One afternoon she looked at her face in the mirror she was cleaning. Her children were not with her. The bathroom was empty. It was a fancy one with a western toilet; she cleaned that too. Then she turned and there was her face. She looked at it for a long while; she felt as surprised as if she was looking at the face of a stranger. She looked older than she was, with gray starting in at the temples, and her skin folding at the corners of her eyes. She was no longer a girl, but she could see the girl of her face there, in the fullness of her lips, in the darkness of her irises, the soft folds of her eyelids, and that girl’s face was pressed over her face like a ghost, the face of her daughter not yet grown or maybe a daughter who was not yet born, or just the face of any young girl, a quiet girl who absorbs everything she sees, everything becomes her, a girl so full of anxious love for the world she is bursting with it. And then another moment passed and her face was her own again, and she was relieved.
The girl was crying when she came home, but the boy was nowhere. Where is your brother? she asked the girl. The girl sniffled and wiped her face. She pointed to the bedroom, the one the uncle and the aunt shared. He said I couldn’t come, said the girl, but I get so sad and lonely sitting outside waiting for him. But he won’t let me in, he never lets me in.
The mother went to the door and opened it. She knew what she was going to see before she saw it—the uncle startled, the boy mute. She knew it, maybe she knew all along. But she had no other place to go.
Sudha woke up. The light was shining on the river, shining hard through the window. It was still early dawn. She dressed and went to the river. She was in the foothills and they were green. She climbed down the narrow concrete steps of the ghat until she got to the last one that remained above the water. It was always quiet here, an early morning stillness that lasted into dusk. For a while, she stood at the edge of the water. There was no one around. There used to be elephants in the jungle on the other side of the river—she had seen them through binoculars as a child. There weren’t any more. The jungle was thinning out, even as the river swelled.
When she looked into the river she saw a face. The face in the water was dark-skinned like hers but had wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. She looked tired and sad, something in the eyes told her, dark but not dull, the small frown in her mouth, and she saw a sigh form on the lips of the face. The face looked like her mother’s face or her grandmother’s face, and yet she could find hers in it too. There was a moment where the two faces lay perfectly still on top of each other—and then the reflection was just her own again.
She let each feeling rush into her belly and lie there. He was there, knotted inside her and growing, in another month her skin would start to stretch to accommodate him as he grew lungs and fingernails, his little heart beating like a moth. She let dread wash over her, and love, and fear, and anger, she started to laugh though there was no cause, and she thought I must not be frightened now. She remembered the baby from her dream, the baby she held in her arms, she remembered her own mother. The feelings were a train, driving hard through the center of her, and when they blew clean through the other side, she felt empty of everything, except for him.
Mourners
You haven’t eaten anything,” Reggie says. They can hear Maya with the baby in the other room; the baby is crying, then being hushed.
“I’m not hungry,” says Mark.
“How now, gentle cuz?” Reggie says. She puts her hand on his rough cheek. Her face is sardonic as always, but there is kindness in it. Then Maya comes in with the baby, whose little cheeks are wet with tears. Seeing her father, the baby reaches her small hands out to him. Maya is wearing a sleeveless dress. Her eyes, thickly lidded, normally languid, now are red and tired.
“Will you hold her?” says Maya.
“No,” says Mark.
Maya looks at Reggie, who opens her arms.
When she learned Chariya had died, Maya immediately left her small apartment. It was windy in New York; she wore a coat and gloves and a scarf and a hat. Daylight passed. She walked by men and women and looked at them with just her face exposed. But from this small expanse of skin they could read her perfectly. Her mind was stunned, her body hungry, a hunger that frightened her. She slept in her seat with a hand over her mouth while her body flew west: she was dreaming of being fucked. It was Reggie who came to get her at the airport, looking rough in the unfussy clothes of a farmwife, holding Chariya’s baby in a carrier. Standing under the arrivals sign, Maya pressed tears back into her eyes with the heels of her hands.
Maya sits in the bathtub for a long time before she puts on the tap. It was Chariya’s room, her sea-room, where she had taken long baths, and where she had given birth. Blue tiles, blue walls, blue towels, and a flat, gray light coming in through the window. With her foot, she nudges open the tap, which floods heat. She looks at her body, wavering under the water. What use is a body? There is no milk in her breasts.
“Maya.” Mark’s voice. It comes from far away, and she lifts her head above the translucent surface, and closes the tap. Then the house becomes silent. He says again, “Maya.”
“What?”
“I—I left something in there.”
“What.”
“My reading glasses. Do you see them?”
“No.” Still she can feel him standing, pressed against the closed door. She says, “I found seven white hairs today.”
“Where?”
“At my left temple.”
“You’re young still.”
“Chariya is going gray.”
“Was.” From far away they can hear Reggie with the baby, cooing, the sound an animal makes. The sound of the baby’s laughter. She has been fussy, getting her teeth in. But the last few days she has sensed the change in the house and become quiet.
“Maya.”
“No,” she says.
Five or six, dusk gathers quietly outside until the room is filled with it. White moths spread their wings against the windows, but from the inside they are just their shapes: black. When the baby cries, Maya takes her and rocks her against her body. Soon the baby is sleeping. Maya and Reggie begin to talk about Chariya. From the other room Mark listens to the fall of their voices. They are tender as they speak about Chariya.
“She’d just cut her hair. Did you see it?”
“No,” says Maya.
“Short as a man’s. Like a French girl’s. It suited her.”
“People used to think we were twins. But she was older.”
“Couldn’t have been by much.”
“Five years.”
“Five? I don’t believe it. I thought Irish twins at least.”
Mark thinks of the sisters together. They both stand at the edge of the lake. Chariya is not yet pregnant. One wades in and the other stays on the shore: one dark, the other darker. Then they are each other’s reflection. It is Chariya who floats up, arms and hair spread out, in the green water. She is wearing a blue bathing suit that makes the skin of her inner arms and thighs seem golden. When she wants to, she can look sublime, so happy. From somewhere he can hear Chariya laughing, and his heart leaps up. But then he realizes it is Maya. Maya as she begins to hum a song to the sleeping child, a lullaby that Chariya sang too. A lullaby for his daughter, but he accepts it as his. And sleeps.