Karma Read Online Free Page B

playing.
    What. Did. You. Say.
    I said that when you play, your fingers are quick. They run like the mice run in the barn. But I meant . . . happy mice.
    Yes. Mice. I play music for chickens, cows, and sleeping cats. And my daughter says my hands are like rodents.
    I watch my mother’s beautiful hands flutter above her head as if she’s playing a piano suspended in air. At the tips of her fingers, the short white nails glow like opals.
    Suddenly Mata grabs my arm and drags me down the stairs to the kitchen. She pulls on the heavy back door, then kicks the screen open with her foot, pushing me into the pale sunlight. In the summer, startled chickens would have flown up cackling in a panic. In the fall, I would have heard a combine coughing clouds of black smoke in the fields. But in the winter, there isn’t a sound. The prairie is silent. Like the inside of an egg.
    Tell me what you hear, Maya?
    My shoulders shake under her hands. I want to say the right thing, the thing that will take away her anger, the thing that will make her smile and not feel so alone. I want to say I hear music. I hear Bach when I’m feeding the chickens. I hear Beethoven like it’s my own heartbeat. I hear music all around me. Your music, Mata. But it’s pointless. There is only one answer to this question.
    I hear the wind, I whisper. Mata lifts her clenched hands from my shoulders, looking at them as if they no longer belong to her. It’s what I always hear.
    My mother looks up at the sky brushed with long white clouds like a horse’s tail. If I’m lucky, Maya, your wind will carry me away one day . She steps inside the house, her hand pulling the screen door tight against the spring-loaded latch. Then she closes the wooden door and turns the lock.
    Sometimes the wind says my name. It whispers, Maya .

Who has seen the wind?
    â€œNeither you nor I:
    But when the trees bow down their heads
    The wind is passing by.”
    Mrs. Robinson had us learn Rossetti’s poem in the third grade. And then we went outside to look for evidence.
    We stood in the playground at Elsinore Elementary, staring at the fields. Twenty-one eight-year-olds, eyes peering. Waiting for the wind to bend the stalks.
    There, there it is! I shouted. The wind is orange!
    No, honey, the teacher said. We can’t really see the wind, only its movement.
    But I can see it, I said.
    No, you can’t, some of the others jeered. You’re just pretending.
    But I wasn’t. High in the air, above the turned heads of the sunflowers, a broad orange ribbon floated through the air.
    Their laughter reminded me of what I already knew. I was different. I had strange parents that came from a place far away. Across an ocean, a world of turbans and saris and peculiar alphabets. I came from a people who saw things that weren’t really there. We made worlds out of nothing: air, wind, water, revenge.
    But Helen, the prettiest girl in the class, envied me.
    If I could see the wind, I’d know where to hide, she whispered. My father has a bad temper. He hits me just because I don’t like peas!
    She took my hand. I had a friend who needed to disappear too.

Overheard through the bedroom walls
    No one in town ever talks to me, Amar.
    Then you must talk first.
    Be friendly.
    It takes time.
    Time? We’ve lived here nine years.
    You have to try harder.
    Why should I have to be the one to try so hard? Do you know that one day a woman actually reached out and touched my sari? Like I was a bolt of fabric in a store.
    Such rudeness.
    Then wear a dress.
    Some pants.
    Leave the sari for home.
    Never. Canadian clothes are hideous.
    They are little better than a scarecrow’s.
    Would you consider not wearing your turban?
    That’s different.
    Oh, yes, Amar. That’s different.
    If you’re a man. If you’re a Sikh.
    I’m just a Hindustani woman in this godforsaken place.
    You must learn to hold your head high, Leela.
    I can’t any