Interpreter of Maladies

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Afterward she took the escalator to the main part of the store, to the cosmetics department, where soaps and creams were displayed like jewels, and eye shadows and powders shimmered like butterflies pinned behind protective glass.

Her soliloquies mawkish, her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.

In those six weeks I regarded her arrival as I would the arrival of a coming month, or season—something inevitable, but meaningless at the time.