In the Sea There are Crocodiles Read Online Free PDF Page A

quickly, without making it too obvious that I was checking every coin, so
osta sahib
wouldn’t think that I didn’t trust him (it was
kaka
Rahim who had trained me to do that). Then I’d say goodbye, leave the shop and instead of going straight back to the
samavat
, I’d walk around the block until I came to the wall outside the school yard and wait for break time.
    I liked it when the bell rang and the doors were flung open and the children came out into the yard, yelling and starting to play. As they played, I would imagine myself yelling and playing and calling out to my Nava friends. In my head I would call to them by their names, and kick the ball, and argue that someone had cheated in our battle to break each other’s kite strings, or that it wasn’t fair if I had to stay out of the
buzul-bazi
tournament for too long, just because the bone I needed was still boilingin the pot and I’d lost the old one. I walked slowly on purpose, so that I could spend more time listening to the children. I reasoned that if
kaka
Rahim saw me walking, he would probably not be as angry as if he saw me standing still.
    Some mornings I was early taking the
chay
to the shop, and I would see the schoolchildren going in, all neat and clean and well combed, and I would feel bad and turn my head away. I couldn’t look at them. But afterward, at break time, I liked hearing them.
    You know, Enaiat, I’d never thought about that
.
    About what?
    About the fact that hearing something is very different from looking at it. It’s less painful. That’s it, isn’t it? You can use your imagination, and transform reality
.
    Yes. Or at least that’s how it was for me
.
    I write in a room with a balcony that overlooks a primary school. Sometimes, I take a coffee break about four, and I stop and watch the parents coming to pick up their children. I watch the children coming out into the playground when the bell rings, and lining up just inside the gates, and getting up on tiptoe to peer into the crowd of adults, trying to see their parents, and the parents waving their arms when they spot them and opening their eyes and mouths wide and
puffing out their chests. Everything holds its breath at that moment, even the trees and the buildings. The whole city holds its breath. Then all the questions start—how was their day, what homework do they have, how was the swimming lesson—and the mothers doing up the zips of their children’s jackets to protect them from the cold and pulling their hats down over their foreheads and ears. Then everyone bundles into their cars and off they go
.
    Yes, I used to see them like that sometimes, too
.
    Can you look at them now, Enaiat?
    Clothes. I had two
pirhan
. Whenever I washed one, I would wear the other and hang the wet one up to dry. Once it was dried, I would put it in a cloth bag in the corner, next to my mattress. And every evening I would check it was still there.
    As the days, weeks and months passed,
kaka
Rahim realized that I was good (and again I’m not boasting), that I was good at delivering the
chay
, that I didn’t drop the glasses or the terra-cotta sugar bowl, that I didn’t do anything stupid like forgetting the tray in the shop, and, above all, that I always brought back all the money. And even a little more.
    Because some of the shopkeepers I went to regularly, every morning about ten, and then again in the afternoonabout three or four, were kind to me and gave me tips, which I could have kept for myself, but at the time I didn’t know if it was right, so I handed them over to
kaka
Rahim. Not that there was much I could have done with the money. It was better that way, I think. If I’d made a mistake in counting and taken more as a tip than I should have done,
kaka
Rahim might have stopped trusting me, and I didn’t want to lose a place where I could sleep and clean my teeth.
    But on a day full of wind and sand, one of these shopkeepers, the
osta sahib
who sold shoes,