We were dogs with our tongues hanging out, panting from the heat when Geeta left us. The air pressed down upon us, and behind it the weight of the monsoon, but still the rains would not come. The ground was parched, the breasts of beggar women suckling in the street were dried up and shriveled. We pushed our way out against the heat wall in daylight hours to do what was necessary, hunting, gathering, then staggered home and collapsed on our beds, Manika shuttling between us. I was grieving over my loss, entering the second stage. All that futile stage-one denial had gotten me nowhere, I moved on to anger, fury at her for abandoning me, reviewing obsessively all of the humiliations and betrayals and deceptions that now were so obvious, how could I have missed them, I must have been blind. I could not swallow it, I could not swallow anything Manika brought to me, I sucked lemons and spit out bitter seeds.

You at least ate, I was relieved for Manika’s sake. No matter how prostrate you were with the lethargy of the season, you ate. Your bed was gravelly with salt crumbs, slick with oil stains, sticky with sweet drinks. Your nymphet days were well past by then. More than a year earlier, Geeta had summoned me to observe you as you slept, your covers kicked off, thighs pulpy and succulent. When had you morphed into such a morsel? At breakfast next morning, as you were shoveling rose petal jam straight from the jar into your mouth, Geeta asked, Do you really need that, Maya?—and snatched the spoon out of your hand, a highly counterproductive tactic as I happen to know exceedingly well from the experience of having grown up with a fat mother. Nevertheless, I switched loyalties, siding with Geeta against you, I admit it—I chose her over you as we held you there captive at that table counseling you as a team for your own good about the importance of diet, exercise, not wearing horizontal stripes, and other weight-control and fat-concealing tips, especially now that you had been initiated into the sisterhood of blood, sweetening our message by reminding you of what a pretty face you had. More and more you were coming to resemble your grandmother, Manika noted with so much pride—my mother who had gone to such lengths across the planet to remove herself almost without a trace from the system that had insulted her so profoundly, who had trekked so far at such cost to achieve moksha, to unstrap herself from the torturous wheel of life, achieve liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth, and here she was nevertheless, reincarnated in you. Rosy plump cheeks for pinching, breasts like cream for licking, hips like a basket for filling, you who had once been such a dark-eyed heartbreaking waif, ethereal with two thick braids down your back that I plaited every morning standing behind you as you picked at your breakfast—you had been recycled into my mother. Manika, how did you do it? And where would we find the rabbi to take you off our hands and marry you?