New York City, as captured through an ice menorah at Hanukkah, November 2009.
Image credit: Lexia Snowe © 2014. All rights reserved
Extract from Lexia Snowe’s debut novel
For her first ten years, the single luxury in Dev’s life was the love of her father.
Dev’s parents met on the sandbanks of the Cauvery River in Tanjore, southern India. Both were hippies, traveling with the intensity of never wanting to go back home. It was becoming obvious there that unconventional living didn’t, in fact, get easier over time.
Dev’s father Mick was from Brooklyn. He looked primal and unfinished, which attracted women honest with themselves and unnerved sophisticated ones. His eyes at rest were arrogant, even cold. Then he’d give you his pumpkin grin full of carefree imperfections and you realized he’d just needed something to laugh at to feel involved. He was full of sweetly bemused one-liners on all the absurd in the world, and anecdotes he never quite finished, led away from the ending by the domino effect of a related, better story he’d just thought of.
Dev’s mother Annie was from Golders Green, London, although this was no more or less home than anywhere else. Her grandparents were Jewish refugees from Berlin, and her parents were school teachers (“Could you get,” Annie would say, “More of an anti-climax between generations than that?”). Annie followed the compulsive traveler’s pattern: scowling through a dead-end job for six months as she scraped together cash for the next six months of traveling. She did this over and over, scorning the urges of her family to develop a long-term plan. She had what she termed a “motel soul”. Others called it a pathological aversion to staying in one place unless she was only there to prepare for leaving it.
Mick was in this part of India because he’d been tossed off a train for lack of ticket and wasn’t sure where his next income shot was coming from. Annie was here for the Chola bronzes: sculptures of the Hindu gods crafted for the temples of Tamil Nadu at workshops that smelt at once of volcanoes and cowsheds.
Annie and Mick met moments after Annie had raised her journal over her head as shelter from the rain, and the ink had run down her face. Mick spotted her as he lurched through the downpour. He stopped in his tracks and laughed. She looked like a witch crying her heart out. Annie had shrugged. What.
“You look like a witch,” Mick yelled over the monsoon drumbeat. Not exactly what he meant. No smile from Annie, then:
“Let me show you a trick,” and she opened up the journal to make shelter for him too. They teased each other for hours afterward about what words of hers exactly they were each wearing on their noses or down their cheeks.
- Six pages
- ·
- Next page →