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I put the torn sheet of paper in between the pages
of a textbook, to make sure nobody sees what I am doing. When I am
finished, I am pleased with my first work of fiction. Gym class is
the second-to-last class of the day and the rest of the afternoon
flies quickly.

Miss Damania looks up from reading the note. ‘Who
wrote this note?' she says immediately.

I am speechless at the question.

The dark eyes narrow. ‘Who?' she
repeats. ‘Answer quickly.'

‘My mummy did. I swear, miss, she did.'

‘Bad girl,' she spits. ‘Lying
while standing under this picture of Jesus.'

I am trapped in my own lie. Wretchedly, I realize
there is no place to go but deeper. ‘I swear on God, miss,'
I say, pinching myself on the throat the way we do when swearing.

Pinching myself was a mistake. Miss Damania's
eyes narrow as they focus on my throat. My eyes are already filling
with tears as I watch her claw-like hands move in the direction of my
throat. I feel her nails dig into my flesh. My head moves from side
to side as she shakes me like a rat. ‘No, no, no, miss,'

I whimper. ‘Please, miss, please.'

‘Who wrote the note?'

Terror engulfs me. ‘I did, miss, I'm
sorry. I did. Please forgive me, miss.'

‘Dirty girl,' Miss Damania spits.
‘Incorrigible liar. Plague of Egypt.' With each word, she
shakes my throat for emphasis.

When the other girls tell the kindly classroom
teacher, Miss Bharucha, what happened in gym class, her face pales.
‘This is a note for your mummy,' she says to me. ‘Tell
her to come see me tomorrow.'

Mummy comes to school the next day anxious to
apologize for my lying and cheating and ready to commiserate with my
teachers. But to my amazement, Miss Bharucha barely mentions the
incident. Instead, she is sympathetic and solicitous and says that
she has an idea: I should leave my gym shoes in the classroom closet
at the end of gym class. That way, I don't have to worry about
remembering to pack them. I begin to breathe easier. But just as my
mother is getting up to leave, Miss Bharucha says the dreaded word.
‘Your daughter is very sensitive,' she says gravely. ‘She
will have to learn to be a little tougher.'

I want to bury my head in shame. For years I
believe that being sensitive is a bad thing, another black mark like
the others that follow me throughout my school years: Talks and
fidgets in class. Does not live up to her potential. Makes careless
mistakes. Daydreams. To which, my mother lends her own complaints:
Reads too many novels. Is forgetful and absent-minded. Is a poor
eater. Will not drink her milk.

Most of these labels I can shrug off. But being
called sensitive dooms me, marks me as an easy target for bold, brash
girls like Olga D'Mello. But it would be too much to expect a
grown-up to understand this.

They are everywhere and they haunt me. They are on
the streets, they appear quietly as shadows when we stop at a
traffic-light, they gaze at us hungrily when we eat pani puri at
Chowpatty Beach. Worse, they infiltrate my dreams at night.

Still, the dreams are not unpleasant. Mostly, it
is the same dream over and over again with some variation on the
theme: It is thundering and raining heavily outside and I am herding
them in, loading the city's destitute and homeless and poor
into school-buses and transporting them to the basement of my school.
What we refer to as the basement is actually a large, open-air room
that is located on the ground floor and overlooks the playground.
During morning recess, we buy battatawadas and Cokes in the tiny
cafeteria located in one corner of this room. Elsewhere, there are
the long wooden benches where we eat our hot lunches everyday.

But in the dream, the room is empty. Or rather, it
is bare of furniture but filled to the point of bursting with
Bombay's unwanted humanity. Unshaven men with tangled hair,
scrawny children with dirt-streaked faces, painfully thin women with
large eyes, are huddled together, some sitting on their haunches,
some standing, others laying down on thin but warm brown blankets.
The slanted rain is coming in, wetting those on the edge of the
basement so that they try to inch their way toward the warm middle.
Their neighbours good-naturedly try to help them, so that there is no
cussing or shoving, even when the food trucks arrive with milk and
sandwiches. Instead, there is a constant hum of excitement and the
tight quarters feel cosy, rather than stifling. Outside, there is
rain and thunder; here, there is a warm, snug feeling, like sitting
before a fireplace on a cold winter's night except that we are
generating heat from each other's bodies rather than an
external fire.

The other variation on the dream is that we are on
a ship rather than in my school's basement. This time, the
solid concrete reality of the basement gives way to the tossing and
turning of the ship on the turbulent waves. But in the dream, nobody
gets sick, nobody has to lean across the railing of the ship and lose
their dinner. Rather, everyone is eating well, ignoring the heaving
waves and the whipping wind and taking comfort in the safety of
numbers. All of us in this together. Every inch of space on the ship
is taken, with bodies tightly packed in but nobody seems to care as
we bump up against each other. Again, the swell and thrust of
humanity, again, dampness and cold on the outside, and the powerful
warmth of human connection on the inside.

I invariably wake up from these dreams with an
amazing sense of exhilaration because I believe that I have found the
solution to India's most intractable problem—poverty.
Every one of my civics textbooks starts with the line, ‘India
is a rich country with poor people.' Well, that has to be true
no more.

All one has to do is gather in all the street
people every night and feed them milk and chicken sandwiches and
Coke. I don't understand why the adults always shake their
heads grimly and declare that the poor will always be with us.

I once try telling Miss Carlson about my dream,
try describing to her how I fall asleep in the warmth of its glow and
how happy I feel when I wake up from it. I guess I am hoping she'll
help me write a letter to the Prime Minister or something but Miss
Carlson only hears me for a few minutes and then kisses me on the
forehead and says I am a good girl and isn't it a shame that I
wasn't born Catholic. Then, as always, I give her ten paise
from my lunch money and she sells me a picture of one of the saints.
But on this day I refuse the card that she hands me. ‘No, Miss
Carlson, it's okay,' I say. ‘You keep the picture
today. You can sell it to another girl instead.'

Miss Carlson's blue eyes grow misty. Her
pink face, which is as creased as a crumpled sheet of paper, grows
red. ‘What a good child of God you are, my dear,' she
says. ‘Not like those other heathen girls, those plagues of
Egypt. Perhaps you will join the convent someday.'

Although Miss Carlson is not an ordained nun, she
lives with the nuns at the convent for reasons that are unclear to
me. I realize that she has just paid me the highest compliment and
her words make me feel guilty. I have not refused Miss Carlson's
offering for reasons of piety or charity but because mummy has made
me promise not to bring home any more pictures of saints. Since I
give Miss Carlson ten paise everyday in exchange for a card, the card
collection is getting unmanageable. And mummy is too superstitious to
throw away any of the religious cards once I hand them to her.

‘Bloodsuckers, that's what these nuns
are—yes, even your beloved Miss Carlson, even if she's
not really a nun,' mummy mutters…‘Taking lunch
money from a child, as if they don't charge enough tuition
fees. But okay, baba, even if you give them the money, at least don't
accept another picture. Tell her to sell it to another unsuspecting
bakra. More profit for them, that way.'

If even Miss Carlson does not understand my dream
then I know it is hopeless trying to talk to any other adult. With
her pure white hair, which she wears in a page boy cut, her short,
tiny, pixyish body and her kind, soft heart, Miss Carlson is a cross
between an innocent child and a saint. If she doesn't
understand, nobody else will.

Besides, I still cringe when I remember the
episode from a few months ago.

Roshan had left school on a Friday with six of her
friends and stopped by Dipeta, the bakery that my family had opened a
few years ago. Mehroo had fed the girls chicken patties and chocolate
cake and given them Cokes to drink. They had left that evening with
full stomachs and in good spirits. I was on my best behaviour while
the older girls were there. But as soon as they left, I began
whining. ‘My turn,' I said, tugging at Mehroo's
fingers. ‘When can I bring my friends to the shop?'

I'd rather invite my school friends to
Dipeta than to my house for one of our parties. For my birthday, I
got intolerable birthday parties to which all the silly,
well-behaved, soft-spoken neighbourhood girls were invited. I had to
cut my specialty cake with a knife that was decorated with a pink
satin bow. Then, there was the excruciating moment when the adults
asked the girls with the good singing voices to sing a song. The
girls giggled and squealed and squirmed and blushed. They were shy
and had to be coaxed to sing. I did not join the chorus of voices
asking them to sing. I knew that they would invariably have high,
airy voices and that they would invariably sing some bullshit song
like
Strangers in the Night
.

These were good girls and I wanted nothing to do
with them.

They were not my people.

I spent most of the following week trying to
decide who to invite but the thought of having to leave any of my
friends out, was too depressing. Besides, something else was nagging
at me. Friday came around without my having invited a single
classmate. Instead, I went up to the street urchins who invariably
gathered around the shop. ‘See this eating-drinking shop?

It belongs to my father,' I said to
dirty-faced children my own age. ‘You all go tell your friends
to gather here in five-ten minutes. There will be lots to eat and
drink.' They stared at me dumbfounded for a few seconds and
then they ran, whooping all the way.

Within minutes, they were back. Mehroo, and my
dad, who had stopped at the shop on his way from the factory, looked
up to see a group of twelve children standing outside the shop, some
of them giggling in excitement, others shoving and pushing each
other, a few of them hopping on one foot. ‘What the hell?'
dad said, as he made to shoo the group away. The urchins looked ready
to scatter like pigeons if my dad took another step towards them.

I stood in front of dad to block his path. ‘These
are my friends,' I said quickly. ‘Mehroo said I could
invite my friends for a small party today. Roshan had her turn last
week.

So instead of my school friends, I decided to
invite my Dipeta friends. Now you have to feed them.'

Mehroo started to say something to claim her
innocence but I was looking up at my father. I watched several
expressions flit across his face—annoyance, surprise,
confusion, and finally, a bemused resignation. ‘Okay,
Thrituma,' he said. ‘You win.

But just this time, okay? We cannot do this
often.'

I skipped to where the children were waiting
patiently.

‘Come in, come in,' I said but the
children hesitated, waiting for my father to give them a command. Dad
pulled me aside.

‘We cannot have them all the way inside the
shop, you understand?' he whispered. ‘Their hands and
feet are too dirty—it will chase our regular customers away.
Just tell them to come to the front of the store and wait there. And
I cannot afford to give away bottles of Coca-Cola. They can have ice
candies instead.'

‘Okay, daddy,' I agreed, not wanting
to push my luck.

The group gathered in the small foyer that led to
the store.

Mehroo took out the red-and-white paper plates
that said Dipeta on them and filled each of them with small cakes,
and chicken patties. She took a few daar-ni-poris and cut them into
equal-sized pieces, and then placed the individual pieces on each
plate. In the meantime, dad was reaching into the deep freezer to
take out the ice candies. ‘What flavour, what flavour?'

I asked the group but most of them were too shy
and tongue-tied to speak. One of the bolder kids from behind the
group finally shouted out ‘Orange' but the rest of them
just looked at me with their big eyes.

Mehroo began distributing the plates and the
children took them from her eagerly. But once they held the plates in
their hands, they were unsure of what to do next. They stood
silently, waiting for some command or signal. I took one of the
plates from Mehroo and bit into a chicken patty.

‘Eat,' I said and they did, their eyes
never leaving my face as we munched on the goodies, staring at each
other.

Several months after the incident, the adults are
still talking about it, repeating it each time they want to impress a
family acquaintance. They place both hands on my shoulders and brag
about how warm-hearted and sensitive I am. But each retelling of the
story makes me cringe because they are taking an absent-minded,
spontaneous gesture and turning it into something different. Part of
the reason I had approached the street kids was because I was
bewitched by their horseplay and games and wanted to be included in
them. It was my need that had drawn me to the urchins but in the
retelling of the story, they had become the needy ones. Also, Roshan
glares at me each time the story is told because she picks up on the
unspoken critique—while Roshan invited her school friends,
Thrity sought out the poor, the marginalized. Can't the adults
see that they are unwittingly pitting me and Roshan against each
other? I marvel again at the insensitivity of grown-ups.