Secret Keeper Read Free Page A

maniacs every time Amritraj hit a winner.
    Asha played tennis for five years, until the day she’d woken her sister in a panic after finding rust- colored stains in her underwear. Everything changed with her body on that day, and there was no going back. Asha could no longer wear shorts or pants-only salwar kameez and her school uniform. She’d had to start growing her hair. No more going down the hill to the market with Baba or playing cricketwith Kavi and the neighborhood boys in the street. And worst of all, it wasn’t
proper
for a young woman to play tennis with boys at the club.
    When Ma issued her final edict about tennis, Asha had lost her temper, shouting at her mother with the servants in earshot. Baba had taken his younger daughter into another room, closed the door, and delivered an unusually stern lecture. She’d listened quietly, her anger spent.
    “It’s my fault, Tuni,” Baba ended. “Ma’s right; I’ve spoiled you and it’s time I faced facts. But even so, I will not permit you to talk to your mother like that. Ever.”
    Baba so rarely laid down the law that Asha always obeyed when he did.
    “I don’t know how Punjabi parents train their daughters,” Ma said now, needles battling each other like swords again. “But in a good Bengali home, a girl obeys her mother. Especially while other people are around.”
    Asha was still swallowing anger over losing her racket, her tennis, and her freedom. And now maybe even her friendship with Kavi.
    “Did you hear me, Tuni?” Ma asked. “Do not bring shame to me or your father in your grandmother’s house.”
    Asha took a deep breath. “I’ll try, Ma,” she made herself say, but the words took a mighty effort, and only the memory of her father’s face allowed her to mean them.

THREE
    T HE TRAIN MOVED STEADILY SOUTHEAST FROM THE STATE OF Uttar Pradesh and through the plains of Bihar, finally reaching the state of West Bengal by the time morning came. It was drawing closer to the neighboring country of Bangladesh, where three years earlier a war between India and Pakistan had devastated homes and farms and villages. The suffering, along with countless refugees, still spilled across the border.
    Asha woke first and peered through the window. The villages they passed were crowded, the houses more make shift, and even the cows looked skinnier. The tea sellers who boarded the train during the stops at the stations began speaking Bangla instead of Hindi.
    Asha and Reet staggered down the aisle to the bathroom. They took turns grasping each other’s hands forsupport as they squatted and swayed over the hole in the floor and washed themselves thoroughly. At the small sink, they brushed their teeth and splashed their faces with cold water.
    Back in the compartment, Ma had folded up the benches and was repacking her handbag. “We have to put on our sarees, Shona,” she said, shutting and latching the door. “Tuni, block the view.”
    Asha held a shawl across the window as Ma and Reet re-draped and tucked the long pieces of silk around their bodies. The span of Ma’s still- slender waist was almost as narrow as Reet’s, and their tight blouses clung to their matching curves. Ma’s saree was pink and Reet’s was blue and brand- new, a splurge made to ensure her grand Calcutta entrance.
    Watching the painstaking ritual, Asha was glad that Ma had let her wear a salwar kameez. She’d worn sarees to parties for the past couple of years, but she still didn’t feel comfortable swathed in six and a half yards of material. Her green, embroidered traveling salwar kameez was soft, the way she liked it, and there was nothing rounded in sight. Not that she was hiding anything out of sight, either, a fact that didn’t worry her much.
    “That’s why I’m fast on the tennis court and the cricket pitch,” she said when Ma moaned about her younger daughter’s slowly changing physique.
    “What good is that since you no longer play sports,” Ma retorted.
    “I do