Smriti Ravindra

In an era when walls were adorned with calendars of gods and goddesses, my mother and her siblings pasted Madhubala and Dilip Kumar cut outs from painted movie posters in their rooms, an obvious side effect of the fact that my grandfather managed two cinema halls in Darbhanga, and brought home free tickets for his wife and six children.   My grandfather was a Meena Kumari admirer and a bitter love-triangle starring Meena Kumari, my grandfather and my grandmother ensued within the house, with my grandmother feeling terribly slighted because no matter how hard she tried, she could not cry as beautifully and tragically as did Meena Kumari.   My own mother, who my grandfather named Meena after his wonderful love, looked a little like the actress, but bloated like a pumpkin the moment she cried, and my mother, like her mother, considered her inability to cry beautifully highly tragic.   When Ma married and came to Sabaila, a small village on the outskirts of Janakpur, ...

All day from the dusty couch—no jumping on the couch, Kristy said to him—Arya watched the pig. It was black like a bottle of paint, its nose flat like the bottle’s cap. It crouched behind the door, bunched against the point where the door and the wall formed a triangle, and made pig sounds. Arya watched Emma coax the pig with a banana, but it stayed in its corner, squealing. Jayden tried to pull it out by its legs, but Kristy came in just then and sent Jayden on a time-out. From the couch Arya listened to Jayden cry and waited for Kristy to pick him up, but she did not, though she was Jayden’s mother and Arya knew then it was better to let the pain he felt in his chest stay in his chest. All day he wanted to pet the pig but was afraid. He was afraid of the pig and of the dog running outside in the yard trying to jump onto the trampoline, of the mouse that sometimes sat on Kristy’s shoulders and went in and out her jacket, the birds Kristy fed sugar water to from a dipper because they...

The first few times in the ladies’ locker room in the US were a shock, to put it mildly.  Coming as I did from Nepal, I was not very familiar with nudity.  What familiarity I had, came from Western movies, Sidney Sheldon novels, and my own imagination.  In all the years I had lived until I entered the US ladies’ locker room, I had never really considered the possibility of standing before a live, nude, female body.  What strange occasion would make space for such a possibility?  And so, when I did encounter naked women in the locker room, I was surprised, confused, and terribly embarrassed.  This is not to say the rooms were full of nudity.  There were, at all times, more clothed women than unclothed ones, but the unclothed ones did not seem to notice this, and it was this casualness, this disregard, that had me nonplussed. I remember her still, this woman, middle aged, averagely sculpted, somewhat distracted as she applied lotion upon her bare b...