This story was originally published in the Fall 2005 issue of Kenyon
Review.
The
By
Champa Bilwakesh
The room behind Krishnamurthi was
dense with the darkness of summer.
Outside, bright sunlight was everywhere.
Massively perched on the deck railing, hot and shiny on the grill, it
deepened the pools of shade under trees. Where the lawn became patchy and
yielded to loam and woods at the rear, he spotted the long cylindrical bird
feeder shifting slightly in the air.
Draws chickadees, Raji had told him.
It was empty now. The one time he
filled it with birdseed he was overcome with so much rancor that it frightened
him.
He turned
away from the window and walked down the hall.
As he passed the girls' rooms it struck him that it had been months
since he stepped inside those rooms.
Vacant, the rooms yawned cavernously behind their doors. He quickly went down the steps.
In the
kitchen he made some tea. Huge
rectangles of sunlight covered the table that was strewn with sections of the
Sunday
He cleared
a place for his cup and picked up the section that was closest to him, the
Personal Line (the s inverted, the L cursive and sexy, and a heart dotting the
i) in the classified. He pursued the little boxes in the column headed Women
seeking Men.
50 but looks 35; likes meaningful conversations, deep
thoughts, the beach, fun times; firm body, sexy, beautiful; seeking like-minded
soul-mate to explore possibilities.
Possibilities. He flipped the page. Men seeking men––flip, women seeking
women––flip. He sipped his tea, feeling quite remote from a world where people
conjured up instant romance.
He missed
Raji most acutely in the mornings, although towards the end there was mostly
only silence between them. Everything that could be said had been said; every
contingency that was thought of was accounted for. Yet, and yet.
Her presence at the table across from him gave weight to his own, as
though they were just a normal couple, empty nesters. Now he felt lop-sided.
He had
married Raji for the way she had clutched his hand at the movies. Along with a
bunch of friends he had cut classes to see Psycho
at the Odeon. First show, first
day. Raji had sat next to him, the
friend of a friend's sister. During the shower scene she gasped and clutched
his arm, startling him. He turned and
saw her wide-eyed and absorbed. Moving
shadows of the horror show flickered on her face. She allowed her hand to stay, relaxing the
clutch on his arm, just in case. He found this incredibly forward and
irresistible, and so he married her. Immediately after that he left for
In those
early days of their life in a new country he would read the Boston Globe in the cold light of wintry mornings. Tunelessly humming
while she cooked, Raji would reach over his shoulder to point to some
advertisement in the paper, pressing her body into him, smelling of
health. He reveled in the sounds and
smells of those Sunday mornings.
When they
moved into a three-bedroom bi-level in
The
real-estate agent from Carlson Realty advised him to get rid of the curry odor
before putting it on the market. Bake an
apple pie, she said, before you show the house. A roast, throw a roast in the
oven.
After he
shaved and showered in the afternoon he stood in front of the mirror. He
wondered if he could manage 54, but looks 40.
Likes horror movies, transatlantic
travel; rocket-scientist, widower.
He blinked
furiously. How foolish he looked dressed like some
cowboy. He quickly changed out of
the denim and into the navy blue chinos, and finally walked out into the warm
breezy day in khaki pants and a blue shirt.
He thought of Janet Griffin as he
took the expressway. It surprised him
that she knew so much about an Indian movie. She belonged to a film club, she
said, and had two tickets for the premier.
Would he like to come?
He wondered
mildly if he had been asked out on a date and didn't even know it.
Three weeks
ago Janet's new print shop had gone up in his building. She had won the contract for his company's
data processing work. All his material
was now outsourced downstairs to Janet's shop.
When he
stopped by in the morning to collect the Datametrex presentation for review,
Janet was there to greet him.
“Here you
go, Doctor!” she said handing him the packet.
Using his
title to avoid pronouncing his name, a familiar ploy.
"You
can call me Kris," he told her.
"Chris?"
"Yes.
Kris."
He always
stumbled a little over that diminutive of his name, as though he was faking it.
Ruth Bailey, the administrator at the international student housing, had
strained and struggled to get her tongue around his name on her list. She finally looked at him over her reading
glasses.
"What
if I called you Kris?" Ruth suggested, reasonably enough.
He stood
with exactly eighty American dollars in his pocket from the meager foreign
exchange the Government of India allowed then.
So he agreed.
He sat down
at a desk in Janet's office and rifled through the presentation packets. A couple of charts looked very wrong. He pulled his notes from his file for
comparison and made the corrections to the data with a thick red pen. He wrote
down some additional notes. He explained
all this to Janet.
"Do
you think you can get me a final version by . . . say, by this afternoon?"
"You
got it."
When he
returned to his office from lunch the packet was on his chair, with a yellow sticker
on top. It had a smiley face and the
initials J.G.
He peeled
off the yellow sticker and looked at the initials again. Jay-gee,
Jay-gee he muttered softly, testing the sound. Jayji. He placed the sticker
on the hairs that sprouted on his wrist. A sensation like a balloon inflated in
his chest. He looked at the note and
wondered why he had done that. That used to be his tickler method to call Raji
in the afternoon, when the nurse left.
This is a date he decided, as he pulled into the
Janet
smelled of mint. He had seen American women fish strong flavored gum or candy
out of their pocketbooks, pry one out of it's crumpled foil wrapper, and pop it
into their mouth. To “freshen the
breath” as the ad said, showing two people kissing, kissing. Perhaps they expect to be kissed suddenly and
are afraid to find themselves caught with bad breath. Would Janet expect to be
kissed, to be grabbed right here on the sidewalk, have him press his face
against her soft skin, his hand wandering over the curves beneath her silky
sweater . . .
He looked
away, afraid that his face might have betrayed his depravity.
“Gum?”
Impelled by
the visions in his head, he accepted.
“We have
some time. Want to take a walk?” Janet asked brightly.
Soon after their meeting at the
print shop he ran into Janet again in the cafeteria one morning. They both reached for the only raisin bagel
that was in the basket. He insisted that
she should have it. He selected a
blueberry bagel for himself. They sat
near a window and had their bagels and coffee.
A robin
tried to fly into the window, knocked against the glass, and then flew off to a
nearby bush.
"Oh,
look, he's blind!" Janet cried. "Maybe he's hurt."
He shook
his head. "Mating season. They try to have a go at anything around this
time."
The next
morning he found her sitting at the same place.
She waved to him and he walked over with his breakfast. He then began to look for her when he came in
for his coffee.
"Chris
is so American," Janet said one day. The cluster of pearls at her ears and
the shade of lipstick that she wore made her lips seem full and rich. "Is
that what your wife calls you?"
A
flame-like flicker at the edges of his vision made everything blur
slightly. Raji rarely called him by his
name. "Listen?" was how she
called him.
"Listen?"
Janet scrunched her brows.
It sounded
all wrong. He tried to tell Janet how the
mild inflection in that address, that gentle hook it hung on, signaled an
owning and a belonging, hinted at distances and intimacies, and that the memory
of her voice, here, now, quite took his breath away. He could have told Janet all this but he did
not usually speak this way. So he merely
widened his eyes at the band of blue around the coffee cup and told her how
Raji died.
Raji got
very tired by sunset. Often she would be
propped up on the sofa when he got home.
Smelling faintly of wilted flowers, the house would be lit only by the
TV.
When he
arrived home that day the house was flooded with lights. He parked his car at
the curb and walked up the driveway, ice crunching beneath his boots, past the
flashing lights of the ambulance that blinked and winked. The front door was flung wide open and the
paramedics stood at the landing, shuffling their big feet in heavy work boots,
voices crackling around them. One of
them whipped out his cell from its holster and spoke into it. Krishnamurthi pushed past him and went
inside. At the top of the stairs he saw his neighbor Claire. The look in her
eyes made something squeeze against his chest.
He climbed the stairs and pushed the door to the room that he shared
with Raji for over thirty years, when the two burly paramedics followed him in.
They placed the pads on her. He felt the
electric currents thumping his own chest, and wept.
He had shredded the lip of the paper cup to bits with
his thumbnail when he felt the warm swishing near him. Janet's hand cupped his shoulder. So quickly did he yield to his deep sense of
abandonment that he felt ashamed at how weak he had become.
A few days
later Janet asked him if he would go with her to see Earth.
"It's
about the partition of
He followed Janet up the
steps to the pavement. Near the Coop a
young couple walked ahead of them. The
man carried a baby-pack from which two tiny hands waved in the air. Raji used to carry Meera in a pack like
that. She would sling the baby in front
of her, catching Meera's tiny fingers in her lips. Simi had come several years later, a
surprise. His heart lurched.
Janet stopped suddenly and turned around with a puzzled
look. He realized he had slowed down and
stopped.
He moved quickly to catch up. Janet’s pants fitted
smoothly around her curvy hips and bottom and her silky cardigan swayed. Her
body seemed to conform compactly against his own. Frantically searching for
topics he could talk about without sounding foolish, he rushed to fill the
silence with words. Was he walking too close to her as though he was going to
molest her, or was he too distant and unfriendly?
Later after
he handed Janet the popcorn and cokes and sat down, he was surprised to find
that the theater was packed. A group of young Indian men and women sat two rows
behind. There were small eruptions of laughter from there, a bantering in
English mixed with Hindi. A stirring in
his heart recalled his own friends from college days and the way they took up
space in the theater with boisterous chatter.
He quelled it immediately; knowing how quickly this train of thought
would lead him into despondency. He sat
up straight and tried to think of something cheery to say to Janet. It was
important that he was a fun
companion.
When the
lights dimmed he turned back to glance at the young people again. A young woman with a perky face turned in his
direction and glanced at him with startling hostility.
One day when they were taking a
boat ride on the Charles, he asked Janet her opinion about the Boston Globe classified. He had quite
without meaning to, begun to scan these pages for clues.
Janet
took a sip of her white wine from her glass, which shone like a jewel in the
light. “Why not?” she said. “A woman I used to work with––her friends placed an
ad for her.
You
know," she explained watching his reaction, "as a surprise.”
“Oh, nothing wrong with that," he agreed, not
wanting to tell her his real feelings which was that ads like that were just a
camouflage for finding sexual partners.
“Nothing wrong in that at all."
She smiled, revealing big teeth all crowded
and friendly. “It should be easy to meet women for a nice sweet guy like you!”
Janet leaned into him and poked his arm gently with a finger.
He was not
used to women talking to him this way, although at various times in his
imagination he had placed the women he knew in his social circle, the select
ones who were pleasant and comely, in extremely compromising situations that
involved him in one way or another. But
Janet had a tiny black mole in the middle of her pink soft cheek, which
frightened him with its sadness. This
called for a whole new response, but for some reason it got all tangled up with
thoughts of his daughters.
“You’re a
charming lady," he said. "You
shouldn't have a problem either.”
Janet
dropped her arm. She sipped her wine and
gazed at the condos across the Charles. Their windowpanes glistened. He hooked and unhooked his fingers, a hard
smile on his lips. It took him a while
to find his voice and when he cleared his throat to say something he was unable
to do so.
He introduced Janet to many
different kinds of Indian dishes up and down
"Scoop
it like this." Breaking a piece of
the soft pancake he dipped it in the sauce and then plopped it expertly into
his mouth.
Janet tried
and a little bit of the sauce smeared on her cheek. He leaned over and dabbed at it with his
napkin.
He asked
about her daughter who worked at a travel agency in
He could not remember when he
actually had these conversations with Janet to have gathered all this
incredible amount of information about her. He worried about what pieces of
information he must have exchanged in return.
People he met in trains, taxi drivers, his hairdresser
at Supercuts, were always wanting to
tell him things; painful things like their children cutting them off and not
speaking to them, botched up surgery, murderous ex-husbands. But with his close friends, all those people
he and Raji had known for twenty, thirty years, forget it! When his quiet Simi started to dress in army fatigues
and black boots, his friends stopped suggesting good matches for Meera, the
doctor. Soon they stopped asking about
either one of his daughters. Whether
this was due to their own embarrassment or to save him from it, he was not
sure. After Raji died they stopped asking him anything at all.
It
disturbed him at first to think how quickly he was relegated to the state of a
widower. For a while he continued to attend the events at the temple in
When he
dropped Janet off later that night, she thanked him, opened her door, then
suddenly turned, leaned over and kissed him firmly on his mouth. "Take
care," she told him.
He drove
home full of Janet's soft and rosy face grazing his cheek, her breath
minty-oniony.
That night
he woke up with a start and imagined that he saw shadows lurking in the still
darkness of the bedroom. A flash of bony
hips, Raji's breath smelling of sickness.
Next day he ordered from a catalog one of those beds that can be pumped
up, and slept in the living room.
Janet lived on a street that was lined with cottage-like
houses with steep roofs and slim doorways.
She was going to cook dinner for him. He brought along a bottle of
cabernet for her.
As he drove down the street he
found in the smallness of the houses, in their red brick faces and tidy patches
of lawn, a certain homeliness that was touching. He was moved by the brilliant edges of the
colored leaves overhead when he stopped at her house.
Janet’s
house was neat and clean and smelled slightly of fish and potpourri. Several small ceramic figurines lined up on
the mantle. A blue ceramic cat lay
curled up near the fireplace. There were dried flowers and candles in baskets,
on the tables, on the top of the toilet tank in the powder room,
everywhere. Everything was clean and
sweet and arranged. It surprised him to
know that Janet's house would look like this, so American. Although he had
never really given this much thought, it made him see Janet differently. He imagined her sitting in the morning light
by the window that looked out into the small patch of the front lawn, puffing
on a cigarette. He had never seen Janet
smoke so he was puzzled as to why he imagined this.
After
dinner they sat in the den that was lit by two luminous globes. They watched Who Wants to be a Millionaire and finished another bottle of wine
between them. They gave each other
high-fives for each correct answer they got. They decided they would go on the
show as partners and split the million.
They called Regis.
Janet rose
to get another bottle of wine. She
limped slightly as she walked away from him. He wanted to put his arm around
her shoulder, tell her it was all going to be fine. "It's all going to be fine, Janet," he called to
her.
Janet stopped and turned, flicked her hand at him, you silly man! He grinned back at her.
Outside the
window the leaves were flying in small eddies.
He leaned
back on the sofa, warmed by the food, the wine, and the glow from the
fireplace. His body seemed to ripple and
the TV's chatter lulled him. He cocked
his ears for sounds of Raji from upstairs, in case she needed help to make it
to the bathroom.
“Is a
merlot okay?”
His body
jerked, and he blinked a couple of times. Janet was holding the bottle
aloft. He looked at her as though he did
not know what merlot was.
She leaned
over and kissed him. She filled his arms, plump with wholeness and health.
Janet's
bedroom had flowered wallpaper. Purple
drapes flowed all around a window that was covered with lace curtains, and on
the dresser was a dried-flower wreath surrounding a candle. A huge king-sized
bed like the kind he had seen only in magazines while waiting at the dentist’s
office stood high in the middle of the room. At least a dozen small purple and
lilac pillows were on it, which they piled neatly at the foot of the bed. The sheets smelled of mint and candles. Lavender, Janet told him.
Janet had
feet that were ridiculously small for a grown woman. She hooked them together over his hips when
they made love.
Before they fell asleep Janet slipped on an eye-mask.
“Like
Gandhari,” he said.
“Like who?”
“Gandhari. From an Indian epic. She was married to the
king Dhiritrashtra. On their wedding night she finds out he’s blind. She then blindfolds her eyes and says, “I
will see the world just the way my husband does.” "
“Oh!” Janet
said. She cocked her head as if trying to recall something. “Wouldn’t she have been better off as a
seeing-eye wife?”
“Like a
seeing-eye dog?”
“She could have described things to him, like the
moonlight, their kid’s face. She had
kids?”
“A hundred
sons.”
“How sad,
even she didn’t get to see her own
children’s faces.”
“She did!
She did get to see their faces.
She removed her blindfold when her sons all died in a war.”
Janet
thought of this for a few seconds, then pulled her eye-mask down and looked at
him.
“That is
the saddest damned thing I’ve ever heard.
What does it all mean? Does it mean something?”
It was more
than seeing, he wanted to tell her, feeling a chasm like the
He fell asleep holding her to him in spoon fashion,
smelling Janet on his fingers, himself in her hair. When he woke up the clock
at the bedside glowed two-fifteen. His
head was facing a different direction, the light from the window was all
wrong. He turned over on his back,
realizing where he was. Janet sighed
deeply beside him. This made his own body sink deeper into the odor of lavender
in the mattress.
Janet was not in yet when he walked past the print shop the
next morning, which was Monday. He walked into the cafeteria, nodded to a
couple of people he knew, picked up a bagel and coffee and waited at their
table. He watched the parking lot where he
could spot Janet's car pulling in when she came. He munched on his bagel and finished his
coffee and poured himself another cup.
After waiting for another twenty minutes he took the elevator to his
office.
He had a strange feeling as though
there were two of his selves in the elevator, one watching the numbers lighting
up as he passed the floors, and the other walking out the elevator, out the
building, across the parking lot to somewhere under the trees. He stared at the numbers change as the elevator
went up as though if he focused hard enough he could stitch his two selves back
together.
He switched
his computer on and then swiveled his chair towards the window. His face looked back at him from the gray,
translucent windowpane. The computer
stuck out of the left side of his face, the walls formed sharp angles above it.
His eyes changed focus and in the distance two gray treeless concrete ribbons
criss-crossed. Cars moved rapidly on
them like bugs.
He clicked on the IND-List, the
discussion digest. Indian election
results, H1 visa questions, cheap air-tickets.
Someone was collecting donations for the renovation of a small Shiva
temple in his native village.
He knew the temple. A small river
ran behind it. Day and night, the heart
shaped arasa leaves rustled in its
bank. The last time he visited the place a few years ago the river was choked
with water hyacinths and sludge. Across
the street shops sold beedis and
sweets in glass jars, and blared film tunes from loud speakers.
The inside of the temple was
deserted, as though it had lost its power to draw people in. After making his
offering he struck up a conversation with the priest, who seemed eager for a
break from monotony. He discovered that
it was from the priest's grandfather that he had learnt to chant the Rudram as a young boy, when his mother
called him Kittu. Wide stripes of ash the man wore across his forehead gleamed
in the shadows of the temple corridor, which reverberated with the chorus of
voices raised in adoration and entreaty:
To me let accrue
Beauty of this world and the
next,
Love, and so Desire,
The Healing and its
Sweetness,
Oh Lord!
Raji’s voice in the chorus, in
unison with his own and yet singularly distinct, her voice, the one thing that
did not atrophy or bleed or deteriorate until the very end.
The
phone rang and jarred through him.
He quickly looked around to see if
someone might have heard him although his office was private. He realized he had not made any sound at
all. He rubbed his cheeks, surprised to
find them wet.
He grabbed the phone.
“How’s my
Dhiriti—Dhirit—. How do you say it?”
“Rashtra.
Dhiritrashtra.”
“So . . .
how’s he?”
Janet’s
voluble intimacy grated against his ears. Her plump cheeks and marble like eyes
grew inside his head until they replaced every other image.
“Fine,” his
voice squeezed out.
Janet
laughed. Faintly over the wires he heard
Raji's voice talking to someone, familiar like tha squeeze of a hand.
"Kris?"
Janet said.
That's not
my name, he wanted to shout, to
silence Janet's voice. She continued to tell him how her daughter's car got
wrecked, she was not hurt, thank God, but she needed to take it to the body
shop and––
"OK,"
he said. "OK, then."
When the alarm woke him up, he
decided it would be quite impossible for him to go to work that day. He
cancelled all his appointments, turned off his answering machine and went back
to bed.
Sometime
in the afternoon he decided to leave a message in Janet's voice mail but forgot
about it and remembered only in the evening when she was home from work. He punched her number but she kept answering
the damn phone and so he had to hang up on her.
The next
day Janet stopped by after work with pizza and flowers--daisies in a blue
ceramic cup.
“Onions and
jalepeno, from Mike’s,” she said. She
stood in the hall with the pizza box, balancing the flowers on top. He stood in his red pyjamas and a T-shirt.
“I’m
sick.”
“With what?”
Janet asked staring at the bed in the living room. There were two piles of
clothes on the sofa. He knew which one
was the clean one. On the coffee table
were several coffee mugs and bowls with cereal stuck to them. "Do you want me to take you to the
doctor?"
He went and
sat on his blow-up bed.
She put
down the pizza, collected the dishes and took them to the kitchen. He heard water running in the kitchen
sink.
Janet
returned, wiping her hands in a kitchen towel.
She stood in the hall for a while looking at him before sitting down on
the bed. She took his hand in hers.
"What's
wrong?" She stroked his face.
Janet's
fingers glowed pink and healthy against his brown hand. Even her nails, shiny
and round, bursted with health. He
recalled how Raji's wrists beneath the sweater that she wore all the time had
become alarmingly thin to the touch, as though they could break from a mere
tug. He was overwhelmed by his urge to bury his head on Janet's lap.
He quickly
withdrew his hands and tucked them between his knees.
"Cold?" She picked up the crumpled sheet and draped
it over his shoulder.
"What's
wrong? Will you tell me? Does this have anything to do with . . . with . . .?"
He shook
his head. "It's nothing! I am just not feeling quite well."
They ate
the pizza quietly. He felt no pressure
to make conversation.
"Do
you want me to stay?"
"Yes.
Yes, please stay." He held both her hands.
After Janet
left a little later he wrote a letter. Forgive me, he said. This will not work,
it is all my fault. You are a lovely person, but this will not work. Thank you
for everything. He saw how stupid it sounded and tore it up.
He stood at
the window and looked out into the dark. The horrible silence of Raji’s voice
loomed in all the corners of the house.
When Meera
called that night he wondered if he should tell her about Janet. But what would he say? After all how do you
talk about loneliness to your unmarried daughter without making her think her
father was only looking for sexual partners? You don't.
He sat for
a few moments with the receiver in his hand.
"Dad,
what's wrong?"
"Nothing. I'm just taking a few days off, that's
all."
"Your
office said you were sick, that you have not been in for two days! Your phone keeps
ringing and ringing. You've turned off
the answering machine again. Dad, why didn't you call me? Sunil Uncle can call
in a prescrip––"
"No
need for all that. Stop it, Meera, please."
The
anti-depressants that Sunil had prescribed made him sick and tired all the
time. "If they make you nauseous, tell me. We can try something else. You
don't just throw away the pills, Krishna, you're a terrible patient,"
Sunil had complained. He also called Meera promptly and told her.
"I am off rotation this week-end," Meera
said on the phone. "Why don't you
come down and be with me for a few days?
I'll ask Simi to come also, it's semester break for her."
He imagined
Meera in her apartment in Brooklyn, clutching the phone to her worried cheeks.
They both suffered terribly. She was
needy just like him. Simi only
bewildered him. Yet he told Meera it
would not be possible, he would be busy for the next two months on the Datamatrix
project. He made his voice sound brusque
and hoped it appeared strong to his daughter.
"Who's
Janet, Dad?"
"What?"
He twisted the cord between his fingers. "I just have the flu," he
said.
Meera was
silent for a few seconds. "She said she's worried about you. I'm
worried about you."
The idea of
Meera listening to Janet talking about him sent a delirious wave of nausea and
shame through him.
"She sounded nice."
He pressed his fingers to his eyes to staunch the
tears that began like heat.
"Dad?"
"Yeah."
"I am
coming down this week-end. OK? Pick me
up at South station?"
He opened the hatch to the attic
and climbed up. Among the boxes of old
clothes and useless appliances he found the suitcase, a beat up Samsonite look-alike that belonged to
Raji. She had bought it for her first
trip to America. He brought it down, set
it on the floor in the middle of his bedroom and clicked it open.
He had
sorted out all of Raji's silk saris, thinking he could give them away. Instead he wrapped them in a muslin towel and
packed them in the suitcase.
He cast
aside the towel's flaps. Fingering the one on top, a green and purple
mini-stripes, he tried to remember how she looked in it. Did she ever wear it, why couldn't he see her
in it? He whipped it open. The end drape
was a solid bright green, the purple silk fringe hand-knotted into
tassels. After folding the corner of the
end piece into a triangle he tied it around his eyes. Cool from the attic, the
washed-silk smelled of mothballs.
The phone rang. Must be Meera with change of plans. Still blindfolded he reached for the
receiver.
"Yes, honey."
“Kris?
Kris, is that you?” Janet said. In his
blindness her voice jolted the whirling thoughts in his head to a stop. He stood in the center of that stillness.
“Sweetheart,
are you all right? Did you call and hang up on me this evening? Kris, hello?
Hello?”
Sound of gurgling water in
the background made him imagine Janet washing up, brushing her teeth. He felt tenderness thinking of her in her
nakedness. The silk clung to his face
filling his head with longings.
"Kris?"
The
room behind him expanded with sounds of laughter from a TV. He could have been in Janet's den,
illuminated by two globes of lamplight.
“Kris, are
you listening?”
His breath
escaped in a moist gust making the damp silk stick to his nose and lips. When he opened his mouth to blow on it the
tassels got caught in his mouth and made him gag.
"What?"
Janet said. "Did you say
something?"
He ripped the sari off his face.
The faded lining of the suitcase lid was printed all
over with something that only looked like Samsonite
and was shredding in vertical lines. The saris inside gleamed with pure
color in the lamplight. He gently pushed the lid down with a finger and it fell
without a sound.
"Hello? Kris, are you there?"
Kris closed his eyes so he could see better. Janet removes her shoes and places them on
the shelves as he shows her how. Her
bare feet, the toenails polished brilliantly red, are next to his on the cool
tiles. As he walks across the temple
floor and Janet's soft footsteps follow beside him.
"Hello?"
He waited. The airwaves pulsed with Janet's breath.
His own heartbeat, so full of awesome desires, became thunderous in his ears.
The End