--Girl--

"See you later, sweetheart." Your uncle smiles as he tucks a lock of dark, curly hair behind your ear. He helps you up into the car, the sun shining all around the two of you, the grass green and the sky a brilliant, cloying blue. There is sadness sitting heavy in your heart. Sadness running liquid and cold down your bones. But there is a smiling sort of contentment too. A soft, smothering sort of sweetness at the knowledge that you are here, surrounded by loved ones. 

Loved ones. Love. The word sits sour-sweet like a pill on your tongue. You don't know what love truly is. But you think it must be this. It must be. For it feels all warm and fuzzy and writhing in your chest, like you swallowed a kitten. 

Inside the car it smells like air freshener. It smells like chemicals. It smells like a fragrant, classy sort of dead. The seats are plush and soft, and there is a lot of space inside. You lean back against your seat and feel the softness underneath you. You feel the simple, unassuming lavishness. 

Inside the car is your aunt, dressed in a colourful floral salwar kameeze with a georgette scarf draped over her shoulders. Her hair flows straight and shining down her back and her lips are bright red. Inside the car is your mother, with her own hair in an elegant bun and pearl earrings in her ears. You don't know whether they're fake or not. 

Inside the car is your baby brother, sitting in your mother's lap, oblivious to the darker facts of the life you both live in. You wonder what is going on inside his head. You think that he is adorable, like a little flower draped in morning dew. 

Inside the car is the driver, whose name you do not know. Who is silent as you all say your goodbyes to each other. He is wearing a simple cotton shirt and there is something hollow, something haunted inside his eyes. You barely notice it though, and even when you do, you barely pay it any mind. 

This is where you are. These are the people who you are with. And nothing anyone can do will change this reality. You might as well not question it. You might as well enjoy it. 

The car speeds up and drives down the long stretch of road connecting the secluded house to the rest of the sweltering city. The road is paved with cobblestones and really rather beautiful here, lined with trees. You look out the clear glass window, shaded in order to ward off the hottest rays of the sun. 

It's actually a little bit cold in the car, despite the outside world being exhaustingly hot and muggy. 

Soon you exit the walled-off guard district and you are being driven through the city proper. Outside the streets are brown-gray, dusty, and covered in all sorts of garbage. You keep looking out the window, the ugly scenes holding their own sort of aestheticism. 

Your mother and your aunt talk, while your brother is playing with his fake keys, big and bright and clunky in his hand. You run your own hands through your curly hair, freshly-washed and soft to the touch. You turn around to talk to your mother. 

The car slows to a crawl, caught in a traffic jam. A woman comes to the door of the car, eyes overly-large and dark and desperate and hollow, hunger etched on every line of her face. She seems almost ethereal, looking at you with desperate wells of eyes. Knocking on the glass of the car door. 

"What does she want?" You ask, voice arching with curiosity. 

"Money, probably," your aunt answers. "Or perhaps food." Her voice is disdainful. Flippant. As if she does not truly care. As if she does not truly see the woman out there, knocking wearily and desperately against the car windows. 

There is a man alongside her now. And another man. And another man. And two more women. The beggars come and they come until they are packed all around every side of the car, pressing in, gazing with their desperate, pained eyes. 

It is as if you are transported into another world. A world filled with need and strife and hunger and pain. A world where every day the sun digs into you and the wind tears across you. A world where death is just a few bad days away. 

You can feel death lingering near the throngs of people gathered around the car, pleading for anything you could spare them. Pleading for help. Invoking the name of God with their dry, parched mouths. Invoking things far greater than God with their eyes. 

Their eyes. Their eyes, their eyes, their eyes. These eyes seep down like twilight, like water, like fire smoke. They seep down into your very soul. You already know that you will remember these eyes for the rest of your life. They will haunt you forever, always over the edges of the surface of your mind. 

They are all pressed together, close to each other. And it's such a strange type of community. Such a strange type of solidarity among all of the people standing there. Standing there and sharing their common pain. Sharing their common need. Sharing their common hope. 

But you look into their eyes and you see a deep aching emotion so much larger, so much more terrible than mere sadness. This is an emotion that you cannot name. An emotion that perhaps there is no name for. This is devastation. Beyond devastation. 

Part of you feels subsumed into their eyes, subsumed into their world, subsumed into their pain. It flows through you and overwhelms you, and you want nothing more than to help them, to honour them, to give them what they so desperately are asking for. 

You don't know how to honour someone yet. Not in your consciousness. But in your unconscious mind you do. And your unconscious mind is telling you to let yourself become subsumed by them. It's telling you to let this haunt you until the end of your days. 

They look at you with their dark eyes. Their wide eyes. Their sorrowful eyes. Eyes that contain infinite depths within them. Eyes that speak of things you know you cannot understand. 

In every line of their face is etched death. And you know, you just know from looking at them that they are suffering beyond what you can ever imagine. 

And so you ask your mother if she can open up her wallet and give some money to the beggars. 

She looks at you as if you are a queer sort of being. She looks at you as if you are a baby, not a child of ten years old. She looks at you as if you are a bad child in need of a scolding. She looks at you as if she cannot believe what she has just heard. 

She looks at you and she tells you that your family does not have enough money to spare. She does not have enough money to spare. It's not as if they are rich. It's not as if they can hand out money to every weary beggar who asks. 

You plead. But she doesn't hear you. You plead again. But she tells you the same thing. You plead a third time. And she tells you to keep quiet and be good. 

The driver says nothing. He doesn't look at you. He keeps his eyes on the road. But there is a certain slouch to his shoulders that you can see. A certain slouch to his shoulders that tells you more than you thought it could tell you. 

Your aunt looks back towards you, her eyes slightly pinched, her face glazed over with youthful carelessness. She offhandedly tells you to listen to your mother. Her leather purse with silver-coloured chain links sits on her lap. 

And so you turn away from her, hands empty. You look out the clear glass window, shaded in order to ward off the hottest rays of the sun. You look at all the beggars pressed around the car, almost pressing into the glass. You see the death surrounding them, dark and jagged and whispering constantly foreboding. You look, and there is nothing else you can do but look. There is nothing else you can do but remember. 

They are out there in the muggy, oppressive heat, out in the dirt and the dust of the streets. And you are in the soft, cool, fragrant car. You are in the throes of luxury. In the throes of life. In the throws of comfort. You live in a world they will never be able to access and they live in a world you will never access as well. There is cold, tinted glass between you and them. And there is a world of different destinies between you and them. A vast chasm that is insurmountable. 

You look at your empty hands and you realize you have nothing to give them. You look at your new dress that you are wearing. And you realize that the world is tilting away from sanity, has been tilting away from sanity for as long as you have been alive. 

The car speeds up and you leave them behind. But still they press upon you. Every time you close your eyelids, they are there imprinted on your mind. And in one sense they make you feel emotions you never knew yourself capable of feeling. In another sense they make you feel nothing at all. 

The dusty streets go by and you are still watching them from your tinted windows. 

Eventually the car reaches the store that it was always meant to go to. Your brother is on your lap now, and you carry him as you step out of the car. Your mother and aunt get out. And then they lead you inside the glass doors of the shop. 

Inside the shop it is clean. It is pretty. The walls are a light blue shade and the polished stone floors have little dark flecks of different sizes scattered through the stone. There are bright and shimmery clothes hanging from the walls or folded on the shelves or draped over the mannequins. There are glass cases filled with jewelry. 

You are so taken in by the calm, cool prettiness of the store that you almost forget about the beggars. Almost. They remain, out of focus and blurry, on the very edges of your mind. What takes up the forefront of your mind is all the pretty, shimmery colours all around you. 

Your mother is looking at saris. Your aunt is looking at jewelry. You join her, looking at all the pretty semi-precious stones arranged into aesthetic shapes and sizes and patterns. You feel so close to your aunt, standing there beside her, looking over jewellery. You feel like you could get lost in this forever. And somewhere, deep in the very core of yourself, you feel lost. 

You see the perfect set. A necklace and a pair of dangly earrings. Each made of a string of little colourful, pastel-coloured, rocks of various sizes. They match a bracelet you have perfectly. They are made of the same rocks in the same multi-sized, multi-cut, multi-coloured pattern, all strung together. You just know that you have to buy this. 

You ask your mother if you can have the necklace and the earrings. A few weeks ago your ears were pierced against your will so you can wear earrings now. You can buy earrings now. 

Your mother says of course you can buy them. She asks the store clerk to put the jewelry in a small bag and she hands him the money as he is busy wrapping them up. You thank your mother. You feel so very lucky to have her as your mother. She lets you do anything that you want. 

But somewhere deep inside you, something festers pale and grey and dead.