Today is her fortieth birthday. They hardly ever went for holidays as a family after ma died, every hill-station felt empty without her. This time they—her father and her sisters—planned to visit Khandala and Lonavla together, they used her birthday as a happy excuse.

Her father opted out at the last minute saying there was no one at the shop.

She made three points to her father. This was being planned since a while so he could have given others at the shop prior notice. It did not matter if there was no one there since he was not officially the partner anymore. He did not need to work so hard since all his daughters were now earning.

Her father mumbled something in response.

A sunny morning in Lonavla. The smell of fresh chocolate fudge. Her. Her abuser. Her father who has, as always, chosen to support her abuser over her.

Just a few more footprints on a heart, no big deal.

That evening they celebrate her birthday, she and her friends. She looks deep into her glass of brandy as the night falls over Lonavla and Khandala.

A clear, dry and cool night. Starry and sharp. The air spiked with a special silence. Carrying with it a memory, cognac eyes. Stay strong, Bombay woman.

She cuts the cord. She imagines her veins opening up and blood pouring out.

She opens her veins in her imagination and lets her blood flow freely.

As she dies, the child grows colder.

Soon she will be a mature adult; not a silly child who keeps feeling orphaned.

3 June 1999. She opens her eyes at the hospital and focuses on her angel of mercy who has performed her hysterectomy. Now her uterus can no longer mock her.

She looks at her husband; her eyes, they sting and shine. Now she is free to love him, live in him unreservedly.

Ma would have been dotty about him. Would ma have let her go through with this? She would have promptly come into the picture, always sticking her Parsi nose straight into my business.

Ma died three days before her twenty-eighth birthday.

Ma tried to wait for things to get better, in many ways they did after daddy got a shock about losing his son. It went straight home to him, that he had his own family, his wife and daughters who could not be continuously persecuted by his own weaknesses which included his brothers and mother.

They even got a new television in the house and fresh paint on the walls in all the rooms; she had chosen light lavender for the one she shared with her three younger sisters.

But a heart can mend only so many times as it breaks. Ma’s heart had ultimately imploded when she was forty-nine.

After ma’s death, several practicalities of life start flinging themselves at her with a vengeance. Ma you sent me off to work and never taught me how to cook, nor the bloody difference in the dals. This is yellow dal, this is small yellow dal, and what do I call this pink one, okay, baby dal.