She wanted to ask the man sitting next to her. He might know. She was about to turn and do exactly that when the priest, impatiently, as if he’d already told her many times, said, “Ammai, can’t you hear? I said, give him the fruit.” And so Poornima decided she would ask later, after handing him the fruit. His hand came closer, closer and closer, and this time, Poornima raised her eyes. Just enough. She gasped. His right hand: it wasn’t whole. He was missing two fingers. His middle and most of his index. The nub of his index finger looked like dry shredded meat, still pink, and the end of where his middle finger should have been was closed up, turned inward, like the mouth of a toothless old man. She shrank away.
So this, she thought with disgust, this is what they meant by idiosyncrasy. She recalled that she’d once known someone else with these hands, with hands just as grotesque (someone’s father, but whose?). And then she thought, But who is this man? And why am I to hand him these two bananas and an apple? They’re mine. These fruits. I don’t want to place them in that hand, she thought; I don’t want to place them in a hand so harmed.
*
It was not the fruit. Or perhaps it was the fruit. Either way, by the time Kishore had tied the mangalsutra around her neck and they’d walked the seven steps around the fire—her five fingers held in his three (and a half)—she understood. And that window? She understood now that there was no window. There never had been. Or, if there had been, it had broken, a rock had crashed through it: and here she was, staring at the rock, the shards, the air rushing in. She understood, in that moment, that she was married.
3
Her husband’s home, in Namburu, was not at all a hut. It was a real house, made with concrete and with two floors. It had four rooms on the first floor and one large room on the top floor, with the remainder of the flat roof serving as a terrace. Here, laundry was hung, and on the hottest summer nights, everyone brought their mats up and slept under the stars. But not anymore. Here was where Kishore and Poornima would live, and here was where Poornima was escorted for their first night together. Poornima’s young cousin accompanied her, serving as a chaperone, and her new mother-in-law and sisters-in-law greeted them at the door with a glowing aarthi. Poornima looked down at her toes.
They played a game, she and her new husband, while all the relations cheered them on. It was a game that had been played since ancient times: the same game, in the same way. Water was poured into a brass vessel, narrow at the top. A ring was dropped in. Plop. Into the water. They were to reach their right hands, only their right, into the vessel, and whoever came up holding the ring was the winner. The narrow opening was the key—their hands were meant to touch. The fingers meant to interlock. The foreplay—between these two strangers—meant to lead to sex. The first sex. Poornima reached her hand in and felt an immediate disgust. Instead of five, she felt three fingers. The thumb and pinkie hardly fingers, so that left only one. And this one rubbing against hers, the nub of the other—the index, the one that was minced—like moist, undercooked meat. And then nothing. The middle finger just an absence. An omission. She smiled shyly, trying to hide her revulsion. This is your new husband, she told herself. This is your new life. And then she looked up. Her new husband was looking right back at her. At her? Maybe through her. But he had a peculiar look in his eyes. Poornima recognized the look; what was it? She went through all the recollections of her youth, and her girlhood, the whole of her life, really, and it seemed to her that it was not at all peculiar, or unfamiliar. It was, in fact, the most familiar look of all. It was the look of a man: undressing her, teasing off her clothes, her innocence, ripping it with his teeth, biting at the tender heart of it, and then laughing and cruel, savoring the completeness of his incursion, its terror and its desire, and here she was, already half spent, half spoiled, half naked.
And here she was: already half swallowed.
And it was then that the tears started—before she could stop them, while her fingers still searched for the ring, but not really, because she already knew he would win; or rather, that she would lose—but they didn’t matter, because hardly anyone noticed, and if they did, they mistook them for tears of joy.
*
That evening, after the afternoon filled with games and gentle teasing of the bride and groom ended, Poornima was bathed and dressed in a white sari and her hair adorned with blooming jasmine. She was handed a glass of warm milk for her new husband, scented with saffron, and she climbed the steps to the rooftop room. Slowly. So slowly that her young cousin, who accompanied her up the stairs, along with a few of Kishore’s female relations, looked at Poornima and thought she might cry again. This young cousin, named Malli, knew nothing of what had happened back in Indravalli—only that there was a strange hush over the ceremony, one that she guessed was associated with the crazy-looking woman curled up in the weaving hut all those weeks ago, nestled under Poornima’s arms, the one she’d only gotten a glimpse of, though a boy cousin, who’d gotten a better look, had told her she was a rakshasi come to devour new babies. “But why new babies?” she’d asked him. “Because, stupid, they’re the tenderest.” That seemed to make sense. “So we’re too tough?” He’d looked at her and sighed impatiently. “I am. I don’t know about you. Let me see.” He’d squeezed her arm, and said, “Probably you’re all right.” Still, Malli was happy to join Poornima on her journey to Namburu. It was the custom—a young female relative joining the bride to her new home, a way to ease the journey to the strange, unfamiliar place—and Malli had jumped at the chance. But now that she was here, climbing the stairs beside Poornima, a cousin she barely knew but who struck her as being in an awful, pounding sort of pain, Malli wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to take her chances with the rakshasi.
Outside the door to the room, Malli and the other relations left her, giggling as they hurried away.
Poornima watched them go.
She looked at the doorway. There was a garland of young green mango leaves strung across the top of the doorframe. The door itself had a fresh coat of green paint and was blessed with dots of red kumkum and turmeric. She stood against it and listened. Not for sounds of her new husband, who, she knew, waited beyond, but for something else, something she could not name. Maybe a voice leading her away, maybe to the edge of the roof, maybe to its very edge. But there was nothing. The glass of milk in her hands grew cool. She looked down and saw the layer of skin on its surface. It had appeared out of nowhere: thin and creased and floating. Cunning. How did milk do that, how did it know to do that? she wondered. To protect itself? How, she thought, could it be so strong?
She set the glass down next to the door and walked to the center of the terrace. The concrete burned her bare feet, but she hardly noticed. She saw something shining toward the middle of the roof, but when she reached it, she saw that it was only a piece of wrapper, for a toffee. What had she thought it was? A coin? A jewel? Poornima didn’t know, but she was so disappointed that she sat down, right next to the wrapper, and stared at it. “You could’ve been a diamond,” she said to it. Then she said, “You could’ve been anything.” The wrapper stared back. It was nearly dark by now. It had cooled some, but the afternoons were still hot, in the high thirties, and the concrete that Poornima sat on held the heat. She didn’t mind. What she minded was that when she was small, three or four years old, one of her earliest memories, she’d gone with her mother to the market to buy vegetables. While they were walking back home, her mother had stopped in a dry goods shop to buy a gram of cloves. Poornima looked at all the tins on the counter of the shop, filled with chocolate candies and biscuits and toffees, and asked her mother to buy her one. Her mother hardly looked at her. She said, “No. We don’t have the money.”