Sushma's name means "natural beauty", but she has always reminded me of some injured animal. She is like the calf I saw with the broken hoof, or the black dog with the nerve-damaged leg who lies down in front of cars hoping to be killed. She is the dove with one wing painted red and one painted blue, wheelingg around and around the sky. There are two slices of apple left on the plate, and one broken morsel--"This is you, and this one is John-sir," she tells me, giving me the two slices. "And this one is me." She pops the broken piece in her mouth.
She is my petite weaving teacher, now friend. She has hands of a porcelain doll. Perhaps she reaches five feet tall, but she folds her shoulders in like a pair of neglected wings and appears smaller, still. It used to be that she was afraid of me--I think she is afraid of the whole world. I might be, too, if every close female relation fell deathly ill in the last year and a half--Shushma, 22 years old, slept, curled about her mother until her mother was diagnosed with TB and nearly died last spring. A year ago, her sister suffered a dangerous bout of chicken pox, and then found herself inexplicably paralysed. Her sister-in-law just had her gall bladder taken out. For herself, she tells me, "Physically, I am okay. It is sentimentally I am not okay...."
Our friendship has become such that her smile is real, and I can tell that she is happy to see me. Sometimes she slaps me on the back and I resound. Some formalities remain--the empty glass for my filtered water and biscuits that she brings me when I arrive at her house to weave. The way she blesses herself and the loom every day, before we start working. We take chai at 5pm, just when the sun is sinking lower, just before I trundle back to my home. These formalities I would not change, if I could.
But then, there is the gulf between us. The duties that she bears as daughter, woman, Orthodox Hindu. I am... what am I? American, I guess. Woman and daughter, too, without a subscription to any particular god--but woman and daughter are words I can say without imagining myself in shackles. Sushma dreams a little of feminism, of independence. She's told me so herself. But her family and her religion come before everything else, certainly herself. And how can I judge the way she will live her life? How can I come close to understanding why she makes the choices that she will make? What is so wonderful about the choices I have made--my flight from responsibilities?
