Inheritance Read Online Free PDF Page A

that in New York City a Tibetan monk had made a mandala out of colored sands, a complex representation of many worlds with intricate designs, and had then brushed the whole thing carefully into a jar and deposited it in a river. It was an act for peace.

    The armless man was gone when I came out. I had a chance to look at the library wall. It was a popular place for impassioned writing, and I checked out the new graffiti. PROMOTE NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT , I read. ADC OUT OF OFFICE , and FREE NELSON MANDELA , Every day, for two weeks now, someone had scrawled this last message, and every day, for two weeks, someone had white-washed it away. There was nothing else interesting, so I moved on.
    My grandmother had given me my first drawing lesson. She drew a large circle, then a small circle right on top of it; adding whiskers and ears, eyes and a tail, she had a cat. My grandmother’s hands were large and wrinkled, ancient-looking hands that could hold an entire bird in either palm. She used to make me rice pancakes for breakfast, spreading the batter into cat shapes. I loved it when my grandmother served me food; the flavor seemed to be imparted from her hands. Now we had a cook to prepare the meals.
    My grandmother had lived for three years in Malaysia and knew some words in Cantonese. It was always a marvel to me that she’d lived in a land so far away from home, where people spoke a different language and ate fish with chopsticks all day. Women rode bicycles there with their tunics billowing in the wind, my grandmother said. She had a box of black lacquer, etched with ivorydragons and flowers. I’d trace the whorls of dragon breath and wish I could see what she had seen.
    For my first mandala, I chose blue and green watercolors to paint on pale violet paper. I knew that for the power to work, I’d have to draw truly, without hesitation; I couldn’t sketch first. I made a box and put a circle inside it. I decided to stop there, not wanting to take chances. I left it to dry on my desk, and it seemed to me to be a flag.
    My grandmother called me, and I went to press her feet. Her feet had hard, cracked calluses on the soles, from years of labor and walking. They always distressed me, for they looked painful, but she would scoff at my sentiment. “They are evidence of a good life,” she’d say, but I didn’t believe her. I massaged her feet with oil and then braided her hair. As if in irony, ever since her illness, her hair had been growing luxuriantly, winding down her back like a silver rope.
    On the second day, I drew concentric circles in orange on yellow paper. It looked like a sun, and I liked the effect. The first mandala had curled up, so I pressed it between two books. I reminded myself to use less water. I cleaned my brushes by dipping them in an old coffee tin andsqueezing out the water with my fingertips. In school, we always used dainty teacups in which the water became muddy with color too fast, and we weren’t allowed to use our fingers. I had nearly failed Drawing and Painting last year. Never mind, I told my grandmother, I do well in everything else and can still go to a good college. The third day, I drew a box, and inside it I placed a diamond. Inside the diamond, I placed another box and inside that, another diamond. I finished with one more box. It looked like a lotus.
    That was the day the doctor came to visit, and I painted while he examined my grandmother in the next room. Even though I was ten, he still gave me sucking candy. He smiled at me when he had finished in my grandmother’s room and asked me to get the prescription filled. With my mouth full of lively peppermint, I rode my bike to the pharmacy. On the way I passed the library wall. Underneath FREE NELSON MANDELA , the whitewasher, tired and possibly fed up, had written WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE. I stood there awhile and realized that with a letter change, Mandela was like the word “mandala.” I wondered if that was significant.
    The next