Postcard prose – Issue 6 | August 2009
Education
by Pallavi Dixit
It’s unthinkably hot today.
Five children descend upon us in front of the cavernous, dirt-floor restaurant, one of those places within the Angkor park grounds that serves heaping bowls of greasy fried rice. They tell us we’re beautiful and where are you from?
America. India, originally.
One kid says, I am from New Delhi.
Another says to my husband, Where is your bindi?
A third corrects: Only ladies wear bindis.
The kids’ faces are younger than their voices. We buy three postcards, but no bracelets.
In the evening, at a restaurant with plastic chairs and buy-one-get-one-free $1.50 beers, a boy comes around with a box of books. We leave out the India part this time.
He says, The capitol of America is Washington, DC, and America has 300 million people minus two. He flashes a dimple, and continues: Obama is the new president and before him it was Bush, but nobody liked him.
There’s some sort of training involved in this type of work: current events, capitols of the world. Intensive English followed by a lesson in turning on the charm.
Well past midnight, in a bar with a microphone and drunken singing, a six-, maybe seven-year-old girl squeezes between chairs and around tables hoping to sell us her flowers.
About the author
Born in India and raised in New Jersey, Pallavi Sharma Dixit earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts and has recently published travel articles in the Star Ledger and fiction in the anthology Fiction on a Stick. She highly recommends volunteering in Tanzania, renting an apartment in Florence, attending a cricket match in Melbourne, doing anything in Luang Prabang and buying around-the-world tickets.
Read our current issue, Issue 6 | August 2009:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
