The Story Hour by Thrity Umrigar Page B

naseeb not allow, because my birth star weak. I see that future Lakshmi again, the day I leaving school forever in eight standard. I see her when I am bent over the kerosene stove and when I dipping chapati in dal to feed my ma because the ’rthritis twisting her fingers like root of tree. I see her again when I working with Dada in field, because Ma cannot help him no longer. Every time I see that future Lakshmi, she spit at me, make blood in my eyes.
    Menon sahib good, honest man. He pay my fees as he promise. Not his fault that the promise turn out to be short and thin.
    Once, only once, I see that future Lakshmi again with happy eyes. It the day my Shilpa become high school pass. You boil, boil, boil milk and what happen? It turn to malai, no? Same way, on day that Shilpa pass school, all my sadness become smaller and smaller and turn into happy.

7
    S UDHIR WAS COMING home tonight and she was picking him up at the airport in five hours. Enough time to spend one last evening with Peter, to boil pasta on the stove of his small kitchen, knowing that he was following her every movement with his eyes. To feel the tingling anticipation of when he would put down the glass of wine and rise from the chair, take the few short steps to where she was, and hold her from behind, kissing the nape of her neck. Ever since Friday night, when she’d arrived to pick him up for a late dinner and he had seduced her on the living room couch, they had fallen into a surprisingly easy routine, meeting at Peter’s home in Homerville after Maggie got off work. Last night they had planned on going out to pick up some Thai food but ended up in front of the television, eating microwave popcorn for dinner. Peter was fascinated by American TV—that’s how he referred to it—because he was on the road so much and seldom had time to watch.
    Their bodies, too, had fallen into an easy rhythm. For almost thirty years Sudhir’s was the only body Maggie had touched, and she knew it as well as her own—the tight muscles of his back, the dark hair on his chest, the sharp jutting of his hip bone, the callous on his big toe, the dark spot on his shin. Peter’s body was a new country to discover and explore, and she felt exactly like a tourist—giddy with anticipation, taking delight in both the familiar and the unfamiliar. In addition, there was the novelty of Peter’s whiteness. Steeped in her parents’ quiet but fierce race consciousness, influenced by the books about slavery and Jim Crow that she read as an undergraduate at Wellesley, she had never been interested in dating white men. Unlike some of her peers, she didn’t cultivate an active antagonism toward white guys and had never condemned her black friends who had white boyfriends. She was simply indifferent to the lures of white skin. When she was a kid, Wallace had told her enough stories about the humiliations he’d suffered, working as a houseboy for a British colonial officer, to turn her stomach. She knew better than to paint all whites with the same stroke, and God knows she’d had plenty of white friends in college, but still, when she met Sudhir, she was relieved that, like her, he was the color of the earth. The joke, of course, was that in many ways Sudhir acted very much like a stereotypical white middle-class American male—he spoke proper English, had bourgeois values, and had grown up in a stable two-parent home. Wallace had said as much the first time he met his son-in-law: “Baby girl, you done gon’ and married a white man.”
    Maggie smiled as she felt Peter’s mouth brushing lightly against her shoulders. “Hey,” he said softly. “You haven’t even left yet, and already I’m missing you. How is this possible?”
    She turned to face him. The thought of not seeing Peter again made her ache. “I know,” she said. How would she face Sudhir at the airport? Would he take one look at