“Be good,” Vaani said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I’ll try,” Billo said.
Billo’s yellow dress, a hand-me-down from Vaani’s teenage years, was falling apart, its stitches coming out at the frame. Vaani pulled out the safety pin she kept tucked in her blouse and fastened it on Billo’s left shoulder to hold the dress upright, and for a moment, Vaani touched Billo’s collarbone with her right thumb with a forgotten tenderness before letting go of the fabric. Billo watched Vaani walk away rather unceremoniously, and she remembered an American story she read in school about a little girl who ripped out her neighbor’s freshly planted marigolds. “Bye, Vaani,” she said, her voice lost in the wisps of the spring breeze. Billo knew she would have to ask Ma for new clothes soon. She figured she would have to go through more of Vaani’s before Ma would be willing to go to the market, but in fact, she never wore her sister’s dresses again, nor would she see her at all for two years and ten months.
A homage to “The Sunday Following Mother’s Day” from Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City (124).
Siri Ranganath 