Free Home by Manju Kapur

doing su-su in front of each other.’
    He put those fingers against his mouth. ‘Give me your hand,’ he went on. ‘I want to show you something.’
    ‘I don’t want to see.’ Nisha was crying.
    ‘Of course you do.’
    ‘No, I want to go to Mummy. Leave me.’
    ‘See, another secret.’ And quickly, so quickly that she didn’t know how it happened, he introduced it to her. Terrorstricken, she looked at the black thing sticking up, and then quickly looked away.
    ‘Feel it.’ He grabbed her hand. She pulled back, and felt the stiff, straight thing knock against her fist. It felt dry and hard and hot.
    ‘See.’ Vicky’s voice was hoarse. Once she started looking she couldn’t look away. It appeared weird, repulsive, and fascinating. ‘Hold it, go on.’
    ‘No, no, I don’t want to.’
    Vicky gripped her wrist so hard and painfully that her fingers opened around the big dark thing. There it was, the small, pudgy, fair little hand against the much darker skin, with the boy’s larger hand clamped over the girl’s.
    He started moving their hands up and down. Quickly the tempo increased, as the fear grew in her. When she tried to struggle, he increased the pressure of his hand.
    He gasped, and out spurted white liquid on to the snakes and ladders, then trickled down her fist. The thing shrank, his face shrivelled. ‘It’s our secret. If you tell anyone, they will beat you and me.’ He gripped her arm. ‘No one must ever know. No one. You understand.’
    Nisha nodded wordlessly. Vicky wiped her hand, then the snakes and ladders, with a corner of his shirt, and gave the game to her. She took it gingerly. They started down, Vicky clutching the durrie and his books, his hair flying over his forehead, his blue Bata rubber chappals going clutter-futter loudly down the stairs. Nisha followed.
    They reached downstairs and Vicky disappeared into the corner of the dining room to his cupboard. Nisha stood silently, staring at the game in her hand. She crossed the angan to the outer wall of the house, and as high and hard as she was able, threw first the board, then the small cardboard box of counters, over the wall, waiting to hear them thud on the other side before going in.

VI
    Nisha
    In the days that followed, Nisha grew silent. For the first time she felt divided from the family she had so unthinkingly been part of. Her mother was always so particular about her being clean, now she had done something dirty. Her hand had touched that filthy black thing. She tried to block it from her mind, but it proliferated, grew large and terrifying.
    Meanwhile Vicky’s preoccupation with Nisha increased, his eyes fixed on the small white hand that had caressed him, the hand that had made him come all over the durrie. Just thinking of the excitement and the release made him long for it again.
    He started making excuses for coming home early. ‘I can’t study in the shop,’ he said. ‘I need to stay home and concentrate.’ This was accepted as a sign of mature behaviour.
    With the small change he wheedled out of his uncles, he bought more gifts for her, little chocolates, sticks of chewing gum, packets of sour mango, sugar-coated fennel seed.
    Vicky was always on the lookout for opportunities to get Nisha alone. Then bliss would follow. She was too young to understand what was happening, and then he really wasn’t doing anything bad to her. Certainly she showed no signs of remembering anything.
    He bought kites. ‘Come, Nishu, I’ll teach you to fly them.’
    Nisha didn’t look up from her colouring book, and Raju came instead. Sona watched in approval while Vicky made himself useful with her son.
    It was evening, the time children drink their milk and go to play. When adults move out of bedrooms darkened against the glare by heavy curtains, sip their tea, and contemplate the heat receding against lengthening shadows.
    The little servant boy had left the hosepipe on in the angan to cool it, and was now sweeping the water