The Red Shoes

We thought for a long time that it was only a child’s exuberance, the kind most of us had left years behind, the irresistible desire to jump and run, even in a sacred space.

At her nalangu, where we had gathered to mark her coming of age, the girl would not sit quietly on the wooden plank and let us paint her feet with turmeric. She put on her strange red shoes that she had found God knows where and skipped around us until all the jasmine spilled out of her hair and lay on the floor in bruised white heaps. She did not retreat into seclusion, as we had all done in our day, but danced out of the hut, tossing yellow rice and marigold petals and banana leaves, and Atthai had to run after her and catch her and push her into the hut that was meant to be her home for the next nine days, and even then she kicked so terribly that Atthai was taken ill.