Where Earth Meets Water. Pia Padukone
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get breakfast started. You’ll have to leave for the airport shortly after your baths,” Ammama says, getting up.
“How much do you think this is worth?” Gita asks when Karom is alone with her in the living room.
“I have no idea. But aside from the price of the stones and the gold itself, I’m sure the antique design and the craftsmanship are worth a lot.”
“I was thinking about selling it,” Gita whispers, her eyes shining in the morning light. “It’s gotta be worth hundreds, maybe even a thousand. And then we can go to Argentina over Christmas.”
“Are you insane?” Karom nearly shouts. His anger seems to reflect off the walls of the small apartment. He feels his temple pulsing, though in the rest of his body, it feels as if his blood has actually run cold and stopped midcourse in his veins. “Gita, that’s your grandmother’s wedding necklace. She would never have gifted it to you if she knew you were going to sell it. It has to remain in the family.”
“Well, too bad you’re not in mine. ’Cause then you could save it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know what it means.” Gita sticks her chin out in a manner that would normally have made Karom tackle her onto the bed and initiate hours of intimacy, had they been in his bedroom back in New York, but now it just provokes him. “Besides, Karom, we can’t all hold on to the past like a narcotic. There are things that link us to our dark memories and don’t let us move on. This necklace is a prime example. It’s tainted.”
“Tainted,” Karom repeats.
Gita grits her teeth as she leans in, whispering toward him. “Yes, tainted. It’s my grandmother’s wedding jewelry. The groom fled this ship thirty years ago and treated her like dirt while he was here. Yes, let’s hold on to this blissful symbol of their awful marriage forever.”
Ammama sticks her head in the doorway. “Would you like Indian breakfast today or something light, like toast? Either is perfectly convenient.”
“Toast,” Karom says, just as Gita says, “Dosas.”
“One of each,” Ammama says, turning back toward the kitchen.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Gita says. “I have to finish packing.” She takes the necklace off and returns to the room she has been sharing with her grandmother. Karom has already finished packing. He is a meticulous planner and has learned to pack from a flight-attendant friend who showed him how to roll T-shirts and tuck underwear into his shoes. His toiletries are stowed in the plastic compartment at the top of his bag, the tube of toothpaste curled up evenly like a scorpion’s tail, ensuring that every inch of space is being utilized. His socks are balled into spheres, and his belts snaked around the perimeter, encasing all his clothes in a tight bundle. The hard shell of his maroon suitcase is streaked with dust, the way it always happens only in India. Dust gets in everywhere, no matter that Karom unzips his bag for only a few hurried minutes each day: in the morning before his bath and in the evening before bed. Dust is caked between the grooved wheels, and he wipes the plastic with a wet towel, where it spreads and nestles into the suitcase’s zippered teeth. He can hear Gita’s version of packing in the next room: unfolded clothes tossed into her gaping Tumi—unwashed ones stuffed into a plastic Fabindia bag—and her huffs and squats as she clambers on top to zip it. Karom sits down on what has been his bed for the past four nights. He turns his wrist upside down and examines the fine hairs that grow where the white of the underside of his arm meets the tan line that has grown deeper during their vacation. His watch ticks reassuringly away. If they leave within the hour, they will make their flight with no problems.
Karom takes the watch off now, weighing it in the center of his palm. The skin underneath his watch is white and moist and gives off a peppery odor. The spicy scents of coconut and lentils waft down the corridor. He can hear Gita as she pads into the kitchen and muffled conversation as she sets the table. The watchstrap is fraying, but in a charming antique way. He rotates the dial, watching the hands spin freely. He picks up the flat pillow and the three sheets that are folded on his pallet bed, and for an instant, he considers leaving the watch on top of the pile. Instead he slaps it back onto his wrist and pulls it tight through the loopholes before pulling his sleeve to cover the face. Karom fluffs the pillow and places it on top of the pile before picking up his suitcase and rolling it into the hallway.
Kamini
Kamini has never considered herself religious. Her nieces and lady cousins all behave as though their community spiritual leader were a cult master and they follow him about the country glassy-eyed and full of praise. She has to give the man credit, though; he is learned not only in the heavenly scriptures but is well-read, inhaling everything from Popular Mechanics to New York Times bestsellers. He recently led a lecture on “How the Ethics of The Da Vinci Code Apply to Our Everyday Lives as Hindus.” It also doesn’t hurt that he is ruggedly handsome, with his scruffy beard and soft eyes. But Kamini has never bought it.
It’s not that Kamini is an atheist or even agnostic. She accepts and she believes. Just not the way the rest of the community might prefer. When those buildings were struck at the very point of New York City where the two rivers come together, she lit candles and prayed. When the terrorists attacked all the fancy Bombay hotels where the tourists, the business elite and their mistresses stayed, she did the same. With the tsunami, with her daughter’s first pregnancy—and then her second and then third, all bearing the nascent fruit of long, lean girls with thick glossy black hair. When Sachin Tendulkar played the test match in South Africa. And she prayed the night before the United States announced that they had voted in that president they called “Dub-ya” for the second time.
It isn’t religion. It is ritual. Just as writing has become her religion now in addition to her ritual. Her whole life, she’s always felt as though she is on the brink of something. Nothing has felt settled or fulfilled. There has always been a longing, a waiting, desiring. Nothing has felt as though she were fully in the moment, because she has learned that there is nothing she can get comfortable with. Nothing, that is, until she began to write.
Somehow, amid all distractions of raising her daughter in a single-parent household, she’d managed to discover a talent. One that would establish some sort of living for herself and her daughter once it was clear that it would be the two of them from here on out. From the time her daughter, Savita, was born, Kamini had a full stock of stories. She’d heard hundreds over the years, from her aunts and uncles, cousins and family friends. She unearthed the round-robin story hours from her year with her cousins in the small house, where they’d lain in circles passing morsels and beginnings of a story from person to person until a fable was born. She used the foundations of these tales as the source of new ones and changed details so they were unrecognizable from those tales she told with her cousins. The stories served as a source of quiet time for herself and Savita before the door barged open invariably at some witching hour of the morning and Kamini’s husband reentered their lives.
At some point, she began writing them down—those she’d created in her youth and those she spun at Savita’s bedside behests, and at some point, she sent one harmlessly to a children’s magazine. And they sent her back a check. So she sent another. And then suddenly, out of the woodwork, there it was: a living. It wasn’t enough to keep herself and Savita in riches but it afforded their basics and allowed them a meal or two out each month.
It was a strange living, one that she couldn’t admit to her family or friends, because during this time in their lives, in India it was considered uncouth for a woman—an abandoned woman especially—to go out and look for work. Never mind the strange dichotomy in this; if she didn’t earn a living, she and her daughter would starve because no one was offering handouts. Somehow she was just expected to go on with their lives as if her husband, Dev, was still there, bringing in his handsome salary as head of a security unit in Breach Candy. So she wrote. She devised stories of all shapes and forms, testing them out on Savita before she dared to seal the envelope and send them in to the editor. Savita would—true to character—challenge her on several endings.
“Mama,