One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Read Free Book Online

a half cup—and how could he give less?—it would be gone.
    Mr. Mangalam was taking tiny bites of his egg with his eyes closed, savoring every morsel. Cameron asked him if there was anything else to drink. Maybe something they had overlooked? A gallon jug in the back? Some leftover tea? Mr. Mangalam opened his eyes reluctantly and shook his head.
    Then Malathi said, “There is a bathroom.” In the pencil light, her eyes gleamed, chips of unforgiving, as she pointed at Mangalam. “His.”
     
    THOUGH PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY SUSPECTED MANGALAM OF HAVING suppressed this crucial bit of information on purpose, it was not so. The earthquake and its aftermath had driven the presence of the bathroom from his mind. Very possibly, in a few hours, feeling natural urges, he would have recalled it and told Cameron. But perhaps there was something Freudian behind his forgetting, because the bathroom had always been his jealously guarded domain.
    This bathroom, an anomaly of construction to which the only access was through Mr. Mangalam’s office, was something Malathi’s coworkers discussed often, usually as they made their way during their break down the long corridor to the women’s restroom, which was drafty and smelled of mildew. Because none of them had seen Mangalam’s bathroom, in their minds it assumed mythic proportions, filled with items culled from the pages of the glossies they bought, secondhand, from the newspaper stall near the subway. Floor-length mirrors, silken towels, perfumed liquid soap in elegant crystaldispensers, a braided ficus tree that reached all the way to the ceiling, a Jacuzzi tub—even a bidet. They spoke of these things with envy but not bitterness; in the universe they inhabited, it was expected that the boss would have a bathroom to himself while the underlings trekked to the other side of the building.
    Malathi, too, had subscribed to this worldview until Mr. Mangalam began to single her out. As his attentions grew, an illicit hope blossomed in her breast. She found herself thinking, If he really cares for me… She changed her break times to match his, though she knew that people would gossip. Several times a day she went into his office to ask what to do with applications she knew perfectly well how to handle. Waiting for his response, she leaned against the closed bathroom door in a casual pose that showed off her curves. These strategies led to the gift of chocolate and to today’s kiss, but not to the words she most wanted to hear: an invitation to use his bathroom, which would have countered the smug smile on the wife’s face and proved to Malathi that Mangalam did not consider her just another time-pass girl.
    Barricaded in his office today, Malathi had realized that this was her chance to explore it; once her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, she went through it systematically. She discovered that the bathroom was nothing like the girls’ fantasies. It was a tiny rectangle into which a sink and a toilet had been crowded. Like the rest of the building, it was old and dispirited. The mirror’s edges felt uneven and worn under her fingers, and the toilet-paper holder wobbled. The only personal items in the bathroom were an air-freshening spray that smelled of chemicals and a bottle of mouthwash. Malathi had used it, swirling generous amounts around in her mouth. It was the least Mangalam and the universe owed her. The mouthwash tasted minty and bitter. Like love, she thought. Then she clicked her tongue, annoyed at having come up with a cliché like that. Finally,she had dipped into his file cabinets, not really expecting to find anything. But her fingers had closed around an item that made her grin fiercely in the dark. For now, she would keep that discovery to herself.
    When Malathi led him into this sagging, cramped space, Cameron couldn’t have been more delighted if he’d been ushered into a spa suite at a resort hotel. He checked the faucet to make sure that the water was