Yes, beautiful still, but how shrunken her mother has become since the diagnosis, how skeletal—all skin and eyes and teeth, scalp showing white between thinning hair. The piteous smile her mother rewards her with spears her, and she turns away hurriedly, toward Seema finally, nuzzling her face blindly against Seema’s, arms tight around Seema’s shoulders.

Tahera squeezes hard. I feel the pressure, a compression of the amniotic fluid firmer than any I’ve experienced before.

Seema stiffens in Tahera’s arms. “Careful,” she says, pulling away and smoothing her top over her stomach.

Tahera lets go. A jolt shakes her as she’s returned abruptly to the glacial lighting of the baggage claim.

“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” she says, trying to smile, working to keep the anger out of her voice.

2

Where does the anger come from?

Consider this: Tahera has not seen Nafeesa and Seema together for nearly sixteen years. Seema, after all, was cast out of their family by their father. The intimacy that Tahera observes between mother and sister—walking arm in arm down the aisle of the baggage claim, laughing at some private joke, leaning on each other for support—is unexpected, almost a betrayal.

And consider, too, Seema smoothing her maternity frock over her belly and pushing Tahera away during their embrace. The first sight of the ravages that time and disease have wrought on her mother had tricked Tahera into turning to Seema more warmly than she’d intended. She’d become her agitated twenty-year-old self, come to the Chennai airport to receive Seema, returning for the very first time after leaving for England for her master’s. The very same embrace, but—

Careful! What a cutting, rebuffing word.