Chapter 15

From Priya Banerjee’s private collection, translated from Malayalam:

The monsoon (twelfth draft)

The monsoon is not a metaphor. 

I am exhausted of making it one.

It is only water. 

Only the sky 

doing what the sky does 

when it has held something too long.

There is no lesson in that. 

No symbol. No sign. 

Only weather.

(I have written this poem twelve times in twelve different years. Every time it rains I think of you first.)

Every time.

You, first. 

Still.

***

“I think this is a terrible idea. I am regretting this. Yes. Definitely regretting this,” is what I wished I said, as we began undressing on the beach. 

Roman had found us a sandy spot tucked away from the main crowd, near two criss-crossing trees that blocked us from sight. As soon as we’d finished our food, she’d squeezed past me and whispered, “Last one in the water loses.”

I was a PhD candidate from Yale. I had made it to the very top of the academic food chain. If there was one thing I could not resist, besides oversharing information and crushing obsessively on women older than me, it was a challenge. The beach was less than a mile from the restaurant—a mile that quickly dissipated, because Roman took one look at my face and began running. I chased after her. If she wanted a race, I would give her a race. 

Afternoon had bled into the early evening, but the sun still blazed bright above us. The clear blue-green waters glistened like gems. The road beneath our sandalled feet disintegrated into silky white sand. Within no time, Roman had found us a private nook. One sandal already in her hand, she started shimmying out of her sarong skirt. It seemed she had worn her bikini under her clothes too.

A flash of soft-looking thigh caught my gaze. Her butter-yellow bikini string, tied just above her hip, startled me. Why had I agreed to swim again? Hadn’t I thought of the logistics? Roman would be wearing practically nothing. I would be wearing practically nothing. She would be dripping wet. I would be dripping wet, in more ways than one.

I suddenly became deeply interested in the ecosystem of the palm tree. I slipped out of my long skirt, letting it puddle on the sand. What did I know about trees? Mycorrhizal networks. Mycelium. My fingers fumbled with the knot of my halter top. Vascular cambium. My hair had tangled with the knot at the nape of my neck. I tried to keep my wincing to a minimum. Pinnate or palmate. Palmate? 

“Do you need help?” 

I made the grave mistake of looking in Roman’s direction. She had finished undressing. Sand glittered on her hips, her arms, her stomach. The triangle bikini top lacked supportive cups, like mine. Her breasts were pinned to her chest: round, soft, glowy with sunscreen, held in place only by those little yellow triangles. 

I had refused to let my mind wander to what she would look like in a bikini. That meant I hadn’t guessed the colour she’d wear. Yellow wouldn’t have been my first pick, but the radiant way it contrasted her dark skin looked magical. Transcendental. I wanted to get down on my knees and worship her. Her gold belly button piercing dangled over her soft stomach, with colourful waist beads slung low over her wide hips. I hadn’t noticed those—for the better, considering my imagination. She was putting her hair up into a bun; her breasts pushed together until a long line of cleavage formed. 

I blinked several painful times as if the sun were burning my eyes. 

“Oh—yes. Help. Would be great.” I stopped fighting the tangled knot.

Roman finished putting her hair up. Then she came up behind me. My heart beat spasmodically, clenched in my chest like she had shoved her hand through my back and begun squeezing it herself. I tried to level my breathing.

“This knot is tricky.” Her breath warmed the nape of my neck.

I was going to have a heart attack. I pictured her full, luscious lips, so near the side of my neck. Pictured her pressing them against my skin. Kissing me gently. She’d feel so good. She’d—I needed to control myself.

“Thanks,” I said, barely a breath.

“Oh, your hair.” She began tugging at a few strands caught in the knot. “Tell me if I’m hurting you.” 

I wouldn’t mind if you hurt me. 

“Doesn’t hurt,” I lied. A few of my curls came free. Finally, the knot loosened and slipped off altogether. I caught my top in my hands and turned around, my bikini top revealed. 

Roman was staring at me. She looked shocked, or maybe a little in awe. Her eyes flicked down to my chest for the briefest moment. She bit her lip slightly, the gold ring caught beneath her teeth. 

“What?” 

“Your, um, hair,” she said. She shook her head, as if freeing herself from a daydream. “It’s beautiful.” 

“Your hair is beautiful.” Did I sound stupid? “It’s . . . all the charms and . . .” I needed to stop talking. This had already gone too far. Roman thought of me as a person from work. She probably just flirted with me when she was bored. She didn’t feel the same about me. It would be pointless to keep thinking about her this way. 

Roman swallowed. “Are you ready? To go swimming?” 

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. No regrets, no regrets . . .  

We moved our things to the forefront of the beach, where we could see them while swimming. The beach remained full, considering we had come in the evening, packed with families beneath umbrellas and children splashing in the water. But I supposed time worked differently when you lived on the coast of the Arabian sea and could swim whenever you wanted, as long as the sun stayed up. 

Kneeling in the sand, sitting on our heels as we tucked our purses and bags together, Roman’s fingers brushed mine. The touch felt electric. I gasped a little.

As a ten-year-old girl, I believed that touching my crush for the first time would be electric, like lightning. Like all the romance movies. Instead, as a group of us had gathered in a circle in the playground, reaching out for each other’s hands, my crush had yanked hers back.

“Your hand is sweaty,” she said. Her name was Hanna; she was a white girl from Manhattan. Then she cried, publicly and uncontrollably, because she didn’t want to keep touching me. At the time, I had been heartbroken. I didn’t realize until much later that her disgust of me had stemmed from much simpler things: my skin was dark brown, her skin was white. People like me were “gross” to her.

That touch hadn’t been electric. In the decade since, no touch had been electric. But that didn’t stop me from the faintest, tiniest wisp in the back of my mind, whispering, wondering if I just hadn’t touched the right woman yet.

“You static-shocked me,” Roman said, grinning. 

“You static-shocked me,” I retorted. I tried to hide how shaken I felt. Roman was not my fairytale true love. Her touch was electric because of science, ions, and negative charges. 

Without warning, I used my kneeling stance to take off in a sprint, remembering the two times in my life I had watched a running competition. I couldn’t beat Roman in a race, but we were close enough to the water that I didn’t have to. I must have taken Roman by surprise; I was waist-deep by the time I heard her splash behind me. 

“Looks like I lost,” she said. Strangely, she didn’t seem upset about it. “Too bad.” 

I waded deeper into the water until only my breasts were surface-level. It was colder than I thought it would be—probably because the worst of the sun’s heat had already passed. But I didn’t mind the cold so much. The day had been long, hot, and overwhelming. The water that lapped over me took the troubles of the day with it. Suddenly everything seemed smaller: Priya’s demand that we leave, the discomfort between Roman and me. My body relaxed: jaw unclenching, eyes closing.

I didn’t know how long Roman and I bobbed in the water, only that she broke the silence by softly saying: “I like your bikini, Kaalia. It’s very . . . eye-catching.” 

Did she mean the rhinestones studded on the fabric were eye-catching? 

My eyes fluttered open. Then widened. Roman wasn’t looking at me; her eyes remained closed. But we had drawn closer to each other than I’d thought. Close enough to touch, close enough to lean over and kiss. Close enough to see the iridescent droplets of water on her long, dark eyelashes. 

“Layli and Iseul got it for me,” I said, closing my eyes again. “They made me promise I’d wear it at least once while I was here. And if we’re leaving tomorrow . . .”

“Can’t break your promise.” Roman’s laugh was a sigh of warmth on my lips.

“Never. I keep my promises.” 

After a while, she added, like an afterthought, “I think I’m more like Priya than I want to admit, deep down.” 

“I think we’re all a little bit like Priya. It’s hard not to be.” 

Roman and I circled each other in the water, swirling, floating around. I peeked at her for a moment, but her eyes didn’t open. I gazed for a little longer. Her face was so pretty. Everything about her was so pretty.

“In my last year of university,” Roman said, “they changed the pictures on the walls of the gym. You know, like the posters they have of student athletes. They’d been the same for three years—token diversity bullshit. But when they changed them, every single poster was a white person. And I found myself missing that token diversity, halfhearted as it had been. Because all I saw were faces of people who didn’t look like me, who would probably never see me as a human, white face after white face, everywhere.” 

I heard her exhale. 

“I resolved to complain to a higher-up. But then days turned into weeks into months. I’m almost out of here, I thought. It doesn’t matter. I figured complaining would be a waste of time. I’d searched up the gym administration; there were only white people running the place. Nobody would listen to me. Nobody would take me seriously.”

“But you complained,” I guessed. 

“I got so fed up one day, Kaalia. I just . . . snapped. I wrote a long, angry email to the person in charge. I called them out with graphic detail for their racist, colonial bullshit. Yeah, the token diversity sucked, but this was worse, you know? They weren’t even pretending to hide their racism. And then the white lady responsible, Stephanie or whatever, answered back.” 

“And?”

“It worked. The posters got switched. And . . . I don’t think she changed the posters out of the goodness of her heart. More so because after reviewing university policies on inclusion and the like, I had her worried that I would go to the dean or file a lawsuit or something. But the posters changed. When I went to the gym, it wasn’t just those frozen white faces staring at me anymore. And of course representation isn’t social change. But that was something. And that something happened because I did something. And I think that moment changed my whole life.” 

I found myself smiling. I opened my eyes again, but this time, Roman was looking at me. She stared, unabashedly, even as I noticed her noticing me. Her clear, dark eyes were bright with something I didn’t recognize. She seemed . . . hungry.

“I read your collection, Kaalia.” A breathless murmur of confession, a raw sliver of guilt. “I had to go through several people to find it. I knew you didn’t want it to be found. But I wanted—I wanted so badly to read it. That was why it took three weeks for you to get a notification about the job offer. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry about that.” 

“Roman—” 

“It was beautiful.” 

I found myself silent, unable to talk as she continued.

“Kaalia, I hired you partly because I want to publish your work someday. You’re going to be . . . you are . . . you’re brilliant. I wanted to keep you close to me, selfishly. I read your poems and felt like I knew you.”

She wasn’t wrong. Writing poems had taken something out of me, something fundamental: a piece of myself, embedded within those words. Something alive, breathing through the pages, growing a beating heart of its own even as I ignored its existence—threw it away. 

But, still, I found my voice cracking as I said, “You read . . .”

“I’m sorry I read them. I know you didn’t want—that. But I was intrigued by the woman who had applied to work as my assistant editor. The woman who had won the Lorde-Walker Book Award. The woman whose thesis was tackling how literary reparations could be made in Western society, given its deeply colonial legacy.”

My heart slammed against my chest. I tried to breathe through my nose, out through my mouth. What was that breathing technique? Two seconds in, three seconds out? I couldn’t remember. 

“Did you read my thesis too?” I tried joking, feeling faint.

Roman bit her lip. “Yes.” 

“But I have—I have several publications. So many academic papers. You didn’t need to read—”

Roman reached out to me. Her hand moved slowly, allowing me to say no. Instead, I leaned into her touch. Both her hands clasped my face, smoothing the skin of my temples, tucking my hair behind my ears. Her water-slick skin shimmered gold under the fading evening sun. Her eyes—liquid dark—captured me and didn’t let me go. “Breathe, Kaal,” she said. Under different circumstances, my brain would have short-circuited hearing her call me a nickname. “You’re okay. Focus on me. Breathe.” 

I focused on her face, on her smooth brown skin, on the breath escaping from her lips. She nodded with me, mouthing the words, “In. Out.” 

“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “It’s not your fault. At all.” I looked up at her, her beautiful face staring at me, her hands still warm on my cheeks. She held me so sweetly, so gently. “I’ve tried so, so hard to forget about that prize. I didn’t want it. My professor submitted it without me knowing. I . . .” 

“You have nothing to be sorry about. I know, Kaal. I know about that.” 

“You know everything, don’t you?”

“No. Not everything.” She leaned her forehead against mine. Her arms wrapped around me, her breasts against my breasts, our bodies slippery-slick against one another. “But I would love to know. Everything about you. One day.” 

It started raining during the car ride home. Roman and I sat next to each other in the backseat. She hugged me with one arm, pulling me into her side. We existed in that liminal state—sleeping but not sleeping, dream-hazy and relaxed.

I should have been upset. Someone finding my poetry collection from my undergraduate year, someone reading it, terrified me. After I’d found out my professor had submitted my work for the Lorde-Walker prize, I’d begged him to rescind it. To call them, or email them, or show up to their office in New York and take it back. But he hadn’t. A few weeks later, I got an email telling me I had won. And that fifty-thousand dollars changed my life. But I hadn’t wanted it, because I didn’t want my work out there. I didn’t want my poems to be read by other people.

After explaining myself, the Lorde-Walker administration had agreed to keep my work private, under pretty much all clauses. It was available only upon request, if you showed up at their office in person with government ID, and only if you signed a contract agreeing you wouldn’t disclose the contents within. It was a long process. Sometimes they made you wait months before they granted approval, if they did at all. I knew this because Adannaya, the secretary, had patted my head and described in graphic detail this process to me as reassurance. If Roman had been able to hotwire this process, it was more than likely that she knew people inside the administration. Maybe even Adannaya herself.

At first, hiding my collection had been about my family. I didn’t want to risk them reading it. But then it became personal, too, so personal it felt like letting someone read it would give them too much of myself, and too much of my sister. My precious, kind, older sister. My murdered older sister. 

Rain thudded against the rooftop of the car. Each drop sounded like the carcass of a bird slamming ungracefully into metal, wings askew. The driver slowed, then stopped. His eyes met ours in the rearview mirror. 

“Monsoon season,” he said with a sigh. “We have to wait it out.”

“But we’re so close to home,” Roman said, talking more to herself than him. Louder, she asked, “Can we walk from here?” 

“Walk?” said the driver. “Walking? Better to try running.” 

“But is it safe? Can we go out there?” 

The driver looked baffled. “Yes, the flooding is not that bad, but—” 

Roman was already rummaging through her purse. She handed him a wad of rupees, then opened the car door. The sound of the wind and the rain screamed within the car, washing out the driver’s protests. 

“Come on, Kaalia!” Roman shouted, sliding out, her forearm braced over her face against the rain. “Let’s run!” 

The driver and I exchanged frightened looks. But I didn’t think I could say no to Roman in a million years. She helped me get out of the car and slammed the door behind me. Then she took my hand. Within seconds, I had been drenched, my hair completely soaked, matted to my head. Even Roman’s bun began to slip, braid after braid sliding free as water weighed down the strands. Our fingers fought to stay laced; we squeezed each other.

Roman took off into a sprint, forcing me to follow. Breathlessly, warm water filling my gasping mouth, I had no choice but to run too. Mud squelched beneath my feet, sticking to my sandals. Both of us wore our bikini tops and skirts. Eventually, Roman’s hand let go of mine; we clutched the hems of our skirts like tragic princesses in a fairytale. We had begun laughing uncontrollably. Despite the water pouring over my head, into my ears, down my body, I could focus on only one thing: the sweet sound of Roman’s voice, the smile I imagined on her face.

With some intense squinting, Aadhya and Priya’s palatial home came into view. Roman and I kept running toward it. Even though I was slightly taller than her, she was much faster than I was. My curves did not hide muscle beneath them, whereas I remembered Louise telling me Roman lifted extremely heavy weights at the gym.

“You’re insane!” I yelled after her. 

Roman spun around. “Isn’t this nice?” 

I stumbled to a stop. “You’re insane,” I repeated. 

She reached for my hand. Lifted it into the air and made me spin.

“But look at you,” she said. Water streaming down her face. 

“What do you mean?” 

The spin ended with me pressed against her chest. Our noses touching. Lips a breath apart. She shook her head.

“You don’t get it,” Roman whispered. “Kaal. I . . .”

“What, Roman?” I searched her face for answers—for something, anything. 

“Bhranthanmar!” 

Roman and I glanced at the porch. The silhouette of what could only be Priya, sitting atop a swinging chair, had yelled at us. 

“She called us lunatics,” Roman murmured. Her eyes fixed on my mouth.

“You speak Malayalam. Since when can you speak Malayalam?”  

“I’m not fluent. It’s what I’ve learned practicing on Duolingo in the year since Aadhya and I started planning this trip. You’d be the same if I gave you more than a week’s notice about Kerala.” 

“I bet you’re in the Diamond League.” 

“I am. You forget I have seven years over you, Kaalia.” Why did she make it sound so sexy? “Plenty of time to practice learning new languages.”

I glanced back at Priya’s silhouette. A shiver slid through my whole body. “Should we go?” 

“Only if you want to.” 

Roman and I gazed at each other. The closest we had ever been. Rain pouring over us. Warmth, everywhere. The heat of the water. The heat of her body. The heat of my own blood, fuelled by my pounding heart. Kiss me. She would taste like rainwater. Like a summer monsoon. Sweet and wet. The flavour would melt on my tongue like a mouthful of fruit. Kiss me. 

“You are going to drown!” Priya said.

My hands cupped Roman’s face; her hands cupped mine. I imagined all Priya saw was an indistinguishable figure: two women so close to each other you couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended. It must have looked like we were kissing. Why weren’t we kissing? 

“Roman?” I said. I was gasping. Rain dripping into my mouth.

“Kaalia.” My name sounded like an incantation, a spell cast to a foreign goddess, so desperate it made me ache. She stared at me like she could see into me, through me. 

Kiss me. I couldn’t make myself say the words. Please.

“Do you . . .” My question melted with the rain. 

Roman pulled back. Her hands slipping from my face. She blinked the rain out of her eyes and started shaking her head. 

“Let’s go inside, Kaalia.” She nodded her head to the porch. It seemed like she didn’t even want to touch me anymore. “I should book our flights home.” 

***

I’m so sorry for edging you guys…

Love,
Meera