by Vrinda Manocha
Jiya sits on the front porch with a lump in her throat and a grey teddy bear in her lap. She’s watching the road extending into the emptiness of a hot yellow Saturday afternoon, when everyone with sense and air-conditioning has retreated into the cookie-cutter houses of an unremarkable neighbourhood.
She shifts uncomfortably in her seat, readjusting Bonkers, whose fur is starting to stick to the skin of her arms. Inside the house, Mrs. R, who is watching her for the day has fallen asleep on the couch with her mouth wide open. She won’t be looking for the little girl until it’s time to feed her again.
The branches of the old trees of the neighbourhood cast wavering shadows over Jiya’s legs in the faint breeze that hisses by every couple of minutes. The silence of a Saturday is otherwise unbroken. And Jiya sits frozen to the top stair, looking into the haze for the wink of an approaching car, a red beacon that will bring her mother home today. Hopefully.
It’s all her fault, she knows. She was acting smart, as her mother often said.
“Don’t act smart, Jiya, either you eat it or you eat nothing…”
“Don’t act smart, Jiya, I know what your teacher said about your spelling…”
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
Five days ago, after her daily dose of dos and don’ts, Jiya set off for school in a foul mood, with her spell-checked homework and the most boring sandwiches her mother could slap together in the five minutes before she rushed her onto the school bus.
Loudmouth Leela was in the bus, waiting to fill the short ride to school with endless “Did-you-knows?” culled from the Child Craft and Time Life books she buried herself in when the rest of the kids were playing hopscotch and cycling in lazy circles around the neighbourhood park.
Jiya listened with half an ear, and rushed off the bus the minute it rumbled to a halt in front of the elementary school. Charging in the direction of her classroom, anything to get away from Leela, Jiya tripped over a tree root snaking through the concrete and went for a toss.
Within seconds, Leela’s face swam into her vision, blurred by the hot tears brought on by the stinging pain in her knees.
“Did you know that you shouldn’t step on cracks? They have a saying, ‘Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Leela rambled earnestly, as if there had been no break in their one-sided conversation. “I don’t know if it’s true, though, but I wouldn’t want to try. Would you, Jiya? Would you??”
Jiya limped to class with the walking encyclopedia in tow, unable to outrun her musings on whether intentionally stepping on cracks would have the same effect as accidentally stepping on them.
It had not been a good day. And to top it all off, Ma wasn’t pleased.“Look at the state of your pants, Jiya. You tore a hole right through them! Why, why is it so hard for you to come home from school looking the way I sent you?”
And after an hour:
“I saw you didn’t eat your sandwiches. Why do I bother to waste my time on feeding you?”
And then:
“Fine, go out and play. But only for half an hour, I don’t want your knees to start bleeding through all your clothes. And you have homework.”
Jiya burst out the door, ears buzzing and blood pounding in her ears. Stomping down the road, as far away from the house as she was allowed to go, she stopped at the site where a water pipe had burst and the men in the shiny coats had dug right through it to fix it. Deep cracks ran all the way across the road, which had been patched up, but not completely.
Cracks.
Jiya walked to the edge of the patch, and stepped deliberately on the fissures running to the edge of the hole where the pipe lay. The men in the shiny coats had left for the day, leaving orange cones and yellow tape that fluttered in the breeze.
Jiya stepped again, feeling the pleasant crunch of crumbly concrete below her thin-soled Mickey Mouse sneakers. Distilling all her pent-up anger into the ground beneath her, she stomped and stamped and hopped on the spot, seeing the cracks widen beneath her feet. And for five minutes the world was wonderful and she felt that surge of pleasure when you see someone get what you think they deserve.
Of course, Ma had to see her.
She came charging down the street like a four-foot steam engine, spluttering with half-formed sentences, lapsing into heavily-accented Hindi.
“Jiya… get away…”,
“Bewakoof ladki, hatt!”
“Gir jayegi tu!”
She didn’t mean to spin away from Ma and turn her back as her last of act of rebellion for the day. She didn’t realize how thin the ground was and how much a six-year-old’s temper tantrum could shake it. What she did see was Ma’s anger change to panic as she yanked Jiya away from the hole in the ground, only to see it vanish beneath her own feet.
It took five minutes for the neighbours to get there after hearing Jiya’s screams rent the soft light of the evening. Another 20 minutes passed before the sirens of the ambulance, no less shrill, were heard in the distance. Jiya’s Ma was lifted out of the pit in a stretcher while the ambulance men yelled instructions to each other. Ma’s face was drawn in pain, but she told Mrs. R to take care of Jiya and call her dad. The ambulance doors slammed. And then there was silence.
Jiya hunches on the porch, mulling over Leela’s thoughts that day, her ponytails wilting in the heat. Papa had said Ma had only broken her leg, not her back and would be home any day now. Nobody died from a broken leg, he laughed, while putting her to bed. Ma would be just fine and back in action in no time. You know your Ma.
Yet, Jiya worries every day.
What if Ma doesn’t come home today? What if she falls down again, making the old curse come true? What if she loses her memory, like that lady on TV did after falling down the stairs?
She couldn’t visit Ma in the hospital because Papa said Ma didn’t want her to miss school. He explained to her that visiting hours were over by the time her yellow school bus dropped her off at the corner. “Hospitals are no fun,” he told her, “and doctors roam around looking for sick little children.” Best to wait until Ma came home, he’d added, slapping together sandwiches while also trying to tie her ponytails, getting breadcrumbs in her hair.
But it has been five days, and there are still no signs of Ma returning.
Jiya crumples into herself, keeping well clear of the cracks in the worn wooden stairs, and allows those niggling thoughts to burrow into her brain while Bonkers gets squashed in her lap.
And right at the back of her mind is the last, and most niggling thought of all. If Ma does remember, (and deep down, Jiya knows she will), what exactly is she going to do to her?
nice piece of work