Garbo’s Faces
a Novel — Part 18: Madhuri
The house looked the same. So much the same that it tried to whisk me back to bare feet and uncut hair. It was the inability to open my right eye more than anything else that kept me in the present.
The house had always been ringed by a low, quite ornate, but partly rusted metal fence with a padlockable gate — the padlock, long since rusted open, hanging uselessly by its eye. The gate creaked from disuse and age, much like a hoarse doorbell, but swung open easily enough. Madhuri heard and came out, head-first, carefully, wondering, I think, at the noise of the taxi and the squeak of the gate.
Her face was a little rounder than I remembered it, an extra chin, I think, but oh: that smile. And those eyes, glinting with knowing snakes, laughing always. Her hair — as always gathered up in a bun at her neck — was graying now, but still mostly black. The phul she wore on her left nostril had grown from the small diamond I remember to a little silver flower which matched her ear studs. She still wore her two gold necklaces: the thin and light one, which had been her mother’s, and the longer and heavier: a present from her husband.
But most familiar of all, and what moved me, was the smile, the smile, nothing but Madhuri behind it, so happy to see me again.
