something caught her eye: she saw that the first row on the topmost page did make sense. It was simply the numbers in the second, third, fourth, and fifth columns added up, and listed in the sixth column. The first column was just a date. That was easy enough; she’d learned addition well before the fifth class, which was the last year she’d attended school. Then she checked the remaining rows, and they, too, were the same: simple addition, that was it.
Was this what Kishore did at work all day? She nearly laughed out loud. Asking for foot massages, demanding that she press his shirts every morning, yelling for a glass of water as soon as he walked in the door: as if he’d crossed a desert, as if his labors had utterly parched him, when all he was really doing was adding up numbers! But then she checked the other sheets of paper, and it wasn’t true. Those columns weren’t added up; something different was happening in those columns.
Poornima sighed and went back downstairs. There were the lunch dishes to wash and dinner to prepare. Her mother-in-law and Aruna liked their tea at four o’clock, and it was already ten past. Poornima hurried to the kitchen. But as she boiled the water and milk, and raced to add the tea powder, and brought down the sugar things, she wondered about those other pages. What were those columns doing? Maybe Savitha had been right, she thought. Maybe, in the end, accounting was not much more complicated than when her father gave her money to go to the market, hardly any money at all, and she’d still had to buy enough vegetables and rice for all of them, and even so, he’d demanded that she bring back change, along with a full rendition of all she’d spent and where. If she’d bought a kilo of potatoes for five rupees, he’d say, “I could’ve gotten them for four,” and if she did get them for four, he’d say, “They’re small. Pockmarked. No wonder.”
Still, as she was scooping the sugar into the cups, Poornima suddenly put down the spoon. She put it down and looked up. She was amazed. She’d just thought of Savitha, and yet she had felt none of the usual blunt, dreary pain or confusion or longing that she always felt, nor even the gleaming, sharp hatred toward her father. None of it. She’d simply, and without suffering, thought of Savitha. It was the first time she’d done so, and the feeling was like being handed a kite in a strong wind. Poornima smiled. But then the smile immediately fell. Because in the moment right afterward, it all rose up again: the desperate sorrow, the disorder, the mystery of her whereabouts that drove her, on some nights, to huddle in a corner of the terrace and weep under the waning or waxing moon, the watching stars.
But she’d been free for a moment, and besides, those columns couldn’t possibly be all that difficult: those two things she knew. Those two things she was certain she knew.
5
The first time Poornima talked back to her mother-in-law was on the morning of a marriage viewing for Aruna. She was six months older than Poornima and yet still not married. The problem, according to Aruna and her mother, was the boys. They were never good enough. One had a good job, high-paying, in Hyderabad, but he was balding. Another, tall and handsome, had a father who was keeping a woman even though his wife was still alive—and who knew if bigamy had a genetic component? Yet another was perfect in every way—job, hairline, family reputation—but he was the exact same height as Aruna, and she liked to wear a little heel whenever she went to the cinema or out to eat. “What am I supposed to do,” she said, pouting, “wear chapals everywhere? Like a common villager?”
The boy coming today was from Guntur; he worked for Tata Consulting and had been to America on a project, and might even have the chance to go again. He was an only son, so the entirety of his family’s inheritance would go only to him, and he looked like a film hero. At least, that’s what one of his neighbors told the matchmaker, when he went around to inquire. “Which hero?” Poornima asked. “Is it the one in the film we saw?” Aruna scowled and shook her head. “No. Not that one, you pakshi. A hero in a