Ode to Broken Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

you want from me, B?”
    “I’m sorry.” She kissed him on the lips. “Just let me get used to us ,” she said. “I’ll tell her soon, promise.”

Five
    Jay Ghosh felt the plane stop and then start again. Inside the dimmed interior of the business class cabin, he unclenched his fist and fought the urge to crane his head for a look. The boy next to him, perched at the window seat, was about eight years old, probably the scion of an important Chinese family in Malaysia and travelling as an unaccompanied minor. Jay found himself increasingly irritated by the ungentle bobbing of the child, who was looking out of the window with great excitement.
    The flashing lights of the cars on the tarmac had distracted the child from the game on his screen. Now the control dangled on Jay’s side of the seat, and he glowered at the intrusion. Jay pressed the button to call for a whiskey.
    An Asian stewardess of doll-like proportions stopped at his seat. Before Jay could say anything, the boy screeched, “Why got police car and ambulance also?”
    The stewardess ignored him and told Jay, “We have a medical emergency on our hands. One of the passengers seems to be disoriented and shaking. Can I get you another drink, sir?”
    Before Jay could ask for anything, the boy leaned across and shouted, “Got bomb on plane, ah?”
    The stewardess managed to force a weak laugh before fleeing. Jay closed his eyes and imagined Manju smacking the child’s clammy hands off the armrest. She was the most unmaternal woman he knew.
    Manjula Sharma… how had she come into his life? He thought of holding Manju in his arms again, but this time strangling her, watching the disbelief on her face. She would probably enjoy it, thinking it was some new sexual game. Pain was exciting; life had to be a tragedy and the constant pain of it kept her going.
    “Every word, all nothing, day after day, it hurts .” That was how Manju spoke while wringing a new poem, the single page crumpling under her frustration in the early morning.
    “So why don’t you do something else? Something not so painful?”
    “Jaan, you will never understand!” she rolled her eyes.
    Jay knew she wasn’t his type. He liked his women smooth and fair, who never bared their arms in the hot sun, never breastfed babies, and kept flat stomachs and pert breasts into middle age. When they made love Manju clutched at him with a needy ferocity. Their relationship toppled him from the parallel rails of the ordered life he first envisioned in Malaysia, while swatting flies on hot afternoons and listening to the horn blaring Pam-pumpah-pah, Old newspaper, Paper lama, Pam-pah-pah-pah.
    On such afternoons, his mother had warned: This is what you will become, son, driving a sampah lorry to pick up old newspapers, if you don’t study hard .
    While his mother had droned on like humming flies he had stared out the window, waiting for her, the doctor’s wife, his first love (even before Shanti, if Shanti could be called a love ; she had been an obsession ), driving to the club in her maroon Jaguar SS 100 Roadster. Her arms were hidden in a snowy linen shirt billowing in the wind and her face shaded by a ridiculous hat flopping about like the ears of her canine companion. Her lips glistened to match her silk cheongsam , and right then, at twelve years of age, he had sworn to become a doctor so that he too would deserve a creature as wonderful as this.
    Whenever Manju started to whine, Jay sucked noisily at his teeth, dislodging imaginary food particles so that he wouldn’t have to listen.
    “I have never belonged here,” Manju would say. “I am still asked where home is for me. I could be with three other American writers at a reading. We could have gone to the same school even, but it’s so predictable; they want me to talk about new ethnicities or brown bodies .”
    “That’s because you peddle it,” he said.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Your ethnicity. What else do you write about?”
    “I