In the living room the dogs lie with their heads between their paws, refusing to eat, refusing to get up. When the coffin is brought to the house Judy finally stands, the fur rising like quills on her ruff. She points her snout to the sky and howls. She has never made this sound before. It makes the small hairs all over my body alert, makes my internal organs cold. My mother raises her brittle face to say, “Shut that damn dog up. People will think we are killing it.” But we don’t need to kill Judy because she is killing herself. I try to coax her to eat. I put the plate of rice and meat that my father has always fed his dogs in front of her, but she ignores it. I sit on the floor and mix the food into fist-size balls, hold them before her grizzled snout. She turns her head away. She lies there, pure misery in her eyes, a broken heart, her ribs suddenly visible. I lie on the floor with her and put my arms around her and my head against her chest. I hear the breath coming in great gasping sighs, the wheeze of her lungs.
We mourn together. She had been my father’s creature so purely. Without him, there is no more reason for her. The next day is the funeral. When I wake in the morning, Judy is gone. “She died in the night,” Sita says, her hand soft on my shoulder. Now only Punch follows at my heels.
*
I stand with my arms raised over my head, not daring to move as Amma tucks and pins the swirling white fabric around me. I try to keep as still as possible because her hands are trembling. She is trying hard to contain herself, and also we are in a rush because the car is coming for us and already we are late. When the safety pin jabs hard into my hip, I gasp as the blood splotches and spreads quickly on the white sari. She sits on the bed, holds her face in her hand, says, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, my girl. I’m so sorry.” But there is no time. She stares at the bloodstain spreading at my hip. The white is ruined. She pulls saris out of the almirah onto the bed, shaking her head, discarding each one. “No, no, no! What are you going to wear?” She has no other white mourning sari. “This one,” she says. “It’ll have to do. It’s a little pink. Never mind. It’ll do.” Later at the funeral I feel the eyes of the relatives sliding up and down me, taking in the pink blush of my sari.
I catch fragments: “The father’s funeral and the daughter is wearing pink? Really? What do they think this is? A wedding?” I feel the undercurrents of shock and outrage, backs turned to us by everyone—the relatives, my father’s colleagues at the university, his young students bereaved at the loss of their favorite professor. Very subtly, even as we are encased in the “So sad, so sorry for your loss, such a tragedy,” in the long line of condolences, we are minute by minute becoming outcasts, the strands that have held us firmly in place being cut one by one.
Earlier the funeral director had come to the house and said, “He won’t look like he did in life. He will look very different. There was a lot of … damage. It is better to remember him as he was before. It’s better that you don’t see him.” And my mother had acquiesced. So he lies inside a closed casket, around it wreaths of lilies and orchids, which send their perfume drifting into the air.
They slide him into the crematory fire. It will take hours, they say, until the fire reduces him to a pile of ash, and then more hours until he is cooled down enough to take home. We wait, and when the attendant hands my mother the urn, her face is startled. “It’s still warm,” she says in wonder. “Yes, madam, this is how it is.” My mother places the urn at her hip, reaches out her hand for mine, and we leave this place together.
*
This is what it feels like: we had all been on a train traveling together toward an unknown destination on a trip that stretched into the far reaches of time. And then abruptly and without warning, my father had stepped off that train. He had simply gotten off the ride, with no forewarning or explanation. He left us to plunge forward into the future with no sense of direction or purpose.
I refuse to go back to school. There will be so much whispering behind my back, so many questioning looks. I won’t be able to stand it. We have a girl with divorced parents in our class; she lives alone with her mother and no one has ever let her forget how different she is from the rest of us. My own othering will be worse. Forever I will be that tragic girl whose father drowned during the monsoon season. I will be a reminder of bad luck, inauspicious omens. All those limes cut over me by the Hindu monk, they have not kept away misfortune. This is a place where people do not forget or forgive bad luck easily.
I wander the house and the garden, Punch at my heels, he too looking lost and bewildered. I sit by the river and stare into the rushing water. I imagine my father’s body falling. An accident, they say. The storm had been so fierce, he had not seen the river; he had fallen in from the bank. But I know that’s not how it happened. When the monsoon comes as it does every afternoon, I sit at my window and watch water punishing the world.
The policemen look for Samson. They want to question him about that night but can find no sign of him. I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes I hear him creeping up the stairs, coming for me. No one knows if he has run away or is hiding somewhere, waiting. Sita brings plates of food to my room; she sits by my bed and mixes it with her hand, feeds me. I can see that she too has not slept properly in weeks. The three of us have become gaunt female ghosts mourning our lost men.
*
My mother stares out of the window at the river. She puts her hand on the glass as if beseeching what is outside to come in. Her voice is ragged. “Why did he have to go out? I begged him not to.”