The Sea Elephants: a Novel by Shastri Akella

Author:Shastri Akella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

JEW TOWN, COCHIN

Marc’s family lived in a quiet housing colony where, in that postdusk hour, the houses released dim murmurs of television and radio programs and the turmeric, ginger, and garlic smells of dinners being prepared.

Marc pushed open the gate to his house, and I followed him past a fenced garden of peppers, carrots, and cauliflowers, past a wisteria tree. The door opened before Marc pressed the bell. The house exhaled a breath of oud. Marc’s mother cupped his face with a hand. Her wrist was adorned with a single silver bracelet. “How thin you’ve become!” she fretted.

I bent forward and touched her feet with an outstretched hand. I belatedly realized I had unwittingly brought a Hindu custom to a Jewish doorstep. As I was about to step away to correct my mistake, she pressed her palm to my head and blessed me. When I stood up and met her gaze, searching for some indication that I had done something out of place, I found, instead, her happiness.

“Welcome to our home,” she said.

Inside, I met Marc’s father, his eyes the same blue as Marc’s. I held my hand out to him. He slapped it away, wrapped his arms around Marc and me, and pressed us to himself.

Marc’s sisters, Mira and Delia, were twenty and twenty-one. Undergraduates in Chadigarh, here to meet me. They pulled faces at a comment Marc made. Identical expressions of disgust on different faces.

I, of course, knew that Marc had younger sisters, but the fact of it and the stories he told me—how readily they adapted to their lives in Cochin, how they affectionally sparred, a universally necessary condition, it seemed, for siblings to coexist and thrive—hadn’t prepared me for the physical expression of affection between Marc and them, the back-and-forth of speech and reaction. I looked away, not knowing how to name the feeling I was overcome with: Did I resent Marc for having what I no longer could? Had the sight of him with his sisters refreshed the anger I’d felt at myself for letting mine die? The image resurfaced: my sisters on a boat, seesawing away from the shore, their eyes wild with terror.

I repeated his sisters’ names in my head. Mira, Delia. I turned my attention away from their familial role as Marc’s sisters and turned it toward them as individuals: their responses to the questions I asked them, about their hobbies, their friends, their dream travel destinations.

We gathered around a teapoy, set with cups of milk tea and slices of plum cake. I observed them: Marc’s raised eyebrows, his father’s hand cupping his cheek, his mother’s rich laughter. A breeze swept in. The thin curtains billowed. Outside, a nocturnal flower opened its mouth to the sky, exhaling one note of jasmine, then another, then another. The air was drenched in its breath.

Marc and I shared a room that night. He placed two pillows between us, one below the other. He turned the double bed into two twins.

“The Great Wall of Singer,” I said, patting one pillow, then the other.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.