Integers, Parabolas, and Jivika

YASHVI, Part 3: The Pool

Yashvi opens the door to a wall of mist. The streets still bustle at six in the morning. There remains this constant commotion, this vague, collective anxiety. People glower at her just because she is in their line of sight. The buildings, which seem to be made of cardboard, tilt in the soil's liquefaction. Naked toddlers trot circles around her while their mothers scold them frantically.

Prisha catches up to her, as do Madam's other girls, trickling one by one out of the Labyrinth. Their banter fills the morning, lulling the city into a trance, everything building up, everything breaking down, everything giving, everything taking.

With gritted teeth, Jiya descends into the pool and bewails its temperature, but the red sun burns, and before long it wouldn't be surprising if the water boiled. Inaaya is blue-eyed, her beige complexion standing out from the other girls', her father rumored to be European. Pihu is always batting away mosquitoes, and you might note that often there is nothing swarming around her as her arms flail. Then come Dina and Mahika, who are perpetually together, the other girls referring to them as "Dinahika." Then comes Ananya who is very tall. Then Zara who is the youngest, perhaps eleven years old. Then of course there is Ruby, nicknamed "Red Gumdrop," who receives the most customers of all Madam's girls. Then are Keya, Zuri, Samaira, Charvi, and many others, their countenances blank, the groggy ghosts who wander the shadows of India.

Yashvi launders and wrings her dress, looking this way and that. The bridge overhead is still sturdy after countless decades, though at times it will groan or shake. A little boy's head peeks down from its deck and swiftly vanishes.

Yashvi lays her attire at the side of the pool to dry. "Laksh," she calls.

The boy kicks dust as he waddles over and greets Yashvi, who stands in her underwear, skipping stones from the edge of the pool, Prisha reclining on a boulder a few meters away. Even though he is not fat, Laksh's belly hangs out, due to the curvature of his spine, and his expression is always surprised or astonished.

"What are you up to today, hahn?" She elbows his head, the top of it reaching only her shoulder in height.

"Throwing stones at Mr. Babu's cows." His age is nine.

She sets her fists on her hips. "Doesn't he catch you?"

"Never! He's slow."

"You're going to regret messing with him!"

"I don't care."

She searches for an unoccupied area of the pool, then skips another stone. "It's hot out, no?"

Laksh has a short attention span and if something is not intensely interesting or stimulating—involving money or candy—in seconds you will lose him. He has no parents that he knows of, only a thirty-eight-year-old cousin, Ajay, who joined the Armed Forces.

"You get more disgusting each day. Come here." Yashvi spits in her hands, smearing her saliva over Laksh's stained face.

"Stop it!" the boy squeals.

A child of mischief, he fends for himself, scavenging in dumpsters, trash bins, junkyards. Atop the ledges of abandoned construction sites, he nibbles half-eaten sandwiches and slurps sour, decarbonated sludge from discarded soft drink cans. When bored, he frequents Mr. Babu's cow pen and hurls pebbles at the cattle inside. The beasts groan and thump their stalls. Mr. Babu runs out to exact his vengeance, but Laksh has left traps in the man's path: a pile of horse manure, dirty diapers, bits of glass for Mr. Babu's poor bare feet, which are heard thwacking the dirt minutes before arriving.

Laksh, though, is not entirely delinquent, for in all his antics he still calls Mr. Babu "Mr. Babu." Not "old man Babu," not "Babu." "Mr. Babu."

The boy now pinches Yashvi's arm and scuttles off before she can retaliate. She squints as he vanishes into the distance, which wobbles in the heat.

"He is the devil incarnate." Prisha sits up on her boulder, facing the sun. "Just don't talk to him."

Yashvi smiles. "He can be my little brother."

She recognizes Kajel, or rather, Kajel's back. Turned from all in the pool, the girl who gets no customers bathes in solitude. Her straw-textured hair hangs limply about her and she regularly trips over herself when she moves.

Yashvi hoots at her: "Hi, Kajel!"

Immediately, Kajel tenses.

"She'll soil herself," Pihu whispers into Yashvi's ear. "She wants no attention, since she's ugly."

"You've never seen her face!" Yashvi is shouting. "Maybe you're uglier than she!" Her eyes are manic and she looks nauseous. "In fact, I'm certain you are!"

She slinks into the pool and wades toward Kajel, who sobs with quick, subdued gasps.

Yashvi inches closer, as quiet, as gradual, as spring's indent on winter's ice.

"I—uh—er—hullo?"

Hearing no response, she awkwardly doggy-paddles away, beating herself internally.

Prisha swims alongside her. "Let Kajel alone."

"You assume she wants to be alone," Yashvi says, "but the people you leave alone could be dying and . . . and you'd be none the wiser."

"Why do you talk so much about dying?" Prisha says.

Yashvi thinks for a moment. "It . . . it isn't about me or you, it is about her and . . . what she's feeling . . . and when it stops being about that, Prisha, everything numbs. Don't you get it?" A teardrop forms in her eye and she wipes it bear before it can be perceived. "She numbs. We numb. Everything numbs. And what will cure the numbing? She will. She is the cure, Prisha. The girl most people hate or could care less about. She is the cure."

"Kajel doesn't speak."

"God doesn't either, but sometimes silence is the only way to speak in a world so loud."

At the pool's edge, Ruby stretches, reaching for her painted toenails. Jiya erupts from the pool, her hair slicked back. She spews water and smirks at Ruby. "Chhee! All that lovemaking has made you so flexible!"

Ruby plunges into the pool and shoves Jiya's head underwater, Jiya then grabbing onto Ruby's foot and pulling her down as well. Prisha rests her chin on her shoulder and rolls her eyes. She and Yashvi share a knowing glance. They laugh discreetly. The mothers in the pool curl their upper lips. Ruby and Jiya wrestle until everyone else has to evacuate to dry land.

"Ruby is filthy! Ruby is filthy!" Jiya shouts again and again as both girls cackle in a storm of splashes.