Read Online Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz - Free Book Online Page B

glass up for a second, then downed it in one quick draught.
    â€œ Buh! ” She made a face and looked as if she were about to spit. Sadhana giggled, but I was too shocked to speak. Mama put down the glass and recapped the bottle, keeping her palm tight on the cap as though the whole thing might explode. Normally, Mama didn’t drink. She didn’t smoke or eat meat. She awoke every day before dawn, had a cold shower, and did meditation and yoga for two hours. She didn’t go shopping for clothes. She didn’t hold grudges. She never once raised her voice to us that I can remember.
    She was holy.
    â€œYou have to respect the power of a substance like this,” she said. “You’re curious, kittens, but you’re too young.” She picked up the bottle and held it to the light. “This has ruined people, ruined lives. Body and soul. I’ve met some of them. It’s not worth the pain.” She held the bottle up by the neck and shook it. “And look at us, we’re stealing from our hosts.”
    â€œWhy did you stop?” I asked.
    â€œDrinking? I was never much for it, baby. It’s poison for the body. But it was when I started yoga. And it’s against what I’ve worked for my whole life. Choosing to confuse my mind instead of opening it up to the truth.”
    â€œWhat about meat? How long is it since you’ve had it?” Sadhana had caught on to my idea. Keep Mama talking until she’d forgotten what we’d done, what we still had sitting on the table in front of us.
    â€œLonger. Since before I lived in California.”
    â€œDo you miss it?” Sadhana and I had had hamburgers once at a birthday party, though we’d made a pact never to confess. I’d gotten sick anyway.
    Mama looked thoughtful. “I miss roast chicken like my mother used to make.”
    â€œWhat did it taste like?” asked Sadhana.
    â€œHeaven,” said Mama, closing her eyes.
    â€œBut you don’t eat animals anymore.”
    â€œThat bird,” said Mama. “Maybe that one bird, I would.”
    â€œAfter all, it would be dead already,” I said. Mama swatted in my general direction as she got up from the table. Heading back out to start the fire, she handed me the bottle. “Put it away, girls, and come outside.”
    The cabin, built by geography professors on sloping land, vibrated with each step she took down the porch stairs. Once everything had stopped shaking, Sadhana raised her glass. “And?”
    I had to laugh. I picked mine up, too. “And.”
    We drank them fast the way Mama did.

It was in spite of all this that we turned out normal. That’s what Sadhana said, though her observation came about the time I was in grade nine, when she was just turning twelve and I was just turning fourteen and had more than a few ambitions about just how much more normal I was going to become. She meant Mama’s strange philosophies, her uncanny enthusiasms. The way we’d battled over our lack of a television and how Sadhana used to beg to go over to her friend’s place to watch Punky Brewster until she learned that a well-timed lie could avoid one of Mama’s earnest eye-level interventions.
    We were sitting around a table draped in bright red crepe, at our mutual birthday dinner. As Mama made flourishes on the cake in the adjoining kitchen, squeezing sugar roses from the pastry bag and singing Pete Seeger, my sister was explaining how miraculous it was that we had come out on the other side of our childhood with a passable claim to ordinariness, with no outward signs of outlandishness or zeal. We were both in high school now, in the other half of the cement-block building where we’d started in kindergarten. In the green and yellow hallways of jostling, slouching, hollering teens, seventh-­graders like Sadhana were reminded of what it was like to be the lowest of the low.
    â€œThink about Emann,” she