By: Anne McGouran

Kate is a Burmese-Indian octogenarian with scornful dark eyes in a heavily lined face. The top of her head just about reaches the height of my armpit.

“My husband dropped dead in his surgery at age thirty-two. To support my five little ones, I taught at a private girls’ school in Dharamsala. I adored the teaching but not the housework. Housework is just a bourgeois fetish.”

“Dharamsala…was that in the sixties?” I ask.

“Yes, during the first wave of Tibetan emigrations. Did you know I tutored the Dalai Lama’s niece? Not the brightest bulb, that one”—Kate stares off into the distance…  into the Outer Himalayas—“I was always the first person up in the morning. I’d pour warm milk and curd into a chati, cover it overnight with a blanket, then churn it for our breakfast. The nuns all adored my lassi. I still get letters from Sister Veronica. That slyboots used to slip Santra Goli candies into my mailbox when I was having a hard time with the spoiled rich students. Sister V. and I are the last ones standing. Soon enough we’ll leave our bodies so nature can work her magic. Our energies are continually recycled, you know. We pass from death to life over and over again. It’s nothing personal, really.”