Mrs Robinson clears her throat and quiets us down. “Mr de Silva’s engaged today,” she says. “He’s had to attend an urgent funding meeting in East London, so I’ll be addressing you in his place.”
There’s a murmur before everyone goes quiet.
“Now, I take it most of you have seen the news. Yesterday, three local girls were abducted on their way home from netball practice. They’re local students, but the police are also investigating cases from neighboring towns. There could be more.”
The silence deepens over the courtyard.
“It’s devastating, of course, but we don’t want to encourage unnecessary panic. The school’s taking the required measures. Members of staff are putting together a committee to produce a memo for students. Evidence suggests the targets are girls, but there’ll be an update for everyone. For now, be discerning: avoid all strangers and don’t walk home alone. There’ll be information on how to use the buddy system in the memo.”
Then Mrs Robinson makes us file back to class in separate grades.
I pull my blazer over my shoulders, pushing through the cold as I climb the stairs to bio. It feels like there’s a threat hanging over the school; I imagine it covering us like a blanket, turning the world dim and silent.
October 7, 1999
I didn’t harp on about the machine, which is what I started calling it. Most of my family was already openly suspicious of me, appalled at stories of how, when I was 12, I’d convinced Tata, a man still grieving his wife, to move me from three schools in the space of 10 months. And how I’d continued to trouble him until he took me to a doctor in town—at which point I’d been awake for four days. I was diagnosed with dysthymia, which my family didn’t know about, and which Tata and I found foreign too.
The doctor wrote me a prescription for a trial of SSRIs, which would change the chemical signals in my brain, he said— this was after he’d taken me alone to a separate room next to his dispensary and asked me about my period, and whether I was having sex yet, in which case I had to be warned against whoring—and which Tata pocketed but ignored. Instead, my father opted for a host of herbal remedies from friends and associates, receiving each one with what I thought was a premature sense of gratitude.
A month later, my symptoms hadn’t abated and we had to drive down to town again for a second prescription. That’s when I decided to tell the doctor about the machine—a mistake, I could tell. He summoned Tata into his office and told him that, aside from the dysthymia, it was possible I was suffering from severe hypnagogic hallucinations, not uncommon in epileptic patients who’d suffered brain trauma from a head injury. Though in my case, he added, it was hard to diagnose me as epileptic without the visible seizures. He leaned back in his seat and shook his head. “The hallucinations will disappear over time,” he said. “The key issue is treating the dysthymia.”
Tata was quiet for most of the drive home. At last he said, “I understand your injury, but now you’re also unhappy with your life. Even at your age. This is what all this is about.”
He creased his brow, the way he did whenever someone mentioned Mama. I knew he wouldn’t face me for the rest of the trip.
I took in the sky with its thick cumulus clouds; it seemed impossible that there was no permanence to the blue that spread itself outside the windows. That from the vantage point of the universe, where light didn’t refract, the only permanence we could know was darkness—or what I’d come to think of as Mama’s home. I didn’t tell Tata that, though. Instead, when we drove into our neighborhood, I turned to him and explained I’d never liked my teeth.
“Teeth?”
I nodded and opened my mouth at my reflection in the sunshade. My teeth were crowded and uneven. I told him that since losing my baby teeth, I’d found it difficult to talk. I was struck, most of the time, with the fear of having an audience.
Tata shrugged, but I could sense his relief. “You want to be even more beautiful than you already are,” he said. “Your grandmother was the same.”
Two weeks into the next month, we drove out to a maxillofacial surgeon in East London—a booming old Indian man who stooped over me and took X-rays of my skull, before presenting Tata with a sheet of paper marked with a vast sum.
“It won’t be impossible to save,” he said on our drive back. “The doctor said we could do the braces in a year, so why don’t you give your father some time?”
I gave it to him, and he was right. I went for surgery toward the end of that year, on his insurance. By the time I got my braces fitted, I was told that my face, always described to me as earnest and severe, had improved fivefold. The pain in my jaws changed my relationship with meat, though. It gave me a diet that trimmed my reflection to that of a stranger’s.
“No more new schools.”
That’s what Tata would say whenever he found me observing my reflection in the bathroom mirror; he detected vanity, where I felt curiosity. Not that he was far off. I’d smile back at him, not knowing how else to respond.
When I started lifting banknotes from the wallet he kept in his bedroom, hoarding full-priced halter tops in a stack at the bottom of my closet, he pretended not to notice. Tata knew the prescription for my SSRIs had gone from trial to regimen, but he’d never come with me to the pharmacy, claiming to be engaged. Only when he’d been drinking, which happened on occasion, would he call me to his room and tell me he’d been reading about what was happening with me.
“Do you still feel anything?” he’d ask, and in those moments, I would. There were times Tata dismissed me if I couldn’t tell him in terms he understood what was wrong with me, but this was different. “Can you tell me what you’re feeling now?” he’d say, and I’d be ready to play my part too.
I’d tell him, “Yes.”
I’d tell him, “I’m happy you’re my father.”
RTR: 003 / Date of Recollection: 05.29.2002 / 1.5 min
I think about the missing girls until it’s almost break, knowing I’m not the only one. The world still feels dim, but I hear our teachers murmuring in the corridors.
In the bio lab, we set out petri dishes to test for photosynthesis in the leaves we were told to gather from home. It’s an experiment to prove the formula on the board:
6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2.
At our stations, we push the leaves inside test tubes using thin glass rods, then watch them boil in ethanol. The room starts to smell like iodine. We test each tube for starch. Before I hand in my answer sheet to Mrs Matten, I look down at what I’ve written on the page and cross it out.
It’s Mom’s birth date. Followed by three question marks.
I look for Kiran during break, and what Lerato said turns out to be true. He’s absent. I find her instead, sitting on the benches at the front of the school with three other girls I know from choir. They sit stretched out to absorb the meager sunlight, in knee-high socks and polished Toughees, and they’re talking about them, the missing girls, I can tell.
I greet and walk past them to the library, where I browse through the few interesting
