How to Escape From a Leper Colony Read Free

mother had sailed over from Madras in southern India before I was born. I knew only southern Trinidad. Tantie B was my grandmother in Chacachacare. And Lazaro was my brother.
    For the first months after I arrived Lazaro would take me for walks. The island was green with palm and sea grape trees. It was loud with the howler monkeys that snored all day and mated all night. Lazaro and I often went beyond the fence that kept the lepers to the leper side. We would climb under it, through a gorge deep enough for a body. It had been first dug out by an iguana and now maintained by Lazaro. We would climb trees. We would eat green fruit and spit the seeds out, aim for lizards and fire ants. One day Lazaro took me farther than he had before.
    “There,” he said, pointing down the hill to a clearing with spots of gray. “The nun burial ground. That’s where they put the nuns’ bodies. That’s where I want to be buried.”
    “But you ain a nun.”
    “Who say?”
    “You a boy. You couldn’t be a nun.”
    “Why I can’t be a nun? Didn’t Peter take over the family after Jesus dead, like widows does do? Peter get to be buried under some rock. I want a rock over me.”
    We climbed down the hill to look at the burial site. The grounds were clean but sharp with ankle-high grass. When we walked we made a swishing sound like waves. The stones over the graves were marked: Sister Marie, Lover of the Lord; Sister Margaret, Lover of the Word; Sister Ann, Lover of the poor and the wretched. We sat among the stones. Lazaro patted my arm gently.
    “Soon they going have to chop some of it away.”
    “I know.”
    “You afraid?”
    “Yes.”
    “You brave?”
    “Yes.”
    “What you love?”
    “My mother.”
    “And who she?”
    “She …” I paused. I had not seen or heard from my mother in months. I had not expected her to write because she had had very little schooling. But what was she now? Was she a new wife? Was she going to be someone else’s mother? “She a woman who works in the cane field. She does pray to Saint Anne to send her signs.” I pushed some dirt around with my toe. “Who was your mother?” I already knew of Lazaro’s tragedy from the little things Tantie B had whispered to me at night, and the stories Babalao Chuck told in the clearing when Lazaro was off helping haul in the goods from the delivery boat. I knew, but it still seemed the right thing to ask. I lowered my head so Lazaro would know I did not mean to be bold.
    “My mother is the woman who tell me that I was her miracle. I was her sign.” With his hand he raised my face so that our eyes met. I felt my skin grow warm and loose. “She tell me a island could be like a world.” He spoke softly and I could see that his eyes were heavy with their water. “Try a next thing,” he breathed out, so that I realized there had been a long silence. “Everyone love their mother. What else you love?”
    I thought about this. I let my good hand run through the sharp grass, feeling the tiny cuts opening on my fingers. “My own-self,” I answered at last.
    “Then on your grave it will say ‘Sister Deepa, Lover of She-self.’”
    “What your stone going say?”
    “Brother Lazaro, Lover of Deepa.”
    I sat on a stone with markings that were clear and fresh. I felt the curved coolness though my clothes. It wasn’t smooth. It was rough and the thin cloth of my sari did not do much to cushion me. I lifted my feet to try to balance. To try to press the cold stone onto me. “Don’t fall,” he said.
    “I won’t.” But I got up anyway. “Why we here?”
    “Because we lepers.”
    I nodded. “But why here-here?” I spread my arms wide to mean the world.
    Lazaro shrugged. “You don’t listen to the priest on Sunday?”
    “I never understand what he does say.”
    “We here because God want somebody to know him.”
    “Like a friend?”
    “Like when someone know you it make you real. Like the tree that fall in the forest when nobody was around. God had