State of Wonder by Ann Patchett Read Free Book Online

burning slowly to ash, his books and papers arranged in such precise order that at dinner time they had to sit on the floor in the living room and eat off the coffee table. There he is at her bed at night, pulling the covers beneath her chin, tucking them in on either side. “Snug like a bug?” he asks her. She nods her head against the pillow, the only part of her free to move, and gazes at his lovely face only inches above hers, until she can no longer keep her eyes open.
    Marina did not forget her father in his absence, nor did she learn to accept the situation over time. She longed for him. Her mother often said that Marina was smart in just the way her father was smart, and that explained why he was so proud that she excelled in the very things that interested her the most: earth sciences and math when she was a little girl, calculus, statistics, inorganic chemistry when she was older. Her skin was all cream and light in comparison to her father’s and very dark when she held her wrist against her mother’s. She had her father’s round, black eyes and heavy lashes, his black hair and angular frame. Seeing her father gave her the ability to see herself, the comfort of physical recognition after a life spent among her mother’s people, all those translucent cousins who looked at her like she was a llama who had wandered into their holiday dinner. The checkers in the grocery store, the children at school, the doctors and the bus drivers all asked her where she was from. There was no point in saying, Right here, Minneapolis , though it was in fact the case. Instead she told them India, and even that they didn’t always understand ( Lakota? asked the gas station attendant, and Marina would have to work very hard not to roll her eyes because her mother had explained that eye-rolling was the height of rudeness and was never an appropriate response, even to very stupid questions). Being the child of a white mother and foreign graduate-student father who took his doctoral degree but not his family back to his country of origin after he was finished had become the stuff of presidential history, but when Marina was growing up there was no example that could easily explain her situation. In time, she came to tell herself that she practically was from India because after all her father was from there and lived there and she had visited him there every two or three years when enough money had been saved. These dramatic trips were discussed and planned as great events, and as Marina marked off the months then weeks then days on her calendar what she was longing for was not only her father but an entire country, that place where no one would turn around and look at her unless it was to admire her good posture. But then, a little less than a week before she left, the dreams would begin.
    In the dreams she is holding her father’s hand. They are walking up Indira Gandhi Sarani towards Dalhousie Square or following Bidhan Sarani in the direction of the college where her father is a professor. The farther they go along the more people start to come out of buildings and alleyways. Maybe the power has gone out again and the trams have stopped and all the fans in all the kitchens have stopped so that people who were in their apartments have come out to the street because the crowd is pushing in closer and closer as more people are joining in along the edges. There is the heat of the day to contend with and then the heat of so many bodies, their sweat and perfume, the sharp scent of spice carried in the smoke of vendors’ fires and the bitter smell of marigolds strung into garlands, and all together it begins to overwhelm her. Marina can’t see where she’s going anymore, only the people pressing into her, hips wrapped in crimson saris and dhoti-punjabis knocking her from side to side. She reaches out her hand and pats a cow. She can hear the persistent music of jewelry weaving through the shouted conversations, bangle bracelets