A young girl is weeping on a wet, mossy cave floor behind a waterfall.
‘Papa! Oh, Papa!’
She flips open her notebook and rapidly moves her fingers over the letters and swipes tears from her cheeks before they hit the keyboard.
Oh Papa, I don’t want her to fall!
You gave me my name before we left Madras, before I was to be born, and Mama said you said with a firm proclamation: ‘It shall be getting a proper Tamil identity.’
Mine is a normal English boarding school where you send me. I know I’m small, but I’m good at mathematics. I think they hate me because of my name and also my dees and bees. If I say, ‘don’t touch me’ or, ‘don’t touch my bag’, I say my dees and bees wrong and they hate me, Samantha specially does. She got me today. But I don’t want her to fall!
. . .
Earlier that day in the school corridor, Samantha had rested her weight on Kavitha Pillai’s chest, arching her over her backpack down to the floor tiles, pinning her shoulders with her knees. Samantha leaned over her face. The other girls had clustered round. She closed the gap between their mouths and dangled a pendulum of phlegm, playing it with her tongue. Kavitha pressed her lips together as tightly as she could. Then Samantha let go of her left wrist, dug her thumb and forefinger into the sleeve above the elbow of Kavitha’s navy blue sweater, and twisted the soft skin there. Kavitha’s mouth sprang open and she bucked. Samantha jerked sideways, causing the saliva string to smack Samantha’s own eye.
‘You shitty bitch!’ Samantha said, grabbing the arm again, quick as an adder. She bent forward and smeared her eyebrow hard against Kavitha’s hair, and beside her ear, and bared her teeth. She said: ‘You’re fucking dead now,’ and rolled right.
Kavitha rolled left and gagged out a dribble of Mama’s palak puri.
Samantha jumped up and bobbed over to her friends making high fives, and received her puffa jacket. Kavitha spat and wiped her mouth. Then she levered herself to her feet and pushed past the girls and through the double doors and out of the building. Outside, rain was falling from dark clouds in a spring sky, onto the playground. The asphalt glistened and steamed under the late afternoon sun. Kavitha creased her eyes and looked up, and listened to the deep booms of thunder as the wind picked up and leaves susurrated in the wind gusts on the branches of the elm trees above her.
She crossed her arms and walked out into the rain.
Samantha sat on a desk and breathed a fog on the classroom window. Then she scribbled the condensation with her finger tips, and peered through the gaps. A small figure is traversing the hockey fields. ‘Exactly,’ Samantha said.
One of the other girls in the classroom walked over to the window. ‘Where’s she going, Sam?’
‘Come on Chelsea, you can see where she’s going,’ Samantha said. ‘She always goes there. And it’s fucking pissing down.’
The other girl cupped her hands around her forehead and pressed them against the glass. ‘Don’t say that!’ she said, and added with mock indignance, ‘You’re so vulgar!’ And the two girls giggled.
‘Yea, but it is,’ Samantha said. ‘Pillai’s mad.’
They both watch in silence until the figure was lost in the shadow of the copse. Samantha whispered: ‘Shall we get her?’
Chelsea looked at her friend, alarmed by something in Samantha’s tone, ‘What you mean?’
‘I think we should get her,’ Samantha said. ‘I’ll call Jade.’ She pulled out her phone.
Chelsea looked through the window again. ‘It’s really raining, Sam.’
Samantha sniffed, chewing her gum, and touching her eyelashes. She pressed the phone against her ear.
Kavitha Pillai found the path and swiped her arms away from her chest, forcing herself through the dense, emerald green stalks of the dripping ferns. Rain fell in a steady, smattering volume and a low roar came from beyond the foliage ahead. The spongy moss of the path folded around her trainer soles. Twigs on the low branches tugged at the hood of her anorak making popping noises, and one scratched her cheek with stinging lines. She heard voices behind her and felt her heart begin beating a syncopated cadence with the patter of the water droplets. Sweat beaded over her eyebrows. Her breath warmed her nose. She glanced left and then to the ground, which dropped into the cut where the swollen stream slithered over and around glistening boulders. When she looked up, a shiver erupted in a chill across her back.
The waterfall was huge. No longer a chuckling ribbon, it cascaded in a turbulent volley smooth as beaten copper from the opening in the rocks three metres above her. The water fell past and Kavitha’s gaze followed it down onto the rocks, where it churned into foam and spray. Beside her, a jagged pathway led to the cave behind the falling water.
The two followers were stepping forward with care on the track, looking at the ground. Samantha said, ‘Look, see? she came along here. There’s her stupid shoe prints.’
‘Are you sure?’ Chelsea said, and her voice rose a note. ‘I can’t see anything, Sam. I don’t like it. Let’s go back.’
‘Stop being a wuss—like Jade,’ Samantha said.
Chelsea protested. ‘But Sam, I’m cold!’ She folded her arms and then opened them again to smack aside some branches. ‘Can’t we get her tomorrow? I’ve homework to do. Let’s go back!’ Chelsea stopped and looked down at the imprinted shoe shapes in the mud. ‘Oh yea, I see them,’ she said.
‘Right? So hurry up!’ Samantha’s walk quickened into a brisk jog. ‘We’ll catch her before she goes behind that—fuck!’ Then the mud slicked her sideways. Samantha felt her left foot slide sideways in a patch of wet moss. She flapped her arms. Then she was weightless.
Chelsea straightened up. ‘Sam?’ she said.
Kavitha Pillai was putting one foot before each other along the wet ledge beside the waterfall, feeling her trainers into a solid footing, when she heard the shriek, and looked back. And saw Samantha fall. The blurred pink spinning
Falling backwards into the ravine, Samantha twisted and swung her arms in quick rotations until the small of her back struck a triangular ledge jutting out a metre below the edge of the path. Suddenly she pinwheeled forward loose-limbed through the angled columns of sunlight until she hit the rocks and stopped at once. There Samantha lay still until, then folded by the current, her body was born away by the dark liquid of the stream.
