One Amazing Thing Read Free Page B

and walk toward her. Who knew what he would do then?
    When her relatives in India—aunties, grandmothers, spinster cousins—heard that she was coming to America, they had shuddered—with horror or envy, Malathi wasn’t sure which—and warned her to stay away from black men, who were dangerous. (And they had been right, hadn’t they? Look how he ran up to thedoor and attacked that poor Indian boy, who was half his size. For the moment Malathi forgot that the auntie brigade, ecumenical in their distrust of the male species, had gone on to caution her to stay away from white men, who were lecherous, and Indian American men, who were sly.)
    No one, however, had thought to caution her about earthquakes. Where she came from, when people said America, many images flashed in their heads. But an earthquake was not one of them.
    Malathi had followed the aunties’ advice—partly because there was not much opportunity to do otherwise, and partly because she had other plans. She shared a tiny apartment with three other women who had been hired by the consulate and brought over from India around the same time. They spent all their spare time together, riding the bus to work and parting only at the elevator (the others worked upstairs in Tourism), walking to Patel Brothers Spice House to buy sambar powder and avakaya pickle, watching Bollywood movies on a secondhand DVD player, oiling one another’s hair at night as they discussed hopes and plans. The other women wanted to get married. From their salaries, which had sounded lavish when translated into rupees but were meager when you had to pay for everything in dollars, they put money aside each month for their dowries, for even though dowries had been officially banned in India, everyone knew that without one you had no chance of landing a halfway decent man.
    But Malathi, who had noted how her two sisters were ordered around by their husbands, had no intention of following in their foolish footsteps. She had set her heart on something different. When she had saved enough money, she was going back—though not to her hometown of Coimbatore—to open a beauty shop. At night she clutched her lumpy pillow, closed her eyes, and was transported to it: the brass bells on the double doors (curtained for privacy) thattinkled as clients came in, the deliciously air-conditioned room walled with shining mirrors, the aproned employees who greeted her with polite, folded hands, the capacious swivel chairs where women could get their eyebrows threaded or their hair put up in elaborate lacquered buns for weddings or relax while their faces were massaged with a soothing yogurt and sandalwood paste.
    Then Mr. Mangalam had arrived at the visa office and derailed her.
    Malathi’s roommates agreed that Mr. Mangalam was the best-looking man at the consulate. With his swashbuckling mustache, designer sunglasses, and a surprisingly disarming smile, he looked much younger than his age (which, Malathi had surreptitiously dipped into his file to discover, was forty-five). He was the only middle-aged man she knew without a paunch and ear hairs. But alas, these gifts that Nature had heaped on Mr. Mangalam were of no use to her, because there already existed a Mrs. Mangalam, smiling elegantly from the framed photo on his desk. (The photo frames had been provided by the consulate to all its officers, with strict instructions to fill and display them. It would make the Americans who came to the office feel more comfortable, they were told, since Americans believed that the presence of a smiling family on a man’s table was proof of his moral stability.)
    Malathi, a practical young woman, had decided to write Mr. Mangalam off. This, however, turned out to be harder than she had expected, for he seemed to have taken a liking to her. Malathi, who harbored no illusions about her looks (dark skin, round cheeks, snub nose) was mystified by this development. But there it was. He smiled at her as he passed by the