A Bollywood Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

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4
    M ili loved the mile-long walk from her apartment to her office in Pierce Hall. Truth be told, she loved everything about Ypsilanti, the quiet university town in Michigan she had called home for four months, except maybe the tongue-twister name. She loved the neat roads, the redbrick facades, the rolling expanses of lush green grass. But most of all she loved the wide-open blue sky with perfect white clouds that looked like they had been drawn with a crayon.
    Back home in Rajasthan the sky was a more purple blue and the clouds were more feathery brushstokes than distinctly etched curves. And yet it was the sky that eased Mili’s ache for home. Ypsilanti was the only place other than Balpur where she had seen so much sky. In Jaipur the buildings lining the lanes cut the sky in half. As for the few days’ worth she’d seen of Delhi and Mumbai, you’d have to fall over backward to get even a glance of sky through all that concrete.
    As she neared Pierce Hall she had the strangest feeling, not quite as if she were coming home but as if she were going to a dear friend’s house. She swiped her card in the reader and took the half flight of stairs down to the basement. The musty old wood scent filled her nose. Everyone in the office complained about the smell. But the painted timber pillars that lined the open courtyard at the center of her grandparents’ house had this exact smell. Mili had spent so many afternoons with her cheek pressed against a pillar while her naani dispensed advice to the village women that the smell was infused with all the warmth of her childhood.
    The office was empty. The rest of the graduate assistants and the professors who ran the Applied Research Unit wouldn’t start to arrive for another thirty minutes. But it was Tuesday and on Tuesdays Mili came in early to use the office phone to call her naani. She used her own calling card of course and she had cleared it with Jay Bernstein, her boss. She hung her mirrorwork sack on the coat hanger and dialed the number. Her naani would be waiting at the village post office for her call. Naani had steadily refused to have a phone installed in her house. “There’s no one I want to talk to whom I can’t talk to on the face,” she always said. And now her granddaughter had run off where she could no longer talk to her “on the face.”
    “Did you eat your dinner?” Always the first question.
    “Yes, Naani.” Except it had been breakfast.
    “How much longer before you come back home?” Always the second question. “He called, you know?”
    Mili pulled the phone away from her ear and groaned. “No, Naani, he didn’t. No one is going to call.” At least not yet. But she was here and she was going to make something of herself, make herself so worthy no one in their right mind would turn her away. And then she’d call him, instead of waiting. Maybe.
    “He’s going to call. You mark my words,” Naani said with so much conviction Mili wondered what scheme she was cooking up. “Have I ever been wrong?”
    “No, Naani, you’re never wrong.”
    “Do they feed you well? I’ve heard horrible things about hostel food. The other day at the Delhi University hostel thirty students died because a lizard fell into the dal.”
    “There’s no hostel, Naani. I told you, I have a flat and a kitchen of my own.” No point mentioning that soon she wouldn’t have a roommate. If she told naani she lived alone, her grandmother might not need to pretend a heart attack like she’d done when Mili had decided to leave for college in Jaipur three years ago. She would have one for real.
    “How much does dal cost there? The price of dal went up to eighty rupees a kilo yesterday. And unless you’re rich you can’t even think about onions, let alone put them in your mouth.”
    Mili hadn’t eaten dal in four months. She had seen a bag of dal marked “yellow split lentils” in the grocery store last week. She had picked it up and held it to her cheek