Ode to Broken Things Read Online Free PDF

peddle my ethnicity?” Manju glared at him.
    “Look, I don’t understand it, but all this stuff about others and exile , and dislocation , and what’s that word… um, yeah, anomie ! What the fuck does it even mean?”
    “ Anomie ?”
    “You get all this attention because you are different, but that insults you? It doesn’t make sense.” He drew in an annoyed breath, “That’s why it’s paid so badly too.”
    Manju was calm. “If you think so little of my work, Jaan, why are you still with me?”
    Jay shrugged and said nothing. She was such a bear to live with. Manju slept all day after working through the night, and was grumpy when awake. She was starting to publish by then, in small poetry magazines that barely paid enough to cover her meals, and she was teaching wherever she could, freshman composition if they wouldn’t let her teach poetry.
    Then she published a chapbook of poetry. It received wonderful reviews but didn’t sell. She travelled around the country giving book readings to five or six people at a time; her biggest audience had numbered fourteen. Sitting in the darkened room while a spotlight shone on Manju, silhouetting her in a yellow cone and diminishing her sharp edges, Jay had been embarrassed.
    When Haversham University started to woo him, he managed to get Manju a teaching position as part of the deal. He even found himself house hunting in picturesque suburbs with her. Then Manju discovered the press release that the university had sent out.
    “The eminent scientist, Jayanta Ghosh; and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Andre Parks, will be joining the faculty in the fall,” she read out. “Twelve paragraphs of how wonderful you are, and what an honour it is for them. Oh wait! Here’s where I come in: Also joining our teaching faculty is the poet, Manjula Sharma … the fucking footnote.”
    Jay shrugged, “It’s a job.”
    “As if,” murmured Manju.
    “Maybe we can renegotiate a better position next year.”
    It had surprised him to see Manju gone the next morning. She had taken her things and left a note on the kitchen table . I don’t think you or Haversham need me. He had been sure she would call; this wasn’t the first time she had pulled this stunt in the two years they had been together. He had gone back to his lab, where his project on polymers in orthopaedic implants had consumed him. He analysed the samples from six resin lots of calcium, evaluating the stearate-free polyethylene for non-degradability. At least his work helped patients gain mobility, and decreased pain. He had no doubts about being gainfully employed.
    Now, at this prestigious new university, he was in a different league. Untouchable.
    He didn’t have the time to moan about his demons, unlike Manju, whose fears were starker. “My father killed himself when I was a teenager,” she had told him. “Suddenly, I came home and all these aunties were there around my mother. He had shopped around for doctors until he had enough sleeping pills to do it.”
    “I’m sorry.” Jay didn’t know what to say. He wished she wouldn’t tell him so much.
    “Yeah. My mother, well, she stayed here to give us a better life, you know. And she never let us forget it.”
    Jay had looked at the floor and said, “My best friend killed herself too, back in Malaysia.”
    “Really? How come you’ve never talked about this before?”
    “What’s to talk about? She got pregnant, drowned, left a mongrel child.”
    “What the fuck is a mongrel child ?”
    Jay shrugged. “Whatever. She killed herself on my birthday. The gift that keeps on giving, eh?”
    “No!” said Manju, “that’s so fucking unbelievable.”
    It was twelve days since Manju had left, and he wouldn’t be there when she came crawling back. He was eleven thousand kilometres away, his plane pulsating at the tarmac of Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, on his way to Malaysia. Jay looked out of the window at the bright lights of an airport that was