THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 53
her everything about himself she, too,
would be old. She sensed the warning
and was discreet. She thought of the
word “divorce,” mentally pronouncing
it DIE-vorce, but the one time he said
it he bit off the first syllable like a hic-
cup: di-VORCE. And somehow that
dampened her desire to hear more, as
if it could only be further proof of her
ignorance. Srikanth had a commerce
degree; she had her tenth-standard
pass certificate, which Sister Stella had
handed over as dispassionately as if it
were a ration card.
They had sex the night Swati left.
After he climaxed, he hovered above
her for another second, before letting
himself drop onto her body. Then he
rolled off and flipped her on her side
and drew her back against him. The
bed they lay on was his parents’, a high,
antique frame with carved posts and a
thin, pitiless mattress. Part of her longed
for her room at the Bakers’, her foreign
sheets, and her too soft pillows.
“And what about you?” he asked in
a drowsy voice, after they’d lain in si-
lence for a while.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. My little au pair from Odi-
sha. You’re not going to tell me more
about yourself? Where you went to
school, what you were like as a child?”
“It is boring,” she said.
“No,” he said. “You’re not boring.”
It was not what she meant, and she
began to correct him, but his hand
twitched, and she knew he was asleep.
She knew, too, that he had been re-
lieved by her non-answer. It was natu-
ral, she told herself. No man at his stage
in life could possibly be interested in
childhood stories.
I
n July, it started to rain. Like clock-
work, for two hours each afternoon.
The ground in the garden turned
swampy. Sitting beneath the terra-cotta
overhang of the roof, she watched the
toads with their lustrous jumping throats,
and the fat brown sparrows that sat im-
passive and then quaked themselves dry.
She heard Srikanth come back from
work, calling her name. She lifted her
body and brought herself inside. The
house was full of dark, heavy furniture,
his parents’ furniture.
“You haven’t started making dinner,”
he said.
“I’ll start now,” she said, moving to-
ward the kitchen.
“It’s almost eight.”
There was a grandfather clock next
to a hatstand whose arms were antlers.
She blinked.
“You’ve been dreaming all day?”
“Maybe we can go out?”
“I have been out. I just want to stay
quietly at home.”
She went into the kitchen to start
dinner. He followed her.
He said, “What did you do today?”
She poured a cup of rice into a pot
and ran her fingers through it, feeling
for stones.
“Nothing.”
“Did you read?”
There was a library, full of stiff-spined
books he claimed his father had bought
to make himself appear more intimi-
dating to visitors.
“A little,” she said. She had taken
down one of the books, but its leather
binding had reminded her of Sister
Stella’s Bible, and she had spent the rest
of the afternoon thinking about the hot
convent-school courtyard and the dreary,
soothing presence of the nuns.
“I don’t understand,” he said finally.
“Understand what?”
“You! What is it that you want? In
this world?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?” he echoed. “Not even a
child?”
She looked up at him. He was smil-
ing in a way that made her, for a mo-
ment, furious. Then the fury was gone.
She picked out a stone from the rice,
flicking it away.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he pressed. “You
want to have a child?”
She didn’t answer. He took the pot
from her hands and set it down.
He said, “I’m not a young man any-
more.”
“I know.”
“You know everything,” he said, teas-
ing her now. “My genius little au pair.”
And he led her by the hand to the
antique bed with the four carved post-
ers and that punishing mattress.
F
ive months later, on Christmas Eve,
they went to midnight Mass. Sri-
kanth had still not converted, but he
promised to do it soon. He fell asleep
during the hymns, and Geeta had to
wake him when the choir began to file
out. He drove them home and fell asleep
again right away, while she lay awake,
trying to think of how to phrase what
she had to say to him.
The next morning, she said, “I think
we should go to a doctor.”
He frowned at her. “I’ve already had
a child, remember.”
“I know,” she said. “It is me.”
The doctor at Baptist Hospital con-
firmed this. That week, Geeta caught
a bus and rang the bell at the Bakers’
door. The maidservant answered and
hugged Geeta.
They discussed her problem. The
maidservant was of the opinion that
Geeta’s sterility was a good thing, but
when she saw Geeta’s expression she
leaned in conspiratorially.
“You can do adoption, you know,”
she whispered.
Geeta shook her head. “It takes many
years, and it is very expensive. And those
adoption people will see how old Sri-
kanth is, and they will say no.”
“But that’s only if you do it here. In
Jharkhand, babies are being adopted all
the time. I know a place where no one
checks. You can do it fast, and they will
give you any baby you want. Old, young,
boy, girl.” She sat back and scrutinized
Geeta’s face. “You should get an older
child. Otherwise your husband will be
dead before it has started walking.”
T
he first thing that surprised Geeta
was the girl’s height. Rani was eight
but nearly as tall as she was. Her brown
eyes took in the house with a single
glance. On the train, she had been si-
lent, eating very little but doing it obe-
diently. Now she stood still, staring at
the mossy steps leading to the veranda
and the flowerpots that held only an-
cient gray dirt. Srikanth had already
gone inside with Rani’s bag.
In Ranchi, the orphanage director,
a scraggy woman with a coal miner’s
cough, had given them Rani’s back-
ground, which amounted to no more
than a blur of prejudices. She was sup-
posedly from a tribal village deep in
the forests of eastern Jharkhand. She
had come to the orphanage a year be-
fore, deposited by an older girl who
claimed to be her sister but could as
easily have been her mother. The fa-
ther was not in the picture, and everyone
