Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Irates

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2023.a903926

1939-9774

Vauhini Vara,

Islamic Studies and History

The Irates Vauhini Vara (bio) For a month afterward, our whole house smelled foul. There was no telling what kind of food scraps were gathering mold in the kitchen trash. What kind of unflushable sap festered in the toilet bowl. No one had the will to contend with it. One morning the smell got too disgusting to tolerate. I got in the shower and washed my hair and scrubbed my skin. I put on a T-shirt and cutoffs. I left the house and walked up the hill and down the path to my best friend’s house. I had barely left home since my brother’s funeral. It was a hot, clear summer afternoon. When I knocked, Lydia opened the door within seconds, as if she’d been lying in wait behind it. My brother was dead. We looked at each other. Lydia’s eyes went wet with need—she wanted to hug, I could tell. She wanted to grieve together, I could smell it on her, this desperation. She said my name—“Swati,” she said. “You look like you’re crying,” I said. “That’s normal, I’m sad,” she said, pulling back. “Let’s go to Capitol Hill,” I said. “I need egg rolls.” We walked down her street toward the main road where the bus stopped. The air was fragrant. Blooming seemed too formal a word for what the flowers were doing on their stems. They were doing something obscene: spurting; spilling. Sweat oozed from my skin’s folds: my armpits; the backs of my knees; my crotch. I felt wet, porous, as if the world were washing in and out of me, a nudity of the soul. Lydia didn’t seem to notice. At the bus stop, we stood under the shelter and waited. The bus came rolling down the street toward us, almost at our stop. I imagined stepping in front of it. “People don’t talk about labial sweat,” I said. “That’s true,” Lydia said. “Do you want to talk about it?” Jesus Christ— she was being so agreeable. “No,” I said. The bus wheezed to a stop in front of us. We got on and rode in silence, down the street, across the bridge, and up Capitol Hill, until we arrived at the corner where Five Happiness stood. ________ Five Happiness was our favorite place—a Chinese restaurant with a yellow-and-red neon sign. We liked it because they gave out egg roll punch [End Page 32] cards. Once you bought 20 egg rolls, you could get one for free. They weren’t expensive—50 cents each. It was possible to save up for even better rewards—50 punches got you a carton of fried rice, and 100 was worth kung pao chicken—but we never could bring ourselves to wait. Once, between the two of us, we filled a whole punch card in one go, and then split the prize egg roll. It was always the same girl behind the counter selling egg rolls—girl or woman, we couldn’t tell. We called her Little Happiness. She was short and plain and unsmiling, with long, oily, black hair that she wore parted in the center and pushed behind big cartilaginoid ears. Her father wore a name tag that said big happiness, but she didn’t have one—hence the nickname. Every time we showed up, she acted as if she didn’t remember us. Maybe she didn’t. This time, when we walked in, I felt conspicuous, having been gone so long. But she acted the same as usual—raised her eyebrows coolly, didn’t ask what we wanted. “How many should we get?” I said to Lydia. “Six—or eight—or what do you think?” she said. “We’ll do 10,” I told Little Happiness. I took a fresh punch card from the stack on the counter and watched her punch holes in it. We sat down at a booth, set our paper plate between us, dug in. The place was empty except for a couple of random people. One was a dilapidated-looking man we’d seen there many times before. He had a blotchy face...