The Parcel Read Online Free PDF Page B

failing so pathetically that they both knew he would soon be joining his wife, who had died giving birth to Padma.
    When he did go, a neighbour took Padma in.
    For one whole year, this neighbour treated Padma as her own, held her close to her chest even though her husband did not like it at all. Padma could give the cough to both their children, the husband said, and she was a sly devil, she hid the cough, she went outside and coughed, so it was gullible of the woman to think that Padma had been spared.
    But Padma had been spared. She had been spared from the cough, but not from puberty. Not from becoming a woman. Nothing could stop that.
    After one whole year of eating meals with her new family, she was sold. She was not even sent far away. She was sold into a brothel only a few feet away, on White Lane itself. It was a matter of convenience, and when she had been broken, several times, until she accepted who she had become, she went across the street, to the woman who had taken her in, and asked her point blank if she’d been in on it. But the woman just shook her head,and from the single tear that rolled down her cheek, Padma knew she hadn’t known, or if she had, she was powerless. Then it dawned on her that her father had failed to look after her, even though the cough wasn’t his fault, and now yet another man had failed her. One good, one not so. Either way, it did not matter.
    From then on, even when she was spreading her legs ten times a day, sometimes fifteen, she never lost that burning desire for power, to never be at the knees of a man again, and she quickly shrugged off any tears and self-pity and focused on rising to the top, which in her world meant owning her own brothel. Her father’s illness had pulled her out of school, it had torn her like a page from a book, and the wind had carried that small page to a small bed, which became her working space seven days a week for the next five years. It was her prison, and if she used her head, it could become her liberation too.
    Her lack of resistance was misconstrued by the madam of the brothel as the sign of someone who was sex-mad, and that was perfect for Padma, because no one detected the cold reasoning under her heaving breasts; no one realized that she accepted prostitution as work, just as a man accepted going knee-deep in a sewer to clean up shit for the rest of the city. The man did not choose that job; it was given to him. It was the same with Padma, except that by the time she was eighteen, her owner, the same madam who had bought her from her neighbour, declared her a free agent. From a sex slave, she was now an adhiya prostitute.
    “What I paid for you, you have earned out,” said the madam. “From this day on, you will get paid. Half of what you fuck, you keep.”
    “Thank you” was all Padma said.
    Then, about ten minutes later, she went back to her madam.
    “How much did you pay?” she asked.
    “For what?”
    “For me,” said Padma. “How much did you buy me for?”
    “What difference?”
    “I want to know how much I was worth.”
    “Three hundred rupees.”
    The sum made Padma reel, but she did not show it. Three hundred rupees could be considered a fair amount at the time, especially for a poor family, but it was also incredibly low. It made her realize that she had no place on this earth at all, that as a girl she had the same importance as a rubber tire, or a clock, or a pair of shoes.
    “I’ll make you a deal,” she told the madam. “I’ll look after the books for you as well. I’ll manage the place. That way you can rest.”
    “What do you know about accounts?” the madam asked.
    “Nothing,” said Padma. “But then again, I didn’t know anything about cocks either.”
    She got the job. It was not the books Padma was after. It was the police. If she had access to the books, she would know which cop to grease, which dick to moisten with her own cunt, and she dove into her dual role with the passion of a woman putting