Chapter 1Janavi was in Shivdaspur, near the locomotive works, when she saw the little girl. She was wearing a short gray frock; it might’ve been blue or green at one time, but like the clothing of all the slum children, it was now the blotchy gray of soot and poverty and privation. There were no other children nearby, which was surprising; they usually traveled in packs. The girl was young, five or six at most. What was she doing? Janavi couldn’t tell right away because the child’s back was angled away from her, and she was hunched over, but as Janavi’s training had taught her, she knew enough not to approach unannounced. She waited. There was no bus stop, but she stood—her stance, her posture, her impatience—as if she were waiting for a bus to turn the corner.
Janavi had started at ChildDefense six months ago and had finished her training, but she still saw street children everywhere. She’d lived her entire life in Varanasi, among its ghats and its temples and its slums and its shops and of course its river, the River Ganga, and yet she could not remember there ever having been this many street children. There had to have been—their numbers couldn’t have exploded in six months’ time, but as one of her workshop leaders had taught her, human eyes only see what the mind allows them to see. There were exceptions, certainly, things the eyes and the mind would rather not see but are forced to. That fell under the section of trauma, which they’d covered on the last day of her training.
Her boss, Ms. Sujata, had hired twenty-three-year-old Janavi only because four of her six social workers had resigned in a two-week period. Janavi, in her interview, had said, “I can start right away, madam. Today. I know English, and I know Varanasi. Oh! And I have a big heart.”
Ms. Sujata had looked at her evenly and said, “Everybody has one of those. What these children need is one that can’t be broken.”
Janavi had assured her hers wouldn’t. But it did break, with every child she met. Though, in a strange way, every child she spoke to also made it stronger. After the first month, she’d stopped crying herself to sleep and wanting to take every one of them home with her, but this girl . . .
She finally angled away from the corner she was hunched by, and Janavi saw, huddled against the edge of a wall, a tiny pink piglet. It was the tiniest piglet she’d ever seen. It could’ve fit in her hand, and maybe even in the little girl’s hand. When the girl saw Janavi looking, she scooped up the piglet in her arms and started to walk away. Janavi called after her, “Wait.”
The girl kept her pace.
“Wait! Does the twenty-seven bus go down this road?” That was a mistake. A rookie one. Street children were the smartest children—the smartest people—Janavi had ever met. They were nowhere near the twenty-seven line and the girl knew it. Janavi tried again. She yelled out, “I have something for the piglet.”
The girl slowed.
Janavi rummaged in her bag. Did she have something? An unopened packet of glucose biscuits! She handed it to the girl. She said, “What’s your name?”
The girl was paying her no attention. Janavi hoped that she might open the packet and feed the piglet right there, but instead she started to walk away again. “What’s the piglet’s name?”
The girl turned and said, “Bulbul.” Songbird.
Janavi smiled. “That’s the perfect name for her.”
“Him.”
“Him.”
Janavi took out a piece of paper from her bag. She said, “Can you read?”
The girl shook her head.
“Can you remember?”
She shrugged. Janavi gave her the address for the home that was run by ChildDefense and asked her to repeat it. She stayed silent. Janavi said, “What if Bulbul needs food? Or gets hurt? What if he needs a warm place to sleep?” The girl was quiet, perhaps thinking it over, and then she repeated the address back perfectly.
Janavi watched her walk away and knew three things. The first was that she’d finally found her calling. After slogging through college and after the debacle of the call center, it was now, on this twilit street, that she knew what she was made for, where the years had been leading. The second thing she knew was that Bulbul would soon get too big to be loved by the little girl. And the third? The third thing she knew was that the girl, if not already, sooner or later, out of hunger or fear or some other threat of extinction, would turn to begging or sex work or the drudgery of digging through rubbish heaps.
That night, when she got home, she researched everything she could find on piglets and their growth rates and even what they liked to eat, so that she might carry a snack for Bulbul in her purse. But then she felt foolish (All this for a piglet? And a girl she may never see again?) and turned off the computer. Even so, she decided to carry a carrot or two in her purse from then on, in case she ever saw the little girl and Bulbul again, and then she wondered, Will I see her again?
She guessed not, but she did.
A month or so later, in October, while Janavi was at the ChildDefense home, filling out paperwork, the little girl walked in. Janavi stared at her, and then she bent down and quickly checked her for blood, bruising, infection. Finding none, she exhaled and said, “You can stay here for as long as you like.”
The girl, instead of looking around or at the ground, as most children did, looked straight at Janavi. She said, “Bulbul died.”
The news pained Janavi in a bigger way than she could understand. She said, “He did? How?”
“He jumped down, out of my arms. And he ran onto the road. Lahartara Road. And then—”
Janavi’s heart seized.
The little girl became a blur.
Lahartara Road.
It happened only for a few days in October when the axis of the earth tilted just so. The sun, in its rising, on one curve of Lahartara Road, blinded the drivers as they rounded it. Janavi’s amma had been killed on that curve, at sunrise. Her amma wasn’t the only one. An old man had died, struck by a scooter, and a young American woman who’d looked in the wrong direction before stepping onto the road. Several animals had died, of course, dogs, cats, any number of small rodents, a couple of goats. And now, Bulbul.
Once, an autorickshaw driver struck and killed a cow at that curve. Being Hindu, the driver was inconsolable. He went to the Shiva temple that very night and cracked open 101 coconuts, each by hand, and prostrated himself in front of the lingam until the gray stones of the antechamber ran sweet with milk. It collected in syrupy pools. Flies converged. The autorickshaw driver swatted them away and vowed to the Lord Shiva that he would make an offering of 101 coconuts every year on this day for the rest of his life. And he did, for the first five or six, maybe seven years. After that, the usual: marriage, family, children, the day-to-day and year-to-year work of being alive, being humbled, being human, and so naturally, he forgot. He remembered only some twenty-five years later when he couldn’t find a marriage match for his daughter, who’d been born with a slight lisp. He came upon her weeping in the kitchen one night, and that is when he remembered. He went to the temple the very next day, offered Lord Shiva 101 coconuts, and within three months, his daughter was married.
The summer before Amma died, she took seven-year-old Janavi and her sister, Rajni, eight, to the house of relatives who lived on the other side of town, a distant cousin or aunt whom Janavi had never seen before. There was a puja of some sort going on when they arrived, the entirety of which Janavi spent yawning or watching the flight patterns of the flies that hovered over the prasadam or poking at Rajni until her sister complained to Amma, at which point Amma smacked Janavi’s arm and told her to sit still. After the puja ended, well past lunchtime, the distant cousin or aunt gathered all of Janavi and Rajni’s boy cousins and herded them to the canopy tent where the food was being served. The Brahmin who’d conducted the puja, along with a few menfolk, were already seated. Amma led Janavi and Rajni to the tent, and without a trace of humor or equivocalness, said to the distant cousin or aunt, “Why aren’t my girls being seated? Why aren’t any girls being seated?”
The woman looked at Amma. And then at the canopy tent, where mounds of rice were already piled high on the banana leaves. “There’s no space. See for yourself.”
“Ask a few of the boys to get up. Better yet, ask the Brahmin to get up.”
The distant cousin or aunt gasped, scandalized. “I couldn’t possibly. He’s a man of God, and the boys . . . they’re . . . they’re children.”
“So are they,” Amma said, indicating Janavi and Rajni, and then she said to them, “Let’s go.”
Copyright © 2025 by Shobha Rao. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
