Brattle Street Review

By Lavanya Malhotra

She is soaring through the woods, chapped goat feet noiseless over the carpet of pine needles.  Doe eyes and pink cheeks, dreadfully wise, a fiery glowing Atalanta. That is how I remember Manisha. Carrying my baby brother securely in her arms as she scrambles up and down the undergrowth of the Dharamshala mountains without getting a scratch on his fat bouncing body. Gliding past the trees that stoop over the inclines, singing the whole time. Around her, the notes dip and spring, wraiths that fizz on the tongue. Her family, she told us, was from near the Nepal border.

My grandmother’s house, sprawled on the mountain, was magic. Husha husha husha, whispered the pines all around, and out on the veranda my parents sipped Assam tea. Winter holidays stretched out lush before me, three weeks of exploring the house and the needle strewn trails that carved tear tracks down the mountain. Then there was my birthday to look forward to!

Best of all, Grandma had a new addition to the household. Manisha seemed promising from the very moment of our arrival. She  noticed my Barbie Tooth Fairy doll clutched in my hand and immediately asked to see it. This gratifying interest was an improvement from the last two, who had ignored me. At a gesture from Grandma, Manisha brought us slices of cake, bleeding with chocolate, out from the kitchen to welcome us.

I called her Manisha didi, which means older sister. She  wasn’t like some of the other older ones, leaving us children to our own devices. She humoured me with my games and played with me as I arranged my dolls all out in a row for a picnic, their frozen plastic faces casting judgment on us. I stuck a lollipop into my mouth, had a long suck, then handed it over to her. There we lay, spears of grass poking our backs, bellies curved to the sky, passing the lollipop back and forth between us.

“I have an early birthday present for you, Roohi,” Grandma told me that evening, hugging me close and kissing my hair. I breathed in her Grandma scent of Mitsouko, redolent of holiday cuddles and comfort and fairytales read aloud, and busied myself with tearing open the present. “A Doctor Barbie!” I gasped.

“Because you want to be a doctor,” beamed Grandma, “And you will.”

I hurtled to the garden so Doctor Barbie could meet the rest of them and make friends with my coterie of staring dolls. Manisha and I got down to the business of making sure they were all properly introduced and no one was left out, and then arranged a ball for them so they could dance and eat. We had to stop soon enough; Grandma called Manisha inside to chop some taro root.

“You’re not very good,” I told her critically as she hunched on the floor over piles of taro spread on a newspaper. She cut each vegetable into uneven pieces, not as skilled as the maids at home, whose nut-brown hands raced over the chopping boards. I wandered back out to play with Doctor Barbie, Tooth Fairy forgotten. Then I wandered back in. “Are you done yet? Can we play now?” And we did, every day, except when she was busy mopping and dusting. Sometimes her younger sister would sneak away from the neighbour’s house to play with us. I didn’t like her, though. She always wore the same dirty white sweater with a crocodile on it and she smelled.

I would burst into the kitchen as Manisha chopped and peeled, the knife enormous in her hands, while she insisted she had to give the baby a bath afterwards. “Forget him,” I demanded, “Come play with me.” I liked to spend my free time exhorting mistrustful playmates to pretend to be characters in whatever fantasy land I had dreamt up, or from whatever book I was reading. Manisha hadn’t heard of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree, though she seemed willing to listen.

She was terrible at crossing roads—she was never able to hear a car coming, or judge distances when she saw one approaching: she would freeze and would have to be jostled to the pavement with a dig to the spine. Yet the eyes that glazed over at cars caught every movement of a grey hornbill up in the highest branches, spotted each woodshrike’s nest. We’d chase each other and collapse. Grandma allowed me no more than one lollipop a day, because “Otherwise your teeth will rot, Roohi.” Lying on the grass we would pass it back and forth between each other, taking turns to suck. Until she was summoned inside, of course. Sometimes I allowed Manisha the first suck, but not often, because it was my lollipop.

When she was busy, I explored the house, because I wasn’t allowed outside by myself. Grandma’s library was a treasure trove. Here I found dusty books with paper that crumbled like dandruff when touched, and great antique globes. On one of the shelves was a wooden charkha, a spinning wheel, mounted on a stone plinth, and Grandma told me the story of how it had belonged to my great-great-grandfather, her grandfather, who organized protests during the Raj. Grandma liked to teach me things, and kept telling me how critical it was that I study well.

I informed Manisha about the charkha, but she didn’t find it very interesting. I was jealous of her hidey hole. At Grandma’s house, I had to sleep on an extra bed dragged into the guest room where Mama slept. My baby brother was in a cot in a corner and would wheeze and grizzle all night. The indignity of being lumped with them! Mama wouldn’t turn off the lamp until midnight because she liked to read before bed, buried under the goosedown blankets with a yellowing paperback perched on her chest. I remember which one it was that week. ROOTS, it said on the cover, rust red capitals, congealed and metallic.

Manisha had her own grotto, a cupboard off the kitchen with one wall of shelves full of the dainty crockery that Grandma only brought out on special occasions and that we were forbidden to touch. Manisha’s clothes lay in a neat pile under her bed. I’d sneak cakes there at night so we could have midnight feasts like in the Enid Blyton books. Soon enough we’d be having a real party, my birthday party, and Manisha was going to wear one of my dresses that needed de-pilling.

One day I was lying belly up in the garden, watching Manisha with one eye closed as she rushed around like a steam engine with a mop around the verandah, shivering the whole time. I didn’t know why she favoured those horrible tattered salwar kameez. They didn’t do anything to protect her from the biting fingers of the wind, and I overheard Mama asking Grandma for a shawl we could give her.

“It’s no use giving anything to these people,” Grandma told Mama. “Last month I gave her one of your old Lacoste sweaters to wear and I never saw it again.”

The weak sun blazed as best it could, I lazed, Manisha huffed and swept. Then I saw it. A crimson wine stain blossoming behind her. I wondered aloud if she’d done a poop, but Grandma pursed her lips tightly and caught Manisha by her birdlike arm and led her inside. I followed them, stealthily, because Grandma was looking very cagey all of a sudden. They went into Grandma’s bedroom and shut the door behind them, but if I pressed my ear hard to the keyhole, I could just about make out what the secret was.

“It’s normal, my dear,” Grandma was saying to Manisha, “And it’s alright to be alarmed the first time it happens. You’ll get used to it.” Then I heard footsteps and I fled, watching through the window from the verandah as they emerged with armfuls of candyfloss cotton. How I longed to be let in on the secret!

We were in Manisha’s lair when it happened.

Four of my Barbies sat in a circle on Manisha’s bed. I wanted them to have a tea party, and thought some of Grandma’s Limoges would do very well. Delicate cream jugs, plates ringed with sinuous green vines, a cafetière – I dragged them out one by one with trembling hands to place them before the dolls. “We’re not allowed to touch them,” objected Manisha, but I waved her away because I knew Grandma only saw me thrice a year and never denied me anything. 

I remember fragments and pieces. Floating in from outside, Grandma’s shouted instructions at Manisha to clean the drawing room for the birthday party. Me startling, the filigree edged plate slipping from my greasy fingers. The windchime crackle of shattering china, and immobility, and Manisha leaping towards me too late, her grasping palms catching only the edges of my fingers. 

It wasn’t the same after that. At my birthday party I sucked my lollipop and stared out of the window surrounded by grown ups I didn’t know braying with laughter at each other’s stupid jokes. Manisha had broken her promise to come to the party. I suppose she’d been coming down with a cold; her eyes had looked pink and leporine. At least the radish parathas she’d cooked were delicious. I saw her the next morning, welts on her arm. She always had been careless around the stove.

My silence. Our silence.

Years later I went back to Grandma’s house and my harem of staring dolls looked at me.

Author’s note

Through my writing, I wanted to draw attention to the blight of child labour: in 2024, there were approximately 138 million child labourers around the world, including about 54 million engaged in hazardous work, according to the ILO and UNICEF.

In my story, the Barbies highlight Roohi’s privilege—she can become a doctor if she wants to, but they also function as a Greek chorus, the spectators’ censorious eyes. Roohi is deliberately myopic: she notices Manisha’s absence at the party, her pink eyes, the welts where the grandmother hit her, but she does not want to admit the reason to herself—punishment for the broken china. The moment of truth occurs on Roohi’s birthday, a marker of growing up. At the end, the collective noun for the dolls is a harem. There is no regaining that vanished innocence.

Roohi is similarly obtuse when it comes to her grandmother’s hypocrisy. Her memories are of “cuddles and comfort and fairytales”. She is a good grandmother, she cares about Roohi’s teeth and stresses the importance of education—but right under her nose is another young girl. I used the charkha (a symbol of India’s independence movement) and the book Roots to show that the family values every person’s right to opportunities for a brighter future, which makes their employment of Manisha particularly jarring.  Manisha’s room is alluded to as a grotto, lair and hidey hole, but never room, because they are not treating her as a real girl. The grandmother refers to Manisha as “these people”; the servants are a different breed to the upper-class family.

Child labourers are not a secret. Charitable organizations are working on the crisis. Somnolent consciences are awakening to the human tragedy. But what about my friend Manisha! I imagine a grown-up Roohi screaming. She was my friend! And that is where the difference lies. India is full of underage workers, but this one had a friend and a face and a name.

---