Free Lips Touch: Three Times by Lips Touch; Three Times

carried
always with her, though her mother often disdained to read them, as it would
have required putting on her spectacles, which she took great pains never to
do.
    For the servants, who were illiterate, Anamique developed an
elaborate language of gestures that almost looked like dance when shaped by her
graceful hands. And when they spoke to her - bless
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    them -- they didn't raise their voices as if she were deaf, or
speak slowly as if she were dim-witted.
    Because of her silence, Anamique had not been sent to school in
England like her sisters and all the other British children, but had spent her
whole life in India, and most of that with the servants. There was more of
India in her than of that far green isle she had rarely seen. She played the
vina as well as she played the piano, and she knew all the Hindu gods by name.
She had ridden a camel in the Thar Desert, scooped rice into a saddhu's bowl,
and been lifted by an elephant's trunk to gather figs from the high branches.
She had even gone back to her ayah's dusty village for festivals and slept on a
string charpoy with the native children, nestled together like spoons. The
voice that was full within her not only sang full lyric soprano but could chant
the Vedas, and yet she bit her lip and played accompaniment to her sisters'
unremarkable singing.
    As her ayah instructed, she kept her own voice like a bird in a
cage. She imagined it as a willful songbird with a puffed breast, its feathers
gray like her eyes, with a flash of peacock blue at the neck, and the cage as
an ornate prison of rusted scrollwork with a little latched door that she never
dared open. Sometimes the urge to do so was nearly overpowering.
    She was playing piano for her sisters one afternoon a few days
after the garden party when a parcel was delivered for her. The chap-rassi
brought it to her and Anamique ceased playing at once so that her eldest
sister's voice was left stranded in the air. "Ana!" Rosie scolded,
but Anamique paid her no heed. Nothing had ever been delivered just for her
before. She scraped back the piano bench and took the twine-tied parcel out
into the garden where she opened it and slid her diary out. Stunned, she
clasped it to her chest. She had
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    thought it lost forever! Her relief bled into agitation, though,
as she began to think of someone finding it, reading it, as they must
have done to know to deliver it here. Her heartbeat quickened as she opened the
little book and saw a letter tucked inside it. With trembling fingers she
unfolded it and read:
    When I was a boy, it was my job to slice the heels off the new loaves
and throw them in the woodstove to feed the imp my mum said lived in the fire,
to forestall him burning down our cottage out of spite. He was a hungry imp,
she said, but I was a hungry boy and I ate those heels myself when she looked
away, and that poor imp might've starved but our cottage never burned, and
maybe I grew taller for the extra bread.
    And I was tasked more than once to go and drown the May kittens in
the pond, as my gran said cats born in that unlucky month suffocated babes in
their cradles and invited snakes into the house. But I never killed a kitten in
my life and only hid them and brought them cream when I could. And never did a
baby die from my failure to murder kittens, nor a snake cross our threshold but
that I brought it there myself in the pocket of my own short pants.
    And I have fought on the plains of France where evil fifinelle
spirits, they say, tickle gunners and make their shells go astray. And though I
manned a howitzer myself and sent many shells arcing into the night, I never
felt their tickle on my neck. Maybe the fifinelles fought for our side and only
beleaguered the Germans, and maybe a shell went astray by their ministrations
that would have been meant for me.
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    Or maybe all that's done in the world is done by men and chance,
and omens are only fears, and curses are only fancies. I never saw God save a
kitten or