Ikram is distracted by a jamun tree, heavy with fruit.
“Go on,” she says. “Get us some jamuns. I will be all right. I will be at the clearing, where the path forks. Come and find me later.”
“You have your wristpad?” he asks.
“I didn’t bring anything,” she says. “Don’t worry, I know this place.”
How strange that the river of her life, which has run sometimes parallel, sometimes away from Raghu’s, has been flowing toward the same destination as his. She is walking through the forest, to the confluence, the meeting place. There is a clearing that she remembers from a trip a year or two ago that he would like.
She walks slowly. In the clearing, a pale sunlight filters through the clouds, illuminating the karvi flowers. She looks at her dark brown arm holding the box, feels the heat of the day on her skin.
There is a language before language that the Earth speaks, Raghu had said.
Yes, she tells him, and you can only learn it through the body.
An animal in a forest, that’s what she is at this moment, susceptible to danger and death, but her senses are coming alive to everything. The pattern of light and shadow, the humming of an insect, the cooing of a wood dove, the distant call of a troop of monkeys. Everything about her, from her dark skin to her facial features, has been shaped by her people’s particular adaptation to their environment: the slant of the sunlight, the temperature of the air. She feels the crushing weight of the centuries of abuse and exploitation. It is there in the DNA of her cells, in the stories of her grandmother, in the loss of her mother at an early age, in Kalpana Di’s suicide. The pain stabs her with such intensity that she thinks she might faint. She leans against the trunk of a tree and holds Raghu’s box to her chest.
Mahua opens Raghu’s box and takes out the folded leaf. Setting the box on a branch, she unrolls the twine, opens the leaf, and strokes, once, the lock of hair. Then she ties up the bundle again, and looks for a place where the earth is soft from the last rain. With a stick from the underbrush, she digs a small hole where she places the little package. She covers it up again with earth.
Go free, she says to Raghu, and to Kalpana Di. She straightens slowly. Her back aches, her legs ache. All this climbing, she’d better get used to it again. Maybe it’s time this old woman learned some new lessons. She cannot own the victories of her grandmother’s people—the newly formed Santhal province with its ideal of reverence for the web of life, its model of communities governing themselves through consensus—she cannot celebrate such things without owning the pains of struggle and sacrifice that are inscribed in her very own body, her people’s history. And it is thus that she is able to see at last, as her people always have seen, the Earth itself: as body, as mother.
At the edge of the clearing, the leaves of the trees murmur in the wind. She feels herself enlarging beyond her own awareness. She is a drop of water trembling on a leaf, she is sunlight on the branch. She doesn’t know the names of the trees or the birds, except for a few, but that can come later. For that moment, she is as unselfconsciously free as a soaring bird.
Ikram is calling to her. Mahua clears her throat, takes a long breath. “I’m coming,” she calls back.
What a privilege to exist in a universe so dynamic, so complex, that one still has something to learn at the ripe old age of seventy-three. She will sit at the edge of the forest with Ikram and look at the sea. They will eat jamuns, stain their lips and hands with purple juice, and she will tell him about that other great forest, the Amazon, half a world away. She will tell him about Raghu.
Green Glass: A Love Story
E. LILY YU
E. Lily Yu (elilyyu.com) received the Artist Trust/LaSalle Storyteller Award in 2017 and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Her stories have appeared in venues from McSweeney’s to Uncanny and in nine best-of-the-year anthologies, and have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. Her first novel, On Fragile Waves, will be published in Fall 2020.
The silver necklace that Richard Hart Laverton III presented to Clarissa Odessa Bell on the occasion of her thirtieth birthday, four months after their engagement and six months before their wedding date, was strung with an irregular green glass bead that he had sent for all the way from the moon. A robot had shot to the moon in a rocket, sifted the dust for a handful of green glass spheres, then fired the capsule to Earth in a much smaller rocket. The glass melted and ran in the heat of reentry, becoming a single thumb-sized drop before its capsule was retrieved from the South China Sea. The sifter itself remained on the moon, as a symbol, Clarissa thought, of their eternal union.
For her thirtieth birthday, they ate lab-raised shrimp and two halves of a peach that had somehow ripened without beetle or worm, bought that morning at auction, the maître d’ informed them, for a staggering sum. Once the last scrap of peach skin had vanished down Clarissa’s throat, Richard produced the necklace in its velvet box. He fumbled with the catch as she cooed and cried, stroking the green glass. The waiters, a warm, murmuring mass of gray, applauded softly and admiringly.
Clarissa and Richard had known each other since the respective ages of six and five, when Clarissa had poured her orange juice down the fresh white front of Richard’s shirt. This had been two decades before the citrus blight that spoiled groves from SoCal to Florida, Clarissa always added when she told this story, before eyebrows slammed down like guillotines.
They had attended elementary, middle, and high school together, hanging out in VR worlds after school. Clarissa rode dragons, and Richard fought them, or sometimes it was the other way round, and this taught them grammar and geometry. Sometimes Clarissa designed scenarios for herself, in which she saved islands from flooding, or villages from disease. She played these alone, while Richard shot aliens.
These intersections were hardly coincidental. In all of Manhattan there were only three elementary schools, four middle schools, and two high schools that anybody who was anybody would consider for their children.
College was where their paths diverged: Richard to a school in Boston, Clarissa to Princeton, with its rows and ranks of men in blistering orange. She sampled the courses, tried the men, and found all of it uninspiring.
The working boys she dated, who earned sandwich money in libraries and dining halls, exuded fear from every pore. There was no room for her on the hard road beside them, Clarissa could tell; they were destined for struggle, and perhaps someday, greatness. The children of lawyers, engineers, and surgeons opened any conversation with comments on estate planning and prenups, the number of children they wanted, and the qualities of their ideal wives, which Clarissa found embarrassingly gauche. And those scions of real power and money danced, drank, and pilled away the hours: good fun for a night but soon tedious.
Several years after her graduation, her path crossed with Richard’s. Clarissa was making a name for herself as a lucky or savvy art investor, depending on whom you asked, with a specialty in buying, restoring, and selling deaccessioned and damaged art from storm-battered museums. She had been invited to a reception at a rooftop sculpture garden, where folk art from Kentucky was on display. Absorbed in the purple and orange spots of a painted pine leopard, she did not notice the man at her elbow until he coughed politely and familiarly. Then she saw him, truly saw him, and the art lost its allure.