Free Oleander Girl by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

funeral was three weeks ago, but it feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind. I swing between numbness and grief, preferring the former, which stuffs my head with cotton wool. The hours blur together. How could they not, when Grandfather is no longer there to order each one into its slot? Who will knock on my bedroom door now, to wake me early so I’ll have enough time to join him for tea before I go off to college? Who will keep track of every test I take and glow with pride when he finds out I topped the class? Who will ask me to play chess and vainly try to hide his delight when I back him into a corner? Who will ask me to light the lamp for his evening worship and then sit by him in companionable silence? Bereft of his fierce energy, the entire household has grown dim. I can sense, vaguely, Grandmother and Rajat, like moths hovering in the half dark. I know they’re anxious about me. I know Grandmother is struggling with her own sorrow. But I can’t seem to reach her from this deep hole into which I’ve fallen.
    Now I understand the calamity my mother’s ghost had come to warn me about.
    Only Grandfather’s books, their solid heft in my hands, comfort me a little. I open this one and run my finger over his name on the title page, tracing the bold slashes made by his fountain pen. I wish I could find something of him in those pages, like the letter from my mother so long ago, but there is nothing. Still, it’s a comfort just to hold it—almost like touching him. I press the book to my cheek. It smells of a faint, wild sweetness, like the fennel seeds that Grandfather liked chewing after meals.
    In the wake of that memory, a tide of others sweep in, tugging me toward happier times. How much clearer they seem than my present life. Sitting on his lap as he told me why volcanoes erupt. Holding his hand on our way to a rerun of The Sound of Music, him explaining the history behind the movie. The pride in his eyes the first time I beat him in chess. His waiting at the airport gate waving a bar of chocolate, face wreathed in smiles, when I returned from boarding school. I had never seen him smile at anyone else like that, not even Grandmother.
    I close my eyes, allowing the book to grow heavy in my hand. I yearn for blessed sleep to carry me away. But Grandmother’s voice intrudes into my cocoon.
    “Get up, you can’t sleep all day like this, you’ll make yourself sick. Clean your face and change your clothes; remember, Rajat will be here in just a while.” Determined to revive me, she refuses to leave until I splash water on my face and pull on a fresh salwar kameez.
    Downstairs, Rajat is already waiting. He asks the same questions every day. I have nothing to offer him but the same desultory answers. I’m fine, everything’s okay. At the dining table, it hurts my eyes to look at Grandfather’s empty chair.
    He had wanted his body cremated under an open sky. That’s why we ended up at the old-fashioned burning ghats at Keoratala, the sulfuric smell of ignited flesh all around us. Framed by garlands, Grandfather appeared mild and saintly, so unlike himself that I felt only unreality—and a slight outrage. Someone had tied a strip of cloth around his face and knotted it under the chin, as though he were an old woman with a toothache. The priest dipped a stick of wood in ghee and called for a son or a grandson. When Rajat stepped forward, I elbowed past him angrily. But I wasn’t as strong as I’d thought I was. When the priest lit the stick and pointed to Grandfather’s mouth, asking me to set him on fire, I couldn’t do it. Rajat had to take the flaming wood from my hand and begin the ceremony.
    It had been terrible to see his body burn. Yet now, beside me, Rajat and Grandmother eat their dinner and discuss various mundane matters. Things have been a bit tense at the Boses’ warehouse between the Hindu and Muslim workers since the