All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Author:Sarah Thankam Mathews [Thankam Mathews, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

D2

As they went to sleep, I went to the computer. Read my unanswered missives to Thom once more, my chest filling with heat and pain. Enough, I said under my breath, but I said it in my first language, even though nobody was around to hear or care. Madi. Enough with this sniveling. Just as romantic love faded or fractured, so too could friendship end.

But nobody consoles you after a rupture with a beloved friend. There are few movies ideal for watching while your tears salt pints of ice cream, no articles in women’s magazines that you can skim at the hairdresser’s. You have only the ache. No script to accompany it. No ritual to give it shape.

As we’d chopped onions for dinner, my mother had asked me with a great abruptness if I was unhappy because of a friend. By which she meant a boy.

I shrugged, then jerked my head into a fraction of a nod. It was not untrue.

Don’t get involved in any silly business, keto, my mother said.

In the dark quiet of the sleeping house I looked at Marina’s social media. For the first time it saddened me that there were so few pictures of us that announced who we were to each other. I found myself longing for the opposite of what I usually desired—to be legible, visible together to the world.

I would send her a really nice email, I decided, beginning to type. It would be long and winning and poetic, not my usual staccato questioning. I would reminisce about our happy moments together, our silly business, check on how she was healing from her extraction. Ask after the hospital bill. I would tell her about this land I came from. How the air felt, warm and velvet wet. How I spent my hours—necessarily sidestepping in my writing the existence of the two people who shaped them. I would tell her the lessons of this place. To bring water up from a well, you pull the rope hand over hand, as though you and the well are dancing a coy dance of seduction. To chop many red onions fast you need a very sharp cleaver and to slice down the onion half as though you are marking five-degree intervals on a protractor. To feel powerful, touch a thottavaadi, watch it shrivel and collapse at your finger’s brush. To know the limits of power, walk by it again in twenty minutes, when it is revived, standing as tall as if you were never born.

Once I could barely hold my eyes open, I switched off the CPU. Made my way down the dark passage.

A guest bedroom, they called it, though there was shared understanding that this was not a construction for the present, but an investment in how my future husband’s family would see them. Three-BHKs are the known domain of the middle class. They signal you have arrived, that you have enough to consider trivialities like where visitors lay their behinds to sleep. I came back wishing to be thought of as a guest, and commandeered the bedroom afforded me.

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