The moonless acres outside his window contained a thousand people just living their lives. None was as happy as he. Through the floor, he could feel Aria in the room below him. He could feel the tempered busyness of her sleep. Omkar could feel the seed of his youth cracking. Inside it, the stirrings of the man he was born to be.

The oil of his mother’s tears lamented the death of his childhood. Though it was daunting, he found the pressure of love’s responsibility to be divine. The summer of his life now hung on a single answer … An answer to a question that Omkar had not yet even asked.

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 36

Six yards of royal sheen sprawled out across the bedroom. Aria had imagined a sari to be an exotically sewn garment. Instead, it was simply yards of radiant fabric.

Omkar stood in the doorway, watching Jarminder fuss over which sari to give her. She settled on one that was the color of ripe plum with gold embroidery on its edges. She handed Aria a matching blouse piece and petticoat and told her to put them on in the bathroom. When Aria returned, Jarminder kneeled on the floor in front of her, three safety pins between her teeth. She took one end of the sari and began aggressively tucking it the entire way around the waistband of the petticoat. When she had made a full circle around Aria’s waist, she took the embroidered end of the fabric and began pleating it.

Watching her hands molding the fabric, Aria felt like she was peering through a telescope across the oceans to a different time and place. Jarminder’s veins netted her hands like the consecrated, colluvium-laden waters of the Ganges; the invisible scar of patriarchy evident in the way that she moved them. With the pleated end of the fabric held firmly in her hand, she twisted it behind Aria, pulling it across her right leg and over her left shoulder. Making sure that the pleated fabric fell just below Aria’s knee level, she stood up and took one of the safety pins she had been holding between her teeth. She pierced it into the fabric on the underside of the blouse just over Aria’s collarbone, fastening it to the fabric that she had just draped across Aria’s shoulder.

Again she took hold of the fabric, this time the embroidered top edge just beneath where she had pinned it. She pulled it tight down and across Aria’s back, around her hips to the front again. Jarminder tucked the fabric into the petticoat, rolling it toward her to expose the underside of the petticoat. She took a second safety pin from her teeth, pinning the silky fabric of the sari to the cotton of the petticoat, and re-rolled it toward Aria’s navel.