fish. The bill for our food came to 378 rupees. In all, our wedding cost us under five hundred rupees. It was nothing compared to the opulent weddings of my relatives and friends, but I had cared only for the happy light in Michael’s eyes, the scent of the flowers in the garlands he had brought for my hair and my neck, and the way he had pressed against me in the cramped seat of the rickshaw on our way to our newly-rented two rooms.
My sari was a dark-green silk that had belonged to my mother. She had given it to me the night I ran away from home. She had not said a word, but had kissed my hair and then my face, staring at it as if she might never see it again. She took off her emerald earrings and twisted them into my earlobes. She draped a corner of her treasured sari over my head to see how I would look in it. For a long minute she stared at my half-veiled face, then put a finger to the kohl in her eyes and smudged its blackness onto my forehead to protect me from evil spirits. We spoke in gestures and were careful not to make a sound: we knew my father was somewhere in the house, alert to every rustle, every whisper.
From the day my father had found out about Michael, he had become as watchful as an animal waiting to pounce. He prowled all over the house, somehow soundless despite the stick he always carried as a crutch to compensate for his shorter left leg. He said nothing, but no longer allowed me to leave the house, not even to go to college. I was only nineteen then, an undergraduate who needed to go to classes. He told everyone I had chickenpox and was too contagious for visitors. He cooked up a doctor’s certificate for my college principal. He put a stop to friends, outings, telephone calls. At times, I felt his cold-eyed gaze travelling over my body as if he were trying to gauge which parts of it Michael had touched. But I was his daughter. Before my fall from grace, he had done his best to train me to follow his example: to be ruthless in getting what one wanted, to take calculated risks. His efforts must have yielded results. I escaped him within a fortnight, knowing I would never return home.
My companion in the bus that morning reached her stop, still chattering of Would-be. She said smiling, “Tomorrow I’ll bring you a card; you must come for my wedding!” I got off two stops later, and walked towards Father Joseph’s office, feeling disembodied, weakened and sleepy, as if I would be compelled to sit on the pavement and then not know how to get up again. I found myself outside a hotel painted pink and yellow, and walked through its gates to a swimming pool at the back. There was a sheltered staircase next to the pool. I sat on one of its steps, before the shining blue emptiness of the water, the stretch of green tiles around it, the damp towel discarded on a chair. There was a line of plate-glass windows on the other side that produced mirror images of everything I saw. A bird passed overhead, low enough for its shadow to ripple across us. At the other end of the pool, a little girl was being urged by a swimming coach to plunge from the diving board. She shouted, as if in a movie: “Let me go! I want to live! I want to live!” My eyes blurred and I began to see human skeletons and bones at the edges of the pool, on the green tiles: skulls, clavicles, fibulas, tibia and femurs. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with ancient silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. I saw skulls at the bottom of the pool, turning their blind gaze this way and that in the clear water, magnified by it. They bobbed to the surface. One of them splashed to the edge of the pool, next to my feet, and the face streaming away from it in dissolving ribbons was Michael’s.
The windows, the towels, that screaming child, the green tiles, the fire-blue sky with its shadow-birds, retreated. The step I was sitting on crumbled and I began to fall dizzily through a vast sky, as