Kavitha lights a cigarette. ‘Can you believe this shit? It’s inhumane, not to mention stupid. Don’t they think that after injecting cyanide into four hundred animals, burning some of them and burying them right by the lake that it won’t affect their water supply, their soil?’

‘Please,’ the Blue Cross man says, walking up to us quickly. ‘Do you mind not smoking here? Things are tense as it is.’

Kavitha squashes the cigarette under her sandal. ‘Just to be clear, I don’t give a shit about their sensibilities.’

She strides back to a group of volunteers who are bagging corpses. They are college students from the city. Many of them have never been in a place like this. Even they look at her with confusion and admiration. She’s wearing a man’s shirt as usual, with jeans and sandals. Every few weeks she gets her head shaved so the salt-and-pepper bristle is maintained. Her face is achingly symmetrical, nose sharp, lips full, but there is a hardness about it that you can tell has accumulated over the years.

‘I’m sick of this,’ I say. ‘There’s no need for us to be here.’

A few hours later we make our way back to the car. The door handles are impossible to touch. I fold the cuff of my shirt under the bottom of my palm and lift up the handle. Three of the volunteers climb into the back seat. We drive with the windows down and the air conditioner blowing hard. We let them off at the Koovathur bus stop. They are all chummy, shouting, ‘Bye auntie, thanks auntie,’ at us. On the way home I cover Kavitha’s hand with mine on the gearstick. I hold it as if it were my sixth finger and I were reclaiming it.

‘Papi was right,’ I say. ‘We’re living with savages.’

Chapter 30

30

The house is secretive at this hour. Kavitha is still asleep, and the dogs are lying in cool patches of mud in the garden. We’ve had rains, so everything looks powerful and unstoppable. I put the kettle on and stand beside the counter with one leg tucked into the other, tree pose, waiting for the water to boil. Everything seems so closely bound in the mornings. I sit on the veranda with my cup of tea and biscuits. The lawn gleams, choked with weeds. A bird in a tree is making a sound I’ve never heard before.

I could not give any of this up. There is a kind of silence in these early mornings broken only by faraway truck horns and flies slamming themselves against window glass, guiding you into the day.

Teacher had told me to come alone.