Sleeping On Jupiter Read Online Free PDF Page B

tears and spit would I know I had been listening to myself crying. How could I tell my foster mother this? I would begin to tear tiny shreds out from the paper napkin she never forgot to set beside my bowl of cereal. I dipped my spoon into the cereal and tried to count how many raisins there were in it, and how many bits of nut, and this way, by examining the cereal hard enough, I dissolved the lump that had somehow appeared in my throat. My foster mother watched me and waited for a while, then sighed and got up and began to wash dishes at the sink. I hunched over the shreds of tissue, unaware of her, the room, or the cereal I kept stirring around in its bowl uneaten, and in my head the rasping calls of crows grew deafening and I was back in that hot classroom, the bench hard and narrow under me.
    Our ashram school had many students. There were girls and boys who came to it from outside for the day. They kept to themselves and in the classroom their seats were in rows away from ours. They were taller than us, their clothes fitted better, their shoes were less scuffed. They looked at us and then away, as if they had not seen us at all. We regarded them as people from another country, one that we would never go to, not even to visit. Some of the boys stayed at the ashram just as we did, but they came in through another door, they sat on the other side of the room, and when classes finished they left for their dormitories, which were so far away they were taken there in a van. We never saw them outside of school.
    The first day at our school we were each given a set of books and a box of crayons. There were twelve crayons arranged in a row, like a rainbow inside a sheath of cardboard. There was also a metal box with a pencil and sharpener and rubber in it. I must have opened the box and shut it many times. I remember how those boxes shut with a click. I am sure I took out the rubber and smelled it, even pressed my teeth into it, as I like to do to this day.
    The woman who handed us these things wore her hair in two plaits. Her eyes were painted black around the rims with kajal. “I am your teacher,” she said. “You will call me Didi. Draw a balloon in your drawing book. Colour it with a crayon.”
    She turned her back to us and drew a balloon on the blackboard. It flew on the board attached to a long line. I opened my new drawing book and on the first page I copied her flying balloon. I picked out the navy blue from my row of new crayons. I started filling colour into my balloon. I pressed the crayon hard to the paper. The colour coated the page like grease. If I touched it, my fingertip turned blue.
    The teacher’s voice, very close to my ears said, “When you colour something, don’t go in every direction, colour in one direction.” She took the crayon from my hand and said, “Like this.” Her strokes with crayon were sure and smooth. She said, “Stay inside the line, never go out. Understand?” This is what we were taught at the ashram: that we were never to go outside. Outside the line was danger. Outside we would be killed or locked up in jail.
    The teacher’s face had so much powder it was white like chalk. She had a black moustache. When she was bending over my drawing book, her plaits hung in front of my nose. They had ribbons at the ends. She had a smear of ash on her forehead and a red dot inside the smear. If I think of her the smell of the incense in Guruji’s cottage and of coconut oil and soap comes back to me. She moved her face away, laid the crayon on my desk and walked to the rows ahead. I kept staring at her, the plaits with the ribbons that swung when she took a step.
    Before I could stop it, my crayon had rolled off the desk to the floor.
    I ducked under the bench to pick it up. Down below there were only legs – boys’ legs, girls’ legs, table and chair legs. It looked much bigger than the room above. It was a maze. I could not find my crayon because the maze made me as dizzy as when I was