“Once you’ve taken off your socks, you need to put your shoes back on so you don’t cut your feet on broken glass. Keep your socks in your pocket, along with these.” He handed out pieces of blue cloth, the last bits of Malathi’s sari. “We have to move to the employees area and sit on the tables there. The ceiling at this end of the room is sagging more than before.” They stared up at the hole that yawned above. In the near blackness, Uma couldn’t tell how much worse it really was. “Use the cloth to wipe your feet before wearing your socks again,” Cameron said. “Stay as dry as you can so you don’t get chilled.”
Everyone did as Cameron instructed. Maybe they were grateful for these small, concrete acts that they could successfully perform. When Uma pulled off her socks with an awkward hand, she almost dropped one. Lunging to grab it, she hit her broken wrist against the chair. Pain shot through her and she cursed out loud. Standing, she saw that the water reached above her ankles, and the inevitability of that rising, more than the pain and the cold, made her want to cry. The group shuffled to their new location and pushed the tables around until they formed a triangle with gaps. Lily helped Jiang, who was holding her arm out stiffly, onto a table, and beckoned to Tariq to join them. Uma climbed onto the second table. Cameron wiped her feet for her and pulled her socks back on. Uma had expected Mrs. Pritchett to join them, but the older woman went to the third table, where her husband was sitting. Uma wondered if his story made her do this. Mrs. Pritchett perched on the edge, leaving the center spot for Mangalam.
Uma moved closer to Cameron to make room for Malathi, who was climbing onto their table. Three to a tabletop was a snug fit. But it would keep them warmer. Cameron was asking if anyone suffered from diabetes. No one confessed to it because Mangalam was holding a big plastic bag filled with sugar packets. When Cameron nodded, Mangalam passed the bag around. Uma took three packets. Greedily, she tore open the corner of one with her teeth and poured some onto her tongue. She was looking forward to the taste, but it was overly sweet and made her want to throw up. The unfairness of this made her want to cry.
Everything was making her want to cry. No matter what her own problems were, Mr. Pritchett’s mother should have taken better care of her son. And why did the boy love her so, in spite of everything? Uma thought of her own mother, who had watched out for her with a hawk-eyed vigilance that she had ungraciously tolerated through childhood and rejected as a teenager. Did one always take for granted what came easily and long for what was impossible?
Cameron disappeared into the storage area, returning with a small stack of disposable tablecloths. He divided them among the three groups, to use as communal blankets. They weren’t very warm, not even with two or three of them layered atop each other. But there was something comforting, Uma thought, something childlike and innocent, about sharing them.
HALFWAY THROUGH MR. PRITCHETT’S STORY, MRS. PRITCHETT had been broadsided by a memory. Years back, when she first realized they weren’t going to have children, she had asked her husband for a dog. He had dragged his feet, pointing out that it would mess up their beautiful new carpet. He didn’t have time to help her take care of it. And what would they do with it when they traveled? But she had begged and begged because she was lonely. Finally he had given in to her entreaties and taken her to the animal shelter.
A few minutes into their visit, before Mrs. Pritchett had taken a single dog out of its cage, Mr. Pritchett had complained of shortness of breath. He had rushed out of the building, and when she followed, concerned, she found him inside their Mercedes, bent over the steering wheel. His hands, when she had grabbed them, had been clammy.
She had guessed the problem to be an allergy, a severe one. To get to the dogs, they’d walked through a room filled with cat cages. Maybe that had set it off. Very convenient! a part of her had thought angrily. Then, ashamed of her selfishness, she had busied herself with rolling down the windows and getting him water. She had put away this disappointment like many others and had busied herself with the garden, the golf lessons he wanted her to take so they could join the local club, and the dinner parties he loved for her to throw. Now she was filled with sorrow and anger: sorrow for the boy he had been and anger because he had not ever trusted her with the truth.
ENTANGLED IN THEIR THOUGHTS, LOST IN THE HYPNOTIC GURGLE of water, they were startled when Lily said, “I’m glad you had your math, Mr. Pritchett. It made you special when everyone thought you weren’t good enough.” She glanced at Cameron. “Can I tell my story?”
“Hold on a little longer,” he said. He peered at the faces around him, checking for responses.
Uma wanted to say something about the treacherous nature of memory, how one painful event can overpower the many good experiences that came before. But a dangerous lethargy arising from cold and hunger prevented her from speaking. It was imperative that someone start telling a story before the feeling overpowered them all.
With relief she heard Malathi’s voice. “I will give you my story. But my English is not so good, and I want you to understand everything properly. So Mr. Mangalam must translate it from Tamil.”
Mangalam jerked up his head, frowning with wary surprise. He looked like he was about to refuse, but Malathi spoke as though he had assented already. “Better not change even one word. I know enough to catch you if you do.”
9
When I failed tenth grade for the second time, my parents figured it was no use wasting more money on my school fees and decided to marry me off. I had no objections; it was not as though I had anything else to do. Having navigated their way through the weddings of two daughters already, my parents knew that the local matchmaker would ask for a photograph. If they could provide her with one in which I looked better than normal, my chances of finding a husband-and theirs of negotiating a smaller dowry-would be highly improved. Though in general thrifty and suspicious, they knew the importance of a well-chosen investment. That is how I ended up at Miss Lola’s Lovely Ladies Salon, the premier beauty shop in Coimbatore.
My mother had been to Lovely Ladies only twice, but Miss Lola knew her right away. “The bridal photo special, again?” she asked. When my mother nodded, Miss Lola looked me up and down and pronounced that I would require more work than my sisters. My mother gave a sigh but did not disagree, and the two of them fell to bargaining about the price of my beautification. When they had reached an agreement, Miss Lola gave a volley of staccato instructions to the pink-uniformed girls who worked for her, ending with “Bridal Special Silver Level with Hair Oil.”
Two girls whisked me to an inner sanctum filled with elegant women undergoing the complex and painful process of improving upon nature. I was settled into a reclining chair and shrouded in cotton sheets. And it was here, in this moist, air-conditioned room decorated totally in shades of pink (Lola’s favorite color) and fragrant with astonishing and exotic substances which my naïve nose was incapable of identifying, that I saw as though illuminated by lightning the path of my future.
Until this day, I had thought of marriage as an inevitable destination. The only other choice a girl from a middle-class Brahmin family, handicapped by respectability, had in our sleepy town was to teach at the Sree Padmavati Girls Higher Secondary School. But teachers were meagerly paid and resembled chewed-up sticks of sugarcane, and I had no desire to become one.