I watch her dance on stage. On the edge of my seat, head up in awe, I watch her every move.
Her large eyes have been made larger, voluptuous, with a thick black outline. Lips a full red, a gold band frames her face, gleaming in the light. That body so tight, every movement precise, a slight shift of the waist to the pull of the sitar. Fingers pointed together like petals. She sits on her toes, the red and green pleats in between unfold like a swan taking flight. Her henna red palms open to us.
It’s the scene of the abduction. She shudders and cries out like a woman abducted, about to be raped, falls to the floor and pleads to be released. And then the music changes, dark and sombre and fast, and now she paces across the stage, to the other side, spreads her leg, thumps her thighs and has become the demon king Ravana, about to rape Sita. She stomps, twirls an imaginary moustache, lifts her legs and roars out to the heavens.
She is beautiful, resplendent, above us all here, above her parents, her extended family--the ammamas and apoopas, the aunties and uncles and family friends drumming their slanted heads, a thing untouchable, a dancer, an apsara, while the talentless mass of us crouch here in the dark like vermin--her best friends, whispering and giggling, the boys from our class sniggering, saying stupid, sexy things to each other about her waist and breasts.
She was scared, I saw it in her eyes all day. It’s not the first time she has performed this dance, she had her arangetram three months ago, but performing at the school concert is something else. I was so worried for her and felt protective.
But I look at her and know, she is already in another world, away from all this, from all of us.
I look at her in complete control of this stage, abductor and abductee, demon and goddess, rapist and rapee. This face, coy one minute, full of fury the next. Angry and mellow, frightened and arrogant, everything at once. For one moment during this I feel she is looking straight at me, her large bindi pointed straight in my direction. And then I shake it off.
I want her, I still do, even after all these years. My first real love. And she loved me back too, we loved each other together, when there was still a lifetime left to love. I wonder how it has come to this. Not so long ago, we wanted each other. But now she hurriedly walks away from me, looks fearful when I approach, ignores me like my love is such a dirty thing.
And just a few months before I left for England she invites me for her wedding, assuming I wouldn’t come all the way to Coimbatore, I am sure. But I do. At the wedding, as expected she is always surrounded by people, always expected to do things and be places, so we speak only trivialities. She is a dutiful, beautiful bride, laughs when her groom is suddenly lifted by his friends when she goes to garland him, head bent down reverentially accepting the most garish sari from the elders, listens intently to the priest and performs every droning ritual to the T, her specs slipping down her tense and sweaty nose as she cowers when he puts a line of sindoor on her forehead, marking her as his, for life. A meek and subdued Indian bride. A cow. I watch from the sidelines, throwing the rice and sugar with others, aiming for his eyes.
And already, she has a baby, is a software developer in Bangalore, puts on her glasses, ties the gajra in her plaited hair, covers her chest with yard lengths of her dupatta. She covers her face and hair too so it does not take in the dust of the city and rides off on her scooty all the way to Electronic City to work as Team Leader for the Data Management Unit of her IT firm. She wears her office badge with pride, puts it on after making idlis for her husband for breakfast, which she wakes up every morning at 6am to do, after feeding the baby, then pumping her breasts, and handing him over to her mother, or his.
I met her once, not so long ago, bumped into her at a clothing store here in Delhi where she was visiting family. She enquired after my health, asked me to give my regards to my parents and then left, quickly, with her baby on her hips, blinking back at me with a freshly tonsured head, right after his mundan, one black dot on his temple, and another on his chin to ward off all the world’s evil, an unrestrained eye.
What has happened to you, I wanted so badly to ask her, did I hurt you in some way? Why do you hide from the world so? At that moment I want to take her ugly baby, and lock him inside the changing room forever.
In the classroom, maths or sometimes geography, I’d pat her on her shoulder, whisper into her ear, ‘now’. She demurely gets up, obediently, and I follow her, we trail to the teacher, holding hands sometimes and ask her if we could go again, and the teacher looks at both of us, one to the other and back, soul twins, sisters joined at the hip, looking nothing like the other. She smiles, sighs and says, alright, alright, but why do you both always have to go at the same time, why and thinks nostalgically of the sweetness of girlhood as she watches us skip out together. We run once we’re out of the classroom, gleeful, our hands on our mouths, out of control, giggling, running to the toilet. She sharply halts my pace when we pass other classrooms and I am forced to gain composure.
We enter the furthest toilet in the school, in the corner of the 5th floor where there’s only the science lab, the computer room and the great big white hall, at least one of which is empty on any given day. We enter into the underwater light of the bathroom, the sound of some girl or another crying against the wall, the flushing toilets, always the toilets are flushing in ladies’ bathrooms across the world, to drown out the sound of crying. We quickly enter a cubicle, make sure no one else can see, or make sure that whoever is in the toilet is safely in their own cubicle. We shut the door, look at each other and giggle some more in silence. When a giggle escapes me, she stuffs her dark hand over my mouth and waits till I have gained some composure. Then we lift the skirt of our uniforms and show each other our bloomers, frilling at the edges with cartoons whose bright colours have been stamped out of their outlines, and later our panties, the latest designs, the cut, the finish, the colour. Mine stylish with curved cuts and lacy edges as the years pass, hers dull, monochrome, dependable.
And in the bathroom, when we made sure the coast was clear and we were alone, I’d do the talking, always me, she does the doing, me saying lift, turn, move, this way, oh very pretty and one day, I said take it off, and when she did without question, without even looking up at me, I stick my finger through the middle gash of her, slicing through soft flesh, dark chocolate like the rest of her, feel strange things poking inside. She tingles. We look at each other.
In the sixth standard, during the short-break while the girls played four corners outside and judged each other’s tiffins, and the boys played cricket or football, or did any of the nameless things boys then did, we’d come here. She’d follow me dutifully and I’d lift her skirt and touch her, first just keep my finger in there but then move slowly up and down. She closes her eyes and is lost to me. And one day she asks me if I could lift the white divided skirt I wore for PE that day, and when I do if I could also please push my purple panties down, and I say no. Just a little? No.
Without knowing it, this becomes something more, something I can control, determine.
I begin to crave her, and the feeling she gives me, everyday, all the time and realise, finally that I am in love.
For years this goes on. She passes me notes from the exam under my table, she shares her dosa and chutney, her sambar or curd rice with me when my mother forgets to pack the dabba, or when she has sent two-day old jam sandwiches for lunch that the other girls pinch their noses, make disgusted faces and pretend retch at. She dutifully writes down the day’s homework in the dark blue calendar, subject wise, and when I call her every evening to ask her what it is, she spends hours patiently telling me. Sometimes, she does my homework too, before the first period, maths and physics and biology, completes it all in ten minutes.
We are best friends for life. She is the only one who signs my autograph book when the year ends, fills the pages with hearts and stars, although a few of the other girls sign hers. On the way to the toilet, on the way back, in the bus home, while nibbling at lunch, she tells me about her dominating mother, her father who is never at home, her sister who latches onto her all the time. I tell her, in bits and pieces, about my own parents and she seems intoxicated by my mother.
She comes home for a pyjama party one day. I am barely beside myself preparing the menu for the snack, dinner, breakfast and lunch for the following day. She wears a matching pyjama set with faint orange autumn leaves and sleeves slightly puffed. She speaks politely to everyone at home, eats the pasta with pesto sauce my mother makes, so alien and exciting to her, refuses a second helping, no thank you aunty, it’s so delicious but I just can’t. She doesn’t talk much around my mother, but asks me all kinds of questions about her when she leaves the room.
That night, I make sure my room is locked shut.
We spend short breaks, and later lunch breaks, sometimes half a class in that same 5th floor toilet with each other. I grow excited at the sight of her every morning, her tiny gold jhumka earrings shaking. Her black wet pools rise to greet me, dripping with awe, ready for instruction. I grow addicted to this look, the last image I see in my mind’s eye every night, the first every morning.
But things changed before either of us realised and before I knew it she had drifted away. Not falling for a boy, or even another girl, she just fell deep into her studies. Always a high ranker, she now was among the class toppers, also acing sports and art and craft, acing everything. Now she sits further and further away, towards the front of the class with the other toppers, a source of condescension, ridicule and minor jealousy for the rest of the class.
I begin to stalk her, she leaves me with nothing else. Stealth and cunning comes naturally to me. I get off at my own bus stop, two stops before hers and then run madly behind the bus, hiding behind vegetable carts, trees, almost banging into motorcycles till I reach her building and from a distance, see her climb up the stairs. I crouch for a little while behind a car in the garage of her building, and then climb up the four floors to her apartment. Stare at her front door garlanded for the festival season, not knowing what to do. When I hear someone talking inside, I rush to the 5th floor landing right above her house, just beside the closed door of the terrace. I catch my breath. I hear her mother and the maid come and go, her sister crying. I barely see her come out at all. I get bored and skip down, three stairs at a time, and look up at her window. There’s her lamp on the study table, I pick up stones and throw them at her. She’s immediately at the window, and when she sees me, looks alarmed and shuts the windows firmly shut.
That Thursday I’ll never forget, the day I knew it was over completely. You ignore me through the day, like you never have before. In Physics class, I get up to go to the toilet and look back at her as I pass, but she has her head firmly in her books. The teacher looks at me and with a sardonic smile says: and what about your friend? I keep my head low and quickly blink back the tears. As soon as I am out, I run to the toilet, our same toilet on the 5th floor, zip past the full classrooms and shut the door of the first cubicle I find. I cry inconsolably on the wall, not caring for all the ruckus I am making, cry with someone else crying in the next bathroom. Two girls feeding off each other’s heartbreak.
But my heartbreak has more permanent consequences. From cheating on my exams from her notes, and doing fairly well, I soon begin failing. First, and it surprises me, I fail maths, just about, and then failure comes to me like fate--one after the other I fail at second term maths, third term chemistry, the next year at physics, even Computer Science once. I look down at the stream of red question marks and diagonal lines on my exam paper. I grow embarrassed and angry, full of spite for her, the reason behind all my bad marks, for my mother’s nightly absences, the maddening quiet at home. So to spite her still, I grow my nails out and paint them black or grey, poke my eyes with the kaajal stick and colour the lower lining like a child discovering crayons for the first time. I watch Avril Lavigne and Evanesence videos and realise, there’s a whole world out there I know nothing about.
My eyes begin to gleam hard. I walk with a studied slouch, dragging my shoes behind me. I secretly chew cherry bubblegum all the time and transfer it the side of my mouth when I’m forced to talk with an adult--a teacher or a parent. I leave the chewed pieces on her desk during our lunch break everyday, even while she’s sitting on her desk eating her lemon rice and delightfully watch her scrape it away. As I drift further and further into the horizon for her, the realisation that she has stopped caring for me more real each passing day, I begin to think she, like most people are actually rather stupid. They might appear to be clever, or might seem pretty but underneath it all they’re all fairly dull and simple, each mimicking each other without even realising it. I develop a shadow self that talks back to all these stupid people in my head, delighted at figuring out the various permutations and combinations of expletives I overhear from the boys. Cunt, cunt, cunt I say to her and to my teacher when he asks me to complete the sum on the board, and I sense her almost blurting out the final answer as I walk past.
I spite her with my lack of concern for my studies, I spite her trying very hard to ignore her back and eventually, I spite her by smoking with a boy from the 10th standard at the back of the school.
One day, when I attempt to casually stroll into the school twenty minutes late as the assembly is underway, I am stopped by the watchman. I roll my eyes and sit on the steps, as the national anthem plays inside and everyone stands up with duty. After assembly, the school principal walks down the steps and taps my shoulder. I jump up and hear her say, If you can’t make it in time, stay out. She hands me over a bright Pink Card and before leaving adds, tomorrow, you have to stay back till 5pm for detention.
I look to my left, she’s handing over another Pink Card to a boy at some distance, I give them a glance and then begin the long walk home, thrilled at the possibility of the full empty day before me, my first day of suspension.
Suddenly I hear someone saying hey-hey, I turn around and he’s asking me if I’d like to join him for a smoke. I freeze, not knowing what to do for a second and then I say, sure, cool.
We smoke cigarettes in the corner behind the back gate. There’s a small alcove where they store equipment for the school and he helps me squeeze in. At first I say, let’s just smoke here, pointing to the cluster of trees opposite the school but he insists we do it inside. He offers me a cigarette and I take it with a practised hand, and put it in my lips. He plucks it out, inverts the side, sneering with his rat-smile wide. I panic at my own stupidity, but he lights the cigarette for me. I stare at the pink acne popping around his jawline and forehead and feel conscious of my own skin, flaming with acne too. I feel a sudden sense of comradeship, with this strange boy who I knew nothing about, who I only knew as the one who failed his 10th standard board exams in a class of eighty-two, an embarrassment to the school. We sit on our haunches beside the boxes and tarpaulin and smoke in silence. I watch the rain fall in heaps outside as I feel his stare fixed on me. Suddenly he says, his mouth caked with spit, you don’t know, do you?
Slowly, gently he teaches me to sip the cigarette carefully and blows out ring after ring. When I try, my throat feels damaged, under attack, and I want to retch but I manage to hold my cough in and I feel a hard kind of pride when I blow the smoke out properly for the first time and hold onto him as the world spins for a second.
After detention the next day, where we’re both made to run twenty-five rounds of the field, we settle cozily into the alcove for a smoke.
My skin erupts and I feel a thick, oily rubbery layer growing on top, like a second skin. The bacteria creep around my comedones. My skin feels to me like a cesspool, full of the rotting garbage and dirt around every corner, overflowing from the stinking naala, behind the playground. When I go to get my eyebrows and the fine hair forming above my lips plucked, the ladies pour over me, cluck their tongues in unison. I itch to grab them by their dupattas with every yank of hair, with every pink stain they add to my face.
I strictly avoid all mirrors.
Suddenly, I grow hungry too, a hunger that comes with no signal or warning, accompanied by no hesitation or nervousness, much to my surprise. I ask the boys out, initially the ones from the smoking alcove behind the gate, the ones with cheese-yellow teeth and greasy hair. The ones like reptiles. Later, the ones in class too, the ones the other girls spend their whole lives figuring out whether they have a crush on or not, and giggle stupidly everytime they walk past. I ask them out and shocked at my boldness, they agree to meet me at the alcove or at the corner of the school, opposite facing the playing field, covered by thick dense thatch and some heaps of garbage. I watch them walk cautiously towards me that same evening, as in the distance the watchman closes the gates we will soon jump over. They look nervous when they enter the alcove and see me smoking and so to ease their silly nervousness I decide the best thing would be to get right to it. I frantically zip off their pants as the bulge appears, and he looks down at me embarrassed. I quickly tear open the condom packet with my mouth, bought from the neighbourhood grocery store, slip it onto the boy, in haste, one eye always making sure we are alone. Each one comes faster than the next, and although this whole process soon begins to bore me a little, I enjoy it for the feeling it leaves me with, the power that comes from knowing I am always one step ahead of the rebellion game, and that this was known to all.
I spend months searching for some trace of shame or guilt inside me, or a combination of both thereof until I realise one day, thrilled to my stomach that I have none. In its place, I feel like a dark, brooding creature, fated, cherry picked over all else here, all the people around me to open the doors to an afterlife, another world.
After a few months of this life it dawns on me that I have become a new person.
And despite myself, while having sex, I find myself sometimes waiting for someone to comment on the depth of my eyes or how pretty my hair looked, but they either say nothing at all, or else they say, half turned on, half scared: whoa intense!, and then chuckling you’re so fast! slow down man, psycho chick! And then one of the last, one of the kindest of those days pushing me away, pushing, saying I like you as a person, really I do, I think you’re quite cool, but why are you so like… needy?
I waited for them to love me but my real love was very far away, sunk in her books, winning all-rounder trophies, being appointed head-girl, topping the board exam in our whole city, soon to join the high ranks of the top management schools, the virtuous cadre of IT revolutionaries of our nation, soon to be a devoted wife and have babies with black dots like a disease all over their faces.
I was needy, I was hungry, I am hungry all the time, but the nights, the middle of the night is the worst.
*
I get invited to the haldi-kumkum in my old lover’s house. She’s a Tamilian Brahmin. I’m half North Indian and half Catholic. I wear the musty dark purple chaniya choli with the annoying gold tassels, too small for me, last worn on Diwali three years ago. I am ecstatic and surprised that she called me, although still full of resentment. Armed with spite. All fourteen girls have been called here because we haven’t got our periods yet. We’re still clean and ripe.
Except that I got my period just two days ago. I’m thirteen and I very much wanted to come here to this haldi-kumkum, to see my lover. My mother laughs at these dumb rituals and pushes me to go as I hesitate. All of us are made to sit in lines of four, on four snow-white mattresses in front of the gods. I am the oldest, the tallest, bursting out of my clothes. So I am made to sit at the end, against the wall. I observe the puja, the fresh apples and melons and bananas gathering a few flies laid out in front of the gods themselves barely visible, sinking in their bright red tinsel edged shawls. I spend the first ten minutes focused on controlling the sneezing attack about to be triggered by the sickly sweet jasmine agarbatti. When I finally realise I am safe, I see her sitting right in the front, her mother controlling her as always, telling her to pour the oil here, and offer four fruits to the gods. She closes her eyes and presses her palms together, as though she’s trying very hard to make them disappear, one into the other, as the bespectacled priest drones on some prayer or the other. The girls in front of me get bored and start to compare their earrings, the smallest one cries for her mother.
When I got my period just two days ago, I think, okay, okay I am a woman now, and I feel the time to be resourceful has come. Then I lock myself in the bathroom and don’t come out for hours. I change my pad every hour, disgusted and fascinated at the red trail I leave inside. I watch for hidden patterns and meanings in the worn pads and find none. I smell it deeply and it smells of nothing but blood. That night, I check whether it is a full moon and I’m told it isn’t.
Through the puja I can feel the blood dripping into the pad. I still hate the plasticky feel of the sanitary napkins perched in between, cutting at the joints, coagulating blood and wet spill. They ask us to get up to take the aarti and worried, I turn around when I stand up, but see nothing. There is no splotch of red on the pure white sheet. I am triumphant in my spite, at the thought of this glimmering dark secret, this transgression of her gods and her holiness and all manner of her excellence. I observe the others and dutifully place my hands above the fire, and then to my head, taking in the aarti, enjoying my grand enactment. Then, help myself to another round of halwa prasad from the priest, who cannot say no, anyway. I look at her as I stuff my face with this artificially orange, oily goop.
Anisha Lalvani has lived in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and London. She has a Master’s of Arts degree in English Literature (Honours) from Mumbai University. She has worked in publishing and on various literary projects including the literary television programme ‘Kitaabnama: Books and Beyond,’ and the Jaipur Literature Festival. She currently works in communications at a leading think tank that engages with the nexus of environment, economic opportunity and human well-being. She posts on Instagram @anisha.lalvani.54 and on X @AnishaL_Writer. Girls Who Stray, her debut novel, was published by Bloomsbury India in 2024. It is a coming-of-age thriller of literary fiction.