Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya Page A

Abhijat’s shirts this way and that, working the iron into the tiny spots around the collar and over the rounded shoulders. She looked at the clock, calculating how long until Abhijat would be home for dinner, wondered whether after the meal, after Meena’s bath and putting her to bed, he would return to the Lab or work in his study off the foyer.
    She wondered how long Meena might sleep. She had come to the end of the pile of dress shirts, each hung neatly on hangers along the ironing board: Tuesday—Wednesday—Thursday—Friday. Maybe she’s about to wake up , she thought.
    Sarala carried Abhijat’s shirts up to the master bedroom, tucking them in among the suits on his side of the closet. She closed the closet door behind her, a little louder than she would have had she not been hoping Meena would wake soon, then walked down the hall, the beige carpeting muffling her footsteps.
    Unlike the other mothers she chatted with at the park, Sarala did not look forward to nap time, such a long period of strange silence in the house. She opened Meena’s door and looked in.
    She was probably just about to wake up anyway , Sarala thought as she sat down on the edge of the bed and reached out to brush the hair from Meena’s face.

CHAPTER 5
    New Symmetries
    I T WAS A POINT OF PRIDE WITH R OSE, THE WAY SHE AND R ANDOLPH had arranged their lives outside the expected norms and traditions. Rose’s upbringing had been so thoroughly and entirely conventional that she had been determined to find a different path for herself as an adult. Their family arrangement was uncommon, certainly, but it worked for them. And yes, even for Lily , she felt she had, always, to explain. Lily and her father are devoted to one another and share a lively and meaningful correspondence .
    From Randolph, Rose and Lily received frequent dispatches concerning his recent adventures. In Malaysia, he’d tended water buffalo, leading them through muddy wetlands, having learned from the natives that the animal was not to be herded but rather that it would simply follow where he led.
    In India, he’d stowed away on a steamship and sailed down the Brahmaputra. From his seat on the bow, he watched the ship’s steady progress, palms arcing overhead. He had traveled the length of the river, from the Himalayas through Bangladesh to the Ganges delta, where he had seen tigers, crocodiles, mangroves, and slender boats skimming over water that in spring rose to flood levels as the snow melted in the mountains.
    In the Kerala backwaters he’d lived in a thatched hut, and near Udaipur, he’d been delighted by the monkeys who came right up to the train as it stopped at the platform—little beggars, paws out, requesting the attentions of the passengers.
    In one of his postcards to Lily, he listed his supplies for his latest trip: We took twenty-four mules loaded with bedrolls, two yaks, tinned milk, ten bamboo tents, and four llamas (who did not get on well with the mules at all) .
    There were parts of his trip, though, that he did not share with Rose and Lily.
    These were the increasingly frequent instances in which he now encountered places that were no longer isolated, no longer separated and protected from modernity. Of these experiences, Randolph kept only a mental list:
    The Coca-Cola sign in front of the camel breeder’s modest home.
    The Tiwi elders dressed half in traditional costume, half in what looked to Randolph like secondhand university t-shirts.
    And worst of all, the tent he’d been invited into, in which he’d found the tribal leader and his wizened council watching a football match on a small television powered by a noisy generator.
    As he added to this growing mental list of the ways in which modernity now seemed to encroach upon these places, he had begun to wonder if he was searching for a kind of untouched culture that no longer actually existed.

    Randolph sat cross-legged with Lily on