54 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
was almost certainly better off that way;
there was the lurking stink of crimi-
nality, possibly even Naxalism, around
him. Rani was not intelligent, the or-
phanage director went on, tribal girls
rarely were, but she was strong and
could help with the house. While all
this was being conveyed to them, Geeta
glanced at Srikanth, who was nodding
seriously, as though he’d expected no
less. With a chill, she wondered if he
was listening to anything the orphan-
age director was saying. At the end,
when he turned to her and asked, “Are
you sure you’re ready?,” she was tempted
to shake her head, but then she thought
of the empty house waiting for her and
said, “Yes.”
“Come inside?” Geeta murmured
now. Rani stiffened, then ran up the
steps and into the hall. She drew abreast
with the grandfather clock just as it
lurched to four. Her thin frame flinched
with each gong, but when it was over
and she turned to look at Geeta, her
face was blank.
“This is where you’ll sleep,” Geeta
said.
She had chosen the room with the
best view of the garden. It had been a
storeroom, Srikanth had told her, in the
days when he was a child and his fam-
ily had four Brahmin cooks working
for them. All four had slept in here.
The soft wood of the door still smelled
of grain and hemp. She had put in a
cot and an almirah and placed a chair
by the window. Because the rooms of
her own life had never contained more,
she had left it at that. It was, she told
herself, the view that would count. A
jackfruit tree stood outside, with ele-
gant, tortured branches, and fruit that
looked like fat, milk-bloated babies.
She might have liked the room for her-
self, but she knew that Srikanth would
have found the idea of sleeping in a
storeroom outrageous.
She was disappointed, therefore, when
Rani barely seemed to notice. She re-
sisted the urge to point out the room’s
advantages and instead asked, “Do you
need anything?”
Rani’s thick black hair had been shorn
and was growing back unevenly over
her ears. She wore a frilly peacock-blue
frock that draggled at the hems, the
same one she’d been wearing when they
first saw her. Her upper lip protruded;
it was possible that she was bucktoothed.
“Do I need anything?” the girl re-
peated. Her voice had an anesthetized
quality, but within it twitched a slip-
pery, mocking thing. Then she smiled.
It was an unnerving smile to see on an
eight-year-old face, somehow innocent,
cunning, and flirtatious at the same time,
and Geeta, to her shame, panicked.
“Then I’ll leave you to rest,” she said,
turning her back on both the girl and
the view. Her first failure, as she would
later come to think of it.S
he had resolved to be unshakable
with Rani, but almost immediately
she found herself swept up in a soft tan-
gle of mitigation and half lies. Each
morning, she lay in bed, worrying about
the things the girl was going to do and
say that day. They had decided that she
would stay at home until the new aca-
demic year began, that it was important
for her to feel accepted into their fam-
ily before shouldering the challenges of
school. But the truth was that Geeta
felt like the one on trial. Rani loped
around the house and had a tendency
to sneak up on Geeta.
“The pictures are dusty,” Rani would
say, and Geeta would run for a cloth to
wipe the frames.
“There is hair in the bathroom,” she
would observe clinically, and Geeta
would run to lift the knob of knotted
hair from the drain, dropping it into the
trash with a shudder.
“You don’t know how to cook,” she
whispered one night to Geeta, when
Srikanth had left a little rice on his plate.
“Even he hates your food.”
At other times, she would say noth-
ing, merely watching Geeta at whatever
she was doing. As a way to compensate,
Geeta found herself talking. Avoiding
her own history, she babbled on about
her husband’s life at great length.
“This house is very old,” she said.
“Your grandfather won the lottery. Your
father has one sister, Swati. You’ll meet
her. She has two children, a boy and a
girl. Your cousins.” She glanced at Rani,
then continued as though she had doted
on these children for years. “Lovely chil-
dren, very well behaved. One day you’ll
meet them. When your father was small,
he used to think there were a hundred
rooms in this house. You know how,
when you are small, you think every-thing is so big? Your father’s family is
vegetarian. His mother allowed only
Brahmins to cook their food. She kept
four cooks.” She halted, hating the sound
of what she’d said. “Your father had a
brother,” she said, concluding, “but he
died when he was small.”
“How did he die?” the girl asked,
perking up.
“I don’t know,” Geeta said. “He was
sick, I think.”
“Did he have tuberculosis?”
“No.”
“Cancer?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Pneumonia?”
“No!” Geeta exclaimed. “I mean, I
don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?” Rani asked slyly.
“You’re so stupid, you didn’t even ask?”
Geeta shrank back. “Your father and
I got married only one year ago,” she
heard herself say slowly. “But he was
married before.”
“He is very old, isn’t he?”
“Not so old.”
“He is an old cocksucking bastard,”
Rani declared. And Geeta was shocked,
less by the profanity than by the girl’s
matter-of-fact tone, though she could
not deny that there was something
slightly comical about it, too, the bald
innocence of the pronouncement.
“Rani!” she said, making an attempt
to sound authoritative. “That’s enough!
Don’t say such things about your fa-
ther!”
“He’s not my father,” the girl replied
scornfully. “My father went to jail.”
Geeta felt slightly dizzy. “I didn’t
know.”
“And you’re not my mother. My
mother is a poor woman,” Rani said.
She stepped close to Geeta, her chin
tilted up, her eyes dark and powerful,
albeit with a detached kind of intensity.
“You are a rich woman. You can help
my mother.”
“What do you mean?”
Rani smiled. She had a million differ-
ent smiles, and this one was regretful,
benevolent, nearly tender. “Where is
your jewelry?” she whispered.I
t took almost a month for Geeta to
tell Srikanth about any of this. In
that time, Rani proved herself a mas-
ter of single-mindedness. At times she
was wheedling, at other times forceful.