Creative Industries
“I untied my sari for your father, and I gave him a beautiful son,” Shakti said into the telephone, “and he told me there is no other woman for him. What else is a marriage but that?”
Her son Anil, on the other side of the international telephone line, shook his head. “Amah, please! Why do you have to run after him? He doesn’t care about us.”
“I’m not doing anything out of the way. You sent me photos, I’m taking to show him. That’s all. He likes to hear how you are doing.”
“Amah…” Anil half reached out a hand, as if to touch her. And then he let it fall. There was half a world between them. She was back in their small-town home in Malaysia and he was in urban California; she in a rubber estate laborer’s quarters that hadn't changed much since WWII, he n high-tech America where the clock on the wall read 1998, and not 1948. They were not just half a world but a whole universe apart. Anil shook his head. “Come on, Amah, you know that’s not true.”
From Monsoon Coming, a novel