AN UNASHAMED PROPOSAL

One gusty day in May of 1997, a mailman trudged down the streets of Fort Greene in Brooklyn and plucked a letter from his bag.

- Kiran Desai

It almost flew from his hands, but it didn't, and he dropped it through the stiff brass mail slot of a sober, liver-colored brownstone, where it lay on the dulled parquet until Lou Orsini, who'd lived forever on the second floor, scooped it up, almost tossed it out with the Panda Garden delivery menus, but didn't. He saw it in time and propped it on the stairs. When Ulla and Sunny returned from the Korean deli with toilet paper, tofu, sprouts, and six assorted artisan ales, Ulla almost trod on it but didn't. She made pincers of her fingers and picked it up despite her hands being full. Ulla was the girlfriend Sunny had never happened to mention to his family, although for more than a year now they had shared a lease, a bed, a Con Ed utility bill, a laundry basket, and, on some absent-minded occasions, a toothbrush.

"What does your mother say?" Ulla asked, unlacing her sneakers.

Sunny would come to regret not bundling the letter away, but in this moment it was so astonishing that he exclaimed, "Look! I have a marriage proposal!" Oh, how could he have forgotten that love, when it arrives, arrives always twinned to its destructive force, as inevitably as God and Devil, life and death, home and the leaving of it; that information collected during sweeter moments will be turned to ammunition and discharged during war; that what is innocent in the morning will not remain so at nightfall.

Ulla took the letter from Sunny.

"My dear boy," Babita Bhatia had penned in her customary envy-green ink.