Sometimes, while sitting listlessly at her charkha, or combing her sister’s hair, she would look up through the open door of the hut and wonder, What is that shining thing out there? What is it, so painful, so bright? People, too, lost their place in her mind; they were no longer moored to anything Poornima recognized or controlled or even understood as herself. Once, early in the month, her younger brother ran inside with a cut on his arm. He held it up to her, crying, waiting to be bandaged, but Poornima only looked down at him and smiled kindly, distractedly. She handed him a fifty-paisa coin and nudged him back out the door, drops of blood trailing him, and said, “Go. A banana. Quick. Savitha’s on her way.” Later in the month, her aunt asked her to put rice on the stove for dinner, and Poornima looked up from the corner where she was seated, stared at her aunt, and with her eyes as empty as an open field, she asked, “Who are you?” Twice, maybe three times, Poornima felt a flash, a stab of something she couldn’t name. Something akin to a shard of bitter cold, or blinding heat. What was it? What was it?
She thought that it might be illness, that she had caught something. Malaria, maybe. But then it settled. It settled in her chest, on the left side, just above her heart. At first it was only a sprinkling, like a few grains of rice that might’ve spilled onto a stone floor. And all she had to do was bend to pick them up, one by one. But then the sprinkling of rice grew into a weight. A density. It became a mound of rice. She tried to press her palm against her chest, in an attempt to soothe it away. But it wouldn’t slacken, it wouldn’t loosen; it simply sat there, tight as a fist. She thought of the weight of her mother’s hand, resting against her hair, and now, in her chest this time, was yet another weight. But this one ravaged, conjuring no memory, no longing, no lost childhood or honeyed voice or a hand raised to feed her, conjuring nothing, nothing at all except the two words: she’s gone.
2
More aunts and uncles and cousins started arriving the week before the wedding. The hut was bustling. A tent was erected, blue and red and green and gold. Mango leaves had been bought and garlanded together, strung across the doorway to the hut and all along its edges. Various items for the ceremony—turmeric, kumkum, coconuts, rice and dals, packets of camphor and incense and oils—came in every few minutes. It all had to be stored, put away. And then there was the cooking. All those relatives, there must’ve been more than thirty by Poornima’s last count. They all had to be fed, bright green banana leaves spread before them as plates, the dirty ones collected and thrown to the pigs. Her aunts and cousins helped, but every few minutes someone would turn to Poornima—usually one of her young cousins—and say, Where do you keep the salt? or, Imagine, you’ll be the wife of a fancy man, or, What is it, why are looking at me like that? To which, to all of which, Poornima would place her hand above her heart, and wonder at the hardness, and the ache.
The days passed.
When the morning of the wedding came, it came like an invader. The sun rose in a clamor of paint strokes—pink and purple and orange and green—then rested angrily against the horizon, waiting for land, women, villages on fire. Early in the day, all her female relatives gathered around Poornima, along with her future sisters-in-law and a few neighbor women, for the bridal ceremony. They oiled her hair and then they rubbed turmeric over her body. Each one, in turn, then blessed her with rice soaked in turmeric and kumkum and sandalwood. With the older women, Poornima rose and bent to touch their feet. Aruna, the sister who’d compared Poornima to a monkey, stood a little apart, watching, as if she were bored by it all. When her turn came to bless Poornima and sprinkle her bowed head with turmeric-soaked rice, it felt to Poornima that the grains landed on her head with a kind of jab, like hail, but they also served to wake her up, and, as if she were coming out of a long and complex dream—so convincing it was, so utterly irrefutable, that the waking world, the one in which she was surrounded by twenty women, all smiling, all with yellow teeth, seemed to her the fraudulent one—she blinked and bowed her head lower, saw the throw of rice, and thought, Rice. Is there anything else in the world besides rice?
The muhurthum—the exact time the marriage ceremony would start, based on the bride’s and groom’s horoscopes—was set for that evening at 8:16 P.M. It was a little after seven P.M. and Poornima was seated on the veranda with the priest—without the groom—conducting the Gauri Puja. It wasn’t until after this that she would be led to the mandapam, the wedding dais, and seated next to Kishore in order to go through more pujas, and then have him tie the wedding necklace, the mangalsutra, around her neck. Poornima sat listening to the priest, following his instructions, but everything still felt to her like a mirage, a distant and unreachable place. She listened to the drone of the priest’s voice; she stared into her lap—her head bent, just as a bride’s should be—her hands folded in prayer.
She was wearing a red-and-green sari, made of heavy silk. She wore a few jewels, mostly fake or borrowed, the row of bangles on each wrist glittering in the camphor flame. The henna crawled up her arms and her feet like moss, smothering and airless.
Everything—everything from the bridal ceremony to the dressing in the shadows of the hut, helped by her aunts, the pujas, the young priest yawning as he incanted them, and the constant rush of color and noise and people—all of these were things Poornima could in no way feel, only see, as if she were peering through a window.
Through this window, the priest looked at Poornima, who was squirming a little, incense smoke choking her, and said, “Pay attention.” Then he said, “Get up.” It was time to go to the mandapam, where her groom was waiting.
Her father waited beside her, to lead her to the dais. Poornima looked at him, his face set hard against her, or maybe against her dowry-raising in-laws, or maybe his own frailty—although she saw none of it; she saw only madness, her own—and he said, “Let’s go,” and she said, “Where?”
The sun was beginning to set by now, the western sky blazed green and orange and red. The line of the eastern horizon was once again white with heat. Where am I being led to? Poornima wondered. Wherever it was, she didn’t mind. Not really. She noticed the sunset, with wonder, and thought, It is such a lovely evening, and such a lovely sari I am wearing. It delighted her. That window she was peering through: so much loveliness behind it. And yet, somewhere deeper, she thought, No, I don’t want this sari. I don’t want this day. I don’t want this father. What do I want—what do I want? She was not able to answer, and so all of it remained, and she walked on, pretending to be delighted.
Her head was down, of course. She didn’t look up, but she knew she was nearing the tent when the heat, the air around her, grew heavier. Her father didn’t seem to notice; he seemed entirely focused on the dais, leading her to it. But the air was stifling, no longer lovely, and Poornima felt a rising panic. She tried to stop him, she tried to buck him off, but he kept his grip on her elbow and steered her toward the dais.
“I want to stop,” she said to her father.
Her father tightened his hold on Poornima’s elbow. He said, “Don’t be stupid.”
Don’t be stupid, Poornima thought, and the words seemed decent enough. And so that’s what Poornima chanted to herself, Don’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. Don’t be stupid. And she kept chanting this, over and over and over again, until she arrived at the mandapam, climbed the two steps, and was seated next to her groom.
Don’t be stupid, she told herself.
Her father placed Poornima’s hand in the groom’s. She didn’t look. Why look? Who was this strange man? He barely held it, anyway. More pujas. The priest handed her two bananas and an apple. Two bananas and an apple. Poornima looked at them. They seemed so familiar. So enticing. As if she’d waited her whole life to be handed this exact number and variety of fruit.
Why?