Read Sleeping On Jupiter for Free Online

hunting for my fallen tooth in the van. I crouched there not daring to come back up without the crayon.
    I don’t know when it was that a girl came wriggling under the bench and crouched next to me. She had stalk-thin limbs. Her head looked too big for her. She crouched on the ground underneath our desks and she smiled at me. She had crooked buck teeth when she smiled. Where I had a shaggy mop, she had straight thin hair to her shoulders. Her eyes were watery, so big that they seemed to bulge. Later I found out that her name was Piku.
    With Piku down below, everything became less strange. The furniture legs became furniture legs again. She crawled between the chairs – I was little myself, but she was even littler. It took her only moments and then she held the crayon up to me. That was how I became friends with Piku.
    I don’t remember many other things about my first year at the school, but I remember how one day we were told that our teacher had been taken ill. We made up stories about her. One of the girls said she had run away to get married and another said she had died and become a ghost who lived on top of the neem tree. But our teacher did come back: maybe it was days later, maybe weeks. A hush fell over the room as she entered. Her head and one of her eyes was wrapped in a bandage. Her ribboned plaits were missing. Her lips were like two swollen rubber chillies. We did not know we were staring, but after a while we remembered and stood up, chorusing Good Morning, Didi as we did every day.
    She sat in her chair and her head dropped to the desk. The bandage on her head had a round patch of red on it right at the top. Under the bandage her head looked as smooth as a ball.
    She pulled her head up after a while and said, “I had an accident.” Then she took a sip of water from the glass on the table and replaced the cover on the glass. She held up the arithmetic textbook and said, “Page five.”
    There was shuffling and fluttering as all of us opened our books. From one of the other classrooms we heard a teacher shout, “Siddown!”
    “Repeat after me,” Didi said, “two wonza two, twotwoza four, twothreeza six, twofourza eight.”
    We repeated the tables. All of us were gaping at her.
    Two wonza two, twotwoza four.
    She had shut the unbandaged eye and clasped her arms and was swaying to the rhythm of our singsong version of her tables.
    Twofivezaten, twosixza twell.
    I kept losing track of the numbers. I repeated them without understanding what I was saying.
    “Twoeightza sixteen,” Didi said. “I had sixteen stitches in my head.”
    All of us repeated, “Twoeightza sixteen, I had sixteen stitches in my head.”
    At that she opened her eye. She stopped swaying. I saw that the eye had a cut at the edge. Blood was caked over the cut like a bit of burnt plastic. She said slowly, “My hair had to be shaved off for the stitches. My plaits had to be cut off.”
    We did not repeat that. Nobody said anything. The fan made a whirring and squeaking and clacking noise. Didi looked at us, expressionless. “That’s what’s waiting for you all,” she said. “All.” She had a glazed, dazed look. She put a hand to her head and touched the places where her plaits used to be. Without warning she got up. She did not pick up her books and the ruler with which she used to rap our knuckles. She left the room without saying another word.
    For some time we waited for her to come back. Then we began murmuring to each other. After some time two of the girls got into a fight, started tugging each other’s hair and scratching and biting. The rest of us watched the fun. The teacher from the next class stormed in and yelled, “What is this madhouse? Where is your Didi?”
    “How long will you stare at your cereal and keep muttering to yourself, Nomi?” my foster mother’s voice broke in. “Look what a mess you’ve made with all that torn up tissue.” She cleared my bowl and brushed away the shredded paper, shaking her