I Kick and I Fly

by Ruchira Gupta

Genres: YA Contemporary; YA Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Any work from Ruchira Gupta is sure to further the cause of liberating women, especially, and in this novel, girls. It takes a strong belief in us, and especially in our young ones, to persevere as she does in both art and politics." -- Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple

 

A propulsive social justice adventure by renowned activist and award-winning documentarian Ruchira Gupta, I Kick and I Fly is an inspiring, hopeful story of triumph about a girl in Bihar, India, who escapes being sold into the sex trade when a local hostel owner helps her to understand the value of her body through kung fu.

 

On the outskirts of the Red Light District in Bihar, India, fourteen-year-old Heera is living on borrowed time until her father sells her into the sex trade to help feed their family and repay his loans. It is, as she's been told, the fate of the women in her community to end up here. But watching her cousin, Meera Di, live this life day in and day out is hard enough. To live it feels like the worst fate imaginable. And after a run-in with a bully leads to her expulsion from school, it feels closer than ever.

 

But when a local hostel owner shows up at Heera's home with the money to repay her family's debt, Heera begins to learn that fate can change. Destiny can be disrupted. Heroics can be contagious.

 

It's at the local hostel for at risk girls that Heera is given a transformative opportunity: learning kung fu with the other girls. Through the practice of martial arts, she starts to understand that her body isn't a an object to be commodified and preyed upon, but a vessel through which she can protect herself and those around her. And when Heera discovers the whereabouts of her missing friend, Rosy, through a kung fu pen pal in the US, she makes the decision to embark on a daring rescue mission to New York in an attempt to save her.

 

A triumphant, shocking story inspired by Ruchira Gupta's experience making the Emmy-award winning documentary, The Selling of Innocents, this is an unforgettable story of overcoming adversity by a life-long activist who has dedicated her life to creating a world where no child is bought or sold.

 

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Release date: April 18, 2023

Publisher: Scholastic Press

Print pages: 348

Sample

Chapter 1

Forbesganj, Bihar, India

My stomach growls as I walk through the wrought-iron gates into school.

Today is Monday. I’m always hungriest after the weekend at home.

The main gate of the school opens off a tarred road lined with tall eucalyptus trees. I breathe in their tangy, sour smell. The faded pink of our L-shaped, two-story school building greets me with a brief, reassuring familiarity.

The low wall is very gray now, though at some point I’d like to think that it too had been pink. It wraps around the entire compound, marking our patch as separate from the green rice fields that surround us on three sides.

I feel the other kids’ eyes on me as I cross the courtyard. Maybe because their clothes are washed and starched every day and mine aren’t. Maybe they can hear my stomach’s hungry growl. Maybe they know that food is why I really come to school.

Last night, Mai found some potato peels and boiled them with a little salt. She forages the garbage near the railway tracks for leftovers because Baba takes her earnings to gamble.

I think of him, big and tall, despite his limp. He twirls his flowing black mustache as he walks around with a swagger in his lungi sarong, red plastic sunglasses, and a bandanna tied around his neck. Looking at him, you wouldn’t think that our family is starving.

But, in our lane, when everyone is cold, dirty, and hungry, we are hungrier, dirtier, and colder than everyone else.

I breathe deeply and remind myself that I can feel confident, because today, I look more like the other children. I’m not barefoot. I have on a pair of white canvas shoes that I found near the railway tracks. I stare down at the bindis I’ve stuck over the torn parts, where I’ve painted little flower petals of blue and black around them with eyeliner pencils.

Still, the nerves find their way to my chest. Whenever I get anxious about class, about the other kids, I think of the breeze over the green rice fields and the white birds that nest there.

I arrive at the two buildings at the end of the courtyard. The hostel for orphaned and vulnerable girls is on one side and the school building on the other. All the rooms of the L-shaped school building open onto a long wraparound veranda. The doors are never shut, even in the monsoon season, and there is always a breeze, even when there is no electricity to power the ceiling fans.

Parrots, sparrows, crows, and even squirrels all nest in the old mango, semal cotton, and guava trees here. And in a corner of the courtyard, just near the swings, is a mud stretch where the hostel girls exercise in white pants and jackets every day. I watch them practice their high kicks as I walk to class.

The kids point and whisper at me as I walk into the school building, but I don’t stop or look at anyone. I keep walking down the long corridor and into class. I prefer the days that they don’t notice me. It’s better than the alternative. The heady smell of steaming rice wafts in from the school kitchen and my eyes blur from the hunger.

“Pretty shoes,” says Manish as I walk in. I blush with pleasure and sit next to him.

Perhaps he’s back to being my friend again like the old days. Before Rosy went away.

It’s been a while since I let myself think of her. Her long black hair, just like mine. Her dimpled round cheeks and upturned eyes. Our teacher always mixed us up, even though I’m much darker than her and am always dressed in the same black salwar kameez, patched up in many places. I wonder if Manish misses his sister as much as I miss my best friend.

I don’t know how or when Manish became the most popular kid in school. Maybe because he’s a good student, or because he’s strong and powerfully built. The girls clamor for his attention and the boys cling to him as if his confidence might rub off on them. Or maybe because his father is a police officer, the famous Suraj Sharma, and Manish comes to school in the police van. In the monsoon season, he gives the school principal a lift too.

I place my schoolbooks on the desk and turn to him with a smile. He points at my painted shoes. “They don’t really hide your dirty feet. You can still see that they’re old and torn.”

Everyone bursts out laughing.

Math class begins. Our teacher, Sunil Sir, sits on a big chair behind a wooden desk. He’s neatly dressed, as usual. His large bony body conceals his gentle and patient nature. I take my stubby pencil and dirty notebook out of my worn cloth satchel and begin to listen.

I’m so hungry I can’t hear a word. If anyone bothered to check, they would see just how completely lost I really am. I copy the problem set on the board and then wr

ite borderline nonsense. Or maybe it does make sense, and I just can’t tell. I can’t stop thinking about the rice and daal boiling in the kitchen.

My stomach performs a big, famished rumble as soon as the bell rings.

Manish hears. “Don’t worry, Heera, it’s lunchtime now,” he says mockingly. And again, everyone starts laughing. Of course they know food is why I come to school.

I focus my eyes away from my classmates and toward the trees outside. One day I’ll get used to the hunger and hopelessness like Mai.

Manish gets up from the wooden bench we share and walks to one near the door. He sits down like royalty with his feet up on a desk in front of him and his back resting on a table behind him. A few of the boys gather around him. He says something and they all laugh. I know they’re up to something, but I have to get past them to get to the mess hall.

When I make my way through the narrow aisle between the tables, my gaze is fixed toward the door. I’m almost there when I trip over something—a foot perhaps—and the ground falls out from under me. My arms shoot out to break my fall, but I’m too late. I’m flat on my face. A spot of blood leaks from my nose as I get up off the floor.

Without wiping it, I run from the laughter. My toes push apart the already-torn canvas of my shoes.

*****

I take my mat and spread it on the floor of the mess hall. As I cross my legs to sit, I sneak a look at my toes peeping out of the torn shoes. Are my feet really dirty? I look more closely. They’re cracked and coated with filth. I thought my brown skin hid the dirt, but it doesn’t really work that way, I suppose. I curl my toes into my shoes and tuck my feet under me.

And then the food arrives. Whole spices, cauliflower, and chunks of potatoes almost melt into the roasted moong daal that has been boiled with rice and arhar daal. The khichdi glistens with the spoonful of ghee topping it. I can think of nothing else as I swallow great, big, hungry mouthfuls. We are almost done eating by the time they bring around the boiled eggs. One perfect, gleaming oval hits my steel plate and rolls around. Eggs are only served twice a week, and they have always been my favorite food. I can practically taste the egg’s rich, heavy, buttery flavor.

I keep my eye on it as I finish the rest of my food. I know it won’t disappear, but I don’t dare to look away. The kids around me don’t seem to notice when I slip the egg into my bag.

What if I were to leave now and bring Mai the egg for lunch? My full stomach is a heavy burden to bear. But as I quietly file out, Manish suddenly appears at my elbow with two other boys who I don’t know as well.

“Oh, hello, Heera,” Manish says with a smirk. “What’s in the bag?”

I hold on to my bag tightly.

“What do you do when you aren’t at school?” asks one of the boys with him before I can respond.

“I bet I know what she does when she isn’t here,” says another boy. He walks forward and stands beside Manish. They don’t live far from our lane lined with small brothel rooms behind the huts. They know.

“Why does she come to school, anyway? We know what she’ll end up doing. You don’t need to read and write to do that,” the first boy says, as if I’m not even here.

“Yeah, like that cousin of hers, Mira. Bet she spends all day reading,” taunts the other boy.

Their laughter echoes through my brain. My cheeks are on fire and my heart begins to race. Shame creeps onto my skin, heating my face from the inside.

And then Manish grabs my bag, and I know immediately what he’s going to do. I try to snatch it back, but he’s already reached inside. His smile is an awful thing across his face.

“Heera laid an egg! Heera laid an egg!” he sings as he pulls out the egg and holds it above his head.

I run after him as he strides down the corridor. It’s as though I’m back in front of my family’s tiny hut just a few days ago, chasing down the pig that stole my little sister Chotu’s only good shirt. That didn’t end well, and neither will this.

I don’t even know my next move; I act on impulse and kick Manish hard in his butt. And as he tumbles to the floor, I reach out and yank the egg out of his hand.

Miraculously, it is intact. I put it into my pocket, and before he can get up, I let my fist fly, hitting him straight in the face. I watch, as though in slow motion. Blood

flies out of his mouth. I lean down and pick up a tooth off the ground, and he looks at me with horror as he reaches up to his face. The shouts around me grow louder, crying for punishment. The crowd wants retribution for Manish and his broken tooth.

I return the tooth but keep the egg.

 

*****

 

The principal is not in his office after Manish has finished dragging me through the hallways. As we wait outside, he continues to taunt me. “You’re not gonna get away with this. I will make sure you never come to school again. You Nats are all thieves and prostitutes. You’ll never change.”

It’s nothing I haven’t heard before. But I can’t seem to quell the anger stirring inside me before my reflexes kick in and I spit at his feet.

The principal comes around the corner at that very moment. “What is going on?” he asks angrily, waving his walking stick.

“Manish tripped me and pulled my bag, sir,” I stammer.

Manish shows him the broken tooth.

The principal looks at me furiously, his bald head glimmering. “As it is, the other parents object to admitting children like you to this school.”

I hang my head, staring at the floor just in time to see a mouse scuttling by.

“Please come to my office,” the principal says. He doesn’t say a word to Manish.

Manish returns to class as I walk into the principal’s chamber.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble, my head still down as I slowly enter.

“I’m afraid I can’t keep you in school any longer. Your father can come and take all your certificates. But you will have to find admission in some other school,” the principal says in a firm voice as I stand in front of his desk.

“Please, sir …” I attempt to explain what happened, but he pulls out a file and begins to make notes as if I’m not there.

“No explanations necessary. There’s no room for discussion under the circumstances. Just leave,” the principal repeats in a voice that brooks no ifs, ands, or buts.

I wait silently for a few moments, hoping he will give me an opening. But after an agonizing minute of standing there, invisible, I walk out, tormented by the principal’s words.

I begin to shake uncontrollably.

My arms and legs feel too heavy to walk home. I don’t want to face Mai’s tears and Baba’s fists. But it’s too late for that. Much too late. Baba will tell her he was right: We Nat tribes are not meant for school. Mai will lose face to Baba after all her sacrifices to make sure I could attend.

What will I eat?

I walk past the empty schoolyard, my feet pinching in my hand-me-down shoes. The other children are all still in class, including Salman, my model older brother—always so calm and studious. He’s able to crack a joke to defuse a fight. But me? I fight too easily. I lose my temper in a minute.

I reach the referral hospital. I can see our dirt lane, smell the rotten food dumped by the food carts as I cross the railway tracks. My stomach growls automatically while my senses revolt. My insides know that the smell means food.

I leave the pigs to it this time. Tomorrow, when the hunger rises like a serpent in my stomach, biting my insides, when even the swallowing of my saliva won’t still the cramps, I will come back.

My eyes sting and

I realize the tears have already come.

I straighten my shoulders and walk to our makeshift plastic home propped against one solid wall. My future is a hazy, unknowable thing, full of menacing shadows. My actions could very well seal the fate for my younger sisters, Chotu and Sania, as well.

Perhaps Chotu might fulfill my mother’s dreams. She is a plucky five-year-old. Her thin, spiny body conceals a determined spirit. Perhaps my brother, Salman, will calm Baba down. He’ll crack a joke, and everyone will forget that they have to share their portion of food with me. Perhaps Baba will be happy that he was right. Perhaps he will leave for the liquor shop without beating me or yelling at Mai.

Perhaps Mira Di has sent some milk over for Sania, the baby.

Perhaps I will be able to sell my canvas shoes to the garbage recycling uncle at the head of our lane.

Perhaps I will accustom myself to the constant hunger like Mai. Now that I am old enough—fourteen going on fifteen.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps …

But perhaps, now that I am not in school, it will be easier for Baba to sell me. I can quell the pangs of hunger, but I cannot quell the fear of what awaits me if Baba and Ravi Lala push aside Mai’s wishes.

 

Chapter 2

 

Chotu coughs from inside our hut as I stand outside, my feet still bolted to the ground. I finally stop thinking about school when I realize that she’s been sick for a full week now. With her short curly hair, tiny brown body, and black night-sky eyes, she is the favorite child of our lane. Her whining can outdo the Bollywood songs that play on mikes. But these days she hardly makes a sound except to cough.

It started the day the rain came down. Great heavy drops poured onto our tarpaulin sheet roof. We put our small collection of pots, pans, bottles, and cans where we could. The sound of the water was frightening. Dhup-dhup dhup-dhup. Louder and heavier by the second. There was no corner to hide in the large makeshift room we call a home—made from plastic sheets strung up in a gap between two other huts, covered by some torn tarpaulin. The plastic sheets flapped mercilessly. We sat, shivering, in the center of our hut while the water pooled around us. It soaked the plastic sheet on the floor that protected us from the cold damp earth.

A huge hole opened up in the roof as the rain tore through the tarpaulin and the water fell like a cannonball. Mai sat with Chotu on her lap, cradling her from the cold. Salman and I huddled together around Sania, the spirited toddler looking so much smaller in that moment. Our bodies were soaked. The water rose in the lane and mixed with the muddy water inside our house. Unknown pieces of garbage floated around us. The other squats made of brick walls with a cement floor were more protected. Their tin and straw and bamboo-thatched roofs shielded them.

We somehow kept Sania and Chotu above the water on our laps, but we couldn’t protect them from the water that poured down when the tarpaulin gave way. Baba was missing, as usual. We stayed awake all night.

I could still smell the overpowering stench the following morning when the rain finally stopped—the yucky water with garbage and excrement would take time to recede. Luckily, the railway platform was dry. So we gathered our few meager possessions and went there. We washed the pots, pans, mats, clothes, textbooks, and ourselves in the hand pump.

As we sat and dried out, I saw Mai wipe a tear. Her five-foot frame has almost disappeared into her wispy cotton sari. Her hair is nearly fully gray, though she’s barely thirty. It’s still long, always tied up in a bun to keep it out of the way.

The little sugar and oil we owned had washed away. There was no garbage along the tracks to scavenge from. It was all just one large pool of water. And Chotu’s body was burning with a fever that she must have caught during the night.

The water is gone but Chotu’s fever remains. Mai has not taken Chotu to the referral hospital. “What is the point?” she said. “I can’t afford the medicine that the doctor saheb will ask me to buy anyway.” She took Chotu to the bhagat, the sorcerer in our lane, instead. He said that Chotu was possessed by a demon and took five rupees from my mother to exorcise the spirit.

The bhagat had a dholak drum that he started playing. Chotu started whining. The bhagat started swaying. This was a sign of a spirit’s arrival in the sorcerer’s body. The spirit gave its name and asked Mai about the disease. Mai described the symptoms. He took out a banana and fed Chotu a spoonful. As Chotu stopped crying, the dhagat said the spirit had been appeased. He tied a black thread around Chotu’s left arm and sent us on our way.

As I hear Chotu cough, I know she’s not cured. I boil with rage at the five wasted rupees, at Mai’s dependence on the sorcerer, at the price of medicine, at the boys who don’t want me in school, at the principal who listens to them, at all the injustices in my life, at the shoes that are of no use.

I will tell Mai what happened at school, but not now. Maybe later, when Chotu gets better.

I pause just as I’m about to step inside.

Chotu has stopped coughing.

I can hear Mira Di’s sobbing more clearly from next door in the back room of my uncle’s shack and suddenly I can’t bring myself to move.

A customer walks out with a swagger. He tightens his belt and I wonder if he’s beaten her with it. Two other men are already lined up outside their hut. Chacha, my uncle, comes out and nods toward Chachi, my aunt, who is sitting on a bench outside their door. She takes money from the man next in line and he goes to the back room.

The fear that lurks in the dark recesses of my heart uncoils. It pursues me like a shadow whenever I lose hope. Along the lane, behind each hut made of bamboo, thatch, straw, and brick, there is a back room with a narrow door, a small window with iron bars, and a large wooden bed. On one of those beds

 is my cousin, Mira Di. She is a prostitute, and one day, if Baba has his way, I will be one too—one of the ghostlike girls sitting on benches outside the seventy or so shacks that line both sides of our lane. They sit in a pool of light in bright, tight clothes and red lipstick. The light comes from lanterns that hang above each bench, giving our area the name Lalten Bazaar, but mostly it is known as Girls Bazaar.

Salman and I have often waited outside these huts, hoping to collect tips from the clients who asked us to fetch the local liquor, tharra, or the more expensive Ingleesh. The girls sometimes ask for other things like a white powder in a little packet known as pudiya or the tobacco called zarda and khaini. Sometimes they ask for paan masala. We get the powder from shops that call themselves dispensaries, manned by people who call themselves doctors.

I twirl Rosy’s bracelet on my wrist. The one she gave me before she left. Suddenly, I feel I will go mad with all this noise. The crying and the sobbing mingle with the sound of the quarreling children, the speakers blaring Bollywood item songs, the screaming vendors, the drunken brawls and customers haggling over the price of a girl.

I think of Mira Di, the textbooks she bought Salman and me with the money she hides from Chacha. Of Mai and the daily wages she hands over to Baba to keep him satisfied whenever he wants alcohol, so that he will not be tempted to reach out for me.

I can’t go into our shack. I can’t bear to see Mai’s face just yet.

 

*****

 

I walk to the railway platform. I will watch the trains come and go. I will watch laughing families, people in clean clothes, busy porters and vendors, and forget about my day.

The lane is not long, but every inch is occupied with filth—more broken glass bottles, discarded food, tinfoil, used condoms, plastic soda bottles, discarded sanitary pads, medicine wraps, beedi, and cigarette butts per square inch than a dumping ground. Rats and pigs vie with dogs for the dregs of grime they can eat.

I cross the road and stay in the shadows. I pass the gambling joint. Luckily, Baba is not there. It’s just a few benches, a couple of carrom tables, and some straw mats for the men playing cards. Men leer at me, shouting obscene comments as I walk past while they gather around a makeshift roulette wheel on the floor.

My stomach rumbles as I smell pakoras frying in the tin shack café on the other side of the road. Jamila Bua greets me with a motherly smile. She often has a sweet for Chotu and Sania tied inside a knot at the end of her sari. The old lady fries her famous pakoras in a huge pan resting on some bricks over an open wood fire. She says she makes the strongest tea in the world. Her big aluminum pot brews it all day and all night on the same makeshift brick oven.

The pawnshop is a brick room with an iron shutter that’s pulled down and bolted with heavy locks in the mornings. Outside, the pawnshop uncle sits on a folding chair in a loose shirt and pajamas. He is square and fat and only gets up if someone has gold to sell. Mira Di has seen him pull gold from someone’s teeth with an iron plier. She says he lends money at an exorbitant interest. That if you’re in his clutches, you’ll never get out. I know that he also recycles discarded things.

I look down at my shoes. They’ve caused enough problems today. If I hadn’t worn these shoes, the kids wouldn’t have laughed at me, and I wouldn’t have gotten angry. Manish wouldn’t have gotten under my skin. I wouldn’t have broken his tooth. I wouldn’t have to worry about my next meal.

My whole family has always been barefoot. Everyone except Salman—the blue-eyed boy of the family and our future hope—and my father. Mira Di buys Salman laced black leather shoes with her earnings every two years. My father wears sandals made from used car tires. My mother is barefoot, as are my two younger sisters. She walks on the hot tar road and works in the fields without any slippers. She says her soles have hardened over the years. She ignores her bleeding feet, simply washes them in water and rubs them with some aloe vera leaves without a murmur.

I am the first one in our family to wear laced canvas shoes and I’m sure fate has punished me for my presumption. If I sell the shoes, perhaps my luck will turn. I take them off and walk to the pawn uncle.

He takes one look from his chair and utters the word garbage.

I feel tears threaten my eyes. But then I decide that the shoes have value to me.

I put them back on defiantly. But as I lace them tight, I can feel someone looking at me from the only two-storied house in the red-light area. Standing on the second-floor balcony above the pawnshop is a man with a lungi wrapped

 around his waist and a gold chain gleaming on his bare chest. I know at once who he is without looking him in the face. Ravi Lala picks at his teeth. His eyes focus on me speculatively. His henna-dyed orange beard glints in the setting sun.

From his perch, he makes sure that everyone knows he controls the red-light area. He knows what’s going on in every family, in every mud hut. He knows when babies are born, when girls reach puberty, when a baby girl is abandoned at the referral hospital across the road, which nurse will sell her, and which brothel owner will buy her. He knows. And as a part of Ravi Lala’s gang, Baba and Chacha do what they’re told.

He looks at me now as he has since the moment we came to Girls Bazaar seven years ago. Now I am a girl of just the right age. Ripe, fresh meat, a new commodity, naya maal are terms used for girls like us. We starve because he wants us to starve. The police do not protect us when we are attacked because he wants it that way. That’s what Mira Di says. So that he can buy me on the cheap from my father and sell me to the dance companies in the fair.

And I realize that even if my shoes were of value, there is no point. They might have paid for one more meal, but then what? The Mela, our annual traveling fair, is coming to town in a few weeks. The best time to auction a girl. The dance companies that accompany the fair buy the girls and sell them to enough “clients” to recover their investment within days.

Men come from far and wide to sell and buy their produce. The harvest of Girls Bazaar is us girls. My shoes alone could never be worth enough to save me from my fate.