Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

from them onto the notebook, on the smudge, which disappears. Lightly, lightly, he runs his fingertips over the stains on Bela’s uniform, and that, too, is clean again. Then he seats himself, cross-legged, at her feet. Bela looks around wildly for someone who can confirm that this is really happening, but they are alone in the garden. Under her uniform, her knee tingles where the magician had placed his fingers.
    The magician’s eyes flit from side to side as though he were reading something very rapidly. Their whites are a pale yellow, the color of drowned sand at the bottom of a river.
    â€œIt’s called learning by heart, you know,” he says. “You can remember anything if you use your heart.” He taps his chest as he says this. Something seems to shift in her chest—her own heart, perhaps, sluggish, muscle-bound, finally coming to life. She feels the same tingle there as she did on her leg.
    â€œAnything?” she whispers, thinking of entire worlds lost within her.
    â€œI can help,” he says. He opens his fist and shows her a small globule the size of a pea, the color of his tamarind face.
    This is exactly the kind of thing that Sabitri and Bijan have warned her of. She begins to shake her head. Then the magician says, “It will teach you not to care what people think about you.”
    The tingling starts on her tongue but then travels all over: fingers, face, the curved backs of her calves. Her throat is a tunnel lined with red silk. Words pour out from it. “Good girl,” says the magician. He is small now and hazy; his face shimmers like dragonfly wings on a lake. She tries to tell him this, but she can’t get through that waterfall of words. Sorrow rakes her as she watches him become tiny, then tinier, until he spins away like a spore on the wind.
    The tingly sensation is leaving her now. She feels drained and disoriented and a little sick, like the time when she rode too long on the Ferris wheel at the Kolkata Maidan with Leena. Leena had thrown up afterward. Bela remembers how red her nose had been, and her eyes, embarrassed behind her glasses. She remembers how she had rubbed Leena’s back and said it was okay. She remembers!
    â€œThat’s wonderful, baby.”
    Bela whirls to find Sabitri standing behind her chair, wearing a flowery salwar kameez that makes her look too pretty. She’s suddenly angry, because Sabitri seems untouched by this move which has torn Bela into pieces and then reassembled her haphazardly, and Sabitri doesn’t even realize it. She’s angry, too, because Sabitri has had something to do with her father’s drinking, though if anyone asked Bela what, she wouldn’t be able to explain. A memory stirs inside her, something that happened in a car and changed everything, something terrifying that ended with a slap that flung Bela against the car door—that’s all Bela can recall. Perhaps if her magician comes back, he will help her salvage more.
    Thinking of him makes her angry all over again because Sabitri might have seen him. Bela’s magician. Bela’s secret.
    â€œHow long have you been standing here?” she asks with a hard scowl.
    Sabitri’s mouth falls open like a scolded child’s. “Only a few minutes,” she says, apologetic. “I came to ask if you want fresh sugarcane. Ayah brought some from her village. I remembered how much you liked it last time. I didn’t want to disturb you, though. It sounded so lovely.”
    â€œWhat did?”
    Through the pounding of her newborn heart she hears Sabitri say, “The poem you were reciting. Is it something for one of your classes? There she weaves by night and day / A magic web with colors gay. / She has heard a whisper say, / A curse is on her if she stray. ”
    â€œIt’s stay , not stray ,” she whispers, but Sabitri continues, oblivious.
    â€œI loved the way your voice rose and fell in all the right