The bicycle carcass lies a few meters back from the scene of the accident, its front wheel bent and twisted from the impact. Almost at once, with no time to have been summoned, three policemen in khaki shorts appear; presumably they were on duty nearby. One of them instructs Rowena to stand out of the way and motions her to a spot near the bicycle to wait. The taxi driver is explaining loudly that the fellow came out of nowhere, though no one seems to be taking his statement. A crowd of passersby has formed, and the police move slowly around its perimeter, calm as shepherds, occasionally consulting with one another. Traffic has not been diverted, but cars, buses, and brightly painted trucks slide past in the narrow channel of road left to them.
Rowena cannot see the cyclist, who is blocked from view by the crowd. But she caught a glimpse of him lying in the road before she was ordered away—a heavyset man in late middle age wearing a white kurta and white drawstring pyjama pants. His small white hat had tumbled from his head and his eyes were closed. She cannot be sure, but she does not think he was moving. Already people had crouched near his body; she could not see any blood nor guess at the extent of his injuries.
“Is he breathing?” she calls to one of the police. Her voice flutters like a weak pulse; she tries again in Hindi. “Can you tell me if he’s breathing?”
The policeman saunters closer. He is shorter than Rowena, with a full lower lip beneath his mustache and plump, pockmarked cheeks. “He will go to hospital.”
“Let me see him.”
He shakes his head, a lazy movement, as though nothing of urgency has happened. “He is hurt here.” He waves a hand near his own hip. “You cannot see. You are needing a taxi?”
Rowena feels as if she may vomit. “I am waiting to see what happens to him.”
The policeman glances at her, the Western clothing and the shopping bags she has put down in the road. “You are from where?”
“Santa Clara.”
“You are living there?”
For a moment it seems simplest to lie to him. But she tells him no, not now. “I grew up there.” She takes off her sunglasses, shields her eyes with her hand. “My husband is Indian also. He is a doctor. I can go with this man to the hospital.”
He inclines his head, appears to accept this remark, and drifts back to one of the other officers. They confer, both glancing toward Rowena at intervals. She has put her sunglasses back on against the glare. The sky is stony with heat; she is rocked by the motion of passing cars. She can hear nothing over the noise of the crowd and the din of motors and horn blasts. After a minute the other policeman approaches. He is tall, with dark, incurious eyes and a sunken chin. “You can pay this man half,” he tells her.
“What man?” Rowena wants to laugh when he jerks his head in the direction of the taxi driver. “He’s hit someone, how can you be thinking of the fare?” But she has no intention of antagonizing anyone; she walks over and tries to hand a few bills to the driver. He tosses his hand, refusing the money, refusing even to look at her; he clearly expects nothing but trouble from all this. The policeman does not press the point. He moves past Rowena and into the moving stream of traffic, his whistle to his lips. Before she has had time to argue, he flags down a passing taxi. It’s already occupied, Rowena can see. A middle-aged woman in a sari sits in the back. The policeman gives the driver brief instructions and turns to Rowena.
“Challo,” he says. Go on.
“No, no, I want to stay!”
He picks up her shopping bags and places them in the vehicle, leaving the back door open.
“Okay. Challo.”
The people inside stare at her, waiting also. Some of the men who are in the crowd tending to the cyclist have turned to watch, and the younger police officer comes forward, looking concerned. Rowena begins to imagine that she is the piece of accident that must be cleared first, before any other progress can be made. She looks uncertainly at the taxi. A fresh garland and a figure of Ganesh dangle from the rear-view mirror. Then she reaches into her purse and writes her name and Grace’s phone number on the back of a receipt. She holds it out to both policemen, insistent, until with a quick glance at his superior, the younger one takes it.
“That is where I’m staying. I want to know what hospital he goes to, yes? I want to know what has happened.”
Rowena directs the driver to Beryl’s house. She is not prepared to face Grace or even Lizzie; her hands are still shaking when she loosens her grip on her bags. And Mark has become a region of difficulty, the person to whom she must either continue to lie or confess the truth. The idea of seeing him exhausts her.
The taxi snorts as it pulls away, leaving Rowena at the gate with her shopping bags. Even in the cool season the sun is strong enough to drive people indoors; the street is all but empty. Dogs sleep, flung on their sides. The fruit seller has set up his cart at the corner, but he sits on his low stool, dozing. At the far end of the street, a parish house and a tea shop intended to attract university students conspire to stay busy all day long. Rowena can see a crosshatch of figures moving back and forth at the juncture. But she feels far from such activity. After all the chaos of the accident, she is suddenly doused in the afternoon quiet. She would like to sink onto a bed, to sleep.
She does not bother to ring the bell but slips her hand between the bars of the gate to lift the latch, the way she used to as a girl. The grass is cropped close, and a stone bench blazes white in the afternoon light. Rowena squints. The house is built around an inner courtyard, and she follows a path to the kitchen entrance. The sounds of insects merge into a single felted buzz, and the heat holds everything in place: a broad, shining blade of grass, distinct from any other; clay flowerpots standing just so on ledges of the stone wall; a beetle. Beyond the garden is the old cashew tree where Rowena and her brothers and cousins used to play as children.
When her mother died, her father was still in the army, posted in a cantonment town. Rowena and her brothers were sent to live with Aunty Beryl and Uncle Oliver. She can remember sitting out on the balcony with her cousins and brothers, all of them bathed and dressed for bed, her hair combed back so that the wet ends pricked her neck and shoulders. In the spring they leaned over the railing and picked guavas. In the stifling weeks before the monsoon, they slept outside. The nights seemed larger than the days, as though a caul of sun and dust had slipped away to reveal what lay behind the featureless Bombay haze. The sky no longer pressed down but spun outward, and Rowena, lying on her back, stared up at the stars until some seemed to drift away and others to slowly settle closer to earth. The boys knew the names of the constellations and pointed them out to one another — straight lines and sharp angles meant to describe the flank of a bull or the curve of a thigh. But Rowena could never see the pictures they saw. She looked up and up until she felt dizzy, and then she reached for somebody’s hand to anchor her. There were always people nearby, her older brothers or Aunty Beryl’s sons, and no one objected when she held onto them. She was seven and her mother was dead.
Inside, the household is quiet. Even the kitchen work is conducted in a kind of stupor. The servants are stone-faced, two day girls from the fishing village in T-shirts, skirts, and rubber slippers, and Bhavani, a wiry woman in her fifties who already seems old to Rowena. One girl sifts rice, and another straddles a low wooden bench, shredding coconut against a long curved blade. Aunty Beryl has bought an electr
ic grinder for twenty thousand rupees, and Bhavani tends it with an abstracted air, as though hardly aware of the crush of spices that pulses within. Her head floats with the sound of its whirring. The two younger ones say nothing to Rowena when she passes, but Bhavani, who has lived with the family for years, smiles when she sees her and pretends to scold.
“Where is Baby? Why have you come without Baby?” Baby is the name she uses for a daughter of any age, for Rowena as well as Lizzie. When Rowena came to see them the first day of her visit, Bhavani seized Rowena’s hand, grinning at the sight of her. “Baby has come!”
The house belongs to its women in the afternoon. The men are off somewhere — in clubs or at cluttered desks in the city. But in the back bedroom, coolest at this hour, Rowena finds the women draped across a narrow double bed: Aunty Beryl; Uncle Oliver’s niece Cuchu, who is living there while her parents are posted in Delhi; and Cuchu’s grandmother, Aunty Vinnie, who is no relation to Oliver but is frequently there with Cuchu. Fifteen-year-old Cuchu sleeps facedown on the coverlet, her legs crossed and white socks (looking dirty and gray) at her ankles; she is wearing the bright green uniform of St. Gregory’s School, and a matching green headband has been tossed on her pillow. The two women are curves and spills of cotton. Their bodies seem supple in repose, and the colors of their salwar kameez are softened in the dim light. Rowena feels tall and angular, standing over them in her narrow black slacks.
“See who’s come!” Aunty Vinnie says in a hushed voice.
“Here, beta, sit.” Aunty Beryl pats a cushion next to her. “Such a lovely surprise! What have you been doing?”
Rowena leaves her bags in a corner and joins them. It is a wood-framed bed, slightly smaller than a double, but with room enough for all of them if they lie with some reference to each other’s lines and curves. She thinks of the king-size bed she and Mark share in the States, the limbs flung mindlessly out in sleep.
“I’ve been to town, shopping,” she begins, uncertain how much to reveal. She must pass along Grace’s invitation, she realizes. She must explain away the lunch.
“You’re looking tired.” Aunty Beryl brushes the hair from Rowena’s forehead. “You’re not used to this heat anymore.”
Rowena remembers the times when she was pregnant, the sudden waves of fatigue, the drag on her limbs. The weight of what she has said to Sonali, what she has not said to Mark, has begun to feel like something she is carrying. She wants to pour out the whole story until it is just another soft shape on the bed. She imagines the women will shift their limbs to make room, that they will have no trouble accommodating her secret. Outside the heat has glazed everything to sharp edges, but surely here, in the dusky light, nothing is so hard or fast as it appears.
“She’s still feeling all this travel. I don’t know how you’re running around town already—such a lot of hustle-bustle. I can hardly pick myself up to go.” Aunty Vinnie is twelve years older than Aunty Beryl; her hair has grayed to a cloudy color, and her skin is slack and creased. Aunty Beryl’s hair is carefully styled, a short cut that shows off her earrings.
“You went alone, beta?”
Aunty Beryl’s voice is so gentle that Rowena finds, to her shame, she is in tears. It is her chance to mention Sonali, but instead she tells them about the accident.
Aunty Beryl shakes her head over the unorthodox behavior of the police. “And they didn’t tell you what hospital he’ll go to?”
Rowena shakes her head no.
“They may not have known. If you haven’t heard anything tomorrow, I’ll make some calls.”
Cuchu groans and lifts her sleepy head, wondering what the commotion is.
“Nothing, nothing.” Aunty Vinnie pats Rowena’s hand. “Rowena has had a shock. But not to worry. I’m sure the fellow isn’t dead.”
“What fellow?” Cuchu props her chin on her elbows.
Aunty Beryl puts a restraining hand on Cuchu’s shoulder. “Come, we’ll talk of something happier. How is Biddy’s little one?”
Mark’s sister has had her fourth child, a girl. For a moment, Rowena imagines she can feel the clutch of the baby’s fist closing around her finger. She had pulled gently, for the pleasure of feeling a pull back. The newborn’s fingers were delicate as the ridges of a shell, the knuckles watery hollows. Had Lizzie grasped a finger so early? Rowena has no memory or even photos of Lizzie at that age; she first saw Lizzie at three months, the earliest she could be released from the orphanage.
“She’s very sweet. Lizzie adores her.”
“She’s not too thin? These babies now are seeming so thin, and then they grow up like sticks.” Aunt Vinnie looks longingly at Cuchu. “You can eat a little more, darling. A few more bites at every meal will make all the difference.” Cuchu groans and pushes her head under a pillow. “At least she has Grace to help her. I went home to my mother to have all of mine. That used to be the way of it, no? We all went home. And such care they took! Bathing us, massaging us. My mother had a girl come just to rub the baby’s head with oil, to shape it properly. After the birth, you know, the heads were always looking too pointed. But they used to rub” — she lifts Cuchu’s pillow aside to demonstrate the technique — “See, a firm touch, just so. They did this every day for such and such a time, and eventually baby’s head was rounded.”
“Not now, Grandma!”
“Nice round-shaped heads everybody had,” says Aunty Vinnie.
“This baby has a good enough head, I think,” Aunty Beryl says with decision, and Rowena smiles.
Cuchu rolls out from under her pillow. “Actually, I am very good with babies. I don’t know why. But they just seem to gravitate to me.” She nudges Aunty Beryl’s leg with her foot. “I tell you, it’s a remarkable thing.”
“Maybe they sense you’ll share your books with them, hmm?” Aunty Beryl pinches her.
Cuchu still prefers comics and children’s books to the novels her class is reading. She has fallen behind in school. Aunty Beryl and Uncle Oliver are trying to push her toward more advanced reading.
“No, I think I’m just naturally good with them. When I grow up, I’ll have lots of babies.”
“You’d better learn to look after yourself first.” Aunty Beryl laughs at her.
Rowena leans back. Her neck aches, and she wonders if she has strained it in the accident.
“Close your eyes, beta. Rest.” Aunty Beryl draws Rowena’s head to her shoulder and while the women speak softly, Rowena falls asleep.
When she wakes, the light is dim. It is not cold, but the breeze from the fan makes her shiver, and she rubs her arms. She can hear noises from the kitchen—voices and the clatter of pans—lively sounds. She gets up stiffly and looks out the window. The sun is low, a bulb of hot color behind palm trees. The ruckus of bird calls has quieted from a matted clamor to a single cry here and there, throbbing in a wide sky.
She splashes water on her face and walks along the courtyard. She passes the bedroom where Cuchu and Aunty Vinnie are staying, and she hears water running into a bucket. It is the time of day for baths. In another twenty minutes or so the women will emerge, fresh and clean, reborn into the evening. She hears voices in the front room, her uncle and perhaps one of her cousins, but she doesn’t feel ready to join them. She goes instead to find Aunty Beryl, who is sitting on a bench in the courtyard with her legs spread wide, leaning forward as she brushes one of her several dogs.
“Had a good sleep?”
Rowena nods. She watches her aunt pull the brush through the dog’s coat. “I’m running late — I must get back. But Grace wants you to drop by later if you’re free. I should have told you earlier.”
“Yes, she called an hour ago. I didn’t want to wake you.” Aunty Beryl smacks the dog lightly with the brush handle. “Off you go!” Long white hairs have drifted to the tile floor, and she bends over to sweep them up with her hands. “I need a whisk broom. What’s all this about lunch?”
“I told them I might meet you.” She looks out into the garden, down
to the cashew tree. “I wanted a morning without Mark.”
Aunty Beryl rises. She kisses Rowena on each cheek, the way she used to when Rowena was a child. “I told Grace I had to rush back from the city. But you know better, beta. Don’t fall into bad habits. Next time just tell him what you want, hmm? Now say a quick hello to your uncle before you go.”
“You missed quite a show.” Mark raises his eyebrows. Rowena has put her bags in the bedroom they are using, where suitcases yawn open like books with cracked bindings.
“She wouldn’t go down? Hang on, I just want to splash some water on my face before Sister Agnes comes.”
“She’s here already. She’s taken Lizzie upstairs.”
Rowena has turned on the tap, is leaning over the sink, but stops. “Upstairs? Why?”
“Biddy brought the baby down to say hello, and when she tried to go Lizzie had an absolute meltdown. She wanted the baby to sleep in her bed.”
“Oh, God.”
“She was just wailing. None of us could do a thing with her. And then she started crying for you.”
It was Sister Agnes who managed to calm the child, Sister Agnes who took the newborn in her lap and held her up for Lizzie to see. “You can give baby a kiss,” she offered in her slow, lilting voice, but Lizzie only stared. “Come,” Sister Agnes said, and Lizzie reached out to touch the baby. “Gently, that’s right. See how she’s wrapped up tightly? That helps her feel safe, even when she sleeps by herself.”
Sister Agnes handed the baby back to Biddy and drew Lizzie to her. “You see how she takes to you? She must know you’re her friend. Now” — she glanced at Biddy—“If Aunty says so, we can go up together and say good night.”
“They’ve gone up ten minutes ago,” Mark tells Rowena. “Go on, wash your face. I’ll pour you a beer. How was your day?”