Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

felt like one of the towels Ayah wrung out before she hung it up to dry. She wanted Leena to be here, to run hand in hand with her across a lawn so large it was like a green ocean. But what was the point of wanting the impossible? She never answered the letters.
    Some days now, Bela can barely recall what Leena was like. Did she have one braid, or two? What was her favorite game? Her favorite movie? Did she like ice cream better, or sandesh? She doesn’t reveal this slippage to Bijan. She senses that it would distress him almost as much as it distresses her. But she knows this much: Leena’s magician (whom she cannot remember at all) could not have been anything like hers.

    Bela has decided that she hates school. She has kept this fact carefully to herself, because she doesn’t want to add to her parents’ troubles. It has been a difficult move for them all. They had to give up their charming high-rise flat near Deshapriya Park, with a courtyard filled with tamarind trees in whose shade Bela played hopscotch with her friends after school; Sabitri’s elegant dinners, where Bela was allowed to stay up and watch guests whispering in their glittery saris and imported suits; Bijan’s air-conditioned office on the top floor of the company headquarters, from which Bela could see the Victoria Memorial, tiny as a toy palace.
    But inside loss there can be gain, too, like the small silver spider Bela had discovered one dewy morning, curled asleep at the center of a rose. Their evenings, on the nights when Sabitri and Bijan stay home, are wondrously uneventful. Bijan leafs through the local newspaper, reading aloud tidbits that amuse or exasperate him. Sabitri labors over a gray sweater that Bela cannot imagine it will ever get cold enough here to wear. Deposited on a quilt on the floor, the baby contemplates his plump, kicking legs. All of a sudden he turns over and looks astonished. At such times, Bela feels for him a piercing love, though she continues with her homework, saying nothing. Once in a while—but less each day—she finds herself holding her breath. She is waiting for the old noises: the crash of items hitting the floor, glasses or furniture or bodies; the sour smell of vomit next morning in the upholstery. And that lightning glance from her mother’s eyes, as though somehow it was Bela’s fault.
    How, into this precarious peace, can she inject her petty problems? She is friendless among the local schoolgirls, children of oil-field employees who look upon her with nervous suspicion as the daughter of the man who controls their fathers’ destinies. Heads bent together, they whisper in Assamese when she approaches. If she happens to answer a question in class (but nowadays she has stopped doing this), they snicker at what they term her fancy city accent. Even the teachers, with their heavy Assamese-tinged English, narrow their eyes at her. Her handwriting, hampered by the fountain pen they insist she use instead of the smooth ballpoints she is used to, has been judged woefully inadequate. And tomorrow she will have to recite Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” in its entirety in elocution class for Miss Dhekial, who is known to rap knuckles with her ruler. Bela’s knuckles ache already in anticipation, for though she has been practicing the poem all week, under the critical gaze of the class she continues to blank out, sometimes as early as stanza two.
    Bela is sitting in the Sunday garden under the mango tree, thinking all this instead of doing her homework, when the magician suddenly appears. Startled, she drops her fountain pen, which makes a spidery black splotch in the middle of her arithmetic assignment. Then it rolls down her lap onto the lawn, leaving a dark, accusing trail on her uniform.
    â€œSo sorry,” the magician says, bending his long, elegant back. “Please allow me.” He removes his hands from the folds of his shawl and a glowing falls