Excerpt

Excerpt from Silver Linings Playbook:

..

Pat: How'd you  lose your job?

Tiffany: By..having sex with everybody in the office.

Pat: Everybody?!

Tiffany: I was very depressed after Tommy died, it was a lot of people.

Pat: We don't have to talk about it.

Tiffany: Thanks.

Pat: How many were they?

Tiffany: Eleven.

Pat: Wow!

Tiffany: I know.

Pat: I'm not gonna talk about it anymore

Tiffany: Okay.

Pat: Can I ask you one more question? Were there any women?

Tiffany: Yes.

Pat: What was that like?

Tiffany: Hot!

Pat: Jesus Christ. Was it like.. older women, a sexy teacher who wants to seduce you--

Tiffany: Made me sit on her lap and do things? Yeah.

Pat: What? You sat on her lap?

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

I quote this copious dialogue from this seemingly romantic comedy of a movie because, it keeps running in my head. On repeat. So the only way out is to write it out. Soon after that Tiffany, dragged down the table cloth, making all the cutlery crash on the floor when Pat casually confessed that he thought she was kind of a promiscuous bitch. Tiffany let lose and claimed to be a crazy slut with a dead husband. She said she opened up to him and he judged her. Now that's an intimate revelation. And this is a long post. 

Excerpt from Unaccustomed Earth:

I returned to my existence, the existence I had chosen instead of you. It was another winter in Massachusetts, thirty years after you and your parents had first gone away. In February, Giovanna got in touch to say she had heard the news from Paola. A small obituary ran in The New York Times. By then I needed no proof of your absence from the world; I felt it as plainly and implacably as the cells that were gathering and shaping themselves in my body. Those cold, dark days I spent in bed, unable to speak, burning with new life but mourning your death, went unquestioned by Navin, who had already begun to take a quiet pride in my condition. My mother, who called often from India to check on me, had heard too. "Remember the Chaudhuris, the family that once stayed with us?" she began. It might have been your child but this was not the case. We had been careful, and you had left nothing behind.

I don't know why I quote this. Probably because this story is engraved on my heart. Hema (the narrator) married Navin, the man her parents chose for her after she came back from a romantic getaway with Kaushik (the one who was killed soon after). Hema, must have fallen for Kaushik. Must've. But she married Navin, out of convenience. Probably. Later, she quietly hoped that she was pregnant with Kaushik's child, but she knew she wasn't. We always wish, the one we love, left something behind with us. But he doesn't does he? We are so careful, and un-fuckin-touchable, he doen't leave a sign. Not a single strand of hair lying on the floor, not the crushed pillow, or the purple love bite on the shoulder.