Sold

One more rainy season and our roof will be gone, says Ama.
My mother is standing on a log ladder, inspecting the thatch, and I am on the ground, handing the laundry up to her so it can bake dry in the afternoon sun. There are no clouds in sight. No hint of rain, no chance of it, for weeks.
There is no use in telling Ama this, though. She is looking down the mountain at the rice terraces that descend, step by step, to the village below, at the neighbors’ tin roofs winking cruelly back at her.
A tin roof means that the family has a father who doesn’t gamble away the landlord’s money playing cards in the tea shop. A tin roof means the family has a son working at the brick kiln in the city. A tin roof means that when the rains come, the fire stays lit and the baby stays healthy.
“Let me go to the city,” I say. “I can work for a rich family like Gita does, and send my wages home to you.”
Ama strokes my cheek, the skin of her work-worn hand as rough as the tongue of a newborn goat. “Lakshmi, my child,” she says. “You must stay in school, no matter what your stepfather says.”
Lately, I want to tell her, my stepfather looks at me the same way he looks at the cucumbers I’m growing in front of our hut. He flicks the ash from his cigarette and squints. “You had better get a good price for them,” he says.
When he looks, he sees cigarettes and rice beer, a new vest for himself.
I see a tin roof.
Before Gita left, we drew squares in the dusty path between our huts and played the hopping-on-one-leg game. We brushed each other’s hair a hundred strokes and dreamed of names for our sons and daughters. We pinched our noses shut whenever the headman’s wife passed by, recalling the time she broke wind strutting past us at the village spring.
We rubbed the rough-edged notch in the school bench for good luck before a recitation. We threw mud at each other during the long afternoons stooped over in the paddies, and wept with laughter when one of Gita’s mud pies hit her haughty older sister in the back of the head.
And in the fall, when the goatherds came down from the Himalayan meadows, we hid in the elephant grass to catch sight of Krishna, the boy with sleepy cat eyes, the one I am promised to in marriage.
Now that Gita is gone, to work as a maid for a wealthy woman in the city, her family has a tiny glass sun that hangs from a wire in the middle of their ceiling, a new set of pots for Gita’s mother, a pair of spectacles for her father, a brocaded wedding dress for her older sister, and school fees for her little brother.
Inside Gita’s family’s hut, it is daytime at night. But for me, it feels like nighttime even in the brightest sun without my friend.
Each morning as I go about my chores-straining the rice water, grinding the spices, sweeping the yard-my little black-and-white speckled goat, Tali, follows at my heels.
“That silly goat,” Ama says. “She thinks you are her mother.”
Tali nudges her head into the palm of my hand and bleats in agreement. And so I teach her what I know.
I wipe the hard mud floor with a rag soaked in dung water and explain: “This will keep our hut cool and free from evil spirits.” I show her how I lash a water jug to the basket on my back, not spilling a drop on the steep climb up from the village spring. And when I brush my teeth with a twig from the tree, Tali copies me, nibbling her twig as solemn as a monk.
When it’s time for me to go to school, I make her a bed of straw in a sunny corner of the porch. I kiss her between the ears and tell her I’ll be home in time for the midday meal.
She presses her moist pink nose into the pocket of my skirt, searching for a bit of stowaway grain, then settles down, a jumble of elbows and knees, burrowing into the straw to nap.
“What a funny animal,” Ama says. “She thinks she is a person.” Ama must be right, because one day last week when I was sitting in the schoolroom, I heard the tinkling of her bell and looked up and saw my little speckled goat wandering around the school yard, bleating in despair.
When finally she spotted me through the window, she bahhed with wounded pride, indignant at being left behind. She marched across the yard, propped her hooves up on the windowsill, and looked in with keen and curious eyes as the teacher finished the lesson.
When school was over and we climbed the hill toward home, Tali trotted ahead, her stubby tail held high.
“Next week,” I promised her, “we will work on our spelling.”
At dawn, our hut, perched high on the mountainside, is already torched with sunlight, while the village below remains cloaked in the mountain’s long purple shadow until midmorning.
By midday, the tawny fields will be dotted with the cheerful dresses of the women, red as the poinsettias that lace the windy footpaths. Napping babies will sway in wicker baskets, and lizards will sun themselves outside their holes.
In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air.
At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land.
Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.