Short Story from around the WORLD: The Red and Gold Shoe part 2/7

The Red and Gold Shoe

The Red and Gold Shoe 2/7

As if startled awake by the train, Pinto's alarm clock jumps with fright and begins to ring. It would turn red in the face if it could; but instead it hops angrily up and down on the shelf where it is tied to a nail with a piece of string. When the train has passed, it is still ringing. Everyone hears it and everyone knows that another day has indeed begun.

Lata was first at the water tap. She usually was because old Amma, her grandmother, went early to work in the homes of the rich beyond the station where she swept, scrubbed, and swabbed. She would return at noon with leftovers of food for Lata, the cock, hens, cat, goat, and dog, and then go off again to do the evening chores.

Lata never lingered at the tap. And certainly not today-not when all the girls were talking about today's doll-mar-riage party. What will you wear? What are we getting to eat? Never before had a match been arranged more grandly. The plastic doll from the sweetseller's house was to be married to the rubber doll from the betel seller's. Anyone would be proud to get her doll married into the sweetseller's house, for it was the richest in the lane, and the feast would be some- thing to talk about for days afterwards. There would doubt less be pieces of stale milk fudge from the sweetseller's own shop, fried crisps, sesame crunch, and maybe even buttermilk only a day old. Lata was never invited to any weddings. She was shabby, she had no father, her mother was dead, and her grandmother worked as a domestic servant. She couldn't provide a feast for the neighborhood children because she lived on scraps off the tables of the rich.

When one is not invited to the most important function in one's street, just two doors away, there's no point standing around at the tap discussing it. So Lata hurried away as soon as her pot was full. She was never invited to any doll-marriage feast; but neither was she the only one. Six-year-old Joseph Pinto never attended because he couldn't walk after polio had left his legs useless. He sat on his bed in his house most of the time except when Lata came, as she did today, and carried him out on her back, creeping through a hole in the railway fence to the green grass on the other side. Here she gently set him down while Rakhi the goat went off to graze.

Jumping off the embankment, Rakhi trotted along the tracks, her hoofs tapping on the crossties as she went. "Rakhi ! Come back!" Lata yelled. "And isn't the grass good enough right here?" It never was, for a goat always sees finer patches farther ahead, and off she goes. Rakhi was a city goat and knew how to look after herself.

The children's favorite place for playing was a hollow in the embankment where seasons ago mud had been dug out by men working on the line. The hollow was overgrown with short grass now, and Lata settled Joseph into it, drawing his legs out before him so that he could balance where he sat.