Arranged Marriage: Stories by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

underwater for a long time. They may be anywhere from eight to fourteen—I can’t tell their ages as I would with boys back home. They scare me on this deserted street although surely there’s no reason for fear. They’re just boys after all, with thin wrists that stick out from the sleeves of too-small jackets, standing under a tree on which the first leaves of spring are opening a pale and delicate green. I glance at Aunt Pratima for reassurance, but the skin on her face stretches tightly across her sharp, fragile cheekbones.
    The boys bend their heads together, consulting, then the tallest one takes a step toward us and says, “Nigger.” He says it softly, his upper hp curling away from his teeth. The wordarcs through the empty street like a rock, an impossible word which belongs to another place and time. In the mouth of a red-faced gin-and-tonic drinking British official, perhaps, in his colonial bungalow, or a sneering overseer out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as he plies his whip in the cotton fields. But here is this boy, younger than my cousin Anup, saying it as easily as one might say thank you or please . Or no problem .
    Now the others take up the word, chanting it in high singsong voices that have not broken yet, nigger, nigger , until I want to scream, or weep. Or laugh, because can’t they see that I’m not black at all but an Indian girl of good family? When our chauffeur Gurbans Singh drives me down the Calcutta streets in our silver-colored Fiat, people stop to whisper, Isn’t that Jayanti Ganguli, daughter of the Bhavanipur Gangulis?
    I don’t see which boy first picks up the fistful of slush, but now they’re all throwing it at us. It splatters on our coats and runs down our saris, leaving long streaks. I take a step toward the boys. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I get to them—shake them? explain the mistake they’ve made? smash their faces into the pavement?—but Aunt holds tight to my arm.
    “No, Jayanti, no.”
    I try to pull free but she is surprisingly strong, or perhaps I’m not trying hard enough. Perhaps I’m secretly thankful that she’s begging me— Let’s go home, Jayanti —so that I don’t have to confront those boys with more hate in their eyes than boys should ever have. There is slush on Aunt’s face; her trembling lips are ash-colored. She’s sobbing, and when I put out my hand to comfort her I realize that I too am sobbing.
    Half running, tripping on the wet saris which slap at ourlegs, we retreat down the street. The voices follow us for a long time. Nigger, nigger . Slush-voices, trickling into us even when we’ve finally found the right road back to our building, which had been only one street away all the time. Even when in the creaking elevator we tidy each other as best we can, wiping at faces, brushing off coats, holding each other’s shivering hands, looking away from each other’s eyes.
    The light has burned out in the passage outside the door. Aunt Pratima fumbles in her purse for the key, saying, “It was here, I am keeping it right here, where can it go?’
    In their thin Indian shoes, my feet are colder than I have ever imagined possible. My teeth chatter as I say, “It’s all right, calm down, Auntie, we’ll find it.”
    But Aunt’s voice quavers higher and higher, a bucking, runaway voice. She turns her purse upside down and shakes it, coins and wrappers and pens and safety pins tumbling out and skittering to the edges of the passage. Then she gets down on all fours on the mangy brown carpet to grope through them.
    That is when Bikram-uncle opens the door. He is still wearing his grease-stained overalls. “What the hell is going on?” he says, looking down at Aunt. Standing across from him, I look down too, and see what he must be seeing, the parting in Aunt Pratima’s tightly pulled-back hair, the stretched line of the scalp pointing grayly at her lowered forehead like an accusation.
    “Where the hell have you been?” Bikram-uncle asks,