steps to the rooftop room. Slowly. So slowly that her young cousin, who accompanied her up the stairs, along with a few of Kishore’s female relations, looked at Poornima and thought she might cry again. This young cousin, named Malli, knew nothing of what had happened back in Indravalli—only that there was a strange hush over the ceremony, one that she guessed was associated with the crazy-looking woman curled up in the weaving hut all those weeks ago, nestled under Poornima’s arms, the one she’d only gotten a glimpse of, though a boy cousin, who’d gotten a better look, had told her she was a rakshasi come to devour new babies. “But why new babies?” she’d asked him. “Because, stupid, they’re the tenderest.” That seemed to make sense. “So we’re too tough?” He’d looked at her and sighed impatiently. “I am. I don’t know about you. Let me see.” He’d squeezed her arm, and said, “Probably you’re all right.” Still, Malli was happy to join Poornima on her journey to Namburu. It was the custom—a young female relative joining the bride to her new home, a way to ease the journey to the strange, unfamiliar place—and Malli had jumped at the chance. But now that she was here, climbing the stairs beside Poornima, a cousin she barely knew but who struck her as being in an awful, pounding sort of pain, Malli wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to take her chances with the rakshasi.
Outside the door to the room, Malli and the other relations left her, giggling as they hurried away.
Poornima watched them go.
She looked at the doorway. There was a garland of young green mango leaves strung across the top of the doorframe. The door itself had a fresh coat of green paint and was blessed with dots of red kumkum and turmeric. She stood against it and listened. Not for sounds of her new husband, who, she knew, waited beyond, but for something else, something she could not name. Maybe a voice leading her away, maybe to the edge of the roof, maybe to its very edge. But there was nothing. The glass of milk in her hands grew cool. She looked down and saw the layer of skin on its surface. It had appeared out of nowhere: thin and creased and floating. Cunning. How did milk do that, how did it know to do that? she wondered. To protect itself? How, she thought, could it be so strong?
She set the glass down next to the door and walked to the center of the terrace. The concrete burned her bare feet, but she hardly noticed. She saw something shining toward the middle of the roof, but when she reached it, she saw that it was only a piece of wrapper, for a toffee. What had she thought it was? A coin? A jewel? Poornima didn’t know, but she was so disappointed that she sat down, right next to the wrapper, and stared at it. “You could’ve been a diamond,” she said to it. Then she said, “You could’ve been anything.” The wrapper stared back. It was nearly dark by now. It had cooled some, but the afternoons were still hot, in the high thirties, and the concrete that Poornima sat on held the heat. She didn’t mind. What she minded was that when she was small, three or four years old, one of her earliest memories, she’d gone with her mother to the market to buy vegetables. While they were walking back home, her mother had stopped in a dry goods shop to buy a gram of cloves. Poornima looked at all the tins on the counter of the shop, filled with chocolate candies and biscuits and toffees, and asked her mother to buy her one. Her mother hardly looked at her. She said, “No. We don’t have the money.”
Poornima waited, watching the tins.
Another customer—a fat lady with her fat son—came into the store. The boy—even to Poornima’s young gaze—struck her as spoiled. He was older than her but seemed slower, as if he’d been fed all his life on butter and praise. He didn’t even ask for a candy. He simply pointed at the toffee he wanted and yanked on his fat mother’s pallu. The owner obliged him by opening the tin, and then, laughing obsequiously, he said, “Take as many as you want, Mr. Ramana-garu.” The boy grabbed a handful and walked away. The owner was busy helping the mother, and so he, too,