Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Amina groaned.

“No! None of this Miss Needed an Enema Last Time.”

“Mom.”

“You want it again? Four days no pooping?”

“Fine! Fine! Going!”

The sun had already set behind the Wall as Amina shuffled through the shadowed yard, toward the kitchen. The taller of the servant girls smacked a coconut against the cement, staring at her as she walked by. Amina waved and then pretended she hadn’t when the girl did not wave back.

“Fingers out of the ghee, or I will chop them off!” Mary-the-Cook was shouting as Amina entered the kitchen. “How many times do I tell you this? Ah! The little one is awake now! What is it, koche ? You want some bread and sugar?”

“Mom says I need water.”

“Good, good.” Black as a tire and perpetually struggling under the weight of her pillow-sized breasts, Mary-the-Cook was the exact same age as Ammachy, a fact that had been made incredible by the way time had expanded her body in the exact places it had contracted Ammachy’s. The result was a face smoothed of any wrinkles, a body that moved like a jogging meatball. “Waterwaterwater. All week I have been making the water for you people! You remember last time, nah? Four days and still you couldn’t—”

“I know, I know.” Amina took the cup Mary-the-Cook offered. “What’s for dinner?”

“Biryani.” The cook nodded triumphantly to a bloody chicken carcass resting on the counter. “And maybe a little bit of this fool if he keeps talking such nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense,” Akhil said. “Anyway, how do you know? It’s not like you were at tea with us.”

“At tea? At tea? I have myself been working at this house since this boy’s father was six years old only, and he thinks I have to be at tea to know what goes on?”

“I’m just saying Ammachy was pissed at him again . It’s like she can’t even look at him.”

“Pist?”

“Angry. It means angry.”

“Nobody is angry! Too much of love is all! All these years Amma works and works to send Thomas to school, and then he goes and marries your dusky mother and studies in America and what? Nothing!” For reasons unclear to anyone, Mary-the-Cook had always been Ammachy’s strongest ally, regularly citing Ammachy’s teaching her English as evidence of a kindness that no one else had seen. “Like every other so-and-so from here to Bombay, this boy runs off and works and works and does not come home! What is she supposed to do?”

“She could move to the States,” Akhil said.

“Don’t be an idiot! What move? She’s too old.” Mary frowned. “Besides, it’s the children’s duty, everyone knows. And she is getting old! What if something happens?”

“She’s got Sunil Uncle.”

Mary-the-Cook snorted. “That one is a miserable good-for-nothing. It’s a miracle she lets him live here at all! Shouting at everybody, sleepwalking like some baby elephant, always unhappy!”

“Wait, what?” Akhil’s eyes widened.

“Sunil Uncle sleepwalks?” Amina had only ever seen Scooby-Doo sleepwalk. She didn’t know real people could do it.

Mary-the-Cook frowned. “Not important. Akhil, hand me an onion.”

“Where does he go?” Amina imagined Sunil Uncle in the kitchen, making himself a six-foot-long hoagie.

“Akhil! Onion!”

Akhil reached into the basket behind him. “Seriously? All the time? Like, every night?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Mary-the-Cook said. “I am only saying that Thomas should be coming home. If he waits any longer, it will be too late.”

“Have you tried to wake him up?” Akhil asked. “Because that’s dangerous, you know. He could attack.”

“Waking him? What fool would try to wake him? We are too busy trying to keep our own selves safe from harm.”

“He hurts you?”

“Not me, things . He hurts things only.”

“What things?”

“Things he himself has bought! The china for Amma’s sixtieth birthday. That television set — you remember? Smashed like one cheap toy. The dentistry chair with its three reclining positions and the overhanging lamp.”

Akhil’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know he’s sleepwalking?”

“What fool will break things he himself has saved up so long to buy? He’s not Thomas, he can’t be breaking and buying new all the time. And you should see how he cries over it the next day!”

“Wow.” Akhil looked impressed. “Psycho.”

“Psycho,” Mary-the-Cook agreed, shearing the ends off the onion with a rusty blade.

“Well,” Akhil said after a pause. “Dad always says Sunil Uncle didn’t want to live here or be a dentist, that Ammachy forced him when he didn’t get into medical school. Maybe he’s doing it to—”

“Are you even listening?” Mary-the-Cook asked. “He’s not doing anything, he’s sleeping!”

“I mean subconsciously, duh.” Akhil rolled his eyes.

“Sub?”

“You know, like what he wishes he could do while he was awake but can’t.”

“And what exactly is that?” Ammachy’s voice, sharp as a blade, pierced through the darkened doorway. She materialized an instant later, curled like a shrimp, her eyes fixed furiously on Mary-the-Cook.

“Oh, hi, Ammachy.” Akhil smiled bravely. “We were just—”

“I thought I told you to stay out of the kitchen.” Her teeth glinted in the bad light.

“We just came for water. OW!” Akhil yelped as his grandmother grabbed a handful of his chub.

“If I catch you in here again, I will beat you with a stick. Understand?”

What wasn’t there to understand? Amina made hastily for the door, Akhil coming up behind her. He pushed her out, and they both skittered across the darkened yard, careening around a pile of coconuts and through the pomegranate trees before running up the verandah steps. Only when they were safely at the top did they dare look back at the kitchen, where Ammachy shouted a storm of Tamil at Mary-the-Cook, who minced the onion with shamed gusto.

“Jesus!” Akhil glowered. “What was she … spying ? She spies on us now?”

“She spied on us last time, too, remember?” Amina reminded him. “She spies on everyone, all the time. Anyway, you shouldn’t have said that about Sunil Uncle.”

“Why not? Everyone knows he’s been unhappy for, like, years . Even Dad says he should have gotten out of Salem a long time ago, when he had the chance.” Akhil rubbed his waist where he had been pinched. “So the truth hurts! Fuck her!”

“Fuck her!” Itty shouted from behind them, and Amina screamed. Her cousin’s white sneakers glowed as he unfolded himself from behind Ammachy’s chair. He looked at them expectantly. “Cricket?”

“It’s too dark,” Akhil said, and Itty’s face sank. It seemed to Amina that her cousin waited the entire two years between their visits peering anxiously at the gate with ball in hand.

“We’ll play tomorrow,” Amina promised, and Itty nodded miserably.

“Hullo? Roof?” he tried, a close second in favorite activities.

“Nah,” Akhil said.

“I’ll go with you,” Amina said.

Minutes later the two of them stepped off the upstairs verandah to the tiny ledge, climbing the ladder that would take them up to the roof. There, with the last burn of the sunset on the horizon and smoke from dinnertime fires growing, Amina could finally see over the Wall. The thoroughfare was clogged with its usual stagnating life, sluggish buses and cars honking in steady lines while rickshaws and bikes ran around them like beetles. The beggar children from the morning had scattered across the street, approaching any vehicle that slowed down long enough for them to get a hand through the window. Amina breathed in deep, sucking down the smell of gasoline and cooking onions, of cow dung and sewage and sweat, and Itty hummed to himself. Amina watched him watching Salem until it was too dark to see much of anything, and held the hand he offered to lead her back down into the safety of her bedroom.