The ink that never dries on the mulberry paper

Dear Delyara, In the teahouse, I am the senior instructor who demonstrates the ancient grace of the tea ceremony with flawless, unhurried movements. The students watch my hands—how smoothly I hold the bamboo whisk, how softly I turn the ceramic bowl—and they think I am a living portrait of traditional virtue and inner calm. They do not know about the mountain of gambling debt my brother left behind in Osaka, or that every month I slide cash out of the preservation fund to keep loan sharks from coming to our family shrine. I lie awake in my quiet room, listening to the water dripping into the stone basin outside, terrified that one slip of my pen will drag a three-hundred-year-old family name into the gutter.