Burning Ashes

Arc 1: Chapter 7

"The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions."~Alfred Adler.

Turns out I didn't really need to face it. The school decided that I'd had more than enough absences, even though my father had told them that every day I took off served a purpose: I needed time to heal. In the end, my father pulled me out of the school before they had the chance to kick me out and arranged for me to attend a different school, in a different district. The new academic year would start off with a fresh start, he promised me but it took convincing before the last time someone made a promise to me, they had broken it. The people in school must have known about me but I wasn't the talk of the school the way I would have been had I continued to attend my old one. 

I was still lonely and by the time recess came about I was ready to get my lunch and head out alone. We had long outgrown dresses and while the boys sported brown pants and white button-downs tucked in, reminiscent of British-India and colonization (the shirts rarely stayed tucked in though), girls were expected to wear a shalwar  along with a knee-length tunic we called a kameez, and a dupatta that served as a scarf over our breasts to preserve the modesty so central to our culture. 

The day seemed to stretch on forever and by the time recess came about I was physically exhausted as well as mentally. We didn't have lockers but neither did we have any fewer books than any other student in the world. We were expected to carry our books everywhere with us and it had become a sort of unofficial tradition to carry bags that exceeded us in both size and weight. We might as well have been ants because the more books you had, the better you worked and the smarter you were. Only the biggest of the nerds brought books that weren't necessary; it was like paying for extra tutors. It also meant that only the richest could invest in it, and I refused to spend money on books that weren't required by the curriculum and hence I kept my father oblivious to these impervious circumstances. It was for his own good.

I chose to settle myself in the corner with my lunch, if bread and butter counted as lunch, and a stick to draw in the ground. I couldn't say I had any particularly noticeable artistic talents but the act itself was fun and I was content drawing pictures in the medium my dead brother's body had integrated itself into. It felt as if I was drawing for my brother and I could almost hear his comments  in my head. When he was in particularly good moods he wouldn't tease me about my drawings but instead act as if I had surpassed Picasso himself. I found it funny because Omar didn't have any particular taste for art but he told me that he knew a good drawing when he saw one. I drew him a portrait of us this time and decided I'd leave it there for him to admire. I drew it flipped, a mirror image, because if he would see it from under the ground then it would be clearer for him. I wrote our names on top of our heads and a tiny "I miss you" along with it. I caught a solitary tear just in time; if someone saw it fall here I wouldn't be spared. I continued to draw, adding a sun in the top-right corner of my imaginary canvas and froze when someone came and kicked the stick from grip. I must have been too late with the tear. 

"Crying for your drunkard of a brother?" It was the school bully, Ali. Of course it was. 

"I'd appreciate it if you left me alone." I replied, picking up my stick again and gathering my Dora the Explorer lunch box. I didn't get very far, because he was quicker than me and snatched my box from my hand. I painfully watched him take my slice of bread splattered with butter and stuff the whole thing in his mouth at once. 

"If you steal my lunch then you should at least bother to savor the taste." I said, too frustrated to really bother putting up a fight. 

"If you're a little worm then at least you should bother keeping yourself in the ground with your brother's rotting corpse."