Judy is framed by golden dandelions brighter than her hair on a perfect Ohio summernoon. She is sipping my masala chai, a mixture of Darjeeling tea with cloves, cardamoms and a hint of cinnamon; it's a taste she has acquired in the fourteen months of our friendship. I flip open the top of a chilled Bud Lite. We watch our boys chase after the grimy-grassed ball when she asks, "Do your people, like, do polygamy?"

I revel in my fluency, but I am stopped by her words, by her face reddening in the sun. I hear the swing still creaking as my daughter races away; the thick hedge she brushes in passing hisses in the silence. I think of my husband (is he cheating?). What could I have said...

Then I remember the visitors from Canada. They had come to catch the tail-end of our glorious summer as the evenings started to chill over the border. My two friends, one from the south of India and the other from the north, were strangers to one other but had driven down from Ontario. The older woman was a banker and was married; her husband had driven the entire way. The younger woman was a fiesty artist, still searching for a suitable brahmin boy.

Their lives were so parallel that being coralled into the same car had been unbearable for six hours, especially as they had hated each other on sight with the slow-marinating hatred of women who would not think of punching each other out like little boys. They had buried their resentments in small talk and pleasant sallies that festered wounds; when one handed over a glass of ice wine, emphasising that it was the most expensive best, the other smiled and said wine was so (giggle) girly she would like a single malt, thank you.

Judy, my neigbour, had watched many such talons-bared jousts on our open deck from the periphery of our unfenced properties. What had tired us over three long days had left her, well...agog.

The unwritten rule of American migration is to astonish. To tell the stories of splendid suns and mournful moons; to unveil an authenticity of the ragged and the oppressed. Especially if we are women of colour. More so if we are writers.

I let out a Sheherazade sigh. Spotlit by the gently wavering shafts of sunlight through the maple tree over my head, I begin: "The young one wasn't a virgin." I whisper, drawing close, "the older wife had to slice her finger on the white bedsheet before leaving it flapping in the wind — it was a blood debt for their husband. Now they can barely talk." Judy closes her eyes and sees, no doubt, beyond her disbelief. "They fought so much..." she muses, "I just knew they had to be married to the same man."

My fingers stroke the weeping condensation, keeping cool.

Dipika Mukherjee is the editor of two collections of short stories from Malaysia and Singapore; The Merlion and Hibiscus in 2002, and Silverfish New Writing in 2006. Her poems have been published in Hong Kong, the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as broadcast over Singapore Public Radio. She currently teaches Creative Writing in Amsterdam.