Track Mangoes

The girl sat on the back porch looking out at the ghats on the river, the trash pieces and dismembered heads of animals floating past as the woman thrashing sheets in great blue tubs full of soapy water wiped the sweat from her brow, smudging across her forehead the vermilion she had placed on her head earlier that morning. And as she watched the woman walk up the bank of the river back to the hotel from whence she came the girl gingerly sipped at her chai which seemed, to her, richer than the chai she had been used to drinking.

Oh! she remembered suddenly. The waiter said it had been made with buffalo's milk! But why? Heaven forbid the other students would see her sitting on that porch with it--yes, the students who were all spending the afternoon rummaging through the markets adjacent to the slums, chattering away about the "real India" and all the legless beggars they had seen by the side of the road earlier that day. How upsetting! one of them would say, while the others would respond in a symphony of approvals whilst holding up silver rings to the light for inspection, finding a flaw in it, and placing it down again.

Earlier that day the girl had tried writing a letter before she found herself in tears (why, she didn't quite know) at the desk and tossing her alarm clock violently against the wall.

The sun had been out that day, though cast in a thick curtain of the city's smog. Were there worlds beyond which they could never touch, she thought, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness? She could not tell. . . . Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle. . . or was that too whimsical? Perhaps the hundred Indias which fuss and squabble so tiresomely are one? She had not the apparatus for judging.

"OH GOD DAMNIT!" she squealed.

"What?" said the boy sitting behind her.

The girl turned around, quite startled, with the expression of utter terror and confusion cast about her face. The boy put down his newspaper and uncrossed his legs, tipping his sunglasses down on the bridge of his nose. "Oh, nothing," she said, standing up to retire into the foyer. "I was just...going...back to my room."

The girl left the chai on the porch's railing, steaming. As the boy saw it, catching light as the smog cleared, the woman washing laundry had left the river bank, though he thought not of it, for he had not seen her previously, and the river looked, at once, how it used to be and how it was, but not in the least how it appeared to her.