good film.”
It didn’t matter which film. The house in Namburu had been aflutter since four in the morning. The stone floors in every room were washed and mopped. All the furniture was dusted, the cushions on the sofa and chairs aired out. A small puja was conducted—as soon as Aruna had washed her hair and dressed, she made an offering to Lakshmi Devi and lit incense. They were arriving at three in the afternoon but had said nothing about staying for dinner—which meant that Poornima had to make enough sambar and curries in case they did, along with pulao rice and bhajis. She was cutting strips of eggplant for the bhajis, the oil already heating on the stove, when her mother-in-law came in, yelling for her to hurry up, the milkman had arrived, and there was the milk to boil and the yogurt to set. Poornima turned down the oil and got up to get the milk pan, when her mother-in-law looked at her, up and down, and said, “When they arrive, don’t show your face. Stay upstairs. We’ll make up something. We’ll tell them you had to go back to Indravalli for the day. Something. Just don’t make a sound.”
Poornima turned from the stove. “Why? Why would I stay upstairs?”
Her mother-in-law sighed loudly. “You’re not—well, we don’t want to bring Aruna’s status down, do we? Besides, six months, seven months, and you’re still not pregnant? I don’t want you to rub off on my Aruna. On her chances. Barren women are a bad omen, and I don’t want you down here.”
There was silence. Poornima listened. She strained her ears and found that there was only the small, quiet sound of the oil beginning to boil, though this, too, magnified the other silence, the greater one. “How do you know?” she said. “How do you know your son isn’t the one who’s barren?”
The slap that followed was so powerful that it knocked Poornima backward, reeling, crashing into the stove. The milk wasn’t on the burner yet, but the oil was. It splattered across the wall, dripped off the granite counter, and landed in thick, hot drops on the floor. A few drops flew onto Poornima’s arm, and she could feel their sizzle, spreading like papad, hissing like snakes.
Her mother-in-law eyed her with real hatred, and then she said, “Keep acting up. Go ahead. There’ll be worse. Just keep it up.”
Worse? There would be worse? Kishore had said the same thing: Was it a coincidence? Or wasn’t it?
That afternoon, when the boy’s family arrived, Poornima was relegated to the upstairs and told not to come down until they called for her. She didn’t mind. She sat in the middle of the terrace for a few minutes, away from the edge so no one would see her. It was after four o’clock when the boy’s family arrived, the hour when flower vendors walked through the village, shouting and singing out the kinds of flowers they had for sale. Poornima could hear the song of the old man who sold the garlands of jasmine, plump as pillows, and just beginning to open, releasing a fragrance so intoxicating that she was certain she caught their scent on the terrace, two, maybe three streets away.
Her mother-in-law sometimes bought a long strand, cutting off the longest lengths—as long as her forearm—for Aruna and Divya (who didn’t even like wearing jasmine in her hair and took it off as soon as her mother turned her head); she took a short one for her own, puny bun and gave the remainder to Poornima. Poornima, whose father, after her mother had died, had never once given her money for flowers, would rush to oil and braid her hair, wash her face, then reapply talcum powder to her face and neck, draw kajal around her eyes, and paint on a fresh bottu. And only then, only after she’d made herself worthy of the flowers, their sweetness, their beauty, would she finally put them in her hair. On those nights, after Kishore took her—not once commenting on the flowers in her hair; did he even notice them? Poornima wondered—she’d lie back on her pillow, and their scent would drift up toward her like mist, like drizzle, like the unbearable sadness of that upstairs room, her husband turned away from her, the shutters closed against burglars, but still a mild breeze sneaking in, rustling the edges of the sheet, and Poornima, lying there in the dark, her eyes open, warm, inundated by