A New Race of Men from Heaven by Chaitali Sen

Author:Chaitali Sen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books

* * *

Go to sleep

My love

Go to sleep

North, South,

East, West

The husband is still explaining it on the day of the parent-teacher conference, and the wife still carries on as if she doesn’t understand. The twins will be home early, their school day shortened so their teacher can meet with parents all afternoon.

“Is the school too difficult?” she asks.

“How do I know? That’s why we talk to the teacher.”

Their appointment is at three o’clock, and it will take almost an hour to get there. He will be away from the shop too long. When is she supposed to start dinner? She can carry on for as long as she wants, he says, but on this he has to be insistent. This reversal of roles must reverse back. She is the mother, the one who should know the details of her children’s schooling.

“It wasn’t my idea to send them to a school so far away,” she reminds him. “It wasn’t mine either,” he says.

It is true it had not been either of their ideas. It happened last year that out of the blue the twins were invited to take an entrance exam to attend a new academy for gifted students. Both husband and wife bore the invitation stoically, though secretly he hoped the children would score well, thinking it would be his only achievement of late. Until then they had known their children to be odd but not particularly brilliant. They attributed their children’s idiosyncrasies to other factors—twins were known to be strange, especially back home, and they had suffered a trauma when they were five years old, at the midpoint of their lives, an abandonment which was well-remembered, though none of them, not brother, sister, husband, or wife ever speak of it.

Now the twins travel by subway in the mornings with their father instead of walking with their mother to the neighborhood school. In the afternoons the boy and girl make their way back alone, instructed to come straight home and never leave each other’s sides, which they never think of doing anyway. Every afternoon, they walk through the door at 4:15 and eat a snack at the kitchen table. They don’t speak, except to thank their mother for the food, until they go to their room where they whisper to each other as they do their homework.

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