In the dusty corner of Nilanthi’s bedroom, her brother Lalith was the first to visit. He brought the smell of earth on his skin and walked with a limp, his left leg dragging, announcing his presence seconds before he came into sight. She teased him about this, how he had once been known for his silence and secrecy, and how these days he walked with the grace of a land monitor, all clunky loudness.
Nilanthi spoke to Lalith with a gurgle in her throat, her voice a half whisper. “Would you like some tea, Brother?” she asked, and Lalith leaned in closer to hear her muted words. “Tea?” she repeated, nearly choking on the tiny word caught in her throat, now a landscape of scar tissue. When she had swallowed the lye, bitter and fiery, she had never expected to be here again, surrounded by the memories of her family’s presence. Her mother’s roti pan hanging from the same rusty nail. Her father’s broken spectacles, long abandoned along the windowsill.
“Yes, please. With milk and three sugars.”
“No milk today.” She gestured to make up for the missing sounds. Her voice was hidden in the past, along with her brother’s alert silences and her mother’s cooking smells. For a moment or two, when Lalith comes to visit, Nilanthi can pretend that this house is still her home, that one day it will be filled again with lively sounds of playful argument between her older brothers: Sri Lanka will win the world cricket title over Australia this year. Champa is the prettiest girl in our A-level study group. No! Kamala is obviously more beautiful. Or from behind the bedroom curtain, the covert whisperings of her parents as they plan family visits to Trinco for a sea bath or a birthday celebration. But as soon as Lalith leaves, Nilanthi will look again around this house and hear its emptiness. She will feel a deep hollow of guilt wedged under her ribs. She has turned her family’s house into matted disarray, where dust buries signs of the past, coating photographs, school medals, and her father’s books. In her attempts at punishing her husband, Dinesh, she shames her family’s memory.
Nilanthi’s kitchen is cluttered. There are armies of ants marching in unstoppable rows. She often grows dizzy and exasperated with their ceaseless progression. When Nilanthi returned from the hospital two months earlier, Dinesh had had the floors polished and buffed with red glaze; he had tidied the shelves, dusted the mats, and bought several new pots and pans and a new electric rice cooker made useless by the island-wide power cuts. Since then the kitchen has grown increasingly dismal, as Nilanthi refuses to play the proper wifely roles even though that is how the entire village sees her now: As Dinesh’s wife. Lucky. Saved.
Dinesh had planted a wedding ring on her finger while her body was still hooked up to buzzing machines in the understaffed hospital. He proposed to her while her throat choked its opposition. As he mopped spit from her lips and chin, Nilanthi saw how he had fooled them all. His gestures were loving and gentle, and his eyes must have seemed kind and loyal to the nurses who watched him. Nilanthi met his glances with glares, willing all the leftover poison in her belly to travel out of her eyes and into his bent frame, his groping, demanding hands, and his bristly chin. She would poison his spirit as he had demolished hers. As the nurses applauded her good luck, rubbed her forehead with coconut oil, and brought lotus and anthurium flowers as blessings, Nilanthi began her revenge. It would be quiet and lengthy and humiliating. Lalith had promised to help, her friend Sunitha, too, and even her mother, who had never before encouraged malice, until Nilanthi was comfortably surrounded by her ghostly army and their commitment to Dinesh’s unraveling.
Dinesh had made their marriage arrangements while Nilanthi slept in a Valium haze, and even now she couldn’t quite recall the details of their wedding day. She had been draped in white, a sash tied neatly around the hole in her neck. Sunitha had come by to paint her nails red and her eyelids blue and called her a peacock as she brushed out her friend’s gnarled hair. “This should have been my wedding, you know,” Sunitha grumbled. She carried the smell of the sea on her breath and in the folds of her skirt. “But I suppose I’ll have my revenge on you both.”
Nilanthi felt the sting of her friend’s accusation. In a brief flush of memory, Nilanthi recalled the muted sounds of Dinesh entering Sunitha’s bed, their overlapping breaths and whispers. With the lingering gossip surrounding Sunitha’s family’s shame, Nilanthi had worried that her friend would be abandoned one day, but she had never expected Dinesh’s sudden visits to her in the night. “It’s your fault I’m still here,” Nilanthi argued with her oldest friend. “You didn’t leave me enough lye, being greedy, as you always were, and here I remain while you come and go as you please.”
Sunitha’s body stiffened alongside her, and for a moment her eyes flashed rage. “Stop moving your head. I can’t get the braids straight.”
Nilanthi leaned back into Sunitha’s hands and remembered the grade ten home science class when Sunitha used Nilanthi as her hair model. Nilanthi had missed her own afternoon biology class for the assignment. After Sunitha had twisted and braided and pinned and tucked, she appraised her design. Nilanthi had felt invisible under her friend’s stern and critical gaze. She watched for a sign of approval, and smiled relief when Sunitha finally nodded and stated matter-of-factly, “I can make you pretty if you’d let me do this more often.” Now, instead of seeking praise, Nilanthi silently instructed her friend to weave ugliness into her braids, paint humiliation onto her eyelids, stain her mouth red with shame.
Dinesh paraded his bride from the temple across the dusty low river toward the school’s cricket field, where he showered the crowd with rupees and candies sent up from Colombo. Such gifts had become rare over the recent months as the war swallowed money and family members. Nilanthi stretched her eyes over the crowd and caught sight of Sunitha crouched behind an abandoned scooter. She waved an embroidered handkerchief in Nilanthi’s direction, raised herself in a quick, easy motion, and faded into the dusty landscape, Lalith limping close behind. Even dead, she is less lonely than I am, Nilanthi thought as Dinesh handed out pineapple slices coated in pepper.
When Dinesh came to her that night, she let out a silent shriek that burned her throat. Her husband flinched, a look of disgust forming as the liquid sounds erupted from his wife. She screamed again, an animal-like, low muted groan, sending Dinesh to his feet backing out of the room. He returned to her hours later and she greeted him with the same combination of gurgling and halted screeching. In the shadowed moonlight, Dinesh had suddenly appeared fragile and desperate. His jutting collarbones cast severe shadows onto his thinning frame, and while the rest of his face was swollen with light, the creases beneath his eyes held darkness. It was in this moment when Nilanthi first sensed the power of her disfigurement. She decided then that she would learn how to wield it.
“But what about the bedsheet?” Dinesh’s voice cooed. “If we don’t prove your virginity, you’ll be humiliated. We’ll both be humiliated.”
Nilanthi felt her eyes glassy and wild in the darkness. She hoped the moonlight reflected them, making her seem ghostly and grotesque. Dinesh pulled a kitchen knife from his belt and lifted his sarong. While Nilanthi closed her eyes, waiting for the cold metal against her throat, Dinesh cut a gash along his thigh. When she opened her eyes, she watched her husband drop his own blood onto her bedsheet, wincing as he squeezed patterns onto the fabric. Nilanthi saw desperation in her husband’s actions, the fixed attention to his pain. Here was his weakness, she determined, and here perhaps her freedom. As he craved and wooed their neighbors’ respect and envy, she would unravel it. He could parade his bedsheet and hand out his bonbons, but she could create a very different kind of spectacle.
OVER THE NEXT weeks, Nilanthi listened silently as the village praised her luck. Women who had known her mother rested their palms on her dirty hair and whispered blessings and wishes and called out to the memory of her mother. Nilanthi found it amusing that people treated mutes as if they had lost their ability to hear after their voices disappeared. In her presence, her neighbors said things like, “She used to be such a clean girl.” Or “Cleverness can’t bring luck. Everyone said she’d be a doctor or teacher, and look at her now. Pity. The girl needs her mother.”
Nilanthi had her own conversations in front of the women. Her mother stood behind Nilanthi as she raised the well bucket to her laundry basin. As she smacked her husband’s clothes halfheartedly against a flattened rock, her mother reminded her, “Don’t be so timid. Really strike the rock with it.” Nilanthi closed her eyes as her mother’s voice continued to whisper. “Do you remember Lalith’s school uniform? No matter how gleaming it would be as he left for school, he’d return it smudged and stained. He’d always offer an excuse. A fierce cricket match. Running after a thief who had stolen a friend’s bike. Somehow he always became the hero of these stories. And a hero certainly needs his uniform shining the next day.”
Nilanthi continued her gentle thwacking. Her ankles were caked with mud, partly hardened under the midday sun. She liked the look of her dirty feet, lined with mud crinkles—they reminded her of stone or the roots of trees digging deep into the earth. Strong and resolute. “A hero, yes, deserves such care. But Dinesh will have to make do with his smudges and stains.” Nilanthi dropped the half-clean clothes into her basket. Her neighbors’ words continued to drift her way, the insults emphasized in each sentence. Disgrace. Shame. Dangerous.
“Never mind them, Daughter.” Nilanthi’s mother breathed comfort onto her daughter’s neck. “They need their own distractions from their own disappointments, you know. You are still a young bride married to the only man with money in this place. It is envy, that is all.”
Nilanthi leaned into the sounds of her mother’s tickling voice. “If it is envy, I will turn it into pity and then to scorn. It will be an easy thing to do.” Nilanthi mouthed the silent words.
The women raised their eyes to one another. Mrs. Kumara wiped her brow, leaving a smudge of suds and dirt. “Who are you talking to, my dear?”
Nilanthi shrugged and gestured to her own chest. Let them think I am talking to myself, she counseled. It will fuel their gossip, which will eventually find its way to Dinesh. One day soon he will regret his arrogance. “Do you approve of my plan, Mother?” Nilanthi leaned back toward the place where her mother’s whispers had been, but now there was only silence. Her mother had retreated with the afternoon wind.
LALITH VISITED LESS than Nilanthi’s mother and Sunitha, but he always brought gifts from his wanderings. Some mornings after Dinesh had left for the bank where he had once worked alongside Nilanthi’s father, Lalith brought curd and treacle to his sister’s kitchen. In silence, they scooped large spoonfuls of creamy buffalo milk, blending the sweetened treacle with the sour curd on their tongues. Nilanthi wiped her brother’s sticky chin with the back of her hand as he grinned messy smiles at her. “You look like you’re still a schoolboy, Brother, when you lick your spoon that way.”
At her teasing, Lalith raised himself up, squared his shoulders, and erased the smile from his face. He saluted his sister and kept his weight on his good leg as his chin jutted with pride. In this gesture, Nilanthi imagined all the secrets of her brother’s past. What he had seen and what he had lost. All the stories hidden in his limp and his fine salute. When he had appeared with Sunitha on Nilanthi’s wedding day, she had attempted to piece together the jagged puzzle of his time away as a soldier, which had led him, like Sunitha and her mother before him, to his ghostly freedom to come and go as he pleased.
Nilanthi saluted back. “Finish your food like a good soldier.”
Lalith squatted, eyes even with his sister’s. He smacked a syrupy kiss on her forehead. “I’m off. Enjoy your curd and clean up this kitchen, Sister, or else we will all get trampled by your ants.”
Nilanthi sulked as her brother took his leave. “You are always off to meet Sunitha. I know that is where you go. It makes me jealous.”
“We don’t all have old husbands to look after. We find other ways to keep busy.”
“You always tease. It’s not nice.”
“What? The teasing, or having an old husband to look after?”
“Both. Both are no good. No good at all.”
Lalith pushed the hair out of his sister’s eyes. “Not too much longer, Sister. Patience, and soon you will be free of him. Of the teasing, I make no promises.” Lalith’s voice followed him out of the house. As the door closed, Nilanthi lay in the sudden darkness, her spoon balanced on her nose, her ants creeping through her hair.
Lalith’s gifts lined the kitchen shelves. Grease-stained paper bags of cashews, mango jam, packets of Nescafé. Nilanthi had seen Dinesh eyeing the unexplained riches, but he never questioned her about them. She wondered if his jealousy was roused, if his imagination fluttered around possibilities of secret suitors, of young, uniformed men coming in from the scrubby bushes to woo his young bride. He most likely reassured himself. Nilanthi was his treasure: A mute girl with a hole in her throat and dirt under her fingernails. Desirable to no one but him.
For several weeks following their wedding night, Dinesh would come to Nilanthi as she slept. She would feel his approach, his humid breath on her neck, the sweep of his eyes over her hips, her breasts, her tangled hair. Her limbs stiffened under his gaze, a silent warning against his presence there. She twisted herself into a knot, arms hugging knees, chin buried in her chest.
“If you let me love you, we could be happy,” Dinesh whispered. His breath smelled of arrack rum and garlic.
A gurgle rattled in Nilanthi’s throat as she wrapped herself tighter.
“One day you will see all I have done for you and you will be grateful. You will learn to be my wife. I am all that you have now and you are all that is mine.” Dinesh’s voice was gentle, and Nilanthi understood that he did truly see himself in a noble light, a hero caught in his own fantasy. Rescuer of the suicide. Husband of the unfortunate mute. Nilanthi imagined him keeping himself company with his own smug satisfaction when she refused his embraces.
IT TOOK ALL of Nilanthi’s energy and concentration to construct her own humiliation. Madness was considered an ugly thing, so she would make herself hideous, a grotesque thing tangled up in the village’s pity and repulsion. She stopped washing, letting the damp smells from her underarms, the insides of her legs, cover everything she touched and anything that touched her. If Dinesh wanted to share her smell of shame and disgrace, he was welcome to it.
By their second month of marriage, he began arriving home later and later in the night. Upon entering the house, he was greeted by a heavy, immobile heat that carried the odor of dirt, sweat, and ruin. Dinesh added the tangy sourness of stale arrack; he carried it on his breath and in the dried drips on his clothes. Nilanthi heard him kick off his sandals and lift the wicker lid off the table. Some nights, Nilanthi would leave half a loaf of stale bread dancing with ants under the lid. Three-day-old lentil curry, hardened and cold.
Occasionally, Nilanthi would huddle in the corner of the kitchen, safely tucked into the darkness of the recent power cuts, and watch for her husband’s return. She savored the melancholy droop of his shoulders as he bent toward his barely edible food. He ran his wiry, dry fingers through thinning hair and left it in tangles. He suddenly had the sloped back of an old man, the defeated sighs of resignation. Nilanthi admired her accomplishments. Soon he’ll look even worse than I do.
In the mornings, Dinesh put on his disguise of a husband in charge. He approached Nilanthi’s bed, threw off her covers, and shook her shoulders. “Today you’ll sweep up this place and wash my shirts.” But each morning he would be greeted by Nilanthi’s slanted grin, a ghoulish smile and a gurgle. His voice would catch in his throat for a moment before continuing. “I’ll expect a decent dinner when I get home.” And then his words would trail off, swallowed by Nilanthi’s scraping laughter, as he backed out of the room, retreating as if from a raised cobra.
Nilanthi walked barefoot when she left the house. Barefoot to the well, to the market, to the temple, where others’ sandals lined the entrance to Shiva’s shrine. At first the heat off the desert earth scorched her feet. Pebbles pierced the balls of her uncallused heels. Her toes bled as she stubbed them against rocks. On her way to temple one afternoon, Sunitha laughed at the delicacy of Nilanthi’s vulnerable feet. “Hospital lotions have turned your feet into pincushions,” she teased.
“My mother never let us out of the house without shoes. My feet were pampered long before the hospital.” Nilanthi rubbed the tips of her toes against the temple’s staircase. The rough stone tickled the soreness out of her feet. She noticed that two of her toenails had started to turn black. When she reached the entrance to the shrine, she placed two anthuriums at Shiva’s feet.
“And what does your mother have to say now?”
“It hurts her to see me in such disgrace, I’m sure of it. But she lets me be—which is more than I can say for you. You seem to be enjoying yourself quite a bit at my expense.” Nilanthi scratched at a scab on her ankle and then smiled up at her friend, reassuring her that her scolding was playful and nothing more. Sunitha winked back, but for a moment Nilanthi wondered about her friend’s expression. Whether there wasn’t a hint of smugness in Sunitha’s fleeting smiles.
A cluster of women dressed in white saris approached the temple with their offerings and prayers. A safe return of their sons, husbands, and brothers. Their voices whispered individual prayers, but together their muffled drone reminded Nilanthi of the rush of the southern sea. Briefly her thoughts traveled to the Galle coastline and to her student days, when her imagination had played in the fantasies of Hindi films. Regal, youthful suitors who carried cricket bats and notebooks and wrinkled love letters meant only for her eyes. In their place now was Dinesh. A crumpled man, bent under the same weight of loss all their neighbors shared. He must think I haven’t noticed all his stashed bottles of arrack and moonshine behind the stacked firewood, she thought.
“Pathetic, these women.” Sunitha interrupted Nilanthi’s memories. “Their men are dead. No one will come back to this place once they are gone.”
“You came back,” Nilanthi answered.
Her friend frowned. “Revenge can keep us in a place. And of course”—her tone lightened—“someone needs to look after you.”
“You lured my brother back, too, you silly flirt.” Nilanthi pinched Sunitha’s arm and giggled.
“He came back all on his own. He missed his home.”
“Sure he did. He spends five minutes with me and then he disappears.”
“Perhaps if you kept your kitchen cleaner he might linger awhile longer.”
“Ha! Before Dinesh knows it, his house—my father’s house—will crumble around him. Only ants will keep him company then. He will not have a clean house unless he chooses to clean it himself.”
Sunitha wrinkled her forehead and murmured toward her feet. “Stupid man, he chose the wrong girl after all.” She glanced at Nilanthi, the anger leaving her voice. “You seem to have an audience.” Another wink and then Sunitha strolled to the temple’s gates, waving once before turning down the path.
All the women were now staring in Nilanthi’s direction, inspecting a conversation that seemed to have only one gurgling, drooling participant. Malsha and Fatima, Nilanthi remembered from school. Mrs. Priyani, the seamstress. Mrs. de Silva, the bank boss’s wife. Mrs. Thiranagama, her mother’s old friend, approached Nilanthi. “Are you all right, my dear?” She handed Nilanthi a handkerchief and gestured at her chin.
Nilanthi examined the handkerchief with pretend confusion.
Mrs. Thiranagama took the cloth back and wiped a bit of drool from Nilanthi’s chin. Nilanthi momentarily thought of her mother, and shame filled her. When she was a little girl, her mother had taken her to this temple, bent alongside her in front of Ganesh, seeking wisdom and luck for Nilanthi. The smartest in her class, her mother had whispered to the statue, thanking the god for his blessings. With this flash of memory, Nilanthi squared her shoulders and straightened her skirt, attempting a smile in her neighbor’s direction. But Mrs. Thiranagama was staring at Nilanthi’s feet and the dried blood caking her ankles. She caught a grimace on the old woman’s face. Repulsion overpowers pity, she reminded herself.
“A lucky thing your mother doesn’t have to witness this. Such a shame.” Mrs. Thiranagama met Nilanthi’s eye before retreating to the circle of flapping white fabric. Though the woman’s voice had carried traces of kindness, there was also a snap of accusation. Nilanthi realized she had become yet another village reminder of lost hopes and powerless prayers, their sons’ deaths smudged onto her muddied feet.
As Nilanthi descended the temple steps, a breeze danced around her, rustling her skirt and bringing the women’s words to her ears. What did you say? You really shouldn’t approach her—you could have stained your temple sari. I’ve never seen a girl so dirty. Did she say who she was talking to? Of course she couldn’t explain—those noises she makes. Did you give her your handkerchief? Oh, Mrs. Thiranagama, you are far too sympathetic. There are dangerous spirits in that girl. You keep your distance. It is only a matter of time before that husband of hers shares her ghosts. Their tumbling judgments bruised Nilanthi as she made her way home. She had become so grotesque that even offering her a handkerchief was a dangerous thing. But as she pictured the women’s scornful glances alongside Shiva’s languid gaze, she was confident that her own prayers were being answered.
DINESH HEARD THE gossip in the neighborhood; Nilanthi was sure of it. Perhaps it was the talk of ghosts and dangerous spirits from the women that increased Dinesh’s distance from her, or perhaps it was the quiet murmurings of criticism from the storekeepers and other men. Now, late in the night, when he returned, he banged and stomped his way through the door, no longer bothering with his shoes or the stale food under the basket. Nilanthi would often find him in a crumpled ball on the floor in the kitchen’s slanted morning light. If she nudged him with the dirty heel of her foot, his eyes would blink awake, find their focus. And then, as she backed away from him, she watched despair take hold of his bloated, scruffy face. Meeting his gaze, she would grin an exaggerated smile until he backed away from her, out of the house, into the morning, and left her in peace.
Soon it became Nilanthi’s goal to follow Dinesh out of the house, to haunt him in the daylight hours. She wanted him to feel her presence on his way to work, as he chatted with his friends, as he bought the newspaper. She longed to see his confrontation with the rumors, the gossiping, the criticism that surrounded his marriage. She wanted to see him—a man once proud and envied—cowered and reduced.
After he had slung his cracked briefcase over his shoulder, Nilanthi crept out of their kitchen and, still in her nightgown, pursued her husband out of the house and onto the path toward town. She felt Lalith’s soldierly company as she practiced her own spying techniques. As her brother whispered counsel into her ear, she felt herself become quickness and invisibility. When Dinesh glanced to the left, she darted behind a tree. When he bent to tie his shoe, she huddled behind a boulder. When he waved at Mr. Thiranagama, he must have caught sight of a brief flash of her white nightgown, because he paused and rubbed at his neck, looking left and right. Nilanthi savored his confusion. From this distance, Dinesh looked like a rag doll neglected by a thoughtless child. Frayed and substanceless, with his underarms and collar stained a murky yellow.
“Anything wrong, Dinesh?” Mr. Thiranagama asked.
“Just felt for a moment that—oh, never mind.”
“Got one of those pangs of paranoia, didn’t you?” Mr. Thiranagama teased. “Easy to feel those these days.”
“Well, I should be on my way,” Dinesh said with a chuckle.
“Right . . . work. One of the lucky ones who still has a job to go to.” Was there sarcasm in Mr. Thiranagama’s voice as he patted Dinesh on the back, causing him to flinch briefly? “By the way, Dinesh, how is your wife feeling? My wife saw her the other day at the temple and, well, she was worried that—”
“Fine. Fine. We’re both fine.” Dinesh raked at his hair, looking around one last time. “Send my regards to Mrs. Thiranagama. You two should certainly come over for . . . well . . . when the weather breaks. At any rate, give my greetings to her, will you?” Nilanthi watched her husband cling to the facade of normalcy. In some ways, his stubborn allegiance to the fiction he’d created impressed Nilanthi—there was a similarity in their determination, she had to admit. But as Dinesh switched his scuffed bag to his other shoulder and turned from his friend, Nilanthi caught a glimpse of his fatigue and assured herself that her will was stronger than her husband’s.
Foolish bugger. Mr. Thiranagama’s murmurs carried to Nilanthi as she resumed her shadow journey behind Dinesh.
Nilanthi followed Dinesh past the tea shop, the stationers, and the pharmacy. She followed him, her nightgown skimming her ankles, as he passed the bank without a glance into his workplace. Here, he picked up speed, followed the road to the right and to the right again. Nilanthi was less familiar with this part of the village. The houses grew sparse, and emaciated cows wandered dopily in the dust. Her husband eventually collapsed on a bench outside a dilapidated shop. A squat man who had been lying with a newspaper over his face rose, smacked Dinesh on the shoulder, and brought out a dusty bottle from the corner of the store. Dinesh handed over a crumpled twenty-rupee note, unscrewed the top of the bottle, and leaned back, coaxing the golden liquid into his mouth.
So this is what he becomes, Nilanthi observed. No longer a hero, he will have to play the other cliché. The sad, bad-luck drunk. She wondered for a moment how she could ever have been afraid of this yellowed man with his wrinkled elbows and sagging head. He is just an old water buffalo who will wander one day from the herd, take too long a break in the shade. Tired and worn out and no longer useful—no one will notice his disappearance.
Nilanthi pursued her husband for several days. He had started to change his route to avoid the village center. Soon she didn’t even have to follow him with her eyes; she could track him by his sour smell, his flimsy sighs, and the shuffling monotony of his steps.
ONE NIGHT, NILANTHI didn’t hear Dinesh come home until she felt him at the foot of her bed. She tucked and readied herself to fight, but his presence there—so small and insubstantial—sent a giggle through her. As her laughter waved over her body, and the slick saliva sounds of her throat traveled toward him, Dinesh met her eyes and started shaking, too. For a moment, Nilanthi thought he was also laughing, and his silent rocking briefly quieted her. In her half sleep, she wondered if they were perhaps about to share in the same joke; she waited for the punch line.
But instead, Dinesh’s silence turned into slurred whispers. “Please.” His voice wavered. “Nilanthi, please. Don’t do this.” He crawled in her direction and leaned his head against her feet. “I am your father’s friend. Your mother served me dinner here.” Dinesh wrapped his fingers around Nilanthi’s ankles. “Please. I am your family and you are mine. This is all we have left. Don’t leave me alone.”
As Nilanthi listened to this crumpled man laying claim to her family’s memory, she felt her stomach churn with disgust. She kicked his head away from her legs and lifted her back against the wall. She felt Sunitha’s scornful laughter empty into her belly. In her mind, she listened to her friend’s voice merge with her own. You chose the wrong girl after all, you pitiful man. You took my mother’s food and then you took my father’s house and then you took their leftover daughter, stole her from death. So here is the prize for your family loyalty. She willed him to hear her as she stared at him, this drunk, wasted husband of hers, and spit out both of their shame into his face.
In the morning, Dinesh was gone. And though as the afternoon shifted toward twilight she understood that he would not be back that evening or any evening to come, Nilanthi listened for the clumsy stumble of his entrance, the halfhearted search for food. All night she listened, but she was greeted only with silence. She waited and listened as the sky turned the electric blue of predawn, and she waited and listened through the next morning. She watched the ants march off with the uneaten crumbs of her husband’s stale dinner. She watched the shadows slide against the walls of her house in the afternoon’s shifting light, and when she gathered herself into bed, still there was only silence.
When Nilanthi woke early the following morning, she opened the windows of her kitchen and picked up her wizened broom. She swept the crumbs off the floor and then flooded it with soapy water. She mourned, briefly, her drowning ants. They had been faithful members of her army, after all, but they had served their purpose. Nilanthi changed out of her nightgown, putting on her pink blouse and flowered skirt and sandals. She wrestled her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck.
When she marched into the village center with her wicker basket under her arm, her neighbors parted as she passed. Some of the schoolboys spit into her hair, called her a water buffalo, but mostly there was silence. Nilanthi stretched out her neck, jutted out her chin as her brother had done in his mock salute, and felt her scar expanding along her throat. At the market, Nilanthi shoveled pumpkins and chilies and coconuts into her basket. Lentils, rice, and potatoes. A sad-looking pineapple peaked out from behind her arm. None of the merchants requested any money from her. Instead they backed into the shadows of their stands as if in surrender. It amused Nilanthi that these people, whom she had once known as her neighbors and her friends, were frightened of her. Perhaps they were just so unaccustomed to seeing hopefulness that they now only recognized it as madness, as something terrifying.
When Nilanthi returned home, she readied a fire under the stove and set about chopping and boiling. She shaved the coconuts and squeezed out their sweet milk. She sprinkled kola and cardamom and cumin over her bubbling lentils. The house took up the scent of her mother’s kitchen, rich cinnamon smells layered with pungent garlic. The earthiness of browning roti. After a bath, Nilanthi draped her mother’s favorite green sari over her shoulders and around her waist. She opened the door and called in her army of ghosts. “Amma! Sunitha! Lalith! Come in! Come in! Let us eat and rest. Let us celebrate! We have won.”
NILANTHI KEPT HER gaze fixed on the far path beyond her house as the sun lowered. As night approached, the heat from the day grew static. The air no longer carried Nilanthi’s cooking smells, only the occasional whispers of neighbors returning to their own homes. And soon these whispers lessened and the path grew invisible in the heavy purple light. Nilanthi brought the edge of her sari to her nose, sniffed it for traces of her mother or even Sunitha, who had danced in it one evening a long time ago. “Let us celebrate,” she whispered into the night. “Let us eat and rest.” She let the sari fall to the ground. She listened and she waited.