She wept more.

Repugnance receded, momentarily replaced by something else. It hijacked her, travelled freely, proprietarily, claiming her as its own. It was grief and it was endless. It threw her carelessly to the ground. It swallowed everything she knew, everything she was. It took her mother, her mami and herself.

She wept again and again.

•

Smrithi sorted through memories: of her childhood, of trips to Sri Lanka and India, of family holidays. She tried to create order among them and extract signs she had missed. But her memories wouldn’t listen to her, defying the new jigsaw puzzle she was re-shaping with the pieces of the old. Her memories preferred the old puzzle, and so did she. If only she could put the box away, surely it would hurt less.

Her brother was her second-cousin and her grandmother was her great-aunt. Her mother was her aunt and her mami was her mother and her mother was dead. Her father and grandfather weren’t related to her at all. Everyone she knew was someone else, most of all, herself.

Suspicions scuttled across her mind, like rats in an attic. Gnawing relentlessly on the timbers of her memory, they weakened the once steadfast architecture around which her life was built. Inchoate fears seeped out and rot set in.

The stranger and the strangeness. She looked at herself in the mirror—the curly hair, the deep-set eyes, the pointed chin. They were features that used to belong to Nala and Priya and Siva. Now she feared they were those of an unknown savage. Someone who was not of them. Someone who should have died for the crime of life he gave her.

She sat on the toilet and wiped herself. She stared at the toilet paper, smoothening down the edges of the square, holding it in her palm like a miniature painting. Red: the colour of the flame tree, the hibiscus flower, the kunkumam powder worn by Tamil women. Dhara never placed the small red orb on her dark forehead, she had never married.

Half her blood belonged to someone—to something—else. Half her blood ran darker, harsher, crueller than the rest. It was tainted.

She didn’t want Prashanth to touch her. She was not the woman he fell in love with. She held her children close and then pushed them away. She didn’t want them near the stranger, touched by his violence. She was shame. She was grotesque and they were still sunlight.

•

Priya made a mixture of rice, sesame seeds and sesame oil, which she fed to the birds in her garden. It was the month of Sanni, and she was trying to appease Saturn with her offering.

Helen peeped over the fence. ‘Would you like some help?’ she asked, her blonde hair catching on the dense murraya hedge. She’d been helping Priya with Saturn for years.

‘No, thank you, Helen. I’m almost done,’ Priya replied.