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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Prisha the twenty-five-year-old hugs her knees. Her jhumkas, two miniature chandeliers studded with gemstones, sparkle on a nightstand whose paint flakes. The room has no illumination save an aperture the width and height of an envelope.
Introspection creeps in when the moon shines disco-white. Each lunar phase is a cap covering the opening of a well bit by bit, bit . . . by . . . bit.
Yashvi and Prisha share a bed. Sometimes the pair sleeps shoulder to shoulder; sometimes one roommate curls up near the footboard to let the other occupy the upper mattress unperturbed; sometimes this or that series of tosses and turns finds a girl on the floor. Yashvi knows sunrise will have her wearier than she is now, as though night was a time for aging instead of resting.
"Do you believe in God?" She reposes.
The other girl, still sitting, gapes down at her. "Occasionally, I guess."
"Does God believe in us?" Yashvi sees nightmares in her blinks before she has even departed consciousness. "Will you be sleeping soon, Prisha?"
"Soon, Radn—Yashvi."
"Are you in love with anybody?"
"No and neither are you. You're not ready for marriage," Prisha scolds. "Get wisdom first. You have years left to be young."
The girls rustle in their sheets. They will not flee, for they are "broken.""Broken girls learn what wise girls know, that there is nowhere better than the Labyrinth." Here was the first thing Yashvi ever heard Prisha say.
This evening the girls are at one another's sides, a position they assume while conversing. Prisha grips her knees tighter as the minutes perish, but she will not lie down. She bites her fingernails. They make popping sounds under the pressure of her teeth. She asks a question she has asked every night since she first met Yashvi.
"How many so far?"
"I stopped counting." Yashvi rolls over to view the room's wall that sweats condensation. Ants emerge from cracks. She will count everything (the ants, the cracks), but not what Prisha refers to when asking "How many?"
Yashvi returns to lying faceup and imagines her lips kissed gingerly in a fog of pedals. She almost touches herself but doesn't, wouldn't. Once sickened of urges she discovers the word "girl" in her neurons and inquires of its darkness, its holiness, its wrath.
She cannot sleep on her right side, because her ear throbs, a literal sensation of fire there, as though massaged with bhut jolokia seeds. Grazing her fingers over the stitches, she rehearses her new name in her mind the way she has done for the past twelve hours. To think she might introduce herself as "Radnya" by mistake! Such would risk detectives tracking down the Labyrinth.
"Prisha?"
"Uh?"
"You are not twenty-five. You pretend you are so you can buy alcohol. You're my age, and your ID is fake."
