The Leaving of Things by Jay Antani Page B

famished.
    Behind the college canteen, Devasia pointed out, was the hostel—a gray two-story building with tiled roofing—where he stayed. After classes, Devasia would eat his lunch in the mess hall adjacent to the hostel. I would accompany him, and we would eat together—he, with his Tamil appetite and enough rice on his stainless steel plate to fill the underside of a Frisbee, and I, with my more modest Gujarati portions of roti and vegetables.
    “Why you’re not taking food here only?” he once asked me, gesturing to the food being ladled out from pots by the serving boys in the mess.
    I shook my head and smiled. “Dysentery isn’t something I want twice.”
    My French classes started up that week too. After lunch, I took the bus, bumping and bashing my way to the Alliance Française. On the first day, I paid the severe-looking French witch the seven hundred rupees I owed her. (Happily, I never saw her again for the six weeks I took that class.)
    The class met in a small room—too small, that is, for the dozen of us enrolled—but it was equipped with an air conditioner. You walked up a narrow spiral staircase from the lobby of the Alliance and into a noisy whoosh of dreamy-cool air—sweaty, musty, but what a relief.
    I kept to myself and my exercise book and wondered what it would be like to kiss our instructor, a round-faced, rosy-cheeked early-twentysomething from Kashmir who had spent two years living in Paris. Her French was efficient, not snotty the way I imagined all things French to be. The words came out of her like water down the stones of a happy brook. She spoke of writing postcards on sunny afternoons at café tables outside the Pompidou.
    After two hours of French, I emerged dazed and dislocated. The gravel path of the Alliance, often drenched from the rains, gave way into late-afternoon Ahmedabad. Back to my own life. I staggered up the road and joined the commuters—the bankers, clerks, and housewives—who’d collected together, ready for the melee. When the bus arrived, this civic peace collapsed instantly and something just short of a riot broke out as everyone hurled themselves over each other to get aboard the bus.
    It was no different on that day, my second day of French class. I managed to clamber on, shoved up by the velocity of onrushing passengers. The conductor squeezedthrough—always insisting on his fare—and I pulled out my wallet, paid for my ticket.
    Tink-tink!
    I hung on to the overhead bar, wedged into a sliver of space. I thought of how it had been two weeks since I sent my letters. Still no word from home.
Had my letters gotten lost?
I decided I’d write Shannon again—as soon as I got home. What was keeping her so long? And Nate? Karl? The frightening thought occurred to me again that I had been forgotten. I could taste the bitterness rising up inside me and tried to shake it off. Stop panicking, I told myself, write them again. And use a post office in the city, not that miserable shack in Ghatlodiya. I resolved to do that. Just that.
    The bus was packed shoulder-to-shoulder now. I held on to the bar and began to doze off, wedged between bodies, to the rocking motion of the bus. Once you got used to the smell, after a long day, it wasn’t too hard to do.
    I snapped out of my stupor as we entered the city’s outer neighborhoods, Ghatlodiya the last stop, farthest out. As the bus came to a halt, I anticipated the stampede to disembark. Bucking up my backpack, I pushed ahead and, in the tangle of legs and hands, shouts, and sweat, I got one leg off the bus then the other.
Ah! Free!
I separated from the mob and took a few steps. That’s when I had the sensation of feeling lighter, of weightlessness, of something—a solid part of me—suddenly yanked from my body. I felt my back pocket—
    My wallet!
    It was gone. Lifted. Into thin air. Outer space.
    I flung myself around, searched faces, for fleeing bodies. But everyone, men and women indifferent, dispersedwhere they