She hated herself for her loose tongue. Across the street, she saw a woman standing behind a wooden cart. “Oh wow,” she said. “Fresh roasted corn on the cob with lime. I haven’t had that in years.” She looked at him. “Can we get some?”
She knew that Mohan had seen through her charade. But after a beat he shrugged and said, “Sure.”
The old woman grinned as Smita bit into the corn. Smita caught Mohan’s eye. “Sorry. There’s so little street food I can safely eat. And I’ve always loved the spices they rub on the corn.”
Mohan reached for his wallet and Smita stopped him. “I’ll pay,” she said. “I traded money at—”
“Smita,” Mohan said. “Please. You are my guest.”
“Yes, but—” Smita said. She jumped as the old woman vendor interrupted them. “The man must pay, baby. It is our custom.”
“See?” Mohan said, smiling. “Listen to your elders.”
As they walked past the information desk in the hospital lobby, Mohan gave the woman receptionist a curt nod and flashed a slip of paper. “Doctor’s pass,” he said.
“And for madam, sir?” the receptionist asked. It was the same woman who had made her wait in the lobby the day before.
The change in Mohan was imperceptible, a slight straightening of the shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said. “She’s with me.”
“Yes, but sir. Visiting hours . . .”
This time, he stopped and looked closely at the seated woman. “It’s okay,” he repeated, and the woman nodded. “Come,” he said as he took Smita by the elbow and steered her toward the elevators. She knew what she had just witnessed. She stole a glance at Mohan. His entire demeanor was different.
“You know,” Smita said as they waited for the elevator, “would you mind if I sat in the cafeteria and worked on my laptop for a couple of hours?”
“Yes, of course,” Mohan said immediately. “If there’s any news I will phone you or come find you. But it will be many, many hours still.”
He walked her to the cafeteria. “Call, hah, if you need anything?”
“Mohan. Stop being a mother hen, yaar.”
He raised his eyebrows at her use of his salutation, then flashed her a quick salute and walked away.
Smita turned on her computer and glanced at her watch. It was late in the US, but Papa was a night owl. She dialed his number.
“Hi, beta,” her father said. “How’s your vacation?
“It’s going great, Papa,” she said. How effortlessly the lie had slipped from her lips. “In fact, we’re seriously thinking of extending it by another week or so.”
“Really?” Despite the slightly crackly connection, she heard the surprise in his voice. “It’s that beautiful? I’ve always heard it was. In fact, your mother had wanted to go there.”
“She did?” How come he hadn’t mentioned this before?
“Yes. I didn’t want to tell you before you left. In case it made you . . . sad. But you should enjoy yourself thoroughly, beta. I worry about you, how hard you work.”
She waited until the lump in her throat dissipated. “No harder than you do,” she said.
“Me? I’m at the fag end of my life, beta. No, the future belongs to you and Rohit.”
Despite twenty years in America, Papa still used some of his British-Indian expressions. She and her brother had tried telling him not to use the word fag, but to no avail. “How is Rohit?” she asked. “And little Alex?”
“Oh, that fat little rascal? Listen to what he said to me yesterday.” And Papa was off, telling her a story about his grandson’s latest antics. As always, Smita was grateful to Rohit for having procreated and given her parents a grandchild. She had never had a strong maternal urge and shared little of her single friends’ angst about the ticking of their biological clocks. Alex was a gift not just to her parents but to her, also.
After she hung up, Smita worked her way through her emails, then left a message for Anjali to call her. She was reading Shannon’s features about Meena when the lawyer phoned her back, urging her to leave for Birwad the next day. “From what we’re hearing, the verdict could come any day now. And you’d said you wanted to interview Meena and her brothers beforehand?”
“Yes, that’s the plan.”
“Make sure you talk to Rupal, okay? He’s the village head?”
“I was just reading about him,” Smita said.
“He’s a pucca bastard, I tell you. He’s the real mastermind behind all this.”
“So the brothers . . . ?”
“Pah,” Anjali said dismissively. “The brothers are just ignorant peasants. But . . . but this man? He’s a monster.”
Monster. Demon. Satan. In Smita’s line of work, people often bandied around such terms to explain away horrendous behavior. Every time there was a mass shooting in America, for instance, there was a rush to label the shooter a crazed monster, rather than place him within the context of a culture that fetishized guns. Every time a cop shot dead a black man, there was an attempt to paint him as a rogue cop. But what about the millions of otherwise normal people who were recruited to massacre strangers during a war? Were they all evil? How alarmingly easy it had been to get millions to participate in genocide during both the Holocaust and Partition. Human beings could apparently be turned into killers as effortlessly as turning a key. All one had to do was use a few buzzwords: God. Country, Religion. Honor. No, men like Rupal were not the problem. The problem lay with the culture from which they bubbled up.
“Hello?” Anjali sounded impatient. “Are you still there?”
“Yes. I’m here.”
“Okay. So we’ll be in touch, then.”
“Anjali. Wait.”
“Yes?”
“What’s she like? Meena?”
There was a long silence. “She’s the bravest client I’ve ever had,” Anjali said finally. “But you have to look past her demeanor to see how brave she is.”
“Brave how?”
Smita heard the heavy exhale. “Do you have any idea what a risk she’s taken, suing her brothers? We had to force the police to reopen the case. She was near death when I first met her. She injured herself trying to rescue her husband. They set him on fire first, and then they actually tried to stop his younger brother from saving her life.”
“The picture of her in the paper . . .”
“Yes. She’s still pretty disfigured.”
“And nothing more can be done? To help?”
“To make her look more presentable, you mean? What for?” There was no mistaking the bitterness in Anjali’s voice. “You think anyone else is going to marry this poor woman? You think her neighbors will ever speak to her again? You think she will ever be anything more than what she is—a social pariah?”
“Well, then why put her through the trauma of a lawsuit?”
There was a strained silence. When Anjali finally spoke, she enunciated each word slowly and deliberately: “To set a precedent. To issue a warning to the next bastard thinking of burning alive a woman. And hopefully, to lock these monsters up forever. That’s all. Not to improve Meena’s life. She knew this when she agreed. And that is why she’s the bravest woman I know. You understand?”
“I do,” Smita said.
After they hung up, Smita closed her eyes, processing everything Anjali had told her. When she looked up, she saw Mohan standing in front of her, frowning as he peered into her face. “Hi,” he said quietly.
Fear made her lean forward in her chair. “What’s wrong?” she whispered. “Shannon . . . ?”
“. . . is out of surgery,” he said. “She’s in the recovery room. The surgery took less time than they’d thought. It went really well.”
“Thank God.”
Mohan gave a slight nod. “Well, I just wanted to give you the news,” he said. “Carry on with your work. I’ll see you later.” He turned to leave but stopped, his attention snagged by the picture of Meena on Smita’s open laptop. “Is that her? Meena?”
Smita nodded.
He emitted a low whistle. “This poor woman,” he said. “Her . . . those scars. Her face looks like a map or something.”
That’s it exactly, Smita thought. Meena’s face was a map created by a brutal, misogynistic cartographer.