Blue Jasmine Read Online Free PDF Page A

and soft. It was perfect, but I didn’t have anyone to share it with. I replaced the comforter on the bed withNanima’s blue silk blanket. I unwrapped the picture Uma had given me and put it on top of the chest of drawers. As I lingered in front of the painting, I began to feel like I was sharing my room with Uma like I used to in India.
    The long window of my room faced the backyard where a circle of yellow marigolds surrounded a clump of red zinnias. The lawn was green and so were the trees. I wondered what the large tree with the white bark was called. Its leaves shimmered and made the same rippling sound as the pipul tree did in our schoolyard, but it wasn’t a pipul . The pipul had heart-shaped leaves with pointy ends, and this tree had oblong leaves with rounded edges.
    At night as I lay in bed, I didn’t like my room as much as I’d liked it during the day. I was lonely. Even though it wasn’t cold, I snuggled up to the extra pillow and pulled my blanket all the way up to my chin. I don’t know when I fell asleep, but the next thing I heard was Mommy saying, “Seema, Seema, wake up.”
    I woke up shivering. Mommy held me in her arms, and I told her about my dream.
    â€œMommy, I was flying and the sky was dark and below me was the dark ocean. The thundering waves of the ocean were trying to catch me. They almost did catch me. There were sharks. Big ones with jaws of shining steel.”
    â€œYou were screaming.”
    â€œWas I?”
    â€œYes. That’s why I came In. You were shaking like a dry pipul leaf. Go back to sleep.”
    I held on to her.
    â€œDo you want me to sing a shloka ?” she asked.
    â€œYes.”
    She sat on my bed and sang the same shloka that Dadima used to sing.
    My heart was full of fear, and yet it had never felt emptier. So, I just listened to Mommy’s singing and held tightly to her arm.
    The next day as I unpacked my suitcases, I spotted the handkerchief that Mukta had given me. I sat there thinking about Mukta, her mother, her house, and her family. My room was bright and cheerful, and yet I could picture her dark and gloomy home vividly. Dadaji used to say that the real eyes are the mind’s eyes. I knew I was seeing with my mind’s eyes.
    I took the handkerchief and laid it gently in the drawer and put my clothes on top of it. Maybe burying the handkerchief would help me forget about Mukta, but I was wrong. It was impossible to bury her memory.
    Every morning when I got up I looked out the window, hoping to find an oblong bed of white parijat flowers with orange stems. I didn’t see them, but there were so many other trees and plants that were nameless to me. Who can tell me about the plants and flowers that grow in this garden?I wondered. Sometimes I saw a neighbor lady working in her garden. It was hard to see her face, for she was always bent over, but maybe someday I could meet her. Someday when I could speak better English I could ask her about the flowers.
    The first two weeks passed in a blur. Everything we did was new and different. Instead of washing clothes by hand, we washed and dried them in a machine; instead of sweeping floors with a broom, we cleaned them with a vacuum cleaner; instead of listening to news in Gujarati, we listened to the news in English; and instead of seeing so many people on the street, we only saw a few when we went for a walk.
    Of all the new things that we did, shopping for groceries was the most interesting. In the supermarket there were frozen dinners, soup in a can, seven different types of milk, more than ten flavors of yogurt, and twenty flavors of ice cream. There was cereal with nuts and cereal with fruit and there was cereal with lots of sugar. There were packages and bottles and containers and cartons all over the store lined up neatly as if they were ready for inspection. It was good to have so many choices, but it was hard to decide what to get.
    When we were out shopping,