Read Riot for Free Online Page B

beyond the next day. It was clear she had gone much further. Nandini was seeing herself in my marital bed, and convincing herself that’s where she belonged. I was beginning to feel trapped.
    One night Katharine noticed a suspicious scent on the sheet, and wondered if one of the servants were taking their siesta in her bed. Their injured protestations of innocence made it clear the idea was unthinkable to them. Before long Katharine began to think of another possibility she had considered unthinkable.
    You find this embarrassing, Randy? Nah, you journalists have pretty thick skins. You’ve heard worse, I’m sure. But this is all off the record. You understand that. Fact is, when I’ve had a few I talk too much. Especially these days. It’s all I’ve got left, Randy. Words.
    Yeah, pour the rest. There isn’t much left. Might as well finish the bottle.
    So Katharine was beginning to get suspicious. But it wasn’t my wife who found out. It was Priscilla. And in the worst possible way.
    Of all of us, it was Priscilla who led the most Indian life. Kim had his high school friends and his exams; Lance had a small group of American friends with a shared addiction to comics, which they exchanged incessantly; Katharine had her teaching and the household; I had my work and Nandini. Priscilla was the one person with a genuine curiosity about Indians — not the handful of Americanized rich kids she met in her school, but what she called “real Indians.” Early on she decided to teach the alphabet to our servants, and was soon giving them reading lessons after dinner. One day she went with the gardener to his home and came back with a horrified account of his family’s poverty. I had no choice but to double his wage. Soon everyone who did any work for us wanted her to visit them too.
    It was Priscilla who was the most active member of the school social service league, Priscilla who volunteered to read to blind children, Priscilla who helped Sundays at the Catholic orphanage. She didn’t know a single Indian with a college degree or a fancy job, but she really cared for the underside of this society.
    So inevitably, when the dhobi’s young son, who carried the bundles of laundry for his father, came to our home looking feverish and ill one Wednesday, it was Priscilla who insisted he rest instead of continuing with his father’s rounds. I was already at the office; I only learned this later. When the father protested that he could not possibly take the boy back home with so many visits left to make, Priscilla declared the child could rest at our place, aspirined and blanketed, and be picked up by his father at the end of the dhobi’s day. And it was typical of Priscilla, of course, that she would decide to skip her regular afterschool commitments to come home early and make sure her patient had been properly fed by the servants and was doing well.
    If I had paid more attention to my daughter, I would have realized all this. And I would not have been at home, buck naked and whooping as I took Nandini doggy-style, slapping her ample behind like a cowboy taming a mare, when Priscilla, puzzled by the noise, opened the door.
    She didn’t scream. She didn’t slam the door. She didn’t run away. Instead, she just stood there, her baby blue eyes widening in bewilderment and hurt, not comprehending what was going on, not wanting to comprehend. And as I saw her, I stopped moving, frozen in shame and embarrassment.
    â€œRuddy, why do you stop?” Nandini clamored, kneeling on the bed on all fours, her breasts still swinging from the momentum of our coition, her eyes shut in ecstasy, oblivious of the intrusion.
    That broke the spell in which Priscilla was imprisoned. A solitary tear escaped from one eye and rolled down her cheek. And then she began to sob.
    â€œPriscilla,” I said, not knowing what to do. I pulled myself out of Nandini and tried to clamber off the bed