Nikki. Under the sprawling banyan tree, we promised to be best friends forever—it was easy like that, in kindergarten. I met her first, so she was mine. We both knew Santa Claus wasn’t real. We both loved lizards. We spent all day gathering smooth pebbles from the grounds, hurtling down the slides and up the swings. We separated after that perfect year, sorted into different sections by the Class I teachers, constantly missing each other in the school’s din, my rock collection inherited by my brother. I forgot as easily as I loved.
Anya. An anti-abortion advocate and a good Christian woman, now. In Class VIII, she tried to run away during school because her older sisters called her ugly and unlovable and fat. No one loves me, she sobbed on the filthy bathroom floor. Anya vanished in the middle of PE, the rest of us absorbed in games of kabaddi, in hanging upside down on the jungle gym like bats, wondering how far we could push our bodies. Her mother showed up in a maroon skirt suit and interrogated the whole class. Anya was found in the broom closet, her face thick with dust. Her mother dragged her home by the ears, hundreds of girl-eyes trained on her retreating back.
Jessica. Who introduced me to Adi with a smirk, pushing us together at her fourteenth birthday party. You’re both geniuses at math, she said, as if that was reason enough to offer up your short, flickering years of existence like a prayer, to stay awake all night talking even when your brother complained he couldn’t sleep, to feel for the first time that your body was a living thing, elastic and lustrous. When I saw his high cheekbones and heard his lopsided laugh, I knew. He was so sure of himself, in a boy’s mysterious way—unlike me, who changed from one moment to the next.
Jessica had been right. She could do that, pull everything together like she was the only gravitational force in the world. Maybe I was only fulfilling her prophecies, so unshakeable was my faith in her. Jessica’s was where I spent my days when I wasn’t at school, or bharatanatyam class, or physics tuition, or attending mandated family-time, or with Adi. Sometimes Adi was at Jessica’s. Sometimes I told my parents I was at Jessica’s, but really, I was at Adi’s. They trusted me, never asked twice. Jessica’s mother even covered for me when I was running late and my phone had died and my mom called to check if I was coming home for dinner because we were eating white sauce pasta and she wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it.
Meera. My skinnier, older, American cousin. Those were the things that used to matter. We saw each other once a year at my grandparents’ house in Bombay, with the other cousins. All ten of us grew close, then distant in turns, the difference in our years spinning us forward or backward. When I turned thirteen, I was allowed to hang out with my older cousins. They said I was sensible and calm and would do whatever they asked. I entered the room, and my brother remained locked out, seven years old, thumping on the wood with his small knuckles. I hate you, he yelled into the closed door. I didn’t care. Inside, we traded secrets like spare change. She’d kissed boys, gone even further. After I returned home, I messaged her on Facebook and she filled my head with sisterly advice: how to ask questions so my mom would say yes, how to hide gifts received from boyfriends, which movies to watch after a breakup.
Zoya, Anna, and Maryam. The month before Jessica’s birthday party, the four of us formed a biology lab clique. We copied flower specimens neatly into our lab books, labeling the stamen, the petal, the ovules, the thalamus. It thrilled me, the complexity of this thing I could crush in my hands, turn to pink powder.
Mrs. Kohli always dozed off in class. We sat on the granite tops of the lab tables, their coolness a cheap imitation of air-conditioning, which the school would not buy. We passed Zoya’s tiffin of uncooked Wai Wai noodles back and forth as Maryam penciled a different kind of diagram into the back of her notebook; Anna was in the center, a little stick figure with a prominent butt. Boy stick figures surrounded her, their boyness marked by backward caps, mustaches, and the occasional penis, though none of us had ever seen one. Their names: Rohit, Karan, Ahan—boys Anna had talked to once: the brothers of friends, the sons of teachers, two or three rotating crushes. Sexy Biatch, Maryam wrote in her neat handwriting at the bottom, linking Anna to all the others. Anna protested weakly, but it didn’t matter. This was a compliment, to be revealed as a girl who knew boys.
Then Mrs. Kohli was standing behind us, and she snatched the Wai Wai and the notebook and ripped the page out.
“What. Is. This. Nonsense,” she said, enunciating every word.
We were rounded up and marched to our principal, Sister Francis, but I was let off. I had good grades; I had probably just stumbled into this accidentally. It wasn’t the kind of dirty thing I usually did, Sister Francis said. Back then everyone was convinced of my goodness: unassailable, permanent. The others all got sent home for the day and had their biology marks deducted by 5 percent.
Sara, Adi’s younger sister. She was always reading Choose Your Own Adventure books when I went over to their house, or else she was baking, her Minion-themed apron dredged in flour. Her hands sticky, her hair in a tight knot. She would have dropped out of school and cooked full-time if her parents let her. Adi and I would disappear into his room and Sara would knock politely, holding trays of lemon tarts or mango cheesecakes or hazelnut mousses. We always ate right there, on Adi’s bed. Sara and I teased Adi, watching him pick the fruit out of desserts like a fussy child. When it was over, I almost missed Sara as much as I missed him.
Adi was not fussy about me, not in his bedroom when we locked the door and his parents were gone and the cook was asleep and Sara was at her friend’s house. He wanted me, plain and simple. Always in the afternoons, when Calcutta seemed to disappear into slumber. Usually, I told my parents I was going to Cafe Coffee Day to work on a school project, and then Adi picked me up. You work so hard, my mom remarked once, and I smiled back.
We were shy at first, or maybe I was. It took us two months to kiss, hastily, in a dark stairwell, separating when a step creaked above us.
But then we were ravenous. I ignored his Superman bedsheets as we fumbled with each other’s bodies, every curious hollow, our strange anatomies, spilling wide and open. In the worst movie theater in the city, pairs of lovers dotting the seats, no one watched Salman Khan or Katrina Kaif or Arjun Rampal. Toothpaste and Coca-Cola lip gloss and my coconut shampoo mixed with his Axe deodorant. In the car he drove without a license, parked in the kind of gully my mother would never let me walk alone, underneath silver veils of rain. We tried things I read in my mom’s issues of Cosmopolitan, stolen from underneath a heap of her books. “How to Spice Things Up in the Bedroom,” the article instructed: ice cubes dragged across bare skin, melted chocolate on our bellies.
We never had sex. We talked about it in slanting, elliptical ways. We took our clothes off and turned all the lights on. We said not now, not yet. It still felt like a dictionary word to me then. I’d seen couples pressed together in movies—my parents shooed me away when such a scene came on. I was scared. There was a brutality to it; the pounding so animal. Always a violence in opening a body. But every now and then I felt rent apart by my desire, like I would never be close enough to Adi, and I knew that was it—my every crevice and fold begging for him. But it disappeared, quickly, leaving behind a thin film of guilt. We’d kiss, touch, roll apart, go home, text each other, make plans to meet again, over and over, the cadence of my days.
Chandni. I went to her house with my whole family in tow, weekend after weekend. She was the daughter of Smita Aunty, my mom’s best friend. Our nights were spent playing Monopoly and Ludo and carrom, eating homemade chips with onions and coriander and masala, putting on new faces with Aunty’s expired make-up.
One night, we eavesdropped on the adults talking in the living room. I could imagine them huddled together on the ochre couch. My brother had cried himself to sleep on Chandni’s bed because we’d refused to let him watch Mean Girlswith us. That was when we longed to be old enough to call ourselves women, when we were hungry for adult words. I always took note of my mom’s black lace bras, her soft pink chemises. Grew heady with the routine glamor of them.
We tried to sort the voices out, listening as the words tumbled fast and low. “There was another case,” Smita Aunty said, I thought.
“God. Another one? Where?” my father asked. I imagined him sitting up straighter, adjusting his sober black glasses.
“Alipore. Alipore! Canyoufuckingimagine,” Smita Aunty answered, her voice shrill.
Chandni and I moved closer to the door on our hands and knees.
“And didn’t she go meet these men because of some online event?”
“And now she’s dead.” I recognized my mother’s voice. “I hate telling Isha where to go and what to do, but you can’t be too careful these days.” My mother’s voice grew louder, as if she wanted us to hear. “The girls are always on their phones. Who knows who they’re talking to? And I don’t know how to say, ‘Stop, be careful, you might get raped!’ For God’s sake, this is the third one this month.”
Chandni was already googling rape Alipore. There it was. I mouthed the word, not knowing what it meant, except that it was something bad, something that seemed to happen to girls. I refused to look at her phone. I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to learn her name, which social media platform she was on. Later, I pulled the dictionary out and looked up the word. I dreamt about the girl in the news that night, her face vacant, the word alipore lingering on its surface instead.
Anika. Our head girl. Top of the class, calm and collected on stage. She stood on the stage every morning, the vice head girl beside her. Thick, glossy hair in a braid, elegant nose, her raucous voice filling the auditorium as she led our morning prayer, rattling the room’s wooden walls as if to say wake up. Heads bowed, hands folded, we were saying Amen to our Lord and Savior but also to Anika, who everyone had a crush on, whether or not they knew it. He wasn’t my God anyway. I said Amen to other things: that I could be like her, my legs long and beautiful even under those hideous white skirts that hovered awkwardly below our knees, neither short nor long. I said Amen to mark the end of day, the free period, the perfect pieces of pizza toast Jessica brought in her tiffin. Amen to finally convincing my mom to let me get my eyebrows threaded. Amen to the sleepy patches of day that disappeared before we could grasp them, stretching on the floors of the corridors, in the balconies, always eating, playing Uno, fighting, copying each other’s homework. Lifting skirts to see who was wearing colored panties, visible under our uniform’s translucent fabric, instead of the mandated white. Who of us had streaked their hair electric blue, hidden in a deft braid. Who would dare to skip class and go to the McDonald’s next door. Never me—always someone other than me. I preferred to watch, to laugh, to admire. Amen, we said, Amen to each other in the morning, sun julienning our faces through the shutters in thin strips of light. Each day new and bare.
Aliya Ma’am. Was not a girl, but she didn’t feel like a woman either—younger than my mother, older than me. I was enrolled in her weekly bharatanatyam class, the fourth dance class my parents had made me join after I had quit kathak, ballet, and tap dancing. Just give it a try, they said. Quit if you don’t like it, my father advised. This was my mother’s doing, I knew—she wanted me to be a dancer, an artist of some kind. My dad was always taking her side on such things, telling me I had to grow into a multifaceted, accomplished person, that I was lucky to have these opportunities when they hadn’t. My mother painted—canvases splattered with haphazard strokes, scrambled faces of women looming over us in her small studio/office. Always in reds, oranges, yellows, their limbs dissolving into the background. But she only did it part-time. There was my brother, and there was me. Two full-time jobs, she said.
Aliya Ma’am never commented on my awkward contortions; she only adjusted my hips and corrected the bend of my knees. Evenings at her dance class, all of us eating Dairy Milk chocolates, tapping our feet to the tak tak ta of the drums, practicing our mudras.
I would tell my mother class started at 3:00 p.m. when it was actually 3:30, and Adi would pick me up. We drove around, stopping for paan or sweet, milky cups of chai. The traffic crept so slowly I wasn’t sure we were moving at all. A man who looked too old to be working perched high on the bamboo frame of a building, covering its sides with black paste. Other men reclined on the hoods of their cars or tinkered with the engines. Harried women walked by with shopping bags and overstuffed purses, shielding their faces from the sun with their pallus. People stared impatiently out their car windows, typing on their BlackBerrys. I slid down in my seat, worried about who might recognize me. A city of millions could be alarmingly small.
I rummage through our time together. What did we talk about? Everything is blurry, disappearing, even his voice. What I remember most clearly was that I was in love, that I gushed about him to Jessica with the fluency of a rom-com star. He told me about their dog, who died in a road accident, its mangled corpse. That he wanted to be a mathematician. I teased him, calling him Aryabhata—the only mathematician I’d heard of.