By Preeta Samarasan

When Mr. and Mrs. Hotel Kong first heard that the Straits Trading Models would be coming all the way from America to take photographs on our island, they announced the news to everyone -- guests, janitors, bellboys -- within earshot of the front desk. “Straits Trading,” they said, enunciating perfectly, the final t and s of Straits crisp as cucumber between their teeth. “Even you haven’t heard the name also, you’ve seen their clothes in magazines lah. All the famous people wear them.” And always, they would end their monologue with the firm declaration: “This is big news for Pulau Kaki Putera. Big news.” After the company sent their catalogues, Mrs. Hotel Kong set them up like family photos on a table in the lobby. Such odd clothes the models wore in those pictures: worn out, patched dresses; blouses like gunny sacks; straw hats for working in rice fields. In Africa they went barefoot, and their gaudy, animal-print dresses almost matched the clothes the fat black women were wearing in the background. In China they wore the rubber slippers we used to keep our feet safe from ringworm in our own compounds. “So rich and dressing like beggars only,” my mother marvelled.

None of us could quite believe it: a glamorous American company that could afford to travel all over the world, choosing the Paradise Hotel? It was not, after all, a luxury hotel with bellboys in pith helments and khaki shorts to open the doors every time people walked in or out. There were no leather armchairs or leopardskin rugs in an old-style planters’ bar. The ceiling fans were modern white ones; the hotel did not serve English Afternoon Tea. But the barman did know how to make a Planters’ Punch and a Singapore Sling, and the tourists still came for the Authentic Island Experience, ate the local delights at the High Tea Buffet, and pronounced the bungalows-on-stilts and the natural swimming pool (which was really just a rock-trapped bit of sea) charming. If not for the Paradise Hotel, our family would have been as poor as the ditch-diggers and the road-sweepers and all their wretched kin who lived on the other side of the island.

Our island’s troubles preceded the disappearance of the little Australian girl at the nightmarket on the mainland, the rape and strangulation of the German ex-model in her hotel room, the hanging of the two Frenchmen caught trafficking cannabis, the public whipping of the American boy who’d spraypainted Spongebob Squarepants on the wall of a mosque, and even the bomb that almost went off in a nightclub. Certainly, though, all these factors led to our transformation, though we did not know it at the time. What we knew was that the flood of tourists began to slow to a trickle. What we knew was that the backpackers who still came, the tired, unshaven ones who couldn’t afford Phuket or Bali, were stingy with their tips. They stayed at the High Tea Buffet from opening time to closing time, really eating all they could eat. They filled their stomachs with the free groundnuts at the bar-cum-restaurant. They barged into and out of shops and bought nothing.

Our cinema closed; our sundry shops stopped giving credit. Half the town was out of work by the time my father lost his job. He’d been working for Mr. Rajan at the spice mill for thirty years, so long that the spices in his lungs were threatening to burst them open from the inside. When he coughed you could smell the spices: chilli powder in the mornings; black pepper when he was angry; fenugreek when he was tired; cardamom on cool nights. Mr. Rajan had a ready-made excuse: “You cough more than you work, man,” he said. “You going to spread your germs to the whole island. One bag of our curry powder is seventy-five percent your phlegm and twenty-five percent spices.”

After my father was fired, he sat and coughed in his bamboo armchair all day. If you listened quietly outside the sitting room you could hear him mutter to himself between coughs: “Useless, useless. Ithalan ennathukku? What is all this for? Chhi!” He switched off the ceiling fan to save electricity, so that the coughing made the sweat pour from his skin. The armpits of all his shirts turned yellow. His hair permanently stood up in the places where it pressed up against the antimacassar when he fell asleep in his chair.

All across our island, other men slouched in other bamboo armchairs, though they were not coughing. They stared at their waterstained ceilings. They plucked the grey hairs from their forearms and forlornly cupped their balls. But we were better off than most; my mother and brother managed to earn us a tiny living at the hotel even when things were at their worst. My mother cleaned the tourists’ red hairs out of their shower and changed their meaty-smelling sheets; my brother brought them groundnuts and crisps in the bar-cum-restaurant after school.

Then the Straits Trading company contacted Mr. Hotel Kong. In anticipation of the models’ arrival, Mr. Hotel Kong hired workmen to paint and renovate the hotel. “Now we put in small money,” he said, “tomorrow we get big money. Where they gonna eat and drink if not here, in our restaurant and our bar? I tell you ah, after Pulau Kaki Putera is famous, different kind of tourist gonna come here. Good for everybody, not just me, what. They will spend their money on our island onni, yes or not? That type of people always want odd-job boys and this and that. Porter lah, guide lah, driver lah. Straits Trading is no chicken-feed company! I guarantee you one thing,” he boomed, looking around at the crowd assembled around him in the courtyard, “in one week these people will completely change our life.”

“Boss is living in a dream world,” my mother muttered to Hamid the cook. “He thinks these Americans are storybook magicians or what, coming here just to fix everything with one wave of their magic wand?” But in her voice I could hear the tight fist of impossible hope: maybe, just maybe Mr. Hotel Kong really did know how the world worked, and we were all on the brink of something unimaginable in its splendor. After all, even without being here, even three months before their arrival, the models had begun to bring our island back to life: here were the workmen, spitting out their toothpicks, rolling up their sleeves with glee.

Only my father refused to believe. When my mother fanned Mr. Hotel Kong’s promises out on the dinner table with a flourish, he called us all bleddi fools. He clenched his rice-eating fist as though he would take those promises and fling them back in Mr. Hotel Kong’s face. “If it’s so easy for the mat sallehs to perform miracles,” he said, “why is half the world still starving? Why are there babies dying in Africa and India? Don’t think just because they got white skin they all are gods or saints or something. They’re selfish, useless bastards, just like the rest of us.”

***

The Straits Trading models came in a blue-and-white yacht that cut silently through the still afternoon water, and when we saw them in the distance we all rushed onto the beach to watch: Mr. and Mrs. Hotel Kong, me and Murali and our mother, Hamid the cook, Jeevan the pool boy, the bartender, the sweepers and gardeners, Mrs. Hotel Kong’s two sleek Doberman dogs -- and all of us were struck dumb. Of course we had all seen white people before. In the old days, before the murders and bomb scares and whippings, we’d seen German businessmen with round, hairy bellies; young Australian women whose skin was already more leathery than my mother’s; white-haired English ladies with long backsides, thick ankles, and floppy cloth caps. But at the Paradise Hotel there had never been anyone like the golden creatures who emerged from their yacht on that bright December day. The women got out, legs first like in an old American film, legs so fine and delicate it took them thirty seconds to unfold themselves, like brand-new butterfly wings. Mr. Hotel Kong did not breathe as he offered his arm to each of them in turn. Jeevan the pool boy took five steps towards the yacht, as if in a trance. Two waiters who’d been setting tables on the balcony froze with their cutlery in mid-air.

“Foof!” Murali said. He had pictures of women like these under his mattress at home.

They were long and thin as water insects, but they had a slow, slinky way of walking. They had shiny hair and sharp cheekbones. Their skin was like mustard oil, so smooth it caught the light when they moved. Bruises sat soft as purple smoke around their eyes, but it was only makeup. There were six women and two men and you could tell the men liked it that way. The men wore open-chested, untucked shirts, tight white trousers, and sunglasses, and they laughed a lot, at things the women said or at nothing at all. And all of them, the men and the women, had a lot of white teeth. Straight teeth, all the same size, not like ours and not like the teeth of the white people we’d seen.

“Look at that one,” my brother said, pointing at a girl in stripey, see-through trousers. “Wearing pyjamas in the daytime until can see her panties also!” It was true, the girl’s legs, long as coconut-plucking poles, showed through her trousers, but all the same, panties was not a nice word to say in front of people. I sucked my teeth and slapped my brother’s elbow and looked at the girl to see if she’d heard us. She hadn’t; she was talking to another girl, leaning towards her and smiling, and when she ran a hand through her coppery cloud of hair I saw that her nails were painted. Not red like Mrs. Hotel Kong’s nails. Not any of the colors you could buy at Jeyanthi Stores before they closed. This girl’s nails were painted in sparkles, so that you couldn’t even tell what color they were, and if you could you wouldn’t have had a name for that color.

You could feel our sudden certainty in the air, a brief stillness followed by a quickening, a drawing in of breath: at once all of us standing there were sure that all the castles we’d built in the air, all the while mocking each other for building the same castles, were not so far-fetched after all. Our dreams really were going to come true: look at these shiny people, gliding across the courtyard like a national day float, a mirage of a mythical city, a grand film opening with curvy letters and big music. Look at them.

That night we could talk of nothing else. “Soooo tall those girls are,” my mother said in wonder at the dinner table, “Mr. Hotel Kong comes up to their armpits only!” She popped an emphatic ball of rice-and-fish into her mouth and extracted the bones from between her teeth.

“Supermodels, what,” Murali said. “Don’t you know, in America, everything is super? Market is not good enough for them so they got supermarket. Superman, Superstar, Superbowl. Supermodels. Cindy Crawford Claudia Skiffer Heidi Nice-bum Klum Linda Angel Evangel -- ”

“What is all this nonsense?” growled my father, and before any of us could even blink, his left hand flew across the table and clipped Murali on the side of the head. Then he lowered his eyes and spoke without looking at any of us, the words pouring out onto his plate to pool thickly with his uneaten rice-and-sambar. “Instead of reading your rubbish magazines like a maharaja,” he growled, “how about seeing if you can do some odd jobs for those buggers? Wasn’t Kong boasting nicely about how many jobs would be opening up? You know what is happening to us and still you sit around and drool over naked women!”

Murali opened his mouth; then he closed it, and his jaw tightened and throbbed. “Be nice to your Appa,” our mother had told us only recently. “Be patient and don’t talk back. He’s the only Appa you’ve got.” Of course, we’d been told not to talk back before, and we’d seldom listened. We were whyers and howers, grumblers, deniers, naysayers. But this time her voice had shivered in our ears, and we’d both looked up to see her peering at her cleaning-lady hands, rubbing at their peeling skin. The delicate, wistful scent of cardamom hung in the evening air; we could hear our father coughing, coughing, coughing in the sitting room.

Now Murali put a handful of rice in his mouth and chewed assiduously before swallowing. He took a long, slow drink of water.

“Maybe your Appa is right,” our mother said after a while. Her lips were pale and thin under her pinched nose. She fished two brinjal quarters out of the sambar -- her share, I knew, and mine, because Murali had already had his -- and deposited them on the rim of Murali’s plate. “No harm done in asking those people if they have any extra jobs for you,” she went on. “After all you have some free time in the afternoons.” She looked at Murali, then at me, and finally at our father. “Who knows?” she said. “Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Hotel Kong were right, isn’t it? After all those people have money to spend.”

Our father’s outburst saddened no one more than himself. That night he refused to go to bed. He sat in the living room with his fingertips pressed into his eyes, and though the lights were all out, his face shone in the moonlight. All night long he coughed in his armchair, once so violently that the chair moved, its legs scraping on the floor. He muttered. He sighed. He wheezed and groaned and sucked his teeth like an old man struggling to do something that had once been easy. In the morning, he was at the table when we came out into the kitchen. He was unwashed and uncombed as usual, but in the palm of his right hand he held his cat’s eye ring. He cleared his throat.

“Murali,” he said simply, “you keep this ring from now on.”

Murali frowned and said, “Hanh? What for I want that ring?”

My father had had that cat’s eye ring since he was eighteen. It was the one object of any worth that our family owned, but we could never sell it or pawn it. “Our family hair-loom,” my mother teased whenever my father told the story of the ring. “We also got one, not bad, like all the rich families.” It was only half a joke: though we were not rich, we had our pride and our dignity and our past, all contained in that one ring. My father’s mother had kept the ring for him after his father died, and on his eighteenth birthday she’d given it to him. Our grandfather had inherited the ring from his father, and our great-grandfather from his father before that, and it was always rumored -- though to these rumors our mother always said, “Tsk, all that simply-simply people say” -- that our great-great grandfather had killed the miner to get that gem. Our great-great grandfather had been a poor farmer who’d watched greedy miners tear up acre after acre of his fields in Ceylon, and one night -- or so the legend went -- when he heard that the miner had practically tripped on an especially fine cat’s eye in the subterranean dark, he stole into the man’s hut, stabbed him in the back, and took the stone.

The cat’s eye was so large and so silky that if it hadn’t been stolen, my father had always claimed, it would surely have ended up in the engagement ring of some English queen or princess. Or at the very least, a duchess. That’s what the English used cat’s eyes for, to seal their grand unions, but among our people, they were said to protect the wearer from evil spirits. My father’s stone was of the very finest quality, a rich honey color on one side, and milky on the other. It was set so deep into the ring that its milky bottom touched the skin of the wearer, because a gemstone that did not touch its wearer would not protect him fully.

“Just keep it,” our father said now. “It is good for our family. The man of the family should have it.”

It’s true that I could never have had that ring anyway. It was the men’s treasure to guard, just as the women and girls were, all precious gems to protect from strangers’ covetous eyes. In the dim morning light of our kitchen the cat’s eye winked narrowly at me, as if we two shared a secret. I stood there, breathless, behind Murali, but I did not want him to take it. If he did, if it passed from my father’s hand to his, that would mean everything had changed. My father’s black hair would turn white before my eyes. His back would hunch; his bones would creak. He would sit in his armchair and wait to die.

I’m not the man of the family yet, I wanted Murali to say. You keep it, Appa.

Instead he only said: “Tsk, all this what for?” His voice was gruff, and he lifted the ring brusquely from my father’s palm, but he rubbed the stone with both his thumbs before putting it on. Then he sat down to eat his bread and butter.

***

The ring brought my brother luck he could never have imagined. When he went to ask Mrs. Hotel Kong if the Straits Trading people might need an odd-job boy, she offered him something even better. “Stand straight,” she said. “Let me see how tall are you.” She looked at him from head to toe and back again like a future mother-in-law before she said: “Ya I think you should be okay. They’re looking for a few local boys to pose with the models. For sure they’ll pay you nicely. Send you free copies of the catalogue some more. They said especially teenage boys. I asked the pool boy also, and two-three waiters. No need to do anything also, simply sit and smile and they’ll pay you, man! Easy money onni.”

So my brother went to talk to the photographers, and they too ran their eyes up and down his skinny brown body and said Okayfine, come back tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock. It was that easy. My brother was going to be a model -- not super, maybe, but a real model, posing with white-and-gold girls on a beach.

They didn’t need girl models, but no one said anything the next day when I sat on the ornamental swing to watch them. A lady came out to give Murali and Jeevan fresh clothes to wear: a black shirt for Murali, a white shirt for Jeevan. Identical khaki shorts for both.

And then, at four thirty, the pajama girl with the pole legs appeared at the top of the outdoor staircase. She wasn’t wearing see-through pajamas now, though. Her hair was puffed up so that it made an even bigger, brighter cloud than usual, and she wore a seashell necklace around her neck. Her blouse was made of dozens of strips of fine, torn cloth, and her trousers were like a soldier’s, moss-green and full of pockets. Strangest of all was this: with that funny torn-up blouse and those soldier’s trousers, she wore the most delicate high-heels I’d ever seen. Their straps were just silver sequins strung together, and the heels themselves were as thin as satay skewers, so high that inside those shoes the girl stood on her toes as though there was almost nothing keeping her tethered to the ground, and she might take off any minute now and drift away above our heads, forcing Murali and Jeevan to strain their necks to try to catch a glimpse of what lay under her billowing blouse.

She descended, her heels clicking on each metal stair, and when she got to the bottom we all realized that it was her we’d been waiting for, without knowing it. The air smelled like no perfume I’d ever smelled: not an eye-stinging smell like Mrs. Hotel Kong’s perfume, or a heavy pink smell like the rosewater my mother wore for weddings. It was faint and wistful, like flowers just around the corner, but each time you turned the corner expecting to see them, they’d be around the next corner after all.

The girl ran both her hands through her hair, smiled first at Jeevan and then at my brother, and said, “Hi guys, I’m Alice.”

Hi guys, I’m Alice. It was only four words, but I knew what they really meant. When Mr. Hotel Kong had told us that the Straits Trading people would change our lives, he must’ve meant Alice. Though he hadn’t yet seen her at the time, he must’ve thought of a girl just like Alice, with her yellow eyes full of promise, her skin like a new day, her special smell. I breathed deep. My nostrils tried to snatch that smell from the air and hold it in my throat. All the possibility of those four words, everything that Alice had seen and touched and carried in her blood rushed through my head: fast cars, white wedding cakes, horses, black stockings, cream-colored carpets, lifts full of buttons, trumpets, violins, snow. Anything was possible.

My brother and Jeevan only smiled bashfully back at Alice then, but for days afterwards they greeted each other with a sassy “Hi guys,” Jeevan thrusting one hip out, my brother running his hands through his hair. Then they’d sashay up and down the poolside, and each time they passed each other they’d say “hi guys” again, and thrust a hip out, or lick their lips, or touch one coy finger to their chins. “I’m Alice,” one of them would finally say, the fourth or fifth time they passed each other, and then the other would repeat it -- “I’m Alice” -- and then they would double over and slap each other’s backs and chortle like hyenas until they fell flat on the cement.

On that afternoon, though, when Alice said “hi guys,” Jeevan merely grinned at Murali, Murali grinned back at Jeevan, and then they both smiled their nervous, crooked-toothed smiles at Alice.

I could tell you that Alice was even more beautiful close-up than she was from far away in her pajama pants, but beautiful is just a word for things that belong where they are. Beautiful is for the Hamid the cook’s daughter doing her twilight candle dances for the tourists in from of the koi pond. Beautiful is for the silk sarees that used to arrive at Jeyanthi Stores for the Deepavali sales. The long white beach at sunset, dark coconut trees and fiery water, that’s beautiful too. Alice was from another world. She smelled different. She talked different. All the colors of her -- her copper hair, her purple lips, her yellow eyes -- stood out against the greens and browns of our island. In a way, Alice looked all wrong sitting there posing for the photographer on the steps of the Paradise Hotel between my brother and Jeevan the pool boy, but it was a delicious wrongness. It made my fingertips tingle and my mouth dry, and I could tell from the way Jeevan’s and my brother’s toes curled on the bare cement that it did something very similar to them.

The photographer had Alice sit on the steps that led up to the hotel from the koi pond, with Jeevan and my brother on either side of her. Yet it was as if Alice wasn’t there at all, as if she were a figment of my imagination, because my brother and Jeevan could only look at each other, like two lion cubs ready for a good wrestle, eager and twitchy, the one just slightly smaller than the other. Between them Alice leaned back on her hands and narrowed her eyes lazily, as if the very air she breathed was different, as if it were cooler, thinner, cleaner, like the air on a mountaintop.

Our story was becoming a proper story, and it began like this:

Once upon a time we lived on a foot-shaped island forgotten even by the tourists, until one day a golden girl named Alice discovered us and changed everything.

I didn’t know exactly how this story would end, but of course there would be a happily ever after, with sandwiches and bottled drinks and music. At the very least business at the hotel would pick up, and the High Tea Buffet would no longer sit uneaten in the chafing dishes, attracting flies. I saw my father get out of bed and stand up straight and stop coughing because times were better and there was nothing to cough about anymore. I saw my brother going to the cinema theatre with Alice, sharing a cone of roasted peanuts between them. Then Alice sending us letters and parcels from America. Maybe even tickets to visit her in New York. Who could say?

“Such a pretty girl,” Mrs. Hotel Kong said every few minutes when she came out to see how the photographers were getting on, and all of us wished she’d shut up, because it was a blabbering both unnecessary and sacrilegious, like gossiping about God.

“Well?” our father said in between coughs that night. “All okay? They paid you already?”

My brother drew his breath in, leaned forward, and pitched himself on the tips of his toes. I could tell he wanted to put it all into words my father would understand: he wanted to grab our father by the collar of his phlegm-spattered shirt and drag him into that other world he’d discovered, in which the beach would never again be the same because Alice had stood on its sand; in which Alice’s eyes were a whole different color in the sun; in which clothes were just for taking pictures in, and people said things like “Hi guys.”

Instead he only lowered himself back down onto his heels and mumbled, “Not yet. They said they’ll pay at the end. Still got plenty of work for me.”

There was a second day of pictures: pictures of Alice and three other girls in the flame-of-the-forest tree by the swimming pool while Jeevan skimmed leaves off its surface in the foreground; pictures of Alice feeding the koi while my brother watched her from the other side of the pond; pictures of Alice leaning out of an upstairs window while Jeevan the pool boy pretended to play a guitar he’d had to be taught how to hold and my brother watched from across the courtyard, far away, outside the picture, unremarked, this time, by the photographer. In the shadow of the jacaranda tree my brother looked forlorn and chicken-chested, like a small boy last in the tuckshop queue for ice cream.

“I know something,” I said to Murali at the end of the third day. I kicked the backs of his ankles as we walked home.

“Ah, shaddup your mouth,” he shot back, perhaps because he knew what I was going to say.

“You like Alice,” I said. “Like that.”

He wheeled around and pushed me lightly away. “No need to talk like you know everything, okay? Twelve years old and already acting like a maami. Go away and leave me alone for five minutes, can or not?”

“You going to ask her to marry you? You going to go back to America with her?”

In those days, you see, I loved to goad Murali like that. He almost expected it, just as he expected me to be his undersized mother-hen at other times, and at still other times a whining, wheedling hanger-on. My little sister. I had to bring her. These were our ways not only of entertaining ourselves but of keeping order in our world, of rolling each long day into an identical bead to be threaded onto our neverending string. So I didn’t expect what followed: Murali grabbing me by the collar of my blouse, gritting his teeth, shaking me like he -- almost like he wanted to shake the life out of me.

“You didn’t hear me, is it?” he said. “You didn’t understand or what? Didn’t I ask you to go away and leave me alone?”

“Yah,” I said, “yah I understand,” but Murali was shaking me so hard I couldn’t hear my own strangled words. It wasn’t the shaking that most confused me, though; it was the tiny tears I saw in the corners of Murali’s eyes when I looked fearfully up into them. I’d never seen Murali cry: by the time I was old enough to notice, he was past the age of crying. Maybe it was all that tooth-gritting that had brought tears to his eyes -- yet even before he let go of my collar, swung back around, and sprinted off down the road, I had at least enough sense left to know that it was something else.

***

When Alice came to find us by the swimming pool on the third day, I knew it wasn’t just us who longed to be in her presence; she wanted to be our friend too. We’d been helping Jeevan the pool boy skim the dead leaves off the swimming-pool surface with his long-handled net. “Hi guys,” one of them would say every so often. “I’m Alice,” the other would respond, sticking his chest out, batting his lashes.

“Hey!” Alice said when she saw Jeevan and Murali, and her hands were on her hips, but she was laughing.

My brother stood suddenly straight and shot her a nervous smile. But Jeevan was clever and cocky, and he knew how to pull anyone into a joke. “Hi guys,” he said, thrusting a hip out at Alice and looking only at her, “I’m Jeevan.” Then Alice hit him on the shoulder and burst out laughing, and my brother slowly joined in, and before long they were frolicking in the sunshine, throwing leaves and twigs at each other, hooting and howling and mimicking each other. And whether it was because Alice had touched him first, or because his joke had been so successful, Jeevan suddenly dared to touch her. He pulled her hair like a naughty schoolboy; he poked her nose; and then -- it made me catch my breath, and I could almost hear my brother catching his -- he picked her up and threatened to throw her into the swimming pool.

Of course we all knew he wouldn’t. Even Alice knew he wouldn’t, because she was too clean and lovely to spoil, but she kicked all the same, and shrieked like a brain-fever bird, until he put her down at the very last moment, just as Mrs. Hotel Kong’s heels came clicking out onto the poolside.

“My goodness!” she said, “What you all doing here? Make me trip and fall in these shoes, then you know! That worried I was. What you doing here? Hanh?”

“Oh, nothing,” Alice said breathlessly.

“Nothing, Maddam,” said Jeevan. He’d somehow managed to pick up his long-handled net after putting Alice down, so that it looked now as though he’d been interrupted in the middle of an afternoon like any other.

After Mrs. Hotel Kong left, Alice and Jeevan turned to look at each other again, she pouting, he grinning, and they stared at each other for so long they might’ve been having a staring contest, except for the fact that each of them blinked many times without the other saying anything. And when they started laughing they started at exactly the same moment, so that neither one of them could claim to have won. But it was Murali who looked like the real loser, standing there scratching his head, trying not to look at Jeevan and Alice, our father’s ring too big and heavy for his hand.

I stood up and dusted off my skirt. I was about to go and tug at my brother’s sleeve and tell him that it was time we went to find our mother and go home, when just like that, like a bored little girl, Alice swung away from Jeevan, and, putting her face up close to my brother’s and her hand on his cheek, said, “You’re a good boy, aren’t you? You’re not a bad boy like that one!” My brother smiled a smile I’d never seen before, and I knew he was only just discovering what I’d seen two days before: he was real now, a real boy with a proper story. Things were happening to him.

And so both of us were wondered: what if, after all the world’s wonders had always been out of our reach, we really could have Alice? What if this was the universe’s way of finally making up for the drudgery of our lives, the hot sun and shapeless days, the fact that we’d been born on a god-forsaken island no one had ever heard of?

***

“If I tell your father,” our mother said after she found Murali in Alice’s room the following day, “now itself he’ll drop dead.”

“We didn’t do anything also,” Murali protested, “just watching TV only.”

“Just watching TV! Sitting there in the bed like a newlywed couple. And who paid for the potato chips?”

“They were in her room already.”

“Don’t lie to me,” our mother said, “I know that type of girl. Nicely-nicely she has wrapped you around her little finger and you’ve fallen for her nonsense. What you think, these white girls -- “

“Alice isn’t that type of girl.”

“Oho, how sweetly her name comes in your mouth now, Alish Alish Alish, Alish this Alish that, as if you’ve been best friends all your life. How you know what type of girl she is, anyway? Hanh? You are not the one spending eight hours in the hotel every day, seeing with your own eyes what goes on behind people’s doors. In the mornings the swimming pool boy is sleeping with his head in her lap and in the afternoons she is sitting with her head on your shoulder. Now you tell me, what type of girl is she?”

Murali had no answer to that, and neither he nor my mother said anything the rest of the way home. That night he tossed and turned in his bed, and once I even heard him sniffle into his pillow. And the next day neither Alice nor Jeevan the pool boy was anywhere to be seen, though Murali and I looked for them everywhere.

This is what I sacrificed for my brother’s sake: ten minutes of my time and an ounce of pride. And what I risked: a slap from my mother if she found out.

I would like to tell you that I did what I did because I felt I owed it to my brother for having made him cry. That I was unselfish enough to think: for once let one of us have some happiness, and never mind if it isn’t me. That my mother-hen side wanted to fulfill all his dreams, and wanting this, I took my heart in my hands and went to Alice. But the truth is that I wanted Alice for myself just as much as for Murali. I wanted to be able to trot out bigger and bigger boasts before the other girls at school: Alice and my brother went to see a picture film together. Alice and my brother went to the Paris Je Taim Cafe for ice cream sundaes. Alice is my brother’s girlfriend. I practised saying this last in front of the mirror, watching the f of girlfriend steam up the glass.

“Alice!” I hissed when I managed to catch her alone. I’d waited outside her door while my brother helped out at the bar, and now, finally, here she was, wrapped in a bath towel, her curls pulled long and loose by her swim.

“Hello, kiddo,” she said, as if she’d been expecting to find me there.

Alice, Alice, I longed to say, my name is Manju. But I had no time to waste; Alice was a busy girl. Already I heard rubber slippers slapping up the outdoor staircase, probably one of her friends coming to remind her of their strict timetable. “Alice,” I said, “you know or not, my brother likes you?”

In Tamil films, this is when the heroine would have giggled and lowered her eyes, perhaps even hidden her face with a corner of her bath towel. Alice did none of these things; she reached out and tugged one of my plaits and said, “And I like you! What do you say to that?”

What did I say to that? I was still racking my brains, thinking of some way to grab this conversation by the horns and wrestle it back onto the correct path, when Alice’s friend appeared, panting, in the corridor.

“Hey Alice -- ” she began.

“Look, Kate, it’s that guy Mu-rah-li’s little sister,” said Alice. “Isn’t she so cute?”

The two of them stood there looking at me, giggling in the wrong way, darting each other meaningful glances of whose meaning I alone was unsure.

“We gotta go,” Kate said at last. “We’re already ten minutes late.”

“All right,” said Alice. “Gimme FIVE minutes. Bye, little sister!” Grabbing Kate by the elbow, she disappeared into her room and left me looking at her locked door. And that was that, the end of my attempt to engineer -- what? I hadn’t even been sure. I’d thought Alice would blush and simper, and a plan would unfurl brightly out of our halting conversation. A secret meeting, a promise to deliver her letters to Murali without my parents’ knowledge after she went back to America. I would’ve been the perfect go-between, but I had no Plan B.

***

A week after we’d gathered on the beach to watch the Straits Trading Company arrive, we gathered again to bid them farewell. There they all were: the men in tight white trousers, the runners-around, the make-up lady, the models. As Alice passed Jeevan she poked him lightly in the ribs, and he poked her back. She was wearing a bright yellow dress with a slit all the way up to her bum, and when she stepped into the yacht with Mr. Hotel Kong’s help I caught a glimpse of her red knickers. Can see her panties also, I thought to myself. I looked at Murali out of the corner of my eye, but he said nothing, though he was gazing so intently at Alice I knew he must’ve seen them too. Alice was leaning towards the girl beside her to say something just as the photographer shut the door behind her. Then both girls looked at Murali and giggled until they had to cover their faces. Murali smiled at them, but they weren’t looking. As the engine started up Alice turned and waved. Her eyes, suddenly solemn, were on the blue-and-yellow sign above our heads that said Paradise Hotel, with its string of unlit colored bulbs and its two coconut trees. She bit her lower lip and stared at that sign, unblinking.

When the yacht was a small white splash in the distance, I tugged at Murali’s hand to wake him from his daydream. He tried to snatch it away from me as if it hurt, but I refused to let it go. My fingers tightened stubbornly around his fingers, and when I lifted his hand to my face to look at it, I saw that my father’s ring was gone.

“Murali Anneh!” I whispered. “What happened to Appa’s ring?”

“Fell into the drain,” he said, turning away.

The idea of it -- my father’s ring, bobbing away with plastic bags and kitchen rubbish on the murky water of a monsoon drain, or taunting my brother from under a metal grating, unreachable! -- sat at the top of my throat, cold as a block of ice that would sting my belly if I tried to swallow it. “Bluffing!” I said. At first I didn’t know why I said it. Just to irritate Murali, maybe, to exact some irrational form of revenge. Or maybe if I refused to accept his story it wouldn’t be true, and the ring would reappear. But even as I blew that playground word into the air between us, that word he had so often flung at my own inexpert white lies and tall tales, I knew what he’d done. “You gave it to Alice!” I whispered in horror. I remember stepping away from him then, as though frightened my words would ricochet off his face and hit me, yet I was not too frightened to persist: “Yes or not? Tell the truth!” Yes, he’d given the ring to Alice because his tongue wasn’t as quick as Jeevan’s, his nerves not as bold, his muscles four years scrawnier. All he’d had was that ring, and he’d hoped it would be enough.

Around us the little crowd was dispersing, Mrs. Hotel Kong bustling off to her front desk, my mother hurrying upstairs to pull the sheets off the models’ empty beds, Jeevan laying down for a catnap by the pool. Still Murali wouldn’t look at me. His mouth moved without opening, as though he was working up saliva to spit on the ground at his feet. “Manju,” he said finally -- so seldom did he say my name that his mouth made a funny shape around the word, and he himself paused and frowned -- “why can’t you mind your own business?”

I would tell our mother, I decided. She would tell Mrs. Hotel Kong, and Mrs. Hotel Kong would get the ring back from Alice. Alice was Alice, after all, and a thousand rings more beautiful than my father’s lay in her future. Diamonds and sapphires and rubies in little black boxes, and handsome men to give them to her. Our ring had been in our family for more than a hundred years, and our fortunes depended on it. If my father found out it was gone he would lay his head in his hands and cough himself sadly to death. Far away in New York, Alice would know nothing of it.

But the ring, furious at being given away like a cheap night-market toy, had already begun to tug what remained of our fortune out from under us. When I went home to wait for my mother, I found my father writhing like a fish on the floor as cardamom-scented bubbles worked their way up from his lungs and out through his mouth. I sprinted back to the Paradise Hotel, and Mrs. Hotel Kong called an ambulance. My mother sat hunched beside my father’s stretcher in the back of the ambulance as it drove away, her eyes like ping-pong balls in the half-light of dusk. “Go and find your brother,” she said before clambering up into the ambulance. “There should be enough money in the Dutch Lady tin for you two to come to the hospital in a taxi.”

Murali was still on the beach where I’d left him. Back and forth he paced against the setting sun, his hands joined behind his back like an old man’s, his gait oddly stiff yet somehow weightless, as though it were the breeze, not any effort of his own, that propelled him. I stood watching him, breathing that cool, salty breeze, trying to work up into my mouth a single sentence that would convey everything. I wanted him to know that we had no time for quarrels. That I needed him now. That I therefore forgave him. But I could hardly bear to look at that dark matchstick figure on the sand. My eyes kept drifting to the quiet, glinting water behind him, and all I could think about was my father’s ring, sailing further and further out to sea on a white girl’s hand.




Photographs by Abeer Hoque.