Read Red Dot Irreal for Free Online Page B

cheerily.
    “Good morning, dear lady,” said the fish. “Today is the day I will die.”
    Mrs Singh stood there dumbfounded, but not because the fish had spoken; she had enjoyed a loquacious companionship with the snapper for nearly three years, ever since it had pleaded with her to let it live, that it would bring her good fortune and good health as long as she gave it a restful place to exist. And it had made good on its promises; her sales had more than quadrupled in the intervening time, which was a sort of consolation after the death of her husband Harshad from lung cancer. The money could not bring back Harshad, but it did allow her a measure of security and material happiness. Which was why the fish’s announcement terrified her with its consequences.
    “Why would you say this, fish?”
    “Because it is true. I have lived a long life, in part thanks to you, but it will come to an end later today.”
    “Are you certain? How can you know for sure, ah?”
    “It is a gift, dear lady, one that all red snappers, communicative or silent, are born with. In my experience, this knowledge is never wrong, and is not to be taken lightly.”
    Mrs Singh let the implication hang in the air as she went about preparing her kitchen for the day. She chopped eggplant and okra and tomatoes into thick slices to be used later in her curries. Her knee was bothering her again today, the result of a hard twist earlier in the week; she’d pop down to one of the neighborhood private clinics later this afternoon after she closed up. Yet another irritant of her advancing age. She had run track in secondary school and junior college, and even won a few regional prizes; injuries were part of any sport, and she couldn’t count the number of times she’d twisted or sprained a knee or an ankle. She thought about the fact that she could no longer recover with the speed of her youth, and let her Chinese chopper come down with added force on each innocent vegetable.
    Mrs Singh also needed to prepare the fish themselves, but her younger son Vishal was late returning from the wet market. Again. Where was that boy? Almost eighteen, going into National Service in three months, but more often than not he had his nose in a book. And not in a medical or law book, as she hoped for him, but fiction of all things. What use was fiction in the real world? she’d repeatedly asked him. He’d tried to explain how experiencing life through someone else’s eyes would make him a more empathetic and understanding person, less likely to be closed-minded or judgmental, more willing to think for himself rather than blindly follow a given ideology. But she wasn’t sure she accepted his argument. When Vishal had been born, his large head nearly killed her—she’d lost a lot of blood, and the doctors had to rush her into emergency surgery, which meant she hadn’t been able to hold Vishal for the first time until the next day as she recovered in the ICU—and she tsked him now in his absence that he would choose to fill up that big cranium with literary nonsense rather than something useful.
    While she waited, she began putting together the ingredients for the curry: softened dried chilies, cumin seeds, coriander, curry powder, chili powder, garlic, fenugreek, curry leaves, tamarind paste, coconut milk. She ground the dried chilies, cumin seeds and coriander in her heavy stone mortar, then placed a metal pot on her gas stove, lit the fire, and poured in ghee to start heating. The recipe was instinct now; she often bragged that she could assemble a curry blindfolded, but no one yet had taken her up on the challenge. Mrs Singh’s mother brought the recipe with her from Kerala when she and her new husband, Mr Menon (Mrs Singh’s father), had traveled by boat to Singapore so that he could start his career as a mechanical engineer. Mrs Menon had passed the recipe down to Mrs Singh in that same instinctual way, eschewing precise measurements in lieu of feeling her way