The Girl in the Road Read Free Page A

fine,” I say. Then I start making things up in case anyone comes to question her, later. “Been living in Gandhinagar. Just in town to see family.”
    â€œFor Onam? Aren’t you Malayalee?”
    â€œNope,” I lie. “Just a darkie Gujarati.”
    That shuts her up.
    I thank her for the supplies and head back to the street. No sign of the barefoot girl, so my ruse worked. Why did I say I was from Gandhinagar? That’s where my mother’s from. It’s deep dusk now. The sky is lilac and all our faces glow.
    I have to find another place to apply the dressing, the farther away from the explosion, the better. The barefoot girl can’t track me if I’m on wheels. I turn to face traffic and raise my arm to flag down an autoshaw, but one with a driver sees me first and veers to the curb. Its cord is dragging in the street so I pick it up and tuck it back before I get in. I tell her to take me to the first place I think of: Butterfly, a Singaporean club at the north end of Marine Drive. Mohini pointed it out to me when we visited last monsoon. It was very much her scene and very much not mine, but that’s a good thing, now. Even if the barefoot girl tracked me there, they wouldn’t let her in.
    The driver powers up. I can see her smiling in the mirror. She has two dimples big enough to hold cardamom seeds. She might be fifteen.
    As we speed up she begins shouting, loud enough to be heard over the wind, and I strain to listen so I can respond, but I realize she’s talking to someone in her ear. Her sister. Wedding plans. The caterer has fallen through but she knows someone else, a brother of a boyfriend, who’s cheap but not cheap enough to insult their in-laws.
    Then the buildings pull back like stage curtains and I see the ocean. We stop at a red light. It’s beautiful, the golden light on black water. The wind blows in from the bay. The ocean tang is stronger here, dirtier and saltier than in Keralam. There are more spices in this sea.
    The light turns green and we swerve right onto Marine Drive. When we break free of the swarms and hit open road, she floors the acceleration and hugs the curve and I press my hand to the side to keep from sliding out. A fingernail moon rises over the sea. I fight to keep sight of it. It means something.
    It’s full night by the time we reach Butterfly. The autorickshaw slides to a stop and the driver says, “Yashna, wait,” and turns around, holding out her wrist with a cheap mitter flashing.
    â€œDo you take cash?”
    She wags her head and turns over her palm.
    I pay her and tip generously. She tucks the bills into a pocket sewn onto her kurta. “Thank you very much!” she says in English without looking back. I step out and she floors the pedal and is gone.
    Butterfly is the neon confection I remember. The bathroom is down a black hall with pink track lighting. In the stall I get toilet paper and ball it up and run it under the faucet and then go back into the stall. For the first time, I take off my jacket and peel up my kurta all the way up over my breasts. The cloth is stuck to the dried blood and rips the scabbing when I pull up. Fresh blood wells like tears and runs down my belly. I wipe it up and press the wet wad of toilet paper to the wound, or rather the constellation of wounds, five scratches of varying depths, not deep but not superficial, either. I don’t know what kind of snake it was. It wasn’t a cobra, krait, or viper, because I know them all by sight and anyway, I’d be dead by now. This snake was colored golden bronze. I take out my scroll and search for images, but none are the right kind of gold, or at least not native to Keralam. It might be an African species. If it is, that would tell me something.
    I wipe up the wounds, apply oil, smear some on my throat because it smells like peppermint, press squares of clearskin to the wounds, and then the larger white bandage over them. I