Rocks

by Seema Srivastava

It usually happened after 7:30, after the Sinhas had their dinner. Bhavana’s mother watched the clock and her father leaned a broomstick against the side of his chair in preparation, though they never saw him use it, except to slide a dead mouse from beneath the rusty trim of their refrigerator once. Bhavana and her brother waited with glee for the giant rock to come through their kitchen window. They didn’t have much money, and as kids, were eager for excitement. It was free entertainment, and better than watching Wheel of Fortune, which was what was always on the television at that time. Bhavana came to associate the amplified ticking of that spun wheel, slowing as it arrived at its fate, as a round-up for the thrown rock. The closer their kitchen clock came to 7:30, the quicker they all began to swaddle their lentils inside torn scraps of roti. Bhavana and her brother looking at each other, chewing furiously, throwing caution to the wind when it came to decorum. They stuffed their palms until the masala ran down their wrists and then licked it away. Sister and brother coughed and laughed and edged their chairs closer to the window. It irritated their mother, their choking out of excitement, their eyes watering, and she whacked their backs pretending to be saving their lives. She was entitled to her frustration, a former professor stuck in a dreary American kitchen awaiting a broken window in the deep of winter. Bhavana’s brother wanted to catch the stone like a fly-ball. Bhavana wanted it for her budding rock collection. They gently pushed their mother’s doughy arm aside as she glared at them. There was nothing funny about the stone. After three breaks, the rental agency charged them for a replacement even though it wasn’t their fault.

“It’s vandalism,” Bhavana’s mother cried to the white man at their doorstep, Bhavana and her brother smirking at her hips from behind the screen door.

“Then you’ll need a police report,” the manager said, brushing snow from his shoulders.

There was no rhyme or reason to the days on which it happened. Bhavana and her brother kept scorecards to see if they could devise a system and crack it like a game. After school, they pressed Chrissy, the leader of the pack, for details. Where did she find the rocks? Which days did she prefer? She spared them on the day she had tap dance but usually made it home in time on the days she had Bible Study. Bhavana began to put in requests for particular kinds of rocks, as though she was selecting a meal from a menu. Had she come across chert or shale or dolomite in her excursions? Chrissy shrugged and said she’d try her best but never managed to crack the glass with anything remarkable. It was mostly shards of dismembered parking lot. The only thing Bhavana and her brother figured out really, was that it happened around 7:30 and that it was always accompanied by mocking sounds of indigenous people singing by slapping their mouths with their hands. Bhavana tried to explain to Chrissy in school one day that they weren’t that kind of Indian, but truthfully, Bhavana had been grateful that she was in the correct etymological territory.

For Bhavana, the hour leading up to the crash took on the air of a cosmic event. The Sinhas were not Christian and did not believe in heaven. But Bhavana had learned about galaxies and distant planets and had begun to draw pictures with her eyes from the smatterings of starlight that rose as fairly above the bleak roofs of their development as they did above those with fancy eaves. There were rocks, massive stones, suspended above their heads. Planets frozen and burning alike. Still, the thing she found most sublime were falling meteors. Released from their foreign origins, the falling meteors left a bright trace in the sky as they traveled to earth, and most remarkable was that they could be seen in all their beautiful strangeness, even before they hit ground, before they landed at human feet, bearing the chance to look as common as the rocks that had been pelted onto the Sinhas’ kitchen table, which Bhavana collected and lined, safe and sound, across her third story bedroom window.

Seema Srivastava earned her MFA in fiction at Columbia University. She teaches undergraduate art history at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her fiction and poetry have been published in Epiphany Magazine and Anamesa Journal.