Shard of Glass | Page 9

I bought a gun on the Ceylon black market and kept it in my pocket next to the book. I was careful when I looked through the glass now, and eventually I realized that I could change the way I waded through the sand. I discovered that if I moved silently enough, I could spy on my uncle, and sometimes my father, as they looked though their own glass. Whatever they were using, it was far inferior to mine--most memories stayed hidden from them, and they could not find me very easily. We stayed a half step ahead of them--as soon as I learned that they had found us, we would move. We never stayed anywhere longer than six months, though, and for that I was grateful. I missed our island and Koichi so much sometimes--I didn't want to come to love any other place that much and then lose it in another afternoon. My mother grew old on those trips; gray hair began to pepper the brown, and worry lines seemed as though they had been etched into her face with a chisel.
And then, when we were walking through a crowded market in New Delhi, they shot my mother. It hit her in the shoulder, and she went down amid sudden pandemonium. It was a stupid place to shoot us--I hauled her up and dragged her out of the plaza, hiding within the milling crowd. I didn't dare take her to a hospital in the city--my uncle's men would surely be watching every one. So I bound her shoulder as best I could and we took the next train out of the country. We traveled all night and part of the next day until we crossed the border to Nepal. There, I felt safe enough to take her to a hospital. The bullet had apparently passed through cleanly, but the doctor gave us some penicillin to ward off infection. We found a small room in a back alley tenement in Katmandu. She slept there for practically three days straight while I went out to find work. I was eventually hired as a dishwasher in the kitchens of one of the western hotels. It paid barely enough for the rent, but my mother was too weak to get a job herself.
Sometimes I wonder why I didn't notice how tired she seemed, how just getting out of bed in the morning was becoming a daily struggle for her. Why did I just assume it was exhaustion, and not something more serious? But my mother was a woman in her forties who had spent the last five years in nearly constant terror. The grueling pace of our lives would exhaust anyone, I thought.
I began to wear a plain orange sari and cover my hair--my lips and nose were a little large, but my skin color was perfect, and in the right clothes I looked like a local. No one would associate my schoolgirl picture with the Nepalese kitchen worker I had become.
And then one day, a few months after we arrived, I saw my father. I was in the market, haggling over a fish for dinner (the one thing I could convince my mother to eat, these days), when I heard his voice.
"She should be about this tall," he said, "brown skin. Living with her mother. Their names are Leah and Carol."
The man he was talking to snorted. "You're just looking for a teenage girl living with her mother. Oh, well, there's only one of those in this city. But perhaps you can buy this vase--very cheap, only thirty American dollars and I'll see what I can do."
I snorted--the vase vendor was robbing my father blind. I looked at him surreptitiously from under my scarf. He was thinner than I remembered, which made his face look harder and more vulnerable at the same time. His hair had turned silver at the temples, but it was as thick as I remembered it. For a moment, I allowed myself to be happy to see him. Then I acknowledged what this meant: they had found us. I took my bag of fish and calmly paid the vendor, glancing around to see if there were other westerners in the market. It looked like he was alone. I walked the few feet to where my father was standing. He had pulled out his wallet and looked like he was actually shelling out the thirty dollars.
"If you want to find the woman, I can take you to her," I said in my best Nepali accent.
My father paused and turned to me. He gave me a searching look, but after a few moments I realized that he didn't recognize me. It made me feel lonely.
"What about the girl?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I don't know about a girl,