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On Saturday afternoon, after a morning spent in the library writing, Anjali walked with Aasha along the Seine embankment along with thousands of others, watching les bateaux mouches full of tourists go by. In the boats’ wakes, the water boiled and bounced off the stone-walled embankments.
“I read that the Brigade Fluviale, the river police, pulled fifty corpses from the Seine last year,” Aasha said. “About ninety people attempt suicide in the river each year.”
“How many of them get rescued?”
“Roughly seventy, the article said.”
“So that’s twenty in the river due to suicide, and thirty persons who turned into corpses in the river for unknown reasons,” Anjali said. “Interesting.”
“Leave it to you, the writer with too much imagination, to do the math and to speculate,” Aasha said with a smile.
A roller blader, going at breakneck speed, flashed by on the crowded embankment. If he knocked some poor kid into the Seine, the child would be one of the statistics.
“There’s no such thing as too much imagination,” Anjali said. And she raised a new topic of discussion
“My mother made me bring a book from Mumbai, and for some weird reason I’m actually reading it. I’m wondering if she ever read it? Or did she pick it out for me simply by the title?”
“What’s it called?”
“Hindu Womanhood. Stories from Indian history about women immolating themselves rather than lose their satitva, their virtue.”
Aasha didn’t appear to be the slightest bit affected by what Anjali was saying.
“Everywhere in this book, there’s the story of a sati—a perfect wife—who immolates herself, who voluntarily follows her deceased husband onto the funeral pyre.”
“That’s all in the past, don’t worry about it now.”
“No, there was a revival in the 1980s, where widows were pressured by the man’s family to immolate themselves—so the family wouldn’t have the burden of taking care of them.”
“Those are extreme cases, don’t you think?” Aasha still didn’t seem perturbed.
“Don’t any of these stories bother you?” Anjali asked as they walked along. A family of four, all on bicycles of different sizes, whizzed by.
“It won’t happen to me. I love Sameer, his family loves me. I’m glad to be in Paris, but I’m looking forward to going back and getting married.”
The stories bothered Anjali, the writer with the vivid imagination.
