She pressed her dried lips into tight lines over disorganized teeth and stared that deep blank Indian stare with thin arms folded under her stained sari and became a disgruntled statue with only dark eyes following the movement of a stranger. Days past and her response, like an eerie character in a wax museum, never changed.
But I love rotis. What is it about warm flat bread that I find irresistible? I could hear the roll of the wooden pin on the board thinning out the dough, followed by the flap of the newly formed circle onto the griddle, and instinctively, quite nearly against my own will, found myself by the stove just in time to slide it fresh off the top of a pile of steaming breads.
She would stare at me. Unblinking.
But rotis have a puzzling charm. One enchanted morning I again found myself stove side waiting for the next roti long before breakfast time. She stared. I grinned in my most endearing fashion. The roti puffed on the griddle. Without removing her stare, she snatched the roti off the stove and to my shock and nearly ecstatic glee gently gave it to me and patted my arm. Her face never betrayed a single discernible change. Everything had changed.
The day she laughed.
We were amusing ourselves with some video footage of a friend dancing. She stood, a shadow among shadows in the kitchen door, her dingy shaw wrapped tightly over her body with her nearly unbreakable stare penetrating that corner of the room taking our hilarity into her silence. A glance and a wave brought her to my side and I demanded that the video be played again. Having seen the video, I now watched her: Her small frame was bent in places that betrayed hours of household labors that were both her livelihood and her duty, black coarse hair braided behind her back, dark face serious with the weight of an ancient tribal culture met with as much modernity as could be found in the midst of an Indian jungle. Her red and yellow sari was dusty at the bottom hem and her ragged bare feet stood motionless on the cool cement floor. Her stare followed the video. Then in a flash that was divine and life giving, her face broke into a smile laugh that tilted her head back, made her body shake, and allowed her shaw to slip from suddenly weightless shoulders. Oh how we laughed.
The day she communicated.
I stood in my favorite morning place letting the sun creep over the garden towards my feet and listening with the intensity of a deaf person hearing for the first time to the sweet chatter of birds in the trees and children preparing for school. The flutter of her sari drew my attention and I threw my arm over her small shoulders. She stared at me, with an uncomfortable stare turned familiar, and then in Hindi, a language that never failed to sound remarkably like the melody of time, and with her hands she told me they can all go, but you, you stay here, don't go, you stay. We laughed together at the impossibility of it, both the request and the fact that I had understood it, and then sobered immediately at the impossibility of it.
The day she touched.
She had asked us to accompany her to a friend's son's birthday party. So we had set out, flashlights in hand, across the school grounds and down the street to the modest assembly. On the way back, as the kapok trees stood silently silhouetted against the moon and our flashlights gave a pale pool of light at our weary feet she and I linked arms. The brilliance of a universe of stars twinkled overhead with laughter at the mystery of time and space and divinity that cause two very different arms to rest in each other on a cool night in India. She says she will remember you, my friend translated as we plodded back to our homes.
The day she invited.
India moments became those times when you caught yourself dreaming of leopards and spices in the middle of the afternoon heat. I was aroused from an India moment by a light slap on the shoulder and with a full body motion that I took to mean come on I followed her grim face, now prone to bursts of brightness, across the garden to the small concrete and cow dung home where she lived with her husband and two of her children. I sat on the bed she cleared for me. A man totally enshrouded in a dull beige blanket groaned and turned on another bed. She brought out sickly sweet tea in mismatching tea cups on a metal plate and filled another plate with the infamous Indian snack mixture and donuts then sat on a plastic chair facing me. She pointed at things around the room and people wandering in and out and spoke about them and I strained to understand anything in the unfamiliar language. She nearly rolled out the chair laughing as I made motions for having eaten too much and becoming fat and then led me to the door and back to shade where my India moment had been interrupted.
The day she braided.
The skin crawling deep stares had nearly disappeared. Now, when our eyes met we usually just laughed. She had taken to grabbing my hand and squeezing, I had taking to patting her shoulder as I passed. She sat down next to me tried to straighten my dusty hair pulled back in a pony tail. I pointed to her hair casually braided, then my own. Her rough hands like a sandpaper comb swept through and in moments had made a twin of her braid out of my own hair. Silky she said in an accent so heavy it was hard to discern as she patted my face.
The day she revealed.
I squatted on the floor and smeared a dollop of Neosporin on the slight crack in my heel before plastering it over with a bandage. Before I could rise again she stood before me, my eyes level with her knees, and she pointed down to her own feet. Wincing back tears, I looked at darkened shoeless feet so deeply cracked in so many places I felt her pain shoot up my own legs. I grabbed her arm, stuffed my pockets full of extra bandages and together we marched back over to her little house across the garden. I had wanted to carry her. She sat on a bed and the, apparently permanent, man covered in a blanket on the next bed stirred. I stumbled around the primitive kitchen looking for water and a rag which she ended up having to get for herself. After she had washed the dust off and dried her feet, I took them one by one in my own hands, filled the cavernous cracks with great globs of Neosporin and stuck bandages anywhere they would fit. She rustled around in a pile of cloth and produced two socks. The broken feet were now covered, but their image would remain to haunt me.
The day she cried.
The deep stare had returned. Even as she laughed at my feeble attempts to make rotis and smiled when I chanced to get it right, I could see her lips begin to tighten once again. Long stares. Stares which spoke a language I didn't know and couldn't understand. I hugged her, she stared. I rolled my bag to the car, she stared. I said good bye and I love you and don't worry and she stared. I reached to shut the car door and this time I stared, at tears like tiny jewels resting and swelling at the inside corners of her dark now endearingly familiar eyes, still staring, but softened, speaking a language of sorrow that the whole earth understands.
