Rearranged

Book 3: Encounters

 "Don't you feel like a celebrity?" Neha asked Jenny as they stood in the middle of town the next morning. "Everywhere we go, there's a crowd."

"The Patel paparazzi." Jenny laughed, surveying the circle of aunties around them. The street was lined with squat shops and sweaty vendors arranging displays of snacks and shawls, textbooks and electronics.

"Hutia! Hutia!" shouted a man with a fistful of live chickens. They squawked and kicked as he rushed by.

Jenny could still hear the chickens when Neha said, "They dowry they asked for was less than Mummy expected. That's why we're shopping. Spending the windfall."

"Crap." Jenny lifted her sneaker.

"I didn't know you felt so strongly about it," Neha said.

"No, crap," Jenny said, pointing to her rubber sole, now brown.

Neha took the shoe to an open well. She pulled the lever and water gushed out. "That will do for now," she said, handing Jenny the soggy sneaker.

"Impressive."

"Some things you just pick up."

On their way back to the aunties, Neha stopped short. She ducked behind Jenny.

"It's him," Neha hissed.

Jenny followed Neha's eyes across the street to a big white building and a field out front. "You're paranoid," she said.

"I swear." Neha craned her neck. "That's him. Playing soccer with those kids."

"Beti!" the aunties called as they entered a sari shop..

"You have to go check it out," Neha said. "This could be our only chance."

Jenny took another look. She thought she spotted a head taller than the rest with wavy hair. She remembered the headshot with the whimsical eyes.

"I'm on it," she said, checking the curb for dung mudpies. She jumped away as a rickshaw nearly clipped her foot.

The block never seemed to end. It merely curved into a traffic circle, offering no easy place to cross.

Jenny found a crowd leaning into the street and added her body to the throng. Heads turned in unison, back and forth, trying to find a hole in the blur of cars, scooters, rickshaws, and cows. Then they lunged ahead, as if a gunshot had started a marathon. Jenny ran with them, pushed from behind by latecomers and squeezed from the side by brave outliers.

When the mass migration reached the other side, Jenny steadied herself on a pushcart. She sank into her soggy shoe as a chai walla offered her a cup of hot tea. She was out of breath and thirsty, but shook her head no.

The white building was a university. A leftover from colonial rule, it could have passed for a British country estate. Students crossed the grass talking into cell phones, others rushed off to class, loose papers in their grasp.

Jenny peeked through the bars of an iron gate. She still wasn't sure it was him. The wavy hair was there. If she could just see his eyes.

The tall, slender boy was passing a soccer ball around a circle of children. One was missing a leg. The boy from the train platform was there, wearing the same rags.

She watched her subject's shirt rise and fall on his bony shoulders as he dribbled. He did moves she had seen in the Argentine café, popping the ball from his head to his knee to his ankle. His young audience cheered with every bounce. He finished by kicking the ball high in the air, setting up the kid with one leg for the perfect header. If this had been a park back home, Jenny would have dismissed him as a showoff. But here, with these kids, she could tell he was giving them more than a soccer lesson.