Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu

Author:SJ Sindu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2017-04-28T20:36:11+00:00

Tamils believe that fate is written on top of our heads, immutable, our future stories scratched into our scalps with permanent ink, birth to death. We can’t run from it, we can’t fight it, we simply accept it—this notion that we’re doomed to pay for the sins we committed in our past lives.

Before I got married, Amma brought Kris’s horoscope and mine to an astrologer who told her we were a seventy-five percent match, and that all the indicators pointed to our having had a connection in a past life. Amma was thrilled. A match made in heaven, or rather, written on top of our heads as our souls traveled through the cosmos from one life to another.

I met Kris in college. He was a lanky boy from India with thick-framed glasses and ruddy skin he hated for its darkness. I met him in a gay and lesbian literature class, and for the longest time I knew him as the other South Asian queer on campus. He was pompous, and drove me crazy with the way he turned up his nose at books that weren’t part of the British canon, how he refused to look waiters in the eye. We would meet at parties, fight about the meaning of the Vedas or the true class issues in the Kama Sutra, but we didn’t become friends until his parents disowned him for being gay. He sought me out at a party, pulled me aside, and said, “I told my mother.”

“And?”

His chin, thin and sprinkled with sparse black hairs, quivered. “It was so stupid.”

His grief bent him toward me. He put his forehead on my shoulder, and just like that we were friends, bonded by our proximity to the cliff, our danger of falling.

•••

Our friendship passed in a blur of booze and parties. Kris and I knew enough people that we never had to get involved in the drama of any one social group. We rode to parties with Juan, the boy Kris dated on and off and the only person we knew with a car. Kris sat in the backseat with me, parting my hair in different ways and fussing with my shirt.

Sometimes I met girls at parties but usually I met men. None of them saw me. I wanted it that way.

At one party, Juan danced with a girl while Kris danced by himself near the edge of the crowd.

“Coldhearted,” said one of the guys next to me. He was blond and tall and spoke to no one in particular.

“Who?”

“My girlfriend.” He raised his bottle toward the dance floor. “I’m Derek.” He had at least a foot on me height-wise, so that when he looked at me he seemed to be bending down.

“Lucky.”

“Who’s lucky?”

“That’s my name. Lucky.”

The girl pressed against Juan, her lips on his.

Derek pointed at the door and followed me out onto the deck. Summer air pressed on my skin. He pulled out a packet of Pall Malls and offered one to me.

“You’re hot,” he said. He lit the cigarette I held between my teeth.

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