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Anjali passed the Tour Saint Jacques on her way home. The four elongated gargoyles at the top of the tower—like panthers leaping out from each corner—were black silhouettes against the royal blue twilight. Like John, she also walked to the Sixth, also to Boulevard Raspail, but to the opposite end of it, where she lived in a chambre de bonne, a maid’s room, on the top floor of an aristocratic family’s Paris townhouse.
Six flights up to a bedroom all of ten square meters. Enough room for a narrow bed, a sink, an electric stove with two burners, a tiny table that also served as her desk, but not a chair. No microwave, no oven, no counterspace other than her desk/table. But she did have a view of the Eiffel Tower if she put her head out the window.
She had found the flat and her job online. Her mother and father in Mumbai were terrified of her being on her own in a distant city, but she thought of it as a grand adventure. Amma and Appa had given her a year to settle down and get the screenplay thing out of her system. Then they expected her back, to marry Ravi.
She used the toilet in the water closet out on the landing. She didn’t mind standing up—unlike millions in India, at least she had a toilet. She re-entered her flat to wash her hands at the kitchen sink. The towel to dry hands was in the shower. The shower’s etched glass wall was what her pillow leaned against when she read in bed. The flat was tight, but it was all hers. She would write a killer screenplay here, and then another. She wanted Hollywood to know her name—not Bollywood, she had no interest.
Sitting on her bed, she indulged in her usual late-night activity—looking up a Mumbai newspaper online, curious about the news from her homeland. As she scrolled through the headlines, one jumped out at her: “More than 8,200 Women Treated for Burns in the Last Ten Years in One Bangalore Hospital.”
What on earth?
She read the article thoroughly. A university team had studied police reports of “stove bursts” in which wives had died.
“It’s amazing that stove bursts kill only the wife; not the mother-in-law, not the sister-in-law, and surely not the husband,” the leader of the study said. Researchers believed that the police had a complicit role because they often did not investigate the site of the incident and based their enquiry on the victim’s statement, made with the husband and his family around her. When researchers did investigate several cases where a cooking accident or stove burst was blamed, they found that the burning took place in the bathroom or living room, while the stove was in the kitchen.
Most of the women were in their twenties, and most had been married for less than two years.
While she read, Anjali thought, what if Ravi or his sisters did that to me? She had met all of them and couldn’t picture it, but probably none of the burned women could have conceived of their marriages taking that turn, either.
She got into her pajamas and curled up in her bed, thinking.
