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.
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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:
The View from Malabar Hill · My Bombay
In the Waiting-Room of History · ‘First in Europe, then elsewhere’
A Bottle of Ink, a Pen and a Blotter · R.K. Narayan
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