Shall I write to your employer and assure him of your most gentlemanly manner? I think I will not, and instead scandalize you further with vague, poetic sentiment.
You thought, first, such rhythms required more than the elementary operations of hands and feet, irregular breath and clouded eyes. How you did unwind yourself like a spool of silk thread in your haste, the assumption on your lips a seal of wounding prejudice.
Next, you recited all of the familiar sentiments in reverse, admitting with each sorry cadence your want, your heart, your want, your heart. You might well have grown a double head to express what you desired and could not, what you discovered in your own depths and like a coward left there.
Long at last you let go, shedding eyelashes and daydreams.
Better the uncanny, this way.
So you do not mistake my meaning, or discover it and think me cruel, 'you' is not you at all. What I have for you I have not finished yet. This I wrote for a young woman I once knew.
It seems so strange to have delayed in writing to you. It has become quite natural for me to receive your letters and muse over a response in the evenings, settled on a couch on the curtained patio near the house. Ammamma seems always to know when I have finished, and comes out with bhelpuri and tea, and we sit together and talk, though rarely about what you have written me, or I you. She says she knows volumes of you already if my habits in writing you are to be taken under concern. I have not decided yet if she is teasing me.
But, I have been a few days delayed because Parvati has come, with mother and father, also. It is very strange to have them here; how accustomed I have grown to doing always as I please! We are going to the coast tomorrow for a few days, and then they shall all be gone again with pleas and demands and stern looks from each - I shall let you guess which from whom - that I come with them. I will not, I know. I have another plan, and should be assured of its success or failure when next I write. Not the stars, just yet, but somewhere new. I have no intention of traveling there without a seasoned astronomer.
Enjoy your world of men, Theodore, and do endeavor to contain your heathen tendencies, at least until you are returned to the land of their origins.
Dodging my sister's watchful eye,
Padma
9 November 1998
Dear Theodore,
Shall I write to your employer and assure him of your most gentlemanly manner? I think I will not, and instead scandalize you further with vague, poetic sentiment.
You thought, first, such rhythms required more than the elementary operations of hands and feet, irregular breath and clouded eyes. How you did unwind yourself like a spool of silk thread in your haste, the assumption on your lips a seal of wounding prejudice.
Next, you recited all of the familiar sentiments in reverse, admitting with each sorry cadence your want, your heart, your want, your heart. You might well have grown a double head to express what you desired and could not, what you discovered in your own depths and like a coward left there.
Long at last you let go, shedding eyelashes and daydreams.
Better the uncanny, this way.
So you do not mistake my meaning, or discover it and think me cruel, 'you' is not you at all. What I have for you I have not finished yet. This I wrote for a young woman I once knew.
It seems so strange to have delayed in writing to you. It has become quite natural for me to receive your letters and muse over a response in the evenings, settled on a couch on the curtained patio near the house. Ammamma seems always to know when I have finished, and comes out with bhelpuri and tea, and we sit together and talk, though rarely about what you have written me, or I you. She says she knows volumes of you already if my habits in writing you are to be taken under concern. I have not decided yet if she is teasing me.
But, I have been a few days delayed because Parvati has come, with mother and father, also. It is very strange to have them here; how accustomed I have grown to doing always as I please! We are going to the coast tomorrow for a few days, and then they shall all be gone again with pleas and demands and stern looks from each - I shall let you guess which from whom - that I come with them. I will not, I know. I have another plan, and should be assured of its success or failure when next I write. Not the stars, just yet, but somewhere new. I have no intention of traveling there without a seasoned astronomer.
Enjoy your world of men, Theodore, and do endeavor to contain your heathen tendencies, at least until you are returned to the land of their origins.