put the oil on to heat. Her mother-in-law lingered in the kitchen and even offered to help with the chopping, but Poornima said it was all right; she would make them. The oil began to pop, and then to slightly smoke. Poornima dipped an onion into the batter. Just then, Kishore walked into the kitchen. Poornima was startled—never once, not once, had Kishore come into the kitchen.
He, too, smiled sweetly.
No, she thought in that instant. No.
None of it made sense, and yet it did.
She dropped the onion back into the batter and stepped away from them, and away from the stove. In that instant, both of them lurched: one body toward her, and the other toward the stove.
Poornima’s vision blurred. She didn’t know who it was that grabbed her, but she pushed them away so hard that she fell backward. She was on the floor, and they were both now by the stove.
Why are they standing there? She had just enough time to think, Why are they standing by the stove? before an arm swept something off it, and Kishore and her mother-in-law sprang away and raced to the other end of the kitchen.
She turned her head to follow them, and that was why, when the oil landed, it splattered across the left side of her face, down her neck, and caught her upper arm and shoulder. Poornima felt a fire, and then the fire, and everything with it, went out.
7
Kishore and her mother-in-law refused to pay the hospital bills, so Poornima was discharged on her second day. Only her father-in-law and Divya came to get her; when she sat down in the autorickshaw, the bandages still on her face and neck and arm and shoulder, she felt so small, so placental, that she shivered in the midday heat. Her father-in-law said, “You can stay for a day or two, but then you have to leave. It’s no good for you in Namburu. It’s no good. I’ll go tonight and buy you a ticket to Indravalli.”
Poornima nodded imperceptibly, and that slight nod sent a shattering pain up the left side of her face.
When they reached the house, her mother-in-law and Kishore were in the sitting room, and they watched her with contempt. Divya led her up the stairs, and when they reached the terrace, Poornima had her go in first and cover the mirror on the armoire. Only then did she enter. She lay down on the bed. Divya left, and then she came back that evening with a plate of food. Poornima looked at the plate of food and started to cry. Divya left again and came back with a glass of milk, and this she forced Poornima to drink.
The next day was the same. Only Divya came and went. But this time, she brought her books with her, and opened one of them, and began to study. Poornima made a sound, a squeak. Divya looked up from her book. “It’s my Telugu primer,” she said.
The primer was from the British era, she told Poornima; the small village school in Namburu never having had the money to buy new ones. Poornima opened her mouth slightly, the slightest amount, in an attempt to speak, but the pain shot through her like a cannon.
“Do you want me to read aloud to you?”
Poornima blinked.
The story Divya read was told from the perspective of a man on a ship in the early 1900s. The man’s name was Kirby. Divya paused and said, “It doesn’t say if it’s his family name or his given name.” Then she continued reading.
In the story, this man Kirby was traveling on a ship from Pondicherry to Africa. While traveling, he met another man, also on the ship, who was a Portuguese army colonel. The colonel, according to Kirby, was traveling to his family’s estate in Mozambique. They grew sisal, the colonel told Kirby, and went on endlessly about how sisal looked (like a Mexican agave, Kirby wrote, though neither Poornima nor Divya, even with a footnoted explanation, had any idea what that was either), how it was grown and then harvested. He said the blades of the sisal plant could cut deeper than a sword. Kirby then asked the colonel, But how do you handle it?
Oh, we don’t, the colonel said. The Negroes do all that.
On his last night on the ship, before he was due to disembark the next morning at Lourenço Marques, the old colonel told Kirby this story:
It happened one winter, the colonel began, when