The Best Day of My Life by Deborah Ellis Read Free Book Online

eyes squished shut, being hit across the back by the guard’s long stick.
    When he had cleared them all out, he looked around. His chest was heaving. His face was pinched with the pain in his head.
    â€˜Are you sure you didn’t miss anyone?’ I called out. And then I laughed because, as I said, I liked to start each day with a bit of fun.
    Men don’t like it when little girls laugh at them. He came at me, waving his stick and yelling in some dialect I didn’t know. But that didn’t matter. I knew what he was saying.
    He was saying, ‘Why are you giving me a hard time on this morning that is already so hard? A filthy street girl like you, daring to make fun of a hard-working man like me? Is this what I left my village for? The more you laugh, the more I will beat you. Then we’ll see who’s laughing.’
    He was so mad that he couldn’t concentrate on beating me properly, and his stick flopped about, barely touching me. When it did reach me, it hit my foot, and I didn’t feel it anyway! That just made me laugh harder.
    Then I saw in his face that his frustration was getting bigger than my enjoyment, and that’s always my signal to find something else to do. A bit of fun could turn into a bit of meanness if you weren’t careful, and that wasn’t ever how I wanted to start my day.
    I ripped my foot out of the barbed wire and hopped down from the wall.
    The secret to jumping down from a high wall to the hard pavement was not to land on your feet. You could break an ankle that way. I had seen it happen. I had also seen people get hit by cars or scooters. Sometimes the driver would get out and apologise and take the person into his car. Sometimes the driver kept on going. If the person they hit couldn’t afford a rickshaw to ride to the hospital, their ankle or whatever stayed broken. They walked lopsided from then on, dragging their useless foot behind them like a clot of buffalo dung stuck to their sandal.
    So I always tried to roll my body to the side when I fell. The pavement was just as hard when you landed, but there was more of you to soak up the hurt. That spread it around. Then you just got to your feet, brushed yourself off and went about your business.
    I jumped from the wall, rolling as I went, and I kept rolling when I hit the sidewalk.
    I almost rolled into a fortune teller. His parrot leaped and squawked and tried to fly away. Its feathers were clipped, so it couldn’t really go anywhere. Parrots were expensive, even for fortune tellers, who could make a lot of money. I had watched them. I had seen the rupees change hands. All the fortune teller had to do was sit and talk and people gave him money.
    I decided that would be a good job for me one day, since I could both sit and talk.
    I sat on my haunches and spoke softly to the bird until it was resting on its perch again. It looked like it couldn’t wait for the next customer to come by.
    â€˜You should be more careful,’ the fortune teller told me.
    â€˜You should have known I would jump from the wall and set yourself up farther away.’
    â€˜How could I know that?’
    â€˜You would know if you were a good fortune teller.’
    â€˜That’s not the way it works,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you how it works. I need to know your date of birth, your astrological sign, the alignment of your planet among the heavens.’
    â€˜Oh,’ I said. ‘I thought the bird just picked a card.’
    Which set the fortune teller off on a long and cheerful explanation of how the bird worked with intuition and how he worked with science and how the two worked together to tell the most accurate fortunes in all of Kolkata. I didn’t listen to most of it, but I enjoyed hearing him talk.
    So, because he was enjoying himself, and because my hunger was still sleeping, I sat while he explained. Every now and then, when he seemed to be winding down, I tossed in a comment that