Mallika: What to do?
August 1980
Three days before Arnav and I left for graduate school in Pennsylvania, I quietly left my house, walked swiftly to the row of houses behind, and surreptitiously climbed up to his barsati. It was five a.m. and still dark.
I was staggering under the weight of all that I was carrying up to his room. My buried story, for one. The earth under which it lay was moving. Not that I had any intention of speaking about it to Arnav. How could I when I couldn’t even speak of it to myself? Yet, as I went upstairs to his room, it was what I bore.
On top of it were the two lies which I had practiced all night. One lie was in anticipation of Arnav’s question, why. In the spectrum of lies, this was a small and harmless one, yet as I climbed up to his room, its weight wa
