By Shanti Chandrasekhar

With words or with things, you always find a way to hurt me, even though you love me. Over the years, I’ve treasured the clothes from you, new and hand-me-downs alike. But that pashmina shawl you’d used only once? Are you sure, I’d said. You’d slipped it into my luggage and hugged me. Later, unfolding it before a party, I saw the stain concealed within the folds. Visible or invisible, stains find a way to remain un-erasable.

I’m that little girl—dark, skinny, bespectacled—with two long braids, hiding behind the curtains, peeking out at you and our other sister, your look-alike, twist to the songs of Beatles and I, the shy one as Mummy says of me, watch, because chatting with the guests is unthinkable, dancing unimaginable. They throw a glance at me, the visitors, and turn back to the two of you with bob-cut hair and pretty skirts, impressing them with your fast-spoken English, though from behind the curtains I can tell where you make a mistake, which our more-fluent-in-Hindi guests don’t notice and I don’t dare to say that’s wrong English and you both jabber-jabber-jabber and they laugh, tickled. When Papa-Mummy are in the room, the visitors call to me in their mock-sweet voices, Come here, but I don’t, and no, the mock-sweetness doesn’t sadden me, not like the skirts sewed with the fabric Mummy’s Anglo-Indian friend brought me from England because I share the same birthday with her snobbish-blue-eyed-son—the first blue-eyed boy I’d ever seen in person, not in English textbooks or movies. But our eldest sister said to Mummy, She’s too dark for these colors, and ran her hand over the cloth saying, It’s so soft you can tell it’s foreign material, and Mummy lets her take the material and get skirts tailored for you two, my fair-complexioned beautiful sisters, and you twirl the skirt and twist to the songs playing on our record player, songs I love, the new-plastic smell of His Master’s Voice discs I love, Nipper-the-HMV-logo-dog I love, the soft-colored skirt I love, but you wear it. My birthday gift.

That memories are unreliable is untrue. I may not recall the size of the pink flowers on the gray textile, but I remember you wearing the skirt.

The skirt, after you shot up, sat in my closet, untouched. That shawl lies somewhere in my basement, unused. Those hurts and memories, to my blue-eyed husband’s relief, I put them all away—to heal, unhindered.

Yet how it crumples, the stubborn-but-soft boundary I now erect between you and me. Intertwined threads, diverging, converging, like the double helix strands, always find a way to keep our fabric from unraveling.

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Shanti Chandrasekhar is a Maryland-based writer whose words have appeared in The Sunlight Press, Bright Flash Literary Review, and Persimmon Tree, among many other publications. Writing gives her a deeper understanding of life, human relationships, and her own self.