Late morning, Sudha awoke, pregnant. She felt it suddenly, she knew, despite what the doctors had said. There was a thin film of sweat on her chest. She went down to the train station, fighting against the crowd at the ticket counter. Her body made decisions of its own accord, elbowing itself to the front of the counter and sliding her money, sweat dampened, to the sleepy man on the other side of the glass. Then she went to look for the right platform. The day had not yet reached its apex, still the sun was hot enough to make her perspire, even shaded as she was by the corrugated tin awnings. All around her the porters, with their red uniforms and perfect posture, climbed up and down the long flights of stairs to the platforms with suitcases balanced on their heads, travelers following behind, like children. She wiped her brow with the back of her palm. Her breasts felt sensitive and full.
She found her platform and waited. The train was due soon. A child approached her, barefooted and dressed in a shirt that was once white but now was brown. His eyes were lucid and rimmed with a yellow crust, teeth in his mouth crowded together. He stretched out his hands. Madam, he said, please madam, I’m hungry. Very hungry. He motioned to his mouth. She could sense the presence of a girl, his younger sister, somewhere behind, a girl in a dirty frock and the same bright, yellowy eyes. Please madam, food madam, I’m very hungry. Sudha had left her city eyes behind. She went to the stall where they were selling samosas and bought him five and then thrust them in his hands. And then he was off; the crowd had eaten him. She leaned over the tracks and retched a clear liquid and when the nausea passed she closed her eyes.
Where are you?
I’m on the train.
What train? Are you crazy? Mr. Malhotra is asking for you. The clients are here in fifteen minutes.
I have to go to Rishikesh.
But why? Where are you?
I’m on the train.
Well, get off the train.
I can’t now. Tell him it’s an emergency. Please?
I can’t hear you. The connection is bad.
I said, can you tell him it’s an emergency?
Okay. I’ll tell him. Are you alright?
Everything’s fine, Sudha said. The train clattered against the tracks. Outside the window, the wide green fields filled with afternoon sun, the nameless cities, villages full of children with no mothers. The train drew parallel to an empty riverbank, and the sky was full of birds and kites made tiny with distance. I’ll be fine, she said into the phone, and said it again after her colleague had hung up.
She reached Haridwar in the evening. Her bag was small, but still she had to wrestle it from the hands of a porter, who had taken it from her as soon as she had disembarked. It was cooler up here. She felt drawn toward the river, not cluttered with pilgrims as it would be in Haridwar, but soft and empty in the evening light, unworshipped by droning priests and their strict adherents. In Rishikesh, a bend in the river. Birds, animals worshipped there, fish, snakes, ashes. Rishikesh, even the name in her mouth felt cool, like water running against a great thirst. She got a taxi. Haridwar was lighting up in dusk, and the sky got darker as they drove, the lights in Mussoorie like low stars against the black hills. It would be cold in Mussoorie this time of year. The town was made for honeymooners. She had gone there with Vinod before they were married. They had pretended they were in order to get a room. She had been wearing a sari to make herself look more wifely. Vinod brought brandy and they drank it from the bottle; later she had been sick.
When Sudha arrived at the ashram in Rishikesh they showed her to a small clean room with brick walls, and a window that looked out onto the sleeping river. She fell asleep and had a dream. She was a woman with two children. Her husband had died in a roadside accident. She lived now with the children at her husband’s brother’s house, in a small room beside the kitchen that had been intended for servants. She fed the children as best she could, but at night she remembered only the saddest part of the fairytale to tell them. The mother in that story was so poor that after she finished cooking for her rich sister-in-law, she saved the water she washed her hands with for her children to drink. The little bits of atta on her hands turned the water a milky white and that was all she could offer to her children’s hunger. In the story the mother was a good woman and her sister-in-law was a bad woman and god treated them accordingly; punishing the sister-in-law with shame or death, and rewarding the mother with riches—she couldn’t remember that now. All she could remember was the bowl of water the mother gave her children, how she watched her children raise the bowl to their lips and drink it, how she forced her lips into a false smile. How at night, the three of them sleeping in the same bed, not a bed but a narrow mat on the floor, breathed heavily in hungry, shallow sleep. She broke off in her telling, watching her children sleep. They needed new clothes. The little one, a girl, was just turning six, with the river colored skin of her father and thick dark hair that her mother had taught her how to comb by herself. Her brother, ten years old, looked like his mother. Someone had given him a pocketwatch. She had taken it away because she thought he would break it, but then he was so angry he wouldn’t speak to her for days, and his uncle—her husband’s brother—had prevailed upon her to give it back. They were sweet children. They went to school, they came with her in the afternoons to the houses she cleaned and sat quietly and did their schoolwork and sometimes the good woman she worked for would give them each a glass of milk. She worked for the good woman on some days, but the other women whose houses she cleaned wouldn’t even allow her children inside, so she had to send them back to her husband’s brother’s house, pressing down, as she did this, a bad feeling, like shame.
The dream-woman remembered when her son was born. They were poor but her husband was still alive. She held her new baby in her arms and felt love and terror in equal parts. He was tiny—he had been born a few weeks premature. A warm, breathing creature in her arms but it was as if he was made of glass. What if she dropped him or he came by some way to harm?
Do you love me? her husband’s brother said.
I love you, she said. He entered her. She had not taken off her sari, she just bunched it up around her waist. She closed her eyes. So many times she had done this now in the small hours of night, night after night, she no longer felt like crying. She hardly felt anything at all. Her mind climbed out of her body and observed the scene from the vantage point of the ceiling fan. With her eyes closed she could see two people moving together, just two dark bodies. Look at me, he said. She wouldn’t look at him. When Dhritarashtra’s mother submitted to his father with her eyes closed, her son was born blind. I said look at me, he grunted, but still she wouldn’t. Hush, she said, and he bucked against her, breathing hard on her.
Want me to stop? he said, mocking.
Don’t stop, she said. He pulled out and came on her belly. They lay beside each other not touching. She didn’t move to wipe his semen off her belly. It was warm and everything in the room seemed simple and very real: the rattan chair, the clean floor. Things that seemed like they shouldn’t be disgusting were suddenly disgusting. She was amazed by this.
Who had given the boy a pocketwatch?
She lay awake some nights. The bodies of her children next to her, smelling of rubbery sweat and soap and scalp. She touched their backs lightly with her palms. They didn’t wake. If there was a way to stay like this forever, the three of them sleeping together on the same mat, the children happy in dreams and hunger forgotten, safe, and quiet. If there was a way to keep them forever, never growing old or ungrateful or sour or angry. Each moment became unbearable. If she could weave armor for them from her own skin and hair. She knew the hardness of the world, the meanness. She would carry it forever if she could, carry it alone.