Ravi didn't wait long to tell her. It was the night that Meera and he arrived in London, haggard from their two-day honeymoon in Jaipur, where an overenthusiastic bearer woke them every morning at six with bed-tea. Then, on a connecting flight from Cairo, they had dozed, their heads forming a tent against the propeller roar, and now, in Earl's Court, the street below empty save for murmuring students and a chestnut seller with a scratchy voice, they stayed awake into the night. Ravi showed her around the sparse, drafty top-floor flat and plugged in the three-bar fire. Then he began speaking to her in a businesslike way, a tone she'd never detected before in his arsenal of charm.
"I suppose, dear, we might as well discuss the issue at hand," he said. Casually he brought up the fact that he was already married to a woman in England, Margaret, a nurse. "I can only be half a husband," he declared. "I owe a responsibility to this woman. You see, when I was lonely and sad in this new country, she was of great ... assistance... to me, and I am like a father to her two children. No, let me finish. You see, there was no circumstance in which I could inform my family in Amritsar about her. People there don't understand these distances-the new world you and I inhabit." Ravi was a tall man with aristocratically weatherbeaten skin. He stooped more and more as he spoke, clutching the daggers of hair at the back of his neck, one eye twitching a little, the whites embroidered with rivulets of red, even as his voice remained deliberate. "You must realize, Meera, it was a very difficult circumstance for me. When a man is cast away from home, he needs an anchor to keep his ship in port."
Meera stood on her toes. Swaddled in several hand-knit pullovers, she reached up and touched his face.
Ravi looked as if he were going to sneeze but then relaxed.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin August 14, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin August 14, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
NO WAY BACK
The resurgence, in the past decade, of Paul Schrader as one of the most accomplished and acclaimed contemporary movie directors is part of a bigger trend: the self-reinvention of Hollywood auteurs as independent filmmakers.
PRIMORDIAL SORROW
\"All Life Long,\" the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: \"The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea,/ All life long crying without avail,/As the water all night long is crying to me.\"
CHOPPED AND STEWED
The other day, at a Nigerian restaurant called Safari, in Houston, Texas, I peeled back the plastic wrap on a ball of fufu, a staple across West Africa.
TOUCH WOOD
What do people do all day? My daughter loves to read Richard Scarry's book of that title, though she generally skips ahead to the hospital pages.
HELLO, HEARTBREAK
Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era.
ENEMY OF THE STATE
Javier Milei's plan to remake Argentina begins with waging war on the government.
THE CHOOSING ONES
The saga of my Jewish conversion began twenty-five years ago, when I got engaged to my first husband.
OBSCURE FAMILIAL RELATIONS, EXPLAINED FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Children who share only one parent are half siblings. Children who have been bisected via a tragic logging accident are also half siblings, but in a different way.
NOTE TO SELVES
The Sonoran Desert, which covers much of the southwestern United States, is a vast expanse of arid earth where cartoonish entities-roadrunners, tumbleweeds, telephone-pole-tall succulents make occasional appearances.
BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
