An Infatuation 
Amit Chaudhuri
an episode from the ‘Ramayana’ retold by Amit Chaudhuri
She’d been watching the two men for a while, and the pale, rather docile wife with vermilion in her hair, who sometimes went inside the small house and came out again. She’d been watching from behind a bush, so they hadn’t seen her; they had the air of being not quite travellers, nor people who’d been settled for long; but they looked too composed to be fugitives. Sometimes the men went away into the forest while the woman attended to household chores – Surpanakha observed this interestedly from a distance – and then they’d return with something she’d chop and cook, releasing an aroma that hung incongruously around the small house.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Amit Chaudhuri’s collection of essays, Clearing a Space, will be published by Peter Lang. He teaches contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia.
Other articles by this contributor:
A Bottle of Ink, a Pen and a Blotter · R.K. Narayan
In the Waiting-Room of History · ‘First in Europe, then elsewhere’
The View from Malabar Hill · My Bombay
print layout
tell a friend