Sheila used to be Sheela once - Sheela of the bland and vanilla fame. So innocuous that she could blend with the background soundlessly. Then in her teens a little knowledge of numerology prompted the dangerous desire for change - namely Sheila. The clothes grew bolder, the hairstyle chic and red usurped pink as her favorite color. She became aware of the primal attraction she felt for tall, athletic men with big lips. Her basal metabolic rate seemed to spike when she was around them - on a cold day she could be sweating. Yet such a man without the spark of wit could not start a fire despite all the electric charge.
When she enters the conference room, Rajesh recognizes her as the woman with the strappy red sandals. He smiles at her. She smiles back in vague recognition. She notices his beer belly, dimples, flabby face and thin lips - the very antithesis of what constitutes attractive to her. Yet during the course of the two hour meeting, she glances at him at few times somewhat intrigued by the air of brooding sadness about him. Sheila's first instinct about him (and she has these about most people) is that he is a romantic soul trapped in the body of a drudge. She feels sorry for him like a mother may feel for her sick child.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
Comments
Hey is this a story in parts like the magazines used to run in India? (To be continued after every cliffhange?)
Looking forward to reading more!
-gg
I did not think of this a story in parts but now you've got me thinking :) I was doing it as a random writing exercise with no precise end in view.