of the door. Yashvi scoops up the ant and sets it outside.
It pauses a moment before charging for the grass.
There is no God, Yashvi thinks, because if there is a God then God has some nerve.
She doesn't want to think this, since all her life she leaned on the concept of something perpetual. Yet God remains absent while mortals persist like moving statues crumbling as they reach for a hushed, yawning sky.
Perhaps God is timid, she thinks. Can't you face your fears, God, for the sake of the people hurting? I understand more than anybody that it's difficult to overcome introversion, but what gets you started is realizing there are folks out there who need help—and if you can't find the courage then so many will go on in agony.
She pans around her empty room. "You know what you become when you stop trying?" she says, needing to hear the words aloud to know they're hers. "A coward."
And then she stops talking, because if God doesn't exist then talking to God means nothing. But just in case someone does listen beyond this maze of concrete and bones, Yashvi adds a final quavering "Please" before lying down in a bed once too small for two girls.
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