Free The Vine of Desire by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

remember. A dark wind tugs at her hair, brings the smell of wet earth into the space between her sunglasses and her eyes. It sends a burger wrapper, a crinkled, attention-catching silver, tumbling down a pathway toward a small concrete building onto whose wall the rain is beginning to brush stroke its transient alphabet. There’s something about that tumble, a gay, I-don’t-care-what-happens abandonment that Anju hasn’t felt in years. She follows it—first her gaze, then her feet—and finds she is at the communications library, a building whose existence was unknown to her until today. Is this another omen? The automatic doors open all at once, like the arms of a long-lostfriend. She walks until she finds a room white as the inside of an egg, circular and without windows. This pleases her. She has always thought of windows as distractions, drawing a person out of herself. And right now she needs to delve inward, to dig up the old, buried shards of her life.
    In this amniotic place, Anju pushes her glasses up to her forehead, takes out a sheet of paper and a fountain pen she has carried, with a nostalgia she didn’t know she possessed, all the way from India.
    Dear Unknown Father , she writes.

    On the car radio, a voice informs Sunil that the Pentagon has dropped its eight-billion-dollar Doomsday project, that more Serb planes have been shot down in a no-fly zone, that the Germans have wrested from the French the distinction of being the world’s largest consumers of alcohol.
    “Bully for them,” he says.
    The voice goes on to warn him of a chemical spill on 101 and Montague, traffic backed up to Mathilda Avenue.
    “Shit!” says Sunil. He is like an animal whose hair, ruffled the wrong way by a thoughtless hand, stands up in prickly patches. Whose skin is uneasy with exposure. Can you sense inside him the desire for speed, building like compressed steam? But the four-thirty traffic has him firmly in its embrace. Raindrops gather their fatness against the windshield and trickle lazily downward. He slashes them away with the wipers, which he operates, unnecessarily, at full speed. His handsome lips (Mel Gibson lips, a woman who knew him once said) are thin with annoyance, his fingers tap a staccato code on the steering wheel. He made himself wait in a café, drinking cappuccino after cappuccinountil it was time for Anju to be home. Does he think of his act as honorable, or foolish? He hasn’t had lunch and the caffeine makes him nauseous and jittery, makes him take turns too quickly, without signaling. He gives honking motorists the finger and—finally—roars into the parking lot of the apartment.
    Taking the stairs two at a time, what is Sunil wishing for? He rings the bell. There is no answer. “Out at the mall again, I bet,” he mutters, letting himself in with his key and dropping his briefcase on the couch. He undoes the buttons of his shirt—he’s breathless today, everything tightens its coils around him—and walks into the bedroom. And sees them.
    Dear Unknown Father—
    It’s a bit awkward, as you might imagine, writing to a person who died before I was born. A man I hated all my growing-up years because he destroyed his family. Yes, Father, you destroyed us by dying—a death you brought upon yourself by going off in search of treasure—a foolish, clichéd enterprise which should have remained where it belonged, between the pages of a children’s adventure tale.
    But it isn’t my intention to berate you. Now that I’m mired in the middle years of my own life, I find my old hatred as useless as the adventure you went on. I need instead (the way one needs to know about the genetic defects that kill one’s parents) to know what drove you. Perhaps the same desperation is beginning to drive me. I need to know what you were most afraid of in your life. Because one knows people best through their fears—the ones they overcome, and the ones they are overcome by.
    These are what the people closest to