Fifteen Seconds by the Ticket Window

The fair came in the first week of the holidays and took over the whole ground behind the temple.

It had a wheel with lights on it that you could see from the bus stop. It had a man selling balloons in a bunch so big he had to hold on with two hands. It had a stall where you knocked tins down with a ball. Everybody knew the tins were heavier than they looked, and everybody paid anyway.

Aarohi was nine. Nikku was five, and Nikku belonged to her aunt, and for this evening Nikku belonged to Aarohi.

“Nikku, hold her hand,” said her aunt, and gave them forty rupees and went off to find the others.

Nikku held her hand. He held it the way small children hold hands, which is with three fingers, and not really holding at all.

They looked at the wheel. They looked at the tins. They stood for a long time watching a machine make a pink cloud of candy floss out of nothing at all. Nikku found it so good that he stopped blinking.

Then the loudspeaker started, right over their heads, enormously loud.

Aarohi jumped. Everybody near them jumped. A whole crowd came the other way at once, off the wheel, all together.

And when she looked down, her hand was empty.

She turned round. Legs. Bags. Shoes. A man carrying a chair on his head. She turned round again the other way, and there was the ticket window, and the queue, and nobody who was five.

Her chest went tight and fast.

Everything in her wanted to run. It wanted to run to the candy floss machine. Then to the wheel. Then to the gate. Then back to the candy floss machine again.

She stood still.

She had been standing right here, by the ticket window with the metal bars, when the loudspeaker went. Right here.

She put her back against the wall of the ticket window and she made her feet stop.

It was the hardest thing she had ever done at a fair.

To keep her feet still, she counted scooters. There was a row of them parked along the fence, packed in at all angles. Some had helmets on the mirrors and some had a plastic bag on the seat.

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

A dog went past under the stalls, fast, with its tail down.

The lights went round. The loudspeaker said something about a ride and something else about a lost pair of glasses. She did not move.

Nineteen. Twenty.

Twenty-six scooters, and there were more behind the tea stall that she could not see properly, so she counted them as two.

She was on the second count, at nine, when something hit her legs from the front and stayed there.

Nikku had her knees in both arms and his face pushed into her. He was extremely cross about it, and he was crying in the way you cry after, not during.

“You went,” he said, into her leg.

“I didn’t,” said Aarohi. “You went. I stayed.”

They sat down on the step by the ticket window. Her legs had gone a bit funny, so sitting was better. She bought one bottle of water with some of the forty rupees. It was not cold. They passed it back and forth, and it was the best water she had ever had.

Nikku’s crying stopped somewhere around the fourth swig.

“How many scooters?” he said.

So they counted them again, out loud, from the step, and got two different answers, and had to do it a third time.