Ode to Broken Things by Dipika Mukherjee Read Free Book Online

the phone with a terse apology, explaining that she needed to send a very quick text, but it would only take a minute.
    Jay stretched out his feet and looked again at the woman before him. The crinkled hair, an untamable frizz, was pulled into a tight knot at her nape, which drew attention by its severe contrast. She could pass as Malay, this one. She looked a bit like his colleague in Boston, the one who had married the Pakistani fellow in a rain-sodden wedding last year.
    Agni put the phone down and regarded him with a half smile as he tried to frame a question. She shifted slightly, the slit in her sarong skirt framing a shapely thigh.
    Women like her thrummed with such tautness, he thought. Shanti had been exactly the same.
    “Thank you for this email… and for inviting me home.”
    She shrugged off his gratitude. “You were my mother’s best friend. It has been so long, but I wrote down everything I remembered. Maybe too much.”
    Jay smiled, even as his pen clicked in disbelief in his hands. “Yes, about your mother, Shanti, but… you said you were barely two years old then,” he paused. “Surely, you couldn’t have seen this… or remembered.”
    “But I did, Professor Ghosh. I can see the scene as clearly as I see you now.” She made a slight movement with the tips of her silver-pink nails, and he felt dismissed.
    She was clearly lying, but he didn’t know why. Before he could say anything, her telephone buzzed again. Agni looked at the number and, with another curt apology, explained that she had to take the call. This time she stepped outside, talking urgently into the phone.
    He was irritated by the constant interruptions. Even after meeting her, Agni’s words didn’t make it any clearer how much she really knew. Did she know that she shared her birthday with him? If her phone kept ringing like a hotline, he may never find out.
    He walked over to the window. Outside, an expanse of manicured land fell away from the slopes into an untamed jungle in the distance; palms swayed in the garden, shielding orangered heliconias bursting through the ground like strange winged birds. The house towered over the emerald landscape under an awning of delicately carved wood, propped up on cement stilts.
    There was a swish of sound as Agni re-entered the room. “I am so sorry, Professor.” She gestured towards her phone, “We are having some security issues at the office…”
    She trailed off and the silence grew longer as she turned her face towards the slatted glass windows. Jay followed her eyes. Even though the light filtered in through the shade of a rambutan tree loaded with red, hairy fruit, the air was moist with the heat of a Malaysian afternoon. Agni’s crinkly hair soaked in the sunshine and, as Jay stared at her with bemusement, she seemed to sizzle.
    Fiery Femme . Jay reframed this woman in front of him. Fire certainly wasn’t Shanti’s style. Shanti had been softer and had sizzled less and, although time had dulled the intensity of her being, he still remembered too well. How clearly this daughter, this mere shadow of a daughter, showed him that Shanti had always been out of his league.
    He was, of course, older now, while Shanti would forever be as young as the day she died. Shanti, caught in that vision he carried in his mind, would always be standing outside the house, under the old Angsana tree – shady and dense, where fragrant yellow flowers would bloom in large bunches, but only for a day. Shanti would stand, waiting for a bus in the early morning, clutching her books to her chest, kicking the dust at her feet. Suddenly a gust of wind from the east would brush the tree, shaking its crown so the golden flowers would rain down, and he, the fourteen-year-old Jay, would watch her transform as she raised her face as if to a lover’s caress. Then she would twirl in that golden shower, bathing her languorous limbs. He would, over and over, feel that prickle as his friend disappeared in that golden