Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

friend is sitting here, that she’s just stepped out for a moment?
    But when I look at him, I know I need not worry.
    “How could you know, Madam Experience? How many men have you talked to in your lifetime?” Anju would say later. “As it happens, he got us into an awful lot of trouble.”
    Sometimes you just know, I would tell her. And the trouble we got into was not his fault.
    In the pearl-blue light of the theater, the man’s—but he was not much more than a boy himself—eyes glimmer, dark and bright in turns. His smile is at once open and apologetic. His hair tumbles over his forehead. Charmingly, I think.
    “Awfully sorry to disturb you, but I think this is my seat.” He holds out his ticket toward me, pointing to the number. The cleft in his chin can break a girl’s heart.
    I lift my schoolbag from the chair. To keep myself from smiling I stare sternly, fixedly at the screen, where the hero has just boarded a night train. In a moment he will see the sleeping heroine and fall in love, unequivocally, irreversibly, in the way of true passion, world without end.
    But I can’t stop myself from looking, just once, out of the corner of my eye.
    He’s intelligent, I can tell that just by how he holds himself, his body relaxed yet alert. Probably a college student, from St. Xavier’s maybe. Or Presidency. Open at the throat, his white shirt is very clean and smells of mint. And when, heart pounding, I raise my eyes a little higher, his lips are smiling. At me.
    How long do we look at each other in that movie hall that is neither in the world nor out of it? How long do we remain suspended in that timeless opal light that gives us strange permission? I don’t know. I must have glanced at the screen from time to time, though I’d long since lost track of the story. (The heroine is weeping as she reads a letter. Then she’s dancing—is it at her beloved’s wedding party? She throws down a glass to shatter on the ground and keeps dancing, her feet smearing with blood, but the pain is less than that which tears her heart. And then it’s the end of the movie, with her in his arms—but how did that come about?) It seems to me as though I haven’t looked away from his eyes at all, that I cannot, even when the houselights come on, and people push each other along the aisles in their hurry to catch the buses before they get too crowded.
    Lying in bed that night I would marvel at the chance that made Anju choose this very day to persuade me to go to the cinema, that arranged this young man’s seat next to mine in a hall that held so many hundreds. But even then I had known it was no chance but the inexorable force of destiny, hushed and enormous as the wheeling of the planets, which brought us together. And as our glances met, like that of the prince and the princess in the story of the palace of snakes, the final word the Bidhata Purush had written for me blazed on my forehead. But this we had no eyes to see.
    They say in the old tales that when a man and woman exchange looks the way we did, their spirits mingle. Their gaze is a rope of gold binding each to the other. Even if they never meet again, they carry a little of the other with them always. They can never forget, and they can never be wholly happy again.
    That is why in families that kept the ancient traditions, girlswere not allowed to meet men until the moment of auspicious seeing, shubho drishti, when the bride and groom gave themselves to each other with their eyes. It wasn’t, as Anju said, to keep the woman ignorant and under control. The elders in their wisdom had done it to prevent heartbreak.

    “Sudha.” Anju shakes my arm urgently. “Sudha, what’s wrong with you? Let’s go!”
    I try to focus on her words, but her voice comes from someplace far away. I start to say something reassuring to her, but instead I find myself smiling at my—yes, foolishly, possessively, I think of him as such—my young man.
    “Come on,” says Anju, and now I