Was this what Kishore did at work all day? She nearly laughed out loud. Asking for foot massages, demanding that she press his shirts every morning, yelling for a glass of water as soon as he walked in the door: as if he’d crossed a desert, as if his labors had utterly parched him, when all he was really doing was adding up numbers! But then she checked the other sheets of paper, and it wasn’t true. Those columns weren’t added up; something different was happening in those columns.
Poornima sighed and went back downstairs. There were the lunch dishes to wash and dinner to prepare. Her mother-in-law and Aruna liked their tea at four o’clock, and it was already ten past. Poornima hurried to the kitchen. But as she boiled the water and milk, and raced to add the tea powder, and brought down the sugar things, she wondered about those other pages. What were those columns doing? Maybe Savitha had been right, she thought. Maybe, in the end, accounting was not much more complicated than when her father gave her money to go to the market, hardly any money at all, and she’d still had to buy enough vegetables and rice for all of them, and even so, he’d demanded that she bring back change, along with a full rendition of all she’d spent and where. If she’d bought a kilo of potatoes for five rupees, he’d say, “I could’ve gotten them for four,” and if she did get them for four, he’d say, “They’re small. Pockmarked. No wonder.”
Still, as she was scooping the sugar into the cups, Poornima suddenly put down the spoon. She put it down and looked up. She was amazed. She’d just thought of Savitha, and yet she had felt none of the usual blunt, dreary pain or confusion or longing that she always felt, nor even the gleaming, sharp hatred toward her father. None of it. She’d simply, and without suffering, thought of Savitha. It was the first time she’d done so, and the feeling was like being handed a kite in a strong wind. Poornima smiled. But then the smile immediately fell. Because in the moment right afterward, it all rose up again: the desperate sorrow, the disorder, the mystery of her whereabouts that drove her, on some nights, to huddle in a corner of the terrace and weep under the waning or waxing moon, the watching stars.
But she’d been free for a moment, and besides, those columns couldn’t possibly be all that difficult: those two things she knew. Those two things she was certain she knew.
5
The first time Poornima talked back to her mother-in-law was on the morning of a marriage viewing for Aruna. She was six months older than Poornima and yet still not married. The problem, according to Aruna and her mother, was the boys. They were never good enough. One had a good job, high-paying, in Hyderabad, but he was balding. Another, tall and handsome, had a father who was keeping a woman even though his wife was still alive—and who knew if bigamy had a genetic component? Yet another was perfect in every way—job, hairline, family reputation—but he was the exact same height as Aruna, and she liked to wear a little heel whenever she went to the cinema or out to eat. “What am I supposed to do,” she said, pouting, “wear chapals everywhere? Like a common villager?”
The boy coming today was from Guntur; he worked for Tata Consulting and had been to America on a project, and might even have the chance to go again. He was an only son, so the entirety of his family’s inheritance would go only to him, and he looked like a film hero. At least, that’s what one of his neighbors told the matchmaker, when he went around to inquire. “Which hero?” Poornima asked. “Is it the one in the film we saw?” Aruna scowled and shook her head. “No. Not that one, you pakshi. A hero in a good film.”
It didn’t matter which film. The house in Namburu had been aflutter since four in the morning. The stone floors in every room were washed and mopped. All the furniture was dusted, the cushions on the sofa and chairs aired out. A small puja was conducted—as soon as Aruna had washed her hair and dressed, she made an offering to Lakshmi Devi and lit incense. They were arriving at three in the afternoon but had said nothing about staying for dinner—which meant that Poornima had to make enough sambar and curries in case they did, along with pulao rice and bhajis. She was cutting strips of eggplant for the bhajis, the oil already heating on the stove, when her mother-in-law came in, yelling for her to hurry up, the milkman had arrived, and there was the milk to boil and the yogurt to set. Poornima turned down the oil and got up to get the milk pan, when her mother-in-law looked at her, up and down, and said, “When they arrive, don’t show your face. Stay upstairs. We’ll make up something. We’ll tell them you had to go back to Indravalli for the day. Something. Just don’t make a sound.”
Poornima turned from the stove. “Why? Why would I stay upstairs?”
Her mother-in-law sighed loudly. “You’re not—well, we don’t want to bring Aruna’s status down, do we? Besides, six months, seven months, and you’re still not pregnant? I don’t want you to rub off on my Aruna. On her chances. Barren women are a bad omen, and I don’t want you down here.”
There was silence. Poornima listened. She strained her ears and found that there was only the small, quiet sound of the oil beginning to boil, though this, too, magnified the other silence, the greater one. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know your son isn’t the one who’s barren?”
The slap that followed was so powerful that it knocked Poornima backward, reeling, crashing into the stove. The milk wasn’t on the burner yet, but the oil was. It splattered across the wall, dripped off the granite counter, and landed in thick, hot drops on the floor. A few drops flew onto Poornima’s arm, and she could feel their sizzle, spreading like papad, hissing like snakes.
Her mother-in-law eyed her with real hatred, and then she said, “Keep acting up. Go ahead. There’ll be worse. Just keep it up.”
Worse? There would be worse? Kishore had said the same thing: Was it a coincidence? Or wasn’t it?
That afternoon, when the boy’s family arrived, Poornima was relegated to the upstairs and told not to come down until they called for her. She didn’t mind. She sat in the middle of the terrace for a few minutes, away from the edge so no one would see her. It was after four o’clock when the boy’s family arrived, the hour when flower vendors walked through the village, shouting and singing out the kinds of flowers they had for sale. Poornima could hear the song of the old man who sold the garlands of jasmine, plump as pillows, and just beginning to open, releasing a fragrance so intoxicating that she was certain she caught their scent on the terrace, two, maybe three streets away.