Free Bodies in Motion by Mary Anne Mohanraj Page A

transparent and brittle, but the prince does not notice. Perhaps he chooses not to notice. He takes her in his arms to the crowd’s acclaim, he lays her down in the forest grass.
    This is supposed to be a happy ending.

Other Cities
    Chicago, 1962
    TWENTY YEARS AGO, IN THE LIBRARY AT OXFORD; THE DECEMBER SUN SHAFTING DOWN THROUGH TALL WINDOWS, ILLUMINATING THE long wood tables with the gift of peace. Silence. It had never been silent in Jaffna, in his parents’ house, with his mother and sister always talking talking. Talking and never doing, and all Aravindan wanted was to do , to get up and go, somewhere, anywhere. Somewhere where he could be more than his parents’ son, his sister’s brother. And so he worked, worked all the time because that was the only way to get away. He liked it too, the math. Liked it well enough, though perhaps never quite as well as he was supposed to. But well enough to get him out. Passing exams with high marks, getting a scholarship to graduate study at Oxford. His parents had sent him off with their best wishes and many tears. His heart had been beating faster than he could count, and once he was on the boat, standing up against the rail, he pressed his hand to his chest, hard. His mouth alternately dry with fear and wet with excitement.
    He had abandoned the sterile math library that Christmas break to take refuge in the Bodleian, in its faded stone walls and high archedceilings, in its comfortable wood chairs, worn down by decades of students. He studied in the deserted library until his brain ached, the symbols spinning in his head, until he had to rest, had to put his head down against the fine-grained wood. Aravindan heard her then, crying in the next aisle. Crying softly; if the library hadn’t been absolutely silent, he would never have heard a thing. He knew then that she wasn’t a white girl; white girls were noisy and cheerful—he’d never seen one cry, but there was no quietness in them, even for tears. This girl cried just like his sister, Mala, had, at the docks, so close to silent that only he, only her brother, could have heard her over their mother’s wailing. Aravindan hadn’t said a word to his sister then—what could he say? He was abandoning her, though she had begged him not to go. Mala was fourteen; she understood nothing. She didn’t know what it was to feel that urge to fly, that craving in his throat, the sick shifting in his stomach, like a bird fluttering there, that said he could not stand it here, not a day, not a moment more. And then be forced to stay, day after day after day.
    Because he had left his sister behind, left her without a word or a touch, he got up from his books, went to this weeping girl—and yes, he knew who she was. Shanthi, a year behind him and in physics instead of math, from Colombo rather than Jaffna, but what was a small stretch of ground between two lost travelers in a cold land? Their cities were neighbors, and though he was not sorry for his flight, he knew what it was to long for the sun, for the sour tang of his mother’s rusum on his tongue, for the songs of his sister in the evening with chirping crickets for company. Aravindan came to Shanthi in the library and sat down in the next chair; he reached out to her head buried in her arms upon her books and stroked her hair, long and black, sweetly redolent of sandalwood and coconut oil. Like Mala’s hair, like his mother’s hair, but softer, a waterfall of silk, a river down to a dark sea. She looked up at him once, then put her head down again. He stroked her hair as she cried, until the last of the sun had disappeared from the long windows, the wide wood tables. His hand was shaking.
    He first kissed her under the tall trees, the spreading oaks and ash; he walked with her in early spring gardens full of daffodils and pale irises. These plants his parents had never seen; they wouldn’t, couldn’t carry tales back