around their ankles. They did not see the grey eyes looking out through the bedroom window, bright with covetous tears.
* * *
The wedding day was windy, too. The clouds looked buffeted and thin. As the hours passed, Isa’s white dress picked up so much red dust it was almost the colour of a sari anyway. The wedding guests looked stifled in their dark suits and pastel dresses. Only Aunt Pavithra had held out and worn a glorious navy, gold and green sari. When she accidentally dropped the silk pallu draped over her torso, unveiling the delicious folds of her belly, she looked like a recently fed python, both substantial and exquisite. The older women envied her peaceably – at their age, another woman’s beauty was no threat and indulging a little envy is a wedding pastime.
Isa herself was brimming with it. She had never cared much for the idea of marriage, which seemed too long and ongoing to comprehend fully, but she had always longed for a wedding: an event, a spectacle surrounding her, emanating from her. The church was cold, the priest spoke too slowly, the pews creaked as if they were in the overdecorated hull of a ship. Balaji kept clearing his throat as if he were about to cry. But Isa felt triumphant and calm and spellbinding. All eyes were on her. The priest pronounced them man and wife. Balaji crumpled his moustache against her nose. The audience applauded as they walked back up the aisle together and waited outside the church for the receiving line.
Only as the guests filed past to shake hands did Isa see that their eyes were wet with grief, downcast with pity – those eyes belonged not to her but to the Colonel, whose own eyes were buried under this red dust, though not yet dust themselves. Sibilla’s envy shifted from her mother to her father – not for his death but what it had brought him: unanimous attention. Tears slipped down Isa’s cheeks. The wind dried them to salt. Her guests inched past, whispering congratulations and condolences. In a fury of deprivation, she took their naked hands in her gloved ones, spitting red dust with her thanks.
* * *
Perhaps because Isa and Balaji first met in a shop, haggling became the pattern for their relationship. If one went up, the other went down, as if they sat on either end of a restless scale, never quite on par, but thrilled with the tilt of it. Thus, he had determined where they would go for their honeymoon – Victoria Falls, like her parents – but she had decided that they would wait until they got there to have sex.
But then the long uncomfortable drive south tired her out: Great North Road was cratered with potholes and around sunset there was an accident, and though they waited for an hour for help to come, it eventually got dark and so they gave up and left money with a young boy to sit with the injured man and pay the hospital fees. Nothing too disastrous, but by the time Balaji and Isa finally arrived in Livingstone that night, their hotel had given their reservation away. The only room available was at JollyBoys, a new backpackers’ lodge. They checked into a double – Balaji shoved the two single beds together – and went straight to sleep.
And so it was not until the second morning of their marriage, in a hovel for teenagers on a gap year, that Isa and Balaji had sex for the first time. Sunrise pinkened the cheap batik curtains. A ray of light slipped between them, took a stride over the floor, spotlit a dead cockroach – lending it a lovely amber glow – then stretched across their dual-carriage marriage bed. Balaji smiled and rolled over the crack between the two singles towards his bride.
Isa’s face was so beautiful to him that morning, her skin gleaming in the dawn, her lips soft with sleep, her eyes blurry with weeping, that it would linger in his mind for decades, a lifelong hangover. Over the years, when confidants to his marital distress conjectured that his wife wasn’t worthy of him, when other women came on to him, implying he deserved better, he genuinely believed them all to be wrong. His feel for Isa’s face, the match of her form to his taste, had revised his eyes so he could see nothing else.
To wit, he had never had to work so hard in his