Roadwalkers by Shirley Ann Grau

Author:Shirley Ann Grau [Grau, Shirley Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4725-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

THE MAGIC KINGDOM

The Beginning

MY NAME IS NANDA Woods, only daughter—indeed only child—of Mary Woods. I am now thirty-six years old and I have been, for most of my life, an inhabitant of my mother’s magic kingdom.

In the beginning there was just my mother and me.

“You are,” my mother would say, “the queen of the world, the jewel of the lotus, the pearl without price, my secret treasure.”

She whispered words like that, singsonging them in her soft high voice that had a little tiny crackle in it like a scratched record, to comfort me when I was a baby. Her light high whisper threaded through all my days, linking them tightly together, from the day of my birth, from that first moment when I slid from her body to lie in the softness of her bed, the same bed she slept in now. The one we took with us from place to place.

And there were many different places. We were wanderers, my mother and I, disciplined and practiced sojourners. I even had a small wicker basket for my toys so that I could pack and carry them myself.

It mattered little to me where we lived. I did not go outside. Wherever we were, I was too precious, too special, to live as other children did. I did not go for walks, nor play on park swings. Nor go to the corner grocery for a loaf of bread or two bottles of Coke. I did not go to birthday parties and play in sandboxes and ride merry-go-rounds. We did not have friends, my mother and I. There were only the two of us. On Sunday, when my mother was home, we stayed inside and worked together; all the while she sang her murmured song to me. Secret treasure, lotus flower. And in her whispering way she told me all she knew about my father, a Hindu from Calcutta, a salesman of Worthington electric pumps. He had stayed with her for two weeks, never leaving her room, sending out for food and drink; when the time came for him to leave, he cried with sadness, real tears streaking down his cheeks. I bear a shortened version of his name, Agehananda, shortened to fit a baby girl. Of all the many men my mother had known, he was the only one she had loved. She told me about his thin face and his large eyes, black as oil, and his skin that was only slightly lighter than her own.

“You have his eyes and his skin,” she said as, after my bath, she rubbed me with oil. (It was baby oil, its vanilla scent soon lost in her heavier perfume.) “You have his lovely hair,” she said, combing in more oil.

And there is, to be sure, a certain look of India about me. Even now, in the grown woman.

“You are exquisite,” my mother would say, turning me around and around. “A princess of all the world, daughter of the moti mahal. You must have a lovely new dress.

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