DESIRE
Shubha Venugopal Leaves bloom into color and die on the trees outside my window. A cat is rolling in fallen flaky piles. Amber and burgundy, burnt maroon and sienna, fleck the cat’s sides. The cat flips upright before rolling again, its back twitching. Then, a pale soft belly exposed, fur silvered, alight with sun. I press against the window to better see. I haven’t touched a cat in years. I feel again the pull of loneliness, lingering shame, the hunger of longing. This is the way I feel when I see cats.
I never knew what a cat could do until I met my roommate’s pet. Sheena was a girl from my college looking for a place to rent. I needed money, so I let her stay with me. She was a thin girl, with startling green eyes in her narrow, bronzed face. She ate rice cakes and salads, and from the start was polite and friendly. I wished she stayed home more often. Only she rarely did. She stayed at her boyfriend’s most of the time, though he wouldn’t let her actually move in. He liked the illusion of his space. As if to assure him that she didn’t really live there, she left her cat with me. For weeks, months. To thank me for learning to clean the litter, Sheena gave me a poster: Ruth Orkin’s “American Girl in Italy.” She hung it up for me in the living room. A young woman, pale and lovely, shawl slipping off, rushing through streets filled with men, not acknowledging their leers. I’d stare at the men, young and old, at their certainty that the girl would want them, at their arrogance. I felt the woman’s shame as she evaded them; I imagined their hands upon her.
The American girl poster reminded me of a painting I’d seen once in a handicrafts store in Bangalore. The story it depicted was atypical amongst the store’s other art. I’d never seen one like it. It showed Draupadi, in the Mahabharata, being gambled away to a cunning king by one of her five husbands. I remember the tale my mother had often told me: The king, Draupadi’s new possessor, ordered that she be dragged through the royal court by her hair as her helpless husbands silently watched. He commanded that she be stripped of her sari in front of all the spectators who witnessed the corrupt dice game and its results. The beautiful Draupadi begged and pleaded, but no one dared defy the king. Finally, she called out to Lord Krishna who appeared to her in a vision. He cast a spell that transformed her sari into an endless ream of cloth that, as she was disrobed, would unroll forever. 94