Integers, Parabolas, and Jivika

GLITTER AND BLOOD, Part 2: Trip to Meerut

Prisha never has to change her name, because she never gets caught working the streets. Yashvi was Hruthi when she first met Prisha, who introduced her to opium, ketamine, and ecstasy.

"Once you're high," Prisha told Yashvi, "you won't care about what's happening to your body."

Yashvi had just met with the slippery-fingered doctor who comes to the Labyrinth to, after much (procedural?) fondling, administer contraceptives. He sticks the girls with a long needle that keeps them from ovulating.

Prisha asked her first "How many?" when she felt close enough to chat with Yashvi.

At first Yashvi wasn't sure what the question meant, but Prisha's fidgeting granted clarity.

Sexual intercourse.

Customers.

How many?

"Ten." Yashvi glanced up quickly, feeling vulnerable. "What about you?"

Prisha shook her head. "More than ten."

"What happened to your ear?" Laksh traces Yashvi's stitches with his thumb.

Bottles discarded by some drunk bob in the pool under the bridge. Yashvi grasps Laksh's chin and concentrates on his eyes as though feeding them with her own.

He says, "Is it bad, Yashvi, what happened?"

She says, "Yes. Terrible."

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

"I . . . I will tell you. . ."

It happened when Yashvi was Radnya.

She clutched a small ticket, TO MEERUT, between her fingers.

Meerut was full of surprises, street music, parades, protests. Perhaps all this also exists back in Delhi, but she would not know it, since she only knows the caverns of the Labyrinth, or "brothel," as she once overheard two mothers refer to it in the shallow pool under the bridge.

Brothel. Weird name, she thought. Sounds like "broth." Are we scallops in a soup or something? Madam's soup of girls.

Yashvi laughed, imagining herself, Prisha, and the others floating in a giant bowl as a giant Madam stirred them with a giant spoon.

Yashvi was bumped from the side, engulfed then in a flurry of papers. A textbook hit the floor. It rolled, wings aflutter, like a panicking pigeon. "I am so sorry!" somebody cried. "Are you all right? Please forgive me!"

Yashvi watched a hand gently lift the book off the porous concrete. The student was about her age, lightweight, well-dressed, a heavy knapsack flopping as he scrambled after his disobedient papers. She did what she could to assist him, the wind causing this to spiral, that to take flight. She managed to retrieve four wayward sheets, one gone for good, blown to the heavens. He took what she had salvaged and he grinned nervously, his teeth intensely white. "So sorry, miss. Thank you so much."

The trees overhead roared and let their dry leaves come sailing down. He rubbed his nape, seeming somehow both in a rush and not. "I haven't seen you before, miss. Are you new?"

She raised her eyes from his shiny teeth, then shrugged.

"Oh," he said. "Well, you have a lovely day."

She nodded.

"Okay, miss. Thanks again! Thanks so much!" He hurried away and she hadn't even spoken a word.

Don't go, she wanted to say. Take me where you're headed. And we can be each other's.