The World We Found Read Online Free PDF

hand brushed against hers. It was the most delicious combination of aliveness and dreaminess she had ever experienced. And just then, in response to something she’d said, Armaiti had rolled over on her side and propped her head on her elbow to look down at Kavita’s face, inches from her own. “What you don’t realize, Ka,” she said, and then the rest of her sentence disappeared into the shimmering afternoon air, because the nickname had landed on her like a kiss and all she could see then was Armaiti’s hair set on fire by the sun, the flecks of light in Armaiti’s warm, brown eyes, Armaiti’s golden face against the denim-blue sky, obscuring, no, taking the place of the sun.
    Kavita waited until Laleh disappeared through the front door of the dentist’s building, then pulled out of the gate and made a left turn onto the busy street.
    Armaiti. Had she ever loved anyone as much? What she now had with Ingrid was so different. Kavita remembered the countless nights when she had lain alone in her single bed, pining away for Armaiti, trying to stop her hands from roaming her body, to intellectualize the slow heat climbing up her limbs, to explain away in anthropological terms the sexual desire that left her mouth dry, to not see the face that loomed before her tightly shut eyes, to not hear the name that threatened to escape from her parted lips. Armaiti. Armaiti—the steady eyes, the wry, wicked humor, the good, kind heart. And then the parts that Kavita saw in the not-seeing: the thin, sensual lips, the clear brown eyes, the pert breasts, just large enough to fill a woman’s hand, the generous hips that would fit perfectly against her own.
    It was India. It was the late 1970s. The West, with its women’s movement and gay liberation movement and its permissiveness and promiscuity, was at least a planet away. It was India in the late 1970s, and the country was still coming to grips with the nightmare of the Emergency years, and corruption was endemic and food prices and college tuition were rising, and public services were breaking down. How could any moral individual worry about the clamoring of her own heart? It was India in the late 1970s and how would anyone even know what name to give this strange, unseemly obsession with another woman? Occasionally Kavita’s mind would circle around the forbidden word, but then she’d remember what her older brother Rohit had once said: “Homosexuality is what men do to each other in prison.” What did anything that ugly have to do with her and this tender, protective feeling that she felt around Armaiti? She could call it love, yes, but she loved Nishta and Laleh, too, though they were not the reason she looked forward to college every day. And since there was no word, no description for what she felt, it was easy—or at least possible—to subsume that desire, to channel the basic unjustness of her situation into a desire for justice for all the world’s dispossessed. She didn’t—couldn’t—count herself as one of the dispossessed, not in the India of the late 1970s, not in a place where malnourished children and lepers with holes for noses haunted the streets, and most of her countrymen couldn’t read or write their own names.
    A car cut in front of her and Kavita slammed on her brakes, setting off a protest of car horns behind her. She barely noticed. Armaiti was dying, would probably be dead before she turned fifty.
    Armaiti, almost fifty. It seemed impossible. She wondered what Armaiti looked like now, added twenty kilos to the slim, lanky girl she’d known to create a matronly figure, gave the sharp-faced girl a triple chin, made the lithe, nimble, movements slower and more deliberate.
    It didn’t work. She kept remembering Armaiti in the college cafeteria as the sun came in through the dirty windowpanes and lit up her face; Armaiti on piano and she on guitar as they learned the chords to a Moody Blues song; sitting beside her at Marine Drive as they