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Unbordered Memories : Sindhi Stories Of Partition

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Rita Kothari

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“Afterwards, Ada turned slow cartwheels on the terrace, watching the world change kaleidoscopically from purple to orange as the queen's crepe myrtles took turns with the hibiscus. The gardener was sweeping the lawn and his helper was cleaning down the curved cane chairs on the wide verandah. Ordinarily, cartwheeling was one of Ada's favorite things to do, but this afternoon her heart wasn't in it. Rather than enjoying the way the world spun around her, she felt dizzy, even queasy. After a time, she sat instead on the edge of the verandah near the spider lilies.”

“Ada tore open the package to find a small black leather book inside. Between its covers were no words, but instead page after page of pressed flowers: orange hibiscus, mauve Queen's crepe myrtle, purple passionflower, white spider lilies, red powder puffs. All of them, Ada knew, had come from her very own garden, and in an instant she was back in Bombay. She could feel the sultry air on her face, smell the heady fragrance of summer, hear the songs of prayer as the sun set over the ocean.”

“She was his first music student. He tried teaching her to play the guitar, but she was so terrible at it that he stopped within a few weeks. By then, her violent strums had damaged all the strings on Joe’s guitar. To make things worse, she had also clawed into his fretboard with her long, sharp nails, leaving several gashes. ‘Your sister is the worst enemy of my music,’ a miffed Joe had told his friend.”

“Given our geography, our tolerant culture and the magnetic attraction of our economy, illegals will always be with us. Our first task, therefore, should be abolishing bilingual education everywhere and requiring that our citizenship tests have strict standards for English language and American civics. The cure for excessive immigration is successful assimilation. The way to prevent European-like immigration catastrophes is to turn every immigrant—and most surely his children—into an American.”