Aimee Liu - Flash House

FLASH HOUSE

Copyright 2018 by Aimee E. Liu Cover image courtesy of Mukul Saini All rights reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Published by Jessfield Press ISBN: 9781625361387

New Delhi, India

J OANNA WAS DREAMING OF SNOW when Aidan kissed her goodbye. At his touch she came up fast and hard to a room too dark, hot against the phantom chill of her sleep. Her husbands closeness alarmed her.

Already dressed and seated on the edge of the bed, he smoothed the hair back from her face and kissed her again, longer this time, as if to imprint her with his leaving. He was off to Srinagar, he reminded her. Six A.M. flight.

She tasted the mint of his toothpaste, smelled his Burma Shave on her cheek. At once consoled and reluctant, she remembered why he was going to Kashmir. The Border War. U.N. observers. Proving himself an American. Depending on what he came up with and when, Aidan would be gone from Delhi for at least two weeks.

I wish you didnt have to do this, she said.

He squeezed her hand. She knew as well as he that there was no point discussing what he did or didnt have to do, but it was unlike him to hold on this tight, this long. She could feel his wedding band pressing into her fingertip.

What is it? she asked.

Will you say goodbye to Simon for me?

You did yourself, last night.

I know, buthe has a short memory. The forced energy of his smile cut through the darkness. Ill be in touch, just as soon as Ive got the right story.

No need to wait that long, she said lightly. But as he released her, she added, Be careful.

Youll be fine, Jo. Ive told Lawrence to see to it.

Thatll make all the difference.

Be nice. Hes a good friend, and we dont have many. Besides, Simon loves him even if you dont.

I hope you dont want me to love him! She tugged her husband back down beside her, placed her lips against his ear to remind him of their lovemaking the night before.

Its time, he said, firmly turning his head. But again, that hesitation. He cupped one hand to her cheek. I love you. You know that.

Neither forming a question nor a statement, the words seemed to wander between them.

I could go with you, she suggested, though they both knew Simon and her work made such impulses impossible.

He kissed her a third time, tenderlybrieflythen pulled back into his ritual preoccupation, reaching for his hat and bag, patting his pockets for wallet and documents: passport, visas, press certification, letters of safe conduct. Like a train edging cautiously but irreversibly out of the station, he moved toward the door. She started to get up, but he raised a hand. Stay there, he said, just where you are. That way Ill know where to find you. The half-light from the hall illuminated his smile, the determined tilt of his head. Before the door closed behind him, he looked back into the darkness and blew her one last kiss.

Moments later she heard the door to Simons room open at the other end of the hall. Then it closed softly and the sound of Aidans footsteps faded down the stairs.

F ROM THE BEGINNING, we were sisters more than mother and daughter. Joanna Shaw rescued me in her way, and I tried to return the favor. I do not say this boastfully, but ironies are the way of the world, and now that I am an old woman I tell you with certainty that those who presume to lift another are most often in need of being raised themselves.

At the same time, those who appear the weaklings of this earth may possess strengths that overrule the mightythat, indeed, may surpass even their own deepest longings and desires. I have seen this to be the case among women and children of my kind for as long as I can remember. Mrs. Shaw, too, was of my kind, though on the now distant day when I first claimed her I did not know this to be true.

On the contrary, as I watched her making her way down G. B. Road in her stiff yellow dress and broad-brimmed hat with her handsome young Hindu escort I thought this must be some pampered firenghi who possesses no notion of pain. She looked younger than her thirty-four years, with a fire in her eyes that at once invited and warned me away. I was merely one of countless children of the red-light district. I owned nothing, not even my skin, but I knew why this foreign lady had come. The whole street knew. Tongas turned left instead of right at the sight of her. Khas-khas tati dropped over open windows. Smugglers bundled up their wares and trotted out of view. Women drew scarves across their faces, and the street became suddenly lively with dancing bears, monkey wallahs , and the calls of melon and paan vendors. All for the benefit of the foreigner who would come to save us.

My keeper, Indrani, said that in the days of the British her kind were missionaries and bored commissioners wives. In the past two years since Independence they had been attached to the new Departments of Health and Social Welfare, and usually they were Indian, but they remained the same. Women with hair like dust clouds and radish noses who had never enjoyed the touch of a manor so Indrani said. Such women in India, it was well known, were so weak that for centuries they had required the almighty power of the Raj to stand guard over their virtue. Now this responsibility had fallen to Indias own officials and police. We in the street could not know why these men should protect the dust cloud ladies when they freely preyed on us, but neither did we question such things.

Mrs. Shaw was not ugly as the others I had seen. True, her body held hard juts and corners, and her lips were bare slivers against her teeth, but her eyes were large and filled with gold light, her skin and thick hair all the colors of honey. Her neck was long and slender and her ears shaped like perfect mangoes

You see, even as early as that first day, I was viewing her in a different fashion. We were strangers, yet any stranger who is drawing such examination becomes something else, doesnt she? A stranger is strange, unknown, unexamined. When we study another we become familiar, and therefore cannot strictly be called strangers. I have often thought that of the thousands who pass in the streets each day, many hundreds may have passed before. Yet even if they pass two, five, twenty times, still they remain strangers except for those few who catch our eye, whose features we note and whose place in the street and day we rememberthese are strangers no more but possessions of the mind. So in this way I, who was then called Kamla, claimed Mrs. Shaw even as I hid from her under the shadow of a bullock cart.

It was easy to see that she was new to India. Her face was like a childs at a puppet show, while her feet and twinkling gloves behaved as if they belonged to the puppet. How awkwardly they plucked at earth and air as she turned this way and that! For although Mrs. Shaws small mouth rounded with evident pleasure at the sight of a tinseled altar or Bharatis little daughter, Shanta, with a red hibiscus in her hair, still she seemed to cling to herself, clutching her shiny white pocketbook to her waist as she stepped sideways past a dozing pi dog. Clearly she wished neither to touch nor be touched. Having claimed her, however, I dismissed this.

I could not help imagining how it would feel to press my small dirty face between those clean folds of her skirt, to rub my palms on the whiteness of her gloves. I pictured my wild black hair coming smooth beneath the answering strokes of her fingers. My heart would quiet to a purr as her foreign voice poured over me. I loved her foreignness. I adhered to it. I did not believe she would rescue me, but I believed that she could if she so desired.