Audio: Madhuri Vijay reads.
The Bakers held a party in their flat, and Mrs. Baker told Geeta that she was to bring the children in to say good night to the guests. So just before eight-thirty she made the girls undress and pulled their purple nightgowns down over their heads. Sally, nine years old, stretched her chubby fingers skyward. Emma, seven, was less coöperative, but together they managed it. The girls smiled sleepily at Geeta through veils of blond hair. Holding each by the hand, she walked them up the corridor toward the smell of rum and cigarettes.
The guests were scattered across the living room, most of them reclining on the Bakers’ couches with the spent aspect of runners at the end of a race. Geeta paused with the girls at the entrance.
From an armchair by the window, Mrs. Baker surfaced. Tall and thin, she wore her yellow hair in a plumb-line ponytail down her black turtleneck sweater.
“There they are,” she said. “Come here, my bumblebees.”
Two small hands left Geeta’s, and then the girls were in their mother’s arms. She heard Mr. Baker’s voice from over by the bar, “Geeta has saved our lives, ladies and gentlemen. Take my advice. Don’t try to go it alone in this country. Get an au pair.” Now she could see him, one elbow on the bar’s burnished surface. He raised his glass in her direction. “Just don’t steal ours, because you’ll have to fight us to the bloody death.”
Laughter dribbled its way across the room. Mrs. Baker was crouching between her daughters, arms around their shoulders. She was drunk, but Geeta knew that those gray-green eyes could snap to attention at any moment. She was not afraid of Mrs. Baker, because she knew that Mrs. Baker liked her. She was not afraid of Mr. Baker, either, because in matters of child rearing, as in most others, he deferred to his wife.
“All right, little misses, say good night to this debauched lot,” Mrs. Baker said. Emma giggled and said, “G’night.” Sally stared at the lounging figures, something imperious in her expression. But when she spoke it was a plaintive whisper. “Good night.”
“And good night to you, Geeta,” Mrs. Baker said. “We’ll try to be quiet, but if we disturb you—”
“I will call the police. Good night, Mrs. Baker,” Geeta said.
There was more laughter. The girls’ mother gave them one last squeeze and then stood, looking wistful. As the children were walking toward her, Geeta glanced around. Most of the Bakers’ guests were British expatriates like them, but there were a few Indians, one of whom was sitting in a chair at her elbow, away from the rest. There wasn’t supposed to be a chair in that corner. He must have dragged it over. He had his forearms on his knees and was watching her. She glanced away immediately but retained the impression of a puffy face, tired eyes behind glasses.
Then she felt the children tugging at her hands, and she marched them back to their bedroom, where she locked the windows, turned down their beds, pushed their dolls to the side, switched on the frog-shaped night-light, and stroked their foreheads before leaving them to sleep.
Her own bedroom was small but well appointed. The Bakers had told her that they were aware of how domestic help was treated in India, and that they would sooner drown themselves than treat another human being that way. So Geeta had sheets and pillows from England and a cupboard that was much too large for her few clothes. She had her own bathroom, and a cell phone, whose bill, for the past eighteen months, the Bakers had paid.
On weekdays, her mornings were hers. The children went to an international school, and as long as she was at the gate by one-fifteen the Bakers didn’t care what she did. Besides Geeta, they employed a maidservant, a cook, and two drivers. The cook was old and beyond the nip of jealousy, and Geeta barely saw the drivers, but it was possible that the maidservant resented her for her relative freedom. To ward off any ill feeling, every so often Geeta brought home a trinket for the girl, who was a chatty, dimpled creature from Jharkhand. Geeta was from Odisha and had nothing in common with her, except the fact that people in Bangalore knew almost nothing about where either of them came from.
At various times, Geeta had bought the girl an alarm clock, a pair of leaf-shaped earrings, and a fake-silver pendant engraved with the words “You Are My Dear Friend.” She worried that she might have overdone it a bit with the pendant, but the girl loved it and loved Geeta for it.
Afew days after the party, Geeta was walking in the Shivajinagar market. She needed nothing but enjoyed the hustle and the abundance of the place, the carts of folded handkerchiefs with crimped edges, the stacks of unbranded jeans, the enormous steel cooking pots meant for weddings. She’d paused at a stationery stall and was examining a fake-gold-nib pen when she heard her name.
Looking up, she saw a vaguely familiar man approaching her with a smile. She did not smile back but waited for him to clarify in her memory.
The Bakers’, the smoke, the chair by the corner.
“You walk fast,” he said. He wore a polyester checkered shirt over his trousers, and on his feet were rubber chappals. He didn’t, in this outfit, look like someone the Bakers would know.
“You don’t remember me,” he said, sounding disappointed.
“You were in Mr. and Mrs. Baker’s house on”—she paused to count back—“Saturday.”
“That’s right,” he said. His face was less puffy than she remembered, but his eyes were just as tired. His name, he told her, was Srikanth. “How long have you been working for those people?” he asked. “What did they call you—an au pair?”
Sensing the delicate contempt behind the question, she answered, “For some time.”
“And before that?”
“I was working somewhere else.”
Srikanth eyed her with amusement. “Are all au pairs as talkative as you?”
By now she was thoroughly wary, which, paradoxically, made her appear serene. When he told her that he was looking for a new frying pan, she nodded. When he asked if she wanted to help him choose one, she looked him full in the face and lied, “Sorry, they will be angry with me if I don’t go home.”
But, just before she was out of earshot, some instinct made her turn back and say, “Frying pans are this way. I can show you if you want.”
During one of their walks in the market, which became routine over the next several months, Srikanth told Geeta that a colleague had invited him to the Bakers’ party, and that he had hated it. “Not one person said anything interesting,” he said. “Except for you. My little au pair.”
He spoke English, Tamil, and atrocious Hindi. She spoke Hindi, Odia, and passable English. So they made English their language, though she learned a few Tamil words, flattening her tongue in her mouth to speak them. Veetu, house. Mazhai, rain. Ponnu, girl.
When she told the Bakers that she was leaving to get married, they did not try to dissuade her.
“I don’t remember him,” Mrs. Baker said. “Do you, Charlie?”
“Not well. Someone brought him along, I think. How old are you, Geeta?”
“Twenty-nine,” she said.
He nodded. “Older than I thought. But he’s quite a bit older than that?”
“He is fifty-three years old,” she said.
“Not a child,” Mrs. Baker said, and there was a warning there, but whether it was addressed to Geeta or to Mr. Baker was unclear, as was whether it was meant to refer to Srikanth or to Geeta herself. “Emma and Sally are going to hate this, you know,” she added.
Mr. Baker said, “Are we at least invited to the wedding, then?”
Geeta smiled. He sighed a little sadly, as if he’d never expected that they would be.
She called to tell Sister Stella, who took some time to remember her. Geeta could see the wide rosewood desk in the dark-panelled office. Three ballpoint pens: red, green, black. The old Bible bound in brown leather, as big as a briefcase. The wooden cross on its stand. The ruler that stretched the breadth of the desk. Sister Stella said, “And he is a Christian?”
“No,” Geeta said. “But he is willing to convert.”
“Oh? In that case,” Sister Stella said, “this is a joyful day indeed.”
They got married in March. Srikanth left for the office around nine o’clock, and Geeta spent most mornings wandering around the large house. She loved to sit in the vast garden at noon, when trees throttled the sunlight and she could hear the hectic buzzing of heat above the canopy. The house had belonged to Srikanth’s father, who had, of all things, won the lottery and bought this fan-shaped slice of land in the heart of Bangalore. Now it was worth a fortune.
“He was a miser,” Srikanth told her. “If he could have taken this house with him when he died, he would have. Nothing made him suffer more than giving it to me. But the only other option was Swati, and he would have burned it down before giving it to a girl.”
She had met Srikanth’s sister, Swati, a tall, officious woman, who arrived on the express from Chennai for the wedding. It was a registry wedding and was over before Geeta knew it. She heard Srikanth say, “Geeta, you have to sign,” and she blushed, knowing that Swati was watching.
There had been a brother, too, but he had died in childhood.
The morning after the wedding, before taking the express back to Chennai, Swati invited them to visit her. She made the offer with cool professionalism, and her eyes betrayed no emotion.
“She is not married?” Geeta asked, after Swati left in a taxi, refusing to allow them to drive her to Cantonment Station.
“Why would you think that?” Srikanth asked. “She’s got two children, a boy and a girl.” He touched her lower back. “Not everyone stays alone for as long as you.”
She knew that he had been married before, that his first wife was still alive. She knew that he had a daughter, who was grown. She did not ask for pictures or details, because early on in their meetings he had joked that he was an old man, and that by the time he’d told her everything about himself she, too, would be old. She sensed the warning and was discreet. She thought of the word “divorce,” mentally pronouncing it DIE‑vorce, but the one time he said it he bit off the first syllable like a hiccup: di‑VORCE. And somehow that dampened her desire to hear more, as if it could only be further proof of her ignorance. Srikanth had a commerce degree; she had her tenth-standard pass certificate, which Sister Stella had handed over as dispassionately as if it were a ration card.
They had sex the night Swati left. After he climaxed, he hovered above her for another second, before letting himself drop onto her body. Then he rolled off and flipped her on her side and drew her back against him. The bed they lay on was his parents’, a high, antique frame with carved posts and a thin, pitiless mattress. Part of her longed for her room at the Bakers’, her foreign sheets, and her too soft pillows.
“And what about you?” he asked in a drowsy voice, after they’d lain in silence for a while.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. My little au pair from Odisha. You’re not going to tell me more about yourself? Where you went to school, what you were like as a child?”
“It is boring,” she said.
“No,” he said. “You’re not boring.”
It was not what she meant, and she began to correct him, but his hand twitched, and she knew he was asleep. She knew, too, that he had been relieved by her non-answer. It was natural, she told herself. No man at his stage in life could possibly be interested in childhood stories.
In July, it started to rain. Like clockwork, for two hours each afternoon. The ground in the garden turned swampy. Sitting beneath the terra-cotta overhang of the roof, she watched the toads with their lustrous jumping throats, and the fat brown sparrows that sat impassive and then quaked themselves dry.
She heard Srikanth come back from work, calling her name. She lifted her body and brought herself inside. The house was full of dark, heavy furniture, his parents’ furniture.
“You haven’t started making dinner,” he said.
“I’ll start now,” she said, moving toward the kitchen.
“It’s almost eight.”
There was a grandfather clock next to a hatstand whose arms were antlers. She blinked.
“You’ve been dreaming all day?”
“Maybe we can go out?”
“I have been out. I just want to stay quietly at home.”
She went into the kitchen to start dinner. He followed her.
He said, “What did you do today?”
She poured a cup of rice into a pot and ran her fingers through it, feeling for stones.
“Nothing.”
“Did you read?”
There was a library, full of stiff-spined books he claimed his father had bought to make himself appear more intimidating to visitors.
“A little,” she said. She had taken down one of the books, but its leather binding had reminded her of Sister Stella’s Bible, and she had spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about the hot convent-school courtyard and the dreary, soothing presence of the nuns.
“I don’t understand,” he said finally.
“Understand what?”
“You! What is it that you want? In this world?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?” he echoed. “Not even a child?”
She looked up at him. He was smiling in a way that made her, for a moment, furious. Then the fury was gone. She picked out a stone from the rice, flicking it away.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he pressed. “You want to have a child?”
She didn’t answer. He took the pot from her hands and set it down.
He said, “I’m not a young man anymore.”
“I know.”
“You know everything,” he said, teasing her now. “My genius little au pair.”
And he led her by the hand to the antique bed with the four carved posters and that punishing mattress.
Five months later, on Christmas Eve, they went to midnight Mass. Srikanth had still not converted, but he promised to do it soon. He fell asleep during the hymns, and Geeta had to wake him when the choir began to file out. He drove them home and fell asleep again right away, while she lay awake, trying to think of how to phrase what she had to say to him.
The next morning, she said, “I think we should go to a doctor.”
He frowned at her. “I’ve already had a child, remember.”
“I know,” she said. “It is me.”
The doctor at Baptist Hospital confirmed this. That week, Geeta caught a bus and rang the bell at the Bakers’ door. The maidservant answered and hugged Geeta.
They discussed her problem. The maidservant was of the opinion that Geeta’s sterility was a good thing, but when she saw Geeta’s expression she leaned in conspiratorially.
“You can do adoption, you know,” she whispered.
Geeta shook her head. “It takes many years, and it is very expensive. And those adoption people will see how old Srikanth is, and they will say no.”
“But that’s only if you do it here. In Jharkhand, babies are being adopted all the time. I know a place where no one checks. You can do it fast, and they will give you any baby you want. Old, young, boy, girl.” She sat back and scrutinized Geeta’s face. “You should get an older child. Otherwise your husband will be dead before it has started walking.”
The first thing that surprised Geeta was the girl’s height. Rani was eight but nearly as tall as she was. Her brown eyes took in the house with a single glance. On the train, she had been silent, eating very little but doing it obediently. Now she stood still, staring at the mossy steps leading to the veranda and the flowerpots that held only ancient gray dirt. Srikanth had already gone inside with Rani’s bag.
In Ranchi, the orphanage director, a scraggy woman with a coal miner’s cough, had given them Rani’s background, which amounted to no more than a blur of prejudices. She was supposedly from a tribal village deep in the forests of eastern Jharkhand. She had come to the orphanage a year before, deposited by an older girl who claimed to be her sister but could as easily have been her mother. The father was not in the picture, and everyone was almost certainly better off that way; there was the lurking stink of criminality, possibly even Naxalism, around him. Rani was not intelligent, the orphanage director went on, tribal girls rarely were, but she was strong and could help with the house. While all this was being conveyed to them, Geeta glanced at Srikanth, who was nodding seriously, as though he’d expected no less. With a chill, she wondered if he was listening to anything the orphanage director was saying. At the end, when he turned to her and asked, “Are you sure you’re ready?,” she was tempted to shake her head, but then she thought of the empty house waiting for her and said, “Yes.”
“Come inside?” Geeta murmured now. Rani stiffened, then ran up the steps and into the hall. She drew abreast with the grandfather clock just as it lurched to four. Her thin frame flinched with each gong, but when it was over and she turned to look at Geeta, her face was blank.
“This is where you’ll sleep,” Geeta said.
She had chosen the room with the best view of the garden. It had been a storeroom, Srikanth had told her, in the days when he was a child and his family had four Brahmin cooks working for them. All four had slept in here. The soft wood of the door still smelled of grain and hemp. She had put in a cot and an almirah and placed a chair by the window. Because the rooms of her own life had never contained more, she had left it at that. It was, she told herself, the view that would count. A jackfruit tree stood outside, with elegant, tortured branches, and fruit that looked like fat, milk-bloated babies. She might have liked the room for herself, but she knew that Srikanth would have found the idea of sleeping in a storeroom outrageous.
She was disappointed, therefore, when Rani barely seemed to notice. She resisted the urge to point out the room’s advantages and instead asked, “Do you need anything?”
Rani’s thick black hair had been shorn and was growing back unevenly over her ears. She wore a frilly peacock-blue frock that draggled at the hems, the same one she’d been wearing when they first saw her. Her upper lip protruded; it was possible that she was bucktoothed.
“Do I need anything?” the girl repeated. Her voice had an anesthetized quality, but within it twitched a slippery, mocking thing. Then she smiled. It was an unnerving smile to see on an eight-year-old face, somehow innocent, cunning, and flirtatious at the same time, and Geeta, to her shame, panicked.
“Then I’ll leave you to rest,” she said, turning her back on both the girl and the view. Her first failure, as she would later come to think of it.
She had resolved to be unshakable with Rani, but almost immediately she found herself swept up in a soft tangle of mitigation and half lies. Each morning, she lay in bed, worrying about the things the girl was going to do and say that day. They had decided that she would stay at home until the new academic year began, that it was important for her to feel accepted into their family before shouldering the challenges of school. But the truth was that Geeta felt like the one on trial. Rani loped around the house and had a tendency to sneak up on Geeta.
“The pictures are dusty,” Rani would say, and Geeta would run for a cloth to wipe the frames.
“There is hair in the bathroom,” she would observe clinically, and Geeta would run to lift the knob of knotted hair from the drain, dropping it into the trash with a shudder.
“You don’t know how to cook,” she whispered one night to Geeta, when Srikanth had left a little rice on his plate. “Even he hates your food.”
At other times, she would say nothing, merely watching Geeta at whatever she was doing. As a way to compensate, Geeta found herself talking. Avoiding her own history, she babbled on about her husband’s life at great length.
“This house is very old,” she said. “Your grandfather won the lottery. Your father has one sister, Swati. You’ll meet her. She has two children, a boy and a girl. Your cousins.” She glanced at Rani, then continued as though she had doted on these children for years. “Lovely children, very well behaved. One day you’ll meet them. When your father was small, he used to think there were a hundred rooms in this house. You know how, when you are small, you think everything is so big? Your father’s family is vegetarian. His mother allowed only Brahmins to cook their food. She kept four cooks.” She halted, hating the sound of what she’d said. “Your father had a brother,” she said, concluding, “but he died when he was small.”
“How did he die?” the girl asked, perking up.
“I don’t know,” Geeta said. “He was sick, I think.”
“Did he have tuberculosis?”
“No.”
“Cancer?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Pneumonia?”
“No!” Geeta exclaimed. “I mean, I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?” Rani asked slyly. “You’re so stupid, you didn’t even ask?”
Geeta shrank back. “Your father and I got married only one year ago,” she heard herself say slowly. “But he was married before.”
“He is very old, isn’t he?”
“Not so old.”
“He is an old cocksucking bastard,” Rani declared. And Geeta was shocked, less by the profanity than by the girl’s matter-of-fact tone, though she could not deny that there was something slightly comical about it, too, the bald innocence of the pronouncement.
“Rani!” she said, making an attempt to sound authoritative. “That’s enough! Don’t say such things about your father!”
“He’s not my father,” the girl replied scornfully. “My father went to jail.”
Geeta felt slightly dizzy. “I didn’t know.”
“And you’re not my mother. My mother is a poor woman,” Rani said. She stepped close to Geeta, her chin tilted up, her eyes dark and powerful, albeit with a detached kind of intensity. “You are a rich woman. You can help my mother.”
“What do you mean?”
Rani smiled. She had a million different smiles, and this one was regretful, benevolent, nearly tender. “Where is your jewelry?” she whispered.
It took almost a month for Geeta to tell Srikanth about any of this. In that time, Rani proved herself a master of single-mindedness. At times she was wheedling, at other times forceful. Always it was the same demand. She wanted Geeta to send jewelry to her mother. Geeta lived in this big house, she was rich, so there had to be jewelry. Where was it?
Then one afternoon she found Rani going through her cupboard. It was kept locked, the key under a lace doily on the dressing table, but Rani must have seen her retrieve it. Now the door stood wide open. One of Geeta’s saris had slipped to the floor. Her piles of nighties and petticoats lay slumped against one another.
“What are you doing?” Geeta asked.
“It was like this already,” Rani said. She sounded bored with her own lie.
“If you’re looking for jewelry, you won’t find it there.”
A scowl creased the girl’s forehead.
“Bitch,” she said.
“I may be a bitch,” Geeta said, struggling to remain calm. “But I adopted you. Even if I give you jewelry one day, it would be for you, not for your mother.”
Rani turned and thrust her hand into the cupboard. Another sari fell to the ground.
“Rani!”
Drawing a breath, Geeta stepped forward and grasped the thin shoulders. The touch seemed to inflame Rani, for she began thrashing, but Geeta kept her hold until they were both outside the room. Then she let go, breathing hard. Rani stood still for a second, then leaped for Geeta, giving her arm a painful pinch before fleeing to her room and slamming the door.
That night, when they were in bed, Geeta described the incident to Srikanth. After she finished, he lay silent for a long time. Just as she began to wonder if he’d fallen asleep, he said, “This is what you wanted.”
She didn’t reply. Her arm, where Rani had pinched it, was black and yellow.
“You said you were ready,” he continued. “I asked you, and you said you were ready.”
She said nothing.
“I go to work every day,” he said. “I sit in an office and earn money for you. Now the girl is my responsibility also? I’ve already finished raising my daughter, my little au pair.” His voice sounded far off. “You’ll have to find your way with this one.”
Rani began making startling pronouncements. One afternoon, she threw her arms around Geeta’s waist and said, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” She said this fiercely. Her voice tore into Geeta like hooks. Two hours later, she told Geeta that she was ugly. “You look like a black rat,” she said. “Black like shit.”
“My mother fell,” she said, on another occasion. “She fell into a hole and then she tried to pull me inside. It was very deep.” And on another day: “I saw my father. He was not wearing any clothes. He is very happy and he likes his food.” And on still another day: “There were many people hiding in the jungle around my house.”
From these sinister fragments, Geeta pieced together the mosaic of a short and terrifying life. She saw a weak, protective mother, an absent, unpredictable father, poverty, the looming threat of outsiders, the fear of corrupt authorities. She recalled her own parents, who, despite their curtailed presence in her life, had at least encased her in the solid outline of their love. Her father, a timid and coöperative tenant farmer, was given to breaking into soft, worried monologues that no one was allowed to hear, whispering it all to himself so that he wouldn’t burden his wife and daughter. Her mother, grave and hilarious, could change her voice at will, now putting on the staid airs of a village elder, now the coarse twang of a city dweller. And those voices had remained with Geeta, even after the accident that had killed both of her parents. The convent-school years, the stone courtyard, her work for the Bakers, even her marriage—they all felt to Geeta like manifestations of her mother’s never-ending repertoire.
It occurred to her, of course, that Rani could be lying, but Geeta had the suspicion that what she said was more or less accurate. Rani’s lies were obvious and lazy; these baroque narratives suggested a more insidious truth. It could not be prodded from her. She could not be asked to explicate. So Geeta listened and tried to make sense of it, of this strong, mad child.
By April, Rani seemed calmer, and her proclamations had cooled, no longer burning with the terrible heat of prophecy. She seemed more prone to conversation, one day even asking Geeta to comb her hair, which Geeta did as gently as she knew how. Midway through, Rani leaned back into her chest and made a small, unconscious grunt of pleasure. The sound brought tears to Geeta’s eyes, and in that moment she allowed herself the hope that maybe the worst of it was over. In front of Srikanth, however, Rani was mute, and he, in turn, passed over them both with the distracted benevolence of a politician taking a pause from state matters.
Only once more did she attempt to talk to him about the girl. She suggested that Rani might be lonely without the company of other children and wondered if they might visit his sister in Chennai. He said, “I know children better than you. There’s nothing wrong with her. Let her learn how to entertain herself. If you spoil her now, she will never be satisfied later.” His tone was so darkly bitter that she imagined he was speaking from experience, and she thought about the daughter he never saw or mentioned.
“These types of girls,” he went on, “they try to get everything from you. If you give them one thing, they will ask for five the next time. Let her learn to be happy with whatever she has.”
She didn’t ask what he meant by “these types of girls.” Tribal girls, girls from the north, rural girls, girls with shady pasts, low-caste girls, girls without money, Adivasi girls, girls clawing their way up, nonvegetarian girls, girls without morals, hardened girls, orphaned girls, ungrateful girls, or simply girls—it might have been any one of these.
The Bakers’ maidservant came to visit at a time when Geeta knew Srikanth wouldn’t be at home. Rani was introduced, the maidservant given a cup of tea and shown around the house. They wandered from room to room, and the maidservant was extravagant with her praise. At one point, the maidservant turned and Geeta saw that she was wearing the pendant she’d given her, with the engraving that read “You Are My Dear Friend.” She commented on it, saying how nice the maidservant looked.
“I never take it off,” the maidservant declared, fishing it out from the neckline of her kurta and holding it dramatically up to her lips.
Geeta saw Rani’s gaze fix briefly on the pendant and then drift away. When the maidservant had gone, Geeta took the teacups into the kitchen and started to wash them. She heard Rani come in but she did not turn. Then a dazzling pain shot through her back, and she whirled around, knocking Rani to the floor. The knife skittered away, still dotted with pieces of the onion Geeta had been chopping earlier. The cut was low down and alarmingly near her spine, but she could tell at once that it was not deep. She touched it and felt warm blood. From the ground, Rani looked up at her, and there was nothing in her face to suggest that anything momentous had taken place.
“Why did you do that?” Geeta asked, voice trembling.
“You gave that bitch your jewelry.”
“That wasn’t jewelry!” Geeta cried. “It was just a cheap necklace I bought in the market. It’s not even real. It’s worth nothing.”
She took two quick steps and picked up the knife. Before she could think twice, she’d washed it and put it back in the drawer.
“Stand up,” she told Rani. “We’re going to the doctor.”
Her wound was dressed, but thankfully no stitches were needed. She did not tell Srikanth what had happened. She kept an eye on his shirt buttons, she cooked his meals with care, but she no longer thought of them as married.
Instead, she focussed her energy on Rani. They had settled on Sophia Girls’ School, run by Catholic nuns of a devout strain, of whom Srikanth approved because they were rumored to be strict, and whom Geeta liked because they reminded her of her own schooling. Rani would begin in June. She had taken an oral aptitude test and had proved, notwithstanding the orphanage director’s bigotry, to be extremely intelligent.
The first day of school would be the fifth of June, a date that acquired for Geeta a kind of shimmer. All she had to do was make it to the fifth, she thought. If she could take Rani safely to the shoals of that bright morning, then it would be the end of the trial period; she would have succeeded; they would have won.
After the incident with the knife, Rani was subdued. She woke early and made her bed. She folded her few clothes and kept them in the cupboard. She never left her wet towel on the bathroom floor, as Srikanth did. She ate whatever breakfast Geeta gave her, then walked out to the long concrete driveway, which had once been gravel raked every morning, according to Srikanth, by a man in a white uniform. The first time, Geeta worried that Rani might climb the gate and disappear. At noon, she pretended to wander by the front door. She saw Rani marching from one gatepost to the other, then back again, a dark shape crossing a river of concrete. Geeta shouted that lunch was ready and Rani responded immediately. From that day on, she was inside before Geeta had to call.
Until the day she wasn’t. Geeta put the food on the table and waited for ten minutes. Then she went to the door. Rani was speaking with a man who stood on the other side of the gate. He had a wispy mustache and his hair was locked in place by glinting gel. He was dressed in the uniform of youth—a red shirt tucked into tight jeans. As Geeta walked toward them, his eyes flickered to her; he said something to Rani, ducking his head. Then he strode off, tipping an invisible hat to Geeta.
“Who was that?” Geeta asked. “Rani, who was that?”
Rani turned with a radiant smile. “My father is not in jail anymore.”
“What?”
“He said my father sent him. He’s going to take me back to my father.”
“Rani, listen to me. What did he say? Did he tell you his name?”
Rani shook her head. Her smile grew still more radiant. Geeta thought of the man’s insolent hat tip and felt weak with fear.
“Rani, does he come every day? Has he talked to you before?”
“He told me my father has come out of jail. My mother is calling for me. He said if I go with him he will take me back to my village.”
In one swift motion, Geeta leaped at the gate and flung it open. She ran out into the street and saw the red shirt, as small as a stamp.
“I’ll kill you!” she screamed. “Don’t come back again! Are you listening? I’ll kill you if you come back! I’ll kill you!”
When Srikanth came home, she described the young man to him, the terrifying promises he’d made to Rani. This time, Srikanth stood up and came unnecessarily close to her.
“She’s too much for you,” he said. His breath smelled of onions and filter coffee. “Admit it,” he pressed her. “You can’t do this. You are not capable. Look at you. Your hair is a mess. You don’t take care of the house anymore. You hardly look at me. You only think of her.”
A month ago, she might have protested, but it no longer mattered what was and wasn’t true. The threats had become too many, too nebulous. Later, she would think of this as her final failure. The first and the last, the only two clear in her mind.
“You may have been an au pair,” he said, drawing himself up, “but I am the one who has actually raised a child.”
“Please,” she whispered. “Talk to her.”
Rani was in her room, where Geeta had instructed her to stay. She had not told Srikanth what had happened after she screamed at the young man: the way Rani had attacked her, the scratches even now blossoming on her neck, the girl’s terrible moans.
Rani was, Geeta noticed with a pang, sitting by the window, on the chair Geeta had placed there months before, looking at the garden. She did not turn around when they came in.
“Young lady, you are not allowed to go near the gate again, do you understand?” Srikanth said in a sonorous voice, and Geeta wondered for whom he was performing. Partly for her, but partly, she suspected, for his vanished first wife. “I give you the money for your food. I paid for that chair you’re sitting on. As long as you are under my roof, you will listen to me. And you are not allowed to speak to strangers.”
Rani turned her head and smiled.
It was a smile that Geeta had never seen before. Beautiful and powerless, it robbed Geeta of breath. She wanted to run over and hug the girl, but she could feel Srikanth puffing up beside her, working himself into a fury with all the mechanical purpose of the clock in the hall.
“Are you laughing at me?” he asked softly.
At that, the girl’s smile became even more helpless. Geeta closed her eyes, and at the moment she opened them she saw a strange thing—a gray-green blur shooting down outside the window. It took her a moment to realize that it was a jackfruit.
“You think you can disrespect me?” Srikanth was saying. “Just because my wife lets you disrespect her,” he continued grandly, “you think you can disrespect me? Eh? I know how girls like you think. Sly, that’s what you are, sly. Fine, if my wife can’t do it, I’ll teach you to behave. I’ll teach you to be scared.”
He lifted a finger in Rani’s direction.
“Pack your clothes,” he ordered.
Father, mother, child, suitcase. It was a parody of the family trip Geeta had suggested months ago. Srikanth, still swept up in his own theatre of punishment, carried Rani’s battered bag all the way to the gate, then set it down in the dust. Rani and Geeta followed, walking a foot apart, not touching.
“Go,” he told Rani, holding the gate open. “Pick it up and go.”
Rani picked up the bag. She slipped under his outstretched arm and past the gate. On the other side, she rolled her shoulders back, as if warming up for a marathon. She was much healthier than when she had first arrived, her face and figure fuller, her hair more lustrous, long enough now to touch her neck.
“You want to find your father and mother?” Srikanth demanded. “Go find them and don’t come back here.”
Rani began to walk. She walked in the direction the young man had taken earlier.
Srikanth stepped out onto the pavement and Geeta followed. Now they could see Rani’s back, her shuffle more pronounced because of the weight of the suitcase.
“She won’t go far,” Srikanth grunted. “She’ll stop.”
But Rani did not falter. She passed under a street lamp, and light raked her hair.
“She’ll turn around,” Srikanth said. “She’ll turn and start crying at any moment.”
The girl walked. On and on and on, without the slightest shift in her stride. Unaccountably, Geeta felt laughter bubbling from inside her.
“Quiet!” Srikanth snapped.
Rani had arrived at the last street lamp. She passed under it only as a shadow, and then she was out of sight. Geeta could not tell which way she had gone.
She turned to Srikanth, who seemed to be in shock. For a moment, they looked at each other, and she saw what ugliness could be released when the bloated complacence of a man like him was ruptured.
“She’s playing with us,” he said. “She won’t really leave. Where can she go?”
“Why doesn’t your daughter call you?” Geeta asked suddenly, speaking in her normal voice. “In a whole year, she hasn’t called you. And you haven’t called her.”
He turned slowly to face her.
“You know what I think?” Geeta continued. “I think you don’t know where she is.”
He froze. Then, as if it were intolerable to remain even a moment longer with her, he took off running in the direction that Rani had gone.
Geeta stayed where she was. A young couple came past, walking their small dog, and she smiled at them. A breeze picked up, bringing the smell of grilled chicken from the hotel next door, and she felt a quick pang of hunger for meat.
After a long while, she saw two figures coming back up the road. Rani was still carrying her own suitcase, her walk as unhurried as ever.
The girl did not look at Geeta as she stood holding the gate open. Srikanth, too, avoided looking at her. He was huffing, his face shining with sweat. Geeta waited a moment longer, then padlocked the gate and followed them in.
That night, he pulled her to him in the old way, the two of them on their sides, his chin at her shoulder. Her eyes were closed, but she could see clearly enough. Their strange bodies, made stranger together, perched on the raft of the mattress.
“We can’t do anything for her,” he was saying, his voice a murmur, as dry as paper at her collarbone. The girl was damaged, he said, had been damaged from the day she was born. They would never be able to control her, they would never be able to love her enough; the older she grew, the more uncontrollable she would become, and who knew how she might hurt them, which shady characters from the streets she would invite inside the house. And once they were inside they would rape Rani, they would steal, they would murder Srikanth and Geeta in bed. And suppose Rani did manage to track down her father and mother, or they managed to find her? They might hold the child as ransom, use her as leverage to extort money. Perhaps this had been the idea all along. Softly, he whispered his insinuations into Geeta’s shoulder, her ear, as tender as a man making love. It would be better for the girl to be with people who understood her, he said, people used to dealing with girls like her. It would be better for everybody, Geeta included, Geeta especially, to let her go. Wasn’t Geeta tired? Wasn’t she ready to go back to her life, to reading or wandering in the market, to things as they had been before? Why take on the extra burden? The girl would be fine. She had lived in their house for less than six months. She would forget soon enough. If they saw her again, she would barely remember them.
“So, my little au pair? What do you say?”
She thought of her mother’s voices, blurring and shifting, already onto the next thing, the next impression. Her father mumbling his worries to himself. Sister Stella’s Bible and multicolored pens. The hard ridges of the healed cut on her back. All these things she would never tell Srikanth about, but the fault was only partly his. She had lost the habit of speaking of herself, and now it was impossible to recover the details that could have made her permanent.
She heard herself say to her husband, “Yes.”
Over the years, they have sold off pieces of land. The hotel next door bought some, wanting to build a forested restaurant, where guests could eat dinner under softly lit trees. They sold some to a developer, who promptly built a twenty-story residential tower boasting “Unparalleled Views! Beauty Redefined!”
The residential tower has its own grocery store, where Geeta now does her shopping. This is not allowed, strictly speaking—the store is meant for residents only—but the security guard lets her in, nodding at her in a way that suggests that he believes they are in collusion against some higher authority, possibly his supervisor. The staff in the grocery store have no idea that she is not a resident, and they sometimes offer to carry her bags up to her apartment, which she politely declines. She has developed a dignified way of walking, has learned how to use her smallness to her advantage. That, coupled with the fact that she is quiet and aware of the people behind the counters—the thin boys, the young girls—makes them solicitous.
There is one girl she particularly notices. The girl works in the cosmetics section of the store, her hair pulled back in some elaborate way Geeta can’t figure out, pimples powdered out of recognition, her lips a shocking magenta or pink. She wears the same uniform as the rest of them, a blue T-shirt tucked into black pants, but there is an air about her, lusciously indolent yet vicious, that Geeta finds attractive. She wanders over to try products she can never imagine using—“That is face serum,” the girl tells her with shining derision when Geeta absently tries to dab something from a little bottle on her wrist—merely for the feeling that the girl produces in her. She would never go so far as to say that the girl—whose name is Ruby—reminds her of Rani. No, that would be too easy, cowardly, as if all girls who have come from unknowable places to stand in front of her were somehow the same. It is the relationship that is the same: Geeta and Rani, Geeta and Ruby. The girl stands there blazing and exposed, and Geeta circles her, unable to look away. ♦
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