MARY IS REMINDED of Mount Harriet as she stands on the highest peak in Sagaing. The greenery rolls out in every direction. But the trees are not as high, the thicket not as dense, as on the islands. Golden spires and domes of all shapes and sizes rise up higher than the trees, like anthills over grass. The Irrawaddy is the closest they will get to the ocean, connecting them to the delta, the Andaman Sea, and ultimately the Indian Ocean. Mary has lived her entire life on this very fault, of which Sagaing is the spine. The Karen villages in the Andamans and Port Blair are nerves branching from it. She will always consider herself an outsider here, in the land of her parents, her husband, and her son.

A few hours ago, when she sat next to Thapa on a small boat to cross the Irrawaddy, she saw fishermen standing waist-deep in the water. Some of them had wooden boxes beside them as they stood above the water on stilts. She wondered what the odd arrangement was for. Perhaps this is how the Burman had fished too, before he left for the islands.

At the riverbank, a girl was selling candied flowers. Intrigued by the foreign delicacy, Mary bought some. They were too sweet for her liking and made her thirsty. Her belly began to ache soon after. Though the river was as gentle and calm as a pond, Mary felt seasick on the boat. Her womb throbbed with pain. Once on land, she rushed behind the bushes to relieve herself. She was shocked to see blood on her dress—her menopause had occurred almost three years ago. The period was a flash flood from the past, an obscene reminder of how helpless she was in the face of blood. Unprepared, she used a handkerchief as a sanitary napkin and returned to Thapa. Later that day, the two find themselves at the highest point in Sagaing. By the time they finish the climb, Mary’s forehead and cheeks are on fire, and she is sweating feverishly. She lies down on a bench and covers her face with a newspaper.

Thapa returns with ice-lollies. He wipes Mary’s forehead with his palms and helps her up. They sit on the bench, licking the bright-orange ice from the stick. It melts onto Mary’s hand, dripping over her dress. If another earthquake were to arrive, she wouldn’t move a finger. She has consumed all her strength to make it this far.

Tomorrow, Plato will be released. But today she is defeated. A short, breezy trip across the Irrawaddy has drained her of every last drop of dignity and will. It has made her bleed like an adolescent and suffer the hot flashes of menopause. It has filled her with the desire to live but drained her of all hope.

Sitting on a park bench that afternoon, Mary lives a thousand emotions and a thousand lives all at once. Crushed by nine hundred and ninety-nine, finding it impossible to hang on to this one.

How ugly he must have been for his mother to abandon him, Plato had said in his letter. It isn’t his but her own ugliness she fears the most.

“Do you have another longyi for tomorrow?” Thapa asks. “We can buy you one.” Her bloodstained, disheveled state has him concerned.

“New clothes cannot change what I did,” she says. “I left my baby, even before I could wean him off.”

The Irrawaddy sprawls in front of them. From the bench, the river looks like two rivers separated by a sandbank big enough to be an island. Despite the low water level, Thapa can see boats traveling upstream. They don’t have a choice—the river is the only way to get to many places up north. In the distance are the hills of Mandalay, soft and rolling, like ripples of sand, in sharp contrast to the daunting Himalayas to the west and Tibet to the north. So high and steep are those mountains, the world ends there for most. No man has made it to the top of the peaks and the bottom of the gorges near Namche Barwa. For the longest time, people mistook the Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra to be two separate rivers, for no one could venture across the great bend to see that they are one and the same.

Thapa tries to distract himself with the view, until it isn’t possible anymore. Mary’s words have transported him back to his own past.

“Not everyone gets a chance in this life,” he says, “to start again.”

Mary nods. A group of crows catches her attention. They are perched side by side on a denuded branch of a dead tree. They give the illusion of being a happy family. The mother crow grooms the father’s feathers, while the adolescent looks around aimlessly.

Crushed by guilt, Mary escapes into the tale she had begun to tell herself on the dinghy from the Andamans to Burma, as she waited, nauseated and anxious, to set foot in the land of her husband and son for the first time.