Karma Gone Bad by Jenny Feldon

Author:Jenny Feldon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2013-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

By October, the rains had stopped. But despite the impending arrival of Hyderabad’s “winter,” it was hot.

So hot I could feel the sidewalk burning beneath my Havaiana flip-flops, so hot I couldn’t shower until long after the sun went down because the water that came from the tank on the roof had literally boiled in the relentless sun. At Ginger Court, Jena tried to tempt us with “hot weather specialties” like mint soup and anari raita, but I just picked listlessly at the plates. Even the air seemed like it was on fire. The Indian city had an ever-present scorched smell that seared the inside of my nostrils with every breath.

“You sleep too much,” Jay declared one morning, whipping the sweat-soaked sheet off my body. “Get out there and do something.” I stayed still, curled into the fetal position, willing him to go to his air-conditioned, electrically sound office and leave me to my misery. He didn’t budge.

“I mean it, Jen. This isn’t good for anyone.”

You mean it’s not good for YOU, I thought to myself, but I got it. I was slipping deeper into a semi-conscious state, hiding in bed and melting into a pool of nothingness while the Indian world marched on around me. It was too hot to shop, too hot to read, too hot to venture out into the crowded city streets for sightseeing. Venkat tried to amuse me by reciting the daily temperature and proclaiming the weather “Much worse hot climate ever, Madam” but his numbers were in Celsius and my brain was too scorched to do the math required to convert them to Fahrenheit.

One day, trying to manipulate our air conditioner to crank out more than a whisper of tepid air, I turned the dial all the way. There was a loud blast. Panicked, I jumped back. White smoke poured from the metal unit, filling the living room. I grabbed Tucker and ran outside, barefoot and screaming, begging for help.

No one came. Venkat was hanging out at the office. Raju was nowhere to be found. A handful of workers in the empty house next door looked up, snickered, and resumed their tedious brickwork under the pounding sun. A neighbor peered out from an upstairs window and then disappeared. Smoke continued to pour from the front door. I dialed frantically on my phone—Venkat, Alexis, Jay, anyone who would come rescue me—but I couldn’t get a signal and eventually I gave up, sinking to the sidewalk with my head in my hands, Tucker trembling beside me. If the house went up in flames, maybe I’d get to go home.

***

“What did you do all day?”

Jay asked this question, with no trace of irony, every night when he walked in the door. At first I thought he was being sarcastic. So I got creative, exaggerating the nothing much I’d actually done into epic tales of struggle and valor on foreign soil. Just as I was crossing the street, the buffalo bared its teeth and started to charge! Then I got defensive, indignantly standing up for my work-permit-less right to do nothing at all.

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