Free The Ivory Swing by Janette Turner Hospital

roof and hung the washing over a coir rope strung between bamboo poles. There were no pegs and the rope stained the clothes but it was the best she could do. She ran out of space so she climbed down again and draped the rest of the sheets over the branches of a low mango tree in the back courtyard.
    Then she gathered all the sandals not being worn that day and took them up to the roof to bake on the tile under the sun. If she neglected to do this, green mould would sprout from the leather and die shoes would look like living things, bewitched forest creatures.
    The three children came running back from the rice paddy with scummy water and aquatic life in their cupped hands to show Juliet their treasures.
    â€œDrop it! Scrub your hands!” she said, exasperated. “How many times must I tell you that water is polluted! The sewer water from all the houses drains into the paddy. It is chock full of god knows what diseases.”
    Jonathan and Miranda exchanged a resigned look and settled in to their correspondence lessons and Prabhakaran dusted the window bars. Or stood looking over Jonathan’s shoulder, dazzled by the speed at which he filled a page with hieroglyphs, until Jonathan gave him a pencil and showed him how to write.
    â€œHouse. This is a house. H-o-u-s-e .”
    â€œ Vitu , vitu,” Prabhakaran said, as he laboriously made an H. But he could not demonstrate how to write vitu in Malayalam script. Much giggling and whispering.
    And Juliet, abstracted teacher, smiled on them and tried to write letters.
    Dear Jeremy, she wrote. You were right. I am pining for books and snow and most of all for rationality. It isn’t quite the lively adventure I was hoping for. I have been absorbed into the growth cycle, smothered by vines. I seem to be headed for imminent harvest and decay.
    She tore up the letter.
    Dear Annie , she wrote. Upon reflection, I think your coming is an excellent idea. I definitely need adult company. (David is so busy, away at the university, touring the villages, etc.) I seem to be slipping inside the children somehow. We are never apart, all the old rhythms shattered. I am losing all sense of separateness.
    I look like — I am — a drudge, growing mould and changing shape like the shoes. Really, nonentity is contagious here. Even the massive trees are swallowed up by creepers.
    I sometimes fear I will disappear just like that. Yesterday there was a large dead toad on the bathroom floor. From nowhere, battalions of ants appeared. It was all over in about an hour. No vestige of that huge squashed creature, not a single stray ant in sight, Do you see what I mean? No wonder that extreme forms of meditation and withdrawal flourish here. The days are drugged; memory is one more mirage. Are you really coming or did I dream it? Yours faintly, Juliet.
    Dear David , she wrote. Is there any point to this? I thought of India as a place of risk and dazzle, a place where I could feel at home for once and still be with you. It’s more like a coma.
    You seem dazed with heat and research and have forgotten I hoped for elephants and bazaars. Memory, like everything else, is so tiring here. (Not that you’ve ever remembered my complaints of deprivation. You believe in Original Goodness, you believe contentment runs in everyone’s veins, you remember only epiphanies, you are not an impartial scorekeeper.)
    I’m not blaming you but I need to get away , away from all this domestic lassitude, here or in Winston, what’s the difference? I need a rest, I need some peace, I need the frenzied hub of a city.
    I’m not blaming you, it’s entirely my own fault. I should never have come, I should never have gone to Winston, you were absolutely right about that twelve years ago, that day on the subway. Remember?
    Anyway, I quit . I concede defeat. I am unregenerately urban, I pine for those places that inspire editorial laments in newspapers: the derelict overcrowded arteries of