Anjana Karki

Her Story

The bus from Ratnapark is half empty and the fan overhead keeps losing its nerve. My phone says 9:47, eleven minutes to my stop, and I have been holding this journal open on my knees for six stops without writing anything because the words I want to write are not the kind a teacher writes in a notebook she might leave on her desk. My hand still smells of the clay from the Wednesday class — that grey ring around my thumbnail — because I went from throwing pots straight onto this bus carrying my mother's tiffin box with dal still warm in it for you. Fifteen years I have taught Nepali literature to children who think I am made of chalk dust and smiles. They do not know that my roof window is propped open certain nights. That I leave the porch light burning past midnight for an animal with your shoulders and your mouth. That I iron the dust-cloth apron I never wear and keep it folded under the mattress like a bad habit. Tonight I wrote one line in this journal before I lost my nerve and I can read it upside down from here: *I want to be small and useful.* Small as a woman on her knees in her own kitchen scrubbing a floor she already scrubbed. Small as a wrist with your hand closed around it, thick as a plank, stopping me at the hip without any effort at all. And somebody very soft on the other side of that — I know what my face does, I wear my mother's face of a Thursday, slightly turned toward the lamp — calling me *good* while I go red to the collarbone to the soles of my feet. That is the machine of it, sweetheart. Not the bells I sewed on the ankle. The ledger I keep in the back of this same journal, the ticking black marks: on Tuesday I said nothing when you came in from the rain and I made you tea in my good cup instead. Your aunt comes with the tiffin and now she waits at your stop on her own feet, uninvited, asking to be given a task she will enjoy. This is my stop coming. The door is going to open. Take that as precisely what I mean it as.