None of us knew her real name. We heard her mother call her Beauty and she became Beauty for all of us.

The day she arrived we were in the yard of Jana’s house, waiting desperately for the rain. Sameer had been hitting the ball all over the large yard, and nothing we did, chucking, distracting, changing the ball, nothing could get him out that afternoon. Our hopes clung to the gray clouds taking over the sky, threatening to wash away everything. And when we saw from a distance a thin-mustached man open the tin gate and a long, beaten-up vehicle drive in, we immediately knew that they were the tenants Jana had told us about.

“They have a daughter too,” he had said. “And you know what? She is our age.”

The driver was the first to climb down, and he and the mustached man, who we understood to be the father, looked briefly toward the sky and then hurried to remove the green tarpaulin that covered the back of the vehicle. The rear door opened and a plump woman got down, holding a stuffed handbag against her chest like a baby, and behind her came the girl, and she held nothing in her hands.

“To fall in love with Brother,” Jana whispered beside us, “here she comes.”

Jana always referred to himself as Brother. He would enter the classroom and before even taking off his backpack he would stand in front of us: “Yesterday, Brother killed a girl with his gaze,” and he would look at us with an intense, almost angry stare. “And guess what? She gave Brother a flying kiss! Oh, Brother almost died.”

Now he was running toward the tenants and we watched him run, his silky black hair rising and falling, and ahead of him the girl. But she looked nothing like we had pictured her from Jana’s stories.

He had told us of her dance at a distant cousin’s wedding in the village. “It was the best dance ever,” he had said, “until Brother break-danced and everyone had their jaws dropping.”

In Jana’s stories she had long blond hair. In reality, though her hair was long, it was not blond but black, and she wasn’t white like snow. For a moment I thought another girl was going to step out of the vehicle: milky white, blond, each breast the size of Raju’s head. Hadn’t we long known, though, that Jana’s stories were made up of more lies than truths, and yet we loved to listen to him, and we believed him too, because no one told a story the way Jana did, not merely with words but with his arms and legs, and his eyes, punctuating those long tales with whistles and sighs, and with music from his mouth, which he called the beat-box. When he had told us of her dance, we saw her whirl in the middle of a small gathering, her arms outstretched and her yellow and gold dress billowing in the air, blond hair turning round and round, one slash enough to take you out for life. By popular request the two of them had danced together, and all along while they swayed to the music, their eyes had been talking. He even did a little jig, showing us his arm wave and rope walk from that night, and then her moves too, all hips and ass. What Jana had strangely forgotten to tell us, though, and what struck me the most from the distance, was how tall she was. She was taller than her parents, and when Jana, who was taller than me, hugged her father and then her mother, she was clearly taller than him too. The rain that had hung in the air for so long broke into our faces and our eyes and I suddenly felt weaker in my legs.

“Don’t look at her like that,” Waheed said. “It will go to her head.”

Raju said he wasn’t looking at her.

“You must be looking at her mustached father then,” Waheed answered.

“No, you are looking at the father,” Raju shot back. “Because your father, too, has a mustache.”

Sameer said we should help them before the rain ruined their stuff.

“Let them call us and we will go,” Waheed said. “We shouldn’t go on our own. These village girls, they climb on your head if you give them a little lift. What does Jana know, rushing like that? Fool!”

From beneath the giant pear tree we watched Jana’s mother and grandmother and his aunt come out of the house, and one after the other embrace the mother and the girl. Jana’s mother held her for so long that we thought she might never release her. “That is how I would like to embrace her,” Raju whispered beside me. And when Jana’s frail little grandmother shouted at us, calling us shameless for watching the guests work, all of us ran through the rain, except Waheed who walked slowly, looking down at his bright red and white shoes and brushing with his fingertips his meticulous hair. I wanted to fall back with him and walk at my own pace, but I kept running behind Sameer and Raju.

The sacks were knotted out of bedsheets, curtains, dupattas, and we carried them from the bed of the vehicle to one of the rooms upstairs. My sack held clothes and Raju’s held pots and pans, and he kept saying that his load was heavier than mine. By the time we carried the second load, our wet shirts were stuck to our bodies, but none of us seemed to mind. Raju stopped me on the stairs and asked in a whisper if I had seen the mole on the girl’s chest. I hadn’t, I said. “Women with a mole on their chest,” he said, “want to be in bed all day.” I tried to remember if any of the women I knew had a mole on their chest, but it seemed I had paid no attention to moles. So while her father passed Raju and me the heavy, worn-out leather suitcase tied together with a rope, I stole glances at the girl’s chest. It was a small mole, a little bigger than a dot, but it wasn’t on her chest but on her left collarbone. And when I said this to Raju on the stairs, he looked at me and said that anything below the throat on a woman was chest. While we waited to be handed another sack, I kept steal- ing glances at that mole on her chest, till she turned her head to look at Jana’s aunt and there, just beside her earlobe, I glimpsed yet another dark dot. I had seen moles for the first time.

The girl was not our age. That was clear. And even if she was, there was something older about her that was different from the girls in our class, even the girls in the classes above us. She was there and not there at the same time, and even though her gaze passed over us several times, she did not seem to see any of us.

The luggage ended quickly and we looked with disappointment at the empty soaked bed of the vehicle. Jana climbed onto it to see if anything had been left behind even though it was clear that nothing had been left behind. A very light rain kept falling and the girl’s mother stood with Jana’s mother on the veranda. She was crying, the girl’s mother, and when I walked a little closer, I heard Jana’s mother say that God was kind and merciful and that she should think of this home as her home too. Then they started whispering the way my mother and aunts sometimes did at home, and while they whispered, Jana’s mother was looking at the girl in a slanting way. I walked a step closer. I still could not hear them, and just as I took another step, both of them turned toward me at the same time. A thief who had been caught, I limped away, pretending that something was pinching my foot. The girl stood with Jana’s aunt under the awning of a window. Jana lingered near them now. I looked at her face and her lips and those clear big eyes that seemed not to rest on anything. Jana winked at me, a signal to come over, and I thought about it but the image that came to me was of not even coming up to her shoulder. The mere thought diminished me. Waheed, Sameer, and Jana would have some chance with her or at least they could stand beside her without embarrassment; even Raju, who wasn’t much taller than me, would be beside her soon because he didn’t care, he didn’t care at all how short or tall or dumb he was. But I did, and the only exchange I could see between the girl and me was shame. And yet, along with everyone I hated Jana for being the only one who would spend the evening around her, as she would gradually settle down and speak, and smile, and stretch her legs, and maybe dance too. When he saw the envy in our eyes, Jana’s happiness doubled.

“Beauty,” her mother called, looking toward her. “Get the radio from the vehicle.”

With gentle steps she walked on the wet pathway and, leaning into the window, brought the radio out, a black radio in a leather cover with the familiar circle of pinpricks. We had the same one at home and almost everyone I knew had one in theirs, and yet in her hands the radio looked like a new thing, a thing of magic, come from some other world. Its handle loose in her fingers, she passed me by and not once did she look at me. Through the hurriedly fallen evening we watched her disappear into the house, and though we should all have been home by now, we remained on quietly in the fine rain. I knew more than anyone what awaited me at home: every passing minute harshening the inevitable beating that was my fate, and yet that fate seemed so distant from me and so insignificant.

Every morning Jana came to school with stories of Beauty. We gathered around him, holding on to his every word. She had asked for his help to fasten a rope across the veranda, and he had then stood there talking to her and watching her hang the clothes on the clothesline, and she had smiled and blushed when, after all the others, she placed on the rope her lingerie. “What color?” Raju asked even before Jana had finished. “Black,” Jana said. “Black,” all of us whispered. The next day Jana said Beauty’s leg had gone to sleep while they were watching TV, and with his arm around her waist she had hopped the long corridor of their house. “At her waist,” Jana said. “Brother touched the most tender flesh in the whole universe.” He kissed the fingers of his right hand, and we grabbed at his hand and ran it over our faces, giggling, playacting, but also hoping for his fortune to touch us.

Of the four of us I had the greatest appetite for Jana’s stories. I wanted them to never end, and sometimes, when Jana and I were on our own, walking around at the lunch hour, or sneaking out on pee breaks at the same time, I asked him to tell a story again. Jana always did, with slight changes here and there, and at times I even reminded him of something interesting he had forgotten. It made me feel part of the story, made me feel closer to Beauty. I had, after all, not seen her since that first time. After a long whipping at home that evening for returning late, I was forbidden to go out to play from the next day on. It was the most terrible punishment and it had come at the worst time, when my heart was in Jana’s yard, where all the afternoon games had moved. Even Waheed had stopped caring about his video games. I promised at home that I would never return late again, I swore that we had a tournament going on at Jana’s house, that I had contributed three rupees to this tournament, but my family said that I could no longer go out. Going out to play was a privilege, my father said, one that I didn’t deserve. So while Jana, Raju, Waheed, and Sameer were having the time of their lives with Beauty, I was imprisoned in the empty garden of our home. I aimed pebbles at the small thorny chestnuts in the large chestnut tree, and I kicked and swiped at the tall grasses and the dandelions, the sight of whose destruction gave me pleasure, and I hurled the tennis ball into the air, hoping for it to rise far into the sky, and watched it turn back and fall as if hitting some invisible ceiling. Sometimes I forgot about the punishment, about the source of my sadness, sharing vacantly in the quiet stillness of everything in the garden—the fruits, the flowers, the birds, the grass, the frogs hopping around, the butterflies—only for the question to suddenly and piercingly stab into me: What must be happening at Jana’s home at that very moment?

At school, I urged Jana for more stories even though Waheed and Sameer kept saying that they were not true and I knew as well that a lot of them were Jana’s fantasies, but what fantasies: an insect flying into Beauty’s right eye at dusk and no one around except Jana and how gently he had wet in his mouth the tip of his finger and taken his time to draw that dark little unknown insect out from the pink underfold of her lower eyelid. How many times later at home, looking over my books, or lying sleep- less in the nights, did I imagine myself in Jana’s place: Beauty’s face in my hands, all the time in the world in my hands? How many dark unknown insects did I remove from the underfold of her eye, how many variations of the same moment did I invent and live, how many possibilities did that one moment open, what unknown paths it led through my heart?

I started spending more time staring into the oval mirror in the bathroom, observing myself under the very bright light that illuminated it. Nothing of that face that looked back from the glass consoled me. A dark face with curly side-whiskers, the shameful fuzzy beginnings of a mustache, hideous gap teeth, and short rough hair; it was a mess and I washed it again and again in hope and in despair. All that was ugly had been thrown my way and there seemed to be nothing I could do except dream with my eyes open. And in my dreams I was as tall as Beauty, sometimes even taller, my skin without a single blemish, and I smiled when she ran her fingers through my smooth long hair, and I told her all about myself. The punishments, the beatings, the urge to run away and never return, the desire to go to a big city where the lights never dimmed, where there were no clocks to tell time. She too had dreamt of a city, not this one, another; it might even be, she said, that both of us had been dreaming the same city. We held each other close, for so long that sometimes I fell asleep in her embrace, an embrace in which I dissolved into the warm softness of her body, only to be woken up by the yelling of my family, demanding that I wake from slumber or calling me to eat or cursing me for having forgotten something yet again.

After five long days of imprisonment, I was again allowed to go out; “but if you don’t return in an hour and a half,” my father said, “we will come to Jana’s home and beat you so bad that you will be ashamed to ever go there again.” They said other things too that I barely heard because I was already halfway to Jana’s in my head. I oiled my short curly hair, put on a different shirt, wiped at my shoes with a rag. On the street a strong breeze blew, and my shirt flapped against my body, making me wish for my hair to be longer, for Beauty to see me with the breeze caressing it.

I saw them the moment I opened the gate. They were on the veranda. Beauty was sitting on a chair and Jana’s aunt sat on the armrest, and Jana, Sameer, Waheed, and Raju stood on the other side of the veranda’s iron railings. I had the feeling I was walking all wrong. They were looking toward me and saying something and smiling at the same time, and, my feet sinking into the earth, I saw myself as I must have appeared to them. I wanted to turn and run back into my prison, but I kept on walking with my head down. “How did Mummy let you come, littley?” I heard Waheed’s voice. “Did you cry at home?” Raju said. They laughed. I tried to smile. “His mummy’s sent him in a new shirt,” Jana said. “Doesn’t he look dashing?” Even his aunt laughed.

Beauty was looking toward me, but she was not laughing. When I got to the veranda I didn’t know how to stand, where to keep my arms, whom to look at. “You look good with your face oiled,” Jana said. “Stop it,” Jana’s aunt said, laughter in her voice. “He looks very good.” That embarrassed me more than everything. She asked about my aunt and told Beauty that my aunt used to be in her class but our family got her married and now she had a child already. “Is she happy?” Jana’s aunt asked me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why? Is she not your aunt?” My aunt had forbidden me from saying anything to Jana’s aunt. “To every question she asks about me,” my aunt had told me the first time she came home crying from her in-laws’, “just say that you don’t know.” “Tell,” Jana’s aunt said. “How is she? Has she put on weight? Does she still wear lipstick? Is she expecting?” I said nothing and looked down, and there, one crossed over the other, I met Beauty’s feet, long and arched, her toes thin and long. “She is a lot of fun,” Jana’s aunt told Beauty. “Or has she become boring after marriage?” I went on looking at Beauty’s feet, at the toes and the nails, at the few hairs on her foot, and when I looked up she was looking at me as if she knew what I was hiding and I noticed another dark speck at the corner of her eyelid. Amid all the talking and the laughter she again seemed to be somewhere else. Once or twice her eyes rested on me and before I knew it, my time was over.

That night I lay beside her in the vast darkness under the quilt, and I traced with my finger the dark scatter of moles on her skin. At each new discovery my eyes glimmered in surprise. Beside her ankle I found a little fleck and two dots that hid unseen in the back of her knee; there they were, sprinkled at her waist, and deep between her breasts, and along her throat, at the corner of her lips, at the edge of the eyelid, a great constellation coming together.

Every day we gathered in the yard around Jana’s house, playing listlessly and distractedly, hoping for Beauty to come out, devising schemes to make her join us. Sometimes she came to the window and I tried to smile at her up there but she wasn’t looking at me or at any of us, even though Jana kept insisting that she came to the window for him. One day Jana said he had figured out the problem. “Fools, we have been fools.” He pulled the stumps out from the pitch. “How could Brother be so blind, asking her to join us at cricket?” He threw the wickets behind the evergreen bushes and tossed the bat on top of them. “Badminton,” he said. “Badminton is what girls play.” A bulb had suddenly lit up in great darkness, and everyone agreed, and while we tied the tattered old net we told Jana that he must call her when she came to the window. And he did.

“Come, come,” Jana said, “you will beat us all.” She looked at him and gestured no with her head. He stood beneath the window while the rest of us looked up from farther away. She stood there quietly for a while, almost smiling behind the glass, and then she went away, leaving the window empty, plunging everything into darkness again. “She is coming down,” Jana announced, rubbing together his palms and snatching the racket from Raju’s hand. “Didn’t Brother say badminton is the trick?” Raju was so happy at her coming that he didn’t even fight for the racket. But I knew that she was not coming, and she did not come, and I no longer felt like playing and no one else wanted to play either.

Our old routines had been smashed to pieces, our old pleasures were no longer ours; what was ours now was the distractedness and impatience and the boredom. Waheed and Sameer were upset that we just lay around listening to Jana’s farts, which was what, between themselves, they called his stories, and soon they started coming late and leaving early and then they stopped coming altogether. Raju said they now played video games at Waheed’s home. “We should go check,” he said. He, too, was tired of sitting under that giant tree that bore small worm-eaten pears, but Jana said Sameer and Waheed could go fuck themselves and play cartoons like children. “We are men,” he said. “We will do love.”

One afternoon at school, during the lunch break, Jana took me aside. His arm around my shoulder, we walked to the far end that housed the primary classes. Children came slipping down the metal slide, went back and forth on the swings, and turned on the creaking merry-go-round. “Hold on tight,” Jana shouted, grabbing at the bar of the merry-go-round, and he ran, spinning the wheel faster and faster, and the children clenched their hands tighter around the bar. We hopped on next to each other. Jana looked at me in a silence that wasn’t usual to him.

“What?” I asked.

“Do you want to see her naked?” Jana said.

We rose a little and dipped back again. The children yelled around us.

He said he had seen her bathing in the small bathroom, through the gap between the floor and the base of the door.

“Did you, really?” I asked.

“Does Brother ever lie!” he replied. “What did you see?”

“What do you think?”

He had seen water dripping down her calves and her ankles, and her feet were moving around in their small bathroom, and when he had gone closer to the gap, he had seen what she was doing inside. Dancing. Naked. Her legs moving, her arms swaying, her breasts bigger than they looked in the clothes. “Just as I had told you,” he said.

“Was she also singing?” I asked.

“Listen to me,” Jana said, the seriousness returning to his face. “I know you also love her. Don’t lie to me. I know everything.”

“I do,” I said.

“I know. Which is why I am asking you.”

The wheel was screeching to a halt and Jana jumped off. “Hold on tight,” he shouted again, pushing at the bar, raising plumes of dust with his feet, and the children, their eyes widening, kept saying, “Faster, faster, faster.”

Jana climbed back on, but he said nothing. I would rather have heard him tell the story, even if the whole thing was nothing but lies, but he was looking at me, asking with his eyes if I was up to it. “Yes,” I said.

“But we can’t tell the others. It must be our secret.” “Why not?” I asked. “I think Raju would want to come.”

“Raju can’t hold his tongue,” Jana replied. “He will tell everything if they give him a shot at the video game.”

“But Waheed and Sameer too might want to see. Don’t you think so?”

“They are good boys.” Jana winked at me. “They want to go to heaven. Let them go.”

I knew Waheed and Sameer would have said no. They would also have tried to wean us away, telling us that it was a sin, that God would throw us into hell.

“What if we get caught?” I asked.

“We won’t,” he replied. “Brother has a foolproof plan.

Tomorrow afternoon; the best Sunday of our life.”

That night I dreamt of Beauty for the first time. It was a strange dream. We were all looking for mushrooms at the edge of Jana’s yard. My aunt was there too, cradling a baby, and Jana’s aunt kept telling her that it was a doll and not a baby, and it was, indeed, a doll with a plastic face, but it was also somehow my aunt’s baby. We found big mushrooms, their heads large as saucers that fell down as soon as we held them in our hands. At some point Beauty’s leg went to sleep, and I ran to help her, but my own legs suddenly wouldn’t move. And the harder I tried, the more my legs were stuck, and I started to yell in panic, but I couldn’t even cry, and then everyone laughed, Jana, Waheed, Sameer, Raju, but we were no longer in Jana’s yard but in an abandoned house whose windows were covered with yellow plastic sheets and the floor strewn with hundreds of mangled slippers and shoes.

Jana was waiting for me at the gate, agitated, cracking his knuckles again. “What took you so long?” he asked. I said I got held up at home. “Ten more minutes and the show would have been over.” I did not reply. Then Jana looked at me and asked if I wanted to do it or had I, too, become a saint. “Why would I come otherwise?” I replied.

It was dark in the corridor, and our eyes took time to see in that darkness. Only his grandmother was home and Jana went to check on her, and when he returned he said everything was fine: sleeping like a corpse. He had locked her door from outside, and if she knocked, he would say it must have been a mistake. “Brother’s plan, foolproof.” His lips pulled into a smile, but he looked nervous, the same way he did on the morning of exams. We stood outside the brown bathroom door, hearing the rustle of the water as it fell from the tap into the bucket. My heart began to pace. What if someone walked in from the outside or Beauty opened the door suddenly, what would we do then, and once it reached my family, what would happen to me?

Jana went down first, prostrating, his head turned to the side. I followed him. The concrete of the floor cold against my face, I heard my heart thump. Through the thin bright gap between the floor and the base of the door I saw the drifting fog, white and translucent, in which I made out the color of skin, but nothing clear till I adjusted my head and my eyes, and then I saw her, amid the mist of that steam, sitting on a low wooden seat, naked and curved forward, her calves drawn tight against her, water falling. But I could only see till her waist, so I crawled ahead, leaving behind Jana, who had been ahead of me all this while. Her wet hair stuck to her shoulders like a dark rich cloth; vapor rose from her left breast. I pressed against the concrete to see her face, I shuffled ahead a few more inches, my own face now barely away from the door. I no longer seemed to care that someone might come and find us. All I wanted was to see her face, and for some reason her hands remained glued to her face. I kept looking, waiting, till she finally lifted them. She looked strange, her face almost warped in the mist, her face a mask, as if she were someone else. I knew it was her, though. Jug after jug of hot water she poured over her head, the haze thickening around her; she blew her nose, poured more water over her head and snorted her nose again, and then holding her face low in her hands she remained like that, shaking, uttering again and again, “What had I done to you, my God? What had I done to you?”

I turned to look at Jana, who at that same moment with stunned eyes looked at me. I ran past him through the dark cor- ridor, past the latched door, past the yard, and stumbling over rotting fruit, past the pear tree, and ran and ran through the mist that blurred away everything.

Zahid Rafiq is a writer living in Srinagar, Kashmir. He was a journalist for several years before turning to writing fiction. His story collection, The World With Its Mouth Open, is his first book and will be published by Tin House Books in December.