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around, jostling each other, drinking from brown paper bags. From time to time they dart sideways glances at me and my Indian clothes. I can tell they haven’t seen many of us. I clutch at the boat’s railings, shivering, wishing myself back in Sacramento, where no one stares when I walk to the store in my salwaar kameez. I hate it all, the knifing wind, the furtive looks, the effortless way in which my brother ignores everything equally—the cold, the men, his visiting sister. He gazes with concentration at the dead landscape as though he were alone in it. Maybe in a way he is, though in his hip-hugging jeans and army surplus jacket, he looks to me just like all the other young men on the ferry. Even the expression on his closed face is so totally
American
. This strikes me as particularly ironic. Because unlike me—who had eagerly (too eagerly?) agreed to have a marriage arranged with Sandeep mostly because he lived abroad—Tarun had never wanted to come to America.
    A FEW WEEKS before Tarun arrived in Vermont, my mother wrote me a letter.
    Today Taru and I had a terrible fight. He still refuses to go to college in America, although his acceptance letter has arrived. He says he wants to stay with me. But I’m terrified to keep him here. You know how bad the Naxal movement is right now in Calcutta. Every morning they find more bodies of young men in ditches. Taru keeps telling me he’s safe, he doesn’t belong to any political party. But that means nothing. Just last week there was a murder right on our street. Remember Supriyo, that good-looking boy? He didn’t belong to any party either. I heard from Manada Pishi next door that his face was sliced to shreds. His poor mother has had a nervous breakdown. I reminded Taru of that. He still wouldn’t listen.
    Finally I called him a coward, hiding from the world behind his mother’s sari, a fool who lived in a fantasy land. How could he throw away this opportunity, I shouted, when I’d worked so hard to bring him this far. I said he was ungrateful, a burden to me. Didn’t he see that I couldn’t sleep at night, worrying, because he was here? You can imagine how I hated saying it—I could see the abhimaan on his face, like a wound—but it was the only thing I knew that would make him go.
    She had been right. He had gone. What she hadn’t foreseen was how absolute that going would be.
    Today I am thinking about the word Ma had used to describe Tarun’s reaction. Abhimaan, that mix of love and anger and hurt which lies at the heart of so many of our Indian tales, and for which there is no equivalent in English. If Tarun pushed her away, would the red-haired girl feel abhimaan? Or are we capable of an emotion only when the language of our childhood has made it real in our mouths?
----
    MY MOTHER’S LETTER distressed me, but it was distress of a peculiar, blurred kind. I knew how serious the situation in Calcutta was, but somehow the tragedies Ma spoke of weren’t
real
, not like my own problems. The pain of my daughter’s swollen gums as her first teeth came through; the smell of our apartment which, no matter how much I scrubbed, stank of stale curry; the arguments I seemed to have every evening with Sandeep and which were resolved, inevitably, the only way we knew how: by the uneasy press of our bodies against each other in bed, his mouth tasting of cloves, making me drunk, making me temporarily forget. Inescapably mundane, these things loomed so large in my world that they forced everything else to recede. A few months later, when Tarun would arrive in Vermont and call me, his voice over the phone line would be edged with a sharp, silver need. But it, too, would belong to that other plane of existence, like a flash of lightning far up in the night sky.
    I hated this change in myself, this shrinking of sensibility, this failure of intelligence. But I didn’t know what to do about it. Did anyone else suffer from such a disease? I was afraid to ask Sandeep, who