night like a drowsy apparition, draped over the four-poster bed in the master bedroom of the house in Kamwala. Isa tried to start an argument about it right away but Balaji dragged her inside the translucent cube for their nightly bout of lovemaking. When they were done, panting beside each other, she gestured around them.
‘This thing is ridiculous!’ she said. ‘We never used mosquito nets at home.’
‘Hm?’ Balaji murmured. ‘It is to protect us, Bella. You can barely see it. Go to sleep.’
Spent, she did. But she was haunted all night by dreams about a woman sleeping above them, as if the roof of the net were a hammock. It was like being suffocated, she complained to him the next morning.
‘By a woman?’ Balaji grinned. ‘Maybe she can join us next time.’
‘It’s like being inside a cloud,’ Isa pouted. ‘It’s not necessary.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Balaji said. Malaria was a real risk and he wasn’t about to go without a mosquito net because of some fanciful dream.
They bantered about it for a few days, but when Isa had another nightmare – a giant spider weaving a web around them – she took it down herself, sneaking it out of the bedroom and stuffing it in a closet when Balaji was out at the shop. She was furious when it reappeared the very next day, dimpled with wrinkles, a shabbier, friendlier version of itself.
A silent campaign began. Isa took the net down; Balaji made sure it went back up. Isa raged; Balaji shrugged. Sibilla stayed out of it, protected by her own net of hair, which had always baffled mosquitoes. The servants found it amusing at first and even took bets on how long each bwana would hold out. But they soon grew weary of fobbing off the duty of hanging it up and taking it down. The mosquito net grew poxy and lax. Its holes widened.
One night, Isa managed to exercise enough self-control to stop Balaji in the middle of sex and force him to take the net down before she would let him back inside her. He gave in, then promptly fell asleep after his orgasm, as she knew he would, and so the bed remained blissfully netless until the morning. Isa woke to the open air and her husband kissing his way up her leg, rising from ankle to shin to knee to…two kisses higher, he stopped. Isa craned her neck to look at him.
‘Just playing connect-the-dots,’ Balaji chuckled. ‘Bite-bite-bite,’ he pressed them like a series of buttons. ‘You had better hope you don’t catch a fever, nincompoop.’
He left her in bed to examine the delirious line of magenta spots in her skin. It was as if something small and injured had stumbled along her leg, dripping a trail of pink blood. Later, under the desultory drip of the shower, she found more bites, in all kinds of places. How infuriating – Balaji was right. She blamed Kamwala. She’d never had trouble with mozzies in Longacres. Then she remembered why.
In the afternoon, she walked from the house to Patel & Patel Ltd, Inc. Balaji looked up with surprise when she walked in – she hadn’t been here since the wedding.
‘My bride!’ he introduced her to his boys as if they’d never met. The dwanzi boys smiled their marijuana smiles. Isa smiled back daintily, then turned to her husband to place her order.
Balaji laughed and shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t be selling anything to you,’ he said as he counted out her change. ‘This is my money. And you shouldn’t be lighting fires in my house.’
Back at home, sitting on the floor of the bedroom, Isa opened the box and a green coil tumbled out and promptly crumbled into uneven pieces: apostrophes and parentheses and an sign. She wedged a semicircle into the flimsy metal stand, lit a match, and brought the flame to the green tip. She watched the thin thread of smoke dangle up from it. Then she went and sat by the open window, a novel in her lap. The rain came, bringing with it the velvety scent of wet soil. Isa stared out at it for so long that when she turned back to the page, the letters seemed to drizzle down it. In the corner of the room, the ember tip of the mosquito coil crept slowly along its arc, leaving the scent of myrrh and a pile of cinders.
When Balaji got home that evening, he came into the bedroom and closed the door.