Lottery

lately, I've been indulging a rather hackneyed fantasy. The receptionist at our office buys a roll of lottery tickets. We all pitch in $5. We stand in front of a TV, all of us, and watch as white ping pong balls with numbers shoot out of a vacuum tube, and then we are all millionaires. I quit my job, donate some of the proceeds to build schools in India, some to Planned Parenthood, buy a cottage in the hills and spend my life writing and having friends over for organic dinners made with herbs grown in my backyard. What surprises me about this fantasy isn't how often I've indulged it in the past couple of days (I'm nothing if not indulgent, particularly when it comes to the world in my mind) but the lack of originality in it. I am far more creative than this. And I know something about lotteries. I am obsessed with statistics, I read, memorize and misquote them often. Sometimes I exaggerate them to prove a point. I sit with this fantasy after the fourth or fifth screening in my mind and tire of it. Haven't I already won countless lotteries? And haven't they coalesced into a mass of luck that's brought me to this place and left me asking myself "what now?"

I was two and a half playing with a red tricycle in the front courtyard of my grandparent's house in Delhi. My grandmother was inside slicing guavas, freshly picked from the tree in the front yard into a steel plate for me to eat later. My mother was at the Delhi University library, doing research for her dissertation. And I was riding my tricycle in dizzying circles around the front courtyard till I got bored and went inside to bury my head in my grandmother's lap, so she could put aside the steel plate of guavas and focus her attention on me, stroke my hair, tell me a story and once I was satiated with my fill of attention, I was left to go outside and ride my tricycle again. I had left it by the black iron gate at the front of the courtyard and there it was. Except now there was a little girl, outside the gate, in shabby brown clothes standing with outstretched arms through the iron bars, touching the muddy wheel of the tricycle. Her clothes were rags, her hair matted, her lips chapped. She was the child of the construction workers who were building a house on the edge of our street.

She had seen me riding my tricycle and now she was standing, reaching for the tricycle's muddy wheel through the iron bars of the locked gate. She looked at me with an expression that I couldn't understand then, or maybe I could. Perhaps this was my first memory of discomfort, of a sadness, of a void that I still just want to leave alone. But in that moment, I couldn't avoid it. She was standing there, touching the muddy wheel of my tricycle, looking at me through the gate. I was wearing green shorts and a red shirt. They smelled of soap and felt strange on my body all of a sudden. I froze and watched her. She didn't move, her hand still stroking the muddy wheel. And perhaps this was my first bout of guilt, of shame, for a lottery that I had already won. And I knew I had done nothing to win it. It was an absurd lottery, and a scary one, because the stakes were so high and so complex. If you won, you got a mother who would scoop you up in her arms when she came home and read you books and feed you orange candies that she had stopped to get on her way back home. If you won, you would sleep in a bed with a blanket that had tiny green and yellow cars printed on it. If you won, and you ever got a fever, your parents would wipe the sweat from your forehead with a tiny washcloth and speak to you in hushed tones and hover over you for hours and days. But what if you lost? I didn't know what it felt like to lose. And I didn't want to know.

I knew that she had been born outside the gate, that her grandmother carried bricks on her head, mine suffered from depression and sliced guavas. Her mother struggled to feed her and couldn't always hold her in her arms when she cried, because she had to work. Mine brought home books and held her hand over mine as she taught me how to wield a pencil. I didn't want to know what losing this lottery meant. And so I snatched back my bike, burdened by what I had learned in an instant. By what I now knew, the unjustness of it. I was angry with her, for invading my world. Even though she hadn't even entered my side of the gate. She had stood outside the metal bars, touching the muddy wheel of my shiny red tricycle.

At the door, I stood back and looked at her, her hand still outstretched through the metal bars at the gate, looking in. Looking at my home, my life, my tricycle.

"Don't touch my tricycle ever again," I told her. She was quiet. She hadn't learned to speak yet, at least not in complete sentences, but she understood the sentiment.

I went in and cried in my grandmother's lap for a long time, and never told her why. I never forgot her face, her eyes, her arms outstretched through the metal bars of the gate. the way she looked at my tricycle and at me.

At two and a half, I was haunted by a question that I still don't know how to answer: what if it had been me on the other side of the gate? And why wasn't it me?