The Henna Artist
Her feet step lightly on the hard earth, calloused soles insensible to the tiny pebbles and caked mud along the riverbank. On her head she balances a mutki, the same earthenware jug she uses the carry water from the well every day. Today, instead of water, the girl is carrying everything she owns: a second petticoat and blouse, her mother’s wedding sari, The Tales of Krishna her father used to read to her—the pages fabric-soft from years of handling—and the letter that arrived from Jaipur earlier this morning...
The Secret Keeper of Jaipur
I stop walking to look at the mountains rising from their sleep. Winter in Shimla is coming to an end. The men and women wrap themselves in two, sometimes three, pashmina shawls, but the hills are casting off their blankets. I hear the plunk, plunk, plunk of melting snow hitting the hard ground as I make my way carefully to Lakshmi Kumar’s house. In the distant hills to the north, I Imagine my tribe herding their goats and sheep through the Kangra Valley to the village of Bramour, in the upper Himalayas, as I would be doing were my husband Dev still alive...
The Perfumist of Paris
There it is again. The idea that we women lose track of ourselves. Lakshmi always said henna was a way for a woman to find a part of herself she may have mislaid. Sheela said she wanted to bring the forgotten women back to life because while their painted images were famous, they themselves were invisible; they’d been discarded, like candy wrappers tossed on the ground. Is that erasure of us something other people do to us or do we women do it to ourselves?
Six Days in Bombay
I looked at our joined hands: hers blue-veined and pale, nails bitten to the quick, remnants of paint embedded in the fingerprint swirls, and mine the color of sand, scrubbed clean, slightly chapped at the fingertips. The warmth of her skin, slightly moist from the fever, was strangely comforting, the way my mother’s touch was. Mira Novak seemed to crave intimacy as intensely as most patients avoided it; they wanted only to reclaim their body—the one we poked and prodded—as soon as possible, shrugging off the memory of their convalescence…