One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

internment camps. Then he said that he couldn’t phone or see me again. Already he had received threats because people knew about me. He was afraid his family would be targeted as sympathizers. The worry was making his mother sicker. Forgive me, he said. I love you, but I can’t fight a whole country . Then he hung up.
    “I felt like my world had ended. I couldn’t believe Mohit could let me down like this. I couldn’t even tell my family (who had their own problems) how much it hurt.”
    Mohit’s sources had been accurate. Within a couple of days, Jiang’s family was notified that they must leave the country or relocateto an internment camp in Rajasthan, all the way across India. Those who did not obey would be forcibly deported to China. Jiang’s father knew that going back to China under the yoke of Mao’s Communist regime was out of the question. From refugees in the 1950s, he had heard stories of the labor camps rife with starvation and disease, the massacre of those labeled traitors to the Party. And he no longer trusted the government of India, this country that he had mistakenly loved as his own. He tried desperately to get his children out of the country—Vancouver or Brazil, San Francisco or Sydney or Fiji—it did not matter where. (Paperless as he and his mother were, he knew they had no hope.) But the Chinese exodus was at its peak. There were no airplane tickets, no ocean berths. Mr. Feng was willing to pay a hefty bribe, but he discovered that others had already paid equally hefty bribes.
    Two days before the family was to board the train that would transport them to the hot, dry quarry town of Deoli, Vincent managed to locate a friend—an acquaintance, really—whom he had met a couple of times at the Chinese Dentists Club. Curtis Chan was the lucky possessor of a berth on a ship that was to leave for America in the morning—and he was a bachelor. That evening, unknown to Jiang, her father and brother bribed the guard posted outside their house and went to Curtis Chan’s home. They took with them Jiang’s photograph, a stack of dollars that Mr. Feng had managed to procure by calling in favors, several of his rare calligraphy scrolls, and all her mother’s jewelry.
    Curtis Chan was a practical man. He had been approached by two families with unmarried daughters earlier that day, and at the very moment the Fengs rang his doorbell, he had been getting ready to phone one of them. But perhaps he had a romantic streak in him, too, or a love of art. Otherwise why would he, after examining Jiang’s photograph and one of the scrolls, agree to Mr. Feng’s proposition, even though one of the other families had offered him as many dollars, more valuable jewelry, and, additionally, a bag of gold Krugerrands? Vincent was dispatched home to fetch his sister. Mr. Feng and Mr. Chan—it is appropriate that we should address him in this manner, because as Jiang was about to discover, he was decidedly older than her brother and going bald, besides—hurried to the Buddhist temple in Tangra.
    “And, just like that,” Jiang said, “I was married.”
    Under normal circumstances, Jiang would have balked at the summary manner in which her father had decided her fate, yoking her to this middle-aged, stocky stranger, without even asking her opinion. But since Mohit’s phone call, she had been walking around in a numb haze that gave way periodically to fits of furious tears. One moment she wanted a bomb to obliterate all of Calcutta, or at least the Das household. The next moment she wanted time to rewind itself to that day at Feng’s so that she could leave the shop before Mohit arrived, and thus avoid the entire heartache of loving him. At other times she longed for Mohit to break down the door of the Feng mansion and carry her away to a place where her Chineseness would not matter. Buffeted by contradictions, she stood in the Buddhist temple, under the ominous shadows thrown by a single, shaky candle (Calcutta