Meena

By O. Hunt

She was a year younger than me, yet when I was a girl, she seemed like a woman.

It wasn’t that she reached puberty earlier than most. If anything, the years of malnourishment probably predating her birth—starting from conception in her poor and sickly mother’s womb—had made her far more waifish than an average eleven-year-old. Her clothes, low-quality salwar and kurti, with once-bright colors faded from overuse and rough washing, weren’t what chiefly belied her age either. 

Plodding silently behind her mother, going from one house to another mopping floors and cleaning dishes, she didn’t have the lightness of foot characteristic of children. She never ran, never frisked. She walked with shoulders hunched, as if they carried on an invisible weight too heavy. Sometimes, she limped like an old woman after being beaten, especially when her wiry legs took too long to recover. 

But more than anything, it was her eyes. Darker than the kohl smudged on her already prominent dark circles because of constant sweating, they held suffering too great for her age. A suffering that seemed to have made her soul weary already. As if she had lived a hundred lives, all starting from adulthood, skipping completely over childhood. As if in all of them she was always Meena. The Meena who was an unwanted, unloved girl. The Meena who was always born a Dalit.

May wasn’t the month one would choose when planning to return to India from Canada. But my parents did just that. 

Our home in Calgary, the Rockies a few hours away, Canmore flanked on all sides by peaks that looked like masts of ghost ships in the dark, the grizzlies and the elks, the walk under the Hoodoos, seemed so distant now that they might as well have been residual fragments from a dream. Here, the very air sizzled, and tiny mirages formed on asphalt highways under the relentless glare of the midday summer sun. 

Amidst the mugginess and the crowd, our ancestral home, already new to me, started feeling like a homeless shelter with a maid and her daughter working for a major chunk of my afternoons every day. I started resenting their presence, especially the girl’s, because once she finished mopping after her mother, she sat and peered into my life for the half hour her mother took to wash utensils by herself. 

Every day, I rushed from school, lest Meena rode my new cycle or took something from my Sailor Moon collection. I had caught her eyeing my room with such longing that I was almost sure she’d try to steal something. 

My room was designed to resemble an eclectic chamber of every fantasy of mine. Even though the rest of the house was old-fashioned and rustic, my room was the first to get renovated to be as close as possible to the one in Calgary. 

For now, my queen-sized bed was Rapunzel-themed. Faux pink ivy that felt softer to touch than the real plant climbed down from the wall to the headboard of my bed to the floor underneath. Woven with golden Sundrop flowers, the ivy resembled Rapunzel’s long braid. The rest of the bedding was varying shades of pink. 

On one side of my bed was a bookcase with a crystal red rose in a glass dome atop it inspired by Beauty and the Beast. There were Sakura suncatchers hanging by the ceiling and the walls were painted to give the entire space an appearance of Howl’s Moving Castle. 

My room was an object of envy and fascination and put me right at the top of the hierarchy in the world of girls. There were so many figurines and expensive show pieces in my room that if Meena stole something, I wouldn’t find out for a long time. Yet, a part of me wished she would do just that, so I could find an excuse to tell on her and get her fired. I wanted her to stop coming into my room. 

When my best friends from school, Shreya and Kinjal, came for annual festival skit practice, Meena slowed down and took longer to clean my room. She was creeping my friends out by constantly trying to pry into what we were doing. Her eyes sparkled at every small thing as if she had found a gold mine. 

Ordinarily, I had gotten used to her by now, but with her unsightly appearance, cringy behaviour that reeked of poverty and classlessness, and the timid smiles she kept giving us as if she was one of us made me feel embarrassed before my friends. 

“Who’s she?” Shreya asked with evident disgust. She very well knew who Meena was, but she wanted me to call her a maid in front of everyone. 

When my friends asked who she was, it wasn’t her name or her age or which school she attended that they wanted to know. I of course, took the hint.

“She’s our servant’s daughter. A maid herself,” I replied. “Don’t pay her any mind.” 

“Can you please hurry up and get out? We are doing something important. Something someone illiterate like you wouldn’t understand. Or are you expecting an invitation for a tea party or something?” Kinjal chimed in too. 

I knew Meena wasn’t illiterate. Mamma had also told me how she was a topper even though she barely attended classes, but I didn’t want to correct my friend and look uncool by revealing something nice about Meena.

When with my friends, I thought nothing of what happened. But in the evening, when I sat cross-legged near the little temple and lit the lamp in front of Shiva and Krishna’s idols, I thought of Meena. 

Though I wasn’t too religious, I felt a tinge of shame once I closed my eyes in our prayer room. The three of us were thought to be such good girls, and we were polite and well-behaved everywhere, then why were we so quick to target and bully Meena and that too with relish? 

A new understanding dawned on me; cruelty was an itch everyone scratched whenever they got an opportunity, when the target was weak and couldn’t retaliate, when there were no consequences. 

Had Mamma seen what I did, she would have scolded me a little, but I knew Grandma would rebuke Mamma for trying to lecture me for an insignificant maid, that too a Dalit like Meena. 

I was supposed to feel comforted by the fact that most adults around me, no, the society itself, had placed Meena at the very bottom. She had no one she could complain to. Even her mother didn’t show her an ounce of love or protection, and her mother was treated like a lowlife by many ladies who employed her. 

My occasional taunts were well within the acceptable range of behaviour Meena daily faced, so there was no cause for guilt. Yet it was guilt that kept me awake at night. 

Let alone steal, Meena never touched anything in my room, and after that day, she apparently learned to curb her habit of throwing those wistful glances as well. It gave me no relief like I’d imagined it to. 

I once saw her accidentally drop my plush pillow lying precariously over the edge while mopping. She quickly picked it up and put it back. Her fingers caressed its softness for a moment before she retracted her hand and looked at it as if it was filthy. 

As if it was a kind of filth she didn’t believe could be washed away by soap and water alone. As if, if she lingered any longer, she would pass it from herself to the pillow, and then to my shiny life. 

Though I had known it all along, like a hot spell, the realization that Meena was a year younger than me, that she was just eleven, scorched me. 

Between the scullery and my pink-themed room, it was like a portal in the sky closed for her when she stopped looking at my life, and an abyss opened before me when I started looking at hers.

Uncover what happens next in the upcoming Winds of Asia anthology.

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O. Hunt is a writer of Indian origin, born and raised in India and now living in Mississauga, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree and a Master of Arts degree in English. An emerging writer, her debut short story is forthcoming in Toronto Journal. She hopes to craft fictions, whether it be fantasy, Sci-Fi, horror, or non-genre fiction, that carries psychological and sociological insights. Writing enriches her inner life, helping her explore emotions and ideas that unfold fully only through narrative. She hopes something in her fiction makes the reader remember it long after they finish reading. When she isn’t writing, she is found enjoying the outdoors, dream journaling, watching anime and podcasts, and reading.