I’m watching Balan hide his second mobile phone in the glovebox of his emerald-green Porsche, the phone he always uses when he has an new girlfriend. I decide not to tell him about the plane ticket. Impulse or resolution, it takes me out of my comfortable flow. At the beginning of the flight, the roar of the engines causes me to yawn and tense the muscles in my neck. These are the warning signs, my habitual prodome. In the middle of the flight, the light on the ocean forms strings of rhinestones and sapphires, like a Turner painting. This could be seen as good luck. At the end of the plane ticket there is Boston’s Logan airport and a red-haired, blue-suited lawyer holding up my old name on cardboard: ‘V. Dutta.’ “Mrs Dutta, ” she…
“Passage,” A Short Story by Anita Goveas
