september 16th: missed deadline, one story [The Salt in the Well], etc.

so. this story was supposed to go somewhere else. i had written it for a publisher's call, revised it, overthought it, opened the document several unnecessary times as though staring harder might constitute editing, and then did the most administratively accurate thing my life could have done with a deadline: missed it. alas. for a while i thought that meant the story had also missed whatever small life it was meant to have, which is stupid. because, a deadline is not a funeral. and, i got to stop treating it like that. so, i pulled it apart again. removed things. added some. put other things back. annoyed myself with sentences and phrases. changed names over and over again. tried to make the ending behave a little. tried rewriting the ending in different voices. and now i am putting it here instead. perhaps this blog is where my late, rejected, undelivered, missed, improperly filed little things come to acquire some home and maybe a citizenship. anyway. here.

The Salt in the Well

The mustard oil always left a yellow skin under her thumbnail that smelled faintly of rancid pickles for days afterward. Raina wiped her palms against the seat of her salwar, but the grease had already soaked into the cotton, turning the green fabric a dark, translucent puddle-color. The brass bowl wasn't hers anyway; she had slipped it into her tote bag from her aunt’s verandah in the market town across the river while the old woman was busy arguing with the milkman over three missing rupees. Raina mentally defended herself occasionally with thoughts like aunt owns several bowls, never uses this one, or once said she hated its dent. Her aunt was probably still looking for it, blaming the maid.

The three-foot iron rod sat across her knees, heavy and annoying. It didn't have a balance point. It was just a piece of scrap she’d pulled out from behind the railway cabin after the line shifters went on strike last November.

Down by the concrete water tank, the village wasn't hiding. That was the thing that made the back of Raina’s mouth taste like brass. Nobody was screaming. Ari, who ran the ration shop, had brought out three plastic chairs with the woven diamond patterns on the backs. The white Bolero had been parked with one rear tyre on a spilled pile of Ari’s onions, which Ari had so far chosen not to mention.

He’d given the chairs to the men from the Clearing so they wouldn't have to stand while the tea boiled. A couple of small boys from the primary school were leaning against the front mudguard of the Bolero, tracing their fingers through the dust on the door to spell out OM. One of them started drawing something obscene beside it until the other smeared it out with his palm. From behind the counter, somebody kept asking whose tea glass was whose.

Everyone knew why they were here. Sami’s daughter had been having the fits again, the ones where she bit her own tongue until the milk turned red in her mouth, and the local healer, the man who gave her powders, had already taken five hundred rupees without fixing it.

“They’re saying she found a dried crow head under the tulsi pot,” the woman on the bus had told Raina three hours ago, her voice flat, competing with the rattle of the broken window frame. The woman had been peeling a mandarin orange, dropping the pith onto the floorboards between their feet. “The mother’s sister says the girl only started doing it after the old widow down by the pond looked at her during the new moon. People are getting tired of the bad luck. The well water tastes like lime this month.”

Raina had just nodded then, her fingers twitching against the zipper of her bag where the iron rod lay wrapped in an old lungi.

Now, the tea was done. One of the Clearing men—the one with the squint and the nylon shirt that stuck to his shoulder blades—wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and stood up. He had the tongs tucked into his belt. They were long, heavy things of black iron, three feet from hinge to teeth, the metal worn smooth in places and rough with old pits in others.

Raina got off the ledge of the low culvert. Her left foot had gone entirely asleep from the way she’d been sitting, and she had to stamp it twice against the dirt road, a sharp, prickling irritation running up to her calf.

She walked past Ari’s shop. He looked up from his ledger, his eyes lingering on the iron rod in her hand, then dropped his gaze back to his numbers. He didn't call out. In these parts, people carrying metal usually belonged to someone else’s argument.

“Hey,” Raina said when she reached the edge of the plastic chairs. Her voice didn't ring out. It was dry from the bus ride, and she had to clear her throat halfway through. “The Bolero's blocking the lane for the night tractor.”

The man with the squint looked at her, his hand moving automatically toward his waist where the tongs hung.

“Who’re you? Sami’s family?”
“No,” Raina said.She didn't wait for him to stand up completely. When you’re five-foot-four and your shoulder hurts from carrying luggage, you don't do the speech.

She swung the railway rod sideways. It wasn't a clean stroke; the weight of the scrap iron dragged her shoulder down, and the tip caught the edge of Ari’s plastic chair first, splitting the blue molded leg with a loud crack before it hit the man’s knee.

He didn't yell about god or righteousness. He just let out a high, wet squeak like a stepped-on frog and tumbled sideways into the dust, his tea glass shattering against a brick.

The other two men rose, but they were awkward, their knees catching on the low table. The tongs slipped from the first man's belt as he rolled and struck the dirt beside the blue chair leg Raina had just split. She turned too fast, got dust in her mouth, and dropped hard on her left knee, gravel biting through the salwar. She never got a proper look at the other men’s faces.

She dropped her railway rod (it had a chip near the top anyway that kept catching on her sleeves) and lunged forward on her hands and knees. The dirt was hot and smelled of spent diesel. Her fingers closed around the rough, pitted handles of the tongs.

“Leave the bag,” the second man yelled, his voice cracking with the sudden, ugly confusion of an afternoon turning into an incident. He reached for a bamboo lathi in the back of the truck.

Raina stood up with the tongs, her breath coming short and smelling of the oily breakfast she’d eaten at the junction. She swung the heavy iron flat against the side of the Bolero’s bonnet, leaving a massive grey dent in the white paint. The noise was loud enough to make the schoolboys run toward the temple alley.

“Move the car,” she muttered, her thumb tracing the greasy hinge. “My legs are tired.”

The walk back to the state highway was four kilometres of loose gravel that kept getting inside the strap of Raina’s left sandal. By the time the headlights of the 9:15 night bus to the district town finally washed over the dust, the back of her heel was raw and leaking a clear, sticky fluid that glued her sock to the skin.

She sat in the second-to-last row, right over the wheel well where the floorboards vibrated so hard her teeth clicked if she didn't keep her jaw slack. The tongs were wrapped in three layers of the evening paper she’d found on the bus station bench, tucked vertically between her thighs like a large, awkward umbrella. The grease from the hinge had already soaked through the sports section, turning the face of a local cricketer into a dark, translucent smudge.

The conductor told her to move “that umbrella” before they had cleared the bus stand. Ten minutes later, when the tongs leaned into the aisle again on a bend, he told her a second time. The old woman beside Raina complained that the newspaper was touching her foot and pulled her sari hem away from it.

When you’re carrying three feet of stolen iron on a night bus, the conductor gets to decide whether it counts as luggage. He tore Raina an extra half-ticket. She paid and spent the next twenty kilometres resenting the tongs for becoming expensive.

She didn't feel victorious. She felt like she had gas from the cold paratha and that her aunt was going to notice the brass bowl was gone by tomorrow morning.

The newspaper around the tongs had gone soft with grease by the time the bus crossed the river. Raina shifted them against the seat frame and smelled, for no good reason, the coconut oil her mother used to put in her hair when she was small.

*

Back in the village, the tea had gone entirely cold.

Ari’s mother, an old woman with cataracts that made her eyes look like boiled marbles, stood over the broken blue plastic chair. She wasn't looking at Nilo, who sat on the gravel holding a wet towel to his temple. She was looking at the ledger.

“Eighty-five rupees for the chair, Nilo,” the old woman said, tapping a blunt fingernail against the wooden counter. “And don't tell me to ask the girl for it. She’s on the district town bus. You brought these people to my porch, you pay for the furniture.”

Sami’s wife, Mara, stood by the mudguard of the Bolero, her arms crossed tight over her chest. She didn't look at her husband, who was sitting quietly on his haunches in the dark. She looked directly at the older woman from the Clearing, a widow named Jori who traveled with the men to ensure the kitchen rules were kept during the travels.

“If the smoke isn't done before the moon goes thin, the milk in the whole lane will turn sour by Tuesday,” Mara said, her voice sharp with the exhaustion of a mother who hadn't slept in four nights. “My girl is still biting her tongue. What are we waiting for? Nilo's knee isn't the one leaking blood.”

“It wasn't under the tulsi pot, anyway,” Mara added. “It was under the sleeping mat. Sami says crow. My sister says chicken.”

Ari’s mother turned a page of the ledger. “First fit was the morning before Aya looked at the girl.”
“You weren't there,” Mara said.
“I was here.”
“That’s what I said.”

Jori didn't look at Nilo either. She was staring at the scrap railway iron Raina had left behind in the dirt.

“We can't use that,” she said flatly to Mara. “Look at the edge. It’s railway iron. It’s been run over by coal wagons and freight trains. It’s got no lineage. You think you can cleanse a house with a piece of the old coal-freight line?”

“It’s heavy enough to crack a skull,” Mara muttered.

“This isn't an assault, Mara, it's a clearing,” Jori said, her voice dropping into the rhythmic, instructional tone of a schoolteacher. “The tool matters. The iron we had was seasoned.”

They tried anyway, an hour later, because the girl in the house started screaming that her skin felt like dry husk.

Jori led the way down to the pond, carrying a heavy tyre-lever she’d forced Nilo to fetch from the Bolero's tool kit. Mara followed close behind with a tin canister of mustard oil. The men walked behind them, carrying the torches, silent and awkward, like boys dragged to a wedding they didn't want to attend.

When they reached the mud hut by the reeds, Aya was already sitting on her wooden cot. She looked older than sixty, her hair a dry, yellow-white thatch that smelled of cow dung smoke.

Jori stepped into the doorway, raising the tyre-lever.

Aya didn't flinch. She didn't even look at the metal. She looked at Jori’s hands, then let out a short, wet laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping across concrete.

“Ancient lineage?” Aya said, her voice dry as tobacco. “Nonsense. Beni bought those exact tongs second-hand in ’84. Eleven rupees.”

“Twelve,” Jori said.

Aya looked at her. “Eleven. The left hinge was rusted through.”
“You don't even remember which yard he got them from.”
“Neither do you. Somewhere across the river.”

Jori paused, the tyre-lever hovering six inches above the old woman’s shoulder.

“He bought them for the shop,” Aya continued, picking up a small brass lota from the floor and taking a slow sip. “Then his nephew died of the lung-rot that winter, and your mother—”

“The winter after,” Jori said.
“That winter.”
“The next one.”

Aya drank from the lota. “Your mother told everyone the tongs had picked up the shadow of the dead boy’s breath. That’s how it started. You didn't inherit a holy relic, Jori. You inherited Beni’s bad debts.”

Jori looked down at the tyre-lever. Behind her, one of the women coughed. Someone outside asked whether they were really going to use a car tool. Jori lowered the iron. Mara spat on the threshold.

“My daughter is still sick,” she said. “Find the girl who took the tongs.”

The room Raina rented behind the district town refinery smelled of damp lime and the sulphur that came off the wastewater ditches at three in the morning. It was six-by-eight, just large enough for a metal folding cot and her blue vinyl suitcase.

She didn't put the tongs under the mattress; they were too thick at the hinge and would have rubbed against her hip bone all night. Instead, she stood them in the corner behind the plastic bucket she used for bathing, wrapped in the same grease-rotted newspaper.

She had an interview at noon at a small corrugated-iron workshop that made brass padlocks for the export market. Her shoulder still throbbed from where the railway iron had yanked it, and her thumb had a split near the nail from the dry bus air.

The woman who ran the workshop was named Sabi. She sat under a rattling Usha fan that did nothing but push the hot smell of machine oil from one side of the desk to the other. She didn't look up when Raina dropped her metric certificate on the glass top.

“Can you work a punch press?” Sabi asked.
“Yes.”

Sabi made a small tick on the form.

“You’re from across the river,” she said, her eyes fixed on a ledger of shipping manifests. “Your aunt called me. She says you stole her brass bowl.”

“I took it,” Raina said. “I didn't steal it. I’ll send it back when I get the first week’s wages.”

Sabi turned a page. A large grey cicada was crawling slow circles around her inkpot. She picked up a brass lock casing from a sample tray, weighed it in her palm, and pressed a thumbnail against the edge.

“Heavy enough,” she said, mostly to herself, and put it into the export carton.

When you’re making cheap padlocks by the thousand, half the job is deciding which small imperfection can still be shipped.

“She also said you were carrying a three-foot iron bar on the bus. What’s that about? You trying to get into the scrap business? There’s no money in it here. The local municipality boys take forty percent before you even get to the yard.”

“It’s not scrap,” Raina said, though she wasn't sure why she was defending it. “It belonged to the Clearing people down in the district.”

Sabi finally raised her eyes. They were small, sharp, and surrounded by a network of deep yellowed wrinkles from forty years of looking at lathe machines. She let out a short, dry snort.

“The ones with the tongs?” Sabi asked. She reached behind her chair, where a heavy zinc-plated lever used for stamping lock-frames hung from a peg. “Jori’s crowd? They’re still running that old circus?”

Raina looked at the zinc lever. It had the same dull, oiled polish as the tongs in her room.

“You know them?”

“Beni bought those tongs from my first husband's yard in ’84,” Sabi said, leaning back until the plastic of her chair groaned. “They weren't even made for the sweet-shop. They were part of an old boiler assembly from the abandoned British indigo works upriver, beyond the embankment, that got torn down after the rains. Beni wanted them because the grip was long enough to handle the hot crucibles without singeing his beard.”

She tapped the zinc lever once against her palm. The door to the cabin didn't slam open. It just clicked, the latch slipping because the frame had warped from the August humidity.

Jori came in first, her white cotton sari grey around the hem from the district town dust. Mara followed her, carrying a small vinyl vanity bag with a broken zipper, her face dark and grease-streaked from the three-hour ride. They didn't look like an inquisition. They looked like two women who had missed their lunch and spent forty minutes arguing with a rickshaw driver over the fare from the junction. Sabi didn't get up.

“The lane outside is private property, Jori. If that white Bolero's blocking my delivery rickshaw, I’m calling the municipality.”

“We don't want the car here,” Jori said. She didn't look at Raina; she looked at the desk, her fingers twitching against her sari edge. “We want the iron.”

“It’s in my room,” Raina said, her hands dropping into her salwar pockets. Her fingers touched the brass key to her padlock. “I’m not giving it back. Your man Nilo owes eighty-five rupees for Ari’s chair anyway.”

Mara stepped forward, her voice low and thin.

“The girl’s still screaming, Raina. The healer man says if we don't have the iron back under her pillow by sunset, the spirit will settle in her liver.”

“The iron won't do anything,” Raina said, looking toward Sabi for support. “It's just old boiler iron from the indigo works. Beni bought it second-hand.”

“We know what it is,” Jori snapped, her old face tightening until her chin looked like a peach stone. “You think we’re stupid? You think because we live by the pond we don't know where scrap comes from? Of course it’s boiler iron.”

Raina stared at her. The silence in the cabin became very loud, filled only by the rhythmic clicking of the cicada’s legs against the glass inkpot.

“Then why do you need it if you know it’s scrap?” Raina asked.
“Because people know it.”
“That makes no sense.”

“Last rains, we went two villages past the canal without it. We used a tyre-lever. It slipped, the rite broke, and the woman’s brothers decided we had to start again. I told them it was finished. They kept hitting her anyway.”

Raina’s fingers tightened around the key in her pocket. “So the tongs make them listen to you?”

Jori looked at the desk. “When I carry the iron, they stop when I say stop.”

Sabi pulled Raina’s application form back toward her and filled in the date. Mara nodded, her thumb nervously flicking the broken zipper of her bag.

“If we go back without it, they’re going to use the railway scrap Nilo found. That thing’s got sharp edges, Raina. It’ll break her collarbone before the first prayer’s finished.”

Raina didn't take her hand out of her salwar pocket. Her thumb stayed pressed against the cold brass ridge of her padlock key, her nail digging into the metal until the skin turned white.

“What happens to Aya when the iron gets back?” she asked.

Her voice didn't have the weight of a challenge. It was just the flat, small question of someone checking the price of rice.

Jori looked out the window toward the courtyard, where the cicada had stopped its circling.

“We do the five days of the fence,” she said. “She stays behind the granary. No salt in the flour. No iron in the room except the tongs across the door frame. By Saturday, the fever leaves the house.”

“And if she doesn't stay?”

“She stays,” Mara said, her hand tightening on the vinyl vanity bag until the plastic seam stretched. “She’s sixty-four, Raina. Her knees are bad. Where’s she going to go? If she’s behind the granary, my brothers don't go into her garden with the bamboo poles. It’s five days. She’s done it before.”

“It makes her skin peel,” Raina said.

The split beside her thumbnail caught against the ridge of the padlock key. For no good reason, she remembered the widow she’d seen three months ago in two villages beyond the canal, or perhaps it had been three villages, and she could not remember whether the woman’s sari had been blue or green. She remembered the fingers. They had been raw and pink from the caustic ash they used to scrub the bad shadow out of the palms.

“The ash water cleans the grease off the porch after the smoke is done,” Jori said. “If she doesn't wash her hands in it, the neighborhood women won't buy her dried cow-dung cakes for their hearths. You think you’re saving her from five days of dry bread, Raina? If we go back without the iron, Sami’s family will have her house down by tomorrow morning. They’ll say she’s the reason the well water tastes like lime.”

“The water tastes like lime because the rice mill and dyeing shed upstream and the small chrome-plating unit near the highway have been emptying their waste into the upper ditch since the winter strikes,” Sabi said from behind her desk. She didn't look up from Raina’s application form. “I told the panchayat three years ago. It takes eleven thousand rupees to line the well with charcoal filters. The block development officer took the money and bought a scooter for his nephew.”

“The filters don't stop the girl from biting her tongue,” Mara said, her voice rising, thin and dangerous as a wire. “The well’s been there since my grandmother’s time. The lime didn't make the milk turn sour on Tuesday. We don't have eleven thousand rupees, Sabi apaa. We have eighty-five rupees for Ari’s chair and we have the night bus back.”

Raina stood between them, her fingers still locked around the key in her pocket.

For two years she had looked for men like Nilo... men who arrived in groups with rope, bamboo, and whatever iron was nearest, and believed that if she could catch enough of them alone, break enough wrists, steal enough iron, something somewhere would stop.

Now she thought of the tongs standing behind her bathing bucket.

She thought of Mara’s daughter. Aya’s bad knees. Jori’s rules. The water. Sabi’s eleven thousand rupees. The brass key could lock one room. That was what it was good for.

“The key is under the water pot on my verandah,” Raina said. “The room behind the oil depot. Don't touch the blue suitcase.”

Jori nodded once. She didn't say thank you. As she reached the door, she paused.

“Your aunt found her brass bowl, by the way,” she said. “She left it by the well herself on Sunday when she went to wash cumin seed. She forgot she’d carried it out. She’s been accusing the maid since Monday morning just to keep from looking foolish.”

The 4:30 bus back to the district was nearly empty. Raina sat near the front this time, her chin resting against the vibrating metal of the window frame. The conductor stopped beside her seat and looked automatically at the floor between her knees.

“No umbrella today?”
“No.”

He tore the ticket and moved on.

Her left heel had stopped leaking, but the sock had dried hard against the raw patch of skin. Every time the bus took a turn, the cloth pulled slightly away and stuck again.

She got off at the crossroads three kilometres before the village, where the road ran beside the drainage canal.

By the time she reached the pond, the sun had gone orange behind the brick-kiln smoke. The white Bolero was parked beside the granary with brown packing paper taped over the broken headlight. One corner of the paper had already come loose and kept lifting whenever the wind came through the lane.

Ari’s mother was sitting on her porch with the ledger open across her knees.

“You come for the chair money?” she called when Raina passed.
“No.”
“He hasn't paid.”

Raina kept walking. They were already doing it.

Mara knelt beside the mud wall with the mustard-oil tin between her knees. Its lid lay upside down in the dirt. Jori stood in front of Aya’s cot with the long black tongs in both hands. The old woman's hair had been cut badly. Some of it was still caught in the neck of her blouse, and she kept trying to shake it loose by moving one shoulder.

Two of Sami’s sisters held her arms behind her back.

“Hold the wrist,” Jori said.

The voice was different from the one she had used in Sabi’s cabin. Louder. Slower. One of the sisters shifted her grip.

“I am holding it.”
“You’re holding her hand. Wrist.”

The woman muttered something and moved her fingers higher. Jori opened the tongs. The left hinge gave a small rusty click.

“The iron has to see the bone.”

Aya laughed once. It wasn't much of a laugh. More air than sound.

“Your iron has seen enough of me.”
“Keep still.”

Jori brought the tongs down. She didn't swing them. She put the flat teeth across Aya’s forearm and pressed. Aya’s heel struck the leg of the cot. The wood scraped half an inch through the dirt. Mara nearly knocked over the oil.
 
“Arre, hold her.”
“I am holding her.”

Aya hissed through her teeth. A dark stripe of old grease appeared beneath the iron. Raina smelled machine oil. For a second she was back in the workshop with Sabi tapping the zinc lever against her palm, asking whether she could operate a punch press. Then Aya twisted. One of Mara’s brothers stood up from the low wall beside the water tank. He had been picking dried mud from the end of his bamboo lathi with his thumbnail. Now he held it properly. Jori looked over.

“Sit.”

He remained standing. Jori did not raise her voice.

“I said sit down. This isn't your part.”

The man looked at Aya, then at Jori, then lowered himself onto the wall again. The bamboo rested across his knees. The other three brothers did not move. Raina put her hand into her pocket. The brass key was there with two old bus tickets, a thread pulled loose from the inside seam and something gritty that was probably sand. Cold metal against her fingers. Small enough for one lock. Mara had begun counting under her breath.

“One. Two. Three. Four.”
“Too fast,” one of Sami’s sisters said.
“I know how to count.”
“You're counting too fast.”
“Then you count.”

Nobody counted for several seconds. Jori kept the iron where it was. Aya's face had gone tight and wet around the mouth.

“Enough,” Jori said.

She lifted the tongs. The brother with the lathi stayed sitting. A dark line remained on Aya’s arm. Mara picked up the oil tin. “Now?”
“Wait.”
“How long?”
“I said wait.”

Aya pulled her wrist toward herself and looked at the mark. She spat into the dirt beside the cot.

“You people haven't even fed me.”

Mara looked irritated.

“You had rice.”
“Dry rice.”
“You threw the dal.”
“It smelled bad.”
“It was morning dal.”
“It was bad in the morning also.”

For the first time, one of Sami’s sisters laughed. Only once. She stopped when Mara looked at her. Raina's hand remained around the key. Nilo stood near the granary with the purple swelling still spread over his forehead. He saw her looking at him and touched it automatically.

“You broke the chair too,” he said.
“You owe eighty-five rupees.”
“That old woman is robbing me.”

From the porch, much farther up the lane than seemed reasonable, Ari’s mother shouted, “I heard that.”

Nobody answered.

Mara poured the first cup of mustard oil. Some missed Aya’s head and ran down the back of her blouse. She swore. Jori moved the tongs away from the cot and laid them across the doorway. One of the brothers started to rise again. Jori looked at him. He sat back down before she said anything. Raina took her hand out of her pocket. The key had left a small ridged pattern in the centre of her palm. A piece of blue thread from the pocket seam was stuck around one of its teeth.

She pulled it free.

Near the reeds, the upper ditch emptied into the pond in a thin grey runnel. Mineral scum had gathered where the two waters met. A torn biscuit wrapper turned slowly there, caught against a root, freed itself, and caught again.

The lime smell came up whenever the wind changed. Behind her, Mara had started counting again. This time, more slowly.

-------------------------------

*

a small note because there is one piece missing from this version of the story.

there used to be a section in it about a woman in raina's family who had been burned by her father after some quarrel involving marriage, family, ritual, clothes, caste. you know, all those things which begin as one thing and somehow become permission for another. so the thing is... that part did not begin as fiction. it came from a memory of my own family, or perhaps more accurately, from one of those strange inherited memories where something was seen when one was young, other things were told much later, details changed depending on which adult was speaking, and eventually you no longer know which parts you remember and which parts you remember being told. what i remember most is a 'back'. but sometimes, i even question that remnant of memory. i get scared to ask my mother again about it. but, anyway. i had wanted to smuggle that memory into fiction. maybe because fiction is useful like that? you can give fiction the unbearable thing, that is, somebody else's name, another house, another family, and for a while you can stand at the doorway and inspect it as though it belongs there... and psychoanalyse it. but as i overthought the story, it was asking this story to become about something else, so i took it out. since the story is ending up here instead of where i originally intended to send it, i don't particularly want to hide that little theft from myself either. raina does not have to carry this memory for me.

it came from somewhere real. or not...

-------------------------------

There had been a room in her grandmother’s house that nobody switched the light on in during the afternoon because the back door faced west and, according to her grandmother, electricity was not free just because the government behaved as though it was. Raina must have been nine or ten. Her mother was sitting near the back step sorting something into two steel plates... green chilies, perhaps, or beans. Raina could never remember that part correctly.

She remembered the light, though. That came through the open door in one long square and stopped just before the cot. Her mother’s cousin was sitting there with her blouse lifted up to the neck. At first Raina thought she was naked. Then she understood that she was looking at a back. The skin did not look like skin. It was pale in some places and shiny-dark in others, gathered into soft ridges that reminded Raina, horribly, of the underside of a newborn baby’s foot. There were no ordinary folds anymore. When the woman breathed, the whole surface seemed to tighten and loosen at once.

Raina stared until her mother slapped two fingers lightly against her knee.

“Don’t stare.”
“What happened?”

Her mother went on sorting whatever was in the plate. For years afterward Raina remembered the story differently depending on who she was angry with. Her mother’s cousin had wanted to marry a man from another caste. There had been shouting, then pleading, then weeks when nobody mentioned it at all. Eventually the parents had almost agreed. Plaintively. Nobody in the family ever agreed happily to anything important; they agreed the way people in the village accepted a leaking roof during the rains, by placing a bucket underneath and complaining about it to visitors.

Then, one night, there was a quarrel which was about a ritual that involved clothes. Raina never understood exactly what. A cloth that had been sent to the wrong house, or worn before some ritual, or touched by someone who should not have touched it. Her mother knew, probably, but every time she told the story that part changed shape. Sometimes it was a sari or a churni. Once she said it was about who was meant to wash it. But, it didn't matter.

By nightfall, the quarrel had become about everything else. Sometime before morning, her grandmother’s brother poured kerosene over his daughter. That sentence her mother always said plainly without any gods or caste or family honor. He poured kerosene over his daughter. She survived long enough to be brought to the grandmother’s house.

The man she had wanted to marry came once in the first month. Then once more after the rains. Then he stopped coming. Years later, when Raina was old enough for her mother to tell the story without first checking whether anyone else was in the room, she said the cousin had died.

“And that fellow is nowhere to be found, he probably left,” her mother said.

They were sitting on the same back step. The house had a new water receptacle by then. Someone had painted the doorframe hideous rani pink. Her mother looked at her.

“You blame him?”

Raina didn't even have to think.

“No.”
“Never?”
“Never.”

Her mother made a small sound through her nose, neither agreement nor disagreement, and went inside to see why the pressure cooker was whistling so much. Raina stayed on the step. For a long time afterward she remembered the back more clearly than the woman’s face.

Back in the village, the tea had gone entirely cold.

-------------------------------

~ Oizys.