"One Amazing Thing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Divakaruni Chitra Banerjee)

8

In the boy’s earliest memories, his mother is always asleep, like Sleeping Beauty in the picture book she bought for him at a garage sale. And even though the boy loves his mother-loves her so much that sometimes he feels breathless, as when he’s trying to blow up a stiff, new balloon-already he realizes she isn’t that kind of pretty. She sleeps stretched out on the nubbly salt-and-pepper couch with a phone book wedged under the corner where one of its legs used to be. Her own legs are propped up on the frayed armrest because they tend to swell by the end of her shift, and when the boy is sure she’s fast asleep he sometimes presses down on her shinbone with a finger and watches the dip that forms. Her mouth is slightly open, its corners pulled down as though she’s just been handed a surprise of the less-than-pleasant variety. She snores softly. The sound comforts the boy, partly because it’s soothing and familiar, and partly because it’s so much better than those moments when she stops breathing and he’s afraid she’s died and left him alone.

Sometimes there’s a bottle of Hires Root Beer on the floor beside her outflung arm. Sometimes (but rarely, because this is before the days of serious drinking that are waiting around the corner) there’s a bottle of real beer, which smells and tastes so awful that he wonders why anyone would want it. But mostly there’s nothing, because by the time his mother gets home from Mickey’s Diner and Take Out she’s too tired even to make it to the fridge. She shucks off the uniform right there, by the couch-she has only two uniforms, and the washateria is too far away and too expensive for more than one trip per week. Besides, she doesn’t like doing laundry and waits until the last possible moment, a fact that will earn him certain unpleasant nicknames when he begins kindergarten next year. It’s his job to pick up the brown pants and tunic and hang them over the back of the couch. If the night is warm, she sleeps in her underwear. If not, he fetches her nightie for her. She wrestles with the worn cotton shift, which is getting tight under the arms. (His mother is involved in a long-drawn-out, losing battle with her weight.) Once it’s on, she thanks him with a hug for being her sweet boy. At those moments, her voice never fails to send a thrill through him. It’s the one part of his mother that’s more beautiful than Sleeping Beauty. Sometimes on the weekends, when she’s in a good mood, she sings to him about a lady with green sleeves, a song that she says is hundreds of years old. And, best of all, she reads to him.

The boy knows how to dress and undress himself, how to brush his teeth (which he does in the bathtub because he can’t reach the sink yet). He gets his own dinner, mostly cereal, which he has learned to eat dry on the days when they’re out of milk. If he feels ambitious, he’ll fix himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but he’s not too good at spreading the peanut butter and usually ends up tearing the bread. His mother eats at Mickey’s-one of the perks of working there-and sometimes she’s able to sneak home a hamburger or French fries or a bit of leftover pasta for him in the oversize tote she carries for that purpose.

The boy eats and watches his sleeping mother-the way her chest rises and falls with each breath, the line of hair that runs from her bra line, down her stomach, to the wavy elastic of her faded pink panties. Her body twitches from time to time like that of the animals he watches on the wildlife shows on TV. Those are his favorite shows, even more than Howdy Doody, and sometimes he and his friend Jimmy get into a fight about this. Should anyone ask him what he wants most in life, the boy wouldn’t hesitate. A dog, he would say-though this is not completely true. He would prefer a tiger. But already he has learned that some desires must be held unspoken in the dark core of one’s being.

When he is sure his mother has sunk into sleep, the boy will turn off the TV. Mostly she watches I Love Lucy, with its baffling jokes. (As he grows older, he will recognize this about himself: most things that people find funny fail to amuse him.) He’ll go to the old tape player with reels as big as his head and carefully rewind the tape that’s on it. He’ll curl up on the floor with his blanket and listen to Lassie Come Home, which his mother recorded for him one week when she hurt her foot and couldn’t go to work. There’s a bed in the other room, but he’d rather lie here so that he can keep an eye on that undependable breath of hers while he follows Lassie over a thousand dangerous miles, determined to find her little boy. In the middle, he’ll fall asleep, secure in the knowledge that before he wakes she would have concluded her quest.

Is the boy unhappy? No. When you’ve known only one thing all your life, you accept it as natural. It isn’t until Mary Lou brings them the stolen math workbook that he will figure out that happiness is a whole different feeling.

THE BOY’S MORNING MEMORIES ARE OF MARY LOU BANGING ON the door of the apartment, shouting his mother’s name- Hey Betsy, are you dead or what-and his mother stumbling bleary-eyed to the door, still in her underwear and cursing, but under her breath because she doesn’t want her son to pick up any bad words. Jimmy runs in through the crack of the open door, shouting, “LL, look what I got.”

In the background he can hear Mary Lou saying, “Shoot, girl, you look like death warmed over. You better go see the doctor.”

The boy’s chest hurts until his mother says: “Now don’t start, Mary Lou. Nothing wrong with me except too many hours at a crappy job.”

Jimmy pulls at his arm. “Look! look! You ain’t looking.”

Jimmy is here because the boy’s mother and Mary Lou, who lives a few apartments over and works in the cafeteria of their neighborhood elementary school, babysit for each other. The boy likes Jimmy. He’s fun to play with, even though he’s always wanting the boy to look at things the boy doesn’t find particularly interesting. Besides, Mary Lou, at whose apartment he eats dinner when his mother works overtime, is a great cook, and her lasagna (though the boy would never admit this, not even if someone tortured him using a cattle prod, like he once saw on Gunsmoke) is way better than anything the boy’s mother cooks. The boy’s mother, who is responsible for lunch, usually serves them canned soup and hot dogs wrapped in slices of white bread. Right after payday, they get real hot-dog buns, along with apples.

When the weather is good, the boy’s mother sends them out to play, warning them to stay where she can see them, to not venture off the sidewalk. Playing cops and robbers, the boy watches her watching them as she talks on the phone, smoking, although she’s told Mary Lou she really wants to quit. “Bang! Bang!” shouts Jimmy. “You’re dead.”

“Am not!”

“Are, too! I shot you in the head. Your brains are splattered all over the ground.”

On days when it’s too cold, they look at the books Mary Lou brings them from the school, claiming they’ve been discarded. “Yeah, right!” her mother says, though not in Mary Lou’s hearing. But she, too, likes the books. Sometimes between phone calls, she sits beside the boys on the couch and exclaims over things she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a lot of things. One day they go through a workbook titled Fun with Math, in which a chipmunk uses nuts to teach baby squirrels about addition and subtraction. The boy’s mother loses interest after two pages, Jimmy after five, but the boy is riveted. Inside his head, the numbers fall into place with little clicks. His body buzzes as though it is filled with electricity. The chipmunk fades away. He does not need it to understand what’s going on. He asks to keep the workbook, and that night, instead of listening to Lassie, he goes over multiplication and division. Though the terms are unfamiliar, within a few minutes he finds that he can work out the problems in his head long before he turns to the page where the chipmunk has written the answers on a blackboard hanging from a tree.

ON WEEKENDS THEY SLEEP LATE AND WHEN THEY WAKE, THE boy lying next to his mother in the bed in the back room, the two of them snuggled in a quilt with blue spouting whales on it, she reads to him. If they’ve had time to go to the library, she reads him new books. If not, as is more often the case, she reads to him from their dog-eared King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, a book that with its small print and no illustrations isn’t really for children. But he loves its complicated cat’s cradle of stories, loves how the familiar names roll off her tongue, Guinevere, Parsifal, Gawain, the sword Excalibur, the Questing Beast, the Chapel Dangerous, and, most of all, his own name. When she speaks it, she gives him a kiss.

Later they go to the grocery in Mary Lou’s car, which rattles excitedly when it hits a pothole and sometimes dies at a stoplight. On the way back they stop at the bakery outlet and the boy’s mother buys them powdered doughnuts. Jimmy eats his right away, but the boy takes tiny bites so the doughnut will last until they reach home. In the front seat, his mother and Mary Lou discuss the no-good men they’ve been dating, bursting into such loud laughter that the boy smiles in the back even though he doesn’t understand most of the things they say. He knows about dates, though. That’s when his mother wears a flared skirt and a sleeveless top (his favorite one is black, with lace over the chest). She sprays herself with perfume and swipes bright lipstick across her mouth and squeezes her feet into shoes with tall, dangerous heels, though later she’ll complain that they hurt. But recently she hasn’t been wearing heels because her new boyfriend, Marvin, is shorter than her and sensitive about the issue.

After they laugh for a while, the women get quiet. They turn up the music and talk in whispers, but the boy knows they’re lamenting the fact that they aren’t getting any younger, and that it’s hard to find a man out there who wants a serious relationship with a woman who’s carrying baggage. The boy wants to ask what kind of baggage, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid he knows already.

The boy doesn’t mind so much when he’s dropped off before a date at Mary Lou’s. But when Mary Lou has a date, too, he and Jimmy are deposited at Mrs. Grogan’s apartment, and that’s not so good because Mrs. Grogan doesn’t have a TV, only a radio that she keeps covered with a lace doily. Mrs. Grogan doesn’t have teeth, either. The boys can’t understand much of what she says, and that makes her angry. Besides, her apartment smells like pee, but when he complains of this to his mother, she says, “We’ll all get old like her-if we’re unlucky enough to live that long!”

(The boy’s own mother will not be unlucky, not in that way. When the boy is in fourth grade, she will collapse at work one day, dying of an aneurysm before the ambulance can get her to a hospital. Later the boy will look up the word in the dictionary, but it will still baffle him.)

When the boy is five and a half, Mary Lou and Jimmy abandon them for Memphis, which is clear across the country. They’re going to live with Mary Lou’s mother, although she constantly bitches at Mary Lou, because Mary Lou can’t make it on her own anymore, and she’s just too tired trying. She cries as she tells the boy’s mother this, wiping at her eyes, smearing mascara over apologetic cheekbones. The boy’s mother doesn’t say anything, but he sees something flicker in her eyes. He thinks it’s anger with Mary Lou for quitting on them. But later he wonders if it’s fear, and that makes him afraid, too. Then Mary Lou and Jimmy are gone, and his memories get a lot worse.

IN THIS AFTERNOON MEMORY, THE BOY IS ABOUT EIGHT, WITH long, untidy hair and clothes that aren’t quite clean. He’s playing by himself in the empty field behind the apartment building that doubles as a junkyard. The junkyard is off-limits-his mother thinks it’s dangerous-but she’s at work and isn’t going to know. Marvin, who lives with them now, is aware of the boy’s disobedience, but Marvin isn’t going to tell his mother. Because then she would insist that the boy stay inside after school, and Marvin wouldn’t like that. In the afternoon, when the boy’s mother is at work, Marvin’s friends come over to the apartment. The boy isn’t sure what they do there, though from the sweetish smoke-smell that lingers after they have left, he can guess at some of it. In any case, he is playing alone in a field overgrown with brambles because there aren’t any kids his age who live around here. If there were, they probably wouldn’t be friends with him, like the children at school who sometimes make fun of his name or shove him around during recess when the teacher on duty isn’t watching but mostly just ignore him.

The boy pretends he’s Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island except for the cannibals who are after him. From behind an abandoned freezer, he trains his binoculars on them, watching them laugh with their pointy cannibal teeth. But they won’t get him; he knows his way around the entire island, the caves and mountain passes where people must travel single file. He has his M1 semiautomatic and one hundred clips of ammo, and he knows how to move quiet as death. He raises his rifle and takes a step forward, then jumps back with a yelp because something furry has just brushed against his shins. It is a kitten.

The kitten is small and scrawny and meows loudly, opening its mouth wide and displaying tiny cannibal-sharp teeth and a very pink tongue. It skitters away when the boy reaches for it, but then lets itself be picked up. Its claws are sharp, too, but the boy doesn’t mind. He thinks it looks like a miniature tiger, and he holds it and strokes its back while the kitten squirms in an attempt to get away. The boy remembers something he read in a book. He sets it down, breaks off a bramble branch, and bobs it up and down. The kitten swipes at it, entranced. They play like this for a while, but then the kitten starts mewing again-with hunger, the boy is sure. So he tucks it inside his shirt-he is afraid he’ll lose it if he leaves it out here-and goes to the apartment. Inside, Marvin’s friends, who scare him, observe him through a haze of smoke. One of them beckons him, asking if he wants a beer. The boy’s face goes hot. Marvin’s friends laugh. He almost backs out. Then he feels the kitten trying to climb up the inside of his shirt. Its tail tickles his chest. He tightens his shoulders and strides past their stares to the fridge-it is his fridge, he reminds himself. His apartment. He pours milk into a bowl. His hand shakes and milk spills on the sticky counter, but only a little. He carries the bowl out to the field.

The kitten laps up the milk and licks the boy’s fingers. Its tongue is sandpaper-rough against his knuckles, and the boy shivers with pleasure. They play some more with the branch, the boy pulling it backward and the kitten pouncing on it so fiercely that right then and there he names it Shere Khan, after the character in The Jungle Book. They play this game for hours, even after the sun sets and the boy shivers in his too-small jacket. Finally he hears the sound he’s been waiting for, the roar of trucks. Marvin’s friends are leaving, and when the boy peers around the edge of the apartment building, he sees to his delight that Marvin is going with them.

It’s simple enough, after that, to carry into the apartment the discarded kitchen drawer that he has already picked out, to hide it behind the couch where he sleeps nowadays, beside the cardboard boxes that hold his clothes and books. He lines the drawer with an old shirt and places the kitten in it, admonishing it to stay put while he does his homework. The kitten promptly climbs out, scampers to his chair, and clambers up his jeans leg onto his lap. That’s how he does his homework, with the kitten curled into a ball of warmth against his stomach and him not daring to move because he doesn’t want to disturb its sleep.

He has never loved anyone in the world as much as he loves this kitten. He will never love anyone this way again, with nothing held back.

When he hears the key rattle in the door, he squeezes his eyes shut and prays it’s his mother, and, miracle of miracles, it is. He stuffs the kitten into his shirt and fetches her a soda pop, and when she puts out a tired hand to rumple his hair, he tells her about it in a rush, because he knows he has only a little time before Marvin returns.

“Can I keep it, please, please? I’ll take care of it. It won’t cost you anything.”

Holding the kitten carefully in both hands, he offers it to her. She puts out a finger to scratch behind its ear. It closes its eyes and purrs, and butts her finger with its head when she stops. She laughs and his heart leaps. But then her face fades and she shakes her head. “We don’t have enough room,” she says. “And Marvin doesn’t like pets.”

All his pent up resentment comes out in a rush. “Why do we have to do what he says? This isn’t his place. Why does he even have to live with us?”

She’s angry, he can tell that by the way her nostrils flare and little blotches of red appear on her cheeks. But then her shoulders sag. “He pays part of the rent,” she says. “He watches you in the afternoon in case there’s a problem or something.” He’s about to protest hotly, but she goes on. “This way I don’t have to get a babysitter. Plus-” She shakes her head. “Oh, you won’t understand.”

He wants to tell her she’s the one who doesn’t understand that things were so much better when there were only the two of them, snuggled in their whale quilt. Her raspy, lovely morning voice reading to him on Saturdays is only a memory now. Instead, at night, wriggling around on the lumpy couch, he hears noises from the other room that make it hard for him to look her in the eye the next morning.

The door swings open, banging against a chair, and the possibility of telling her anything ends. Marvin throws a fit when he sees the kitten, going on and on about how he’s allergic to cats, and is the boy trying to kill him. Scared by the noise, the kitten pees on the boy’s hand. He doesn’t care, but some of the pee drips onto his mom’s uniform and now she’s shouting, too. He’s forced to take the kitten out on the porch, where he puts it into the drawer, tells it to stay, and covers the drawer as best he can with a cardboard box. The box is too small and he’s afraid the kitten (already scrabbling madly inside) will escape. He hunches beside the box, trying not to cry, shivering, hating Marvin, wishing he would die. Alongside Marvin, he hates his mother-this is a first-and wants her to die, too. Then he can go and live with a different family, one that will let him keep his kitten. He hates them even more when she yells at him to get inside before he catches a cold and when Marvin stomps out and yanks him into the apartment, telling him to mind his ma. His hatred swells through the broken dreams of a night he will never forget.

In the morning, he runs out to discover the kitten gone. In school he is unable to pay attention-even to math. He rushes from the school bus to the junkyard, searches frantically through piles of garbage, and finally discovers the kitten shivering under a bush. Even when he hugs it hard against his thumping chest, hatred simmers inside him.

HE WILL REMEMBER THIS HATRED THE DAY HIS MOTHER DIES. Guilt will press down like a ball of iron on his chest no matter how much he rationalizes it, telling himself that he wasn’t responsible, because look at Marvin, wasn’t he still walking around hale and hearty in spite of all the boy’s wishing?

He will be sent to live with foster parents. They’ll turn out to be an older, childless couple, a bit strict but clean and organized. They will not get him a pet-and that’s good, because surely then the iron ball would crack his chest. They will make sure he gets to school on time and does his homework and has nutritious meals. They will take him to art museums and classical music concerts and will not upbraid his indifference to such things. They will recognize his talent and enter him in math contests-regional, then state, then national-and winning these contests will begin to change the way he feels about himself.

He knows his mother would have done none of this. Why then, lying in a bedroom all his own, the wallpaper of flying dragons that he picked himself lit ghostly blue by the night-light-a room he couldn’t have imagined when he lived in the old apartment-should he give in to tears?

FOR A WHILE AFTER THAT TRAUMATIC NIGHT, THINGS GO WELL. The boy cleans out the abandoned freezer in the junkyard and lines it with his old clothes. He keeps inside it a bowl of water and a dish of cat food bought with money he has stolen from his mother’s purse and Marvin’s wallet, a couple of cautious dollars at a time. After school each day, he takes Shere to the other end of the junkyard and plays with him, keeping a wary eye out for his mother and Marvin, because he doesn’t want them to know what he’s doing. When it’s time for him to go in, he reluctantly puts Shere in the freezer, bids him good night, and wedges a stick under the lid-enough to allow the kitten to breathe without letting it escape. This way, the raccoons and wild dogs that roam the junkyard at night can’t get to it. The kitten learns to recognize the boy. It launches itself at his chest as soon as he opens the freezer lid, purring so loudly that its whole body vibrates. The boy steals more money-what else can he do when his mother will not give him an allowance?-to buy Shere a catnip ball and can’t stop grinning as he watches the kitten go crazy over it. Then one day he returns from school to find the stick with which he had wedged the lid open lying on the ground. The freezer lid is shut, and when he opens it, he discovers that the kitten has suffocated.

He does not tell his mother. From this time on, he speaks to her as little as possible. She tries at first to engage him in conversation; then she gets angry. She doesn’t have time for this nonsense, this sulking without a reason when she’s knocking herself out to provide for him. He finds a pie server in a bottom drawer, digs a hole in the junkyard, and buries the stiff kitten-body though he can hardly bear to touch it. He can’t eat anything the rest of the day or the next, but no one notices because he fixes his own meals. At night he lies in bed, going over the moment when he had last wedged the stick in the freezer door. How could it have fallen out? Had he been in a hurry? Had he been careless? Had someone followed him and pulled the stick out on purpose? Who would do something like that? There are no answers, and perhaps that’s why the questions keep replaying in his head. Sometimes when people are talking to him, the questions come back, very loud, and he is unable to hear anything else. He gets in trouble at school for this; a couple of his teachers wonder if he’s mentally handicapped. But they’re overworked; since he doesn’t cause trouble like the others, they let him be. At home he gets clouted on the head when he blanks out while Marvin is talking to him. Once his mother sees this and it leads to a huge fight between her and Marvin. Earlier, such a development would have pleased the boy. Now he hardly notices.

The only time he can forget the feel of the kitten’s fur under his palm, or the way it butted its head against his shins, is when he’s doing math. So he does more and more of it, asking his teacher for extra worksheets that he brings home, fractions and decimals, and word problems about Aunt Anna who’s driving from Boston to Philadelphia at a certain speed, or a bathtub where the stopper doesn’t quite fit, and how long would it take to fill. The words transform themselves into numbers that line up like acrobats, numbers that can be trusted to perform the way they’re supposed to. He begins to understand their nature. They are ancient and immortal, not frail and easily broken. As long as he offers them his full attention, they will never abandon him. They sing their answers to him, and the inside of his head fills with light as he writes them down.

THERE HAD BEEN A NAKEDNESS ABOUT MR. PRITCHETT’S STORY, the feeling of a wound not yet healed. Perhaps that was why no one said anything, Uma thought. Or were they hoarding energy and oxygen for their own tales?

The noise of water had grown louder, more uneven, a chug-chug followed by a silence, then a gurgling, swallowing noise. Uma tried to visualize what might be happening. Cameron told them to roll up their pants legs or hitch up their skirts and remove their shoes and socks before getting off their chairs.

“Once you’ve taken off your socks, you need to put your shoes back on so you don’t cut your feet on broken glass. Keep your socks in your pocket, along with these.” He handed out pieces of blue cloth, the last bits of Malathi’s sari. “We have to move to the employees area and sit on the tables there. The ceiling at this end of the room is sagging more than before.” They stared up at the hole that yawned above. In the near blackness, Uma couldn’t tell how much worse it really was. “Use the cloth to wipe your feet before wearing your socks again,” Cameron said. “Stay as dry as you can so you don’t get chilled.”

Everyone did as Cameron instructed. Maybe they were grateful for these small, concrete acts that they could successfully perform. When Uma pulled off her socks with an awkward hand, she almost dropped one. Lunging to grab it, she hit her broken wrist against the chair. Pain shot through her and she cursed out loud. Standing, she saw that the water reached above her ankles, and the inevitability of that rising, more than the pain and the cold, made her want to cry. The group shuffled to their new location and pushed the tables around until they formed a triangle with gaps. Lily helped Jiang, who was holding her arm out stiffly, onto a table, and beckoned to Tariq to join them. Uma climbed onto the second table. Cameron wiped her feet for her and pulled her socks back on. Uma had expected Mrs. Pritchett to join them, but the older woman went to the third table, where her husband was sitting. Uma wondered if his story made her do this. Mrs. Pritchett perched on the edge, leaving the center spot for Mangalam.

Uma moved closer to Cameron to make room for Malathi, who was climbing onto their table. Three to a tabletop was a snug fit. But it would keep them warmer. Cameron was asking if anyone suffered from diabetes. No one confessed to it because Mangalam was holding a big plastic bag filled with sugar packets. When Cameron nodded, Mangalam passed the bag around. Uma took three packets. Greedily, she tore open the corner of one with her teeth and poured some onto her tongue. She was looking forward to the taste, but it was overly sweet and made her want to throw up. The unfairness of this made her want to cry.

Everything was making her want to cry. No matter what her own problems were, Mr. Pritchett’s mother should have taken better care of her son. And why did the boy love her so, in spite of everything? Uma thought of her own mother, who had watched out for her with a hawk-eyed vigilance that she had ungraciously tolerated through childhood and rejected as a teenager. Did one always take for granted what came easily and long for what was impossible?

Cameron disappeared into the storage area, returning with a small stack of disposable tablecloths. He divided them among the three groups, to use as communal blankets. They weren’t very warm, not even with two or three of them layered atop each other. But there was something comforting, Uma thought, something childlike and innocent, about sharing them.

HALFWAY THROUGH MR. PRITCHETT’S STORY, MRS. PRITCHETT had been broadsided by a memory. Years back, when she first realized they weren’t going to have children, she had asked her husband for a dog. He had dragged his feet, pointing out that it would mess up their beautiful new carpet. He didn’t have time to help her take care of it. And what would they do with it when they traveled? But she had begged and begged because she was lonely. Finally he had given in to her entreaties and taken her to the animal shelter.

A few minutes into their visit, before Mrs. Pritchett had taken a single dog out of its cage, Mr. Pritchett had complained of shortness of breath. He had rushed out of the building, and when she followed, concerned, she found him inside their Mercedes, bent over the steering wheel. His hands, when she had grabbed them, had been clammy.

She had guessed the problem to be an allergy, a severe one. To get to the dogs, they’d walked through a room filled with cat cages. Maybe that had set it off. Very convenient! a part of her had thought angrily. Then, ashamed of her selfishness, she had busied herself with rolling down the windows and getting him water. She had put away this disappointment like many others and had busied herself with the garden, the golf lessons he wanted her to take so they could join the local club, and the dinner parties he loved for her to throw. Now she was filled with sorrow and anger: sorrow for the boy he had been and anger because he had not ever trusted her with the truth.

ENTANGLED IN THEIR THOUGHTS, LOST IN THE HYPNOTIC GURGLE of water, they were startled when Lily said, “I’m glad you had your math, Mr. Pritchett. It made you special when everyone thought you weren’t good enough.” She glanced at Cameron. “Can I tell my story?”

“Hold on a little longer,” he said. He peered at the faces around him, checking for responses.

Uma wanted to say something about the treacherous nature of memory, how one painful event can overpower the many good experiences that came before. But a dangerous lethargy arising from cold and hunger prevented her from speaking. It was imperative that someone start telling a story before the feeling overpowered them all.

With relief she heard Malathi’s voice. “I will give you my story. But my English is not so good, and I want you to understand everything properly. So Mr. Mangalam must translate it from Tamil.”

Mangalam jerked up his head, frowning with wary surprise. He looked like he was about to refuse, but Malathi spoke as though he had assented already. “Better not change even one word. I know enough to catch you if you do.”